Ramana, one of India’s great enlightened ones, lived in Tiruvannamalai. At the center of his teaching stands the concept of the Self: its emptiness and, at the same time, its immeasurable vastness. His teaching is simple; he does not follow a long tradition of interpretation. He was a simple man who meditated on the mountain and held satsangs. He was a contemporary of Aurobindo; people listened to both of them and compared their radically different approaches. I am in Tiruvannamalai…
The traditional music of India, the raga, is melodic in relation to a fundamental tone. Western music is harmonic, that is, simultaneous and complex. In the West, much thinking takes place in terms of structures; for a time, there was much talk of structuralist and poststructuralist thought. Complex systems are found everywhere: in philosophy, in canonical texts and systems of images, in technology and models that explain the world. One essential underlying idea is atomistic thinking. The idea is that…
My morning meditation is becoming something of a routine, though after a handful of sessions one can probably hardly say that yet. It is more a stretch of road, a path, or an exploration. Like hiking in the mountains: with the summit in view, hiking along paths, on ridges, through valleys and rivers, past rock faces, through scree and stone, meadows and forests, and beyond the vegetation line onto glaciers in the snow, the mountains become a metaphor for the…
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…
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,…
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…
For several weeks now, I have been living with a neurotic dog. She barked a lot, as long as she still perceived me as a stranger. She kept her distance, was frightened. After a few weeks, she accepted me, approaches and wants to be petted. Now she lies in front of my door and keeps watch; she protects me. What happened? I did not change my attitude towards her. I have little connection to dogs and pay her little attention.…
(this is an old text of mine, found in the archives. It is strange to read it again, as it shows to me how desperately I tried to get out of the trap of representation and the urge to embrace a philosophy of immanence. I went through so many ideas, looked at so many artists – I never did anything with the text, as my self-critical voice didn’t consider it to be any good. I have to say I like…
