2nd lecture: Irumbai Temple as Yantram (Apparata)
During the Chola Empire, the layout of Shiva temples was highly formalized. Based on the Agamas and Shastras, the temple was fully developed into a place in space, time, and consciousness where the microcosm and macrocosm mirror each other. When a temple is built, a site will be chosen, and it has to be indicated as auspicious. Often an unusually friendly encounter with the animal realm is considered a good sign. The site then has to be…
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1st lecture: Apples and Mangoes
The snake in paradise seduced Eve into eating a fruit from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, which distinguishes between good and evil. Why was the Tree of Knowledge forbidden? Why did the snake seduce Eve? What did the fruit taste like? When I asked myself why I wanted to talk about this, I felt like Eve standing before the tree, talking to a snake who was trying to seduce me into eating the fruit. Do...
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Play and Blunder
Game – Misstep In the West, I used to think that playing games had to do with "games" in the sense of playing video games and that video games had rules. Playing a game means entering a space that is limited by rules, and within these parameters, the player can develop strategies to act according to the rules with the goal of winning. There is the broader theory of games, which has been applied to sociology and other fields, and there are computer simulations that test hypotheses based on...
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Understand
What does it mean to understand another person? It's easy to understand someone when you agree with them, because then you're simply agreeing with yourself. You might even enjoy seeing your own thinking reflected in the other person, enriched by a slightly different perspective – more colorful, more vibrant, more energetic, because both of you are happy to have found someone on the same wavelength. This mirroring, the mirror neurons, gives us a feeling of appreciation, of being seen, a harmony, and a sense that…
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Full moon
It's a full moon in India. Time for self-reflection, meditation, and inner contemplation. I've actually never really thought about death. It always seemed like a boundary to me, the thing that defines our existence negatively. Finitude throws us back on ourselves, or so I thought. I agreed a little with Heidegger here. Thinking about something beyond death always seemed arbitrary, naive, romantic, escapist, and gullible to me... Only in existential reflection did it seem meaningful to me. The dead...
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Structure and process
Traditional Indian music, the raga, is melodic with respect to a fundamental tone. Western music is harmonic, meaning simultaneous and complex. In the West, much is thought in terms of structures; for a time, there was much talk of structuralist and post-structuralist thought. Complex systems are found everywhere: in philosophy, in canonical texts and visual systems, in technology, and in worldviews. An essential fundamental idea is atomistic thinking. The notion is that the world consists of elementary parts and can be broken down into them...
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Enlightenment
Enlightenment – Illumination: The Paradox of Enlightenment: Here's the thing about enlightenment. Someone recently asked me if I was seeking enlightenment. I was a bit taken aback. But because I really respected this person, I tried to be honest – yes, no, um, I don't quite know, actually yes, if I'm being completely honest… Why all this hedging? Why not just say directly, yes, I am, like you did, when you answered that you thought most people were seeking…
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Psychic Being
I cut short my nighttime meditation a little earlier to switch to writing meditation. Suddenly, some things became clear to me. The necessity of aligning one's own body in meditation, finding the right position, which for me means following the movements, the tensing and relaxing of musculature, the skeleton, the spine. Then observing the breath, inhaling and exhaling, the turning point of the breath, pausing to observe oneself, how thoughts begin to loosen, following them attentively...
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Harmony
My morning meditation is becoming a bit routine, though one can hardly say that after only a handful of times. It's more of a stretch, a path, or an exploration. Like hiking in the mountains: with the summit in sight, hiking through the paths, along the ridges, through the valleys and rivers, past the rock faces, through scree and rocks, meadows and forests, and beyond the tree line on the glaciers in the snow, the mountains become a metaphor for the inner search. The...
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Dakshinamurti
I woke up from a nightmare at 4 AM. I was talking to Will in Apt about a strange irritation in my perception of time. I described how time was fragmenting and some parts were simply missing. It was seconds or minutes, and as I tried to dive into the time to describe it better, it went black. I screamed for help, I was blind, and I woke up. It was one of those dreams where I seemed to die. Immediately...
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Connection
Connection For the last two years, I've been diving quite deeply into the Upanishads, have practiced some yoga, and have explored the system of yoga a bit. I've delved into my own body, my own senses, my own consciousness. I've seen that there are a large number of levels and that there's no reason to assume that more levels don't exist. Two years ago, I simply denied most of what I'm experiencing here. It is...
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