Ramana, one of India's great enlightened beings, lived in Tiruvannamalai. At the center of his teaching is the concept of the self: its emptiness and at the same time immeasurable vastness. His teachings are simple, he does not follow a long tradition of interpretations. He was a simple man who meditated on the mountain and held satsangs. As a contemporary of Aurobindo, people have [...]
Art beyond progress
Dotemporary art is obsessed with the "next step". The avant-garde, the unprecedented, the new and unique. But in the hunt for the new, we lose sight of something essential: artistic practice itself. Artistic practice is not just about crossing boundaries. It is one of those things that make art [...]
General intelligence and the cosmic archive
II am in a sesshin, a 2.5-day short form of intensive Zen meditation. My thoughts and images keep coming back to me about the artificial general intelligence (AGI) that we are currently creating. More and more people from the fields of humanities, psychology or team organization are impressed, surprised, anxious about the capabilities of AGI. It seems that [...]
Sacred Energy
Dhis is tantra. That is divine. The crucial question is whether such a sacred encounter is only possible in romantic love, as tradition and romance suggest - or whether it can arise when we open our being fully, beyond reason and rationality, beyond ego, desire or obligation. I believe [...]
Spritual growth
When I began reading the Upanishads, I realized that the inner path I had embarked upon was leading me into an extraordinarily beautiful inner landscape. Discovering that this inner landscape is connected to cosmic consciousness made me aware of the important work I must undertake-what people often call "inner work." As I committed myself to [...]
Play and Blunder
Spiel - misstep In the West, I used to think that playing had to do with games and games had to do with rules. To play a game is to enter a space that is constrained by rules, and the player can develop strategies within those parameters to act according to the rules, with the goal of [...]
Enlightenment
AEnlightenment - enlightenment: the paradox of enlightenment Enlightenment is one of those things. Someone recently asked me if I was looking for enlightenment. I was a little taken aback. But because I held this person in particularly high esteem, I tried to be honest - yes, no, um, I don't really know, actually I do, if I [...]
Dakshinamurti
II woke up from a nightmare at 4 o'clock in the morning. I was talking to Will in Apt about a strange irritation in my perception of time. I described how time fell into fragments and some were simply missing. It was a matter of seconds or minutes, and while I tried to immerse myself in time to describe it better, [...]