New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness only exists in connection with other consciousness
There is a strange place within me, where the word "self" wants to point something out. That place of stillness and quiet, where I am with myself and look for the self. A place deep in the heart, free from ties to the outside world, a place where being alone feels right, no expectations are active there, other people are certainly present in memory or thought, but they have no influence. That place where...
Weiterlesen
I am back in Europe for a short time and I see a busyness, an energy of constant doing. Working, discussing, cleaning up, running errands, attending to obligations, organizing, optimizing, presenting, questioning, exchanging. Something is constantly being done. Having something to do seems important, doing nothing seems unproductive and requires justification. However, not being productive has many important qualities, so inaction is sometimes a form of resistance, or quiet contemplation can be understood as inner work, a work,...
Weiterlesen
Movement Instead of Rootedness I recently asked myself if I really want to be grounded. Am I a tree that sinks its roots into the earth and doesn't move, but grows in the environment where the seed once sprouted? Or do I want to be a rock in the surf, letting the water wash over me, yielding something over millennia and dissolving into the sand? My idea of human existence is actually different, more about movement, exploration, and...
Weiterlesen
When I began reading the Upanishads, I realized that the inner path I had embarked upon was leading me into an extraordinarily beautiful inner landscape. Discovering that this inner landscape is connected to cosmic consciousness made me aware of the important work I must undertake—what people often call “inner work.” As I committed myself to this inner work, I focused on how I was feeling, who I am, and what I must face. What are my shadows? My insecurities? My…
Weiterlesen
The spider brings forth its own web. This image from the Upanishads invites deep meditation on how nature brings forth a thread that it weaves into a complex symmetry. Looking at the spider, the thread, and the web—its function and the source of the complex pattern—we have an image that invites deep speculation about mantra, tantra, and yantra, about art and knowledge, about creation and information. The 5th lecture explores art and scientific visualizations of sacred symmetry in a field…
Weiterlesen
Game – Misstep In the West, I used to think that playing games had to do with "games" in the sense of playing video games and that video games had rules. Playing a game means entering a space that is limited by rules, and within these parameters, the player can develop strategies to act according to the rules with the goal of winning. There is the broader theory of games, which has been applied to sociology and other fields, and there are computer simulations that test hypotheses based on...
Weiterlesen
It's a full moon in India. Time for self-reflection, meditation, and inner contemplation. I've actually never really thought about death. It always seemed like a boundary to me, the thing that defines our existence negatively. Finitude throws us back on ourselves, or so I thought. I agreed a little with Heidegger here. Thinking about something beyond death always seemed arbitrary, naive, romantic, escapist, and gullible to me... Only in existential reflection did it seem meaningful to me. The dead...
Weiterlesen
Yesterday, during a panel discussion at the India Art Fair, I heard someone quote Plato. She said that Plato said art is the reflection of the reflection of the real. Whether that is accurate in this shortened form is another question. It's an interesting thought. What is the real, what is a reflection, what is art? For Plato, there is the world of Forms, the world of shadows that the ignorant perceive as real in the cave, and the philosopher who guides them out...
Weiterlesen
German German 
English
French