New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness only exists in connection with other consciousness
I remember I've always stared into the fireplace since I was a child. Many people do that, I think. Fire is fascinating. In the Vedas, Agni is the god of fire, one of the 5 elements alongside water, air, earth, and ether. The Greeks also have these elements. I didn't understand this for a very long time and found it ‚unscientific‘. I thought of elements in terms of physics and chemistry, and there it only makes limited sense. Mythology Within the...
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Yesterday, I saw two millipedes mating. It was pretty much the most fascinating thing I've seen in a very long time. The creatures intertwined, rubbed, and courted each other. There was rhythm, devotion, entanglement. The two met by chance and after a few minutes, went their separate ways. An encounter. They were two life forms that united to create more life. A life. Today, I then read Deleuze's last...
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Recently, I listened to a podcast about dreams and was once again very surprised. The head of the sleep lab in Mannheim says that anyone can train themselves to remember dreams. I can do that, so that's true. But what really surprises me is the reduction of dreams to the subconscious. Dreams, he says, merely use stronger images to alert us to something we are neglecting in our waking consciousness. A shame and sad, and at the same time telling, how pathetic this...
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For three weeks now, I've been reading in India: Deleuze, the Upanishads, Sri Aurobindo. In between, I meditate sometimes. The rest is still a remnant of everyday life from the New World. Reading news, consuming entertainment media, organizing things that don't actually matter here but require continuity so they don't break apart in the Old World, and the New World. So, reading... It seems to me that I've been preparing myself for decades to read here. My thinking oscillates between Deleuze and the Upanishads. This wisdom in...
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Today I was in a choir lesson. What happened there was a very intense shared experience. I'll try to describe it as objectively as possible. We (about 60 participants) started with breathing exercises, ‚warmed up‘ our vocal cords, sang four-part chords, and scaled the pitch. The choirmaster pointed out that we weren't here by chance. He said we were in Auroville because something had drawn us here. I think most people in the room understood what he meant, for others perhaps...
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Schopenhauer, a great admirer of the Upanishads, wrote a small book „On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason“ (1847). He identifies four forms of causality, e.g., small cause – large effect, or large cause – small effect, etc. This fascinated me because it offers a broader understanding than the purely scientific model, which ultimately always follows the law of conservation of energy. For example, when someone declares a war, that is a relatively simple act (small cause) and...
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I've always resisted the word meditation. Much about it seemed suspect to me. At the same time, I've always practiced my own forms of meditation without calling them that, or without having learned them. For me, meditation includes: a.) contemplation, i.e., sinking into a thought and consciously tracing thought impulses on a topic, circling around it until the mental image becomes clearer and appears before the inner eye. b.) focusing on…
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