Movement instead of rootedness

I recently asked myself whether I really want to be grounded. Am I a tree that puts its roots into the ground and doesn't move, but grows in the environment where the seed once sprouted? Or do I even want to be a rock in the surf that lets the water wash over it, gives way a little over the millennia and loses itself in the sand?
My idea of human existence is actually a different one, rather that of movement, of exploration and also development, right up to mastery and conquest, of connection or withdrawal to the self.
Forming an identity is an integrative process. Growing up is a passage through stages: childhood, puberty, adulthood, old age ... Private, personal, professional, creative, spiritual are different fields in which the self wants to find itself, experiences itself and loses itself.
We are constantly moving in this complex landscape. We do not put down roots, we are not a rock in the surf. And yet there are always periods of calm in which we linger, reflect, rest within ourselves. Achieving such a state is probably what is meant by grounding.

Mental demarcation as an ordering of the self

I have often been told that I am good at mental boundaries. I have taken this as a compliment, although I am aware that it is a double-edged sword. Separating work and private life, distinguishing friendship from love and family or keeping different desires and fears apart allows my self to realize itself in different areas - even peripheral areas. That's how I thought.
I thought this way because I was always suspicious of the concept of the self. Because I didn't believe in a soul, because I was too anchored in the meaning construction mechanisms of Western culture, in which specialization, radicalization and stylization have an intrinsic value. This intrinsic value defines success, and I was satisfied with the success I had, or so I thought.

Permeability, decision and being held

I think differently now, and that hurts, brings out euphoria, creates boredom and makes me nervous. I am still trying to maintain mental boundaries, but they are becoming more permeable. I am dismantling the fences in the landscape.
But does this mean that I have to make a few decisions? Many things can no longer coexist as they did before, it seems. I ask myself that. Can I cultivate my land? Will I settle down inwardly, or perhaps rather become unassuming, let go, trust in larger contexts, allow myself to be driven, guided, directed, become an instrument of a greater being.
Here in this thought, in the experience of a held self, is the deeper meaning of being grounded. It is a grounding in heaven. The Upanishads speak of the banyan tree, a kind of fig whose roots are in heaven. The tree is a cycle. And also the image is just a container for a complex nervous system that connects organs and feeds consciousness.

I am currently in Tiruvannamalai. I have attended a few satsangs. I had a question in my mind: how does the true self relate to another true self, especially when it comes to romantic love? I am sitting in an apartment overlooking the mountain. Yesterday, after a little argument, I was sitting on the terrace in the morning when a monkey came and touched me very gently and looked into my eyes as if to tell me that everything was going to be okay. Then he sat down next to me and looked at the mountain. He folded his hands on his knees in a deep, contemplative posture and it felt like an old friend had come to give me comfort.

What we call the self is not what we normally understand it to be. It is not our ego, our personality, our identity or even our soul. The self is the focus of our attention, it is a point in the infinite consciousness of the universe that enables self-realization. It is nothing more than that, and that is precisely why it is everything. The self is the point in the vastness that offers perspective; in deep meditation it can dissolve with universal consciousness, return to its source and cease to exist in full self-awareness.

Being in love

I realized this for the first time as a teenager on the hill in Rome. I was in love, I had an unfulfilled longing. A friendship that was deep, tender and intimate, but never physical, we were not a couple. And while I sat on the mountain and thought about the world, I saw it from within myself. I got to that deepest level of our existence, and even now, 40 years later, I can instantly return to that awareness whenever I remember it. I was both blissful and shocked at the same time. Do I really have the whole world inside me? Do I really not exist? How can it be that everyone talks about themselves without realizing that the self as they see it does not exist? I have carried this realization with me ever since. I've deepened the understanding, put it into context, thought about it. But in the end, not much has changed. It was just there, pure and simple.

I believe that an unfulfilled longing is a good teacher. I become aware of my desire and the impossibility of satisfying it. Desire creates suffering. Why am I not seen the way I want to be seen? Why is the love I feel not reciprocated? Why don't I share what I really feel? This last question is perhaps the most important. Other desires are about attachment, about wanting or being, but unfulfilled love is about being seen.

How can a self see another self? And do they have to see each other to love each other? Is there a deeper unity within cosmic consciousness where two can unite to become something else? What is this transformation?

The self, as a point of consciousness within universal consciousness, becomes aware of its soul when it awakens. The soul, however, is even more difficult to understand. It is that which is born and reborn. The soul comes with biological birth, it enters my body and stays there. It leaves my body when it breaks up. It was there before I was born and will still be there after I die. It is a manifestation of the universal soul, Purusha. The soul is what we really are, not the physical body, not the self. The soul is the core of our existence. Finding our soul is the most difficult path we can take. Only when we find our soul can we truly love; we can find our soulmate.

Soul

Every soul is different. That is the beauty of it. The soul is not my ego, not my personality and identity. The soul holds life in my body, it flows through every nerve, every fiber, every bloodstream, every nerve cell, every hair and every taste bud. The soul holds my experiences together, plays with my memory, delights in my existence. As a by-product, it creates the ego, my personality and identity. But all this can change, I can change. The soul does not change. It flows through time as part of the universal consciousness, it could be related to the concept of time itself. Self-consciousness is not bound to time and space. In a deep state of being, I can live 1000 years, I can connect with my soul and realize that it is immortal. And when the self and the soul join hands and fly, we can experience something that cannot be described by science. It is Shiva and Shakti, the universal interplay between self and manifestation. The only problem is our ego and our mind. We need them to find nourishment and to live with others, but they stand in the way of true self-realization.

Because we have a soul, we can love. The yogis, sadhus and siddhars may focus on self-realization. But to love, we go through the self into the soul and find another soul. These two souls are not the same, they fight and unite, they enjoy and suffer, they dance.

While the self has little to do with my biography, the soul shows itself through my biography. It is always there, whether I am aware of it or not. Seeing this core of my own biography is the path to realization. For me, this path was the search. I am a wandering soul. My path has always been a spiritual search, my strength a deep healing.

What does it mean to understand another person? It is easy to understand another person when you agree with them, because then you simply agree with yourself and perhaps even enjoy seeing your own thinking reflected in the other person, enriched by a slightly different perspective, more colorful, more lively, more energetic, because both are happy to have found someone who is on the same wavelength. This mirroring, the mirror neurons, give us a feeling of appreciation, of being seen, a sense of harmony and the idea that we have a common basis on which we can build and develop further.

Is that the case? What if I want to understand someone who thinks completely differently? What if I fundamentally disagree with the other person's basic assumptions? What does understanding mean then? When every sentence and every thought of the other person calls my own thinking into question and I have the feeling that I can dismiss everything as nonsense, perhaps even have to, because it undermines my existence. But if, at the same time, I see in the other person a lovable person whom I want to understand - what does that mean? When an atheist talks to a believer, a rationalist to a conspiracy theorist, a scientist to a mystic... how does understanding work here?

It is possible to meet on other levels, on the level of the heart, for example, or on the level of intersubjectivity, to perceive that there really is another, someone who is decidedly different from me and does not feign the illusion of understanding. This challenge of the other - Hegel describes it as a life-and-death struggle, Lévinas as an ethical encounter - is a much deeper encounter that demands a different understanding.

Understanding here is not mirroring, not assimilation, but the experience of otherness, which makes a genuine encounter possible in the first place. Understanding then means understanding the other as the other, and what the other says and does is then secondary. The thinking of the other is thus classified and contextualized differently. It is not about consistency, i.e. freedom from contradiction, but about the possibility of seeing the other person. Seeing then means seeing with different eyes; a difference does not demand a resolution or conciliation, but rather a going deeper to the ground of being. Difference makes perception and identity possible in the first place; unity, on the other hand, does not exist in dialog, but only in spiritual experience, which then includes the other.

Talking to someone who thinks radically differently can therefore lead to depth rather than confrontation. However, this is only possible on the basis of genuine appreciation. But what does understanding mean? Is it the joint search for the reason? Does understanding mean understanding how the other person is searching? Which paths does one's own thinking and the thinking of the other take? Do these paths intersect? Are they crossroads or forks in the road, convergences or parallels? Are the encounters respectful and loving?

This experience of the other, which is not part of my consciousness, which is not an illusion but fundamentally eludes my thinking, is a reconciliation of thinking with the world. For the experience of this otherness overcomes any doubt about reality. Reality is not an illusion; it may be radically different from what I think, but it is real. This experience is only made possible through the encounter with the other.

I broke off my night meditation a little earlier to switch to writing meditation. A few things suddenly seemed clear to me. The need to align my own body in meditation, to find the right position, which for me means following the movements, the tensions and relaxations of the muscles, the skeleton, the spine. Then observing the breath, inhaling and exhaling, the turning point of the breath, pausing to observe how the thoughts begin to loosen up, following them attentively to see where they go. Establish a connection with the outside world and the inner world. How far do my thoughts wander? Where am I now? Is this real? What part of reality is this? The world of fellow human beings, the world of work or interest, the interpersonal world, nature or daydreaming, fantasy, vision, the world of fear and missed opportunities, the world of regret and hope, the world of art and philosophy, music and architecture. These are a few of my worlds, others may go into completely different worlds, worlds in which I do not live, all those worlds that are explored in crime series, for example.

There is then a correlation between one's own body in meditation and the world of thoughts that roams in memory, and the world of thoughts that is relatively freely associated and jumps around unguided and unconsciously. Seeing this interplay and realizing that there is a connection is a first step towards deeper meditation.

This process of inner alignment serves to position one's own self in a larger context. I can now meditate on my different levels of existence: my material body, my living body, my emotional world, my thought world, my intellectual world and the world of spirituality. I can meditate on my individual senses, the outer and inner ones and how they interact and what kind of experiences they have brought and how I can recall these experiences in my memory. I can meditate on how these experiences combined with desires and fears, with expectations, goals and conventions, develop them into a plan - a LIFE. After all, this life that I live is embedded in a context, the context of my own body, my own soul, the world in which I live and my environment.

This level of life is pure immanence. Everything flows together here, it is fed by consciousness, consciousness is its original source, it cannot be anything else, only here can life be experienced. But consciousness must now be understood broadly. It is not my reactive, unreflected, thoughtless associating and being caught up in patterns, compulsions, habits, desires and suffering, but it is consciousness as that which underlies all my experiences, an experience of consciousness as consciousness in itself. I have consciousness that fills with content, I can focus and direct, align and clarify, I can empty my consciousness and invite the new. Consciousness is the level of my existence, where my existence, my life, is constituted. Consciousness in itself, when it individualizes, makes life possible. This is the secret of the soul, the relation of Brahman, Purusha, Atman, Prakriti.

Many people around me talk about a psychic being and how it relates to the divine, to the soul, to one's own person and identity. As a philosophical concept, Aurobindo is not entirely clear to me, but I develop an intuition in meditation as to what it could be. It is that being which, for example, reflects on its own conditions in meditation and holds them together in an individualized way, that which underlies my ego, that which recognizes that the world of experience of the outer senses is an illusion, that which recognizes that a universal principle of individuation in the form of a soul or Atman or Purusha is the condition of my existence. That being which glides through the different planes of being, moves in the worlds of yoga, transcends time and space and understands the barriers of life and death as permeable. This seems to me to be the psychic being.

I have been living with a neurotic dog for a few weeks now. She barked a lot while she still perceived me as a stranger. She kept her distance and was frightened. After a few weeks, she accepted me, approached me and wanted to be stroked. Now she lies at my door and keeps watch; she protects me. What happened? I haven't changed my attitude towards her. I have little connection with dogs and pay her little attention. I am relatively indifferent. But something fundamental has changed with her. It's hard for me to ask her questions, we don't speak the same language. But I seem to have become part of her world. She remembers me, I have become familiar to her. In her world I was a stranger, a threat; now I am a confidant, part of her world, perhaps one day a friend. The possibility exists.

How can I become part of a world that is someone else's world? I think it has a lot to do with memory. I become part of the memory of others. The same applies to me, of course. A new world of experience builds up, especially when I move to a new world, e.g. from Europe to India. Everything is new, strange; I am not afraid, but rather fascinated and curious. All the new impressions - the objects and nature, the people and the culture - become part of my memory. They are integrated into what is my world.

I have been attending a workshop on Tantra philosophy for the last few days. I learned the 36 tattvas, some new meditation techniques, the difference between western science and shastras (knowledge systems). I heard reports of things that are considered impossible in the western world (e.g. alchemy and telekinesis). In essence, Tantra is about the relationship between two forces: Shiva and Shakti, and this on all levels of being, i.e. on the material level, the level of life, consciousness, mind, spirituality, the cosmos, pure existence... It is about understanding that what holds the world together inside is not empirical science. Empirical science is the method that our minds have mastered relatively well since modernity; but it explains very little of what makes up our living world.

But what makes up our world? It is the inner experience, and the approaches to this are through reflection, devotion, meditation and yoga. Tantra seems to be undogmatic here. Every path is okay: never value the path of others, after all, the world is much bigger and more complex than any of us can even imagine. Fate and chance have a complex relationship; spiritual practice, sadhana, shows the way.

But at the moment I'm interested in the Memory and the memory. Memory is the vessel, memory is the content, experience is its history and structure. Memories are images; they are within us and can be actively remembered, appear unasked, be associated more or less by chance. They form our identity. And just as the world outside me becomes part of my memory, I naturally become part of other consciousness if I was part of that experience. And just as I forget many things, I will also forget. That is okay. Sometimes, however, something imprints itself and becomes an integral part.

I'm slowly getting to the point I want to make here. We have cultural techniques to share these memories, our memory, our experiences, our identity and our world view. Through language, text, images, expression through dance, theater, music, mantras, tantras. There are 64 kalas (art forms) in India. Over thousands of years, techniques have been perfected to refine the process of this communication. The resulting aesthetic theories are manifold. In the West, for example, the mechanism of representation is very important; in the Eastern tradition, rasa is more important, i.e. the expression of essence, the essential. Since the 19th century, we have had technical devices such as the camera, the cinematograph and the gramophone as an extension of older printing techniques. So we have found a technique not only to materialize memory (as many art forms do), but also to automate and reproduce it. I think this has created a great deal of confusion.

Gilles Deleuze, with reference to Henri Bergson, has created clarity here by recognizing that film is thinking.

Yesterday I had a long conversation about the origin of thought. Which comes first, the words or the thoughts. There are of course very different forms of thinking. Visual, musical, analytical, synthetic, performative thinking etc... There is thinking on the level of intuition, there is thinking in memory, there is vision and intuition. There are so many types of thinking. What is thinking? Who thinks while thinking? How is it different from consciousness?

Much within my consciousness is not thinking, it is sensory perception, contemplation, daydreaming, there are unconscious and subconscious processes. Strictly speaking, none of this is thinking. Thinking is reflection, it is a reflection on the world, it is an attempt to understand and comprehend the world. It is largely analytical. When I perceive something through my senses, something is simply given to me within my consciousness. When I think about what I see, I give things names, I identify characteristics, I describe actions. This is my way of understanding the world. Describing the world in the form of an imaginary text allows me to see deeper connections: Functionalities, causalities, principles...

But where does a thought come from? How does it arise? There is intertextual thinking, i.e. I read or listen and react to text with text, connect many texts ... that is rather academic. There is a way of thinking that involves active listening and communication. People who listen to each other and think together explore a thought together. This listening and communicative thinking is exciting. Someone says something, someone else understands something, hopefully the two will coincide as far as possible, because they will never be identical. Now there are many dialogues here that are relatively standardized. Generalities are exchanged, or standard positions are compared, like in a game of chess ... but there is also philosophical dialog, the joint questioning. The question, for example: What is thinking? How do you answer this question? How do you think about it?

Sensations and impressions

I recently read Deleuze's essay on David Hume read. Hume says that everything begins with 'sensation' or 'impression'. When I feel something and then name it, this is the beginning of thinking. I can perceive objects, abstract properties, postulate causality, make statements, establish facts. But how can I record sensations and impressions? How can matter have a memory? How can my consciousness have images? These are Henri Bergson's questions.

What is the relationship between the outside world and the images of consciousness that are then structured into thoughts in language? Doesn't language have to be designed a priori as possible in order to express itself? Chomsky says that our brains, and perhaps also those of animals, have a general capacity for language baked into them. The Bible begins with: In the beginning was the word. Something similar can be found in the Vedas and Upanishads. In the Vedas, however, it is not just language that was there in the beginning, but a whole system of knowledge that encompasses different levels of consciousness and understands the human being as a microcosm. Everything that I can think can also exist and everything that exists can also be thought. We will probably need many more generations as a species. But a correspondence is postulated between the world and consciousness. They are one, nondual.

Deleuze's thinking revolves around how thoughts arise from a level of immanence. How these thoughts connect and combine to form complex systems. He calls this, for example, abstract machines, diagrams, rhizomes, plateaus etc... This is how words, thoughts, things, structures, power, art, the unconscious and the abstract etc. can combine. The world thus expresses itself, there is life in it (A Life). This is also the basic principle of the Upanishads, Brahman expresses itself through the creation of the world. An existence must also contain the process and change. This is the only reason why this reality exists.

As far as we know, man has so far created the most complex and wildest level of reality within thought. If you take all the different languages, cultures, religions, forms of society together, it becomes clear that something is being expressed here, something is manifesting. This is that. This is that.

Origin of thought

The origin of thinking is therefore only on one level in perception. In spiritual practice, inner contemplation and habitual practice (meditation and yoga) are the key to an original way of thinking that frees itself from stimulus-response patterns. The scriptures and teachings, the rituals and exercises serve a self-formation that allows us to look beyond the surface of sensual certainty. The thinking that becomes possible here goes further than the mere recognition of causal connections. It also goes further than rational reflection on problems of ethics, aesthetics and cognition. The rational mind has succeeded in ushering in the Anthropocene, a terraforming that is unique as far as we know. Nevertheless, existential questions remain untouched by this kind of thinking.

So the question of the origin of thought remains. Did the word come first? The word stands for language, which can capture many things. If we understand language as a symbolic system that can also be understood visually, musically or performatively, we could say that thought itself is always language. However, this only covers a small part of our existence. Our consciousness is broader, our physical existence, our life force (prana) our intellect (buddhi), memory (manas), our identity (ahankara) our spirituality (satchitananda), all this goes beyond thinking. Thinking can reflect and describe it, but it is not thinking itself.

I keep asking myself what it looked like at the beginning of thought. Many thousands of years ago ... I remember how we once wanted to bury a cat. Our (living) cat was irritated by the cardboard box. When the box with the carcass was gone, our cat performed a very elaborate ritual. We had never seen this before, even though he is an older cat and we have lived together for a very long time. It was clear that our cat was reacting to the death of a fellow cat. There are many stories from the animal kingdom, the elephant graveyards are perhaps the best known. It seems to me that there is a consciousness here that remembers others.

Thinking is rooted in experience, language, insight. It is often an experience of the world that lies beyond empiricism. This is where everyone's true creativity lies. Thinking is also always an act of creation.

There is an international zone in Auroville. An area in the city of the future that wants to give different cultures and nations a place to express themselves and come into contact with each other. People in Auroville should be able to experience these different cultures. The whole concept is quite vague, roughly organized along the lines of continents, with some focus on selected nation states. Aurobindo has written something about some 'national souls', he has tried to characterize them. However, these characterizations date from the first half of the 20th century.

I have always found the concept of the soul itself very problematic, and the concept of the nation is also problematic. A national soul, what is that supposed to be? And a German one at that. The whole world knows how badly that went wrong in Nazi Germany.

Aurobindo's philosophy is essentially about the illumination of consciousness. Not just of one's own subjective consciousness, which has remained in a self-assertive reflex since Descartes' skepticism, but of consciousness itself, as a phenomenon that can be experienced intersubjectively between different forms of life and spiritual realms of experience. Aurobindo's philosophy anchors consciousness in a global spirituality, describing it as divine consciousness. For him, consciousness is the starting point of all existence. This consciousness is real and can be experienced. Through mental and spiritual evolution, we can expand, enrich and transcend our own consciousness. This always sounds so esoteric, but actually only describes something that we observe every day. A person is born and learns, develops a personality and grows intellectually, emotionally, socially, creatively, etc.... At some point in the history of Western cultures, rationality has gained dominance and discredited everything that is alien to it. Taming this rationality and reintegrating it into a holistic context through the practice of yoga is the project of Sri Aurobindo's Synthesis of Yoga.

Sri Aurobindo anchors his philosophy on 7 levels: Matter, Life Force, Rational Thought, Intellectual Worldview, Spiritual Sensuality, Pure Consciousness and Pure Existence. You could say that rational thinking got lost in matter in the 20th century. However, in order to be able to connect all 7 levels, Aurobindo needs the concept of the soul, whose archetype is Purusha. This cosmic soul manifests itself in individual souls, be they mine or yours, or those of animals and plants, planets or nations. Everything is permeated by consciousness, everything has an identity, but the languages are very different.

I still find it very difficult to penetrate the implications of this. It's plausible in the intersubjective realm, and it's an inviting door to spirituality. But when it comes to the German soul, I really have my difficulties. Nevertheless, there seems to be something behind the cultural stereotypes. There are friendships and enmities between cultures, peoples, nations, and there are families of cultures and languages, e.g. the Indo-European language area, the Dravidian languages, or Afro-Asian languages and many others. There are religious spheres of influence that overlap with language areas, cultural areas and national borders. Behind the complexity of these overlaps, which are additionally mixed by colonialism, globalization and socio-economic dynamics, there is perhaps a kind of map of different spheres. Such a map can only be drawn up, if at all, in the spirit of unity in diversity. This seems to me to be the project of the international zone. Perhaps the German Pavilion could house a kind of research center for such a map.

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"Collections with Maps | Maps | Library of Congress". n.d. Web page. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Accessed June 15, 2023. https://www.loc.gov/maps/collections/.

As I follow the wisdom of the Upanishads and the power of the Rigveda, many things become clearer and clearer to me. The spiritual power of the ancient scriptures in India lies in their unfiltered access to experience and intuition.

The systems of thought that I have come to know in the Western tradition basically always try to find a starting point:

• Philosophy always searches for the beginning. However, it usually does so through the mind. This leads to the question of axiomatics and ontology, i.e. the question of basic assumptions and irreducible forms of being.
• Other, more religious and mystical attempts look for an anchor in the transcendental, metaphysical or supernatural. Ultimately, in an authority that can be experienced.
• Science, with its materialistic approach to the world, looks for patterns and tries to generalize them in order to verify or falsify the theories derived from them.

What I am getting to know here in India is the essence of mediation. Spirituality starts from an inward view. This inward view is pure and unclouded. It is like clarified butterfat - ghee.

Meditation on the self

In the Meditation the body is in a resting position and the mind allows the stimuli of the outside world to fade away. Concentration on the breath is often used as an aid at the beginning of mediation. Counting your own breaths directs your awareness to your own body, to the life force of the breath, to the relationship between the outside world and the inner world. Once the mind and body have come to rest in this way, the actual meditation begins. The senses, which are now largely freed from the stimulus-reaction scheme, are open. And this is precisely where the Upanishads come in.

The next step is not about experiencing the transcendental, the mystical, some other kind of reality, as so many meditators think. The Upanishads are about bringing the senses into a pure form. Seeing becomes seeing, hearing becomes hearing, thinking becomes thinking etc... No more and no less. Those who succeed in remaining at this level of consciousness perceive the basic structure of consciousness. It becomes clear that the sensory impressions, stimulated by the external sensory organs, appear within consciousness, but transformed. In philosophy, many thinkers now jump far too quickly to the conclusion that we are dealing here with mental representations. However, a lot still has to happen before we arrive at mental images.

The Kena Upanishad asks: Who sees when seeing, who hears when hearing, who thinks when thinking etc.... This is the question of all questions. The answer is clear and pure - Simplicity is complexity resolved - the absolute self. What does that mean?

When my consciousness concentrates on one of the senses in meditation, it becomes - detached from its object of perception and equally detached from the subject of perception - a pure content of consciousness, a form that springs from a vibration. Vibration is the concept of the Upanishads; for the scientific mind we could speak of consciousness contents that accompany neuronal currents. This vibration, which is triggered by the sense organs, constitutes consciousness. Even reductionist materialists would still agree here. It is what Hegel calls sensual certainty.

But who is it that has this sensual certainty? It is not the subject that synthesizes the mental images, the representations, but it is a mixture of vibrations. Consciousness does not exist in isolation. Consciousness is a mixture of different contents of consciousness. The vibration of the senses mixes with our breath and heartbeat, with nature. In short: consciousness is bound to the life force (prakriti), to a soul (purusha) and identity (atman).

Atman and Brahman

During meditation, the blending of the senses is easy to observe. The clear consciousness becomes aware of this harmony and enjoys it. It is here that ecstasy and bliss are experienced. And here, at least for me, the self awakens in a deeper sense. For here consciousness is detached from the stimulus-response scheme. The synthesized consciousness (Atman) develops its own power of action, it becomes an agent, i.e. free. And in this very consciousness of the free self (which is a much stronger concept than the rather technical self-consciousness with its self-referential structure), the self recognizes its unity with the absolute self. Free consciousness recognizes itself as part of consciousness in general. Atman is Brahman and Brahman is Atman.

Pictures of the Rigveda

From here, images of Rigveda also become clear to me. The sacred cows that appear as rays of the sun and in other strange constellations, the horses that are harnessed and come from the cities or drive the gods, the fire that is omnipresent in various forms, sometimes smoking, sometimes clear.

Sometimes, after a meditation, I would transport myself to a prehistoric time, a time with few tools, without writing, under the starry sky, where horses grazed in the meadow and milk was boiled over the fire and churned butter was clarified. The mystery of life and consciousness, the experience of being part of the cosmos, sitting around the campfire, or lighting the oil lamps with clarified butter for the gods, is a deep spiritual experience that can still be felt to some extent in the temples and at the festivals in India.

The clarified butter of the majestic, free-range cows that gives strength and light, the breath of the puffing horses at dawn, the fire that warms and is reflected in the sun and the moon. These are very concrete experiences that are central to spiritual mediation. The rishis start from what is in front of them, and they reflect inwards and describe the mystery of our existence here and now. It is not a spirituality based on authority or a priori categories. This spirituality is developed from the most general world of experience, it explains who and what we are. It merely gives names to things and forces and describes them.

The gods are nothing other than the forces we see: the growth of trees in nature, the struggle and love of living beings, the forces of our subconscious, the ideals of our spirit. They are part of every culture, they are everywhere, they are real. In Hinduism, they are named forces and worshipped as gods. What is wrong with that?

We live in this world, this is where we are, and this is where our spirituality is. It is not in the hereafter, nor is it here.

I took part in a Zen meditation circle last year. Not so much because I see myself as a Zen Buddhist, but because I was looking for a quiet community to pursue my practice. During the Dokusan, I got involved in actively exploring my questions. I gave up a lot and left a lot behind. It was surprisingly easy. The 'teacher' drew my attention to the fact that the homelessness that I was actively initiating was also a spiritual state. That was liberating.

Instead of tying one's self to an identity that is bound up in social structures, my philosophical and spiritual journey leads me to a consciousness that tries to free itself from this illusion. Home has no meaning in this context, or if it does, it has a completely different meaning - living in harmony. This harmony is arbitrarily complex and co-present. A physical reference point for the body is not a home - the social, cultural, political, spiritual is perhaps more so. But here too, the point of reference in Buddhism or Hinduism is different. The core is to understand oneself as part of a diversity and immanent unity, which contradicts the concept of a home.

Being homeless is a spiritual state. It is not negative, but a goal. I have always felt homeless, I have always had difficulties with the concept of self. I have always been searching for an answer that is not based on a location, but on a realization. This realization is beyond the mind, it is intuitive and in its overcoming. Sri Aurobindo wrote a lot about fire. Its flame is light, it transforms. Its energy: destructive, giving, universal, mystical and spiritual.

The Kena Upanishad describes how the self as such does not exist. Who sees in seeing, who hears in hearing? This cannot be answered. In the Christian tradition, a self has been constructed for this purpose. I see, I hear, cogito ergo sum, imago ergo sum.... What is this cogito (I think), the imago (I imagine)? The I that creates identity, has responsibility, acts and interacts.

It seems clear that thinking, if it is conscious of itself, needs a point of reference. I write this, you read this... But this point of reference is a consciousness that constitutes the self in the first place, as an illusion. Recognizing consciousness and overcoming the self is the central core of Eastern meditation. Focusing on the here and now, perceiving sensory impressions and understanding them as such is a central part of spiritual practice. But where does imagination come from? Why can I conjure up memories, be caught up by them? What is the force that controls thought and creatively brings forth something new?

Bringing this restless self to rest is the first step towards bliss, a step towards nirvana. And yet it is this self that allows us to be together with others, that gives us an awareness that there is a consciousness beyond our self.

Stages of consciousness

Consciousness is general, i.e. it exists as such in the world. We participate in it. We can participate in it unconsciously, selflessly and contemplatively, acting and interacting. A self can be constituted that is not conscious of itself, but is its point of reference. It can grow beyond itself. Consciousness can transcend, dissolve and immerse itself, merge and empathize. Consciousness travels in the world of sensory impressions, memories and ideas. It connects and disintegrates. When we sleep, where is it? Who or what is dreaming? In a dissociation, a schizophrenia or a delusion, is consciousness torn apart?

In contemplation, consciousness is the other, in transcendence it is the resting point of clarity. In volition it is agent and in interaction it is self.

I have been thinking about Marx for so many years. Who hasn't? The idea of an equal and solidary community, free of ideological superstructures or irrational will-o'-the-wisps. A world that knows only matter and sees in it a scientific, progressive movement. Their goal? A world in which humanity is perfect, i.e. harmonious, without envy and resentment, in solidarity and with equal rights, without alienation and heteronomy, which alone enables the development of the individual within a collective.

This dream of a better future, which, following the course of history, will inevitably be achieved - albeit in the future - encourages struggle and revolution, but for others it also encourages serenity: what can stand in the way of history?

Consciousness is determined by matter, according to Marx. The world as will and imagination, on the other hand, according to Schopenhauer and Kant, ultimately... Why should the world either arise from my imagination or have nothing to do with me? What is wrong with that?

The unfolding of the spirit - based on Hegel - why think so small? In the spirit of the Enlightenment, the aim was to establish a world view that is based purely on science. This protects against charlatans, ideologies, magicians, seducers, warriors and other deceivers.

We have chased away the spirit and replaced it with money, success and power. The wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, the Sermon on the Mount, the shamans and seers, for example, can no longer be found in our cultural identity. They have been declassified as superstructures. The intersubjective, the anchor of one's own consciousness in another consciousness, leads to the path of meditation. Empathy not only shows us that we are not alone, but that we are part of something that goes beyond us.

The color on a canvas means more than just that. As in Jackson Pollock's last painting, it gives us a glimpse of the beginning. Heterogeneity arises from looking at it.

When the Internet became accessible to the public, i.e. in the mid-1990s, there was a phenomenon of people putting their deepest secrets online. The anonymity, simplicity and speed were seductive. Confessions were quickly made, anonymity was largely preserved and there was perhaps even a little thrill that someone you knew might read the secrets without knowing who was behind them. These tele-confessions were cathartic. Today it's the other way around: everyone should see what you're doing without knowing what you're really thinking. Anonymity has also changed.

Writing something without using your own name is similar. Of course, anyone could find out the identity of the domain owner, but that's not the point. Public writing is exciting. Putting your own ego in the background and letting your thoughts organize themselves. It is perhaps even a kind of meditation, which is also very much about overcoming one's own ego consciousness to a certain extent and immersing oneself in a larger collective. This fascination also radiated from the Internet in the beginning. In the 60s, it was the cybernetic systems that stimulated these thoughts.

Many sci-fi books and films are based on this technical level of networking: Dune, Matrix, Neuromancer... There is, of course, a whole literary history of net literature. In Silicon Valley, this has developed into a 'technology spirituality' of radical rationality in the spirit of Ayn Rand in the form of a technical Tower of Babel. It has turned into a dystopia in which the individual becomes a slave to technology. Giorgio Agamben wrote about Homo Sacer. Our 'soul' becomes an economic object.

Today I heard a quote from Sri Aurobindo. He said that each of us has several selves. That was clear to me. It has been my experience for decades that the different aspects of a personality are many and that the idea of a subjective identity is a construction. I always saw the principles of construction as ideological, serving the logic of passports, individual responsibility and jurisdiction, but also of guilt and atonement, the idea of a soul in the Christian context, etc.

My reaction has always been to resist this constructive principle of individuality. Aurobindo now says that it is precisely when people feel that they have many aspects, many 'I's within them, that the task of sorting them out is difficult. Some people live in their own orbits and have found a way to somehow unite the contradictions. Others have so many 'I's that it is difficult to sort them out. How is this sorting supposed to work?

What is new for me is the idea that the many 'I's can be organized around something that is bigger and different. A greater consciousness. For many, this is perhaps a divine consciousness. For Deleuze, perhaps immanence. No longer being oneself as I have 5 years of philosophy studies to overcome here. And 20 years of art theory, which focuses on the individual.

Some time ago, I was talking to a friend about the fact that I was saying goodbye to many ideas. I told her that I - quite unscientifically - visit my memories and think about why I no longer find certain ideas interesting, that these are often ideas that I dealt with in my studies. Great ideas! From Kant and Hegel etc. She was quite taken with my story and asked if I was writing this down. I said: Why? I'm saying goodbye. She was disappointed. Did she want to check whether I was right to leave these ideas behind me? Did she want me to share myself so that others could follow, or did she just want me to become a fellow writer? SHE advised me to start a blog.

The idea I said goodbye to when I talked about it was no small idea. It was Kant's idea of the transcendental ego. The idea that there must be an ego that can accompany all my thoughts. This ego not only makes me aware of these thoughts, but also integrates them into an identity. At the same time, however, this ego is not merely part of my conscious world of experience, in which case it would be fleeting, lost in sleep. I realized on a long train journey to France that there must be something similar. An anchor point, so to speak. From here to Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit. However, I realized that I was no longer interested in idealism. Especially German idealism. Consciousness in Germany is romantic and dangerous. It is subjective.

That's why I now read books from India. I find cemeteries fascinating and suspicious. Strange anchorages.

When I was a teenager, I had lost my heart to someone who lived in Rome. I traveled to the Eternal City with no money, no plan, it was supposed to be a surprise. That went somewhat wrong. We ate a pizza together, otherwise I had a lot of time to myself. I spent many hours on one of the hills looking up at the sky. I thought about Einstein. What else. Everything else seemed too trivial. There, for the first time, I had an awareness of the whole. Not that I understood Einstein, although I felt like I did: looking up at the starry sky, I realized that everything is connected and interacts. That energy, matter, space, consciousness, time - everything is connected and can be transformed into one another. I still remember that moment today. It seemed so clear to me, so indisputable. As a result, I lost my self. From then on, it made no sense at all for me to speak of a self. Identity now seemed to me to be an ideological construct that was only valid on passports. The foundation for my philosophy studies had been laid.