New Spirits – Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness exists only in connection with other consciousness
There is a strange place within me, there where the word Self tries to point something out. That place of stillness and calm where I am with myself and look out for the Self. A place deep in the heart, free of ties to the outside world, a place where being alone feels right. No expectations are active there; other people are certainly present in memory or in thought, but they have no influence. That place where the word Self…
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I am back in Europe for a short time, and I see a busyness here, an energy of constant doing. Working, discussing, tidying up, running errands, fulfilling obligations, organizing, optimizing, presenting, questioning, exchanging. Something is always being done. To do something seems important; to do nothing seems unproductive and in need of justification. Yet not being productive has many important qualities. Sometimes non-action is a form of resistance, and a quiet turning inward can be understood as inner work —…
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Movement Instead of Rootedness Recently I asked myself whether I really want to be grounded at all. Am I a tree that drives its roots into the earth and does not move, but grows in the surroundings where the seed once sprouted? Or do I perhaps want to be a rock in the surf, washed over by water, yielding a little over millennia and losing itself in the sand?My image of human existence is actually a different one: rather that…
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Play — Misstep In the West, I used to think that play had to do with games, and that games had to do with rules. To play a game means to enter a space restricted by rules, and within those parameters the player can develop strategies in order to act according to the rules, with the aim of winning. There is the larger field of game theory, which has been applied to sociology and other disciplines; there are computer simulations…
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It is full moon in India. Time for self-reflection, meditation, and a turning inward. I have never really thought about death. For me, it was always a boundary, that which defines our existence negatively. Finitude throws us back upon ourselves, or so I thought. Here I agreed a little with Heidegger. To think of something beyond death always seemed arbitrary, naive, romantic, escapist, and credulous to me … Only in existential reflection did death seem meaningful to me. The dead…
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Yesterday, during a panel discussion at the India Art Fair, I heard someone quote Plato. She said Plato said art was the reflection of the reflection of the Real. Whether this is correct in such an abbreviated form can remain an open question for now. It is an interesting thought. What is the Real, what is a reflection, what is art? For Plato, there is the world of Ideas, the world of shadows that the ignorant person in the cave…
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I am fascinated by the synchronicities here in Auroville. The spaces of thought, mind, spirit, body and emotion that intertwine here often do so over several days, seemingly effortlessly, intuitively, lightly. I was exhausted. A friend had left his body, as people say here. The community had provided support for over a month; many had grown closer. The death ceremony Karumadhi was held in a small circle, a particular kind of Puja on the 16th day, when the soul leaves…
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we experience the power of consciousness through the intermingling of different vibrations. This text explores the constitution of consciousness in a meditative state.
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