Dhe secret of the Kolams

In the morning, before sunrise, when most of the animals are still asleep and the rooster has not yet crowed and when the men go to the temples, the women draw kolams on the street in front of the house. In Tamil Nadu, kolams have been drawn for centuries, if not millennia. This form of meditation, art, prayer, honoring the gods and blessing is usually practiced by women.

In the tradition, many families have had their own kolams for generations, as there are an infinite number. Some are 'classics' and are drawn in front of the house, on the street or in the temple on holidays, for example. Others are very individual and serve as a morning routine. A kolam is drawn at every festival in the south of India. The large kolams are difficult and take years of practice.

I have often seen the women in the villages of Kolam drawing early in the morning before sunrise. They sweep the street and prepare the ground. They use rice flour, which is sprinkled on the ground with their hands. This rice flour is a gift and is eaten by the insects, the kolams in front of the house are crossed and traversed during the day, and at the end of the day they are gone again. So that a new one can be drawn the next morning.

The basic principle of most kolams is the connection of points in a regular grid in such a way that the lines or curves do not cross without a certain symmetry, i.e. points are usually not simply connected crosswise. Many say that it is a language. The patterns are complex and include elements of symmetry, nets, algorithms, iterations, etc.

Kolams are complex

There are a whole series of levels on which Kolams work:

Drawing kolams is a movement of the whole body and has elements of dance, meditation and contemplation. The posture, the scattering of rice flour, the coordination of arm, leg, breathing, eye, fingers, spine and balance requires whole-body coordination. It is a practice that requires practice and is part of a long tradition. The complexity of the kolams, the quality of execution and the regularity are perceived in a community and suggest conclusions about the performer.

Individual geometric patterns are assigned to gods, legends, seasons, crops, stars etc.... The combination of different patterns in a kolam therefore contains a statement, they store knowledge that is passed on over generations, i.e. centuries and millennia. In the sense of a semiotic analysis, kolams can therefore be decoded.

The geometry of kolams can become extremely complex, overlapping with yantras, mandalas and tantras. However, kolams are often seen as purely decorative, ritualistic and traditional. Yantras, mandalas and tantras, on the other hand, are presented as part of the highest spiritual practice. In recent decades, much research has been done to appreciate the complexity of kolams and to correct this misconception.

So some speak of the language of the Kolams. Grace, an Aurovillian who grew up in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, recently said that she speaks Kolams better than Tamil. She sees wisdom, history, spirituality, body control, science, social function etc. in the Kolams.

Kolams are complex signs that provide access to a world. The world that they open up is captured holistically. The structure of this language encompasses an infinite number of symbols, it has its own grammar and syntax within each individual kolam, its rules are mathematical and its expression aesthetic. This language is anything but trivial, it has been forgotten and has been analyzed for several decades.

Computer animation

These Kolams make me think of John Whitney's catalog from 1961. Whitney was in IBM's research laboratory and had access to the best analog computers. He used this access to explore the artistic and aesthetic potential of computers. His Documentation from 1968 is still impressive today. He sees the computer as a tool for exploring the language of art, based on graphic patterns that rotate and shift like a kaleidoscope. Much of it looks like kolams.

And so the circle closes. In the middle of the 20th century, progress is looking ahead, materialistically influenced scientists are chasing a dream of explaining the universe with numbers. And in India, mathematical colams have been drawn on the streets for thousands of years in an attempt to establish a connection to creation. Both are about mathematical images, one coming from the gods, the other from the rational mind. In India, we know that the rational mind is limited and does not understand the essentials. The images here, for example in the Kolams, allow a cosmic foresight and circumspection that embraces the idea of progress in the West.

—

Der Beitrag Das Geheimnis der Kolams: Meditation, Kunst und Tradition in Tamil Nadu erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Gesterday I went to sleep expecting to get up early and meditate. I set the alarm for 6 o'clock. In the evening, a French yoga teacher and mountain guide tells me about the early morning hours in India, that they are the best for meditation - that they are good for Ryas I already knew that. She also told me about the morning chants in the cities, I remembered the Mantra songs in the temples.

I woke up at 5:30 am, temple chants could be heard in the distance, no it wasn't a dream. I followed them, walked across the countryside in the dark, and to a place where the paths were already being cleaned at 6 a.m. on Sundays. The women were washing clothes, cleaning, looking after the animals, although the goats and cows still seemed to be asleep - in the courtyards of the small huts. The men were in the temple. There was a loudspeaker that could be heard for miles around. I greeted the gods and went back.

On the way back, I passed a burial site from the Iron Age. The megaliths are 2500 years old. The burial site on which Auroville was built is 60 hectares in size.

I had breakfast and went to bed. A wonderful sleep welcomed me and I dreamt of Auroville. I had now also arrived here in my dreams. It is these transitions between waking and sleeping states, in which the consciousness merely changes its state but actually remains in a continuum, that are the greatest happiness for me.

There are so many types of sleep:

• Sleep of exhaustion, when the body demands its right to rest.
• Sleep to recover, e.g. at lunchtime and to increase concentration and process what has been done
• Sleeping together after a beautiful meeting of bodies.
• Waking sleep, in which the self is merely conscious in a different state.
• Daily sleep of habit that follows tiredness.
• Sleep while traveling, on a train, car, plane, train station or park bench. A moment of rest and lingering while the body moves.
• Sleep of intoxication, when the senses are confused and the self loses itself, drunkenly associating and suffering.
• Sleep in the seminar or at school, where I still continue to listen to the teacher. But now I hear something with a very strong filter, because the absorption of facts has reached its capacity limit.
• Sleep of the insomniac, when sleep seems impossible and only small moments of exhaustion demand a restless short sleep. The sleep of the nervous... This can also be very unhealthy, and perhaps help is needed here.
• Sleep in Forest or under the starry sky, where consciousness expands and almost completely withdraws from everyday life.

The list could certainly go on, but the point seems clear. Sleep is a very special state of consciousness. It cannot only be experienced by remembering dreamers, but is an intermediate state of consciousness in which the self visits other spheres of consciousness in order to regenerate, sort, learn, process, see...

We generally call some of these experiences dreams, but they are much more complex. I like to sleep a lot and I don't feel guilty about it. Sleeping is a central part of my existence. I don't understand at all when people try to sleep less. They deprive themselves of many wonderful forms of knowledge.

In the Prashna Upanishad (p.32) speaks of this. "When a man sleeps, who sleeps?"

But above all in the Mandukya Upanishad. in: Aurobindo Vol 18 p.193ff. (unpublished by Aurobindo)

The comparison of 10 different translations into English is also nice:
"Mandukya Upanishad". Accessed November 28, 2022. https://realization.org/p/namedoc/upanishads/mandukya/mandukya.html.

Here is an excerpt from Aurobindo's translation:

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

Nhe other day I 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

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

Et is definitely time to rethink. What our fathers and grandfathers called progress is destroying our planet. Science is not an end in itself, not everything that is technically feasible is good, not everything that is fun and satisfies our senses is useful. Now we keep hearing from many quarters that we should concentrate on the small steps ahead of us, that this is the only way we can move forward together. This may be true at times, but it distracts us from the essentials. Where do we actually want to go?

Does it make sense to fly into space and burn up our Earth in the process? Is it really a good idea to jeopardize our extremely complex biodiversity here in order to search for water on a desert planet and think about how we can artificially create the most basic conditions for life there? Why do so many people believe that this makes sense?

Knowledge structures

There are indigenous peoples who have lived in harmony with nature for thousands of years. The wealth of experience grows very slowly and is passed on orally from one generation to the next. This oral tradition is a bottleneck. On the one hand, oral tradition requires narratives. Secondly, the flow of information is limited. Knowledge dies with the bearer of knowledge. Only what is passed on and remembered survives. There is no significant accumulation of knowledge. Outdated knowledge dies out and is replaced by new knowledge. There is a concentration of knowledge and selection.

In 'advanced civilizations', on the other hand, knowledge is archived. Everything is stored in knowledge repositories, such as libraries or networks. It is accessible to many people and allows for extreme specialization. This specialization loses sight of the context. Arbitrary maxims become leitmotifs: Wealth, power, pleasure. Knowledge is instrumentalized to serve these maxims. We call this the freedom of science. Knowledge has been detached from the grand narratives and liberated. We call it secularized or modernized (Galileo).

Now we have this tower of accumulated knowledge. In a Babylonian confusion of languages, we no longer know where we want to go. We are breaking the master narrative and releasing micronarratives. We call this plurality or postmodern (Lyotard).

Much has been written about all of these. We have created a world that is wonderfully complex. There is a dazzling tolerance in many places, our creativity has been unleashed and our minds have been given wings. We have technology that allows us to transform our knowledge, our communication, our bodies, space and time. There is certainly no point in trying to turn back time. Not everything was better in the past.

Biological and mental knowledge repositories

What seems important to me is the direction of view. In the industrialized nations, we focus on technology. What is on the Internet is real. We have long since arrived in the hyperreal (Baudrillard). Only slowly are we (re)recognizing the complexity of biological and mental knowledge repositories. If knowledge is stored in living 'archives', then it is part of life. This does not mean that it is always good, on the contrary, it is probably value-neutral. But it is part of a complex system. However, we should not understand this 'system' in cybernetic terms. The aim is not decoding and imitation or simulation (biomimicry). Rather, the aim should be to reintegrate ourselves, to become part of nature and consciousness again.

I don't think this has to be a step backwards. I just doubt the belief in a technological singularity. The Silicon Valley ideology that the next big step will be to transfer consciousness to a hard disk, to integrate it into the network or hyperreality will really help us. For biological humans, it would be more of a nightmare. The question remains as to why we are striving for this. The dream of immortality is the driving force, in essence the preservation of the self. But it is precisely this illusion that needs to be overcome. If we succeed in doing so, whose part do we want to see ourselves as? Computer processors, nature and/or consciousness?

Der Beitrag An einer Utopie arbeiten erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

I have been thinking about Marx for so many years. Who hasn't? The idea of an equal and solidary community, free of ideological superstructures or irrational will-o'-the-wisps. A world that knows only matter and sees in it a scientific, progressive movement. Their goal? A world in which humanity is perfect, i.e. harmonious, without envy and resentment, in solidarity and with equal rights, without alienation and heteronomy, which alone enables the development of the individual within a collective.

Dhis dream of a better future, which will inevitably, following the course of history, necessarily be achieved - albeit in the future - encourages struggle and revolution, but for others also serenity: what can stand in the way of history?

Consciousness is determined by matter, according to Marx. The world as will and imagination, on the other hand, according to Schopenhauer and Kant, ultimately... Why should the world either arise from my imagination or have nothing to do with me? What is wrong with that?

The unfolding of the spirit - based on Hegel - why think so small? In the spirit of the Enlightenment, the aim was to establish a world view that is based purely on science. This protects against charlatans, ideologies, magicians, seducers, warriors and other deceivers.

We have chased away the spirit and replaced it with money, success and power. The wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, the Sermon on the Mount, the shamans and seers, for example, can no longer be found in our cultural identity. They have been declassified as superstructures. The intersubjective, the anchor of one's own consciousness in another consciousness, leads to the path of meditation. Empathy not only shows us that we are not alone, but that we are part of something that goes beyond us.

The color on a canvas means more than just that. As in Jackson Pollock's last painting, it gives us a glimpse of the beginning. Heterogeneity arises from looking at it.

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

Hoday I dreamed 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.