First encounters with ragas As a teenager, I listened to ragas for hours. I didn't know anything about them. I looked them up a little: Microtonality, meditation, tone sequence. That was all I understood. But it was the most profound musical experience - a meditation on music. To this day, ragas lead me into my inner self or into deep states of insight, which are not rational [...]
Zen is about finding the true self. But this doesn't exist, and that's the mystery of our existence. In a world of representations, cognitive dissonances, and alternative facts, it is good to sink into the essence of existence, into a non-dual being. Thinking helps only very limitedly, because thinking is [...]
When the rational mind wanders through the realms of knowledge, sifts through the library, or searches for the causal laws of the universe, it is engaged in the painstaking work of constructing systems of knowledge. At first, these systems have little in common with the world of experience, let alone the inner world. It is only through contemplation that the mind pauses and contemplates the systematized, […]
The Archaeology Department of Tamil Nadu has officially counted thousands of temples. Learn more about the significance of these temples and their millennia-old knowledge. #Archaeology #temples #TamilNadu
Yesterday I went to sleep expecting to get up early and meditate. I set the alarm for 6 o'clock. In the evening, a French yoga teacher and mountain guide told me about the early morning hours in India, that they are the best for meditation - I already knew that they are good for ryas. She told me [...]
Solitude Farm in Auroville is a 'food forest'. This is one of the few English terms that is difficult to express in German with a compound noun (Esswald?). We don't have anything like that, and it's hard to think about. An orchard that we would let run wild with other edible annuals and short-lived plants until [...]
There was a time in Europe when people spoke of universal geniuses. In Germany, that would be Alexander von Humboldt or Goethe, in France an Enlightenment thinker, in Italy the Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci. In antiquity, Aristotle. Certainly, there are wise people in many cultures and eras that history tells of, they […]
It is definitely time to rethink. What our fathers and grandfathers called progress is destroying our planet. Science is not an end in itself, not everything that is technically feasible is good, not everything that is fun and satisfies our senses is useful. Now we keep hearing from many sides that we should focus on the small steps ahead [...].