What does it mean to understand another person? It is easy to understand someone facing us when we are of the same opinion, because then we are simply agreeing with ourselves. We may even enjoy seeing our own thinking mirrored in the other, enriched by a slightly different perspective, more colorful, more alive, more energetic, because both are pleased to have found someone on the same wavelength. This mirroring, the mirror neurons, gives us a feeling of appreciation, of being…
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…
The Enlightenment — Spiritual Enlightenment: the Paradox of Enlightenment Enlightenment is a tricky thing. Recently someone asked me whether I was seeking enlightenment. I faltered a little. But because I valued this person especially highly, I tried to be honest — yes, no, um, I don’t quite know, really I am, if I am completely honest … Why this hedging? Why not simply say directly: yes, I am, as she did when she replied that she thought most people were…
I ended my nighttime meditation a little early to move into writing meditation. Suddenly a few things seemed clear to me. The need to align one’s own body in meditation, to find the right position, which for me means following the movements, the tensions and relaxations of the muscles, the skeleton, the spine. Then to observe the breath, breathing in and out, the turning point of the breath, the pause in which to observe oneself, how thoughts begin to loosen,…
I woke from a nightmare at four in the morning. I was talking with Will in Apt about a strange disturbance in my perception of time. I described how time broke into fragments and some were simply missing. These were seconds or minutes, and while I tried to immerse myself in time to describe it better, everything went black. I cried for help, I was blind, and woke up. It was another of those dreams in which I seemed to…
Connection Over the past two years I have immersed myself quite deeply in the Upanishads, practiced some yoga, and engaged a little with the system of yoga. I have immersed myself in my own body, my own senses, my own consciousness. Have seen that there are a great many levels, and that there is no reason at all to assume that still more levels do not exist. Just two years ago I simply denied most of what I am experiencing…
During the Chola Empire, the layout of Shiva temples became highly formalized. Based on the Agamas and Shastras, the temple was fully developed into a place in space, time, and consciousness where microcosm and macrocosm mirror one another. Studying the Irumbai temple as a smaller temple that follows the strict rules of temple construction and serves as a temple for practitioners shows its central role in a cluster of about two dozen temples in the surrounding area. It follows the…
Sometimes meditation is quite simple and natural. I sit down, enter my body, become aware of my sensory apparatus and of how my consciousness and intellect engage with it, bring everything to rest, and higher consciousness shows itself, another kind of knowledge, space and time, another world of experience … Sometimes, though, it is difficult, and then I learn how meditation really works. I sit down; a chaos of thoughts and feelings spreads out. It takes a long time before…
