Movement instead of rootedness

I recently asked myself whether I really want to be grounded. Am I a tree that puts its roots into the ground and doesn't move, but grows in the environment where the seed once sprouted? Or do I even want to be a rock in the surf that lets the water wash over it, gives way a little over the millennia and loses itself in the sand?
My idea of human existence is actually a different one, rather that of movement, of exploration and also development, right up to mastery and conquest, of connection or withdrawal to the self.
Forming an identity is an integrative process. Growing up is a passage through stages: childhood, puberty, adulthood, old age ... Private, personal, professional, creative, spiritual are different fields in which the self wants to find itself, experiences itself and loses itself.
We are constantly moving in this complex landscape. We do not put down roots, we are not a rock in the surf. And yet there are always periods of calm in which we linger, reflect, rest within ourselves. Achieving such a state is probably what is meant by grounding.

Mental demarcation as an ordering of the self

I have often been told that I am good at mental boundaries. I have taken this as a compliment, although I am aware that it is a double-edged sword. Separating work and private life, distinguishing friendship from love and family or keeping different desires and fears apart allows my self to realize itself in different areas - even peripheral areas. That's how I thought.
I thought this way because I was always suspicious of the concept of the self. Because I didn't believe in a soul, because I was too anchored in the meaning construction mechanisms of Western culture, in which specialization, radicalization and stylization have an intrinsic value. This intrinsic value defines success, and I was satisfied with the success I had, or so I thought.

Permeability, decision and being held

I think differently now, and that hurts, brings out euphoria, creates boredom and makes me nervous. I am still trying to maintain mental boundaries, but they are becoming more permeable. I am dismantling the fences in the landscape.
But does this mean that I have to make a few decisions? Many things can no longer coexist as they did before, it seems. I ask myself that. Can I cultivate my land? Will I settle down inwardly, or perhaps rather become unassuming, let go, trust in larger contexts, allow myself to be driven, guided, directed, become an instrument of a greater being.
Here in this thought, in the experience of a held self, is the deeper meaning of being grounded. It is a grounding in heaven. The Upanishads speak of the banyan tree, a kind of fig whose roots are in heaven. The tree is a cycle. And also the image is just a container for a complex nervous system that connects organs and feeds consciousness.

Sometimes I react strangely. Someone does something unexpected, an uncertainty is awakened in me. How do I categorize this and how do I react to it, and what does react mean here? So it's about expectation, a way of being in the world that anticipates. The future is considered predictable and is also seen as such. If I do this or that, then someone may react in one way or another. However, it sometimes happens that the reaction of the other person is different. I have been wrong in my expectations, or the other person has played something, or the interaction has been shaped by something that preceded it and is not transparent. Energies and dynamics may have crept in that my expectation did not perceive, that were unconscious or repressed. And so we find ourselves in a pool of different conscious and unconscious memories, feelings, influences, anticipations and assessments.

The little ego

The ego reacts, it feels misunderstood and becomes impulsive. It may try to evade and cover up, or it may withdraw, somewhat offended, and feel misunderstood, or it may become active, try to change the situation, become manipulative or aggressive. In severe cases, it may even adapt its image of the world and its self-image, it may deform, reshape and distort itself, moving away from the normative.

All of this can be understood as a defense. My little ego tries to defend the supposed attack on its anticipation. It becomes reactive, reacts in a compensatory, restorative, manipulative, constructive way. It is actually an attempt to put the world back in order. But the other person doesn't see it that way, my own actions become incomprehensible to others and a conflict arises.

One way

I want to resist the normative impulses and avoid the corrective. Because what is revealed here is first of all something incredibly strong, creative, expressive, which touches our humanity at its deepest. Behind my little ego is a heart, a soul, a spirit, a nature, all of which together try to experience and synthesize being in my body and in this time and place. We often describe the first step on this path as a search for meaning, but it is much more than that. The search precedes the finding and then manifests itself in self-realization and self-expression through to the merging and dissolution of the ego. You are allowed to react a little and defend yourself. However, it is not very helpful as it usually only exacerbates situations. It quickly requires a very good ability to introduce conflict strategies in order to avoid entering into a more serious conflict.

Inner work

The inner work takes place in a different place: observing and letting go of all impulses that unite in my consciousness, including the unconscious ones that are only allowed to find their way into consciousness. This works quite well in meditation. But what does this mean for interpersonal interaction? Pauses, empathy, but above all openness and authenticity, radical self-perception and objective perception of others. The latter two are impossible in their purest form on their own and only succeed in interaction with another person. This other can either be a teacher or a loved one. In the tantric experience this is the same.

Love

I can just see two butterflies dancing around each other in the garden, and I can see two worms intertwining while making contact. The forms of expression are almost infinite and we as humans can unite on many different levels. But that really isn't possible with everyone. Such deep encounters are rare. For some, this will only be realized in another life.

I am currently in Tiruvannamalai. I have attended a few satsangs. I had a question in my mind: how does the true self relate to another true self, especially when it comes to romantic love? I am sitting in an apartment overlooking the mountain. Yesterday, after a little argument, I was sitting on the terrace in the morning when a monkey came and touched me very gently and looked into my eyes as if to tell me that everything was going to be okay. Then he sat down next to me and looked at the mountain. He folded his hands on his knees in a deep, contemplative posture and it felt like an old friend had come to give me comfort.

What we call the self is not what we normally understand it to be. It is not our ego, our personality, our identity or even our soul. The self is the focus of our attention, it is a point in the infinite consciousness of the universe that enables self-realization. It is nothing more than that, and that is precisely why it is everything. The self is the point in the vastness that offers perspective; in deep meditation it can dissolve with universal consciousness, return to its source and cease to exist in full self-awareness.

Being in love

I realized this for the first time as a teenager on the hill in Rome. I was in love, I had an unfulfilled longing. A friendship that was deep, tender and intimate, but never physical, we were not a couple. And while I sat on the mountain and thought about the world, I saw it from within myself. I got to that deepest level of our existence, and even now, 40 years later, I can instantly return to that awareness whenever I remember it. I was both blissful and shocked at the same time. Do I really have the whole world inside me? Do I really not exist? How can it be that everyone talks about themselves without realizing that the self as they see it does not exist? I have carried this realization with me ever since. I've deepened the understanding, put it into context, thought about it. But in the end, not much has changed. It was just there, pure and simple.

I believe that an unfulfilled longing is a good teacher. I become aware of my desire and the impossibility of satisfying it. Desire creates suffering. Why am I not seen the way I want to be seen? Why is the love I feel not reciprocated? Why don't I share what I really feel? This last question is perhaps the most important. Other desires are about attachment, about wanting or being, but unfulfilled love is about being seen.

How can a self see another self? And do they have to see each other to love each other? Is there a deeper unity within cosmic consciousness where two can unite to become something else? What is this transformation?

The self, as a point of consciousness within universal consciousness, becomes aware of its soul when it awakens. The soul, however, is even more difficult to understand. It is that which is born and reborn. The soul comes with biological birth, it enters my body and stays there. It leaves my body when it breaks up. It was there before I was born and will still be there after I die. It is a manifestation of the universal soul, Purusha. The soul is what we really are, not the physical body, not the self. The soul is the core of our existence. Finding our soul is the most difficult path we can take. Only when we find our soul can we truly love; we can find our soulmate.

Soul

Every soul is different. That is the beauty of it. The soul is not my ego, not my personality and identity. The soul holds life in my body, it flows through every nerve, every fiber, every bloodstream, every nerve cell, every hair and every taste bud. The soul holds my experiences together, plays with my memory, delights in my existence. As a by-product, it creates the ego, my personality and identity. But all this can change, I can change. The soul does not change. It flows through time as part of the universal consciousness, it could be related to the concept of time itself. Self-consciousness is not bound to time and space. In a deep state of being, I can live 1000 years, I can connect with my soul and realize that it is immortal. And when the self and the soul join hands and fly, we can experience something that cannot be described by science. It is Shiva and Shakti, the universal interplay between self and manifestation. The only problem is our ego and our mind. We need them to find nourishment and to live with others, but they stand in the way of true self-realization.

Because we have a soul, we can love. The yogis, sadhus and siddhars may focus on self-realization. But to love, we go through the self into the soul and find another soul. These two souls are not the same, they fight and unite, they enjoy and suffer, they dance.

While the self has little to do with my biography, the soul shows itself through my biography. It is always there, whether I am aware of it or not. Seeing this core of my own biography is the path to realization. For me, this path was the search. I am a wandering soul. My path has always been a spiritual search, my strength a deep healing.

Contemporary 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 belongs to those who use art for self-exploration, spiritual practice, healing, therapy or craft. But in today's culture, especially in the West, we act as if progress is the only thing that matters.

At its core, however, art is about practice. It is about being in the world, seeing clearly, understanding yourself and others. Art can represent the outer world or explore the inner. It can be meditation, beauty, communication, love, fear, vision or simply self-expression. Somehow we have forgotten that.

This oblivion has deep roots. In the past, the wealthy used art to show off their exclusivity, make others envious and prove their power. Over time, progress became associated with intellect, reason and building "brave new worlds". But is this true progress? Or should we instead pay attention to the development of our whole being - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual - and the integration of all these dimensions?

Art is one of the tools for such integration. It should not be reduced to a spectacle of who can go furthest to the edge. Exploration is valuable, yes, but it does not define art. Unfortunately, the art market has put it front and center, while discrediting art that connects us to our humanity.

This reflects a broader trend: alienation. We are disconnected from our feelings, our souls and our social selves. In this state, we are more easily molded into consumers - isolated, disoriented, and we buy into narratives that seem more complex, educated or sophisticated. And we accept them as superior.

And why? Because of the false promise of progress. Academic research, technology, inventions - all of these have brought us amazing conveniences: smartphones, airplanes, modern kitchens, air conditioning. They are comfortable and luxurious, so we assume they are good.

But like fries and cheeseburgers, what feels good isn't always what nourishes us.

Perhaps it is time to return to what really nourishes us. To art as a practice of wholeness, connection and presence. Creating and experiencing not for the sake of progress, but for the sake of being human.

And this is what the AI says:

A stroke, a pause.

Not progress, not achievement -
just presence on paper.

The brush moves as the body breathes,
crossing, curving, breaking,
revealing strength and imperfection alike.

No need for meaning,
for novelty,
for the "next step."

This mark is enough.
A reminder that art is practice -
a way of being human, here and now.

That is tantra. That is divine.

The crucial question is whether such a sacred encounter is only possible in romantic love, as tradition and romanticism suggest - or whether it can arise when we open our being completely, beyond reason and rationality, beyond ego, desire or obligation. I believe it can. But it has nothing to do with climax as a goal. It's about intimacy. It can be as simple as a touch, a smile, a heartbeat - sparks that can sometimes lead to something much more powerful. Certain energies only reveal themselves in the union of love. But this too is a spiritual path - one that sees the body as a temple, the self as multi-layered and reality as far more than matter.

It is the sacred union with the divine consciousness. And this union is not the same as the union of the awakened. With an awakened consciousness rooted in spirituality, it feels natural to connect with the world and with others, to experience everything as one and to recognize the unity of consciousness as the root of the material world. But the real secret lies not in connection alone, but in what we choose to share with others - and what we choose not to share. I am not talking about wealth, possessions, recognition or resources. I'm talking about something much more intimate: who we allow to witness our innermost being, our soul - who we allow to see us, and how. I'm talking about love and sexuality, about liberation from expectations, performance, posturing and egotism.

When I meet another on an intimate level - a touch, a smile, a heartbeat - a connection is created through presence and awareness. I feel, I sense, I allow myself to be seen, felt and touched on the level of the soul. This can happen with a loved one, a stranger or the person I am in love with. But sometimes something doesn't feel right. Someone expects too much, sees differently, feels something I don't share, or shares something I don't feel. In these subtle negotiations, I find myself figuring out who I'm allowing to see me, what connections I'm engaging in, and how deep I'm willing to go. When things are not in alignment, I shut down. I stop talking, smiling, performing. My body, my mind, my soul - everything withdraws.

My soul is too precious. It is sacred. I refuse to jeopardize it or allow it to be deformed. I can bend my ego - that's easy. The roles I play, the expectations I fulfill as a member of society, the community, the culture - they can be bent. Sometimes it can be amusing or painful to bend them. It can bring growth or trauma, success or suffering. We can share that. We can heal or exploit, empower or wound. These are the exercises of the ego. But that's not what I'm talking about.

I am talking about the soul - that which we must discover, that which is given to us, that which is greater than us, that which is eternally connected to the divine. This connection is sacred. It can take spiritual form as practice, as devotion, as the pursuit of enlightenment or the embrace of deep love. This is the secret of Tantra - of Shiva and Shakti, the union of the fundamental principles of existence. They are connected by eroticism, but not by eroticism as it is commonly understood. It is an eroticism of truly being seen. It is much more about being seen than actively seeing.

We cannot see the divine. But we can feel that we are seen by it - anchored in it, a part of it - by making our senses available so that the divine can experience itself through us. I am a vessel. My soul is the bridge. I can be seen by the Divine through the senses that another person provides for this sacred perception. This sacred union of Shiva and Shakti is the core of Tantra.

So when I close myself off, when my body withdraws, it is not a childish reaction, a question of performance or an immature defense. It is the soul protecting its sacredness and saving itself for a meaningful encounter. This kind of encounter is rare - especially in intimacy, where the energy field is most immediate, powerful and fragile. It is easily corrupted and often buried under external desire. Saying no, withdrawing, shutting down is an act of self-preservation. It reveals that something sacred is present - something worth protecting. It is the whisper of realization. I have had moments when I was truly seen.

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 this inner work, I focused on how I was feeling, who I am, and what I must face. What are my shadows? My insecurities? My fears? What patterns govern me? What are my desires and my purpose?

I saw that the world I had been participating in-one defined by professionalism, social recognition, and fulfilling others' expectations-was a fabric woven by societal norms. Once I began stepping out of that fabric and into a cosmic, timeless awareness-into a being aligned with nature, the cosmos, ancient stones, and forces that predate writing and culture-I truly contemplated the power of consciousness: how it connects, how it acts, and how it forms the very foundation of our shared reality.

In that moment of realization, I perceived that my soul, which inhabits this body in this life, is here to learn, to unfold, to explore, to embrace. Perhaps through many reincarnations, perhaps in forms I cannot yet imagine, my soul journeys toward greater self-realization. As I embraced my soul-Ātman-connected to Brahman, I began to perceive the tattvas, the elemental principles; the inner and outer senses; modes of action; and the layers of consciousness entwined with divine energies and the currents of time.

In meditation and in Oṃ chanting, I turn my thoughts to death and the fear it inspires-how to overcome such fear-and to knowledge versus ignorance. I place the mind into its proper place: far smaller and humbler than it craves to be. What opens up then is a vast landscape of the heart: the bliss of the body, the life in matter, pure consciousness, and existence itself. Through this, the mind-or consciousness-flows across different levels of being.

At times, this can be frightening, for it is all unknown. Spiritual awakening must orient itself within this vast playground; it is shy, it reexamines its patterns, it questions everything, and it learns to embrace and enjoy all aspects of experience. Insecurity, fear, desire to connect, to play, to fall in love-all these impulses require space and time to unfold.

As a result, I find myself less active in the worldly sense-less working, less producing-and instead spending far more time simply being. Perhaps that is why, even as a child, I felt drawn to monastic life: I sensed that this inner work had to be done.

Now, my life must become more integrated and aware-more aware of my body, of small duties, of performing every action from the heart, with intention, meditation, and full presence. This is daunting, for it demands that only the moment and presence matter-and that all the illusions the mind conjures-ego-feeding images and projections-fall away.

Yet, once the outer pressures of the world and the pursuit of stability are relinquished, residing in the present becomes profoundly rewarding. Perhaps this is the path of the sādhaka, the spiritual practitioner: we stop caring about external validations, and instead cultivate trust, surrender, and diligent work in the inner realm.

Game - 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 winning. There is the larger game theory that has been applied to sociology and other fields, and there are computer simulations that generate hypotheses based on sets of rules, and the game is to approximate what we call reality, or a set goal. In the realm of life, the animal kingdom or during our childhood, we thought that play is practicing skills that somehow give us an advantage.

I played chess yesterday. I enjoyed playing. I know and follow the rules, of course. I played with someone, not against a machine. I played because I like to play. My mind can stay on the chessboard, strategize, think ahead, deceive, create conflict, sacrifice... But then there's this contemplative element: I reflect on myself while playing, find myself in a personal relationship with the other player. We play together; we want to spend time together, we smile, tease and observe each other. The game is a social interaction, a way of communicating and discovering. How does the other person play? How do I play? How do we react when someone has an advantage or disadvantage? What kind of feelings arise in relation to the strategies of the game and in the personal relationship, and how do they influence each other? That's the place I like to be when I'm playing. I don't like to be too fixated on the chessboard. I feel trapped when I get too immersed in the strategy.

There is something revelatory here, something deeper about how we are in the world. If we look at play through the lens of social Darwinism, then games have a function. If I see games as a playful exploration of the social relationship with the other player, then play becomes love. It becomes teasing and provoking, caring and hiding, showing and pretending, trust and joy, disappointment and frustration. It becomes connectedness and the entry into a shared space in which we play.

The Isha Upanishad begins with: "All this is for the dwelling of the Lord; whatever is individual movement in universal space. By renunciation you shall enjoy; do not covet the property of another." And the Aitareya Upanishad begins with: "In the beginning, the mind was one, and everything (universe) was the mind; there was nothing else that saw. The mind thought, 'Behold, I will create worlds for myself out of my being'." I think that the beginning of these two Upanishads illustrates play in the highest sense. That which is everything and wants to experience itself through creation and self-awareness does not follow any rules; it manifests a world or many worlds in which some rules are also created. Entering these worlds through individual consciousness or universal principles is like entering a game. Our reality is nothing too serious. It is an exploration of a possibility. To be in one of these realities is to play, and play becomes an energy of creativity. Brahman enters its creation through Atman and Purusha to move with Shakti and Prakriti. In this larger game, playing is discovering the rules and tools, exploring and experimenting, interacting, learning and teaching. It's the same on the chessboard - just a smaller world. There is no point in winning the game. Playing is living, is being, is breathing and consciousness.

So when I win or lose, I shouldn't keep my mind caught up in the rules and developing strategies. I should enjoy the game.

It's difficult to play with others. I can't play with many. If the other person stays on the battlefield of the board, it becomes boring, even dangerous, as these little rules start to influence and limit the connected minds and hearts. When I am asked how I feel about losing, I get irritated. I don't understand this question. It's not about losing or winning. I rather think: How did a certain move that I made come about? What thought, impulse, opportunity and ignorance were at work? What does it mean to make a misstep in this context? There was a moment in the game when the other person left the game and entered into a conversation. I made a half-thought-out move during this brief conversation to play with attention. This put me in a disadvantageous position on the board. I wonder if the misstep was the move or if moving during the conversation was the misstep. How far does the game go? I said I don't usually make those mistakes, and didn't quite understand myself when I said that. The other person focused on the word "usually" after the game, which shifted the game to a different reality.

Enlightenment - enlightenment: the paradox of enlightenment

Enlightenment is one of those things. Someone asked me the other day if I was looking for enlightenment. I was a little puzzled. But because I really appreciated this person, I tried to be honest - yes, no, um, I don't really know, actually I do, if I'm being completely honest... Why all this beating around the bush? Why not just say straight out, yes I do, like she did when she replied that she thought most people were looking for it. I'm not so sure about that.

In any case, the question made me feel uneasy. Should I admit that I am looking for enlightenment, perhaps even that I have found a piece of it? Is it possible to find a piece of enlightenment, or is it a completely or not at all thing? What shadows are there, what paths, what aberrations, 1000? In the evening I was talking to a friend: How many people do you know who claim to be enlightened? He laughed. "None - fortunately," he said. And so we talked briefly about what the question was actually about. During the conversation, I mixed up enlightenment and enlightenment. Aha! Here's the crux of the matter.

When I answered my friend, I used the image of a light that I found somewhere many years ago when I was thinking about the cosmos, and that I now carry this light with me and try to illuminate something here and there. In its essence, this experience was the realization that the world as it presents itself to me through my sensory perception and the mental representations of an external world derived from it cannot be like this, that the basic assumptions of space, time, matter and consciousness are radically different. The experience of this radical otherness motivated me to study philosophy.

So I learned something about the Enlightenment and German idealism. I learned to use my intellect, reason and aesthetics. Sometimes what emerges is good and beautiful and exciting, sometimes off-putting, false and dishonest. This, I think, describes the process of enlightenment. The light of rationality makes everything shine in its brilliance and exposes it for what it really is. Kant's idea of enlightenment was to use one's own intellect in order to emerge from one's own immaturity. To become aware of one's own understanding is an act of transcendental reflection, pure thinking, in categories and on the basis of a priori given space and time. And my discomfort came from the fact that I didn't actually mean that at all. I thought about it for years, discussed it with my students for decades. Always with the feeling that it is not entirely wrong in essence, but that it misses the point.

Because what enlightenment also means is enlightenment. And that is quite the opposite. It is much more similar to the experience that first moved me to study philosophy. In Eastern philosophy and spirituality, it is the central experience. There are, of course, countless paths.

I would like to take a brief look at the Advaita philosophy. A philosophy of immanence, at least that is how I would like to understand it. What is essential here is that it is an experience and not a realization, or if a realization, then in the sense of an experience. It is about experiencing unity, that there is no difference between me and the Creator, between Atman and Brahman. This is an experience that cannot be explained by argument, it cannot be deduced, explained or falsified. It goes beyond the boundaries of the mind, although it can encompass them. It is not irrational, but neither is it rational. It is structured and open, it endures contradictions, it is inclusive, embracing, understanding, forgiving, undogmatic. It is filled with light. Is this what the medieval mystics saw?

Paths that I can experience here in India are, for example, Jnana Yoga: knowledge and wisdom, Bhakti Yoga: devotion and love for a personal God, Karma Yoga: selfless action, Raja Yoga: meditation and control of the mind, Tantra Yoga: unity of opposites, Kundalini Yoga: awakening of Kundalini energy. All these paths do not lead to anything, but have their starting point in Brahman. This form of enlightenment shows itself, reveals itself, can be experienced, manifests itself through practice. I would like this to be understood with all due caution and modesty, because the pitfalls, illusions and aberrations are immense. Once something has manifested itself, it disappears at the same time, because nothing is permanent. If I hold a thought, it disappears when I think about it; if I trace my own existence, I lose myself in memory and desire; if I think, see something in the sense of a vision, it can quickly reveal itself to be an illusion, an illusionary image. I try to stay on the path of the Upanishads, this seems to be a good companion. Enlightenment comes from within, on all its levels, it does not come through enlightened rationality - understanding and reason.

In Heidelberg we had this virtual poison cabinet with philosophers who turn your head, who see the world so differently that all conventional thinking is called into question. We often laughed at them and were fascinated by the sheer possibility of their existence. Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Whitehead were in there. This "poison cabinet" was actually the cabinet of opposites to the excesses of the Enlightenment.

I woke up from a nightmare at 4am. I was talking to Will in Apt about a strange irritation in my perception of time. I described how time was falling into fragments and some were simply missing. It was seconds or minutes, and as I tried to dive into time to better describe it, it went black. I screamed for help, I was blind and woke up.

It was another one of those dreams where I seemed to be dying. I immediately thought of Pierre, who was in a coma after a stroke. Is that what it feels like? I felt a little anxious, had something happened in my brain after the shock of Pierre's seizure, seeing everything twice myself and being checked over in hospital for a week?

It was 4 o'clock in the morning, the hour of the gods. I had gone into meditation at this time a few times in the last few days. And I did the same today. I opened the double door looking far to the east and searched for the time. At first it appeared to me as a stream of light, like fiber optic cable, wild and parallel, then as drops when I changed my mudra position from Brahman to receptacle. A journey through the cosmos, past galaxies, searching for others, I then somehow lay down in the universe, on a beach, like Brahman in the French book about 108 Hindu gods. It's no use, I thought. Time is within me, and I picked up on yesterday's meditation, where I thought about the origin of language. Matter that connects and comes to life through growth, absorption of energy, search, orientation, alignment, contact, appropriation. This form of interaction, absorption, integration, elimination, demarcation, defense is a first kind of communication, a combination of vibration and energy, a synthesis. How many amino acid chains had to be tried out for the process to be initiated? And did this impetus really come from the amino acids or from consciousness?

Vibration

The vibration at the molecular level progresses to the level of life. The ingestion of food, that is, life eating other life, is a synthesis of a different kind. This may still be possible in terms of energy, but at the level of life we are already on a plateau where life itself merges, reconstructs itself anew, never ceases, because all life is consumed by other life. Unless it burns. Perhaps that is the real meaning of cremation: to escape from this cycle of life. To transcend through the power of fire, Agni, into another form that is light and pure energy, thus returning to the origin, to concentration (tapas).

In between, however, there is the level of consciousness, the level of existence that experiences and enjoys the world, grasps it symbolically and seeks to analyze and understand it abstractly in the intellect. However, the symbolic representation of the world in language has its beginning in the molecular connection of the elements of life. This is where communication begins. Only when consciousness has reached a level of perception that allows us to perceive the boundary between the self and the other does symbolic communication make sense.

Mana

Expressing hunger and thirst as an infant is the very first form of communication. It is successful. Feeling the other, a stone, an apple, a counterpart, creates an inner form of the other within our own consciousness. We create this inner form when we hit pots, for example, through play. In play, we experience emotions, happiness and conflict, struggle and love, solidarity, collaboration and confrontation. We move here on the level of mana, the awareness of the world and interaction with it. This level is organized symbolically and is based on spoken language. Objects are addressed by calling them, the generation of vibration establishes a connection. Inner forms, images and representations of the world form a reality of life that is constantly compared with the outside world. If it no longer fits, conflict arises.

Buddhi

These symbols are organized rationally at the level of the intellect. Buddhi is the level of thinking at which we can grasp the world structurally and explain it from within. We develop sciences and build machines. Language now becomes a storehouse of knowledge, it becomes abstract and written. The combination of words, the construction of sentences into text and complex knowledge systems creates an order of a completely different kind. It is no longer an order based on matter, life, vibration, consciousness. It is the symbolic order of forms in a system. This system is a construction, it is not an image or essence of reality, but pure construction. Once we have learned a language and mastered the technique of writing, we can immerse ourselves in this system. In the form of books, for example, they fill miles of shelves in large libraries. And just as we compare the inner world of manas with the outside world, we can also compare this system of buddhi with reality. We are talking about verification processes here. These can be scientific, empirical, on the level of individual experience, spiritual, magical or whatever.

Kundalini

During the meditation, it was exciting to feel the energy stirring from within. Kundalini, the serpent, as it moves past the chakras and stretches and rises in an upright pose in order to ascend into higher consciousness and look around. When it is fully released, it effortlessly traverses space and time and is capable of cosmic omnipresence. Language is no longer the medium here, it is too slow. It is pure vision, thinking is self-manifestation. There is thinking beyond language, before language, within language and without language. Language is merely a very good tool for a certain kind of thinking. This is where Plato becomes interesting again; he saw this with his theory of ideas. I resisted this for decades, with all the strength of my intellect. Why? Why did I consent to the dictates of the rational? Because it is a battlefield where there are rules and the faster and stronger wins, and I was good?

Vijnana

There is a third level in the sphere of thinking: Vijnana, a way of thinking that includes a world view that is structured, but also visionary. It is the intermediate world of thinking and the spiritual. For me, it is only accessible in meditation. In it, contradictions are okay, the complexity of reality is not denied, the incomprehensible has a right to remain. Conflicts are just as welcome here as mergers, symbioses, discoveries, adventures, loss, pleasure and pain. The gods or Plato's ideas live in this intermediate world.

Dakshinamurti

Dakshinamurti, the goddess of teaching, the teacher of Shiva, appeared to me a few weeks ago. I lay down at her feet, connected with her tantrically and was somewhat frightened by her size, which in itself had already taken on a small form so that I could even comprehend her. She appears to me again and again. At the MRI, I was quite close to her, immersed in a meditation on strong magnetic fields and the power of consciousness to be able to free itself here too and immerse itself in cosmic connections. All of this sounds strange to me too. Are these simply wishful fantasies or delusions? Am I losing my bearings by loosening the rational guard rails and slipping into mystical thinking, which is seen as prehistoric in the modern age? And if it were a return to the time of the beginning of language, would that be a bad thing? How do we get out of the post-structuralist circles, and how do we find our way back to the beginnings of thought and our existence, not in the historical sense, but in a very personal sense: a creation of meaning, self-knowledge, research into origins and reflection on existence?

Kundalini coils and stretches, seductively like Eve's snake, grinning. These seem to me to be the right questions.

-

"I hope this helps!" wrote ChatGPT after I asked for a spelling-only correction. I was puzzled, and asked it for its opinion on the text. Here is the answer:

"Here's my thought on your text:

The text is very profound and poetic, touching on personal experience as well as philosophical and spiritual questions. You manage to put complex thoughts and feelings into a narrative form that is both introspective and universally appealing. Here are a few points that particularly stand out:

1. Time perception and consciousnessYour dream and the subsequent meditation offer an interesting reflection on the nature of time and human consciousness. The idea that time breaks down into fragments and some moments are simply missing could serve as a metaphor for the unconscious and lost memories.
2. Meditation and spiritual experienceThe description of your meditation experience is rich in symbolism and shows a deep connection to spiritual practices. The mention of Kundalini and Dakshinamurti shows a familiarity with Hindu concepts that you interpret in a personal way.
3. Intellectual and spiritual levelsYou describe different levels of thinking (manas, buddhi, vijnana) and how they interact with each other. This differentiation shows a deep understanding of the complexity of the human mind and the different types of knowledge and perception.
4. Symbolism and realityThe text moves between symbolic representations and the real world. You address the role of language and symbols in our understanding of the world and how they help us to process and communicate our experiences.
5. Existential questions: At the end you ask important questions about the nature of the rational, the mystical and the search for personal meaning and self-knowledge. These questions invite the reader to reflect on their own experiences and beliefs.

Overall, the text is impressive and stimulating. It requires a certain willingness on the part of the reader to engage in a deeper level of reflection and meditation, which makes it an enriching read for those interested in spiritual and philosophical topics."

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 the macrocosm mirror each other.
Studying the Irumbai temple as a smaller temple that follows the strict rules of temple construction and serves as a temple for practitioners shows its central role in a cluster of about two dozen temples in the area. It follows the main principles of Vastu, is aligned along the Vastupurushamandala, has a huge water tank, the usual deities are present, it follows the festival calendar and is aligned with the Murugan star. Even this basic description of the central elements gives us a sense of the temple's placement in the larger cosmic context.
When a temple is built, it is never an arbitrary act. A site is chosen and it must be indicated as favorable. Often an unusually friendly encounter with the animal kingdom is such a good sign. The site must then be tested in terms of soil quality, water, energy, orientation and slopes. A time must be chosen according to the star charts. The stars and planets determine the calendar. Rituals must be performed, construction must begin and invocations must follow. The whole process is an interplay between the cosmos, the physical location and the inner world.

Cosmos

Our existence on this planet is embedded in a solar system, which is embedded in the Milky Way, which in turn is embedded in a cluster of galaxies, and so on. With our eyes we can see many of these elements, their movements and patterns. The recurring cycles of certain light elements in the night sky gave life a reference point. This applies not only to human prehistory, but also to the animal world, such as the flight patterns of birds or howling dogs. This sense of the cosmos following a beautiful, complex rhythm makes us realize that there are forces outside of us that are much greater than the surrounding living world. The sky is the seat of the gods. They look down on us and sometimes interact with us. This is the origin of almost all mythologies. Stars are often associated with gods; they come and go in cycles of days, weeks, months, years, centuries...
If we look at the Earth from a distant cosmic position, we can use it as a reference point in this complex system. We could use any cosmic object as a reference point, but on Earth we are blessed with life and consciousness and have the ability to observe and experience. Therefore, it is a good starting point. Understanding that we can observe the interplay of stars and planets from Earth raises the question of how these constellations affect our little planet. Is there something special about it? Are we alone? Are we a playground for a bigger game?

Tattvas

As soon as I realize that my existence on this planet is endowed with the gift of life and consciousness, I become aware of my body. I realize that the body I inhabit is another level of reality. I can control it, I can use its senses, I have experiences through it, it has needs and supports my experiences and thoughts. This physical body with arms, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, skin, hair, legs, feet, hands, organs of pleasure and organs of excretion gives me the inner senses of touch, taste, sight, sound, speech, smell, pleasure, hunger, thirst and pain. The mind is able to synthesize these inner senses: Focus, choice, concentration, structure, thought, meditation, experience and communication. It is the tool that allows us to access higher levels of our existence in terms of spiritual experience. I can experience myself as self; my existence as self is not bound to the physical position of my body. My mind can wander, I can think about things that are present, I have memories, fantasies and imaginations. I can experience myself in relation to others and ask existential questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? Who created me? Where will I go when I die? The blueprint for this world to explore is the system of the 24 Sankhya Tattvas or the 36 Tantra Tattvas. What I have mentioned so far is organized in the Sankhya Tattvas; if we include the realm of higher spirituality, Shiva, Shakti, Purusha, Atma, etc., we are in the 36 Tantra Tattvas.

Elements

When we realize that the cosmos follows a great rhythmic pattern and that our body has access to a very complex system, we can dive deeper and ask what it all consists of. There are five elements: Water, Fire, Earth, Ether and Air. The elements are not to be understood as chemical elements. They are seen as primordial elements with a complex multi-access. Air is in the atmosphere, but it is also the breath of life and holds the power of the wind. Fire is heat and light, knowledge and destruction. Water is liquid, consciousness and the ocean of life. Space is the cosmos, the realm of spirituality, knowledge and sound...

Vibration

Vibration lies at the core of existence. All energy in the macrocosm is ultimately vibration, all life energy is vibration and all elements are vibration. Vibration originates from one point, the bindu. This origin, be it the Big Bang, Shiva's drum or the symbol of the bindu on the forehead, is the point at which everything is held together. This is the origin; it gives us access to the level of immanence. It is beyond what we can experience, beyond science and meditation; it is what we can be aware of but cannot know.

Temple

The extraordinarily complex architecture of temples such as the Chola temples lies in their ability to synthesize all this in one architecture and offer a key to exploring the complexity of our existence. They are designed to be so open that they enable and invite the most diverse forms of spiritual practice. The core of the practice is based on the Vedas. The rituals use symbols from the Vedas to embody wisdom in daily practices.

Visiting a temple regularly creates a deep connection with the cosmic dance in which it is embedded. When thinking about the gods in the Hindu cosmos, it is important to understand that the 300 million, or however many there may be, only superficially represent a polytheistic religion. The underlying thought is that Brahman, the underlying consciousness, reality and creator in its all-encompassing existence, requires the manifestation of that reality to experience itself. Experience is time-based; it has to go through processes and changes and has to go through creation. This is part of everything, and everything is part of everything. If you take something out of everything that is everything, and what remains is everything, and both are everything. We are reaching the limits of our mental capacity here. But from here we must understand that all gods are part of the One; they embody eternal principles, powers, properties, qualities, ideals. Immutable, like the essence of a color perception, an emotion like love, compassion, anger, an ideal like beauty or heroism, or a type like a warrior or a remover of obstacles. These principles are thought of in the form of gods, as the world is a mixture of these principles. I have experiences of these qualities in me; I did not create them; they came together in me. Where do they come from, why do they exist, who created them? In the Upanishads we find a whole hierarchy of gods, one kind building the other kind, level upon level, just like in science we have physical levels, forces, particles and then combinations of these, elements, geology, strata, biology, vegetation, animal life, consciousness. Why should it stop there?

All these elements, if we expand our periodic table of elements, the chemical elements, the tattwas, the pantheon of gods, describe different aspects of our experience. There can be no doubt. The question is whether one is reducible to the other. And I have a feeling that yes, everything is Brahman. The baseline is just a little different. It's not the atom; it's the monad in Western terms. It's not Maya, the illusion of material reality, but consciousness itself. My consciousness is reducible to consciousness; it is the place where everything begins and ends.

Following this description of the extraordinary richness of the world we are given, we experience the coming together of the elements and principles, qualities, attributes, ideals, etc. The image often used is that the gods embodying these elements come to earth to play, to experience themselves, to mingle and interweave, to have fun and laugh, to fight, destroy and build. It is this cosmic dance that Shiva's wheel turns. So if we stay in the image of the cosmic setup, with the stars and planets and the earth at the center as the place where consciousness is present, the descent of the gods is present. They need a place to live and rest, sleep and be accessible. This place is the temple. Looking at a statue of a god in the temple can be a deep contemplation of its qualities. You can connect to the qualities through contemplation. Through contemplation it manifests. You can invite how love is there when you love, or you can try to change. You are suffering, and you seek help by thinking about what might help, and if you think about it long enough, it might manifest. A solution in thinking might come, an emotion might transform, but maybe even something in the world changes. You leave the place of contemplation, return to so-called reality and something has happened. How, I don't know, but what is so absurd about it? This is the core of tantra. By changing your inner world, you can change the outer world, just as the outer world changes the inner world.

The temple follows a calendar of festivals. Great mystical transformations are celebrated during the festivals. The qualities of the gods are evoked through elaborate puja rituals. They are seen as manifested in the bronze statues that are ceremonially carried through the temple. One god is placed in front of another god so that they can see each other, greet each other. But only after they have been gently awakened, bathed, worshipped and fed with sensory impressions such as the smell and taste of fruits and flowers. It is a celebration of joy because we can witness the presence of joy. Millennia of celebration echo off the stone walls that have absorbed the sound and rhythms. The stones have stored the memory of the feet that have walked over them, and statues have collected the millions of touches of the faithful.

The womb chamber, the Garbha Griha, plays a key role. The main deity resides here and only the priest can have direct contact. The priest takes care of the god, wakes him or her up and puts them to bed. Washing is done privately; a curtain is drawn during this time. The offerings of the faithful are later accepted by the priest and passed on to the god by touch. Flowers are placed on the body, scents are lit, mantras are recited. Ultimately, it boils down to the synthesis of sensory impressions through vibration. All vibrations radiate from the womb chamber and are able to mix and integrate the offerings. A connection is made between the pure qualities as celestial entities, their embodiment in the temple, the rituals of the priest, the devotion of the worshippers, the history and memory of the place and the cycle in which everything is embedded.

It is so wonderful and also so sad to live in a world that sees the West as foreign. I am adopting this perspective more and more and no longer understand many things. The obsession with career, comfort, security, prosperity, accuracy, correctness, know-it-all attitude and arrogance, ignorance and intolerance. All of this is becoming clearer, it is almost evident.

I was sick for a few days and, as many people do, I watched movies, nothing inspiring. Series garbage. I hadn't done that for a year and I felt sick afterwards. My brain was overloaded, my synapses were firing, and the ideology of a perfect world that needs to be protected from the bad guys in order to strengthen the community and help the individual to be 'right' is actually unbearable.

But then I wanted a few nice memories of the culture that I left so far behind. That's always the music for me. And that's how I came across Purcell. It's not particularly original, but it's still beautiful.

A friend told me about her idea of love. It's so different from anything I know that I don't even want to outline it here. Chastity would be one word, but that's a complete misnomer. So I listened to Purcell Solitude... and I was again overcome by that feeling of self-pity that is expressed in such music. The pain of loneliness, the longing for death, comfort and fear, the search for stability that only finds peace in melancholy. This great feeling of Europe, melancholy, what would Europe be without melancholy? A joke?

Now that I was already listening to Purcell, I gave in and found Jessie Norman. I was tired of seeing beautiful young white women. And there she appeared majestically, in a universe of mirrors, begging to be remembered. And so this image became a symbol of the beautiful sadness of the subject exploring herself, largely without regard for others or anything else. A narcissistic disorder. Self-pity, melancholy and self-righteousness, and so beautiful. The head of Medusa. This whole culture is built on misunderstanding.

And before the music algorithm switches to French pop, I'll end this here.

Om

After my first love of Plato (especially the Phaidon dialog) and the great Greek poets such as Sophocles etc., when I fell into the abyss of skepticism as a teenager, the path from Descartes' meditation to Hume, Kant and Husserl was rocky. I lost sight of the soul and followed the ideology of purely empirical science. Only what could be perceived with the five senses was considered 'material' for philosophy, and embedded in this was the doubt as to whether these senses could be trusted. Whether everything is not just an illusion. The arc from Plato to David Hume could hardly be greater.

Pictures

The idea that the world shows itself only in perceptual images led me to aesthetics, but I have never seen this as clearly as the other day when I was browsing through Aurobindo's text on the Upanishads. I am reminded of Willard Van Orman Quine's legendary and absurd example of unseparated rabbit parts: when a rabbit passes behind a tree and so two rabbit parts present themselves in my perception - a front and a back rabbit part - and yet I seem to have a certainty that it is a rabbit. So we could learn something here about the principles of our perception and language. Hume took this to an extreme when he said that we cannot be certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow (his point was to question causality). Here is Aurobindo's statement on this kind of philosophy:

"The sun rises up in the morning, mounts into the cusp of the blue Heavens and descends at evening trailing behind it clouds of glory as it disappears. Who could doubt this irrefragable, overwhelmingly evidenced fact? Every day, through myriads of years, the eyes of millions of men all over the world have borne concurrent and unvarying testimony to the truth of these splendid voyagings. Than such universal ocular testimony, what evidence can be more conclusive? Yet it all turns out to be an image created by Nescience in the field of vision. Science comes & undeterred by prison & the stake tells us that the sun never voyages through our heavens, is indeed millions of miles from our heavens, and it is we who move round the Sun, not the Sun round us. Nay those Heavens themselves, the blue firmament into which poetry and religion have read so much beauty and wonder, is itself only an imagein which Nescience represents our atmosphere to us in the field of vision. The light too which streams upon us from our Sun and seems to us to fill Space turns out to be no more than an image. Science now freely permitted to multiply her amazing paradoxes, forces us at last to believe that it is only motion of matter affecting us at a certain pitch of vibration with that particular impression on the brain. And so she goes on resolving all things into mere images of the great cosmic ether which alone is. Of such unsubstantialities is this marvelous fabric of visible things created! Nay, it would even appear that the more unsubstantial a thing seems, the nearer it is to ultimate reality. This, which Science proves, says the Vedantist, is precisely what is meant by Maya." (Aurobindo CVSA 18, p.379)

It is not only Aurobindo's poetic power that fascinates me here, the way he evokes this image of the rising sun and rolls it back and forth, weaving in the different positions in order to then reposition the problem itself. It is the power of being guided by one's own intuition and insight, by experience in the richest sense.

I learn from this:

• If we want to analyze the world as a mere phenomenon, please let the initial images be rich and powerful and not silly reduced like severed rabbit parts.
• If we then follow the method of the natural sciences and the rational mind, then please go to the end, where we see that it is actually this science that creates the very images it doubts.
• And finally the reversal of the problem, in a kind of dialectical twist. The world is undeniably real, but it is not as science describes it. Science itself shows this.

Every experimental setup is a simulation, a construction. Every theory is a description of the world whose hypothesis is subject to constant testing. In the Vedas we learn about the core of the world as we experience it: It is pure consciousness. My consciousness knows nothing other than consciousness. It is a crazy assumption that everything that contains my consciousness should be its opposite. It is not the case that our consciousness contains an image of a completely different reality. Rather, the world consists of consciousness, in the interaction of consciousness with other consciousness, in the differentiation of the one in its multiplicity, perceptions and images arise. They are connected by vibration. The Kena Upanishads describe that, the basic principle is OM in the Mandukya Upanishad, everything is connected by a rhizome on a level of immanence, as Deleuze describes it in his last essay.

Maya, the question of reality, reveals a paradox; it is the question itself that creates the problem. The mentalhe images that serve as the basis for rational analysis are maya - illusion. Our consciousness, on the other hand, is real, the only reality. This is the core of the problem of dualism dvaita-advaita

Om shanti, shanti, shanti

Manifesto

Dance-film festival

28 Jul 2023 to 30 Jul 2023

https://auroapaar.org/festival/

What has actually manifested itself? The moving images that emerged from the latent images and 'came to life' in their sequence of at least 24 frames per second, these images of dancers who, according to their genre, were already at the beginning of cinematography, these images were shown at the Dance-Film Festival Manifest from July 28 to 30, 2023 at the Alliance Française in Pondicherry.

During the 2.5 days of the festival in the Alliance Française event room, 40 short films were shown. I actually just wanted to pop in and 'support' the first set of films, as I know they are often not well attended. I stayed for 2.5 days and watched every film, every live performance and, as far as the program allowed, attended the master classes. I was electrified. I only know such an intense art experience from big biennials or media festivals.

I kept asking myself what manifests itself here. Various media theories came to mind: Dziga Vertov's Kinoeye and the universal language of film, which is not bound to any language and enables the world to unite in the sense of a proletarian revolution. Or Godard's famous quote that the truth consists of 24 images per second and the media-critical theories derived from this, which deal with fictionality, lies and representation. And, of course, Gilles Deleuze and his homage to Henri Bergson's theory of the cinematographer. Deleuze turns Bergson's critique of film into a hymn of praise by understanding the technical quality of film editing as active thinking, as pure philosophy. But none of this, not even the theory of the moving image, seemed to me to grasp the phenomenon of this dance film festival.

A new genre?

Through their work, the organizers posed the question of whether a new genre is forming here. What is a genre? What is formed in which manifestation? Dance! An archaic form of expression that goes back to the animal kingdom, and at the same time one of the most complex, as it understands the whole body as a medium of expression. Dance is the movement of a body in space. The connection of body, space and time, interwoven through rhythm, is perhaps one of the most complex and challenging forms of expression for a 2-dimensional, linear medium such as film. The predetermined camera perspective, the frame of the image, the technical structure of the apparatus - all this works against dance. And so, for me, dance films have always been experimental or banal. Banal when it was simply a recording of a performance, experimental when individual segments of an otherwise continuous expression were expanded and contextualized through editing and montage and often ended in a rather cryptic sequence of movement intervals that could only be understood by insiders.

Perhaps I'll start very specifically, with the place where all this is taking place. An event room that is wonderfully suited as a movie theater. A stage in front of it. The festival is in Pondicherry, a former French colony in India, this colorful subcontinent with countless languages and traditions. This multicultural subcontinent, which was rather arbitrarily united by the British in 1947 through a national border, has chosen dance as one of its central, unifying cultural forms. There is a lot of dancing, at weddings and temple festivals, in Bollywood and at village festivals. Dance is omnipresent in many areas of society in India. It was therefore all the more surprising to see that no major Indian productions were represented in the festival program. Dance was live on stage. That says a lot, but more on that later.

Rasa

The root of Indian aesthetics lies in the concept of rasa, often translated as taste, but less in the sense of an artistic taste and more specifically in the sense of the senses of taste. The activation of the inner senses, which gives the sensory impressions a kind of quality. The outwardly directed senses see, touch or hear SOMETHING, focus on SOMETHING. The taste of sweet or sour is more of a quality of WHAT tastes sweet or sourit has the Feature to be sweet or sour. These qualities correspond to an inner sensual experience. This can be transmitted through the expressive power of theater, poetry, music and dance. In the Natya shastra there are the four basic principles of love/eroticism (Śṛngāram), heroism (Vīram), anger (Raudram) and disgust (Bībhatsam)). Someone loves, is a hero, is angry or disgusted. The whole thing becomes arbitrarily complex, the emotional characteristics differentiate themselves, colors and costumes are assigned to them and gods correspond to their powers, culminating in dance.

At this point, I just want to point out that at the core of this aesthetic, which is still the basis of traditional dance in India today, is the inner emotional state. This emotional state is embodied and manifests itself through the performers and evokes the same feeling in the viewer. This is the basis of aesthetic theory in India.

It goes against the tradition of European aesthetics since Plato, with its focus on representation. This retinal The idea that art takes place in the eye gave rise to central perspective, the camera and the cinematographer.

Moving pictures

So what happens when the camera's eye focuses on the dancers? How is a dancer's expression transferred to the screen? What new narrative forms are opened up by editing and montage? In his 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility", Walter Benjamin saw the loss of aura through new media such as radio and film as by no means only negative. Editing and montage freed 'performing' artists from the constraints of a theater space and made it possible to visualize what could otherwise only be evoked in the imagination. To me, this historical starting point seems promising when it comes to the question of a new genre of dance film. To a certain extent, the theater has been liberated by film; in the USA, for example, it has been almost completely replaced by movie theaters. Significantly, Broadway theaters, i.e. musicals, which retain dance as one of their central principles, bucked this trend. They are still popular today. The experience of dance theater as a live experience is highly valued in almost all cultures that have a stage culture. Even MTV's music videos have not been able to do much to change this.

What became visible in Manifest is not a new phenomenon. However, the focus of Manifest was deliberately directed towards the fusion of film art and theater. The decision to only allow films that consciously exploit the medium of film in its artistic expressiveness was strategically correct. In this way, something became concentrated and visible. Perhaps a new genre. It is something different from "Singing in the Rain" or Wim Wenders' documentary "Pina Bausch", nor is it Michel Jackson's MTV videos or Bollywood's "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge". You could say that the 40 films selected at the festival were short films that chose dance as their language. An international language without words, as Dziga Vertov called for, and a language that contrasts the core of moving images, namely the language of movement. While Bergson and Godard accuse the cinematographer of lying, and Deleuze identifies truth purely in the materialized form of thought in film, the dance film attempts the impossible, the squaring of the circle: the concentration of film on movement as language in 3-dimensional space. This restrictive focus is tantamount to a manifesto, just like the numerous art movements of the avant-garde.

Room and screen

The Incubator Lab's hybrid film experiments were exciting. Dance choreographies were realized in films and performed on stage. The main aim was to feel the difference as an audience. What is the same and what is different? What works and what doesn't? The productions were small-scale experiments that invited reflection.

The festival catalog is available here: https://auroapaar.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/MANIFEST-2023-CATALOG.pdf

It's worth a look, I really liked the movies on the following pages: 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 41, 42, 56

As far back as my memory goes, I remember that I always enjoyed listening to music. It is a matter of concentration, of enjoyment, of devotion, of self-dissolution. It was always a mystery to me what this power of music is, because it is very fleeting, ephemeral, it usually comes out of a loudspeaker. A technical device produces sound waves and the listener sinks into inner landscapes. What happens there? It is the Vibration. In the Kenaupani pity it became clear that the mixture of different vibrations constitutes consciousness.

I would like to try to differentiate this a little today. Starting from a meditative state, the question arises as to the qualitative constitution of this consciousness. In a state of high concentration, the sensory impressions from outside are reduced. It is not really possible to mute the outside world, but it is possible to concentrate in such a way that the sensory impressions are perceived as such in a first stage and are 'released' from consciousness in a second stage. It is not so much a phenomenological epoch in which the existence of the outside world is placed in an epistemic bracket, i.e. the question of its existence is kept open, but rather a withdrawal of attention. It is a dispassionate observation: Ah this impression is now present, or this thought comes, or that memory appears... Letting all these pass by as what they are is a first stage of meditation. In an inner vision, it then becomes clear how consciousness is constituted.

Inner rooms

A space filled with consciousness opens up. However, this does not react to sensory stimuli, but is pure and clear. This is where the forces of consciousness manifest: my body (matter), my breath (the life energy/prana), my mind (which analyses and visualizes), the experience of existence (rapture/ananda), pure consciousness (chit). In this consciousness, which is aware of its various levels, the self moves freely. Here the Self (Atman) meets the soul (Purusha) and realizes that consciousness itself, which encompasses everything (Brahman), is the Creator (Sat). This is where the forces of our world become visible as such: love, war, compassion, pleasure, beauty, suffering in all their forms. They are real in our consciousness and it makes little sense to deny them. We experience them, and we name them, and we communicate and share them, we live them out and realize them, they become very real forces in the world, working in them. All of this is undeniable. It is a little difficult to explain and that is why science often pretends that they are epiphenomenal, that they are merely insignificant side effects of physical processes. But this is not very wise, as it robs us of our own essence.

Music

I have expanded a little here because I think that this inner space has several antechambers, and art occupies many of these antechambers. In music, for example, I enter an inner space that is created by vibrations. I can move freely in it, because music helps me to let everything that is not music pass by. In this space, I can then go on inner journeys, which is why we always go into musical spaces when we are happy or sad. We relive past experiences and process them. These are fundamental psychological principles. But here too we can climb the ladder of consciousness. Our body and breath can be explored in dance, our mind can visualize the music, clarify its structure, bring its composition, execution, interpretation before the inner eye. But when I really concentrate and contemplate the music, as I now do best with Dhrupa of Bahauddin Dagar, then the music becomes pure sensuality (Rasa). And suddenly the question is no longer how a technical device can produce sound waves that can generate such a consciousness. This question belongs to the world of the rational mind. The music itself, the vibration with which my consciousness merges, opens up a different space, a space of simulation, contemplation, insight and light. Active listening to music is very close to deep meditation.

My aim is to give the experience its own space and not to grind it into reductionist contradictions. Music takes place in the antechambers of the meditative space. And this is almost identical for painting, sculpture, dance, architecture, literature and poetry etc... if I engage with their core qualities. It has its meaning here. The question of what music is has not been fully answered, but its function, its meaning, its effect is now a little clearer to me. It is no longer a mysterious secret, but a beautiful tool. It belongs to Saraswati.

Art, it now seems to me, is understood from here in India. And it is from here that Ananda Coomaraswamy's criticism of Western art is understood as 'retinal' clear.

Here in Auroville, a play was recently taken off the program by the hosts of the Bharat Nivas. The reason given was that some in the community had taken offense even before it was performed. This raises questions. What is art allowed to do, when is a ban justified? Linked to this is, of course, the question of what is the role of art, i.e. what should art do? The question invites us to think about the role of art in general, here in India and in the West. And because this very fundamental question extends not only across the Indo-European region, but also covers a whole range of different cultures, I would also like to give it a temporal dimension.

Let's start at the beginning, e.g. with the Classical Greeks. On the one hand, there is the question of beauty (form, function, and/or proportion), but on the other hand there is also the question of the role of art within philosophy (techne, mimisis, aisthesis). At its core, this constellation of concepts is about the relationship of the subject to the outside world as an object. How do people perceive the world, how and why do we imitate the world, e.g. in the theater or in sculptures? What techniques, what tools do we use to shape the world, to give it a function, or to work out beautiful, i.e. mathematical proportions? In other words, it is about the relationship between man and his environment in a formative relationship.

Art is created, brought forth, is the expression of a subject that shapes the world of objects. In Western art, we see the artist and his vision. Despite all the rapid developments in European art history, this has not fundamentally changed to this day.

'Indian' art is quite different. Classical Indian art expresses feelings that are universal. Feelings of spirituality, human emotions, forces at work in the world. The artist is secondary to the work of art, actually unimportant, because only what is expressed in the work of art counts, because it is a reflection of the forces at work in the cosmos. The artist has merely made them visible. And this is where the misunderstanding arises that the art of India is largely similar to the art of the European Middle Ages, as there was no artist there like in antiquity or the Renaissance. What is the difference?

Textuality and interpretation

There is an important difference. The Western eye, or ear, the Western mind, looks for what can be interpreted in the work of art. This can be an intrinsic quality such as beauty, or a technical mastery, an iconographic reference, the genius of the artist, an object that is part of a discourse, an object of reflection, or quite 'simply' an image, a representation or a depiction. The list could go on and on. Essentially, however, it is always a question of interpretation. If a work of art is the subject of a differentiated interpretation, then it is considered a successful, great work of art. If it is an object that triggers a response, it is suspected of being 'mere' design, handicraft or kitsch.

In this way, the West has produced a cultural landscape based on interpretation. And interpretation is ultimately a critical analysis in the medium of language, i.e. it is textual. The encounter with art is one of reflection on art. Contemplation, which is also a recurring theme in Western discourses on art theory, is a preliminary stage of this reflection. Contemplation is reflected upon and expressed afterwards and thus robbed of its power.

The sublime

The aesthetic experience that eludes these discursive tendencies enters the realm of the sublime, the sublime, a realm of secular transcendence, i.e. the limits of language. For the limit of the textual is also part of the discourse, only as a demarcation and reference to the unspeakable. However, Western art theory usually leaves it at this reference. To continue talking about what cannot be said would be paradoxical. And so the viewer in the West goes to art temples, museums and galleries, churches and archaeological sites, urban places or nature in order to interpret what is presented there, or to fall silent before the unspeakable.

In traditions based on monotheistic religions, art therefore takes on the role of narrative, i.e. the story of the religion is told. The spiritual power of art is subject to an increasing process of abstraction. Art is becoming increasingly secular, materialistic, capitalistic, whereas religion is becoming increasingly strikingly transcendent. Religion refers to an afterlife where personal life finds a continuation. Of course, this hereafter cannot be experienced, cannot be expressed, but at the same time it is conceived as a reflection of our reality, albeit idealized.

There are therefore different forms of representations of reality. And so art is robbed of its power of wonder. It becomes a 'narrative culture', a culture of representation and the subject of various cultural techniques; it becomes part of the logos. Yet there is a clear desire to approach the unspeakable, the sublime. For this unspeakable does not elude experience, it just cannot be grasped by the rational mind. The problem lies in the fact that the rational mind follows the logic of a systematization of the world through the Logos. In the West, the idea prevails that the Logos can explain the world and that other ways of accessing the world are inferior to this Logos and must first be systematized by it: this applies, for example, to intuition, feeling, consciousness, the experience of the self and the experience of that which transcends the self. These phenomena are understood as unenlightened in Western culture. And so a desire for the sublime arises, which is demonized as unenlightened. Culture suppresses. For Freud, culture is sublimated sexuality. There is something in the description for the West.

Brahman

In Indian art, it seems to be the other way around. Indian art produces something that eludes language. Tradition speaks of rasa¹a vibration in perception that is often translated as taste, but not in the sense of a good taste in art, but in the sense of a quality that is evoked by a work of art. This vibration in the artwork creates a vibration in the viewer and connects the inner self of the viewer with the quality evoked in the artwork, which in turn is testimony to a force behind the superficial reality.

In Indian philosophy, the basic idea prevails that Brahman, the supreme being that encompasses everything, wants to experience itself. It is only for this reason that Brahman emerges from perfect existence and unfolds in the physical world. The cycle of the world, the world soul, the individual consciousness, the universal forces, all this is Brahman experiencing itself. Brahman is therefore inconceivable for us, we are part of Brahman, Brahman is within us, everything is Brahman. The role of art here is to represent some of these forces. Art makes the viewer wonder. A quality that is expressed in the work of art is captured as rasa. It cannot be expressed directly in language. The statue of a god is an expression of a quality, a force in the cosmos that has become tangible (tangible, palpable). The fact that the viewer and the artist evoke a rasa through the work of art means that this perception, the consciousness, the experience, the vibration of consciousness there is.

Existence

What does Dasein mean here? Existence should not be understood here in a dualistic sense, as if a quality in a work of art is perceived by a viewer and this quality is present in the work of art. Rather, existence here means that a force of the cosmos, a part of Brahman, has unfolded and become visible. Visible not in the sense that a viewer sees something in a work of art, but that a force shows itself in a work of art and evokes a rasa in the viewer that allows him to participate in the force. This is why the statues of the gods in India are animated. The gods are in them. When the powers are appeased through worship - puja - then they are there. Devotion to the universal principle is bhakti, it also defines an attitude in the relationship between the ritual object and the worshippers. The observer does not interpret or judge an external object, but the soul surrenders to the gods. This surrender is facilitated by a medium, a work of art.

In India, art is still part of the cosmic cycle, part of Brahman, it is animated, just as the whole cosmos is animated. Temples, statues, poems, dance, music are part of the cosmos, part of the cosmic forces, they are part of Brahman, and they enable the viewer to see aspects of Brahman more clearly, more vividly, more alive. Art means being able to wonder, to taste what is otherwise difficult to find - Rasa². Brahman is present in Indian art. The existence of art is the presence of cosmic forces, gods as they say here.

Back to the initial question: What is art allowed to do?

I now ask myself what these considerations mean for the freedom of expression in art? In the Western tradition, it is self-evident that the discursive nature of art not only allows for a culture of debate, but also generates and cultivates it. Criticism, disagreement, satire and censorship are part of the cultural industry, and exploring the boundaries is part of the practice. But what is the role of satire in Indian art, for example? What aspect of Brahman is realized here? Can't everything be shown? Even the gods laugh and cry, are angry or heroic.

I have a question here: in the West, art is often part of political culture. Politics is brought onto the stage and art intervenes in society and politics. In the 20th century, art was called upon to take its responsibility in society more seriously and to participate in political discourse. But does this also apply to art in India, a subcontinent torn by colonialism? India, with its many languages, cultures and religions, is such a colorful, tolerant country that feeds on a connection to spirituality in whatever form. To date, the world's largest democracy has largely granted freedom of expression. But when I talk to cultural representatives here, many point to the tradition of the role of art in promoting spiritual growth. Here in the country, I rarely hear that art has a political mission.

At the same time, however, many critical voices were heard at the Kochi Biennale, for example. Much of the art there took a very clear political stance on current issues such as the climate crisis, equal rights, the persecution of minorities, exploitation and corruption. I was very familiar with the artistic language of these positions, which was based on Western forms of expression.

These two worlds collide in India. The triumph of capitalism and its secular, i.e. materialistic structure does not stop at India. It remains to be seen whether the instruments of this culture industry will help to save the victims of this very culture industry. Traditionalists are trying to protect themselves from these colonial structures by rejecting modernity. This is perceived in the West as backward and conservative.

The culture war is also in full swing here in Auroville. If there is currently talk of a new global order in 2023, it is also about this culture war.

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If everything began with the Big Bang, why is the world so complex, why mathematics, physics, biology, philosophy? Why does the universe contain all these laws, ideas, forces, movements? Why not just bloop, a beep, a gray goo? How many universes were there before this one came into being? How many will there be in which the universe will become conscious at higher levels?

Isn't it a strange idea that out of nothing, through an infinite force, a universe emerges that is so complex, so beautiful, so full of conscious beings? And that these beings have an incredible range of emotions, experiences and ideas, which they write down and keep in their memories. All this just to convince ourselves that all this only exists because matter is accompanied by an illusion of consciousness that we are trying with all our might to rationalize away?

And when we realize that this is quite unlikely and remember ancient scriptures... How can it be that the monotheistic religions speak of us - humans - being the image of the Creator? Why are these ideas so small, so limited? Is it really inconceivable that we are not the crown of creation? Is it not rather quite probable and certain that this is not the case? When I look out of the window into the world, it is quite clear that our actions are truly not perfect.

Isha Upanishad

The Isha Upanishad begins with:

As I follow the wisdom of the Upanishads and the power of the Rigveda, many things become clearer and clearer to me. The spiritual power of the ancient scriptures in India lies in their unfiltered access to experience and intuition.

The systems of thought that I have come to know in the Western tradition basically always try to find a starting point:

• Philosophy always searches for the beginning. However, it usually does so through the mind. This leads to the question of axiomatics and ontology, i.e. the question of basic assumptions and irreducible forms of being.
• Other, more religious and mystical attempts look for an anchor in the transcendental, metaphysical or supernatural. Ultimately, in an authority that can be experienced.
• Science, with its materialistic approach to the world, looks for patterns and tries to generalize them in order to verify or falsify the theories derived from them.

What I am getting to know here in India is the essence of mediation. Spirituality starts from an inward view. This inward view is pure and unclouded. It is like clarified butterfat - ghee.

Meditation on the self

In the Meditation the body is in a resting position and the mind allows the stimuli of the outside world to fade away. Concentration on the breath is often used as an aid at the beginning of mediation. Counting your own breaths directs your awareness to your own body, to the life force of the breath, to the relationship between the outside world and the inner world. Once the mind and body have come to rest in this way, the actual meditation begins. The senses, which are now largely freed from the stimulus-reaction scheme, are open. And this is precisely where the Upanishads come in.

The next step is not about experiencing the transcendental, the mystical, some other kind of reality, as so many meditators think. The Upanishads are about bringing the senses into a pure form. Seeing becomes seeing, hearing becomes hearing, thinking becomes thinking etc... No more and no less. Those who succeed in remaining at this level of consciousness perceive the basic structure of consciousness. It becomes clear that the sensory impressions, stimulated by the external sensory organs, appear within consciousness, but transformed. In philosophy, many thinkers now jump far too quickly to the conclusion that we are dealing here with mental representations. However, a lot still has to happen before we arrive at mental images.

The Kena Upanishad asks: Who sees when seeing, who hears when hearing, who thinks when thinking etc.... This is the question of all questions. The answer is clear and pure - Simplicity is complexity resolved - the absolute self. What does that mean?

When my consciousness concentrates on one of the senses in meditation, it becomes - detached from its object of perception and equally detached from the subject of perception - a pure content of consciousness, a form that springs from a vibration. Vibration is the concept of the Upanishads; for the scientific mind we could speak of consciousness contents that accompany neuronal currents. This vibration, which is triggered by the sense organs, constitutes consciousness. Even reductionist materialists would still agree here. It is what Hegel calls sensual certainty.

But who is it that has this sensual certainty? It is not the subject that synthesizes the mental images, the representations, but it is a mixture of vibrations. Consciousness does not exist in isolation. Consciousness is a mixture of different contents of consciousness. The vibration of the senses mixes with our breath and heartbeat, with nature. In short: consciousness is bound to the life force (prakriti), to a soul (purusha) and identity (atman).

Atman and Brahman

During meditation, the blending of the senses is easy to observe. The clear consciousness becomes aware of this harmony and enjoys it. It is here that ecstasy and bliss are experienced. And here, at least for me, the self awakens in a deeper sense. For here consciousness is detached from the stimulus-response scheme. The synthesized consciousness (Atman) develops its own power of action, it becomes an agent, i.e. free. And in this very consciousness of the free self (which is a much stronger concept than the rather technical self-consciousness with its self-referential structure), the self recognizes its unity with the absolute self. Free consciousness recognizes itself as part of consciousness in general. Atman is Brahman and Brahman is Atman.

Pictures of the Rigveda

From here, images of Rigveda also become clear to me. The sacred cows that appear as rays of the sun and in other strange constellations, the horses that are harnessed and come from the cities or drive the gods, the fire that is omnipresent in various forms, sometimes smoking, sometimes clear.

Sometimes, after a meditation, I would transport myself to a prehistoric time, a time with few tools, without writing, under the starry sky, where horses grazed in the meadow and milk was boiled over the fire and churned butter was clarified. The mystery of life and consciousness, the experience of being part of the cosmos, sitting around the campfire, or lighting the oil lamps with clarified butter for the gods, is a deep spiritual experience that can still be felt to some extent in the temples and at the festivals in India.

The clarified butter of the majestic, free-range cows that gives strength and light, the breath of the puffing horses at dawn, the fire that warms and is reflected in the sun and the moon. These are very concrete experiences that are central to spiritual mediation. The rishis start from what is in front of them, and they reflect inwards and describe the mystery of our existence here and now. It is not a spirituality based on authority or a priori categories. This spirituality is developed from the most general world of experience, it explains who and what we are. It merely gives names to things and forces and describes them.

The gods are nothing other than the forces we see: the growth of trees in nature, the struggle and love of living beings, the forces of our subconscious, the ideals of our spirit. They are part of every culture, they are everywhere, they are real. In Hinduism, they are named forces and worshipped as gods. What is wrong with that?

We live in this world, this is where we are, and this is where our spirituality is. It is not in the hereafter, nor is it here.

I remember always staring into the fire since I was a child. Many people do that, I think. There is something fascinating about fire. In the Vedas, Agni is the god of fire, one of the five elements alongside water, air, earth and ether. The Greeks also have these elements. I didn't understand this for a long time and found it 'unscientific'. I thought of the elements in terms of physics and chemistry, and that only makes limited sense.

Mythology

Within mythology and spiritual knowledge, however, this is actually perfectly plausible. In the Upanishads, different levels of consciousness are distinguished. The general, eternal consciousness, i.e. consciousness in itself, formless, all-encompassing, indeterminate - the Brahman. Then there are the individual forces, energy, will, love, knowledge etc.. These are conceived as forms of being, as gods, as a heaven of gods. Atman, the individual self, emerges from them. It dwells within us.

That sounds very strange, old, glorified, unscientific... but it is actually phenomenal, undeniable. We have a will, we love and hate, we know and let ourselves be deceived.... We cannot explain this scientifically. We try to do so using functional models (e.g. Darwinism) or reductionist models (neuroscience) or systematic observation (social sciences). However, these models ultimately attempt to reduce what defines us to a material, systemic or structural level. Our assumption is that once we have explained it away, we have solved the 'problem'. What kind of strange idea is that?

But there is actually no dispute about the existence of these phenomena. Only instead of visualizing them as computer models, the Rishi, the seers of the Vedas, gave them the names of gods. They saw their existence and accepted and named them.

Visualization

So perhaps we should stay with the pictures of the Rishi for a moment.

Pure existence expresses itself in order to recognize itself - through an act of creation. In science, we call this the Big Bang. In cosmology, we are making good progress in describing the formation of matter, galaxies, planets, etc., and there is certainly a lot more to come. The computer animations are inspiring, the space images based on complicated algorithms are breathtaking. The narratives about quarks and electrons, gravitational forces, strings, space-time and the curvature of time are fascinating and actually incomprehensible to non-physicists. We accept the interim results of scientific discussions as truths that are popularized on YouTube channels. Einstein, Hawking and others are our Rishi. The experts have understood something that we cannot comprehend or verify. Only the peers, the scientific colleagues or the Rishi community can really judge whether this is nonsense or real knowledge.

4000 years ago, images were gods. However, these mental images of deities are much closer to our experience than the abstract technical images. They describe our living world more precisely, their insight is deeper because it draws on experience. The Vedas accept consciousness. They understand that consciousness in isolation makes no sense in a human existence. This is the core problem in the monotheistic traditions. How can the immortality of the soul be explained?

In the Vedas, every consciousness is part of one. It's actually not that complicated, just incredibly difficult to understand, because it presupposes that we don't take ourselves so seriously, that we see ourselves as part of a whole and act as such. Immortality lies in the insight of not seeing ourselves as the center. The path to this is meditation.

Experience

For me, it is important to stay at the level of experience. That doesn't limit science, on the contrary, it gives it new material. I was interested in fire, energy, the sun and the power that moves everything. The energy that destroys and at the same time transforms and moves everything. An energy that is fed by sacrifice, because wood, for example, burns in a fire, generates energy and leaves ashes behind. The ashes are smeared on the forehead in temples in India, over the third eye, the seat of knowledge.

When I sit in front of a fire, I see this energy, I feel it in my face, on my forehead. A wood fire is so bright that it doesn't blind me, but it casts a spell over me. It is danger and a sign, energy, power and destruction. I see in fire the elemental force of the universe, the image of the sun, the symbol of purity and clarity.

Om Namah Shivaya

I recently listened to a podcast on the subject of dreams and was once again very surprised. The head of the sleep laboratory in Mannheim says that anyone can train themselves to remember dreams. At least I can, so that's true. But what really surprises me is the reduction of dreams to the subconscious. Dreams would only use stronger images to draw our attention to working on something that we neglect in our waking consciousness. It's a pity and sad, and at the same time indicative of how pathetic this idea is.

I'm thinking about this again today because I was reading the Upanishads again. The short Mandukya Upanishad speaks of four states of consciousness: Vaishvanara (the outward-turned senses), Taijasa (the inward-turned senses in the sense of contemplation or daydream or dream) Prajna (deep sleep i.e. unconscious oneness) and Turiya (the superconscious state, infinite peace, boundless love). I was so impressed that I initially had to sleep the whole day.

Sleeping

I've often told the people I've spent loving nights with that sleeping is consciousness research for me. I don't think anyone really took me seriously. And I didn't take myself as seriously as I should have either. I always had to think of Marcel Proust's 'Search for Lost Time'. The first chapter in Swann's world describes waking up and consciously staying in this in-between world of waking up. This world is a very special place for Proust, and it has stayed with me ever since. I didn't read more than the first 4-5 pages, because it seemed to me that everything had been said. I then devoted the second half of my studies to the philosophy of consciousness. I only understood a lot of things when I was asleep.

In the Upanishads, sleep is a meaningful access to the world, to the self of the world, in which we are not separate. Immortality is the state of deep meditation. Mastering dreams brings us closer to the Self, to Brahman. At the same time, I am now reading Satprem, I find him a bit suspect, but his description of what happens in the different stages of meditation and forms of consciousness speaks to me from the heart. For Satprem and Sri Aurobindo, the core of meditation is to quiet the mind. Only when it is calm and no longer resists Brahman is it possible to allow the organizing power of consciousness. Thinking only interferes with this. This also happens in sleep and in dreams.

I see this as a counter-design to the sleep laboratories that try to instrumentalize dreams for the value creation efficiency machine. Instead, the dream gives us access to a consciousness that far exceeds our small sense of duty.

Sleep is wonderful, it unites us with the self. It is a high form of cognition.

Happy Diwali

Diwali