First encounters with ragas

Ahen I was a teenager, I listened to ragas for hours. I didn't know anything about them. I looked them up a little: Microtonality, meditation, tone sequence. That was all I understood. But it was the most profound musical experience - a meditation on music. To this day, ragas lead me into my inner self or into deep states of insight, but they are not rational. Rather, it is a way of being in the world.

Music as a shared space and pure energy

Listening to music draws us all into the realms of emotional landscapes, daydreaming, aesthetic experience. It is emotional, abstract, temporal; it allows the other senses to fade in or out, to recall memories or forget something. We can dream up a future, yearn or express emotions - let them out.

When we make music together, practise, dance, listen together or even just recommend music, we enter a shared space. This space is a different dimension. It has no material reference as the other senses have (e.g. in the performing arts or in cooking). Music corresponds to the ether, to space itself. Vibration requires a physical carrier, but is itself pure energy.

Music, consciousness and the fourth reality

When my senses mix - smell, touch, sound, taste and sight - the messengers of my nervous system unite somewhere inside me, perhaps in my head or my heart, and form a basis for consciousness there. This ocean of consciousness, which is fed by the senses, can access a reality through them: This is what we call the waking state.

In the dream state, we access another reality, a reality made up of memories, feelings and fantasies. Or we go into deep sleep, where the senses do not reach consciousness. However, since I continue to exist, as I experience every morning, my self was apparently somewhere else entirely. It was probably where the material world as we understand it is irrelevant. We were in the dark ocean of pure existence.

In the Māṇḍūkya Upanishad, however, a fourth state is mentioned - the state that can perhaps be described as "enlightened". In this state, we are awake but not bound to our senses. We do not perceive, but we also do not dream, we do not sleep and yet we grasp a higher reality. We know about the world in a deeper sense. I see my inner self and the world as such, I understand that my everyday consciousness is functional but limited. I become aware of my ignorance. I know that I know nothing. I am one with the world, even though I seem to be outside of it. One could speculate here about the ideas of the transcendental, advaita or immanence. But I prefer not to do that, as it gets lost in intellectual gimmicks.

Music, and for me personally ragas, have something of this fourth reality. I expressly do not want to say here that listening to music is like an enlightened state, and yet I am suggesting this parallel. I am not asleep and I am not aware, I am not dreaming and I am wide awake. I feel myself in a world that is often more intense than reality. Sometimes I escape into it. But when I listen with great concentration, when I become one with the music, then something shines within me - with a purity and clarity that I otherwise only know from meditation.

In music, we identify with something. Music is a carrier of something that I can become. In meditation, I can also become something; if it goes well, I become one.

Der Beitrag Musik – Nāda-Brahman erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

When the rational mind wanders through the worlds of knowledge, rummages through the library or searches for the causal laws of the universe, it is a meticulous task of building up systems of knowledge. These systems initially have little in common with the world of experience or even the inner world. It is only through contemplation that the mind pauses and considers the systematized, abstract representation as a picture of the world, as a world view. It is intuition that anchors this image in a deeper reality. When can we say that we really understand something, beyond the rational? When is the point reached where something makes sense?

The creation of meaning takes place through contemplation and the anchoring of knowledge through intuition in the deep reality of our consciousness. The butterfly, whose flight paths we can describe and which we can assign to a species, whose habitat we can examine, its mating behavior and its search for food, all this we can explore through rational knowledge. But the contemplation of beauty, the elegance of dreamy flight, the gentle landing on a flower - all this lends itself to contemplative observation. And when we then ask about the deeper meaning of this reality, about the meaning of life itself, it is intuition that helps us to build this bridge.

Intuition, which Henri Bergson once again placed at the center of philosophy, is also a key to meditation. The vision of intuition, which does not follow the strict rules of science and easily penetrates the core of our being, allows a world view to make sense.

The beauty of intuition is that it is quite unbound in relation to the external world. It is free and not afraid to engage in thoughts that are not rational. This is why it is condemned by the enlightened, who misunderstand it and fear that it will lead to wild speculation. When driven by fanaticism, it becomes destructive and allows itself to be blinded by power.

Der Beitrag Kontemplation und Intuition erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

What would the world look like without the focal point of a lens? Our eyes have a lens that concentrates the light and focuses it on a plane so that the retina can record this focused image - as an image in a plane. The light rays are captured by receptors and transmitted to the brain. This vibration of the nerve cells is transcribed into another vibration, that of consciousness. This principle was copied in the camera obscura and the cinematograph and forms the basis of classical photography and film or video recordings.

So what would a world look like that is perceived by a consciousness that has no lens interposed in visual perception? The room would be flooded with light, colors would be visible, but there would be no spatial depth, no objects. How would a consciousness orient itself in it?

Senses

A newborn baby's eyes are still closed for the first few days. First of all, it has to become aware of its own body, gross and fine motor skills, hunger, pain, tiredness. All this comes first. The senses of sight, touch and hearing come later. The boundaries between one's own body and the outside world must be explored. Is the object in your hand part of your own body or not? How does the feeling of hunger relate to the milk bottle? All these perceptions are possible without visual representation. Object recognition is largely based on motor skills, taste and touch. In other words, very direct.

The perception of what is not in direct physical contact comes later via smell, sight and hearing. That which is far away must somehow present itself to me. The contact is physical, light waves, sound waves, odors. They arrive at the sensory organs at different speeds and leave an impression there, they inscribe themselves in the senses, a resonance, a rhythm, a fusion or intermission takes place. In the case of smell and hearing, the senses are directly exposed to the vibrations. Although the sense of hearing, the sense of smell and the sense of taste are quite complex, as the perceived vibrations have to be processed by the brain, none of these organs are as complicated as the eye.

Are the problems of Western philosophy retinal?

The eye therefore creates an image. This is the root of representation. Which of these representations are physical reality, the living world, art? It seems to me that most questions in philosophy arise from this retinal process. The question of representation is therefore at the center of Western aesthetics. Attempts to understand representation as the basis of aesthetic and epistemological philosophy lead down all kinds of wrong paths. They lead to a philosophy that understands the world as objects that are presented to us. This has consequences not only for art, but also for economics, politics, society, science...

In Indian aesthetics, it is rasa, a completely different approach. It is about a state of consciousness that is facilitated by sensory stimuli. The aim of art is to enter and remain in this state. Art opens a gateway to higher consciousness - Satchitananda. The origin lies in the Vedas. Rasa is the taste, rasa is not retinal. Rasa is the essence.

Literature:

Der Beitrag Fokuspunkt erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

II have always resisted the word mediation. I was suspicious of many things about it. At the same time, however, I have always practiced my forms of meditation without calling them that or without having learned them.

For me, mediation includes: a.) contemplation, i.e. immersing oneself in a thought and specifically tracing thought impulses on a topic, circling around until the mental image becomes clearer and appears before the inner eye. b.) paying attention to one's own breath. This makes you aware of your own body. This means that by consciously breathing in and out, the body also straightens up, the spine is relieved and one's own physical existence becomes conscious. With this awareness of existence, new levels of consciousness can then be opened up. c.) In transcendental meditation, the self connects with the general consciousness and can now take on almost any form. The concept of becoming is exciting in this context. The self can now merge completely into another. For example, the self can open up or it can mentally transfer itself to another space or time. The thoughts are free. These are forms of meditation that I usually practise for half an hour.

During longer meditations in the lotus position of up to 1.5 hours, completely different things happen. This also has something to do with the pain that the sitting posture brings with it. I sit through the pain, so to speak. This leads to a kind of trance. This borderline experience transcends the separation of self and world, in it I find a reality where everything is in harmony.

India

In India, I feel like I can write this down without sounding like a dreamer. It feels natural to do this and also to talk about it. Perhaps my longing for India also has something to do with this. I have the feeling that I can give my consciousness space here without having to justify myself. These experiences are simply allowed to be and do not have to prove themselves against the reductionist constraints of a materialistic philosophy. Rather, being here allows me to explore consciousness in the first place and, from these experiences, to understand the constraints of the Trinity, capital and neurobiology as such.

I am not a machine and I don't want to be seen as one.

A beautiful description of what meditation can be can be found in the Shvetashvatara Upanishads Chapter 2. in: "The Upanishads. Introduced and translated by Eknath Easwaran" ISBN-10: 3-442-21826-8 p.294f.

Der Beitrag Meditation erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Our brain is not the seat of our mind, but the medium with which we can reach the spiritual. When I heard this for the first time many years ago at a conference on media theory, I was amazed. Were they really serious? Is it crazy or brilliant? There is this wonderful old-fashioned word 'subtle'. Our body is a medium with which we can achieve this.

What our media theories generally have in common is that they are conceived in technical terms. There is a technical medium that is used to share information between different participants. Claude Shannon was the first to define media theory in this way. Now there is much discussion about what a medium is, what information is, who sends it, why and to whom, with what intention? Media are material, technical objects that can store information. Of course, information can also be read, which is the only way it makes sense to us. This is the only way media become part of society.

What actually is information?

I have been looking for a useful definition of information for years. What is it supposed to be? A structure, a process, an energy? Is it abstract, like mathematics? The number 2 doesn't exist in the real world either, just two apples, for example. Abstract theories describe reality with the help of concepts that do not exist in so-called reality. That makes me suspicious. And it makes me even more perplexed that most people are not perplexed by this. This is science and technology, and it works. Without a doubt, but how?

What if we put this technical concept of media to one side and look at moist media instead? Bodies, plants, animals, (viruses and fungi) are wet media. Their DNA stores information, just like the technical media, but we would probably say that the individual living beings cannot be reduced to their DNA. They are more than that. This stored information must first blossom, so to speak, before the wet media are activated. Only when this technical information is alive can it interact with the world and perceive it. And yes, we are currently trying to recreate this very principle with artificial intelligence and autonomous interactive systems.

Moist media

Many wet media have consciousness and therefore access to a part of reality, only they are really able to perceive reality. In contrast, technical systems process information in a simulation which, if it is good, corresponds to reality. Wet media therefore understand communication not merely as information processing, but as genuine interaction; they are part of reality. Through access to consciousness, to the subtle (?), moist mediums can recognize the cohesion of the universe. The interaction of all elements with each other can be thought of here. Moist mediums can see themselves as part of reality because they have a bridging function between the material and the subtle, between matter and spirit. They are not a simulation, they are not hyperreal. They are real.

Wet media are far ahead of technical media. Many have awareness, a sense of context, they are anticipatory, emotional, holistic, improvise, are creative and playful. Wet media train their bodies, repair themselves, are adaptive. But above all, they are communicative, collective, social. At the moment, they are still so much more complex than technical media.

The future is wet.

Der Beitrag Feuchte Medien erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

In Plato's allegory of the cave, people sit in front of a wall on which the shadows of real objects in the world can be seen. As they have only seen the shadows in their entire lives, they think that these are reality. The philosopher's task is to explain to people that they should turn around to see how the apparatus of light, which serves as a projection mechanism, creates an illusion. Once people realized this, they would free themselves from the chains that kept them trapped in the cave and determined their line of sight. They would leave the cave and enter the real world. Plato thought that we are all trapped in this cave and that only very few manage to leave it.

The questions

This image is so complex that it has been thought-provoking for almost 2500 years. We cannot seriously refute this image, nor can we easily leave the metaphorical cave. We are virtually trapped in this image. I have used and analyzed this image in my seminars for many years. The analogy to the cinema is particularly striking and invites us to interpret the flame as a media projection apparatus. From here, it is easy to think about our media. What function do they have, what do they do to us? Do they liberate us, or do they keep us stuck in a consumerist mindset? What are the conditions of the apparatus that creates these illusions? What might the world outside the cave look like? If all the objects around us are only shadows of reality, in what dimension does reality lie? What is it made of? If everything we perceive is only the shadows, does this also apply to our theories, our science and art?

The answers

In what kind of 'view of being' can we grasp reality? The millennia have produced various answers: skepticism (we cannot know anything), idealism (reality is ultimately rational and only in our thoughts), phenomenology (the only thing we can really describe is our consciousness), structuralism (the relation of things to each other, i.e. the structure of the world, is the only thing we can know). Alongside this tendentially materialistic tradition of thought, we have Leibniz's monads (I am my world and other worlds are also self-contained, but they can mirror each other), Spinoza (the world is pure immanence, everything is from one reality and this is anchored in God). And of course the Christian tradition (a creator made all this, his ways are unfathomable).

What do we learn from this?

Of course I don't know either, but from the perspective of spirituality the question may be different. Perhaps we are actually trapped in Plato's image, and perhaps the image itself is not correct? Reality and illusion, true and false - perhaps these are categories of our thinking that represent a mere transitory stage. Perhaps our consciousness is not yet ready for the real question. Isn't it unlikely that the mind, let's say in the 21st century, has reached its evolutionary peak, even on a cosmic level? It seems unlikely to me. It is more likely that thinking is evolving, our consciousness is expanding, our perception and its apparative amplification are becoming more refined. Any philosopher who thinks he or she can free humanity from its chains should first and foremost free themselves from their own hubris. To me, that seems arrogant and presumptuous, know-it-all and contemptuous.

But perhaps Plato's allegory of the cave is just a tool, a key to make us think. If this is the task of the philosopher, then Plato has solved it masterfully.

Der Beitrag Platons Höhle erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Today I dreamt that I was cutting myself off. I changed something in my life because I could no longer go along with it. My dream provided me with an image that I could easily understand. Dreams have always preoccupied me. I dream a lot, colorful, whole stories, I work through situations, dream of things that I would like to do, but which are impossible in so-called reality.

I was at a conference a few years ago. There was a dream trauma researcher there who invited us to come together in the morning and explore collective dreaming. We associated images in order to penetrate a collective subconscious. It was rather playful, without any scientific pretensions. But it made us all think. Is there another reality that we can reach in this way? I find the idea exciting. More interesting than Freud's macho reduction of dreams to ancient images of sexuality. I always had a problem with Freud, that women were hysterical, that culture sublimated sexuality, that we all suffered from an Oedipus complex and so on. That's pretentious, indoctrinating, know-it-all, patriarchal, etc... Of course, that's very abbreviated now. C. G. Jung had more to say: the collective unconscious, a common visual language of human consciousness, an ocean of shared experience and wisdom. With Freud, everything seems to boil down to the fact that a therapist heals his patients because he knows the problems and puts them right in his patients. A bit like a mechanic fixing a car. The mechanic knows the bodywork and can fix the car if something has gone wrong or something has broken.

Why is it so difficult for us to imagine that there is a consciousness in which we merely participate? A consciousness that is capable of becoming aware of itself, but is not reduced to it?

Der Beitrag Träume erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.