Auro Art World organized a series of 6 lectures at the Centre d'Art multimedia room in Auroville. These lectures, conducted by Dr. Christoph Kluetsch, explore connections between art, philosophy, and spirituality, bridging Eastern and Western traditions to illuminate the enduring questions of existence, consciousness, and creativity. The series is offered on the first Tuesday of every month.

Fourth lecture - Tuesday 7th January 2025 at 5pm

Who in our consciousness experiences sensations? How are sensations synthesized? How do matter, vibration, consciousness, and self connect? And how can we share sensations through art? Sri Aurobindo introduced the uncommon notion of intermiscence at a central point in his interpretation of the Kena Upanishad. This concept invites deeper speculation about the power of art and provides a profound tool to understand postmodern theories like Gilles Deleuze's provocative reinterpretation of the notions of concept, percept, and affect. The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze) is an analysis of the forces in modern painting as an encounter. It will become clear that Aurobindo's interpretation of the Kena Upanishad as a key text of the Vedanta can hold space for one of the most profound rhizomatic postmodern thinkers.

On a deeper level, we want to explore how Aurobindo's idea that sensations can 'operate without bodily organs' relates to Deleuze's notion of body without organs (BwO). Both philosophers point at the forces of consciousness on a plane of immanence.

Transcript:

I think I'm going to start slowly. Hello, welcome. Thank you for coming. I've been doing a lecture series here over the last couple of months. This is, I think, the fourth lecture I'm doing. They're not really related; they're all different topics. One was on temples, one on retinal art, one on apples and mangoes-just topics I find interesting.

It was an eye-opening experience when I discovered the Upanishads. I realized that not only are the Upanishads at least as deep as some of the most profound Western philosophies I've read, but they actually address a lot of questions I had been searching for. One of them was the question, "Who is seeing when seeing?" So I want to explore that a little bit. I will talk a bit about the Kena Upanishad. I'm not teaching it as a philosopher, because I don't have the expertise to go too deeply into it, but I will use it as material. Then I want to contrast it with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, a French contemporary thinker who died in the 1990s-probably one of the most prolific postmodern thinkers of the 20th century.

The Laocoön, from around 27 AD, is probably one of the most famous sculptures. Winckelmann wrote about it, and the key phrase associated with it is "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur." The way the bodies are intertwined-how Laocoön is fighting the serpent to protect his sons-really captures so much of the energy and essence that defines us as humans, expressing it in a beautiful way that engages the viewer.

So, when I look at the Kena UpanishadI've highlighted a few things: "What gives sight to the eye and hearing to the ear?" I probably don't need to explain much about this Upanishad to people here, but it makes us aware of how our senses work and what the binding force behind them is. It leads us to meditation and reflection on the relationship of Brahman and Atman. Sri Aurobindo wrote an extraordinary commentary on the Kena Upanishad, which I've read many times. It's incredibly prolific, almost infinitely deep.

Looking at art in the 20th century, we can ask: What is art doing? What does it capture? One example is Vincent van Goghwho painted shoes. Martin Heidegger wrote about those shoes, saying they capture the very essence of "shoeness." He points out how we can see the earth under the soles, how they are worn. Another example is Paul Cézannewho painted apples again and again-there's something significant about painting an apple instead of simply eating it. Plato, in antiquity, famously mistrusted artists, calling them liars: if you paint an apple, you can't eat it, so in a sense you're deceiving people. But Cézanne might be indirectly responding to that by painting dozens of still lifes with apples, to show we can delve into our very own way of seeing and creating art, and reflect on the world.

When I was studying Sri Aurobindo's commentary, I found a few ideas that really shook me awake. For instance, here is one of those insights: if we suppose that physical senses act through a physical body, we can explain physical phenomena that way. Still, that action is only an organization of the inherent functioning of the essential sense.

And I was reading this and thought, "Wow, this is Sri Aurobindo, talking about the Kena Upanishad, essentially discussing a 'body without organs,' which is usually associated with Gilles Deleuze's way of thinking. And here it is!" I wondered what he meant-how one goes to the very essence of sensation and talks about it in a way that allows us to think about a body beyond our ordinary notion of organs.

It's much less common to think of the body in that way. And Deleuze makes a proposal to consider the "body without organs" as something that brings thinking into art. He uses Francis Bacon as an example-a famous British painter known for distorted figures that convey pain and distress, expressing the suffering of the 20th century. But what Deleuze says is that when we look at a painting by Bacon, what we see is the actual sensationnot merely the face or how hair is flying around, but a subtler level-an inner working of the sensation someone in distress might have. It's shown through what he calls the "logic of sensation."

So, taking that term-"logic of sensation"-back into the Upanishads, what happens?

Sri Aurobindo, in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad, makes a distinction of five different elements. It's quite a complex idea. I stumbled over the word "intermissence" because I didn't know what it meant. When I looked it up, I saw maybe three books in the world use it. It's a very obscure word, but a valid (though out-of-use) English term.

When Aurobindo discusses sensation in relation to the Kena Upanishad, of course he speaks about the five senses and the five elements, intertwining them. He starts by saying, first, we have rhythmwhich is sound. Secondly, we have intermissence, this "flowing into each other," which is touch. If I touch a surface, then my skin and the surface of the object are flowing into each other to a certain degree-otherwise, I wouldn't be able to touch it. Something stops my body and makes clear there is something else there.

Third is shapewhich relates to sight. Fourth is taste, involving "upflow," or water. Fifth is the discharge or compression of force and movementwhich he relates to smell-atoms evaporating from the object and being received by my nose. Beyond these correlations, there is something deeper, as Aurobindo notes. He's exploring how these senses operate at a profound level.

So again, the correlation is:

• Rhythm = Sound
• Intermissence = Touch
• Shape = Sight
• Button = Upflow/Water
• Compression/Discharge = Smell

I was thinking about what example of 20th-century art could help illustrate this. In 2009, I was at Tate Modern in London for the installation How It Is by Miroslaw Balka. In the Turbine Hall, there was this massive black container, completely dark inside. You walk in, and it's really a journey into yourself. People move slowly. At the end, you turn around, and light pours in. You see everyone coming towards you, slowly, and you see how you yourself must have looked walking in. So there is this interplay between perception and self-awareness.

Sri Aurobindo, in his Kena Upanishad commentary, states that all the senses have a kind of complex unity. They aren't separate compartments-hearing here, seeing there, tasting there, all in isolated boxes within a human being. Instead, it's a complex unity at the core.

So, in a way, seeing is connected to hearing, taste, and touch, and they all operate upon each other. I don't want to go too deeply into modern scientific or philosophical discussions about "What if someone is blind or deaf?"-that might raise interesting questions, but at the core, it's still valid that when we talk about consciousness, when I speak of my experience of the world, these senses flow together. A little like I said before: in Sri Aurobindo's terms, there is rhythm, intermissence, form, the "upgoing force" (related to rasa), and compression of energy. Somehow, these aspects combine.

So, when we ask, "Who is seeing when seeing?" it's really about the consciousness behind everything-whether you call it my consciousness, your consciousness, or Brahman in manifestation. There's a larger consciousness of which we're a part, and we participate in that manifestation, thereby allowing the world to "sense" itself.

Another example is James Turrella famous American light artist. His Roden Crater project has been in the works for decades; only recently have a few people seen it, and I, unfortunately, haven't been there myself. He constructs these spaces that open up to the sky, blurring the boundaries between myself, the space I inhabit, and something deeper-the cosmos, the stars, silence. Some of his installations work on the very fine line of perceiving light in and of itself, dimmed down to such a degree that you just begin to see it. In that process, your mind passes through different levels of being-what some might call the chakras or the seven layers. In Indian thought, we might call them prana, rational mind, vijnana, philosophical view, sat-chit-ananda, and so on. The Upanishad guides us to become aware of these sensory and perceptual layers.

Images are fascinating when you think of them philosophically-not just as representations like a painting of something. Images are also what appear on our retina when we perceive. We have them in memory, in visions. I see you, you see me-we see each other. There is a way to think of images as the fundamental layer of our existence, because all I truly have of the world is my perception of it. I don't directly have "the world" in my mind; I have a sensation of something, and that's an image.

Henri Bergson is a philosopher who was very radical in this regard, and he's one of the very few Western philosophers Sri Aurobindo acknowledged. Bergson essentially says that our consciousness is dealing with images only. Everything is an image-this object, that object, you, me. Even my body is a particular image, because consciousness has direct access only to these images. We don't have direct access to "matter" in our consciousness. Modern science may talk about matter from an analytical perspective, but in our actual conscious experience, there is only this array of images.

These images also extend into our memory. I can tell you what I was doing yesterday; those memories consist of images. Yesterday no longer exists in the present world-it's simply gone-but I have images of it. So, in a very strong phenomenological sense, it's useful to pause and consider that all we have is this interplay of images, here and now.

We can make sense of images in many ways. We can contemplate them, compare them, act upon them, or even run away from them. There's something very particular about the image of my body in relation to all the other images that can act on it. That is an extraordinary observation by Henri BergsonIf you follow the Upanishadic path inward to your own body, you're essentially doing what Bergson describes-treating your body as an image. And the fact that we can act upon other images is found in meditation through the Upanishads, which always point to the force behind everything. Bergson, Deleuze, and others may discuss it differently, but the Upanishads call it Brahman or that deeper principle.

Mark Rothko gives a good example of this in his color-field paintings. One might say if you've seen one Rothko, you've seen them all-two or three rectangular color fields relating to each other. Yet if you visit a large Rothko retrospective, you see dozens of them, and it's mind-blowing. The tension between the colors and the way they float over a background color create a field of sensation. In painterly terms, that field of sensation is close to what Gilles Deleuze refers to as the plane of immanence-the most fundamental layer. You might think of that layer as Brahman in the Advaita sense: "There is only one reality," which unfolds into complexity. That complexity is necessary for anything to be set in motion. Once set in motion, experience becomes possible, and that is how existence gains a sense of itself.

Such unfolding can only happen through time, through duration, through actual movement. People often say Earth is where things "come down" to be worked out-whether you call it divine consciousness, soul, or something else. It must take concrete form in reality to experience itself and evolve. Visually, to me, that's what Rothko's fields suggest.

Now, going to the concept of the body without organs in the sense of immanence: consider this as an illustration-Deleuze doesn't specifically talk about it this way, but it's a helpful image. When Deleuze discusses the plane of immanencehe views it as having a transcendental field where action and becoming are possible-where "sense-creation" can happen. It's not just the material world we walk around in, but a subtler level that allows a different way for things to emerge.

Deleuze often gives the example of an egg: at first, you have yolk and white, which seem like formless mass. Many of us eat this for breakfast without a second thought, but if you let it incubate, there's already a chicken in there, in some virtual sense. That's the "body without organs" concept: the egg already contains the chicken, even if it's not yet realized.

By the same token, my body or your body is a body working with sensations, consciousness, and the analytical mind. We enter the world, connect with each other, speak, form communities, develop institutions, come up with knowledge systems, and create science and art. Through all this, we produce the complexity of modern societies. We reflect on reality in an analytical way, dissecting, reassembling, and building. We invent computers and projectors for gatherings like this. In doing so, we generate new intensities, new connections, new ways of being.

In interacting with these systems-institutions, electoral processes, laws-there emerges something that operates on its own. It can improve our lives or make them worse. But it functions as a body in itself, an agency in our reality that acts like a "body without organs." That's the power of Deleuze and GuattariThey analyze how society works (or doesn't), describing problems as a sickness in that body. Recognizing the sickness is the first step to talking about a cure.

Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of capitalism and schizophrenia basically uses this idea of seeing society as a body that's not functioning properly-one that is "sick." Once you recognize there's something wrong in the complex system, you can talk about how to fix it. But first, you need to understand that it's not simply about you or me making one or two changes.

Moving on to a more primary level with Deleuze, he talks about percepts, affects, and concepts. If we want to understand how these realities connect to our consciousness, we need to recognize these categories. A percept is not just my perception. When I look at this pen, there's a perception of a pen, which means my consciousness is directed toward it, and at the same time, the pen "presents itself" to me. You, looking from another angle, see the other side of it. Deleuze calls that pre-personal "something" a percept-prior to our individual perception, and not simply the object itself.

Deleuze says these percepts are akin to what Bergson might call "images." We could think of them as "inner senses." If you go into the Upanishads, you can go much deeper into this. Essentially, percepts are something we can work with; the realm of art taps into that directly.

Similarly, affects are emotions-fear, joy, love, pain-which occur before I even become consciously aware of them. They're triggered pre-subjectively in my nervous system. So Deleuze's idea is that if we look at the complex interplay between the outside world and my inner being-between my sensations, how my consciousness is composed of images, percepts, and affects-we can then see how these can be reworked or rearranged. This leads to a "logic of sensation," which is an awkward kind of move and not many philosophers do it. Deleuze is in many ways unique; you could even call him a kind of "Advaita philosopher," although he would describe it as "materialist immanence." He's non-committal about whether it's consciousness or matter, saying it's just one plane on which things happen.

Paul Cézanne exemplifies this fragmentation of our perception perfectly. He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire about seventy times, breaking the scene into brushstrokes. None of those individual strokes represents anything by itself. Only together do they form what looks like a field, a mountain, trees, houses. But it's not photographic realism. We have to think: How am I assembling these strokes to see the landscape? It's almost a meditative process-a deeply spiritual encounter with reality.

Shifting back to Francis BaconIf we consider percepts, affects, sensations, and distortion, and we look at one of his triptychs, we immediately see a formal, rhythmic structure of three images. It's reminiscent of a traditional Western altarpiece. We might see the same entity repeated, but the body depicted is utterly different from a normal human body-it's reduced or distorted. It seems alive, though not in a straightforward, representational way. I can feel the motion, sense it, and sympathize with the affects it conveys. We see a pre-subjective consciousness of affect rendered visually in these percepts.

Deleuze sometimes draws diagrams to illustrate this. He talks about geological strata-how the Earth has molten magma inside, with layers of stone forming the crust, and tectonic plates shifting to create mountains. Through this folding process, insides and outsides form. Once there is a fold, it can vibrate, leading to dialogue, rhythm, and refrain.

Inside the Earth, you have magma. As the planet cools and solidifies, different layers of stone form. Then there are tectonic movements-continents moving toward or away from each other-creating mountains and folds. Eventually, things fold, and when they fold, you get an inside and an outside; there's some sense of identity forming within that fold.

Once you have that, things can vibrate, get into a dialog, or find a rhythm. For instance, if I knock on a surface, and then you knock in response, those two knocks can start a drum session-there's a shared rhythm. That rhythm creates about, perhaps a territoryan area in which we find ourselves. Often, drum rhythms are used to signal to others that people are present-for invitation, to scare, to attack, or to celebrate. In any case, it defines a territory, and within that territory, social events happen.

This connects to a part of Deleuze's philosophy of art that states art is ultimately an intersection of different planes of knowledge. He describes a plane of immanence, a plane of conceptsand yet another plane. Think of it in terms of wide conceptual planes for thinking about the world. If you intersect them on a very abstract level, you create an inside and an outside-like building a house, in a metaphorical sense. You surround yourself with art, books, ideas, people; you have a belief system and a way of anchoring yourself in reality; you relate to nature in a specific way, eat certain things, care about certain things.

That's how the plane of immanence unfolds in Deleuzian terms. In Upanishadic terms, it might be Brahman bringing itself into existence. It's not an exhaustive interpretation, but it's one way of describing it.

To illustrate this, consider a flock of birds, like the seven sisters or myna birds. There's a rhythm to how they fly around and chatter. They create a territory and invite others in. Sometimes a different bird joins them-sometimes not. They move on, rearrange, and so forth.

Coming toward the end, let's revisit the Kena Upanishad. It doesn't actually start with seeing; it starts with speech: "By whom impelled does this word [speech] arise?" In other words, who is speaking when I am speaking? It's not really "me." We know this idea from the motif of Shiva's drumfrom which syllables and language come-the beginning of the word itself.

Sri Aurobindo, in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad, writes:

"Brahman expresses by the word a form of presentation of himself in the objects of sense and consciousness, which constitutes the universe, just as the human word expresses a mental image of those objects."

Here, Brahman focuses on objects through the word, and humans also focus on objects through the word-but obviously they do so in very different ways. Brahman is expressing through sense and consciousness, constituting the universe.

In looking for a Western counterpart, I remembered Eduardo Kac, a South American media artist, and his experimental project called Genesis. He works with E. coli bacteria, splicing in new genetic code-DNA art, in a sense. It's a controversial territory in its own right, but it reflects these questions of creation, expression, and what it means to bring something into being through a "word" or a code.

Eduardo Kac took a sentence from the Bible's Genesis-"Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth"-so when we speak of Genesis, "In the beginning was the word," and at the end of Genesis there's this notion of man's power to dominate the earth. That's a very different understanding of how words can be used. Sri Aurobindo often talks about words as the most powerful means to manifest, to bring something into existence. In spiritual practice, you use words and mantras to transform yourself; the vibration and the sound of words create reality. Brahman forms the world through words.

What I've tried to do here is intersect these profound observations from the Kena Upanishad and Sri Aurobindo's extraordinary interpretation, looking at "Who is sensing when sensing?" and connecting it with postmodern thinking. Both inform each other quite well. It helps me understand what art is ultimately about on a very deep level-art can be transformative. I'm sure most of us have experienced looking at an artwork for hours, not knowing why, but feeling that it did something to us. Our mind goes into that artwork, entering its plane of sensation, that logic of sensation, beyond narrative-beyond, "Oh, this is the artist, that's the subject, here's the story." It's more about really seeing. "Who is seeing when seeing?" is the question. When you engage with an artwork, when you really try to see and observe, that's where transformation can happen.

Any comments or questions about the "body without organs"? It's a concept most famously associated with Gilles Deleuze, the French postmodern philosopher. He borrowed it from Antonin Artaudwho was known in the early 20th century as an actor and theatrical theorist. Artaud wrote about the "theater of cruelty." It was a way of creating a shock, exposing the body to forces that propel us into being affected. Film itself is another way of dealing with percepts that evolve under distress, as in "theater of cruelty." One connects to these forces-there's torture or conflict in a certain place-and it all extends into that early idea of the "body without organs."

Somehow, it all echoes in Sri Aurobindo's analysis of the Kena Upanishad. Don't ask me why-I just found it striking. Deleuze came decades later, and I'm sure Sri Aurobindo wasn't thinking about the theater of cruelty. But there's an eerie overlap.

DISCUSSION:

Audience:

Then there's this other point in the Upanishads about "seeing" or "vision." In English, we say, "I see what you mean." William Blake famously said, "To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower." How do you see the world in a grain of sand? He's not talking about looking through a microscope; he's talking about a different set of eyes. And you have Master Eckhart in the 13th century saying, paraphrased, "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me." That's an entirely different kind of relationship.

Yes, exactly.

One more mention: the artist who used brushstrokes to indicate a mountain was Paul Cézanne. You said he painted it 70 times in a meditative process?

Yes, he painted the same mountain-Mont Sainte-Victoire-70 times, possibly from different angles. He lived close to it, would walk around, choose different viewpoints, but essentially kept to the same subject. Over that series, he became more and more abstract. He's considered the father of Cubism-Picasso was heavily influenced by him-one of those breakthrough artists like Kandinsky, only earlier.

Audience Member:
And the artist who makes these deformed images-sometimes it's unpleasant to look at. It provokes something that isn't a happy feeling. It's like the "theater of cruelty." I understand that was the aim: to create that kind of reaction. These works were painted for museums. They could be marketed. In the past century, a lot of modern art leans in that direction: beauty in the traditional sense is often abandoned. There is still a market for it, but it focuses on creating a shock or disturbance. It reflects what the artist sees inside himself.

I watched a documentary about one such artist; his studio was a mess. He was clearly disturbed, but we still place him very high in the art world, even calling him a genius. Over time, I've started to change my taste. One of my favorite artists was Burri-I'm sure you know him, Alberto Burri, the Italian. One of his works was... well, it depicts great pain. It reflects what the world is going through right now. That pain is put onto the canvas.

Of course, people can go watch a Disney movie if they want an escape from the world. This kind of art, however, represents a harsh reality. It provokes a reaction. Maybe it helps us confront the fact that the world is in pain, and it inspires us to change it. After the Enlightenment in the West, the notion arose that spirituality, religion, or any non-scientific thinking should be set aside-that was part of the Enlightenment process. But it's an interesting twist on the word "enlightenment," almost the opposite of what we might mean in a spiritual sense.

Lecturer (responding):
Yes, I think that after the Enlightenment, art did jump on that train: it dove into the ugly, the painful, the disturbing, the unusual, the provocative-anything the rational mind can examine and say, "This is pain, this is perception." And from a modern perspective, originality often became the main criterion: you just have to do something new, whether it's admirable or not. That's the logic many follow, though personally, I don't think that logic applies here.

Audience Member:
What's your point of view on art, then? What's your definition or meaning of art?

Lecturer:
I've had to redefine my view. Part of why I'm doing these lectures is that I'm partly saying goodbye to some of those assumptions. I've been disturbed by this for a decade. Sure, I was initially excited by artists like Francis Baconseeing all that pain. But at a certain point, I realized that if I look at Bacon through Deleuze and through the Kena Upanishad and Sri AurobindoI find something deeper that I want to keep. I don't care about the treadmill of modernity anymore.

It's a personal and sometimes painful process. We also have to recognize that we're unconsciously addicted to certain emotions-sometimes even unpleasant ones. We seek experiences or images, including art, that feed those emotions. So these paintings can be a way people indulge in that.

Another Audience Member:
Regarding astrology and planets: In Sanskrit, the word for "planet" is "graha," meaning "to grasp." The planets themselves do nothing, but they "grasp" your mind and direct your perception or actions, engineering certain experiences for you. From another perspective, in the body, Saturn rules the nervous system, and the nervous system is the foundation of whatever experience you have. The Sun rules the bones, etc. In that sense, you see parallels to the concept of "affect" that we discussed-something preexistent to humans.

Another Audience Member:
From a Western viewpoint, that might be new, but from an Eastern viewpoint, it's familiar. And about the Enlightenment you mentioned: I recently read about a meeting of all the world's religions, including the Dalai Lama and various Christian representatives, and one priest pointed out that the Enlightenment was, in a way, a scientific "proving" of certain constitutions, but we got confused and thought it meant discarding religion altogether. It's a tragic misunderstanding.

Lecturer (concluding):
Yes, indeed-it's a very tragic confusion. Alright, thank you all for coming!

Retinal Art and the Ruins of Representation: Revisiting Plato's Cave and the Notion of Rasa in the Natyashastra​

Christoph Kluetsch

"Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter." Gilles Deleuze - Difference and repetition p. 139

"Minds exist only in relation to other minds." (Mihai Nadin)

"even those elements designated as "basic" or "proto-elements" are not primitive but are, on the contrary, of a complex nature." (Kandinsky, point... p.31)

"Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible" (Paul Klee)

"the objective is that which has no virtuality" (Deluze, Bergsionism p.41)

"the eye thinks even more than it listens" (D+G Philosophy p. 195)

"This is the dark thought I have had about representation for so long: we are immersed in it and it has become inseparable from our condition. It has created a world, a cosmos even, of false problems such that we have lost our true freedom: that of invention." (Dorothea Olkowski, p.91)

Worldmaking

- Birds

Our animal instincts and our habitudes dominate a large part of our daily life. Our body calls with its needs, society has its expectations, we have our routines. Sometimes we follow an impulse to do something different, we want to escape, look for a change, or surprise, some excitement and fun, or we are just bored or overwhelmed. Then these little impulses bring change, allow us to become different, enable encounters, and create connectivity with the not-so-ordinary. We become being.

But there are other modes of being in the world. Some which are more directed: contemplation, experimentation, creativity, practice, curiosity, passion, and a desire for knowledge and to overcome ignorance. It is an act of 'worldmaking', in the sense that we combine different planes of knowledge, being, and activities - like intersecting walls so that they form a house, that we inhabit, that defines an inside and an outside, that allows us to leave (de-territorialize) and come back (re-territorialize). We explore the world from here, our home - standing between earth and heaven - that is not physical but spiritual. We design it and put up kind. And that art which we invite into our home is a mirror of the world inside and outside. We can access it through action, meditation, or melancholy.

- Melancholy

...

To art

-Artifacts

But I want to stay focused on worldmaking and its essence of doing artof what it means to create. Because that act of creation, in a deep sense of worldmaking, is something we seem to have lost. So when we go back into Greek antiquity or the time of Vedanta. We enter a world of magical and mystical thinking that has been touched by the rational mind and deep contemplation.

When we go back in time, to the beginnings of civilization and before, we find artifacts that seem to serve a different purpose. Figurines and drawings on cave walls let us believe that humans 40,000 years ago became aware of themselves, their place in the cosmos, and tried to make sense of it. Entering a cave and painting on the walls the life of animals, with the flickering light of a torch, only from memory and an ecstatic state of mind, shows the desire to deeply connect with a deeper reality. There seems to be the idea that life itself can be captured inside a house that does not serve as a home but as a temple. The figurines worn around the neck or carried as totems or talismans may have served as a physical manifestation of some spiritual energies to which the carrier connects.

What I am trying to get at is that they don't represent what they resemble. It is not an act of mimesis or copying the outer appearance. The contemplative mind uses the memory of the visual form as a vessel for the underlying forces, energies, principles, gods, life, consciousness... To art is to become and encounter beyond oneself.

- Damian Hirst Skull

Today, when we are drawn instead to technical perfection, when we wonder how the artist achieved a certain effect through light, composition, form, style, genre we are in a textual, a contextual world of cross-references, so-called progress and development. We enter the history of ideas, power, ideology, taste and connoisseurship. We deal with artist egos and art markets, surplus values, fetishes and accumulation.

Today we sometimes see artists who create a spectacle of otherness, a deep wonderland that is fascinating and intriguing for the most different reasons. But that society of the spectacle uses these world simulations as mental tourist destinations for the so-called cultivated mind. And if we feel fancy, we become critical, develop an attitude, and reflect on the state of the world we collectively build. We zoom in and out of politics and ideology, explore sensations of beauty, simulate other ways of being, experiment with identity, and celebrate and dive into the most complex emotions which we can evoke through poetry, performance, and visual and plastic arts.

Interlude with La Monte Yung

- Daniel Spoeri table

There is this deep discomfort with representation I have had since I can remember. As a child, I used to repeat words until they lost their meaning. Butter butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter... Until I lost the reference point, stopped thinking about butter, but then focused on the word, the letters, the sound. They became arbitrary. I focused on what is "represented" in the mind-the image, taste, smell of butter-but there was no butter. So, what is happening here?

- semiotics

Later, I learned there is a sign (symbol), a signified (object, referent), and thought or reference. I was baffled. How is that supposed to work? What else do I have in my mind? And how is that connected to the outside world, and how can I talk about it?

So I focused my studies on two areas: Art and consciousness. Why do we "art"? And how do we "art"? And what is art? When I want to think, I don't mean that rambling on of more or less clear rational thoughts and images, emotions, and memories, but a clear thinking that is holding world, that you might call vijnanaa thinking that is empty yet apprehensive, that is clear yet stays with the larger picture, a thinking that penetrates the surface without losing sight of it. In short, a thinking that is holding world. That thinking happens; it's not something that I do. It is within meditation now, and it was for a long time in my life in listening to music.

- La Monte Yung

Listening to music - a deep listening - where the now is constituted by the present hearing of sound, but also by the memory of what has been heard and the anticipation of what is to come-a now that extends into the near past and near future, that synthesizes time and transcends space and self. A moment of deep contemplation, filled with structure, consciousness, presence.

In that space, I like to let my mind and body, my self and my unconscious, enter a deep state of wake-dreaming. That world is a pure and abstract world, it is Consciousness sitting on a well-defined structure. If it is a recording, it can be repeated over and over again, yet the experience will never be the same. It is something of the plane of immanence, i.e., on the vastest level of cosmic being that is structured, that becomes consciousness when it runs through my senses.

A musician performs something that has come to them through either a score, an improvisation, intuition, or some practice-whatever it might have been. The artist expresses something through their performance, whether live or recorded. The information, i.e., the sequence of vibrations, reaches someone else, i.e., me. I hear, and my mind and body, my self and my unconscious, my emotions and memories are brought to the surface of consciousness. They flow. And if I let myself be just there, as focused and clear as the moment allows - I become that music.

- play music

The well tuned piano by La Mont Yung is a masterpiece in improvisation. He retuned Bach's well tempered piano back to its natural harmony and thus brings us closer to the harmonics of Indian Raga music, where the vibration is in the center of Nada Yoga.

The well tempered piano is a compromise in harmonics that negates the pure symmetry and geometry of overtones. To me the well tempered piano is a baroque distorted lie, that illustrates the rational pragmatic mind taking over natural frequencies and subordinates the divine under the mundane. La Monte Yung's performances are liberating the ears, activating pure harmony, and allow us to retune with nature.

So, this is the deepest mystery of representation. What is shared, by whom, with whom, and how? Artists are practicing-becoming an instrument, becoming music, becoming complexity. And the listener explores the encounter, resonates, embodies, and manifests. Nowhere is in the now and here any representation.

- Kandinsky

For Kandinsky art is always spiritual. It starts with a point (bindu) when moved it becomes a line, when the line is moved it becomes a plane. The form vibrate and resonate, they have rhythm

Story telling around a fire in the cave and the moving image

- Anish Kapoor Bean

What we are really dealing with since the beginning of aesthetic theories in antiquity is the art of story telling. How do you tell a good story? And how can you evoke feelings in the listener? How do I most effectively tell a story about love and passion, jealousy and devotion, commitment and freedom? Or how do I tell a story about power and corruption, about abuse and selflessness, about manipulation and heroism? I imaging people sitting around a fire 5000 years ago telling stories and refining them. Each time they become more colorful, more emotional, more engaging. And the audience participates, improving the story, a collective memory is formed a saga is born, the beginning of mythology, religion, collective identity.

These stories will be passed on from generation to generation and distill to its essence of humanness. And there we have the core of aesthetic theories. Telling, refining, listening to stories. Building effects, using tricks and rhetoric, developing tropes and styles.

- Chauvet cave

Now I see the flickering light of the fire. The group of people sitting around the fire listening to words and firing their imagination. Their shadows are playing on the walls of the cave they are sitting in; and the analytical mind kicks in. What are they actually seeing when they listen? But before going into what the true nature is of that what is seen - sitting across from each other over a fire with a vivid imagination - I want to look at the walls with its images: The shadow play, maybe even using the hands to form animal shadows, or some forms that produce images of vegetation, animals, people, landscapes. And the shadow theater on the wall will become a performance. And while I imagine people sitting around a fire 5000 years ago, imagining a story told by someone and seen on the walls of shadows, the question arises, what is real? Am I real? Is the story I am telling real? Is the story I am hearing real? Where there people 5000 years ago doing what I describe? What is their reality?

...

- Diagram Platos cave and Deleuze

...

In 1907, Henri Bergson criticized the cinematograph in his book Creative Evolution as a device that produces illusions. The sequence of individual frames that creates the illusion of movement, he argued, was ultimately a lie. Plato had similarly argued that painting was a lie, since one cannot eat a painted apple. In 1985, Deleuze "rescued" cinema from the accusation of being a lie by arguing that, although the criticism was valid, it was short-sighted. The film strip, he claimed, contains more than just individual frames; it is not merely the illusion of movement but pure thought-material philosophy. The élan vital (Bergson's concept of vital force), which the cinematograph supposedly lacks, is extended through the power of thought. The cuts and collages enable streams of thought that are unique to film. Film, then, is not "truth 24 times per second" (as Godard claimed) but pure philosophy (collage, montage, time, story, whole, nooshock).

...

Cy Twombly School of Athens

- Mona Lisa

BUT, I was strangely never really interested in story telling. I never considered art works to tell stories. Although most of them do, I am more interested in the formal qualities: line, shape, color, composition. Abstraction, concepts, ideas. Context, subtext, structure. Usages, power, ideology. I always looked at art through my mind and intuition. I never considered that what art represents as its object, purpose or meaning.

I always lived in the ruins of representationThrough representation humans have been building cultures for millennia. Heroic stories, idol worship, representations of power, ideology, ignorance, and a distorted sense of reality that is taken as what it appears to be to the outer senses. Butter, butter, butter, butter... That what lies behind the outer appearance - consciousness and its deep connectivity - cannot be represented. If at all, it can be invoked through art, and that invocation has to go beyond the evocation of emotions through story telling. That what matters in the world to life is consciousness and is best apprehended through intuition, contemplation, mediation. And when the world is over populated with sign and symbols, with art and artifacts, than the only way to show us a deeper sense of reality through art is through deconstruction. Deconstruction guides us into the ruins of representation, it fissures, cracks, inconsistencies to let shine though them that what lies beyond.

- school of athens

Rafael painted in 1510/11 The school of Athens for the Vatican, while Micheal Angelo was painting the bible scenes in the Sistine Chapel.

- school of athens names

In the center we see Plato, the author of the allegory of the cave and by many considered to be one of the greatest philosophers. He is surrounded by other great philosophers of Greek antiquity. They all came out of the cave into the light and have been rediscovered during the renaissance in Europa.

Cy Twombly repainted the school of Athens. He shows us marks and smearing, gestures, energies, movement, color, density, center and periphery, composition and deconstruction.

- Cy Twombyl

We are looking at a painting, filled with signs, it is a broken open, semiotic mess. The signs on the wall, the ruins of representation irritate us, they make us wonder. Couldn't I do that, or my 5 year old child? But what we seeing here is a masterpiece of 20th century art. It is the hight of complexity and reflection, an endless reference point that ties together the very essence of painting itself and brings us closer to the truth of images, that fact that they don't represent, or if they do, they do it very differently from how we think they do.

So I think from here we can explore the real meaning of evoking emotions.

Absence of Truth

- Descartes

When we are freed from the shackles and leave Platos cave, we see the light, the truth, the real of ideas, the essence of existence, pure and bright, good and complex. We enter a realm where we don't let ourselves be deceived by shadows, neither by objects, but see the ideas themselves. The world of idealism. But this world always seams to be the world of the mind, of rationality. That world is accessible to us says Plato, it is truth, it is a deeper reality. It is eternal and we, with our souls, are part of that world.

This reality however is of matter, in which we sit, it is less, inferior, deception - it is bad. Art is part of the matter reality. It is bad, Plato doen/sn't like it.

- Rasa

I want to try to look at the shastra and how they are embedded in a larger framework. The Rishis, who are considered to be some special beings, had seen truth and passed it onto the world through the Vedas. An early systematic summary of their teachings is found in the Vedanta, where the Upanishads give the foundation for how to understand the body, the outer and inner senses, the different layers of consciousness, realms of truth, knowledge and ignorance. They talk about rituals, language, gods, teachings, paths, the structure of consciousness, meditation, OM. They talk little about art, rather are their focused on how Atman, Brahman, Purusha and Praktri are intertwined, how they are the same, and how we can be everything, and everything is me. From that point of view it is understandable that to see truth doesn't need to go through a medium like art. It all happens in pure consciousness already.

Evoking Emotions

What I find intriguing about aesthetic theories that are based on the notion of rasa is there intersubjectivity. Artforms are tools of communication between the artist, the audience and the divine. The goal is to evoke aesthetic emotions through forms. But of course under these forms are experiences of the divine. These experiences of Śṛṅgāra (Love, Delight), Hāsya (Laughter, Mirth), Karuṇa (Compassion, Pathos), Raudra (Anger, Fury), Vīra (Heroism, Courage), Bhayānaka (Fear, Terror), Bībhatsa (Disgust, Aversion), Adbhuta (Wonder, Amazement), Śānta (Peace, Tranquility).

We are back to story telling, yet the stories are not deceptive representations of an idealistic realm, they are rather a manifestation of direct divine experience. The story itself is just a vehicle to evoke those emotions. Truth may be reached through collective divine experience.

Rasa and cinematography

Rasa is only existing as an aesthetic emotion, I don't love while watching a performance, but can experience love through a performance, I am not disgusted through a performance, but feel disgust through a performance. I am wondering if this can be compared to film theories, where we talk about suspension of disbelieve. When watching a movie I pretend that what I see is real, although I know that I am sitting watching moving images.

The viewer of a performance understands a double negativitythat the performer is not the person he/she performs, and also that the performer is not the person he/she is in real life. The performer is an embodiment of something that is not representing anyone in particular. The performer evokes an emotion, a character, that is not bound to anything physical, or referential. It is the pure emotion, a pure character to which the viewer connects.

Walter Benjamin, in the Artwork in the time of mechanical reproduction, focuses on exactly that point. Loosing its aura that traditional art form is not deprived of its glory but set free in the technical image of film, where the act of acting is even freed from the actor.

We see these technical images in a cinema that resemble almost exactly Plato's cave, and the circle closes.

-Rousseau

I would like to propose a provocative and maybe even extreme hypothesis: Maybe the Western creative mind is guided by melancholia and its black bile - though sad self-reflection and reasoning. While the Indian mind is guided by bliss and the search for inner light. And maybe that explains why the Western mind, 2,000 years later during the time of Enlightenment, thinks of enlightenment as the torch of light of the rational mind, as it is shown in the Pantheon in Paris at Rousseau's grave, and why the Indian mind seeks enlightenment only within oneself. Finding the light within means connecting to the source and opening a realm of knowledge that does not deny rationality but also does not restrict itself to it.

- Bwo

So to close, I want to introduce the concept of the BwO. The BwO is not a literal body but a conceptual space or state of being. It refers to a body or system stripped of its predetermined roles, functions, and hierarchies-an undifferentiated field of potential. It's a way of thinking about becoming, flux, and creativity beyond fixed identities or functions.an undifferentiated field of potential.

During the Chola empire, the layout of Shiva temples was highly formalized. Based on the Agamas and Shastras, the temple was fully developed into a place in space, time and consciousness where the microcosm and the macrocosm mirror each other.
Studying the Irumbai temple as a smaller temple that follows the strict rules of temple construction and serves as a temple for practitioners shows its central role in a cluster of about two dozen temples in the area. It follows the main principles of Vastu, is aligned along the Vastupurushamandala, has a huge water tank, the usual deities are present, it follows the festival calendar and is aligned with the Murugan star. Even this basic description of the central elements gives us a sense of the temple's placement in the larger cosmic context.
When a temple is built, it is never an arbitrary act. A site is chosen and it must be indicated as favorable. Often an unusually friendly encounter with the animal kingdom is such a good sign. The site must then be tested in terms of soil quality, water, energy, orientation and slopes. A time must be chosen according to the star charts. The stars and planets determine the calendar. Rituals must be performed, construction must begin and invocations must follow. The whole process is an interplay between the cosmos, the physical location and the inner world.

Cosmos

Our existence on this planet is embedded in a solar system, which is embedded in the Milky Way, which in turn is embedded in a cluster of galaxies, and so on. With our eyes we can see many of these elements, their movements and patterns. The recurring cycles of certain light elements in the night sky gave life a reference point. This applies not only to human prehistory, but also to the animal world, such as the flight patterns of birds or howling dogs. This sense of the cosmos following a beautiful, complex rhythm makes us realize that there are forces outside of us that are much greater than the surrounding living world. The sky is the seat of the gods. They look down on us and sometimes interact with us. This is the origin of almost all mythologies. Stars are often associated with gods; they come and go in cycles of days, weeks, months, years, centuries...
If we look at the Earth from a distant cosmic position, we can use it as a reference point in this complex system. We could use any cosmic object as a reference point, but on Earth we are blessed with life and consciousness and have the ability to observe and experience. Therefore, it is a good starting point. Understanding that we can observe the interplay of stars and planets from Earth raises the question of how these constellations affect our little planet. Is there something special about it? Are we alone? Are we a playground for a bigger game?

Tattvas

As soon as I realize that my existence on this planet is endowed with the gift of life and consciousness, I become aware of my body. I realize that the body I inhabit is another level of reality. I can control it, I can use its senses, I have experiences through it, it has needs and supports my experiences and thoughts. This physical body with arms, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, skin, hair, legs, feet, hands, organs of pleasure and organs of excretion gives me the inner senses of touch, taste, sight, sound, speech, smell, pleasure, hunger, thirst and pain. The mind is able to synthesize these inner senses: Focus, choice, concentration, structure, thought, meditation, experience and communication. It is the tool that allows us to access higher levels of our existence in terms of spiritual experience. I can experience myself as self; my existence as self is not bound to the physical position of my body. My mind can wander, I can think about things that are present, I have memories, fantasies and imaginations. I can experience myself in relation to others and ask existential questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? Who created me? Where will I go when I die? The blueprint for this world to explore is the system of the 24 Sankhya Tattvas or the 36 Tantra Tattvas. What I have mentioned so far is organized in the Sankhya Tattvas; if we include the realm of higher spirituality, Shiva, Shakti, Purusha, Atma, etc., we are in the 36 Tantra Tattvas.

Elements

When we realize that the cosmos follows a great rhythmic pattern and that our body has access to a very complex system, we can dive deeper and ask what it all consists of. There are five elements: Water, Fire, Earth, Ether and Air. The elements are not to be understood as chemical elements. They are seen as primordial elements with a complex multi-access. Air is in the atmosphere, but it is also the breath of life and holds the power of the wind. Fire is heat and light, knowledge and destruction. Water is liquid, consciousness and the ocean of life. Space is the cosmos, the realm of spirituality, knowledge and sound...

Vibration

Vibration lies at the core of existence. All energy in the macrocosm is ultimately vibration, all life energy is vibration and all elements are vibration. Vibration originates from one point, the bindu. This origin, be it the Big Bang, Shiva's drum or the symbol of the bindu on the forehead, is the point at which everything is held together. This is the origin; it gives us access to the level of immanence. It is beyond what we can experience, beyond science and meditation; it is what we can be aware of but cannot know.

Temple

The extraordinarily complex architecture of temples such as the Chola temples lies in their ability to synthesize all this in one architecture and offer a key to exploring the complexity of our existence. They are designed to be so open that they enable and invite the most diverse forms of spiritual practice. The core of the practice is based on the Vedas. The rituals use symbols from the Vedas to embody wisdom in daily practices.

Visiting a temple regularly creates a deep connection with the cosmic dance in which it is embedded. When thinking about the gods in the Hindu cosmos, it is important to understand that the 300 million, or however many there may be, only superficially represent a polytheistic religion. The underlying thought is that Brahman, the underlying consciousness, reality and creator in its all-encompassing existence, requires the manifestation of that reality to experience itself. Experience is time-based; it has to go through processes and changes and has to go through creation. This is part of everything, and everything is part of everything. If you take something out of everything that is everything, and what remains is everything, and both are everything. We are reaching the limits of our mental capacity here. But from here we must understand that all gods are part of the One; they embody eternal principles, powers, properties, qualities, ideals. Immutable, like the essence of a color perception, an emotion like love, compassion, anger, an ideal like beauty or heroism, or a type like a warrior or a remover of obstacles. These principles are thought of in the form of gods, as the world is a mixture of these principles. I have experiences of these qualities in me; I did not create them; they came together in me. Where do they come from, why do they exist, who created them? In the Upanishads we find a whole hierarchy of gods, one kind building the other kind, level upon level, just like in science we have physical levels, forces, particles and then combinations of these, elements, geology, strata, biology, vegetation, animal life, consciousness. Why should it stop there?

All these elements, if we expand our periodic table of elements, the chemical elements, the tattwas, the pantheon of gods, describe different aspects of our experience. There can be no doubt. The question is whether one is reducible to the other. And I have a feeling that yes, everything is Brahman. The baseline is just a little different. It's not the atom; it's the monad in Western terms. It's not Maya, the illusion of material reality, but consciousness itself. My consciousness is reducible to consciousness; it is the place where everything begins and ends.

Following this description of the extraordinary richness of the world we are given, we experience the coming together of the elements and principles, qualities, attributes, ideals, etc. The image often used is that the gods embodying these elements come to earth to play, to experience themselves, to mingle and interweave, to have fun and laugh, to fight, destroy and build. It is this cosmic dance that Shiva's wheel turns. So if we stay in the image of the cosmic setup, with the stars and planets and the earth at the center as the place where consciousness is present, the descent of the gods is present. They need a place to live and rest, sleep and be accessible. This place is the temple. Looking at a statue of a god in the temple can be a deep contemplation of its qualities. You can connect to the qualities through contemplation. Through contemplation it manifests. You can invite how love is there when you love, or you can try to change. You are suffering, and you seek help by thinking about what might help, and if you think about it long enough, it might manifest. A solution in thinking might come, an emotion might transform, but maybe even something in the world changes. You leave the place of contemplation, return to so-called reality and something has happened. How, I don't know, but what is so absurd about it? This is the core of tantra. By changing your inner world, you can change the outer world, just as the outer world changes the inner world.

The temple follows a calendar of festivals. Great mystical transformations are celebrated during the festivals. The qualities of the gods are evoked through elaborate puja rituals. They are seen as manifested in the bronze statues that are ceremonially carried through the temple. One god is placed in front of another god so that they can see each other, greet each other. But only after they have been gently awakened, bathed, worshipped and fed with sensory impressions such as the smell and taste of fruits and flowers. It is a celebration of joy because we can witness the presence of joy. Millennia of celebration echo off the stone walls that have absorbed the sound and rhythms. The stones have stored the memory of the feet that have walked over them, and statues have collected the millions of touches of the faithful.

The womb chamber, the Garbha Griha, plays a key role. The main deity resides here and only the priest can have direct contact. The priest takes care of the god, wakes him or her up and puts them to bed. Washing is done privately; a curtain is drawn during this time. The offerings of the faithful are later accepted by the priest and passed on to the god by touch. Flowers are placed on the body, scents are lit, mantras are recited. Ultimately, it boils down to the synthesis of sensory impressions through vibration. All vibrations radiate from the womb chamber and are able to mix and integrate the offerings. A connection is made between the pure qualities as celestial entities, their embodiment in the temple, the rituals of the priest, the devotion of the worshippers, the history and memory of the place and the cycle in which everything is embedded.

One year of Auroville

I have lived through some intense years. Moving to a new country is always a major transformation - that was the case when I moved to London, then to the USA, France and now India. It's always important to me to leave my own culture in the background as much as possible and to embrace the new, which of course isn't new at all, just for me. And so one important task - especially in the first year - is to forget. Making space in your head, breaking down prejudices, surrendering to the magic and enjoying the rush a little.

The senses feel very fresh, the self very young, a childlike curiosity and naivety spreads that allows everything to take effect without prejudice.

I'm moving further and further away from the place that socialized me, and it's becoming increasingly clear why I'm doing this. Two things go together: the unease in a culture that I have always perceived as somehow foreign and the longing for a culture that would be more of a home.

India

India has always been this place of longing, and I'm certainly not the only one. Of course, it is the search for spirituality that brings people like me to India. Mother India calls and carries. The adventure that awaits you here is almost incomprehensible. It can hardly be grasped, neither by the act of grasping nor by the act of comprehending. The world as such reveals itself to be a different one. The European traditions of the Christian religion, occultism, exorcism, enlightenment, empiricism, romanticism, transcendentalism, modernism, postmodernism, etc. do not apply here. They are perceived as possible points of view, but no more.

Indian spirituality is about a synthetic understanding of life. It is not primarily about a scientific picture, the explanation of the material world or the construction of a simulation. In India, the question of consciousness is at the center. Consciousness is the starting point of everything. It has its starting point in consciousness itself. It is actually obvious that consciousness itself must exist, I have one, the reader has one, we can exchange ideas with other consciousnesses. Why is it so difficult to accept this in the West? (Husserl was quite close) But why is the statement of this fact branded as speculative? Just because it eludes the small-minded paradigm of scientificity? Isn't it much more the case that only what I find in my consciousness has any kind of relevance? Isn't that why the West celebrates so-called culture so much. But it is objectified, it does not invite a serious exchange about our own existence, but a discursive reflection. It is representative, it represents something as something else and it is used to represent, that is, to communicate power and powerlessness.

Adventure

It is this adventure of consciousness that makes traveling in the Indian cosmos so fascinating. Of course, you have to tame your skepticism and that immediately opens doors to all kinds of worldviews. Many are very strange to me. But they have a subjective validity. It would be presumptuous to want to place my consciousness above that of someone else. The contradictions that this creates must first be endured. This is not easy and causes a large number of crises in me. Crises in the sense of disorientation, restlessness and impatience. But the nice thing is that these crises can quickly be transformed into opportunities. They are invitations to meditate. An adventure of inner synthesis.

However, this synthesis is only possible if I admit to myself that my existence does not only consist of rational consciousness. I have a material and biological body, a life spirit and rational thinking, I have a world view and am capable of experiencing the sublime. I can reach higher levels of consciousness that move beyond the stimulus-response scheme. And I can approach the big question of our existence. I cannot answer it, but I can stay close to it. Many questions that present themselves as dilemmas to the rational mind are almost irrelevant on other levels of my existence, or even dissolve there.

This adventure is made possible by a whole series of different knowledge systems that have their origins in prehistoric times, i.e. the time before written language. The complex system of the Vedas was not written overnight. It is true that the knowledge it contains was revealed to the rishis. And no matter how skeptical one may be about this idea, one central question remains. Where does the idea of creation come from? And even more importantly, what is creation? How could such complex knowledge systems emerge at the beginning of history, of orderly time? What does inward vision see? Who hears by hearing, who sees by seeing?

Temple

I have decided to approach Indian culture through the temples. They are infinitely complex and I have to be patient with myself. It takes several lifetimes to even scratch the surface here, yet I want to try and capture an approximation. It will be amateurish, but perhaps that is precisely why it will be interesting.

The temples combine the knowledge of the Vedas, the Agamas, Tantras... It is architecture, sculpture, dance and music. They are places of worship, learning and coming together. They are embedded in the economy, ecology and social structures. They are intertwined with cosmology, meditation and spirituality. The bindu, the mantras, yantras, tantras, describe the relationship of the individual consciousness to the great, to the one. Unity and diversity manifest themselves in the temple. They are the living core of Indian spirituality. Many traditions seem to have existed unbroken for thousands of years.

I am still pursuing my project of reading Deleuze in India. Apart from difficult ideas like immanence in Deleuze, what interests me in Deleuze is the house in relation to art:

"Art perhaps begins with the animal, at least with the animal that marks out a territory and builds a dwelling (the two complement each other or sometimes merge in the so-called habitat). With the territory/house system, many organic functions change - sexuality, procreation, aggressiveness, food; but it is not this change that explains the appearance of territory and dwelling, rather the other way round: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensual qualities, sensibilia, which are no longer merely functional, but instead become expressive features and thus enable a transformation of functions. Certainly, this expressivity is already widely scattered in life, and one can say that even the field lily praises the glory of the gods. But it is only with territory and house that it becomes constructive and erects the ritual monuments of an animal mass that celebrates the qualities before gaining new causalities and finalities from them. This emergence is already art, not only in the treatment of external materials, but in the positions and colors of the body, in the songs and cries that mark the territory." (Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, 2003. What is philosophy? p.218)

What fascinates me about Deleuze is that his philosophy essentially describes how ideas come into existence. They emerge from the Implicitness, out of immanence. Ideas become active, they fly, form a flight path and thus connect. They create complexity. This way of thinking, which manages without axiomatics and without ideology, seems to me to be structurally very similar to the thinking of the Upanishads. Brahman unfolds itself in order to be able to experience itself. Where else but in the temple could this best be experienced?

So I sit in temples a lot, listen to the chants, bow to impermanence by smearing ashes on my head. From the inner chamber Garbhagriha the vibration spreads and manifests itself in the images on the walls of the temples. The Garbhagriha is only entered by the priest, who recites the mantras for the devotees. The bell, the incense sticks, the ablution and bedding of the gods, all this happens in the Garbhagriha. Here is the origin. "the territory implies the emergence of pure sensual qualities, sensibilia, which are no longer merely functional, but instead become expressive features and thus enable a transformation of functions." (see above)

After my first love of Plato (especially the Phaidon dialog) and the great Greek poets such as Sophocles etc., when I fell into the abyss of skepticism as a teenager, the path from Descartes' meditation to Hume, Kant and Husserl was rocky. I lost sight of the soul and followed the ideology of purely empirical science. Only what could be perceived with the five senses was considered 'material' for philosophy, and embedded in this was the doubt as to whether these senses could be trusted. Whether everything is not just an illusion. The arc from Plato to David Hume could hardly be greater.

Pictures

The idea that the world shows itself only in perceptual images led me to aesthetics, but I have never seen this as clearly as the other day when I was browsing through Aurobindo's text on the Upanishads. I am reminded of Willard Van Orman Quine's legendary and absurd example of unseparated rabbit parts: when a rabbit passes behind a tree and so two rabbit parts present themselves in my perception - a front and a back rabbit part - and yet I seem to have a certainty that it is a rabbit. So we could learn something here about the principles of our perception and language. Hume took this to an extreme when he said that we cannot be certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow (his point was to question causality). Here is Aurobindo's statement on this kind of philosophy:

"The sun rises up in the morning, mounts into the cusp of the blue Heavens and descends at evening trailing behind it clouds of glory as it disappears. Who could doubt this irrefragable, overwhelmingly evidenced fact? Every day, through myriads of years, the eyes of millions of men all over the world have borne concurrent and unvarying testimony to the truth of these splendid voyagings. Than such universal ocular testimony, what evidence can be more conclusive? Yet it all turns out to be an image created by Nescience in the field of vision. Science comes & undeterred by prison & the stake tells us that the sun never voyages through our heavens, is indeed millions of miles from our heavens, and it is we who move round the Sun, not the Sun round us. Nay those Heavens themselves, the blue firmament into which poetry and religion have read so much beauty and wonder, is itself only an imagein which Nescience represents our atmosphere to us in the field of vision. The light too which streams upon us from our Sun and seems to us to fill Space turns out to be no more than an image. Science now freely permitted to multiply her amazing paradoxes, forces us at last to believe that it is only motion of matter affecting us at a certain pitch of vibration with that particular impression on the brain. And so she goes on resolving all things into mere images of the great cosmic ether which alone is. Of such unsubstantialities is this marvelous fabric of visible things created! Nay, it would even appear that the more unsubstantial a thing seems, the nearer it is to ultimate reality. This, which Science proves, says the Vedantist, is precisely what is meant by Maya." (Aurobindo CVSA 18, p.379)

It is not only Aurobindo's poetic power that fascinates me here, the way he evokes this image of the rising sun and rolls it back and forth, weaving in the different positions in order to then reposition the problem itself. It is the power of being guided by one's own intuition and insight, by experience in the richest sense.

I learn from this:

• If we want to analyze the world as a mere phenomenon, please let the initial images be rich and powerful and not silly reduced like severed rabbit parts.
• If we then follow the method of the natural sciences and the rational mind, then please go to the end, where we see that it is actually this science that creates the very images it doubts.
• And finally the reversal of the problem, in a kind of dialectical twist. The world is undeniably real, but it is not as science describes it. Science itself shows this.

Every experimental setup is a simulation, a construction. Every theory is a description of the world whose hypothesis is subject to constant testing. In the Vedas we learn about the core of the world as we experience it: It is pure consciousness. My consciousness knows nothing other than consciousness. It is a crazy assumption that everything that contains my consciousness should be its opposite. It is not the case that our consciousness contains an image of a completely different reality. Rather, the world consists of consciousness, in the interaction of consciousness with other consciousness, in the differentiation of the one in its multiplicity, perceptions and images arise. They are connected by vibration. The Kena Upanishads describe that, the basic principle is OM in the Mandukya Upanishad, everything is connected by a rhizome on a level of immanence, as Deleuze describes it in his last essay.

Maya, the question of reality, reveals a paradox; it is the question itself that creates the problem. The mentalhe images that serve as the basis for rational analysis are maya - illusion. Our consciousness, on the other hand, is real, the only reality. This is the core of the problem of dualism dvaita-advaita

Om shanti, shanti, shanti

What is a sacred space and what is not? In the meantime, I find it much easier to say what a sacred space is than to say what it is not.

I had always felt drawn to churches in Europe. Not to their iconography, because I always found the imagery of the Bible, a dead man on a cross, irritating. The 'sacred spaces' in the Christian world are primarily Catholic churches, because Protestant churches are by definition not sacred spaces, they are more like meeting rooms where a community comes together.

Catholic churches, or those built by Catholics, have a special aura of contemplation and silence. The sparse light, the vaults, the side aisles, the perspectives that open up in these spaces, the seclusion from civil society outside, the inside and outside, the inner and outer... all these elements have always attracted me. Time and again I went into churches, sat down for a few minutes and found peace. But there was always this cross, the guilt and forgiveness, death and despair that never let me stay there for long. For me, churches were always places of refuge for inner contemplation, no more, but also no less. My favorite thing in churches was when the organ was playing, then there was only the space and the vibration, the light, the perspective, the inside, so no material space and also no ideology or religion.

Temples in the Mediterranean region

My experience with temples in Italy, France, Greece and Egypt was completely different. In Greece and Egypt I only saw ruins, national monuments, tourist attractions. But still, the way they stand in the landscape was impressive. They are open to the elements, largely liberated from iconographic ideology by devastation and neglect, these sites are havens of a connection with nature, history, the cosmos, they bear witness to a bygone era and set the imagination free.

I think of Winkelmann and the Renaissance, the dramas of ancient Greece, the tombs of the pharaohs and hieroglyphics. These ruins are haunted by a spirit, as they say in German. This spirit of the pantheon of the gods of Olympus, which overlaps with those of the Egyptians and Romans, describes a different world. A world characterized by polytheism, mythological stories, contradictions and all-too-human conflicts. It is a mirror of social man, at least that is how I have always understood it, and I am probably not alone in this. It made sense to me that the human spirit mirrors itself in grand narratives to explore itself and share the experience. These stories then became stories of power and politics.

Temples in India

How different the temples in India are. They are alive, the tradition is anchored in the present. The gods have been worshipped since the time of the Vedas or even longer. The pantheon of gods is not a mirror of mankind, it is the origin. The gods represent the forces of the universe: physical forces, psychological and emotional forces, life forces and forces that we cannot yet name, because it would be silly to think we already know everything. So when I go to an Indian temple, it is a combination of experiences from Europe, enhanced by the experience of a living tradition that integrates different types of yoga. The Sutras are one thing, vibration is another. Vibration is the center of Indian spirituality. In the sound OM this is expressed. Matter and energy, consciousness, life are merely different forms of vibration. In Indian philosophy as interpreted by Sri Aurobindo, there are therefore 7 levels of existence: matter, life, rational mind, ideal knowledge, bliss, consciousness and pure existence. It makes no sense to try to understand Indian culture without recognizing this distinction.

When I enter a temple, I have the feeling that all these levels are activated. This activation of the holistic self is formed in the ancient temples in the form of the Vastupurusamandalas from. Vastu is the art of architecture, Purusa the primordial soul, Mandala the sacred geometric form. These three elements form the matrix of most of India's ancient great temples. So when I enter a temple, I enter a spiritual space. The temples are not a reflection of society and man's self-image, for many they are society in themselves and the core of human existence. They are based on a holistic knowledge that not only recognizes our 7 forms of existence, but also synthesizes the different forms of knowledge. Even at the time of the Veda, there was knowledge of art and music, Ayurveda, the sutras, various forms of yoga: karma (action), hatha (power), tantra (energy), bhakti (prayer), jnana (knowledge), raja (meditation).

Temples are personal universities of life.

A few years ago, I had a guest artist in my seminar. A young, successful, socially committed artist who wanted to make a difference. He came to our seminar, we all sat in a circle, and he asked each student why he/she was here. It was a seminar on a campus of an art university for a semester abroad, and so the students told us they were here for the culture, or the experience, to get to know France etc... but he, the guest artist, didn't accept these answers, kept asking: Be honest, why are YOU here? or: Don't kid yourself why are you HERE? or: go a little deeper: WHY are you here? Everyone had to ask themselves this question. Above all, I learned how difficult it is to ask this question seriously. It's clear that it's not easy to answer the question anyway.

We should all ask ourselves this question from time to time. Why are we actually here? Depending on the context, the question naturally takes on different dimensions: political, social, economic, personal, perspective, collective, etc.... At the end of all contextual questions, however, the bare question remains. It is a question about the meaning of life.

Now many people - trapped in everyday constraints from which it seems very difficult to escape - are running after a life that is determined by conventions or consumer worlds mediated by the media. I don't want to judge that in itself, it's not up to anyone. Ultimately, everyone has to decide for themselves as long as ... and here comes the question I want to get to, as long as the community doesn't suffer. Community is a bit of a loose term, it can mean many things, and that's a good thing. But there is one structure that has been used as a model time and again since antiquity, and that is the City.

City

What should a city look like, how should it be organized, who takes on which tasks, are there rules, if so, how are they made, by whom, for whom and why? Because people live together in a city, in a division of labor that is not alienated should be. Everyone should find a place there that does justice to their abilities and expectations of a good life.

The reading of A. K. Coomaraswamy confronted me with this idea again today, he asks about civilization in an essay. Plato came to the conclusion that ultimately only a philosopher-king would know what was good for the community and the city, because only he or she, the philosopher-queen, would be able to look after the inhabitants, detached from power interests and personal advantage. Only she could ensure that everyone's inner values could develop freely. That sounds very cerebral, and also quite authoritarian, even if the Philosopher King would forbid authority.

In capitalism, everything is controlled by income. Supply and demand determine who gets how much and who finds a place where. But is that also the right place when it comes to the question of why you are here? Is the question of space even that important? In the world of advertising, it's all about how you can improve your place by consuming more. It's annoying a lot of people now and it's also clear that the planet won't be able to cope with this for much longer, and AI probably won't be able to solve it either.

Democracy, the lesser of two evils, doesn't really have an answer either, it's an eternal negotiation process based on majorities. That is good for the majority, and that is no small thing. Modern democracies are also guided by principles. They are written in the constitution and can only be changed by super majorities, or not at all. There may be good reasons for this from the lessons of history. But that is not a real answer to why you are here.

Auroville

Now the objection could be raised that this is actually a very personal question that does not need to be clarified politically or socially. That the city only has to provide the framework conditions so that everyone there can face up to this question privately, create their own House build or search. That is pragmatic, but not an answer. It is clear that the question is anything but trivial. And as the person writing these lines, i.e. me, the author, I don't really want anyone to answer this question for me. But I would like to live in a city where this question is at the center. Where everyone can, can and should ask themselves this question. This city is called Auroville, and it is anything but perfect, especially now in 2023.

This city is there for everyone, has no laws or capital as an ideal and also manages without advertising. The only condition imposed by this city is that every inhabitant sees herself as a servant of divine consciousness. For beginners, you can read Mirra Alfassa or Sri Aurobindo to find out what this could mean. But you don't have to. Everyone can decide for themselves, as long as it is not an organized religion. This restriction is important and refers back to the initial question: why are you here? Why are you in this life? The whole city actually only exists to answer this question. It is a huge laboratory, a living university without administrative structures. Everything is motivated by this question. One's own life is organized in an act of dedication as a voluntary service to a great idea. Because the question: Why are you here? contains very important concepts. 1) A you or implied I, which 2) exists, 3) has a physical location, 4) demands an answer as a question and thus an act of reflection, 5) is finally formulated in language. All of this points to a consciousness that outgrows itself. A self-awareness that questions its own existence, and if it does so authentically, sincerely and with perseverance, then this leads to a spiritual path. That is the meaning behind the restriction that everyone should see themselves as yours of divine consciousness. And that is why there is no room for religion. There is a space for meditation, which is open and free, and everyone can do what he/she wants. Meditation, or concentration, is possible anytime and anywhere, but it also has a special space in Auroville, namely the center. This space is largely empty, as far as emptiness exists at all. The space is simple and is in the Matrimandir.

I sometimes hear the idea of exporting Auroville, of founding many small Aurovilles, i.e. communities, all over the world and thus contributing something to the world that tries to create such important free spaces. Is that possible? How does it differ from artists' villages, self-managed farms, kibbutzes or revolutionary communes? Auroville is one of the very few experiments that has made it beyond the first generation. However, Auroville is currently facing its greatest challenge and threat. Old, encrusted structures are being brutally broken up by new external structures. This is incredibly painful. Diversity in unity, Auroville's motto, seems to be subject to centrifugal forces. May no more misguided interests take advantage of the moment.

Karl Marx said that matter determines consciousness, i.e. the material conditions of existence determine who we are, how we are, what we are. Right down to the platitude that you are what you eat. This material basis follows the rules of the economy. As long as the economy is based on capital, its accumulation creates a superstructure that ideologically dominates the base.

Marx lived in Soho London from 1849 to 1883. Charles Darwin also lived in London, or rather just outside London about 20 kilometers away, at almost the same time from 1842 to 1882. Darwin thought less economically or philosophically, he thought more biologically and proposed a theory of evolution. Variations in reproduction (the concept of DNA did not yet exist) are subject to the competition of nature and those that form a survival advantage prevail. He called this selection, of course.

In the 20th century, these two thinkers significantly shaped the world view of the capitalist Western bloc and the communist Eastern bloc. Their ideas were born in the center of the British Empire, which owed its power and wealth to the exploitation of India. There, in India, the wisdom of Indian philosophy had been suppressed for centuries, especially by the British (the French and Portuguese were probably a little more tolerant)

Teatime

So while Marx and Darwin probably drank Darjeeling from India, the 'Indian Renaissance' was born there, primarily in Bengali. A movement that sought to free itself from the shackles of colonialism and revive India's own ideas. Here, the wisdom of the Rishis, the spirituality of the Vedas became part of modern discussions again. What the British very ignorantly called Hinduism reduced the complexity of Indian philosophy, culture and spirituality to a geographical 'religion'.

Before Darwin died in London in 1882 and Marx in 1883, a little 7-year-old boy named Sri Aurobindo from Bengali arrived in Cambridge in 1879, a good 80 kilometers north of London. Arthur Schopenhauer, who found solace in the Upanishads, had died in Frankfurt in 1860, Friedrich Nietzsche had to give up his professorship in Basel for health reasons in the year of Aurobindo's arrival in England and fell into madness 10 years later. Sigmund Freud studied medicine, Carl Jung was of kindergarten age and Albert Einstein was born that year. In the USA Charles S. Peirce straight "How to make our ideas clear" published. Pierce writes there:

„It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. „

And finally, Gottlob Frege published his first book "Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens" in Jena in 1879. Pierce and Frege laid the foundations for the analytical philosophy of language. However, it is doubtful whether they really helped to clarify ideas. For here, too, there is a reductionist approach. It could be argued that although consciousness clearly benefits from language, it cannot be reduced to it.

In 1893, the year Mahatma Gandhi went to South Africa as a lawyer for 21 years, Aurobindo returned to India at the age of 21 and taught in Baroda. His philosophy, his yoga, became the antithesis to the materialistic, reductionist philosophy of the West.

The basic problem of philosophy can actually be described quite quickly in just a few steps:

1) As conscious beings, we perceive the world and move in it.

2) That which is present in our consciousness as perceived is an image of an external world. I do not have the house itself that I see in my head or in my consciousness. I have an image of it present in my consciousness.

3) This gives rise to 3 central questions:

• What exactly is this world that is only given to me in images?
• How does the image that is present to me relate to the real object (the house itself)?
• Who has this image present?

Admittedly, these are not simple questions. And so the most diverse sciences, philosophies and religions are formed from these questions, because:

Science tries to find out what the world itself is like. It pretends that consciousness is not so important, as it is only a perception of something that precedes it.

Philosophy traditionally proceeds the other way round. It says that it is only due to the fact that I have a perception of the world that thinking about the world can take place at all. It therefore thinks about thinking and justifiably asks whether the way we perceive the world is not subjective and whether what I perceive can perhaps be completely different on many levels from what is the object of perception. I am not only referring here to the image relationship, but also to structural dimensions. Perhaps static objects, for example, are not static at all, perhaps we only see and measure a small part of what exists.

Religion and spirituality are essentially about thinking about who this "I" - the one who perceives - actually is, and how this "I" relates to other "I "s, where it comes from and where it goes after death.

That's all there is to it.

OM

p.s. Everything is conceivable, but philosophy doesn't like contradictions.

Here in Auroville, a play was recently taken off the program by the hosts of the Bharat Nivas. The reason given was that some in the community had taken offense even before it was performed. This raises questions. What is art allowed to do, when is a ban justified? Linked to this is, of course, the question of what is the role of art, i.e. what should art do? The question invites us to think about the role of art in general, here in India and in the West. And because this very fundamental question extends not only across the Indo-European region, but also covers a whole range of different cultures, I would also like to give it a temporal dimension.

Let's start at the beginning, e.g. with the Classical Greeks. On the one hand, there is the question of beauty (form, function, and/or proportion), but on the other hand there is also the question of the role of art within philosophy (techne, mimisis, aisthesis). At its core, this constellation of concepts is about the relationship of the subject to the outside world as an object. How do people perceive the world, how and why do we imitate the world, e.g. in the theater or in sculptures? What techniques, what tools do we use to shape the world, to give it a function, or to work out beautiful, i.e. mathematical proportions? In other words, it is about the relationship between man and his environment in a formative relationship.

Art is created, brought forth, is the expression of a subject that shapes the world of objects. In Western art, we see the artist and his vision. Despite all the rapid developments in European art history, this has not fundamentally changed to this day.

'Indian' art is quite different. Classical Indian art expresses feelings that are universal. Feelings of spirituality, human emotions, forces at work in the world. The artist is secondary to the work of art, actually unimportant, because only what is expressed in the work of art counts, because it is a reflection of the forces at work in the cosmos. The artist has merely made them visible. And this is where the misunderstanding arises that the art of India is largely similar to the art of the European Middle Ages, as there was no artist there like in antiquity or the Renaissance. What is the difference?

Textuality and interpretation

There is an important difference. The Western eye, or ear, the Western mind, looks for what can be interpreted in the work of art. This can be an intrinsic quality such as beauty, or a technical mastery, an iconographic reference, the genius of the artist, an object that is part of a discourse, an object of reflection, or quite 'simply' an image, a representation or a depiction. The list could go on and on. Essentially, however, it is always a question of interpretation. If a work of art is the subject of a differentiated interpretation, then it is considered a successful, great work of art. If it is an object that triggers a response, it is suspected of being 'mere' design, handicraft or kitsch.

In this way, the West has produced a cultural landscape based on interpretation. And interpretation is ultimately a critical analysis in the medium of language, i.e. it is textual. The encounter with art is one of reflection on art. Contemplation, which is also a recurring theme in Western discourses on art theory, is a preliminary stage of this reflection. Contemplation is reflected upon and expressed afterwards and thus robbed of its power.

The sublime

The aesthetic experience that eludes these discursive tendencies enters the realm of the sublime, the sublime, a realm of secular transcendence, i.e. the limits of language. For the limit of the textual is also part of the discourse, only as a demarcation and reference to the unspeakable. However, Western art theory usually leaves it at this reference. To continue talking about what cannot be said would be paradoxical. And so the viewer in the West goes to art temples, museums and galleries, churches and archaeological sites, urban places or nature in order to interpret what is presented there, or to fall silent before the unspeakable.

In traditions based on monotheistic religions, art therefore takes on the role of narrative, i.e. the story of the religion is told. The spiritual power of art is subject to an increasing process of abstraction. Art is becoming increasingly secular, materialistic, capitalistic, whereas religion is becoming increasingly strikingly transcendent. Religion refers to an afterlife where personal life finds a continuation. Of course, this hereafter cannot be experienced, cannot be expressed, but at the same time it is conceived as a reflection of our reality, albeit idealized.

There are therefore different forms of representations of reality. And so art is robbed of its power of wonder. It becomes a 'narrative culture', a culture of representation and the subject of various cultural techniques; it becomes part of the logos. Yet there is a clear desire to approach the unspeakable, the sublime. For this unspeakable does not elude experience, it just cannot be grasped by the rational mind. The problem lies in the fact that the rational mind follows the logic of a systematization of the world through the Logos. In the West, the idea prevails that the Logos can explain the world and that other ways of accessing the world are inferior to this Logos and must first be systematized by it: this applies, for example, to intuition, feeling, consciousness, the experience of the self and the experience of that which transcends the self. These phenomena are understood as unenlightened in Western culture. And so a desire for the sublime arises, which is demonized as unenlightened. Culture suppresses. For Freud, culture is sublimated sexuality. There is something in the description for the West.

Brahman

In Indian art, it seems to be the other way around. Indian art produces something that eludes language. Tradition speaks of rasa¹a vibration in perception that is often translated as taste, but not in the sense of a good taste in art, but in the sense of a quality that is evoked by a work of art. This vibration in the artwork creates a vibration in the viewer and connects the inner self of the viewer with the quality evoked in the artwork, which in turn is testimony to a force behind the superficial reality.

In Indian philosophy, the basic idea prevails that Brahman, the supreme being that encompasses everything, wants to experience itself. It is only for this reason that Brahman emerges from perfect existence and unfolds in the physical world. The cycle of the world, the world soul, the individual consciousness, the universal forces, all this is Brahman experiencing itself. Brahman is therefore inconceivable for us, we are part of Brahman, Brahman is within us, everything is Brahman. The role of art here is to represent some of these forces. Art makes the viewer wonder. A quality that is expressed in the work of art is captured as rasa. It cannot be expressed directly in language. The statue of a god is an expression of a quality, a force in the cosmos that has become tangible (tangible, palpable). The fact that the viewer and the artist evoke a rasa through the work of art means that this perception, the consciousness, the experience, the vibration of consciousness there is.

Existence

What does Dasein mean here? Existence should not be understood here in a dualistic sense, as if a quality in a work of art is perceived by a viewer and this quality is present in the work of art. Rather, existence here means that a force of the cosmos, a part of Brahman, has unfolded and become visible. Visible not in the sense that a viewer sees something in a work of art, but that a force shows itself in a work of art and evokes a rasa in the viewer that allows him to participate in the force. This is why the statues of the gods in India are animated. The gods are in them. When the powers are appeased through worship - puja - then they are there. Devotion to the universal principle is bhakti, it also defines an attitude in the relationship between the ritual object and the worshippers. The observer does not interpret or judge an external object, but the soul surrenders to the gods. This surrender is facilitated by a medium, a work of art.

In India, art is still part of the cosmic cycle, part of Brahman, it is animated, just as the whole cosmos is animated. Temples, statues, poems, dance, music are part of the cosmos, part of the cosmic forces, they are part of Brahman, and they enable the viewer to see aspects of Brahman more clearly, more vividly, more alive. Art means being able to wonder, to taste what is otherwise difficult to find - Rasa². Brahman is present in Indian art. The existence of art is the presence of cosmic forces, gods as they say here.

Back to the initial question: What is art allowed to do?

I now ask myself what these considerations mean for the freedom of expression in art? In the Western tradition, it is self-evident that the discursive nature of art not only allows for a culture of debate, but also generates and cultivates it. Criticism, disagreement, satire and censorship are part of the cultural industry, and exploring the boundaries is part of the practice. But what is the role of satire in Indian art, for example? What aspect of Brahman is realized here? Can't everything be shown? Even the gods laugh and cry, are angry or heroic.

I have a question here: in the West, art is often part of political culture. Politics is brought onto the stage and art intervenes in society and politics. In the 20th century, art was called upon to take its responsibility in society more seriously and to participate in political discourse. But does this also apply to art in India, a subcontinent torn by colonialism? India, with its many languages, cultures and religions, is such a colorful, tolerant country that feeds on a connection to spirituality in whatever form. To date, the world's largest democracy has largely granted freedom of expression. But when I talk to cultural representatives here, many point to the tradition of the role of art in promoting spiritual growth. Here in the country, I rarely hear that art has a political mission.

At the same time, however, many critical voices were heard at the Kochi Biennale, for example. Much of the art there took a very clear political stance on current issues such as the climate crisis, equal rights, the persecution of minorities, exploitation and corruption. I was very familiar with the artistic language of these positions, which was based on Western forms of expression.

These two worlds collide in India. The triumph of capitalism and its secular, i.e. materialistic structure does not stop at India. It remains to be seen whether the instruments of this culture industry will help to save the victims of this very culture industry. Traditionalists are trying to protect themselves from these colonial structures by rejecting modernity. This is perceived in the West as backward and conservative.

The culture war is also in full swing here in Auroville. If there is currently talk of a new global order in 2023, it is also about this culture war.

___

Approaching big topics with small texts - is that possible? The Mediterranean region is the birthplace of monotheism - Judaism, Christianity, Islam. India is the birthplace of Hinduism. Countless gods are commemorated here, or the absence of God, or the universality of the divine, depending on which of the numerous strands you follow.

However, two principles are visible here: the maxim of individuality, which continues even beyond death, and the idea of being part of a much larger entity within which the individual is to be overcome. The one demands obedience coupled with individual responsibility, the other enlightenment in humility and overcoming one's own individuality.

The common root lies in karma.