New Spirits – Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness exists only in connection with other consciousness
I have just returned from a devotional meditation. It is Sri Aurobindo’s anniversary. He left his body 72 years ago, as people say here. Over the past few days I have thought and spoken a great deal about his commentaries on the Kena Upanishad. There I came across the word ‘intermiscence’. It is used almost only by Aurobindo. I asked everyone I met what the word means. A friend here found ‘flowing into one another’ as a German translation (in…
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“the eye thinks even more than it listens” (Deleuze) I now remember that, before I began reading Deleuze, I had struggled with an aesthetics of process. I put together a 100-page manuscript with notes, quotations, sketches of structures. I wanted to move away from the idea that art consists of objects perceived in a particular way, because this produces two main strands of thought: 1.) What constitutes an object that we call art, and 2.) why is the perception of…
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I am approaching Sanskrit very slowly. On Thursdays, Nishtha holds a seminar on the Rigveda. Reciting together in Sanskrit, the detailed analysis of the translation, Nishtha’s philological considerations and the explanations of the psychology of the gods open a way into these ‘sacred’ texts. I remember my study of Latin, the Indo-European roots, the sounds that reverberate in the ragas, phonetics as a declaration of existence, language as sound and vibration, communication as rhythm. The breath of life, yoga, vitality,…
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The last time I seriously asked myself what I should do was during my studies. I studied philosophy and was often asked what I wanted to do with it. What a stupid question, I always thought. It is an inner urge, almost a compulsion, that you cannot oppose. Every such attempt must fail; there is only a thinking forward. So it was not really the question of what I should do, or what was to be done, or how the…
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Yesterday I fell asleep 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—I already knew that they were good for Ryas. She also spoke about the morning chants in the towns; I remembered the mantra chants in the temples. I woke at 5:30; temple chants could be heard in…
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I remember that ever since childhood I have always stared into the fire in the fireplace. Many do this, I think. There is something fascinating about fire. In the Vedas, Agni is the god of fire, one of the 5 elements alongside water, air, earth and ether. These elements exist among the Greeks too. For a very long time I did not understand this and found it ‘unscientific’. I thought of the elements from the perspective of physics and chemistry,…
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Yesterday I saw two millipedes mating. It was pretty much the most fascinating thing I have seen in a very long time. The creatures entwined themselves in one another, rubbed and courted one another; there was rhythm, devotion, engulfing. The two had met by chance, and after a few minutes moved on in different directions. An encounter. They were two forms of life that had united to beget further life. A Life – A Life Today I then reread Deleuze’s…
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Recently I listened to a podcast about dreams and was once again very surprised. The director of the sleep laboratory in Mannheim says that anyone can train themselves to remember dreams. I, at any rate, can do that, so that is true. What still surprises me greatly, however, is the reduction of dreams to the subconscious. Dreams supposedly only make use of stronger images to draw our attention to working on something we neglect in waking consciousness. A pity and…
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