What does it mean to understand another person? It is easy to understand someone facing us when we are of the same opinion, because then we are simply agreeing with ourselves. We may even enjoy seeing our own thinking mirrored in the other, enriched by a slightly different perspective, more colorful, more alive, more energetic, because both are pleased to have found someone on the same wavelength. This mirroring, the mirror neurons, gives us a feeling of appreciation, of being…
Recently I stumbled upon David Hume again. I remember how intensive the study of his writings in Heidelberg was. We went very deeply into the text, very meticulously and systematically. It was the opposite of those Anglo-American lectures on the history of ideas. So I stumbled upon the concept of taste in Hume, as the core of his “aesthetic” theory. I thought of rasa and began a conversation with AI. Larger connections became clear to me, lines I had never…
Here in Auroville, the people in charge of Bharat Nivas recently removed a play from the program. The reason given was that some in the community had taken offense at it, even before it was performed. This raises questions. What may art do, when is a ban justified? Bound up with this, of course, is the question: what is the task of art, what should art do? The question invites reflection on the role of art in general, here in…
In the western analytic-modern theories of consciousness, i.e. those which understand themselves as empirical-scientific, a correlation between matter and consciousness is always assumed. This is relatively undisputed in itself, since actually the very most thought buildings assume it. Birth and death mark the corner points of this correlation. Now the question arises, how does this correlation look like? Does the consciousness determine the matter, or the matter the consciousness, or is it an interaction? 3 variants of the relation between…
I have just returned from a devotional meditation. It is Sri Aurobindo’s anniversary. He left his body 72 years ago, as people say here. Over the past few days I have thought and spoken a great deal about his commentaries on the Kena Upanishad. There I came across the word ‘intermiscence’. It is used almost only by Aurobindo. I asked everyone I met what the word means. A friend here found ‘flowing into one another’ as a German translation (in…
