Learn more about the artists and their inspiring practices in Pondycherry. Discover the visual language and spiritual depth of the art landscape around Auroville. Immerse yourself in the world of art beyond the conception of representation and discover the vibration of the senses. Learn how Deleuze’s thinking and the Kena Upanishads are interwoven. Let the question of the body without organs inspire you and discover the boundaries of the physical body.
In India, the books of the Vedas have been held in memory for 3000 years. The Rigveda (10,552 verses), Samaveda (1549 verses), Yajurveda (4001 verses) and Atharvaveda (5977 verses), as well as the Upanishads (about 1800 verses), are passed down from generation to generation. Sanskrit grammar has not changed substantially, and its pronunciation has been handed down with the greatest precision through exact phonetic description. So these texts sound the same today as they did 3000 years ago. They are…
Recently a friend asked me about the relationship between Eastern and Western culture. Of course that is an enormous question, one I also ask myself and one that, of course, no one can really answer. But I want to formulate a few thoughts: Distance From an Imagined Center Facing the ‘Western’ world, based on classical antiquity, Christianity, the Enlightenment and materialism, is the Occidental world of the Assyrians and Persians, of Islam and the conception of a divinely guided polity.…
Discover the significance of the five senses and learn how proprioception as a possible sixth sense constitutes a revolution. Immerse yourself in the world of perception and consciousness. #Philosophy
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…
I am approaching Sanskrit very slowly. On Thursdays, Nishtha holds a seminar on the Rigveda. Reciting together in Sanskrit, the detailed analysis of the translation, Nishtha’s philological considerations and the explanations of the psychology of the gods open a way into these ‘sacred’ texts. I remember my study of Latin, the Indo-European roots, the sounds that reverberate in the ragas, phonetics as a declaration of existence, language as sound and vibration, communication as rhythm. The breath of life, yoga, vitality,…
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…
