First Encounters with Ragas As a teenager, I listened to ragas for hours. I knew nothing about them. I looked things up a bit: microtonality, meditation, melodic progression. I didn't understand anything else. But they were the deepest musical experiences – a meditation through music. To this day, ragas lead me inward or into deep states of realization, which are not rational, however. It's more of a way of being in the world. Music as a Shared Space and Pure Energy Listening to music draws…
Traditional Indian music, the raga, is melodic with respect to a fundamental tone. Western music is harmonic, meaning simultaneous and complex. In the West, much is thought in terms of structures; for a time, there was much talk of structuralist and post-structuralist thought. Complex systems are found everywhere: in philosophy, in canonical texts and visual systems, in technology, and in worldviews. An essential fundamental idea is atomistic thinking. The notion is that the world consists of elementary parts and can be broken down into them...
Connection
For the last two years, I've been diving quite deeply into the Upanishads, have practiced some yoga, and have explored the system of yoga a bit. I've delved into my own body, my own senses, my own consciousness. I've seen that there are a large number of levels and that there's no reason to assume that more levels don't exist. Two years ago, I simply denied most of what I'm experiencing here. It is...
It is so beautiful and also so sad to live in a world that understands the West as alien. I am increasingly adopting this perspective and no longer understand many things. The obsession with career, comfort, security, prosperity, correctness, self-righteousness, know-it-all attitudes, arrogance, ignorance, and intolerance. All of this is becoming evident, it's practically obvious. I was sick for a few days, and as many people do then, I also watched movies, nothing inspiring. Trashy series. I have this...
Learn how a 3-day intensive workshop at Sunlit Path with Niloy led to an immersion into the world of Dhrupad. Discover the complexity of Dhrupad and Nada Yoga - the exploration of sound and vibration. Sharpen your senses and immerse yourself in the art of sound.
we experience the power of consciousness through the blending of different vibrations. This text explores the constitution of consciousness in a meditative state.
For 3,000 years, the books of the Vedas have been preserved in memory in India. The Rigveda (10,552 verses), Samaveda (1549 verses), Yajurveda (4001 verses), and Atharvaveda (5977 verses), as well as the Upanishads (approx. 1800 verses), have been passed down from generation to generation. The grammar of Sanskrit has not fundamentally changed, and the pronunciation has been meticulously conveyed through precise phonetic descriptions. Thus, these texts sound the same today as they did 3,000 years ago. They are written in the form of mantras, that is, in verse form and...
Gilles Grimaître visits Auroville for a few days during his Pro Helvetia artist residency in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Pondicherry to engage with Carnatic music. The program he chose for the evening of December 17th, 2022, was a passionate, loving introduction to usually not-so-accessible Western avant-garde music. Grimaître started off with Johannes Brahms's Drei Intermezzi op 117, a romantic crowd-pleaser, followed by a more challenging piece by Olli Mustonen (*1967) called ‘Jehkin Iivana’. Nobody would know the…
German 
English 
French