Se have been reading in India for three weeks now: Deleuze, Upanishads, Sri Aurobindo. Sometimes I meditate in between. The rest is still a remnant of everyday life from the New World. Reading the news, consuming entertainment media, organizing things that don't really have any meaning here but need continuity so that they don't break in old Europe and the New [...].
Hoday I was in a choir lesson. What happened there was a very intense shared experience. I'll try to describe it as objectively as possible. We (around 60 participants) started with breathing exercises, 'warmed up' our vocal chords, sang four-part chords and scaled the pitch. The choirmaster pointed out to us that we were not here by chance [...]
II recently met a young Indian here. He comes from Delhi and for him, South India is also a foreign world, although not as foreign as it is for me. He doesn't speak Tamil and his spirituality is also a bit more serene or enlightened, as you might say. I met him again on the street [...]
Hoday was my first time at Matrimandir. I had a guided tour 6 years ago, which is a prerequisite for going there alone later. It's also useful to have a rough idea of what kind of place it is, how to behave there, what would disturb others. During my Monday meditations in the Zen circle in Bremen [...]
Schopenhauer, who was a great admirer of the Upanishads, wrote a small book "Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde" (1847). He identifies 4 forms of causality, e.g. small cause - large effect, or large cause - small effect etc... I was fascinated by this because it offers a broader understanding than the purely [...]
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 own forms of meditation without calling them that or without having learned them. For me, mediation includes: a.) contemplation, i.e. sinking into a thought [...]
Iany films feature good hotels that are centrally located and where the political, intellectual and economic elite meet. I have always perceived this as something very elitist, colonial and power-hungry. What I missed in the films, and was probably rarely a topic there, is the networking that takes place in such places. [...]