Seit vielen Jahren schon ist mein Geist die meiste Zeit von Leer erfüllt. Auch mein Gedächtnis ist nicht gut und oft wiederhole ich Wörter oder Sätze in meinem Geist, ohne zu wissen warum. Oftmals sind es einfach Erfahrung in einem Wort in einer Endlosschleife, gewissermaßen wie ein Mantra.
This worried me a lot for a long time. I tried to find excuses and justifications for it. For example, that I worked a lot mentally and my mind was simply exhausted, to the point of burnout. I told myself that my memory wasn't working properly or differently because I live, think, feel and experience in three languages. How do we store experiences, thoughts and knowledge in our minds? If I experience, learn, recognize something in one language, can I recall it in another language - without distinction? And if my mind repeats a word, 20, 30 times, because it stumbles over something, can't quite categorize or grasp it, is it because the mind is slowing down, confused?
But above all, I didn't know how to categorize 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 it as a break, as gathering strength and coming to rest in order to be productive again. Is there any way to increase this, I asked myself.
Discomfort
So I have felt a sense of unease in my mind for many years. This emptiness and the mantra-like repetition of words, the search for information in a linguistically confused memory, all this now seems to me to have been an indication that the productivity demanded by society is causing me discomfort. It is as if something is stirring in my mind that eludes this false consciousness. For a long time it felt like a weakness, a failure. My socially conditioned self condemned these moments. Something didn't seem to be running at maximum performance.
Now I realize that something is emerging here that cannot be suppressed. It is a different consciousness. An awareness of a different context, 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 one's own memory then no longer function. The mind no longer wants to do this, and if I try to force it, it resists and becomes tired. In my case, this other consciousness, a more alert, selfless, seeing one, has wanted to go to India for many years. It wants to go home.
Homesickness
Something inside me was homesick. Now it's here in India. Everything feels strangely familiar. The sounds and smells themselves foreign, the fact of their existence not. The people around me (not the tourists) do what they have to do with a great serenity, 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 is happening here on a different level, not through an intellectually critical attitude towards society - I have cultivated that for decades - but through a spiritual insight, a return home.
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 was not expecting this intellectual rigor and it opened my eyes to the importance of delving into the source texts. These mantras feel as if I have chanted them many times a very long time ago. I feel the same way about some Gregorian and Byzantine music, as well as ragas, Jewish chansons, and Simon and Garfunkel...
Viewing direction
Of course, I wonder whether this retrospective is really the answer to the global challenges. I think it is in many respects. If we really want to change something, thinking about the status quo is wrong. Tying climate targets to one year in the past is wrong (although it is a right and pragmatic first step), just as peace cannot be tied 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 that can only mean that we allow the plurality and diversity of people to develop in harmony with our environment. And this driving force that allows us to develop is not a status quo, it cannot be prosperity or capital.
We need to get away from the materialistic and economic way of thinking that we have misunderstood since the Enlightenment. I have spent years teaching myself that my mind does not exist and is just an illusory by-product of a neurochemical process that I do not understand. I have spent decades trying to understand art as a theoretical discourse reflecting the principles of perception, and I have spent a lot of time trying to understand social processes as a system that follows the logic of information processes. I really ask why I have done this?
What was the purpose behind it? The only thing I can think of is the progress of science and the rise of the information age. We have built a world on these reductionist principles of thinking, the result of which we are now seeing. It has created a global elite that can indulge in any pleasure and has plunged much of the world's population into abject poverty. All this has been paid for by nature, which is on its last legs. I really don't think that discussions about Engeriespaarlamps will get us out of here.
Global awareness
We need to start thinking about what we are doing here. We have a huge task ahead of us to work on global awareness. We have to activate all the resources we have for this. I think that is perhaps one reason why fundamentalist positions are resurgent. They are being reactivated in order to understand their core. It is not very surprising that this is being abused by power. But we can only synthesize this through dialogue. Building walls to consolidate the status quo is completely the wrong approach.
It is the emptiness in the mind that creates space to meet the other, when we leave the self behind, diversity in unity becomes possible.
