New Spirits – Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness exists only in connection with other consciousness
Outside my door there is soft red sandy ground. It is swept several times a week with a bundle of palm leaves and looks beautiful. I am still thinking about the same temple in Irumbai. Its history is becoming more and more complex, and so I am now immersing myself in Tantra philosophy. A few months ago I attended a workshop on it. We learned a small meditation exercise that I tried again today: Choose two objects and look at…
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Slowly, and at long intervals, I keep reading Sri Aurobindo. Why not read a lot and quickly, soak everything up and finally bring order to my world of thought, which wants to break out of the consequences of a rational monotheism? Why do I not give my intellect the freedom, concentration, quiet and strength to embark on one of life’s greatest adventures? As a student, I once went swimming in the Rhine, very naively, somewhere before Basel, where the water,…
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Fate, karma, causality, laws of nature, determinism—all these are different expressions of a conception that the universe follows a predictable logic. They imply that what happened arose consistently from what preceded it, and that the now is likewise determined by what came before. We consider this logic reasonable and rational, logically correct. Yet if we assume that the future is likewise determined by the now and the past, we dismiss this as superstition, irrationality, a lack of scientific rigor. We…
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When the rational mind roams through the worlds of knowledge, rummages through the library or searches for the causal laws of the universe, this is meticulous work building systems of knowledge. At first these systems have little in common with the world of experience, let alone the inner world. Only through contemplation does the mind pause and behold the systematized, abstract representation as an image of the world, as a worldview. It is intuition that anchors this image in a…
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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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Yesterday I had a long conversation about the origin of thought. What comes first, the words or the thoughts? Of course there are very different forms of thinking. A visual, musical, analytical, synthetic, performative thinking, etc… There is thinking on the level of intuition, there is thinking in memory, there is vision and inspiration. There are so many kinds of thinking. What is thinking? Who is thinking when thinking? How is it different from consciousness? Much within my consciousness is…
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One Year in Auroville: An evocative account of transformation and the search for spirituality in India. Learn more about the adventure and the significance of consciousness. #India #Spirituality
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Discover the subtle differences between the German ‘werden’, the English ‘becoming’, and the French ‘devenir’ in Deleuze’s postmodern thinking. Explore the world of sensations and consciousness in this philosophical journey.
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