One Year in Auroville
I have lived through some intense years. Moving to a new country is always a powerful transformation; it was that way when I went to London, then to the USA, France, now India. It is always important to me to leave my own culture in the background as far as possible and engage with what is new, which of course is not new at all, only new to me. And so a meaningful task—especially in the first year—is forgetting. Making room in the head, dismantling prejudices, surrendering to the magic and enjoying the intoxication a little.
The senses feel entirely fresh, the Self entirely young; a childlike curiosity and naivety spread out, initially letting everything have its effect without prejudice.
I move further and further away from the place that socialized me, and it becomes ever clearer to me why I do this. Two things belong together here: the unease in a culture that I have always somehow felt to be foreign, and the longing for a culture that would be more of a home.
India
India was always this place of longing, and I am certainly not the only one. It is, of course, the search for spirituality that brings people like me to India. Mother India calls and carries. The adventure awaiting you here is almost beyond comprehension. It can scarcely be grasped, neither through the act of grasping nor through the act of comprehending. The world as such reveals itself as another. The European traditions of Christian religion, occultism, exorcism, Enlightenment, empiricism, romanticism, transcendentalism, modernism, postmodernism, etc. do not take hold here. They are perceived as possible perspectives, but nothing more.
Indian spirituality is concerned with a synthetic understanding of life. It is not primarily concerned with a scientific picture, with explaining the material world or constructing a simulation. In India, the question of consciousness is central. Consciousness is the starting point of everything. It has its starting point in consciousness itself. It is actually evident that consciousness itself must exist: I have one, the reader has one, we can exchange with other consciousnesses. Why is it so difficult to accept this in the West? (Husserl came quite close) But why is stating this fact branded as speculative? Just because it eludes the small-minded paradigm of scientific rigor? Is it not rather the case that only what I find in my consciousness has any kind of relevance? Is that not why the West so celebrates so-called culture. Yet it is objectified, inviting us not to a serious exchange about our own existence but to a discursive reflection. It is representative, it represents something as something else, and it is used to represent, that is, to communicate power and powerlessness.
Adventure
It is this adventure of consciousness that makes traveling in the Indian cosmos so fascinating. Of course you have to tame your skepticism, and that immediately opens gates to all possible kinds of worldview. Many are very foreign to me. Yet they have a subjective validity. It would be presumptuous to want to place my consciousness above someone else’s. For now, the contradictions this produces have to be endured. That is not easy and brings about a great number of crises in me. Crises in the sense of disorientation and restlessness and impatience. The beautiful thing, though, is that these crises can quickly be transformed into opportunities. They are invitations to meditation. An adventure of inner synthesis.
But this synthesis is possible only if I admit to myself that my existence does not consist solely of rational consciousness. I have a material and biological body, a life spirit and rational thinking; I have a worldview and am capable of experiencing the sublime. I can reach higher levels of consciousness that move beyond the stimulus-response pattern. And I can approach the great question of our existence. I cannot answer it, but I can stay near it. Many questions that present themselves to the rational mind as dilemmas are almost irrelevant on other levels of my existence, or even dissolve there.
This adventure becomes possible through a whole range of different systems of knowledge that originated in prehistoric times, the time before written language. The complex system of the Vedas was not written overnight, after all. It is held that the knowledge contained in it revealed itself to the Rishis. And however skeptical one may be of this conception, one very central question remains. Where does the conception of a creation come from? And, still much more importantly, what is creation? How could such complex systems of knowledge arise at the beginning of history, of ordered time? What does the inward gaze see? Who hears in hearing, who sees in seeing?
Temples
I have decided to approach Indian culture through the temples. They are infinitely complex, and I must be patient with myself. It takes several lives even to scratch the surface here; nevertheless, I want to try to attempt an approach and record it. It will be amateurish, but perhaps for that very reason interesting too.
In the temples, the knowledge of the Vedas, Agamas, Tantras unites… It is architecture, sculpture, dance and music. They are places of worship, learning and gathering. They are embedded in the economy, ecology and social structures. They are intertwined with cosmology, meditation and spirituality. The Bindu, mantras, yantras, tantras describe the relationship of the individual consciousness to the greater one, to the one. Unity and diversity manifest in the temple. They are the living core of Indian spirituality. Many traditions seem to have existed unbroken for millennia.
I am still pursuing my project of reading Deleuze in India. Apart from difficult ideas such as immanence in Deleuze, what interests me in Deleuze is the house in relation to art:
“Art perhaps begins with the animal, at least with the animal that marks out a territory and constructs a dwelling (the two complement one another or sometimes merge in the so-called habitat). With the territory/house system, many organic functions change—sexuality, procreation, aggression, food; but it is not this change that explains the appearance of territory and dwelling, rather the reverse: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, sensibilia, which are no longer merely functional but instead become expressive traits and thereby enable a transformation of functions. Certainly, this expressivity is already widely scattered throughout life, and one can say that even the lily of the field praises the glory of the gods. But only with territory and house does it become constructive and erect the ritual monuments of an animal Mass that celebrates the qualities before deriving new causalities and finalities from them. This emergence is already art, not only in the treatment of external materials, but in the body’s postures and colors, in the songs and cries that mark the territory.” (Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, 2003. Was ist Philosophie? p.218)
What fascinates me in Deleuze is that his philosophy essentially describes how ideas come into existence. They emerge from implicitness, from immanence. Ideas become active, they fly, form a line of flight and connect in this way. They produce complexity. This way of thinking, which manages without an axiomatic framework and without ideology, seems to me structurally very similar to the thinking of the Upanishads. Brahman unfolds itself in order to be able to experience itself. Where could this be experienced better than in the temple?
So I spend a great deal of time sitting in temples, listening to the chants, bowing before impermanence by smearing ash on my head. From the inner chamber, Garbhagriha, the vibration spreads and manifests in the images on the temple walls. The Garbhagriha is entered only by the priest; he recites the mantras for the faithful. The bell, incense sticks, the washing and putting to bed of the gods, all this takes place in the Garbhagriha. Here is the origin. “the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, sensibilia, which are no longer merely functional but instead become expressive traits and thereby enable a transformation of functions.” (see above)
