Emptiness

For many years now, my mind has been filled with emptiness most of the time. My memory is not good either, and I often repeat words or sentences in my mind without knowing why. Often they are simply experiences in a word on an endless loop, in a sense like a mantra.

For a long time this worried me a great deal. I tried to find excuses and justifications for it. For example, that I had done a great deal of mental work and my mind was simply exhausted, even to the point of burnout. I told myself that my memory did not work properly, or worked differently, because I live, think, feel, experience in three languages. How do we store experiences, thoughts, knowledge in our mind? If I experience, learn, recognize something in one language, can I then retrieve it in another language—without difference? And if my mind repeats a word 20, 30 times because it more or less stumbles over something, cannot quite place or grasp it, is it because the mind is becoming slower, confused?

Above all, however, I did not know how to make sense of the emptiness in my mind. I always thought it would be desirable for the mind to be constantly active, productive, busy. Looking into the world and perceiving it as such seemed unproductive to me, lazy. I justified this as breaks, as gathering strength and coming to rest in order to be productive again. Can this somehow be increased, I asked myself.

Unease

So I have felt an unease in my mind for many years. This emptiness and the mantra-like repetition of words, the search for information in a memory confused by languages, all this now seems to me to have been a sign that the productivity demanded by society makes me uneasy. It is as if something stirs in my mind that withdraws from this false consciousness. For a long time it felt like a weakness, like a failure. My socially conditioned Self condemned these moments. Something did not seem to be running at maximum performance.

Now it becomes clear to me that something is emerging here that cannot be suppressed. It is another consciousness. A consciousness of another connection, contemplative, meditative, spiritual, seeing. It is a consciousness that withdraws from everyday life, leaves the Self behind, sheds the constructed biography as such. It is quite natural that the mind’s mechanisms for accessing its own memory then no longer work. After all, this is precisely what the mind no longer wants to do, and when I try to force it, it resists and tires. This other consciousness, a more wakeful, selfless, seeing one, has in my case wanted to go to India for many years. It wants to go home.

Homesickness

Something in me was homesick. Now it is here in India. Everything feels strangely familiar. The sounds and smells in themselves unfamiliar, the fact of their existence not. The people around me (not the tourists) do what they have to do with great composure; everything seems to be in an organic flow. Namaste.

Synthesis

It took me a long time to take this step, to admit all this to myself. This happens here on another level, not through an intellectual critical attitude toward society—I cultivated that for decades—but through a mental, spiritual insight, through homecoming.

Yesterday I attended a seminar on the recitation and interpretation of Rigveda mantras. Starting from the Sanskrit original, different translations by Sri Aurobindo were compared. I had not expected this intellectual rigor, and it opened my eyes to how important it is to enter into the source texts. These mantras feel as if I had sung them often a very long time ago. I feel this way with some Gregorian and Byzantine music too, as well as with ragas, Jewish chansons, and Simon and Garfunkel…

Direction of the gaze

Naturally, I ask myself whether this looking back really is the answer to the global challenges. In many respects, I think it is. If we really want to change something, reflecting on a status quo is wrong. Fixing climate targets to a year in the past is wrong (although this is a right and pragmatic first step), just as peace cannot be pinned to maintaining national borders (although aggressively crossing them is of course wrong).

Much more fundamental, and actually more important, is the why. How do we see the future of humanity? And surely this can only mean allowing the plurality and colorfulness of human beings to unfold, in harmony with our environment. And this driving force that lets us unfold ourselves is surely not a status quo; it cannot be prosperity, nor capital.

We have to move away from the materialist and economic way of thinking that we have misunderstood since the Enlightenment. I spent years teaching myself that my mind does not exist and is merely an illusory by-product of a neurochemical process I do not understand. I spent decades understanding art as a theoretical discourse that reflects the principles of perception, and I spent a great deal of time understanding social processes as a system following the logic of information processes. I really ask, why did I do that?

What was the meaning and purpose behind it? The only thing that comes to mind is the progress of science and the rise of the information age. On these reductionist principles of thought, we built a world whose result we now see. It has produced a global elite that can surrender to every pleasure and plunged a large part of the world’s population into bitter poverty. Nature has paid for all this, and is on its last legs. I really do not think that discussions about energy-saving light bulbs will get us out of this.

Global consciousness

We have to begin thinking about what we are doing here. A tremendous task lies before us: to work on a global consciousness. We must activate all the resources we have for this. I think this may be one reason why fundamentalist positions are growing stronger again. They are being reactivated in order to understand their core. That this is abused by power is not very surprising. But we can synthesize this only through dialogue. Building walls to consolidate a status quo is an entirely wrong approach.

It is the emptiness in the mind that creates room to encounter the other; when we leave the Self behind, diversity within unity becomes possible.