First encounters with ragas

Ahen I was a teenager, I listened to ragas for hours. I didn't know anything about them. I looked them up a little: Microtonality, meditation, tone sequence. That was all I understood. But it was the most profound musical experience - a meditation on music. To this day, ragas lead me into my inner self or into deep states of insight, but they are not rational. Rather, it is a way of being in the world.

Music as a shared space and pure energy

Listening to music draws us all into the realms of emotional landscapes, daydreaming, aesthetic experience. It is emotional, abstract, temporal; it allows the other senses to fade in or out, to recall memories or forget something. We can dream up a future, yearn or express emotions - let them out.

When we make music together, practise, dance, listen together or even just recommend music, we enter a shared space. This space is a different dimension. It has no material reference as the other senses have (e.g. in the performing arts or in cooking). Music corresponds to the ether, to space itself. Vibration requires a physical carrier, but is itself pure energy.

Music, consciousness and the fourth reality

When my senses mix - smell, touch, sound, taste and sight - the messengers of my nervous system unite somewhere inside me, perhaps in my head or my heart, and form a basis for consciousness there. This ocean of consciousness, which is fed by the senses, can access a reality through them: This is what we call the waking state.

In the dream state, we access another reality, a reality made up of memories, feelings and fantasies. Or we go into deep sleep, where the senses do not reach consciousness. However, since I continue to exist, as I experience every morning, my self was apparently somewhere else entirely. It was probably where the material world as we understand it is irrelevant. We were in the dark ocean of pure existence.

In the Māṇḍūkya Upanishad, however, a fourth state is mentioned - the state that can perhaps be described as "enlightened". In this state, we are awake but not bound to our senses. We do not perceive, but we also do not dream, we do not sleep and yet we grasp a higher reality. We know about the world in a deeper sense. I see my inner self and the world as such, I understand that my everyday consciousness is functional but limited. I become aware of my ignorance. I know that I know nothing. I am one with the world, even though I seem to be outside of it. One could speculate here about the ideas of the transcendental, advaita or immanence. But I prefer not to do that, as it gets lost in intellectual gimmicks.

Music, and for me personally ragas, have something of this fourth reality. I expressly do not want to say here that listening to music is like an enlightened state, and yet I am suggesting this parallel. I am not asleep and I am not aware, I am not dreaming and I am wide awake. I feel myself in a world that is often more intense than reality. Sometimes I escape into it. But when I listen with great concentration, when I become one with the music, then something shines within me - with a purity and clarity that I otherwise only know from meditation.

In music, we identify with something. Music is a carrier of something that I can become. In meditation, I can also become something; if it goes well, I become one.

Der Beitrag Musik – Nāda-Brahman erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

IZen is about finding the true self. But there is no such thing, and that is the mystery of our existence. In a world of representations, cognitive dissonance and alternative facts, it is good to sink into the essence of existence, into a non-dual being. Thinking only helps to a very limited extent, because thinking is actually always a Thinking about somethinga Thinking about something. Thinking is an activity that relates to something that deals with representations of the world. What I think, whatever it may be, is not real in the material sense. It can represent something material. Thinking, or more generally mind and matter, we think differently. This is the basic problem of thinking: thinking cannot be non-dual. It is trapped in duality, but cannot dissolve it.

The self is quite different, but similar in its paradoxes. The self is what drives us, what makes us conscious, what identifies and differentiates us; it is unique and individual. But it does not exist, neither materially nor logically-transcendentally. It may be connected to the soul, to the heart-mind, but that doesn't help at this point because it becomes dangerously tautological. We cannot understand something that we do not understand by equating it with something that we also do not understand. That only distracts us.

The true self emerges when it ceases to exist - and I mean that very seriously. When I go into meditation, become calm and concentrate on emptiness, i.e. when the pauses between the events of the head cinema become longer, a window opens that initially fills with a kind of trance state. This is beautiful and allows for completely different experiences. I've already written about this a few times: Thinking becomes fast, it understands intuitively, it can penetrate areas that remain blocked to everyday thinking; it is blissful and intense. But it has only detached itself from the self to a certain extent. It has to detach itself a little from the self, otherwise it cannot gain this lightness, but it remains anchored in the self. It is still me who is doing something that is difficult to understand and that gets caught up in similar problems as normal thinking. What is real, what is just imagination?

So I have managed to free myself a little. I have calmed these thoughts that relate to the world, and I have activated a way of seeing that is fed by memory, knowledge, vision, imagination, but only moves in that world of pure consciousness. It is an intuitive knowledge, an omnipresence, it is almost outside of space and time; it is the place where it is identical with itself, i.e. the self ceases to exist and connects with the deepest ground of our existence. The deepest ground of our existence is mysterious and based on something we cannot grasp. It is beyond our self.

Zen brings me closer to this mystery. It anchors me in my physical existence and at the same time shows me that this existence is non-dualistically one with everything. I am Buddha, you are Buddha, we are all Buddha. There is only Buddha - kill Buddha when you see him.

Der Beitrag Das wahre Selbst erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

When the rational mind wanders through the worlds of knowledge, rummages through the library or searches for the causal laws of the universe, it is a meticulous task of building up systems of knowledge. These systems initially have little in common with the world of experience or even the inner world. It is only through contemplation that the mind pauses and considers the systematized, abstract representation as a picture of the world, as a world view. It is intuition that anchors this image in a deeper reality. When can we say that we really understand something, beyond the rational? When is the point reached where something makes sense?

The creation of meaning takes place through contemplation and the anchoring of knowledge through intuition in the deep reality of our consciousness. The butterfly, whose flight paths we can describe and which we can assign to a species, whose habitat we can examine, its mating behavior and its search for food, all this we can explore through rational knowledge. But the contemplation of beauty, the elegance of dreamy flight, the gentle landing on a flower - all this lends itself to contemplative observation. And when we then ask about the deeper meaning of this reality, about the meaning of life itself, it is intuition that helps us to build this bridge.

Intuition, which Henri Bergson once again placed at the center of philosophy, is also a key to meditation. The vision of intuition, which does not follow the strict rules of science and easily penetrates the core of our being, allows a world view to make sense.

The beauty of intuition is that it is quite unbound in relation to the external world. It is free and not afraid to engage in thoughts that are not rational. This is why it is condemned by the enlightened, who misunderstand it and fear that it will lead to wild speculation. When driven by fanaticism, it becomes destructive and allows itself to be blinded by power.

Der Beitrag Kontemplation und Intuition erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

The Archaeology Department of Tamil Nadu has officially 44,121 Temples in Tamil Nadu counted. With 72,138,958 (2011) that is 1635 inhabitants per temple. Germany has 84,270,625 (2022) inhabitants and 45,600 Catholic and Protestant churches. That makes 1848 inhabitants per church.

However, many estimate that the actual number of temples in Tamil Nadu is much higher (between 200,000 and 300,000). In Germany, on the other hand, all churches have probably been recorded.

The Christian churches concentrate largely on the message of the Bible, and other systems of knowledge are quickly demarcated as conspiracy theories by secret orders such as the Knights Templar. The Hindu temples, on the other hand, are based on the Agama Texts that connect to the sciences, cosmology, the arts, spiritual wisdom, architecture, music, ceremonies, urban planning, economics, yogas, yantra, tantra, mantra...

Temples in India are one of the many keys to thousands of years of knowledge, where it is still not really clear where it came from, because the oldest texts in India, the Rigveda, is not just any textual testimony, but a highly complex system of knowledge of all kinds.

How yantra (the geometric form, which can also be found in temple ground plans), mantra (the spoken/sung text) and tantra (the 'instruction', the teaching) are interwoven can be seen beautifully in the Gayatri Mantra. You can listen to it here: Gayatri Mantra by Manish Vyas

I would like to link the Vāstusāstra here, because it is not easy to find an English translation:

Vastu shastra VL. 1: Hindu Canons of lconography &Paining (76mb, 822 pages)

Viswakarma Vastusastram: A Treatise On Town-planning Etc. 

The standard work of art history on temples in India is here:

Kramrisch, Stella. 1946. The Hindu Temple Vol .I . http://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.282158.
Kramrisch, Stella. 1946. The Hindu Temple Vol. 2. http://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.40420.

Here from page 32 Vol.1 a diagram of the arrangement of the gods in the temple:

Der Beitrag Tempel in Tamil Nadu: Eine Verbindung zu Jahrtausende altem Wissen und Wissenschaften erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Yesterday I went to sleep 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 told me about the early morning hours in India, that they are the best for meditation - that they are good for Ryas I already knew that. She also told me about the morning chants in the cities, I remembered the Mantra songs in the temples.

I woke up at 5:30 am, temple chants could be heard in the distance, no it wasn't a dream. I followed them, walked across the countryside in the dark, and to a place where the paths were already being cleaned at 6 a.m. on Sundays. The women were washing clothes, cleaning, looking after the animals, although the goats and cows still seemed to be asleep - in the courtyards of the small huts. The men were in the temple. There was a loudspeaker that could be heard for miles around. I greeted the gods and went back.

On the way back, I passed a burial site from the Iron Age. The megaliths are 2500 years old. The burial site on which Auroville was built is 60 hectares in size.

I had breakfast and went to bed. A wonderful sleep welcomed me and I dreamt of Auroville. I had now also arrived here in my dreams. It is these transitions between waking and sleeping states, in which the consciousness merely changes its state but actually remains in a continuum, that are the greatest happiness for me.

There are so many types of sleep:

• Sleep of exhaustion, when the body demands its right to rest.
• Sleep to recover, e.g. at lunchtime and to increase concentration and process what has been done
• Sleeping together after a beautiful meeting of bodies.
• Waking sleep, in which the self is merely conscious in a different state.
• Daily sleep of habit that follows tiredness.
• Sleep while traveling, on a train, car, plane, train station or park bench. A moment of rest and lingering while the body moves.
• Sleep of intoxication, when the senses are confused and the self loses itself, drunkenly associating and suffering.
• Sleep in the seminar or at school, where I still continue to listen to the teacher. But now I hear something with a very strong filter, because the absorption of facts has reached its capacity limit.
• Sleep of the insomniac, when sleep seems impossible and only small moments of exhaustion demand a restless short sleep. The sleep of the nervous... This can also be very unhealthy, and perhaps help is needed here.
• Sleep in Forest or under the starry sky, where consciousness expands and almost completely withdraws from everyday life.

The list could certainly go on, but the point seems clear. Sleep is a very special state of consciousness. It cannot only be experienced by remembering dreamers, but is an intermediate state of consciousness in which the self visits other spheres of consciousness in order to regenerate, sort, learn, process, see...

We generally call some of these experiences dreams, but they are much more complex. I like to sleep a lot and I don't feel guilty about it. Sleeping is a central part of my existence. I don't understand at all when people try to sleep less. They deprive themselves of many wonderful forms of knowledge.

In the Prashna Upanishad (p.32) speaks of this. "When a man sleeps, who sleeps?"

But above all in the Mandukya Upanishad. in: Aurobindo Vol 18 p.193ff. (unpublished by Aurobindo)

The comparison of 10 different translations into English is also nice:
"Mandukya Upanishad". Accessed November 28, 2022. https://realization.org/p/namedoc/upanishads/mandukya/mandukya.html.

Here is an excerpt from Aurobindo's translation:

Der Beitrag Schlafen erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

The Solitude Farm in Auroville, is a 'food forest'. This is one of the few English terms that is difficult to express in German with a compound noun (Esswald?). We don't have anything like that, and it's hard to think about. A fruit meadow that we would let run wild with other edible annuals and short-lived plants until we have a dense jungle of nothing but edible plants ... I'm looking for a word for that. It's the opposite of a 'food dessert', we don't have a compound word for that in German either, it means a part of town where there are no stores selling fresh food. The only things that exist in urban 'food desserts' are gas stations and kiosks that sell chip bags and candy, stale toast and chemical cheese.

Tamil

Krishna gave a short talk. His enthusiasm for the project, which he has been pursuing for over 20 years, was unmistakable, passionately palpable. Krishna is from England, speaks fluent Tamil and often had to find English words for Tamil words. The Tamil culture has not only grown close to his heart, but he seems to be deeply rooted in it. And that is exactly what his core message is. We have thousands of years of knowledge about what grows in the environment in which we live, what we can eat, how we can prepare it, the nutritional and energetic value of plants and the healing effects they can have.

Grandmother's knowledge

Our grandmothers had this knowledge, we still have it somewhere inside us, but we have forgotten it. Nature has more to offer us than our chemical inventions, if we let it do its work and only guide it a little here and there. His core message: activate the old knowledge, let nature do its thing, handle the fruits responsibly, collectively and ecologically....

Krishna draws inspiration from Masanobu Fukuokaa pioneer of permaculture. He met him many years ago in Japan and saw his "do-nothing agriculture" with his own eyes; he carries on his spirit. You can only enter his edible forest barefoot - any child would have known that in the past. As he talks - wandering through the small forest of 1 to 2 hectares - he picks leaves, eats them and calls them by Tamil names. His voice is overflowing with enthusiasm about the richness of the small forest. Most of the plants came by themselves. He doesn't know the word weed. A friend in Auroville brought a piece of land that had been so degraded in the 20th century that it was nothing more than a stony desert into the state of an edible forest within five years. It was a lot of work, but rewarding and sustainable.

The food box principle enables farmers to live much better, and the community and nature are also better off.

Learning

A group of students from Pondicherry were there that day with their lecturer. They wanted textbook knowledge. 'Use your campus to grow vegetables for the canteen, encourage your students not to eat at the fast food chains just outside the campus, ask your grandmothers. The knowledge is there, you just have to use it,' was his answer. Otherwise, he would of course be happy to give various workshops on practical procedures.

The old woman, who was born here in the country and sat on the floor in the background, didn't understand English. She knows what to do.

Der Beitrag Wurzeln – Essbares erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

There was a time in Europe when people spoke of universal scholars. In Germany this would be Alexander von Humboldt or Goethe, in France an Enlightenment philosopher, in Italy the Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci. In antiquity, Aristotle. There are certainly wise people in many cultures and epochs who history tells us knew everything that could have been known at the time.

That's nonsense, of course. But this narrative serves a longing. We want to know everything, but we feel - rightly - that we can't know everything, and we have a romantic longing for a time when this was apparently still possible. It doesn't bother us that knowledge itself was limited - there and then. But it reassures us that it would have seemed possible to know everything. Mount Olympus could be climbed, the mountain on which the tablets of the law would be received. And yet there is already the story of the Tower of Babel.

Tower of Babel

In Babel, people wanted to know everything, they built a tower that was supposed to contain all knowledge. The result was a confusion of languages. Knowledge was divided into many languages. Nobody speaks them all. The Bible describes this as a punishment from God. Arrogance was punished as a warning and man was shown his limits. But if we had not supposedly been punished by God, might we not know everything after all? This is the central question. Would it have been possible in principle? Or will it be possible in the future due to the singularity?

In philosophy, the question of the beginning of knowledge arises. On what foundation can we build knowledge? Logic, ethics, aesthetics? Science is about the great unifying theory that brings the microcosm and macrocosm together. When it comes to the question of human nature, things become quite confusing. Do we want to approach this religiously or spiritually, or perhaps Darwinistically or in terms of information technology? We are completely lost when it comes to our aesthetic thinking. Plurality and media overkill offer a pure sensory overload that we seem to enjoy. Ignorance is bliss.

Driving force

It seems so clear that we can't know everything. So why do we keep trying? What drives us? A longing? Have we really been driven out of paradise and are looking for a way back? Or are we evolutionarily wired in such a way that we can't help ourselves? Does the feeling of knowing a lot give us satisfaction, power or peace of mind? What makes us think that our small brain of just over 1 kilogram, which is quite modest compared to elephants (4 kilograms) or sperm whales (9 kilograms), can decode the universe? Are we perhaps actually in a simulation and reality is not what we think it is? The different varieties of skepticism offer some nice thought experiments here. Maybe my senses are being manipulated from the outside, maybe I am alone in the universe, maybe I haven't even woken up yet and am waiting in an anteroom for the next level...

We follow an achievement mania. If a person has produced something that is new, he or she is celebrated by society. This drives us on. We are fascinated by high performance. We worship them or enter into a competition. Only a few are indifferent to it. Perhaps this is what sets us apart from our intelligent fellow inhabitants on the planet.

We create needs in order to satisfy them: Knowledge, culture, pleasure, sensuality, sociality, power... We strive for more. Buddhism sees this as the root of suffering. The only way to end this suffering is to bring wanting, striving and desire to rest.

Deleuze contrasts this with becoming. Instead of continuing to systematize the world and giving free rein to our pathologies, we can pay attention to what we can become, become different, be instead of have. We are flexible, fluid, moist.

I have the feeling that the Upanishads still have a lot to offer here. Wanting to know everything also contains a longing for unity. In the 20th century, we experienced that there is something very totalitarian about this unity. When was this unity broken? When were we expelled from paradise? Can this be determined historically? Is that an absurd question? Can the fall of man be reversed or dissolved?

Der Beitrag Wissen erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

It is definitely time to rethink. What our fathers and grandfathers called progress is destroying our planet. Science is not an end in itself, not everything that is technically feasible is good, not everything that is fun and satisfies our senses is useful. Now we keep hearing from many quarters that we should concentrate on the small steps ahead of us, that this is the only way we can move forward together. This may be true at times, but it distracts us from the essentials. Where do we actually want to go?

Does it make sense to fly into space and burn up our Earth in the process? Is it really a good idea to jeopardize our extremely complex biodiversity here in order to search for water on a desert planet and think about how we can artificially create the most basic conditions for life there? Why do so many people believe that this makes sense?

Knowledge structures

There are indigenous peoples who have lived in harmony with nature for thousands of years. The wealth of experience grows very slowly and is passed on orally from one generation to the next. This oral tradition is a bottleneck. On the one hand, oral tradition requires narratives. Secondly, the flow of information is limited. Knowledge dies with the bearer of knowledge. Only what is passed on and remembered survives. There is no significant accumulation of knowledge. Outdated knowledge dies out and is replaced by new knowledge. There is a concentration of knowledge and selection.

In 'advanced civilizations', on the other hand, knowledge is archived. Everything is stored in knowledge repositories, such as libraries or networks. It is accessible to many people and allows for extreme specialization. This specialization loses sight of the context. Arbitrary maxims become leitmotifs: Wealth, power, pleasure. Knowledge is instrumentalized to serve these maxims. We call this the freedom of science. Knowledge has been detached from the grand narratives and liberated. We call it secularized or modernized (Galileo).

Now we have this tower of accumulated knowledge. In a Babylonian confusion of languages, we no longer know where we want to go. We are breaking the master narrative and releasing micronarratives. We call this plurality or postmodern (Lyotard).

Much has been written about all of these. We have created a world that is wonderfully complex. There is a dazzling tolerance in many places, our creativity has been unleashed and our minds have been given wings. We have technology that allows us to transform our knowledge, our communication, our bodies, space and time. There is certainly no point in trying to turn back time. Not everything was better in the past.

Biological and mental knowledge repositories

What seems important to me is the direction of view. In the industrialized nations, we focus on technology. What is on the Internet is real. We have long since arrived in the hyperreal (Baudrillard). Only slowly are we (re)recognizing the complexity of biological and mental knowledge repositories. If knowledge is stored in living 'archives', then it is part of life. This does not mean that it is always good, on the contrary, it is probably value-neutral. But it is part of a complex system. However, we should not understand this 'system' in cybernetic terms. The aim is not decoding and imitation or simulation (biomimicry). Rather, the aim should be to reintegrate ourselves, to become part of nature and consciousness again.

I don't think this has to be a step backwards. I just doubt the belief in a technological singularity. The Silicon Valley ideology that the next big step will be to transfer consciousness to a hard disk, to integrate it into the network or hyperreality will really help us. For biological humans, it would be more of a nightmare. The question remains as to why we are striving for this. The dream of immortality is the driving force, in essence the preservation of the self. But it is precisely this illusion that needs to be overcome. If we succeed in doing so, whose part do we want to see ourselves as? Computer processors, nature and/or consciousness?

Der Beitrag An einer Utopie arbeiten erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Mnemosyne Atlas

This is a personal blog. However, it is also about a transformation of consciousness. Consciousness does not exist singularly within people. It only exists in connection with other consciousness. Consciousness is communicative. A journey into consciousness is therefore always more than just a personal journey. It is a manifestation.

I traveled to India in 2016. I wanted to read Gilles Deleuze there. I had a hunch that it would open up a new level there. I read slowly. Thoughts are complex entities. Understanding other people's thoughts means questioning your own thinking. An encounter between worlds of thought takes time. Understanding is not absorbing knowledge. Philosophy is not (just) abstract thinking.

It was a metamorphosis of my thinking.

Der Beitrag Reading Deleuze in India erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.