New Spirits – Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness exists only in connection with other consciousness
Movement Instead of Rootedness Recently I asked myself whether I really want to be grounded at all. Am I a tree that drives its roots into the earth and does not move, but grows in the surroundings where the seed once sprouted? Or do I perhaps want to be a rock in the surf, washed over by water, yielding a little over millennia and losing itself in the sand?My image of human existence is actually a different one: rather that…
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A koan, then. I had often heard of them, those mysterious riddles of Zen that are meant to lead the mind out of the purely rational and open new forms of insight. I decided not to read much about them, nor to ask others about them. I wanted to receive one from a Zen master. During Doksan he asked me a few things about myself. We closed our eyes, he smiled, and said I should imagine a forest with a…
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The Solitude Farm in Auroville is a ‘food forest’. This is one of the few English terms that is difficult to express in German through a compound word (Esswald?). We do not have such a thing, and find it difficult to think about it too. An orchard that we would allow to grow wild with other edible annual plants and shorter-lived plants until we had a dense jungle consisting entirely of edible plants… I am looking for a word for…
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Auroville was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfasse. The architect Roger Anger developed its city plan. It is modeled on a cosmic spiral nebula. The land made available to Auroville was a dry plateau. A forest has been planted since the early years. There is a beautiful, slow documentary about it (Ever Slow Green (2020) – S.O.S. from Auroville (now), 2021.) Now I have spent my first night sleeping in this forest. The Auroville Center Guest House is a magical…
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The forest is a wonderful habitat. Recently I heard a little story about a man who whistled a melody whenever he entered the forest. After a while, the animals recognized him by it and accepted his presence. They no longer ran away, sometimes even greeted him. Most of the time we do not see the forest as it is at all, because we often disturb it. Today I was in the forest. Instead of going for a walk as usual,…
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