Art begins not with flesh but with the house. (Deleuze)
I now practise meditation. It took me a long time to admit this to myself. I've somehow always done it, I just didn't know it. Like most people, I have phases in which I look inside myself or concentrate on something contemplatively, phases in which I try to calm my mind or find out what this me inside me actually is, phases in which I try to understand what my rational mind cannot understand (e.g. infinity, or the beginning of time, etc.).
I have done this when I have had a crisis (be it intellectual, emotional, biographical...) or I do this when I am clearing my consciousness (like clarified butter) or looking at what forces are at work in me, as if large animals are pushing forward and upwards in me, as if horses and cows are restlessly trying to free themselves and strive towards the light.
Light
In the face of light, then, when the mind has come to rest, the rational mind has made peace with the fact that it cannot understand everything and yet is able to grasp the world intuitively, a moment of unity with the world on a level of consciousness that transcends everyday life, there is that for which there are no unencumbered words in German: Wonne, Seeligkeit, in English Bliss, in Sanskrit Ananda.
But this state was always somehow uncanny to me. Because there I saw phenomena that I knew from kitschy New Age postcards, or from a roommate from my student days in London, who always painted on LSD... I think I did well to be critical of these visions, because it is a somewhat gimmicky distraction of meditative consciousness. Color, geometries, light, cosmic vastness... all these are beautiful experiences and images, but they don't take you very far. They make the small ego think it is something special. These images arise during a longer meditation, especially in the lotus position after half an hour or so, when the legs start to fall asleep. When the pain of the sitting posture subsides and the endorphins no longer have to control the body's stimuli, but can let off steam freely and wildly in consciousness, it's nice, but, as I said, it doesn't lead anywhere. So I was always suspicious of that.
Room
I find it more exciting when a space opens up in this consciousness and the mind's eye begins to see clearly. When the eyes are closed, the consciousness meditates on itself. It detaches itself from the stimulus-response pattern, as there are actually not many stimuli left (provided the meditation takes place in a really quiet room with few stimuli). Consciousness is now alone with itself. Where does it want to go? Into memory? Into reflection and problem-solving thinking? Into contemplative vision? Into imagination and creativity? Into the feelings, the heart?
To help and systematize this a little, there is the image of the 7 chakras (Sahasrara, Ajna, Vishuddha, Anahata, ManipuraSvadhisthana, Muladhara). I can visit these chakras in meditation and see if one or the other chakra needs a little attention. This can create a kind of inner balance. Again, I try to avoid the cheesy color circles. I don't find this helpful, but it may be different for others. But I digress, there are many such 'techniques'.
Concept, percept, affect
Where does consciousness want to go? Who or what is behind consciousness, where does it come from? Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Is it part of something bigger? Can I think of the universe, existence itself, with all its complexity and its many facets, as a unity?
This is where I quickly reach the limits of what is conceivable with my concepts (Kant's antinomies). My little brain, how should it approach this? As long as I hold on to the idea that my consciousness consists solely of sensory impressions - perceptions - generated by my body's sensory organs, I cannot leave this subjective perspective. However, my intuition and my creativity help here. There are affects in my consciousness, it is affected, it acts. For me, it is precisely this action guided by intuition and creativity that is the key to deep meditation. Concept and percept have their role and task, but they are limited in their range and capacity for understanding. Affects, however, are different. What is an affect?
"By whom missioned falls the mind shot to its mark? By whom yoked moves the first life-breath forward on its paths? By whom impelled is this word that men speak? What god set eye and ear to their workings?
That which is hearing of our hearing, mind of our mind, speech of our speech, that too is life of our life-breath and sight of our sight. The wise are released beyond and they pass from this world and become immortal." (Kena Upanishad)
Who hears when hearing, who sees when seeing, who thinks when thinking? A life force, an élan vital, a becoming, a change? When the vibrations of the senses mix (intermiscence), a percept arises. If this percept wants to express itself, it does so in language, another form of vibration. A concept emerges. These concepts are sometimes abstract, they may be ideas. But these ideas are part of a different reality. As early as Plato, this leads to an idealism which, however, withers away in Western rationalism to a transcendental phlosophy.
For Deleuze, however, concept, percept and affect remain agile; they arise when the body enters into an encounter with the outside world. Concept, percept and affect change, but are recognizable, they form patterns. They are the basic forms of vibrations, i.e. energetic patterns. They can also be communicated to a certain extent. Above all, however, they form an inner space that can be experienced in meditation.
Space is only to be understood literally to a limited extent. In meditation, the mind is free to move. Space and time are no longer limitations. Just as when associating thoughts, the objects of the thoughts are not moved along with them, in the space of meditation the mind can rush freely from one vision to the next. I think this is what is meant by the vision of the inner eye, which for some is heightened to the point of visions.
Visions
These visions, as I like to call them in the old-fashioned way, give access to more than just an inner world of experience. A house is built there, a city in which forces are simply forces, detached from causal chains. There may be neurochemical processes that take place when the mind is so active, and if you like, you can make a reduction here. But this is a very daring theory, not supported by anything, is pure science fiction - because we are dealing with correlations at best, a causal relationship cannot be proven. We don't even know what it is that we want to put into a causal relationship.
Let's just take consciousness for what it is: consciousness. Why this reductionism? I don't reduce my life to biochemistry either.
A space, i.e. an architecture, is created in this consciousness. Deleuze makes it sound like this:
"Interlocking these frames or joining up all these planes wall section, window section, floor section, slope section- is a composite system rich in points and counterpoints. The frames and their joins hold the compounds of sensations, hold up figures, and intermingle with their upholding, with their own appearance. These are the faces of a dice of sensation. Frames or sections are not coordinates; they belong to compounds of sensations whose faces, whose interfaces, they constitute. But however extendable this system may be, it still needs a vast plane of composition that carries out a kind of deframing following lines of flight that pass through the territory only in order to open it onto the universe, that go from house-territory to town-cosmos, and that now dissolve the identity of the place through variation of the earth, a town having not so much a place as vectors folding the abstract line of relief. On this plane of composition, as on "an abstract vectorial space," geometrical figures are laid out cone, prism, dihe-dron, simple plane-which are no more than cosmic forces capable of merging, being transformed, confronting each other, and alternating; world before man yet produced by man. The planes must now be taken apart in order to relate them to their intervals rather than to one another and in order to create new affects. We have seen that painting pursued the same movement." (Deleuze: What is Philosophy? p.187)
