What does it mean to understand another person? It's easy to understand someone when you agree with them, because then you're simply agreeing with yourself. You might even enjoy seeing your own thinking reflected in the other person, enriched by a slightly different perspective – more colorful, more vibrant, more energetic, because both of you are happy to have found someone on the same wavelength. This mirroring, the mirror neurons, gives us a feeling of appreciation, of being seen, a harmony, and a sense that…
Recently, I stumbled upon David Hume again. I remember how intense studying his writings was in Heidelberg. We really delved deep into the text there, very meticulously and systematically. It was the opposite of those Anglo-American intellectual history lectures. So, I came across Hume's concept of taste as the core of his ‚aesthetic’ theory. I thought of Rasa and began a conversation with the AI. Larger contexts became clear to me, lines I had never seen before. However, I was a bit...
Recently, in Auroville, a play by the landlords of Bharat Nivas was removed from the program. The reason given was that some in the community took offense to it even before it was performed. This raises questions. What is art allowed to do, when is a ban justified? Coupled with this, of course, is the question of what the task of art is, what art should therefore do. The question invites reflection on the role of art in general, here in India and...
In Western analytical-modern theories of consciousness, that is, those that consider themselves empirically scientific, a correlation between matter and consciousness is always assumed. This is relatively uncontroversial in itself, as virtually all frameworks proceed from this assumption. Birth and death mark the endpoints of this correlation. The question then arises: What does this correlation look like? Does consciousness determine matter, or does matter determine consciousness, or is it an interaction? 3 variants of the relation between consciousness and matter The first…
I'm just back from devotions and meditation. It's the anniversary of Sri Aurobindo. He left his body 72 years ago, as they say here. I've spent the last few days reflecting and talking a lot about his commentaries on the Kena Upanishad. I came across the word ‚intermiscence‘ there. It's used almost exclusively by Aurobindo. I asked everyone I met what the word meant. A friend here found a translation into German: ‚ineinanderfließen‘ (it describes in German...
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