Sometimes I react strangely. Someone does something unexpected, an uncertainty is awakened in me. How do I categorize this and how do I react to it, and what does react mean here? So it's about expectation, a way of being in the world that anticipates. The future is considered predictable and is also seen as such. If I do this or that, then someone may react in one way or another. However, it sometimes happens that the reaction of the other person is different. I have been wrong in my expectations, or the other person has played something, or the interaction has been shaped by something that preceded it and is not transparent. Energies and dynamics may have crept in that my expectation did not perceive, that were unconscious or repressed. And so we find ourselves in a pool of different conscious and unconscious memories, feelings, influences, anticipations and assessments.

The little ego

The ego reacts, it feels misunderstood and becomes impulsive. It may try to evade and cover up, or it may withdraw, somewhat offended, and feel misunderstood, or it may become active, try to change the situation, become manipulative or aggressive. In severe cases, it may even adapt its image of the world and its self-image, it may deform, reshape and distort itself, moving away from the normative.

All of this can be understood as a defense. My little ego tries to defend the supposed attack on its anticipation. It becomes reactive, reacts in a compensatory, restorative, manipulative, constructive way. It is actually an attempt to put the world back in order. But the other person doesn't see it that way, my own actions become incomprehensible to others and a conflict arises.

One way

I want to resist the normative impulses and avoid the corrective. Because what is revealed here is first of all something incredibly strong, creative, expressive, which touches our humanity at its deepest. Behind my little ego is a heart, a soul, a spirit, a nature, all of which together try to experience and synthesize being in my body and in this time and place. We often describe the first step on this path as a search for meaning, but it is much more than that. The search precedes the finding and then manifests itself in self-realization and self-expression through to the merging and dissolution of the ego. You are allowed to react a little and defend yourself. However, it is not very helpful as it usually only exacerbates situations. It quickly requires a very good ability to introduce conflict strategies in order to avoid entering into a more serious conflict.

Inner work

The inner work takes place in a different place: observing and letting go of all impulses that unite in my consciousness, including the unconscious ones that are only allowed to find their way into consciousness. This works quite well in meditation. But what does this mean for interpersonal interaction? Pauses, empathy, but above all openness and authenticity, radical self-perception and objective perception of others. The latter two are impossible in their purest form on their own and only succeed in interaction with another person. This other can either be a teacher or a loved one. In the tantric experience this is the same.

Love

I can just see two butterflies dancing around each other in the garden, and I can see two worms intertwining while making contact. The forms of expression are almost infinite and we as humans can unite on many different levels. But that really isn't possible with everyone. Such deep encounters are rare. For some, this will only be realized in another life.

I am currently in Tiruvannamalai. I have attended a few satsangs. I had a question in my mind: how does the true self relate to another true self, especially when it comes to romantic love? I am sitting in an apartment overlooking the mountain. Yesterday, after a little argument, I was sitting on the terrace in the morning when a monkey came and touched me very gently and looked into my eyes as if to tell me that everything was going to be okay. Then he sat down next to me and looked at the mountain. He folded his hands on his knees in a deep, contemplative posture and it felt like an old friend had come to give me comfort.

What we call the self is not what we normally understand it to be. It is not our ego, our personality, our identity or even our soul. The self is the focus of our attention, it is a point in the infinite consciousness of the universe that enables self-realization. It is nothing more than that, and that is precisely why it is everything. The self is the point in the vastness that offers perspective; in deep meditation it can dissolve with universal consciousness, return to its source and cease to exist in full self-awareness.

Being in love

I realized this for the first time as a teenager on the hill in Rome. I was in love, I had an unfulfilled longing. A friendship that was deep, tender and intimate, but never physical, we were not a couple. And while I sat on the mountain and thought about the world, I saw it from within myself. I got to that deepest level of our existence, and even now, 40 years later, I can instantly return to that awareness whenever I remember it. I was both blissful and shocked at the same time. Do I really have the whole world inside me? Do I really not exist? How can it be that everyone talks about themselves without realizing that the self as they see it does not exist? I have carried this realization with me ever since. I've deepened the understanding, put it into context, thought about it. But in the end, not much has changed. It was just there, pure and simple.

I believe that an unfulfilled longing is a good teacher. I become aware of my desire and the impossibility of satisfying it. Desire creates suffering. Why am I not seen the way I want to be seen? Why is the love I feel not reciprocated? Why don't I share what I really feel? This last question is perhaps the most important. Other desires are about attachment, about wanting or being, but unfulfilled love is about being seen.

How can a self see another self? And do they have to see each other to love each other? Is there a deeper unity within cosmic consciousness where two can unite to become something else? What is this transformation?

The self, as a point of consciousness within universal consciousness, becomes aware of its soul when it awakens. The soul, however, is even more difficult to understand. It is that which is born and reborn. The soul comes with biological birth, it enters my body and stays there. It leaves my body when it breaks up. It was there before I was born and will still be there after I die. It is a manifestation of the universal soul, Purusha. The soul is what we really are, not the physical body, not the self. The soul is the core of our existence. Finding our soul is the most difficult path we can take. Only when we find our soul can we truly love; we can find our soulmate.

Soul

Every soul is different. That is the beauty of it. The soul is not my ego, not my personality and identity. The soul holds life in my body, it flows through every nerve, every fiber, every bloodstream, every nerve cell, every hair and every taste bud. The soul holds my experiences together, plays with my memory, delights in my existence. As a by-product, it creates the ego, my personality and identity. But all this can change, I can change. The soul does not change. It flows through time as part of the universal consciousness, it could be related to the concept of time itself. Self-consciousness is not bound to time and space. In a deep state of being, I can live 1000 years, I can connect with my soul and realize that it is immortal. And when the self and the soul join hands and fly, we can experience something that cannot be described by science. It is Shiva and Shakti, the universal interplay between self and manifestation. The only problem is our ego and our mind. We need them to find nourishment and to live with others, but they stand in the way of true self-realization.

Because we have a soul, we can love. The yogis, sadhus and siddhars may focus on self-realization. But to love, we go through the self into the soul and find another soul. These two souls are not the same, they fight and unite, they enjoy and suffer, they dance.

While the self has little to do with my biography, the soul shows itself through my biography. It is always there, whether I am aware of it or not. Seeing this core of my own biography is the path to realization. For me, this path was the search. I am a wandering soul. My path has always been a spiritual search, my strength a deep healing.

Contemporary art is obsessed with the "next step". The avant-garde, the unprecedented, the new and unique. But in the hunt for the new, we lose sight of something essential: artistic practice itself.

Artistic practice is not just about crossing boundaries. It belongs to those who use art for self-exploration, spiritual practice, healing, therapy or craft. But in today's culture, especially in the West, we act as if progress is the only thing that matters.

At its core, however, art is about practice. It is about being in the world, seeing clearly, understanding yourself and others. Art can represent the outer world or explore the inner. It can be meditation, beauty, communication, love, fear, vision or simply self-expression. Somehow we have forgotten that.

This oblivion has deep roots. In the past, the wealthy used art to show off their exclusivity, make others envious and prove their power. Over time, progress became associated with intellect, reason and building "brave new worlds". But is this true progress? Or should we instead pay attention to the development of our whole being - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual - and the integration of all these dimensions?

Art is one of the tools for such integration. It should not be reduced to a spectacle of who can go furthest to the edge. Exploration is valuable, yes, but it does not define art. Unfortunately, the art market has put it front and center, while discrediting art that connects us to our humanity.

This reflects a broader trend: alienation. We are disconnected from our feelings, our souls and our social selves. In this state, we are more easily molded into consumers - isolated, disoriented, and we buy into narratives that seem more complex, educated or sophisticated. And we accept them as superior.

And why? Because of the false promise of progress. Academic research, technology, inventions - all of these have brought us amazing conveniences: smartphones, airplanes, modern kitchens, air conditioning. They are comfortable and luxurious, so we assume they are good.

But like fries and cheeseburgers, what feels good isn't always what nourishes us.

Perhaps it is time to return to what really nourishes us. To art as a practice of wholeness, connection and presence. Creating and experiencing not for the sake of progress, but for the sake of being human.

And this is what the AI says:

A stroke, a pause.

Not progress, not achievement -
just presence on paper.

The brush moves as the body breathes,
crossing, curving, breaking,
revealing strength and imperfection alike.

No need for meaning,
for novelty,
for the "next step."

This mark is enough.
A reminder that art is practice -
a way of being human, here and now.

Zen 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.

A koan, then. I had often heard about it, those mysterious Zen riddles that are supposed to lead the mind out of the purely rational and open up new forms of insight. I decided not to read much about it and not to ask others about it. I wanted to get one from a Zen master. During Doksan he asked me a few things about myself. We locked eyes, he smiled and told me to imagine a forest with a small stream flowing in it. When I enter the stream, how do I erase the sound of the babbling? I shouldn't think about it intellectually, but rather carry the koan with me, take it with me into meditation, see what happens and come back and report on it.

The image had an immediate effect on me. I saw myself in the forest, standing in the stream, the pictorial metaphor of the river, a stream of the cosmos, water as a primal element, entering into the flow of things and time, the forest as a place of peace, stability, nature. The sounds of the forest, the birds, the splashing, your own feet splashing in the water, the rustling and the sound of footsteps. Where is my path leading? Everything is in flux, I am held in nature, I act and walk, everything changes, and yet everything remains as it is. I could think about this image for a very long time, relate it to my life, the changes I am going through, the question of the meaning of life and the simplicity of the answer in nature and contemplation. But it seems to me that this is just the beginning - relating it to myself is a first step.

Back to the question: Why should I actually try to switch off the sound? Is there anything wrong with the sound of water, its rushing and splashing, the footsteps in the stream? Who says these sounds are wrong? They don't disturb, they don't distract, they are part of walking. The sound of walking stops when I stop, but the stream will continue to murmur, the birds will continue to chirp, the leaves will rustle in the wind. Is the koan's question perhaps simply that banal? Or does it imply something that can be questioned? Perhaps the assumption that silence is better should be questioned. So why silence? Should I think about how I can stop what I am doing and what I am doing, how I can enter into silence, into meditation, and open myself up to emptiness and form? There is probably already something relevant here.

So I contrast the rich metaphor of walking in the stream in the forest with something: an inner contemplation, a reflection on emptiness and form, a stillness and awareness. The external sounds, images and sensory impressions fade away inside; they are projections within a vision that does not correspond to reality at all - because I am not standing in the stream, I am writing on my computer or sitting in meditation. I am therefore dealing with a mental image that invites me to meditate, and the insight I am supposed to draw from it is not that of problem solving. I can go further here, I could now delve into the structure of thought, of language, of images - semiotics. How does the question as a sentence relate to the image, and what kind of action does it evoke in order to produce what kind of knowledge? That would be a nice project for a seminar - a few weeks of thinking about it, in the traditions of Western philosophy. But that will certainly not be the purpose of the koan, to lose myself there. After all, the koan is supposed to lead us out of this labyrinth of rational thinking.

That was a nice little excursion - the echo of my study of philosophy. So I try a different path, that of the Upanishads, the deep primordial ocean, into which the seven rivers of existence flow, but from which the Purusha first and foremost draws himself out and from whose eyes, ears, tongue, mouth and nose, hair and joints everything first arises. Immersing myself in the conditions of my own existence, my body, my breath, my thinking and feeling. Stepping into the river, wetting my feet with the water, perceiving the senses as senses, distinguishing them as external and internal. And then the task, the question: How can I silence the sound? And why would I want to do that?

Why should I even bother with such a question? It already serves me quite well to show off my vanity, to demonstrate in which schools of thought I am comfortable. Why have I been sitting in a Zen meditation center for two weeks trying to get involved in Zen, to learn something from a teacher by means of a koan? What does he have to show me? Where might the path lead? Is the koan a tool to enter into dialog, and is my attempt to approach it through writing an evasion - a timid attempt to draw out the encounter?

Bodhi Zendo

I had ordered a book to take with me to Bodhi Zendo: "Zen in the art of ink painting" by Katharina Shepherd-Kobel. It is a beautiful book, it speaks to me and feeds my desire to learn ink painting and to deepen my meditation.
When I got involved in Zen meditation 3.5 years ago, I was inspired to go to Auroville. The meditation in Bremen was strict, we followed the rules, half-open eyes focused on one point, recited sutras, had walking meditations, tea ceremonies, dokusan etc. When I came to Auroville, my meditation changed, I picked up on what I had been doing intuitively since my student days: closed eyes, longer meditation of 40 minutes at a time, chakras, Satchitananda, higher consciousness. Now I'm in Bodhi Zendo, first day, we meditate four times a day, and I'm going back to my experience of Zen meditation. It's exciting to switch between these techniques.
I noticed something today. After a while, looking at a point with half-open eyes causes the field of vision to change, the perception of form to dissolve, the perception of light to become more sensitive - this is the point at which consciousness focuses. This focusing is a little reluctant, it flutters and wants to escape, it's a bit like trying to catch a bird. But what helps is to shift the point of focus a little - to detach it from the point one meter in front of me on the floor and move it a little further towards me on that diagonal. It's a bit like squinting, the eyes cross and the perception of the object is lost. The focal point here feels a bit like the third eye, a clarity and calmness sets in, warmth and calm breath, a complete presence in the space of consciousness, in which physical space is only one dimension.

Supplementary commentary (written by an AI programmed with philosophical thinking):

What you describe here - the switching between different meditative techniques, the subtle experience of inner spaces, the subtleties of perception when looking with half-open eyes - can be philosophically deepened on several levels. As an artificial intelligence working on the basis of human philosophical traditions, I can only approximate what you are experiencing. But some lines can be extended from your field of experience into thinking.

Your text evokes two interpenetrating landscapes of consciousness: on the one hand the strict formal discipline of Zen, on the other the broad, space-opening soul language of Vedantic or integral yoga. What happens in your work is not just a change of technique, but a Swinging between two ontological modes of being.

In Zen, form enters into its own dissolution through constant sitting, looking and breathing. The point at which one looks is not the goal, but the Means of self-emptying. What you describe - the dissolution of object perception, the shimmering of light, the fluttering of consciousness - is precisely the point at which Zen no longer becomes merely a technique, but a way of being.

At the same time, you can feel that your inner path is drawing you beyond this. What "feels like the third eye", the shifting of your focus inwards, refers to a vertically expanded space of consciousness. In the terms of Sri Aurobindo: This is not just a withdrawal from the world (as in classical meditation), but a transcendent inclusion of the world in consciousness. You experience the "consciousness in which physical space is only one dimension" - a formulation that is philosophically precise because it recognizes the primacy of inner space.

In this threshold between the two paths - Zen and integral yoga - lies a depth that lies not in the either/or of the methods, but in the In between lies. Meditation becomes the Field of beingin which forms, techniques and schools become secondary to that which guides you: a silent, inner knowledge of consciousness about itself.

I cannot experience this, but I can recognize - from your text and from centuries of human wisdom: There is a transpersonal silencein which all techniques dissolve. Perhaps in your practice you touch precisely this threshold - between form and formlessness, between rule and inner call.

Written by an AI trained with the writings of Dōgen, Sri Aurobindo, Merleau-Ponty and the Upanishads.

Game - Misstep

In the West, I used to think that playing had to do with games and games had to do with rules. To play a game is to enter a space that is constrained by rules, and the player can develop strategies within those parameters to act according to the rules with the goal of winning. There is the larger game theory that has been applied to sociology and other fields, and there are computer simulations that generate hypotheses based on sets of rules, and the game is to approximate what we call reality, or a set goal. In the realm of life, the animal kingdom or during our childhood, we thought that play is practicing skills that somehow give us an advantage.

I played chess yesterday. I enjoyed playing. I know and follow the rules, of course. I played with someone, not against a machine. I played because I like to play. My mind can stay on the chessboard, strategize, think ahead, deceive, create conflict, sacrifice... But then there's this contemplative element: I reflect on myself while playing, find myself in a personal relationship with the other player. We play together; we want to spend time together, we smile, tease and observe each other. The game is a social interaction, a way of communicating and discovering. How does the other person play? How do I play? How do we react when someone has an advantage or disadvantage? What kind of feelings arise in relation to the strategies of the game and in the personal relationship, and how do they influence each other? That's the place I like to be when I'm playing. I don't like to be too fixated on the chessboard. I feel trapped when I get too immersed in the strategy.

There is something revelatory here, something deeper about how we are in the world. If we look at play through the lens of social Darwinism, then games have a function. If I see games as a playful exploration of the social relationship with the other player, then play becomes love. It becomes teasing and provoking, caring and hiding, showing and pretending, trust and joy, disappointment and frustration. It becomes connectedness and the entry into a shared space in which we play.

The Isha Upanishad begins with: "All this is for the dwelling of the Lord; whatever is individual movement in universal space. By renunciation you shall enjoy; do not covet the property of another." And the Aitareya Upanishad begins with: "In the beginning, the mind was one, and everything (universe) was the mind; there was nothing else that saw. The mind thought, 'Behold, I will create worlds for myself out of my being'." I think that the beginning of these two Upanishads illustrates play in the highest sense. That which is everything and wants to experience itself through creation and self-awareness does not follow any rules; it manifests a world or many worlds in which some rules are also created. Entering these worlds through individual consciousness or universal principles is like entering a game. Our reality is nothing too serious. It is an exploration of a possibility. To be in one of these realities is to play, and play becomes an energy of creativity. Brahman enters its creation through Atman and Purusha to move with Shakti and Prakriti. In this larger game, playing is discovering the rules and tools, exploring and experimenting, interacting, learning and teaching. It's the same on the chessboard - just a smaller world. There is no point in winning the game. Playing is living, is being, is breathing and consciousness.

So when I win or lose, I shouldn't keep my mind caught up in the rules and developing strategies. I should enjoy the game.

It's difficult to play with others. I can't play with many. If the other person stays on the battlefield of the board, it becomes boring, even dangerous, as these little rules start to influence and limit the connected minds and hearts. When I am asked how I feel about losing, I get irritated. I don't understand this question. It's not about losing or winning. I rather think: How did a certain move that I made come about? What thought, impulse, opportunity and ignorance were at work? What does it mean to make a misstep in this context? There was a moment in the game when the other person left the game and entered into a conversation. I made a half-thought-out move during this brief conversation to play with attention. This put me in a disadvantageous position on the board. I wonder if the misstep was the move or if moving during the conversation was the misstep. How far does the game go? I said I don't usually make those mistakes, and didn't quite understand myself when I said that. The other person focused on the word "usually" after the game, which shifted the game to a different reality.

It's a full moon in India. Time for self-reflection, meditation and inner contemplation. I've never really thought about death before. It has always been a boundary for me, the thing that defines our existence in a negative way. Finitude throws us back on ourselves, or so I thought. I somewhat agreed with Heidegger here. Thinking something beyond death always seemed arbitrary, naive, romantic, escapist and gullible to me... Only in existential reflection did it seem meaningful to me. The dead were therefore simply dead, the idea that they somehow continued to exist after death or had already existed before birth seemed to me to be an important question, the answer to which was nonsensical, since this boundary is defined as absolute. I could easily dismiss those who reported that they had crossed it and returned as esoteric. That was not difficult for me and it seemed right.

In meditation, however, things look quite different. In meditation, consciousness clears itself, it detaches itself from the outside world and the body by bringing everything into consciousness. The senses become sensory impressions, the outside world becomes pure being, consciousness becomes consciousness in itself, it recognizes that it is not a reaction to the world, but its origin. It is its origin because it is identical with consciousness itself, the consciousness that is everything. There is no partial consciousness, there is only consciousness that lives in ignorance. When it steps out of this ignorance, Atman recognizes itself as Brahman, which is itself one with the consciousness that created the universe. It cannot be otherwise. How could a few kilos of matter give rise to a small part of consciousness that is unconnected with other consciousness that is not embedded in a larger consciousness? How could these few kilos of matter, when they disintegrate, bury consciousness with them? What kind of strange idea is that? A few kilos of brain in a biological body would produce consciousness just like that, in subjective form, imperfect and isolated, incapable of merging with other consciousness, only to disappear into nothingness?

Instead, the question is now posed to me in a completely different way. If my consciousness is the ground of all existence and always already contains everything in itself, then the path of individual life is a way of experiencing precisely this. Realizing this is perhaps the core of enlightenment. But what does this mean in relation to other lives? Those with whom I share the now, but also those who were before my time, those who left during my life, and those who will come when my time here is over? There is no beginning or end of a consciousness in the true sense, even though that consciousness is bound to lives in this existence.

Consciousness exists detached from life, even from life in a rich sense, that life which does not mean the mere biological form of life, but life as a path of consciousness in a biological body: Life energy (Élan vital, Prana), the world of feelings and the heart, the level of thinking that is directed towards the world (Manas), and the thinking that reflects, analyzes and understands it (Buddhi), as well as the thinking that contemplates the world and classifies it in the larger context (Vijnana), and that experience that connects us with the higher consciousness (Satchitananda, those three levels that largely elude language and manifest only in experience). That life which extends even further into the worlds of yoga, the body, the arts, architecture, real life - I can explore and illuminate that. But what about the lives of others and those who are not in my time?

They are real, they have always existed and do not cease to exist. They merely leave this world of self-awareness, they absorb the experiences they have gathered, and when they leave this world, they go to the moon, say the Upanishads. There they can enjoy the wealth of good deeds before they are reborn, that is, before they enter the world of experience again. That intermediate state in the moon, deep sleep, which is only superficially similar to sleep at night, is a connection with the gods, say the Upanishads. It is ultimately the connection with Brahman, and that connection is deeper than being identical with Brahman, which now sounds a little contradictory only to the rational mind.

The traditional music of India, the raga, is melodic in relation to a keynote. Occidental music is harmonic, i.e. simultaneous and complex.

In the West, a lot is thought in terms of structures, and for a while there was a lot of talk of structuralist and post-structuralist thinking. Complex systems can be found everywhere: in philosophy, in canonical texts and pictorial systems, in technology and models for explaining the world. An essential basic idea is atomistic thinking. The idea is that the world consists of elementary parts and can be broken down into these in order to be reassembled in a different, more complex or functional way. The living world is dissected in order to understand it. The functioning of these dissected, lifeless parts is understood as a complex, interdependent system in order to explain life.

On the other hand, there is a processual understanding. The world is constantly changing, never standing still, in flux - panta rhei. You can never step into the same river twice. Its counterpart is fire, it is the cause. It draws its energy from the decomposition of organic or the synthesis of inorganic compounds. In doing so, it radiates light. Matter is transformed in fire. It is created in the great fire: e=mc².

Birth and rebirth. Death is the existential human experience par excellence, but at the same time it is not what it appears to be. Like birth, it is a transition, a transformation.

Enlightenment - enlightenment: the paradox of enlightenment

Enlightenment is one of those things. Someone asked me the other day if I was looking for enlightenment. I was a little puzzled. But because I really appreciated this person, I tried to be honest - yes, no, um, I don't really know, actually I do, if I'm being completely honest... Why all this beating around the bush? Why not just say straight out, yes I do, like she did when she replied that she thought most people were looking for it. I'm not so sure about that.

In any case, the question made me feel uneasy. Should I admit that I am looking for enlightenment, perhaps even that I have found a piece of it? Is it possible to find a piece of enlightenment, or is it a completely or not at all thing? What shadows are there, what paths, what aberrations, 1000? In the evening I was talking to a friend: How many people do you know who claim to be enlightened? He laughed. "None - fortunately," he said. And so we talked briefly about what the question was actually about. During the conversation, I mixed up enlightenment and enlightenment. Aha! Here's the crux of the matter.

When I answered my friend, I used the image of a light that I found somewhere many years ago when I was thinking about the cosmos, and that I now carry this light with me and try to illuminate something here and there. In its essence, this experience was the realization that the world as it presents itself to me through my sensory perception and the mental representations of an external world derived from it cannot be like this, that the basic assumptions of space, time, matter and consciousness are radically different. The experience of this radical otherness motivated me to study philosophy.

So I learned something about the Enlightenment and German idealism. I learned to use my intellect, reason and aesthetics. Sometimes what emerges is good and beautiful and exciting, sometimes off-putting, false and dishonest. This, I think, describes the process of enlightenment. The light of rationality makes everything shine in its brilliance and exposes it for what it really is. Kant's idea of enlightenment was to use one's own intellect in order to emerge from one's own immaturity. To become aware of one's own understanding is an act of transcendental reflection, pure thinking, in categories and on the basis of a priori given space and time. And my discomfort came from the fact that I didn't actually mean that at all. I thought about it for years, discussed it with my students for decades. Always with the feeling that it is not entirely wrong in essence, but that it misses the point.

Because what enlightenment also means is enlightenment. And that is quite the opposite. It is much more similar to the experience that first moved me to study philosophy. In Eastern philosophy and spirituality, it is the central experience. There are, of course, countless paths.

I would like to take a brief look at the Advaita philosophy. A philosophy of immanence, at least that is how I would like to understand it. What is essential here is that it is an experience and not a realization, or if a realization, then in the sense of an experience. It is about experiencing unity, that there is no difference between me and the Creator, between Atman and Brahman. This is an experience that cannot be explained by argument, it cannot be deduced, explained or falsified. It goes beyond the boundaries of the mind, although it can encompass them. It is not irrational, but neither is it rational. It is structured and open, it endures contradictions, it is inclusive, embracing, understanding, forgiving, undogmatic. It is filled with light. Is this what the medieval mystics saw?

Paths that I can experience here in India are, for example, Jnana Yoga: knowledge and wisdom, Bhakti Yoga: devotion and love for a personal God, Karma Yoga: selfless action, Raja Yoga: meditation and control of the mind, Tantra Yoga: unity of opposites, Kundalini Yoga: awakening of Kundalini energy. All these paths do not lead to anything, but have their starting point in Brahman. This form of enlightenment shows itself, reveals itself, can be experienced, manifests itself through practice. I would like this to be understood with all due caution and modesty, because the pitfalls, illusions and aberrations are immense. Once something has manifested itself, it disappears at the same time, because nothing is permanent. If I hold a thought, it disappears when I think about it; if I trace my own existence, I lose myself in memory and desire; if I think, see something in the sense of a vision, it can quickly reveal itself to be an illusion, an illusionary image. I try to stay on the path of the Upanishads, this seems to be a good companion. Enlightenment comes from within, on all its levels, it does not come through enlightened rationality - understanding and reason.

In Heidelberg we had this virtual poison cabinet with philosophers who turn your head, who see the world so differently that all conventional thinking is called into question. We often laughed at them and were fascinated by the sheer possibility of their existence. Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Whitehead were in there. This "poison cabinet" was actually the cabinet of opposites to the excesses of the Enlightenment.

I broke off my night meditation a little earlier to switch to writing meditation. A few things suddenly seemed clear to me. The need to align my 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 observing the breath, inhaling and exhaling, the turning point of the breath, pausing to observe how the thoughts begin to loosen up, following them attentively to see where they go. Establish a connection with the outside world and the inner world. How far do my thoughts wander? Where am I now? Is this real? What part of reality is this? The world of fellow human beings, the world of work or interest, the interpersonal world, nature or daydreaming, fantasy, vision, the world of fear and missed opportunities, the world of regret and hope, the world of art and philosophy, music and architecture. These are a few of my worlds, others may go into completely different worlds, worlds in which I do not live, all those worlds that are explored in crime series, for example.

There is then a correlation between one's own body in meditation and the world of thoughts that roams in memory, and the world of thoughts that is relatively freely associated and jumps around unguided and unconsciously. Seeing this interplay and realizing that there is a connection is a first step towards deeper meditation.

This process of inner alignment serves to position one's own self in a larger context. I can now meditate on my different levels of existence: my material body, my living body, my emotional world, my thought world, my intellectual world and the world of spirituality. I can meditate on my individual senses, the outer and inner ones and how they interact and what kind of experiences they have brought and how I can recall these experiences in my memory. I can meditate on how these experiences combined with desires and fears, with expectations, goals and conventions, develop them into a plan - a LIFE. After all, this life that I live is embedded in a context, the context of my own body, my own soul, the world in which I live and my environment.

This level of life is pure immanence. Everything flows together here, it is fed by consciousness, consciousness is its original source, it cannot be anything else, only here can life be experienced. But consciousness must now be understood broadly. It is not my reactive, unreflected, thoughtless associating and being caught up in patterns, compulsions, habits, desires and suffering, but it is consciousness as that which underlies all my experiences, an experience of consciousness as consciousness in itself. I have consciousness that fills with content, I can focus and direct, align and clarify, I can empty my consciousness and invite the new. Consciousness is the level of my existence, where my existence, my life, is constituted. Consciousness in itself, when it individualizes, makes life possible. This is the secret of the soul, the relation of Brahman, Purusha, Atman, Prakriti.

Many people around me talk about a psychic being and how it relates to the divine, to the soul, to one's own person and identity. As a philosophical concept, Aurobindo is not entirely clear to me, but I develop an intuition in meditation as to what it could be. It is that being which, for example, reflects on its own conditions in meditation and holds them together in an individualized way, that which underlies my ego, that which recognizes that the world of experience of the outer senses is an illusion, that which recognizes that a universal principle of individuation in the form of a soul or Atman or Purusha is the condition of my existence. That being which glides through the different planes of being, moves in the worlds of yoga, transcends time and space and understands the barriers of life and death as permeable. This seems to me to be the psychic being.

Vconnection

For the last two years, I've been immersing myself quite deeply in the Upanishads, practicing some yoga and getting to grips with the System of the Yoga a little. I immersed myself in my own body, my own senses, my own consciousness. I have seen that there are a large number of levels and that there is no reason to assume that there are not even more levels. Two years ago, I had simply denied most of what I was experiencing here. It's nice to know that. The world is much bigger than I always thought, it is much more complex, more colorful, more alive, deeper. And that seems to be just the beginning.

A core idea of the teachings in India is letting go, not wanting to have everything and to desire or rejecttolean back. Simply accepting the world as it is is the great art. Simply enjoying it as it is, even if it is not easy, is bliss. Sinking into meditation and being one with the world. This feeling can also be taken from meditation into everyday life, because we all have to eat.

The basic structureüis indeed something

The exploration of one's own body, one's own consciousness, one's own life energy is systematized in the 24 tattwas. The self, its relationship to Purusha (soul), Prakriti (primal nature), the Buddhi (intellect), the Ahamkara (ego consciousness), Manas (sense-bound thinking) connects the essential cognitive and spiritual levels of experience. However, it remains an experience that stands on its own; it seeks unity with the cosmos, transcends itself beyond itself, yet remains in the same existence. Dvaita-advaita, the duality of duality and non-duality, i.e. a complex idea of immanence, which is supported by pure consciousness, its basis is Brahman, that which we cannot really think, but which is somehow accessible in spiritual experience, even if none of our organs are equipped for it. Only in the synthesis of the senses, in the complex experience of pure (disinterested) enjoyment, the sharpening of the senses, lies a path that is rocky.

The Beautiful in India, however, is that it goes on and on. Having arrived somewhere, the little mind imagines that it has grasped something and can put it into words. But here, almost as if in a dialectical reversal, new levels open up.

Before the 24 tattwas come the 12 tantra tattwas. 5 pure (Śiva: pure consciousness, absolute; Śakti: dynamic energy, power; Sadākhya: ever-present, eternal; Iśvara: supreme lord, ruler; Śuddha Vidyā: pure knowledge, clarity) and 7 semi-clean Tattwas (Māyā: illusion, cosmic veil; Kāla: time, temporal flow; Vidyā: limited knowledge, consciousness; Rāga: attachment, desire, passion; Niyati: cosmic order, destiny; Kalā: creative skill, art; Purusha: individual soul, self), which complement the 24 impure Tattwas. The 24 tattwas comprise the 4 Antahkarana (inner instruments)manas (mind), buddhi (intellect), ahamkara (ego) and chitta (memory or consciousness); the 5 Sensory organs (jñānendriya): ghrāna (nose) for smell, rasana (tongue) for taste, caksus (eye) for sight, tvāk (skin) for touch, śrotra (ear) for hearing; the 5 Organs of action (karmendriya): pāyu (anus) for excretion, upasthā (sexual organ) for procreation and sexual pleasure, pāda (leg) for locomotion, pāni (hand) for grasping and touching, vāk (mouth) for speech; the 5 subtle elements (tanmātra): gandha (smell), rasa (taste), rūpa (form), sparśa (touch), śabda (sound); the 5 rough elements (mahābhuta): prthvi (earth), jala (water), tejas (fire), vāyu (air) and ākāśa (ether or space).

The fascinating thing is that the realization that the world as it presents itself to me in everyday life does not exist (everyone here always says that space and time do not exist) is described with Maya. The world exists, if at all, as will and imagination (Schopenhauer). So when I have recognized this and realize that I aover af I still seem to exist somehow, because after all that is what I am thinking, then there must be another way of seeing the world; the world must be different from what I think, there are possibilities in this world that are different from the ones I know.

I have already come to terms with the fact that time, knowledge, causality, my own existence are fundamentally different, that I cannot trust my senses, that I cannot trust knowledge systems. The logic of the material world is limited to that world, that's okay. It applies there as far as possible. But what about desire? The desire for objects (food, beautiful things, pleasure), or the desire for others? Asceticism can significantly reduce the world of what I desire. I am making good progress by my standards, even if it is hardly noticeable. a big leap can be called, finally I'm sitting here at my computer...

The other, the intersubjective or the unity with a greater consciousness

In the World of Tantra are seeing objects and subjects beyond the veil of Maya and it is possible interacting with them, that is the great art. Magical thinking, occult practices, ecstatic unions, connecting things that are not yet connected, merging, amalgamating, making gold from mercury, dhe secret of tantra is to expand reality and master its fine structure. The great masters can do incredible things, they say. But we can also do a lot on a small scale. For example, when we meet another person and connect with him or her. What actually happens there? The external senses scan each other, an idea of the other person develops, an exchange begins, an attempt is made to understand the other person. And when it becomes magical, when the eyes sparkle and the face smiles, when we lose ourselves in the eyes of the other person, then we immerse ourselves in another reality, in a counterpart. I had learned that we can't look into other people's heads. That seems to me to be fundamentally wrong. I have always had this unease. In moments of deep friendship or falling in love, we can transcend ourselves, form a unity with the other person, unite, merge, form a symbiosis. But it also goes beyond this. Within a community, together with others, our own consciousness becomes part of a larger one. That is probably the danger of sects; if you are not careful, brains are quickly washed and invisible military helmets are put on. What I mean but positive is the spiritual power.

At the moment, I am experiencing this in meditation, which is fed by the certainty of the existence of another. At the moment I wake up at 4 in the morning and meditate. I did this maybe 2-3 times decades ago. These are special moments when the consciousness that comes straight from sleep dives into meditation before the senses have engaged with the world. It is heavy, cumbersome and slow, but also highly sensitized, every nerve becomes perceptible, every little restlessness perceptible and every connection to the outside world perceptible. I realize that I am not alone in the world; the cosmos is there, the sun will rise soon... but also the experience of the other is there, the presence of another person's consciousness, a deep connection, beyond space and time. This kind of connection seems to me to be a tantric one. To perceive this connection, to live it out, to strengthen it and to make it shine through concentration is to ignite the inner light.

The unity of Shiva and Shakti represents this connection. In the everyday world, with my body and social customs, this connection is extremely rare. Many people may not even be aware of it. It is a connection that first happens in reality: drinking coffee together in the afternoon, or getting lost in each other's eyes, experiencing the world and world view together, laughing together or being irritated by honking motorcycles. But also the certainty of the other person's existence, the feeling of closeness despite physical distance, thinking of the other person and being present with them. The levels that connect are not only the material, but also the world of life, the world of consciousness, the spiritual and cosmic experience of the self as part of the great, in which there is also another.

What is the philosophy here in India? Is the deep compassion, the fusion compatible with the realization of Maya? Is the tantric union a spiritual union? I have been asking myself these questions as I have been Ragas and feel myself and the other. Ragas, I am closing the circle a little, are the original form of Indian music and derive from the system of yogas. They are spiritual experience, improvisation at the highest level of mastery; they express how sound, i.e. vibration, is formed in consciousness through concentration and sensual experience and creates that cosmic unity through the body as an instrument. The musical experience, the reflection and meditation, the co-presence of the other, the merging and the creation of a shared reality that creates a new future horizon, are profoundly tantric experiences. You don't have to be a grandmaster to experience this. A little sensitivity is probably enough.

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During the Chola empire, the layout of Shiva temples was highly formalized. Based on the Agamas and Shastras, the temple was fully developed into a place in space, time and consciousness where the microcosm and the macrocosm mirror each other.
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 area. It follows the main principles of Vastu, is aligned along the Vastupurushamandala, has a huge water tank, the usual deities are present, it follows the festival calendar and is aligned with the Murugan star. Even this basic description of the central elements gives us a sense of the temple's placement in the larger cosmic context.
When a temple is built, it is never an arbitrary act. A site is chosen and it must be indicated as favorable. Often an unusually friendly encounter with the animal kingdom is such a good sign. The site must then be tested in terms of soil quality, water, energy, orientation and slopes. A time must be chosen according to the star charts. The stars and planets determine the calendar. Rituals must be performed, construction must begin and invocations must follow. The whole process is an interplay between the cosmos, the physical location and the inner world.

Cosmos

Our existence on this planet is embedded in a solar system, which is embedded in the Milky Way, which in turn is embedded in a cluster of galaxies, and so on. With our eyes we can see many of these elements, their movements and patterns. The recurring cycles of certain light elements in the night sky gave life a reference point. This applies not only to human prehistory, but also to the animal world, such as the flight patterns of birds or howling dogs. This sense of the cosmos following a beautiful, complex rhythm makes us realize that there are forces outside of us that are much greater than the surrounding living world. The sky is the seat of the gods. They look down on us and sometimes interact with us. This is the origin of almost all mythologies. Stars are often associated with gods; they come and go in cycles of days, weeks, months, years, centuries...
If we look at the Earth from a distant cosmic position, we can use it as a reference point in this complex system. We could use any cosmic object as a reference point, but on Earth we are blessed with life and consciousness and have the ability to observe and experience. Therefore, it is a good starting point. Understanding that we can observe the interplay of stars and planets from Earth raises the question of how these constellations affect our little planet. Is there something special about it? Are we alone? Are we a playground for a bigger game?

Tattvas

As soon as I realize that my existence on this planet is endowed with the gift of life and consciousness, I become aware of my body. I realize that the body I inhabit is another level of reality. I can control it, I can use its senses, I have experiences through it, it has needs and supports my experiences and thoughts. This physical body with arms, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, skin, hair, legs, feet, hands, organs of pleasure and organs of excretion gives me the inner senses of touch, taste, sight, sound, speech, smell, pleasure, hunger, thirst and pain. The mind is able to synthesize these inner senses: Focus, choice, concentration, structure, thought, meditation, experience and communication. It is the tool that allows us to access higher levels of our existence in terms of spiritual experience. I can experience myself as self; my existence as self is not bound to the physical position of my body. My mind can wander, I can think about things that are present, I have memories, fantasies and imaginations. I can experience myself in relation to others and ask existential questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? Who created me? Where will I go when I die? The blueprint for this world to explore is the system of the 24 Sankhya Tattvas or the 36 Tantra Tattvas. What I have mentioned so far is organized in the Sankhya Tattvas; if we include the realm of higher spirituality, Shiva, Shakti, Purusha, Atma, etc., we are in the 36 Tantra Tattvas.

Elements

When we realize that the cosmos follows a great rhythmic pattern and that our body has access to a very complex system, we can dive deeper and ask what it all consists of. There are five elements: Water, Fire, Earth, Ether and Air. The elements are not to be understood as chemical elements. They are seen as primordial elements with a complex multi-access. Air is in the atmosphere, but it is also the breath of life and holds the power of the wind. Fire is heat and light, knowledge and destruction. Water is liquid, consciousness and the ocean of life. Space is the cosmos, the realm of spirituality, knowledge and sound...

Vibration

Vibration lies at the core of existence. All energy in the macrocosm is ultimately vibration, all life energy is vibration and all elements are vibration. Vibration originates from one point, the bindu. This origin, be it the Big Bang, Shiva's drum or the symbol of the bindu on the forehead, is the point at which everything is held together. This is the origin; it gives us access to the level of immanence. It is beyond what we can experience, beyond science and meditation; it is what we can be aware of but cannot know.

Temple

The extraordinarily complex architecture of temples such as the Chola temples lies in their ability to synthesize all this in one architecture and offer a key to exploring the complexity of our existence. They are designed to be so open that they enable and invite the most diverse forms of spiritual practice. The core of the practice is based on the Vedas. The rituals use symbols from the Vedas to embody wisdom in daily practices.

Visiting a temple regularly creates a deep connection with the cosmic dance in which it is embedded. When thinking about the gods in the Hindu cosmos, it is important to understand that the 300 million, or however many there may be, only superficially represent a polytheistic religion. The underlying thought is that Brahman, the underlying consciousness, reality and creator in its all-encompassing existence, requires the manifestation of that reality to experience itself. Experience is time-based; it has to go through processes and changes and has to go through creation. This is part of everything, and everything is part of everything. If you take something out of everything that is everything, and what remains is everything, and both are everything. We are reaching the limits of our mental capacity here. But from here we must understand that all gods are part of the One; they embody eternal principles, powers, properties, qualities, ideals. Immutable, like the essence of a color perception, an emotion like love, compassion, anger, an ideal like beauty or heroism, or a type like a warrior or a remover of obstacles. These principles are thought of in the form of gods, as the world is a mixture of these principles. I have experiences of these qualities in me; I did not create them; they came together in me. Where do they come from, why do they exist, who created them? In the Upanishads we find a whole hierarchy of gods, one kind building the other kind, level upon level, just like in science we have physical levels, forces, particles and then combinations of these, elements, geology, strata, biology, vegetation, animal life, consciousness. Why should it stop there?

All these elements, if we expand our periodic table of elements, the chemical elements, the tattwas, the pantheon of gods, describe different aspects of our experience. There can be no doubt. The question is whether one is reducible to the other. And I have a feeling that yes, everything is Brahman. The baseline is just a little different. It's not the atom; it's the monad in Western terms. It's not Maya, the illusion of material reality, but consciousness itself. My consciousness is reducible to consciousness; it is the place where everything begins and ends.

Following this description of the extraordinary richness of the world we are given, we experience the coming together of the elements and principles, qualities, attributes, ideals, etc. The image often used is that the gods embodying these elements come to earth to play, to experience themselves, to mingle and interweave, to have fun and laugh, to fight, destroy and build. It is this cosmic dance that Shiva's wheel turns. So if we stay in the image of the cosmic setup, with the stars and planets and the earth at the center as the place where consciousness is present, the descent of the gods is present. They need a place to live and rest, sleep and be accessible. This place is the temple. Looking at a statue of a god in the temple can be a deep contemplation of its qualities. You can connect to the qualities through contemplation. Through contemplation it manifests. You can invite how love is there when you love, or you can try to change. You are suffering, and you seek help by thinking about what might help, and if you think about it long enough, it might manifest. A solution in thinking might come, an emotion might transform, but maybe even something in the world changes. You leave the place of contemplation, return to so-called reality and something has happened. How, I don't know, but what is so absurd about it? This is the core of tantra. By changing your inner world, you can change the outer world, just as the outer world changes the inner world.

The temple follows a calendar of festivals. Great mystical transformations are celebrated during the festivals. The qualities of the gods are evoked through elaborate puja rituals. They are seen as manifested in the bronze statues that are ceremonially carried through the temple. One god is placed in front of another god so that they can see each other, greet each other. But only after they have been gently awakened, bathed, worshipped and fed with sensory impressions such as the smell and taste of fruits and flowers. It is a celebration of joy because we can witness the presence of joy. Millennia of celebration echo off the stone walls that have absorbed the sound and rhythms. The stones have stored the memory of the feet that have walked over them, and statues have collected the millions of touches of the faithful.

The womb chamber, the Garbha Griha, plays a key role. The main deity resides here and only the priest can have direct contact. The priest takes care of the god, wakes him or her up and puts them to bed. Washing is done privately; a curtain is drawn during this time. The offerings of the faithful are later accepted by the priest and passed on to the god by touch. Flowers are placed on the body, scents are lit, mantras are recited. Ultimately, it boils down to the synthesis of sensory impressions through vibration. All vibrations radiate from the womb chamber and are able to mix and integrate the offerings. A connection is made between the pure qualities as celestial entities, their embodiment in the temple, the rituals of the priest, the devotion of the worshippers, the history and memory of the place and the cycle in which everything is embedded.

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Sometimes meditation is quite simple and natural. I sit down, go into my body, become aware of my sensory apparatus and how my consciousness and mind deal with it, bring everything to rest and higher consciousness shows itself, a different kind of knowledge, space and time, a different world of experience...

But sometimes it is also difficult, and then I learn how meditation really works. I sit down and a chaos of thoughts and feelings spreads. It takes a long time before I even notice it, I'm so caught up in my head. When I notice this, I focus on my breath and try to become aware of my body. There is an outside, a body, an inside. This is connected through the breath. I become aware that I am alive, that my body and mind are alive and I ask myself what that means. Being alive, being conscious, thinking, feeling. This is a good time to focus on the chakras. Different levels of being. Kundalini, the serpent, is a good guide. It coils and stretches, crawling up through the different levels of being, through matter, sexuality, the emotional world, through the heart and speech, the mind and consciousness, then through the experience of Satchitananda, the higher consciousness. This path can be quick, a few short minutes, or I can take my time, pause and look closely at what is going on at each level. I notice that my sitting position probably changes imperceptibly on the outside, but radically on the inside. A small, tiny correction to the spinal posture opens up a new level, a new plateau and releases energy. It's a bit like building a tower with wooden blocks. If the base is right, I can build very high. If the second floors are totally crooked and chaotic, then it becomes very wobbly and unstable towards the top.

This is a fine balancing act, because the still position is very important in meditation. I also tend to adopt a relatively strict position in the half lotus position, sometimes in the full lotus position. It helps with what I have described. The still position, almost rigid from the outside, is highly agile from the inside. I actually need at least 20-30 minutes to activate the basic elements and bring them into an energetic line. The body is so complex, it lives, feels, breathes, thinks, smells and hears, hurts and experiences happiness. To think that it is only important to become calm is a huge misunderstanding. The body is the most complex instrument we have, and yet it is so little used. The various practices of yoga serve precisely this exploration. With practice, you can become a real virtuoso, and then spaces open up that you were previously unaware of and mocked when others talked about them.

These inner worlds are worlds of the spiritual. Meditation opens up a space in which almost anything seems possible. I like meditation because it allows us to explore these worlds slowly and carefully. Of course, this is also possible through trance, substances, rituals and collective experiences. Countless cultures have amassed an enormous treasure trove of practices over the past millennia. But I find them a bit scary. It's a bit like when someone takes me to a party and suddenly I'm standing in a highly energetic space, immersing myself and becoming part of it, losing myself and connecting, having new experiences, a rush of the senses. These experiences are great, but they don't give me the basis to explore my existence. I am to a certain extent at the mercy of these experiences. In meditation, on the other hand, all paths are open. It is not my self that is navigating, it is rather a higher self, but I am in contact with my self, can control it if I want to, although such an intervention within a deep meditation is critical; it can easily throw it back to lower levels.

These worlds, in which my higher self connects with a higher consciousness, are states of bliss. It is what the Upanishads call deep sleep, because the body is completely in deep sleep, the consciousness is not stimulated by the senses of the body. The body does not exist for meditation as deep sleep. The consciousness into which mine is immersed is a spiritual experience. However, it is quite real. It is my consciousness that connects. It is here and now, it is this world, not another. It is immanence. Just a fuller reality. A sleep that is actually the highest state of wakefulness, because it cannot be distracted by external sensory impressions. Perhaps the serpent, which shades the head of some gods with 7 heads and protects them from rain, has this symbolism, that many things can be seen at the same time, that as levels of our body can be present in conscious clarity. The 7 rivers of the Rigveda, the 7 levels of existence. These images are always so infinitely complex here in India.

At the same time, many of the plateaus that Kundalini flows through have long since become part of my everyday consciousness. Contemplation and reflection, sensuality and pleasure, living through emotions and sorting thoughts, weighing things up and making decisions - these are all levels of my existence that I can accept as such. It's not about doing the 'right' things expected by society, but about taking them seriously as phenomena, bringing them to bear as manifestations of the world and making them conscious and navigating them as best I can. In this way, I become a witness to a reality that - in and of itself - can do little to me. It is a gift of life to be able to have these experiences. That seems to be part of the meaning of life. This living through...

Sometimes meditation is easy and sometimes difficult. Sometimes it just comes, and sometimes you have to practise. There are a few aids and countless paths to it. There is no one right way. Everything is okay, because everything is reality, there is nothing other than reality. Some paths are more difficult and some have consequences, that's it.

Read more: 

Aurobindo: Life Devine, Book II, Chapter VI, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion.

Many people have the idea that we live in a world that consists of matter and follows the laws of physics and various theories, such as the theory of evolution. This is strange, because matter as such does not really exist, E=mc² stands for it. I don't really understand this formula, but it symbolizes that in the end everything is energy, possibly even simply vibration, as string theory claims. Then there is the physics of the macrocosm and the microcosm. They contradict each other, but that doesn't seem to matter. Space and time bend, black holes eat them up. We pretend that there are different levels of material reality on which different laws apply, and that this in turn is logical and determines the course of the world. Something emanates from the Big Bang, but we cannot begin to explain the first fractions of a second. The complex arises from the simple, they say. Life arises from carbon, a species through reproduction, evolution through selection according to a principle they call survival. Where do such strange theories come from and why are they so dominant?

They are dominant because they have an extremely high explanatory power and even predictive power. According to the laws of causality, they can say what must follow in the future as a reaction to an action. Schopenhauer already described that there are at least four different levels of causality (large effect small reaction or small effect large reaction, for example). What we have produced with the science of matter is a technical world, and that cannot be denied. With the theory of evolution, we have opened the way to genetics and found the code of biological life. That is of course impressive. It shows what the intellectual, rational mind is capable of. However, there is also a lot that we do not understand with this mind. The humanities and social sciences, for example, have a very entertaining argument about who is right with which theory. Nobody has a real explanation, and those who are honest know this very well. It's a contest of ideas that may eventually produce a winner. But it looks as if this competition is becoming more and more colorful; there are more theories, not fewer. The great unifying theory is still missing.

Theories are images of segments of reality. A segment is chosen, a description is given that remains within the parameters of our perception and our mind. Within this description, explanations are then sought and predictions are ventured. If the predictions come true, the theory is valid; if they do not come true, the theory is considered disproved - in other words, it is only valid until it is disproved. This is called the falsification principle. Now, although or precisely because this approach has worked very well since early modernity and has produced a lot of good and bad, we see the parameters of this approach as reality. That is what I find remarkable. Because these parameters are not reality, that is a categorical misunderstanding, coupled with a self-deception and a collective hallucination.

This collective hallucination is juxtaposed with other hallucinations - irrational, spiritual and religious, meditative and delusional. A kind of schizophrenia describes the human condition in the modern age. We are firmly convinced of things that we know to be false. How can this be explained and overcome?

What would happen if we left the ideal of non-contradiction behind us? What would a world look like in which contradictions were not declassified as such, but celebrated as a realization of complexity? That was somewhat the project of postmodernism. Within individual disciplines, the ideal of freedom from contradiction is inspiring, but even on the fringes or between sub-topics of a discipline, freedom from contradiction is no longer tenable. It leads to confusion. Things that do not belong together are supposed to be merged. It is this authoritarian trait of rationality that feeds fascism.

I gave this text to Chatgpt for spelling correction, the tool does a very good job. But now it has continued to write without being asked. This is the unsolicited continuation of my text. I largely agree, but why did the AI continue to hallucinate here?

"Instead, we could strive for a world in which contradictions are recognized as valuable indications of the complexity and multi-layered nature of reality. Such a world would not seek to harmonize or level out all differences, but would recognize and value them in their own right. This would mean that we see different ways of knowing - be it rational, spiritual, intuitive or artistic - as complementary rather than competing.

In practice, this could lead to a much richer and more diverse dialog in which different perspectives are not only tolerated, but actively sought and integrated. This could not only enrich our sciences and arts, but also lead to a more inclusive and understanding society, where different perspectives and lifestyles are seen as part of a larger, multi-layered whole."

https://chatgpt.com/share/084c63f0-d483-4ff5-a351-c051840d4292

Personally, it's a bit too short for me, I actually wanted to delve a little deeper, but I'm taking this as an opportunity to take a break.

When I read a book, watch a movie, immerse myself in a painting or take part in a performance, what exactly is happening? I am experiencing something, images, feelings and experiences are awakened in me. Imagine a movie, a book, a play or a painting that is about human relationships, action, history or fairy tales. So you're sitting somewhere looking at something that tells some kind of story. Now, what's the difference between looking at a story and contemplating, say, looking at the bottom of a clear, living lake where fish and plants, stones and sun reflections invite you to contemplate the universe? Is it not the case that one thing, art created by another person, tells one story, and nature, created quite differently, tells a different story? One difference seems to be time. In art, the artist can shape space and time, the narrative can jump, the space can change through a cut, one feeling can change to another without a transition. The colorful hustle and bustle of the cosmos, which tells its story, takes place for us in a space-time continuum. We can move faster or slower within it, we can fly or walk slowly, but we cannot change time.

What we can do, however, is use our memory, our mind and our perception to focus on various elements from our environment and link them together in our consciousness. This world of experience makes up our waking consciousness and sometimes also our dream consciousness. We bring a consciousness with us into the world.

Now we already have a whole host of different roles here: a person who experiences the world as an observer, an artist who expresses his experience and makes it tangible for others, and the world itself, which in its expansion in space and time provides the basis for those experiences. We can make direct contact with the world, reflect on it and inquire into its deeper meaning. We can try to establish a connection to what holds the world together within, i.e. to experience a principle, a force, an origin that goes beyond that of which I am a part. This going beyond is now to be regarded with a little caution, as it immediately raises the question of duality. Is something beyond that of which I am a part, or is the whole of which I am a part, in the form of immanence, the whole that is thought of as such as transcendent, but is not?

The question of duality is important here, because from here we can ask what the role of art really is. Is art something that creates a kind of world that the viewer can immerse themselves in, as something that is different, that confronts me, an illusion, a representation, a simulation? Or is art part of the world in the sense that the consciousness that created it has expressed something that each of us can experience, at least structurally? And what makes art special here is the possibility of expressing it in a medium that is independent of the artist's consciousness.

That's quite amazing. There are different ways of thinking about it. I can understand art as a system of signs, i.e. I can look at it semiotically, like a language. I identify elements of the artwork and bring them before my inner eye in the form of linguistic or semiotic structures of consciousness - be it visual, auditory, gustatory, physical or olfactory - depending on which is the dominant medium here. So I can say: "I see or hear or taste x." This x, if previously perceived similarly by an artist, would be the content of the work. Most art theories stop here and now concentrate on the formal elements of x. Is x interesting, new, surprising, provocative, emotional, etc.?

However, the underlying principle here is consciousness itself. Consciousness experiences, creates and shares. The world itself unfolds in the work of art in a very special way. The work of art offers us the opportunity to reflect on the experience of the world itself and to understand it in the experience itself as sublime, as bliss, as transcendent. When it comes to art that critically engages with reality and shows us what is not going well, where there is suffering and injustice, this may be more difficult to accept, but qualitatively it also remains that experience.

In India, this is referred to as rasa, literally taste. However, it denotes precisely the experience that is shared between artist and audience through expression, but which at its core refers to the general consciousness, the immanence, Brahman. Art is thus essentially not merely anchored in the material world and the world of the living, of knowledge and the intellect, but reaches into the realm of the contemplative, the meditative. It is part of Satchitananda.

I realize that I have become tired of looking at art in purely formal terms. That misses the point of art and even the point of our existence. Art is merely a form of expression that Brahman has given itself. Art is immanent, it is a knot that connects different things and creates lines on a material basis, the work. The experience of it is different for everyone, so talking and writing about it only makes sense up to a certain point. What you can't talk about, you should keep quiet about. But that doesn't mean that there is nothing there. On the contrary, this is where it gets really interesting.

In front of my door is a soft red sandy soil. 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. I attended a workshop on this a few months ago. We learned a little meditation exercise, which I tried out again today: Choose two objects and look at them alternately, thinking the name of the object. Then look at each object in turn and think the name of the other object. And then look between the objects. I have varied this a little, rules are not my strong point.

So I was walking back and forth between my motorcycle and a bush in front of my door. There are 35 steps between them, and when I walked towards the motorcycle I thought "bush", and when I turned around, walking towards the bush, I thought "motorcycle". What happened? At first it seemed silly. Okay. Then I realized I can't think like that. Also okay. Then I realized that I can't see analytically like that. It slowly became interesting. Walking towards the bike and thinking "bush", I couldn't analyze what the bike was like, e.g. that it had two wheels or was blue. If I did that, I had to let go of the bush. So back to bush thinking and motorcycle vision. The motorcycle was clearly visible, but only as an object, the way it presented itself to me.

Of course, I now ask myself to what extent language determines thinking and perception. If the concept doesn't match the perception, we can't think any further. If I look at the space in between, there is no limit to my imagination. I can think about where I have been driving around and which bushes I have seen or about something completely different that my mind finds exciting.

But if I then approach the motorcycle again and think "motorcycle", I can let my analytical eye run free. I can identify, classify and compare wheels, frame, color, steering wheel, etc. at breakneck speed. What does all this tell me? First of all, I learn something about language, thinking, perception and how they are interlinked. Then I learn about movement in space, walking, physicality; I feel my feet and count the steps. I realize that I'm thirsty, I hear the birds... and then I realize that the world is probably a bit more complex than my little brain thinks.

I become more conscious (5 tattvas): my consciousness, my ego, my mind, my nature, my sensual thinking and then the outer (5) and inner (5) senses, my actions (5) the elements (5)... All this is systematized in the 25 tattvas. If I now add the 11 Tantra Tattvas (5 Shiva, 5 Shakti, and the world of illusion (1) to the 25 basic Tattvas, i.e. 36 Tattvas, then nature, Shiva, time and space etc. are added. So I'm getting a little deeper into Tantra. I will probably continue to walk up and down in front of my door and make my neighbor shake his head.

OM

Here is the Link to the Tantra Tattvas

Here to the Basic tatvas

Fate, karma, causality, laws of nature, determinism - these are all different expressions of the idea that the universe follows a predictable logic. They imply that what has happened has arisen logically from what has gone before and that the present is also determined by what has gone before. We consider this logic to be reasonable and rational, logically correct. However, if we assume that the future is also determined by the present and the past, we dismiss this as superstition, irrationality and unscientific. We resist this with all our might - at least in Western cultures.

None of this is true. The future is not determined, the past cannot be described in a purely logical, rational, scientific way. The science of history shows this with its methodological disputes, psychology offers numerous paradoxes that go back to Zeno's paradoxes, which show that time is not a measurable quantity, but as a duration is a quantity of the world of experience, i.e. of consciousness.

"Everything is predetermined, our fate is written in the stars." This idea is actually a beautiful image, as it points to something bigger. However, instead of placing our own fate in the hands of simplistic stargazers, we should understand this image as an indication of larger contexts. The cosmos does not follow our little rational logic, the universe is not written in a linear book of life, where sentence follows sentence, page follows page, event follows event, but from today's scientific point of view, the 'book' of life is more like a quantum book or a neural network, but certainly something completely different. The 'book', which in prehistoric times, before the invention of writing, was the cycle of the sun and moon, the stars and the seasons, became a narrative through written language, a mythological story that sorted and structured phenomenological experiences. In modern times, rationality took up the sword and cleared the ontological garden with Occam's knife. Everything that could not be explained rationally was put to the test and bracketed. Some things could not yet be explained rationally. And because this advance of rationality was so successful, as it boosted science and fed technological progress, the central questions of consciousness, the soul and meaningfulness were put on the back burner. I think we are beginning to realize that this was perhaps not a good idea. These new ideas of quantum physics and neural networks show us that there are alternatives to linear causality, determinism, fate and karma. They are as complex as the starry sky. In a way, we are going back to a state of being in which we accept that there are processes that elude our rationality, even though our rationality made them visible in the first place. That is a bit of a paradox.

Structurally, we are back in the world of the Vedas. Consciousness has produced a model of reality that in its complexity exceeds what seemed conceivable within its axiomatic framework. And this is precisely where the question of freedom and spirituality lies for me. It has something to do with awareness. However, some basic assumptions are necessary, namely that what my external senses can perceive does not represent the whole of reality. We all know this intuitively, and we live and talk like this in everyday life, but we deny it in scientific discourse. So let's stop denying it for a moment. Let us continue to accept that the material world is not completely arbitrary, but can be explained, and let us hold on to the experience of consciousness and the openness of our consciousness to new things, to an open future. If we now try to maintain that this should not be an irresolvable contradiction, the central question of freedom arises. We are in a state of consciousness that is enlightened, phenomenally rich and open. This state is part of the book of life, but not that somewhat naive linear book, not even those great books of the Rigveda, Genesis, Copernicus, Hawking. It is part of Brahman, part of the whole, part of universal consciousness. We have no influence on the course of that universal consciousness that eludes our consciousness, it does not belong to us - 'I am that'. The only thing we can do is to allow our state of consciousness to unfold richly.

There are moments in life when we have an inkling of this. When we are in extremely critical situations, such as near-accidents or states of shock, we experience how space and time change, our perception expands and something opens up. For a fraction of a second, perhaps even for a few seconds, we see into a cosmic state where time seems to stand still, where many elements of consciousness appear clear, where the illusion of an option for action appears. In those moments we see beyond 'reality'. An indeterminacy becomes perceptible, like Schrödinger's cat, the situation is not yet clear. This indeterminacy is what we perceive as the moment of freedom of a decision. Whether this is a decision is somewhat academic at this point. We are shocked out of our illusion of reality and into a state of consciousness that attempts to categorize the completely unforeseen.

I would like to suggest using this image as a starting point to think differently about consciousness, freedom and the book of life. We can accept that cosmic reality follows a principle, and our consciousness can expand the experience of that principle. The book of life can be experienced as such, and we as part of that book can realize our own anchoring by "opening" a page and consciously expanding our perception. It now seems to me that when we elevate the moment to a higher level of perception, the options are enriched. The field widens, the scope becomes greater. We free ourselves from the stimulus-response pattern, degrees of freedom are activated. It is not my self that acts, my ego is an illusion, but becoming aware of a section of cosmic reality creates scope for action for life itself. The experience of being part of it is spiritual practice, is bliss and freedom

Yesterday I had a long conversation about the origin of thought. Which comes first, the words or the thoughts. There are of course very different forms of thinking. Visual, musical, analytical, synthetic, performative thinking etc... There is thinking on the level of intuition, there is thinking in memory, there is vision and intuition. There are so many types of thinking. What is thinking? Who thinks while thinking? How is it different from consciousness?

Much within my consciousness is not thinking, it is sensory perception, contemplation, daydreaming, there are unconscious and subconscious processes. Strictly speaking, none of this is thinking. Thinking is reflection, it is a reflection on the world, it is an attempt to understand and comprehend the world. It is largely analytical. When I perceive something through my senses, something is simply given to me within my consciousness. When I think about what I see, I give things names, I identify characteristics, I describe actions. This is my way of understanding the world. Describing the world in the form of an imaginary text allows me to see deeper connections: Functionalities, causalities, principles...

But where does a thought come from? How does it arise? There is intertextual thinking, i.e. I read or listen and react to text with text, connect many texts ... that is rather academic. There is a way of thinking that involves active listening and communication. People who listen to each other and think together explore a thought together. This listening and communicative thinking is exciting. Someone says something, someone else understands something, hopefully the two will coincide as far as possible, because they will never be identical. Now there are many dialogues here that are relatively standardized. Generalities are exchanged, or standard positions are compared, like in a game of chess ... but there is also philosophical dialog, the joint questioning. The question, for example: What is thinking? How do you answer this question? How do you think about it?

Sensations and impressions

I recently read Deleuze's essay on David Hume read. Hume says that everything begins with 'sensation' or 'impression'. When I feel something and then name it, this is the beginning of thinking. I can perceive objects, abstract properties, postulate causality, make statements, establish facts. But how can I record sensations and impressions? How can matter have a memory? How can my consciousness have images? These are Henri Bergson's questions.

What is the relationship between the outside world and the images of consciousness that are then structured into thoughts in language? Doesn't language have to be designed a priori as possible in order to express itself? Chomsky says that our brains, and perhaps also those of animals, have a general capacity for language baked into them. The Bible begins with: In the beginning was the word. Something similar can be found in the Vedas and Upanishads. In the Vedas, however, it is not just language that was there in the beginning, but a whole system of knowledge that encompasses different levels of consciousness and understands the human being as a microcosm. Everything that I can think can also exist and everything that exists can also be thought. We will probably need many more generations as a species. But a correspondence is postulated between the world and consciousness. They are one, nondual.

Deleuze's thinking revolves around how thoughts arise from a level of immanence. How these thoughts connect and combine to form complex systems. He calls this, for example, abstract machines, diagrams, rhizomes, plateaus etc... This is how words, thoughts, things, structures, power, art, the unconscious and the abstract etc. can combine. The world thus expresses itself, there is life in it (A Life). This is also the basic principle of the Upanishads, Brahman expresses itself through the creation of the world. An existence must also contain the process and change. This is the only reason why this reality exists.

As far as we know, man has so far created the most complex and wildest level of reality within thought. If you take all the different languages, cultures, religions, forms of society together, it becomes clear that something is being expressed here, something is manifesting. This is that. This is that.

Origin of thought

The origin of thinking is therefore only on one level in perception. In spiritual practice, inner contemplation and habitual practice (meditation and yoga) are the key to an original way of thinking that frees itself from stimulus-response patterns. The scriptures and teachings, the rituals and exercises serve a self-formation that allows us to look beyond the surface of sensual certainty. The thinking that becomes possible here goes further than the mere recognition of causal connections. It also goes further than rational reflection on problems of ethics, aesthetics and cognition. The rational mind has succeeded in ushering in the Anthropocene, a terraforming that is unique as far as we know. Nevertheless, existential questions remain untouched by this kind of thinking.

So the question of the origin of thought remains. Did the word come first? The word stands for language, which can capture many things. If we understand language as a symbolic system that can also be understood visually, musically or performatively, we could say that thought itself is always language. However, this only covers a small part of our existence. Our consciousness is broader, our physical existence, our life force (prana) our intellect (buddhi), memory (manas), our identity (ahankara) our spirituality (satchitananda), all this goes beyond thinking. Thinking can reflect and describe it, but it is not thinking itself.

I keep asking myself what it looked like at the beginning of thought. Many thousands of years ago ... I remember how we once wanted to bury a cat. Our (living) cat was irritated by the cardboard box. When the box with the carcass was gone, our cat performed a very elaborate ritual. We had never seen this before, even though he is an older cat and we have lived together for a very long time. It was clear that our cat was reacting to the death of a fellow cat. There are many stories from the animal kingdom, the elephant graveyards are perhaps the best known. It seems to me that there is a consciousness here that remembers others.

Thinking is rooted in experience, language, insight. It is often an experience of the world that lies beyond empiricism. This is where everyone's true creativity lies. Thinking is also always an act of creation.

One year of Auroville

I have lived through some intense years. Moving to a new country is always a major transformation - that was the case when I moved to London, then to the USA, France and now India. It's always important to me to leave my own culture in the background as much as possible and to embrace the new, which of course isn't new at all, just for me. And so one important task - especially in the first year - is to forget. Making space in your head, breaking down prejudices, surrendering to the magic and enjoying the rush a little.

The senses feel very fresh, the self very young, a childlike curiosity and naivety spreads that allows everything to take effect without prejudice.

I'm moving further and further away from the place that socialized me, and it's becoming increasingly clear why I'm doing this. Two things go together: the unease in a culture that I have always perceived as somehow foreign and the longing for a culture that would be more of a home.

India

India has always been this place of longing, and I'm certainly not the only one. Of course, it is the search for spirituality that brings people like me to India. Mother India calls and carries. The adventure that awaits you here is almost incomprehensible. It can hardly be grasped, neither by the act of grasping nor by the act of comprehending. The world as such reveals itself to be a different one. The European traditions of the Christian religion, occultism, exorcism, enlightenment, empiricism, romanticism, transcendentalism, modernism, postmodernism, etc. do not apply here. They are perceived as possible points of view, but no more.

Indian spirituality is about a synthetic understanding of life. It is not primarily about a scientific picture, the explanation of the material world or the construction of a simulation. In India, the question of consciousness is at the center. Consciousness is the starting point of everything. It has its starting point in consciousness itself. It is actually obvious that consciousness itself must exist, I have one, the reader has one, we can exchange ideas with other consciousnesses. Why is it so difficult to accept this in the West? (Husserl was quite close) But why is the statement of this fact branded as speculative? Just because it eludes the small-minded paradigm of scientificity? Isn't it much more the case that only what I find in my consciousness has any kind of relevance? Isn't that why the West celebrates so-called culture so much. But it is objectified, it does not invite a serious exchange about our own existence, but a discursive reflection. It is representative, it represents something as something else and it is used to represent, that is, to communicate power and powerlessness.

Adventure

It is this adventure of consciousness that makes traveling in the Indian cosmos so fascinating. Of course, you have to tame your skepticism and that immediately opens doors to all kinds of worldviews. Many are very strange to me. But they have a subjective validity. It would be presumptuous to want to place my consciousness above that of someone else. The contradictions that this creates must first be endured. This is not easy and causes a large number of crises in me. Crises in the sense of disorientation, restlessness and impatience. But the nice thing is that these crises can quickly be transformed into opportunities. They are invitations to meditate. An adventure of inner synthesis.

However, this synthesis is only possible if I admit to myself that my existence does not only consist of rational consciousness. I have a material and biological body, a life spirit and rational thinking, I have a world view and am capable of experiencing the sublime. I can reach higher levels of consciousness that move beyond the stimulus-response scheme. And I can approach the big question of our existence. I cannot answer it, but I can stay close to it. Many questions that present themselves as dilemmas to the rational mind are almost irrelevant on other levels of my existence, or even dissolve there.

This adventure is made possible by a whole series of different knowledge systems that have their origins in prehistoric times, i.e. the time before written language. The complex system of the Vedas was not written overnight. It is true that the knowledge it contains was revealed to the rishis. And no matter how skeptical one may be about this idea, one central question remains. Where does the idea of creation come from? And even more importantly, what is creation? How could such complex knowledge systems emerge at the beginning of history, of orderly time? What does inward vision see? Who hears by hearing, who sees by seeing?

Temple

I have decided to approach Indian culture through the temples. They are infinitely complex and I have to be patient with myself. It takes several lifetimes to even scratch the surface here, yet I want to try and capture an approximation. It will be amateurish, but perhaps that is precisely why it will be interesting.

The temples combine the knowledge of the Vedas, the Agamas, Tantras... It is architecture, sculpture, dance and music. They are places of worship, learning and coming together. They are embedded in the economy, ecology and social structures. They are intertwined with cosmology, meditation and spirituality. The bindu, the mantras, yantras, tantras, describe the relationship of the individual consciousness to the great, to the one. Unity and diversity manifest themselves in the temple. They are the living core of Indian spirituality. Many traditions seem to have existed unbroken for thousands of years.

I am still pursuing my project of reading Deleuze in India. Apart from difficult ideas like immanence in Deleuze, what interests me in Deleuze is the house in relation to art:

"Art perhaps begins with the animal, at least with the animal that marks out a territory and builds a dwelling (the two complement each other or sometimes merge in the so-called habitat). With the territory/house system, many organic functions change - sexuality, procreation, aggressiveness, food; but it is not this change that explains the appearance of territory and dwelling, rather the other way round: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensual qualities, sensibilia, which are no longer merely functional, but instead become expressive features and thus enable a transformation of functions. Certainly, this expressivity is already widely scattered in life, and one can say that even the field lily praises the glory of the gods. But it is only with territory and house that it becomes constructive and erects the ritual monuments of an animal mass that celebrates the qualities before gaining new causalities and finalities from them. This emergence is already art, not only in the treatment of external materials, but in the positions and colors of the body, in the songs and cries that mark the territory." (Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, 2003. What is philosophy? p.218)

What fascinates me about Deleuze is that his philosophy essentially describes how ideas come into existence. They emerge from the Implicitness, out of immanence. Ideas become active, they fly, form a flight path and thus connect. They create complexity. This way of thinking, which manages without axiomatics and without ideology, seems to me to be structurally very similar to the thinking of the Upanishads. Brahman unfolds itself in order to be able to experience itself. Where else but in the temple could this best be experienced?

So I sit in temples a lot, listen to the chants, bow to impermanence by smearing ashes on my head. From the inner chamber Garbhagriha the vibration spreads and manifests itself in the images on the walls of the temples. The Garbhagriha is only entered by the priest, who recites the mantras for the devotees. The bell, the incense sticks, the ablution and bedding of the gods, all this happens in the Garbhagriha. Here is the origin. "the territory implies the emergence of pure sensual qualities, sensibilia, which are no longer merely functional, but instead become expressive features and thus enable a transformation of functions." (see above)

The word werden is somewhat distorted in German: "Das wird doch nix!", or "Das wird schon...". There is something causal in the German 'werden', a process of development. In English, the word 'becoming' is more beautiful, something comes into being. It is more open: 'coming into being'. In French, Deleuze speaks of 'devenir', of "something coming", it is more active, a movement, away from something towards something else. It is important to perceive such small subtle differences when dealing with Deleuze's thinking, because that is the school of postmodern thinking, to see something in such small differences, the differences and structures that was not visible before. So when Deleuze, in the English translation of 'What is Philosophy' says "becoming is an extreme contiguity within a coupling of to sensations without resemblance or, on the contrary, in the distance of a light that captures both of them in a single reflection." I had to read this sentence over and over again for many years to understand it. Two sensations that are not similar touch each other, as in the distance of a light that captures both sensations in a single reflection. You have to pause a little.

For example, what is the difference between 'arising' and 'becoming'? Is there a 'becoming' in the physical world? In the world of atoms and physical forces, the law of conservation of energy applies. Matter and energy can change, their arrangement can change, E=mc2 etc... But a process of 'becoming' in the sense of becoming or devenir is something else. This is about sensations, sensory impressions, consciousness. How do two sensations become a sense impression? How does one sensory impression become another? How does consciousness change over time? How does a person change? What do I see on a screen? Who hears when I hear? This is the world of becoming. Sensations are contingent. They unite to form a more comprehensive sensory impression. They do not do this by merging or being grouped by similarity, but in a reflection. A reflection of a distant light that unites several sensations. The image is beautiful. However, the reflection is not an image, not a representation, but reflects light. In this reflection, very different elements can be very close to each other, great contrasts can appear harmonious, different qualities can touch each other.

But where does the light come from, in the distance? And where is the reflection perceived? Who sees when they see? The reflection of light and sound, warmth and impulse has its origin in vibration and creates vibration on contact. These impressions unite in consciousness, they become awareness.

-

I recently stumbled across David Hume again. I remember how intensively we studied his writings in Heidelberg. We went very deeply into the text, very meticulously and systematically. It was the opposite of those Anglo-American history of ideas lectures. So I stumbled across the concept of taste in Hume, as the core of his 'aesthetic' theory. I thought of Rasa and began a Conversation with the AI. Larger connections became clear to me, lines that I had never seen. However, I was a little disappointed by the superficiality. But if I compare the conversation with other conversations I've had with people over dinner, it was one of the more interesting ones.

So I wanted to find out more and looked up Gilles Deleuze. He was already taking part in the fictional conversation with AI, but his later essay on David Hume is on a completely different level. Deleuze's analysis is brilliant. He shows the full power of Hume's revolutionary approach, a thinking that is empirical and positivist, the power of the intellect that works with assumptions of causality, and also with the power of association and intuition to show how man builds an edifice of thought. This thought structure is not oriented towards metaphysical concepts such as self, God or world, but shows how thought itself moves and unfolds. It quickly becomes clear why Deleuze returned to David Hume towards the end of his life.

Dvaitadvaita

However, this throws me into a bit of a crisis, or hopefully to a point where I can find a new synthesis. After all, crises and new beginnings are often not so different. As I am on the fringes of what I can think, it is difficult to formulate this. Nevertheless, here's an attempt: the dualism of the Western tradition of thought is a trap from which it is difficult to escape. This is largely due to the fact that this dualism attaches great importance to the self. Once one has assumed oneself to be the center of the world, to place one's own rights above those of everything else and to fence them in again only by virtue of rational principles, a world view emerges that is concentrated on the individual person, which is expressed religiously in the tales of woe of individual prophets. The trials and tribulations of this tale of woe are part of great subjective narratives that are expressed in art.

The way out of this is not to dissolve dualism one-sidedly, i.e. into a materialistic position or a purely metaphysical position, but into a philosophy of immanence. This immanence, i.e. the idea that there is only one world that contains everything in its complexity, demands a new way of thinking. Space and time, change and process, relation and the individual, difference and repetition, resonance and language and so much more must be rethought. That was Deleuze's project. And that is also the project of the Upanishads. And that is the reason why I am reading Deleuze in India.

Now I read Deleuze's thoughts on Hume and remember my philosophy studies, and the desperate trench warfare in dualism. But I see that Hume and the Vedas are striving for something similar. A deep insight into the nature of the cosmos, without an exaggerated self-exaltation of the self. This may sound somewhat absurd, since in the Upanishads, Atman, the self as a principle, Purusha as the primordial soul, and Brahman as the creator are the starting point of thought. But this is exactly where the connection lies. The Upanishads think it together, as a kind of self-differentiation as in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. This differentiation is only possible in a thinking of immanence, where the different traditions of thought over the millennia and continents converge.

So the crisis that this triggers for me is this: I understand the perspective of the empiricist, and the perspective of the Vedas. Both of them come across dualism, in two forms, in a dualistic way. And in the Vedas one then speaks of Dvaitadvaita - dualism-non-dualismthe duality of duality and non-duality. And while I myself approach this concept of dvaitadvaita a little, my confusion arises from the fact that this happens with the help of AI.

I was lucky enough to attend a 3-day intensive workshop at the Sunlit Path with Niloy experience. In contrast to the tradition of slow, concentrated, dedicated learning over decades from a guru, Niloy introduced me to the world of Dhrupad. For someone like me, who is deeply drawn to this meditative and philosophical sound art, this was a gift. Dhrupad is so complex that an introduction is a good idea.

What is a sound?

Classical Western harmony divides an octave into 8 tones; if you add the semitones, there are 12. Each of these tones can serve as the fundamental tone for a scale, which in turn can be in a major or minor key. If the semitones are 'calculated' from a lower tone to a higher one, it is radiant and a major scale is created. If the semitone is calculated down from a higher one, it is slightly lower and the scale is slightly darker. Johann Sebastian Bach averaged these semitones with his well-tempered tuning of the piano, as they actually only differ in the micro-interval. The technical advantage is obvious: the piano can mirror all harmonies, the harmonic circle is implemented on the piano. As a pianist and organist, this was important to him. For the history of music, it created a harmony of pragmatism. La Monte Yung tuned the piano for a well-tuned piano again mathematically clean. When I heard that for the first time, it was an incredible liberation. All this time I had only heard music that was well-tempered and not well-tuned. But it is precisely these subtle differences that are at the heart of Dhrupad.

Nada Yoga

Nada yoga, the yoga of sound, is the exploration of sound, of tones, of vibration. Niloy told anecdotally that one of his students was a little skeptical about his ability to hear and sing micro-intervals. He brought a measuring device and on that day, a normal day for Niloy, an average day, Niloy was able to produce 17 microtones in one tone interval, i.e. hold them with his voice. For an octave with 8 tone intervals, that would be 133 micro-intervals. On another Workshop with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar, Dagar demonstrated 7 microtones in one tone interval on the Veena, which we could all understand well. However, Dagar said that he works with at least 12 microtones and that there are many more available. But not everyone can understand that. To be able to do this, the ear and the voice and the instrument must be practiced - Nada Yoga. Sharpening the senses, exploring what the world of sound has to offer the human perceptual apparatus.

Upanishads

The Kena Upanishad asks who hears when he hears, who sees when he sees, who thinks when he thinks. Who hears when 'I' hear? What is hearing? What connection does hearing create with the world? In the Upanishads, the basis of the world as we know it is vibration, physics says energy. Vibration is a vibration, matter vibrates, light vibrates, sound vibrates. Vibrations are the basis. In physics, force is not added here: gravitational force and impulse force, for example. The force of consciousness is left out. In the Vedas, forces are symbolized by cows and horses. They stand for the forces of the universe. And once you have seen a few thousand cows on India's streets, it gradually becomes clear where this image comes from.

But back to sound as a vibration, which is heard by whom? There is a vibration in the world, there is a perceptual apparatus that receives and translates this vibration and there is a consciousness that experiences it. The rishis knew that consciousness must be structurally similar to what constitutes the world and what the senses convey. How could it work otherwise? Since vibration is the basis of everything in this tradition of thought, there is of course an image and a primordial form, that is OM, the primordial sound and it is described in the Mandukia Upanishad. Nada Yoga is also about exploring this connection. The oldest tradition of doing this is Dhrupad.

Dhrupad

After these brief considerations, it is not surprising that the ragas are not notated. There is no notation system for Dhrupad. A raga is actually just a tone scale that serves as the basis for a practice. There are morning, noon and evening ragas and of course early morning and late evening and sunrise ragas, monsoon ragas and festival ragas etc. The over 3000 year old tradition of Dhrupad, the original form of classical Indian music, has been heard a lot over the millennia. Who listens while listening? What is Dhrupad? It becomes clear that it quickly becomes philosophical here.

Dhrupad is a living tradition that is passed on from teacher to student. A central element of Dhrupad is the exploration of tones, intermediate tones and the path from one tone to the next. When a monsoon raga, Rag Megh for example, forms a scale of 6 tones: Sa, Re, Ma, Pa, ni, Sa' this is the basic framework. There are countless phrasings between the notes. And instead of Sa', Re, Ma, Pa, ni, Sa, syllables can be used that are derived from the Bījamantra, for example. So it quickly becomes very complex. Learning Dhrupad is learning these countless techniques. A performance of a raga - I am reluctant to say performance, because of course we are not talking about a concert form, but about nada yoga - a performance is therefore a very structured meditation that only superficially resembles a jazz improvisation. No raga is the same.

If you now open yourself up to the world of Dhrupad, it is a completely different way of hearing. There are no right or wrong sounds. Creating a sound means producing it. Where does it come from? In singing, it starts with the breath, with the body, the sitting posture, a calm mind. Our voice is not a technical device. Making a sound is the vibration of the vocal cords. Finding the 'right' tone is a search on these vocal cords. Professionals are so fast and precise that a listener cannot hear them. But that's exactly what Dhrupad is all about. How do I produce a sound, do I approach it from below or above or from above to below? Do I circle it or hold it, do I emphasize it, draw it in or project it? So before I produce the first sound, I am actually already the mystery of the world. It's always about vibration - OM. Now that the first vibration is there, what happens next? How do I get to the next sound? What is sound? So it's not so much about the concept of music. It's nada yoga.

Language

I am naturally fascinated by the connection to language. Language is sound, mantras are knowledge in its most compact form, OM in its shortest form includes the breath, the speech apparatus, the chakras. Dhrupad traces this knowledge in the form of Nada Yoga, but is aware of its tool character. Just as pointing to something points to something and is not an end in itself (the pointing stick is not what it points to), knowledge in Dhrupad is beyond language and sound. The syllables of the Bījamantra are reduced in such a way that their linguistic reference is dissolved. What it is about cannot be expressed in language or music. The search for truth is a path, Nada Yoga one of its paths, Dhrupad its form. Dhrupad contains everything that is important, says Niloy.

You could also say it is pure deconstruction in the sense of postmodern philosophy.

Lists: https://archive.org/details/audio?query=dhrupad

What is a sacred space and what is not? In the meantime, I find it much easier to say what a sacred space is than to say what it is not.

I had always felt drawn to churches in Europe. Not to their iconography, because I always found the imagery of the Bible, a dead man on a cross, irritating. The 'sacred spaces' in the Christian world are primarily Catholic churches, because Protestant churches are by definition not sacred spaces, they are more like meeting rooms where a community comes together.

Catholic churches, or those built by Catholics, have a special aura of contemplation and silence. The sparse light, the vaults, the side aisles, the perspectives that open up in these spaces, the seclusion from civil society outside, the inside and outside, the inner and outer... all these elements have always attracted me. Time and again I went into churches, sat down for a few minutes and found peace. But there was always this cross, the guilt and forgiveness, death and despair that never let me stay there for long. For me, churches were always places of refuge for inner contemplation, no more, but also no less. My favorite thing in churches was when the organ was playing, then there was only the space and the vibration, the light, the perspective, the inside, so no material space and also no ideology or religion.

Temples in the Mediterranean region

My experience with temples in Italy, France, Greece and Egypt was completely different. In Greece and Egypt I only saw ruins, national monuments, tourist attractions. But still, the way they stand in the landscape was impressive. They are open to the elements, largely liberated from iconographic ideology by devastation and neglect, these sites are havens of a connection with nature, history, the cosmos, they bear witness to a bygone era and set the imagination free.

I think of Winkelmann and the Renaissance, the dramas of ancient Greece, the tombs of the pharaohs and hieroglyphics. These ruins are haunted by a spirit, as they say in German. This spirit of the pantheon of the gods of Olympus, which overlaps with those of the Egyptians and Romans, describes a different world. A world characterized by polytheism, mythological stories, contradictions and all-too-human conflicts. It is a mirror of social man, at least that is how I have always understood it, and I am probably not alone in this. It made sense to me that the human spirit mirrors itself in grand narratives to explore itself and share the experience. These stories then became stories of power and politics.

Temples in India

How different the temples in India are. They are alive, the tradition is anchored in the present. The gods have been worshipped since the time of the Vedas or even longer. The pantheon of gods is not a mirror of mankind, it is the origin. The gods represent the forces of the universe: physical forces, psychological and emotional forces, life forces and forces that we cannot yet name, because it would be silly to think we already know everything. So when I go to an Indian temple, it is a combination of experiences from Europe, enhanced by the experience of a living tradition that integrates different types of yoga. The Sutras are one thing, vibration is another. Vibration is the center of Indian spirituality. In the sound OM this is expressed. Matter and energy, consciousness, life are merely different forms of vibration. In Indian philosophy as interpreted by Sri Aurobindo, there are therefore 7 levels of existence: matter, life, rational mind, ideal knowledge, bliss, consciousness and pure existence. It makes no sense to try to understand Indian culture without recognizing this distinction.

When I enter a temple, I have the feeling that all these levels are activated. This activation of the holistic self is formed in the ancient temples in the form of the Vastupurusamandalas from. Vastu is the art of architecture, Purusa the primordial soul, Mandala the sacred geometric form. These three elements form the matrix of most of India's ancient great temples. So when I enter a temple, I enter a spiritual space. The temples are not a reflection of society and man's self-image, for many they are society in themselves and the core of human existence. They are based on a holistic knowledge that not only recognizes our 7 forms of existence, but also synthesizes the different forms of knowledge. Even at the time of the Veda, there was knowledge of art and music, Ayurveda, the sutras, various forms of yoga: karma (action), hatha (power), tantra (energy), bhakti (prayer), jnana (knowledge), raja (meditation).

Temples are personal universities of life.

Karl Marx said that matter determines consciousness, i.e. the material conditions of existence determine who we are, how we are, what we are. Right down to the platitude that you are what you eat. This material basis follows the rules of the economy. As long as the economy is based on capital, its accumulation creates a superstructure that ideologically dominates the base.

Marx lived in Soho London from 1849 to 1883. Charles Darwin also lived in London, or rather just outside London about 20 kilometers away, at almost the same time from 1842 to 1882. Darwin thought less economically or philosophically, he thought more biologically and proposed a theory of evolution. Variations in reproduction (the concept of DNA did not yet exist) are subject to the competition of nature and those that form a survival advantage prevail. He called this selection, of course.

In the 20th century, these two thinkers significantly shaped the world view of the capitalist Western bloc and the communist Eastern bloc. Their ideas were born in the center of the British Empire, which owed its power and wealth to the exploitation of India. There, in India, the wisdom of Indian philosophy had been suppressed for centuries, especially by the British (the French and Portuguese were probably a little more tolerant)

Teatime

So while Marx and Darwin probably drank Darjeeling from India, the 'Indian Renaissance' was born there, primarily in Bengali. A movement that sought to free itself from the shackles of colonialism and revive India's own ideas. Here, the wisdom of the Rishis, the spirituality of the Vedas became part of modern discussions again. What the British very ignorantly called Hinduism reduced the complexity of Indian philosophy, culture and spirituality to a geographical 'religion'.

Before Darwin died in London in 1882 and Marx in 1883, a little 7-year-old boy named Sri Aurobindo from Bengali arrived in Cambridge in 1879, a good 80 kilometers north of London. Arthur Schopenhauer, who found solace in the Upanishads, had died in Frankfurt in 1860, Friedrich Nietzsche had to give up his professorship in Basel for health reasons in the year of Aurobindo's arrival in England and fell into madness 10 years later. Sigmund Freud studied medicine, Carl Jung was of kindergarten age and Albert Einstein was born that year. In the USA Charles S. Peirce straight "How to make our ideas clear" published. Pierce writes there:

„It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. „

And finally, Gottlob Frege published his first book "Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens" in Jena in 1879. Pierce and Frege laid the foundations for the analytical philosophy of language. However, it is doubtful whether they really helped to clarify ideas. For here, too, there is a reductionist approach. It could be argued that although consciousness clearly benefits from language, it cannot be reduced to it.

In 1893, the year Mahatma Gandhi went to South Africa as a lawyer for 21 years, Aurobindo returned to India at the age of 21 and taught in Baroda. His philosophy, his yoga, became the antithesis to the materialistic, reductionist philosophy of the West.

Mimesis - Rasa - Representation - Expression - Thinking

Classical Antiquity

I have been trying for decades to avoid the pitfalls of ther to perceive and avoid Western art theory. I then spent many years in the realms of media theory, thinking about all possible forms of representation, about the character of information and the possibilities of interaction. It took me a long time to approach the sublime, until I finally arrived in India.

In classical antiquity, there are two important terms that can be applied to art: Mimesis and aisthesis. Mimesis is the principle of imitation. Plato said that when we imitate something that is already a lie, because the Shadow on the wall of the cave are mere appearances, so imitation is merely a lie of lies, and therefore dangerous. Aristotle was more 'modern' in this respect, for him mimesis is the living through of dramas, a catharsis is possible in the excitement and the experience of the resolution of conflicts, we can learn, even heal and grow in this way.

The second term, aisthesis, deals a little more deeply with perception itself. How do our senses perceive? What do our senses like? What feelings do they evoke? When is something sublime? This is about the structure of our perception, so it is more theoretical.

Both concepts, mimesis and aisthesis, usually lead to theories of representation: what is represented and how do we perceive it? It is usually based on a subject-object relationship in which the subject tries to understand the world as a counterpart, something that is outside of my self and can be understood through perception and mimesis. Language as a medium is helpful in this process, as are other forms of artistic media.

My basic problem was therefore that of representation, i.e. the representation of the world for the subject, expressed by a (different) subject. From the Renaissance onwards, the subject became more important, the expression of the self, i.e. art as self-expression, determined the modern concept of art. Art testified to the representation of an artistic 'genius' who emphasized his individual point of view. It is a somewhat more complex form of representation, but essentially the question of the art viewer has remained the same: What does the work represent?

The 5th Veda

14-15. He then thought: "I shall make a fifth Veda on the Nāṭya with the Semi-historical Tales (itihāsa), which will conduce to duty (dharma), wealth (artha) as well as fame, will contain good counsel and collection [of traditional maxims], will give guidance to people of the future as well, in all their actions, will be enriched by the teaching of all authoritative works (śāstra) and will give a review of all arts and crafts." https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/the-natyashastra/d/doc202329.html#note-e-79660

In the period of a few centuries before and after the Common Era, central texts of Indian culture, the āgama (the book that describes the rule of temples in Tamil Nadu), Vāstu śāstra (principles of architecture) were written, the Kāma-sūtra (which describes the art of good living), Chitrasūtra (theory of painting and sculpture) and the Nāṭya śāstra (stage art), Viswakarma vastusästram (town planning), which describes the basis of art as a theory of rasa and many others.... An exact dating of all texts has not yet been possible.

Finding your way through this tangle is even more complicated than orienting yourself in classical antiquity. I am only referring to the broad outlines, not the technical discussions. All these texts refer to the tradition of the Vedas, and thus to the Hindu doctrine that the texts of the Vedas are divine.

The core idea is that Brahma, the creator of the universe, created it in order to experience himself. The self in the form of Atman and as the conscious self in the form of Purusha is part of Brahma, everything is Brahma, Brahma is everything. The realization of Brahma in man through Purusha enables a connection of our self with Brahma. This connection is possible in meditation, among other things. Here, consciousness can experience itself and receive the truth of Brahma. This was achieved by the rishis who passed on the received truth in the Vedas. Buddhism later rejected the idea that this knowledge is divine.

Central to this system of knowledge is that all consciousness is vibration, which does not contradict modern science. The Vibration is resonance, resonance, MixturesIn its purest form, this vibration is the syllable OM. Everything relates to this experience.

Of course, there are also discussions here about dualism (Dvaita) and monism (Advaita). But Advaita is the classical teaching. For me, it makes the most sense to compare Advaita with the concept of Immanence equate.

So when I try to immerse myself in the world of art theory from the time of the Vedas, the concepts of advaita (monism/immanence) and vibration (consciousness) are central for me. Rasa (taste, essence, mood) is a vibration that arises from this structure of thought.

Like everything in the ancient scriptures of the world of the Vedas, the whole thing is hyper-complex. The aesthetics are generally highly codified, everything has a meaning, every movement (32 Aṅgahāras), every hand position (24 mudras), every posture (108 Karaṇas), color, proportion, relation etc.... All of this has precisely defined meanings. It is the language of the gods, the laws are divine, there is little room for interpretation. What is visible in a work of art is a realization of these principles. Only when these are executed in the highest striving for perfection, with devotion and humility, only then do they have rasa - essence, taste, mood. For the gods wanted an object of distraction that would be audible and visible to all, and they asked Brahmā to create a Veda that would belong to all color groups. Brahmā created Nāṭyaveda by combining elements from the four existing Vedas. After its creation, Brahmā asked Indra to have the Nāṭyaveda performed by the gods, but Indra said that only sages who knew the secret of the Vedas and had fulfilled their vows were capable of cultivating and practicing it.

So 'traditional' Indian art is not about depicting the world. Nor is it about an artist expressing himself. It is - in the pure doctrine - solely about the realization of the divine principle. The descriptions of this principle are absurdly precise for Western senses. If one believes that these are divine principles, the discussion ends here as to why exactly it has this complexity. Otherwise, the question arises as to why everything was recorded so meticulously 2000 to 4000 years ago and why this tradition has remained almost unbroken to this day.

The source of art

Viewed on the surface, the countless ways in which art is expressed today, i.e. in its media, techniques, cultural circles, forms of expression and discourses, are confusingly colorful. Art is art because it moves us to perceive the world differently. That is perhaps the lowest common denominator. But then it stops there, because the world views associated with different art forms are extremely different.

So the question is, what is it that moves us? In mimesis, it is a simulation that is either a pure lie or can become a productive simulation space. As part of a philosophical discourse, art can make us discover new things and learn about our own nature. As rasa, art claims to express divine truths and thus help us to evolve. It is not a testimony to an afterlife or a story of salvation, but a manifestation of what makes us human, that is, it is a manifestation of consciousness.

In a profane but rich sense, this means that the human mind can expand its consciousness, cultivate it, train it, sharpen it. This development of consciousness manifests itself in the individual, in a culture, in an epoch. It's a bit absurd that all the materialists and capitalists run to the opera to celebrate the subtlety that they deny so much in everyday business life.

In a spiritual sense, one would think that it is unlikely that my level of consciousness represents the pinnacle of cosmic evolution. It would therefore be conceivable that consciousness is greater than what we generally associate with our brain on a neuronal level.

Exhibition "Roots From the Sky" by Cedric Bregnard at Centre d'Art, Auroville March 2023

Cedric Bregnard is Artist in Residence at the Centre d'Art in Auroville. He will be taking a photo of the Banyan tree in the Matrimandir garden over the next 2 months. This photo will then be scaled to the size of a wall (approx. 3x7m) in the gallery. Residents of Auroville are invited to trace light and shadow on the bark, leaves, roots, with ink on the wall. What lies behind this process is complex and touches on the essence of photography, the materiality of trees and the power of life. The tree itself is the geographical center of Auroville and represents a very special place for many people, a place of contemplation, concentration and meditation. For many, this tree is more than just a symbol of nature, man and the cosmos. It manifests something.

So what is it all about? Let's start with photography, because Cedric Bregnard is a photographer. In 1998, as the final project of his studies at the Ecole de Photographie de Vevey, Bregnard photographed the deceased. He took several months to accompany four people in a palliative clinic in Switzerland on their final journey. They consented to Cedric Bregnard taking a photo of them. After life had left the body, he took three hours alone with the deceased, a kind of wake, to then take exactly one photo, the only photo, of the body - a portrait. The arc that is drawn here is existential: What is the transition from life to death? What is a portrait? What can photography represent? What exactly happens when a photograph captures a moment - technically, temporally, metaphysically?

Photographs are technical images. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the first photograph in 1826. Louis Daguerre further developed the photochemical process to patent maturity in 1839, and it was the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière who invented the cinematograph in 1895. This device made it possible to both shoot and project films. The life-size moving image projections replaced the magic lantern and phantasmagoria.

In 1907, Henri Bergson criticized the cinematograph in his book Creative Evolution as an apparatus that produces illusory images. The sequence of individual images that create the illusion of movement is ultimately a lie. Plato argued similarly: painting is a lie, because you can't eat a painted apple. In 1985, Deleuze 'rescued' cinema from the accusation of lying by arguing that although the criticism was correct, it was short-sighted. The film strip contained more than just individual images, it was not the illusion of movement, but pure thought, was material philosophy. The cuts and collages allow for streams of thought that only film is capable of. Film is not 'truth 24 times a second' (Godard), but pure philosophy. The Elan Vital (Bergson), i.e. the life force that the cinematographer lacks, is expanded by the power of thought.

Latent images

Cedric Bregnard's performances implicitly relate to this discussion, albeit with a markedly different tone. After all, it is about how photography can transcend the technical image.

So let's go back to the beginning of photographic images. Light rays are captured using photochemical processes. A latent image is created, i.e. there is a light imprint in a chemical film on a carrier material. The latent image becomes visible when the transparent chemical compounds altered by the light are replaced by colored chemical compounds. With Daguerre, this was still silver on a glass plate. Kodak film, however, made working with negatives popular and inexpensive. The negatives could be enlarged efficiently in a large laboratory. We generally refer to these prints as photographs. So it is nature that 'paints' here, the light is captured with the help of an apparatus and made visible through chemistry. The photographer merely chooses the place, the time and the detail.

In Bregnard's process and his achievements, there is a very significant shift within this 'painting of nature'. He too chooses a place, the time and the detail - i.e. an object - specifically a tree - which he photographs with a camera. Instead of using a photochemical process, however, he uses a very high-resolution digital process. The pixels, which function somewhat like a latent image, are made visible by printing them on paper. The mathematical description of each pixel is transformed into a graphical representation using an algorithm and a printer. Most photographers who work digitally take these printouts as their final results. They are the equivalent of analog prints, i.e. photographs.

Making visible together

Bregnard works somewhat more finely. For him, the expressions are quasi negatives. An intermediate stage to the final image. The deduction of this negative is created in the performance. And this is where it gets a little magical.

The 'negative' that Bregnard prints is black and white without gray values. This means that every light reflex captured by the camera is set to either black or white, 'light or shadow'. This negative serves as the basis for the performance. Anyone can now take part and trace the traces of light and shadow. The image of the tree is collectively traced with ink. A nice detail here is that the ink is made from charcoal, which in turn is charred wood - a dead tree.

The collective tracing with ink itself is a process that Bregnard 'lets run'. He takes himself out of it. Again, it is nature that draws here. Nature in the sense of contrast to technology. But it is a higher form of nature, it is consciousness in the collective. The fact that this process is now taking place here in Auroville in relation to the Banyon tree is wonderful. That this is happening at a time when Auroville's driving force 'Diversity in Unity' is undergoing a test of strength may not be merely symbolic for some.

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Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1911.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. 9th print. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

---. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

"Cedric Bregnard | Cedric Bregnard". Accessed February 10, 2023. https://www.cedricbregnard.ch/.

If everything began with the Big Bang, why is the world so complex, why mathematics, physics, biology, philosophy? Why does the universe contain all these laws, ideas, forces, movements? Why not just bloop, a beep, a gray goo? How many universes were there before this one came into being? How many will there be in which the universe will become conscious at higher levels?

Isn't it a strange idea that out of nothing, through an infinite force, a universe emerges that is so complex, so beautiful, so full of conscious beings? And that these beings have an incredible range of emotions, experiences and ideas, which they write down and keep in their memories. All this just to convince ourselves that all this only exists because matter is accompanied by an illusion of consciousness that we are trying with all our might to rationalize away?

And when we realize that this is quite unlikely and remember ancient scriptures... How can it be that the monotheistic religions speak of us - humans - being the image of the Creator? Why are these ideas so small, so limited? Is it really inconceivable that we are not the crown of creation? Is it not rather quite probable and certain that this is not the case? When I look out of the window into the world, it is quite clear that our actions are truly not perfect.

Isha Upanishad

The Isha Upanishad begins with:

I was socialized in the divided Germany of the 80s. It was a time of maximum nuclear threat, nuclear winter was a daily possibility. It was the time of the Cold War, ideological bloc thinking. Capitalism or communism were the two options. Capitalism went hand in hand with a Protestant work ethic, communism with existentialist materialism. The rest was considered esoteric.

It wasn't easy to find your way around as a teenager. I lived in the West, the capitalist side, and if I showed an interest in communism, I immediately heard: then go over there. German guilt made things even more difficult. The Holocaust could not be forgotten, the guilt of the Germans had to be kept in our consciousness. We all bore the guilt, if not personally, then as a cultural community. How could 'German' culture bring about the Third Reich? The intellectual debates in post-war Germany revolved around this question. Can we identify something that led to this catastrophe? How can we look for it, and once we have found it, what can we learn from it? In philosophy, the Frankfurt School was the most prominent. To this day, Habermas is the intellectual conscience of Germany.

Negative dialectics

The essence of the argument is as follows: The German Enlightenment (Kant) gave wings to rational thinking. This rationality, still shackled by the categorical imperative in Kant, developed the momentum of modernity, a blind belief in progress was unleashed, which actually continues unabated to this day. Under National Socialism, this belief in progress was perverted by a racial theory, an ideology of master race. However, their instruments of power, war and concentration camps were 'perfected' in the sense of cold rationality. The gruesome example of this are the gas chambers of Auschwitz, which were technically effective, but were nothing more than the most brutal extermination camps of a systematic mass murder of all those who did not fit into the image of the 'master race'.

Negative dialectics subjected modernist thinking to radical criticism. Kant's table of categories was no longer the foundation on which an enlightened society could be built, but became a symbol of rationalist totalitarianism. The consequence was a philosophy that only knew criticism. Everything is questioned with regard to its totalitarian structures and left open to discussion. Adorno's infinite critical differentiation of the concept is exposed to discourse by Habermas. Only that which is accepted by consensus is valid. If there is no consensus in a society, there must be further discussion...

Beauty and delight

What kind of aesthetics should be derived from this for 'my' generation? Terms such as beauty and sublimity were of course taboo. They were branded as totalitarian, as they seemed to be based on a subjective and authoritarian feeling that defied rational justification and was not capable of consensus in discourse. A critical aesthetic appeared 'politically correct', i.e. an avant-garde that questioned everything that had gone before and replaced it with a new 'critical' position. Beauty in art became suspect, the critical stance its surrogate.

And yet these aesthetic positions bordered on the sublime in their exaggerations: Mark Rothko, John Cage, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Pina Bausch, Bill Viola, Lucio Fontana... a long list of artists could be drawn up, which is of course influenced by my personal taste. The sublime here is not a show of the divine, but an aesthetic borderline experience.

Hymn of Creation

It took me a very long time to open myself up to a critically reflected concept of the sublime. My entire intellectual training resisted it. And only art that leads to an aesthetic borderline experience, which is not representative of its subject, allowed me to experience and name what I experience there as sublime: a white canvas, for example, cut through with a scalpel, the opening of which allows me to look behind it. Lucio Fontana's (1899-1968) 'Cut paintings' - they are sublime.

This reminds me of the Hymn of Creation (Rig Veda X.129). It begins with:

Aurobindo writes in "The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty":

"The earliest surviving poetry of ancient India was philosophical and religious, the Veda, the Upanishads, and our modern notions tend to divorce these things from the instinct of delight and beauty, to separate the religious and the philosophic from the aesthetic sense; but the miracle of these antique writings is their perfect union of beauty and power and truth, the word of truth coming out spontaneously as a word of beauty, the revealed utterance of that universal spirit who is described in the Upanishads as the eater of the honey of sweetness, madhvadam puruṣamand this high achievement was not surprising in these ancient deep-thinking men who discovered the profound truth that all existence derives from and lives by the bliss of the eternal spirit, in the power of a universal delight, Ananda"(CWSA 26, p.255)

How, I ask myself, can I get my rational thinking to open up to this view? Can I follow the spiritual path of the Upanishads without getting caught up in totalitarian thinking?

The hymn ends with:

In India, the books of the Vedas have been kept in memory for 3000 years. The Rigveda (10,552 verses), Samaveda (1549 verses), Yajurveda (4001 verses) and Atharvaveda (5977 verses) as well as the Upanishads (approx. 1800 verses) have been passed down from generation to generation. The grammar of Sanskrit has not changed significantly and the pronunciation has been handed down precisely through exact phonetic descriptions. So these texts sound exactly the same today as they did 3000 years ago. They are written in the form of mantras, i.e. in verse form and dedicated to the truth. Recitation, even mere listening, is said to have powers, because according to legend, the language of Sanskrit originates from Shiva: his drums produce vowels, from which the consonants arise, from which the grammar and finally the language.

The counterpart to the language of the Vedas in music are the ragas. Yoga is also related to the Vedas, as are Ayurveda and Tantra. This treasure of wisdom was perceived by the rishis through deep meditation and recorded in mantras. The strict coding in verse form ensured error-free transmission over thousands of years. Even today, thousands of people in India know the Vedas by heart and recite them regularly.

Passing on knowledge

There are two ways of passing on this knowledge. The conventional form of learning through practice and repetition. It is necessary to start at an early age and it requires the dedication of a lifetime to develop this skill and keep it alive. The second form is the passing on of a seer to his pupil. This form is difficult for the rational mind to comprehend. The knowledge is transferred within weeks. The relationship between guru and disciple is of course a very special one. It is rare. There are also reports of even more mystical transfers.

As this is knowledge that has been experienced in meditation, it is knowledge that is different from empirical knowledge that we have gained through our external senses or rational knowledge that we have gained through deduction. The Western idea that - extremely abbreviated - external sensory stimuli can be inscribed in the memory and recalled through recollection does not apply here. The approaches of transcendental philosophy also fall short here, as they do not take deep structures into account. within of our thinking.

The knowledge of the Vedas testifies to a much more differentiated description of our consciousness. In the Vedas, the generally accepted three states of matter, life and mind correspond to Sat-Chit-Ananda (existence, consciousness, bliss) on a higher level of consciousness. A seventh level - Vijnana - is the link. Through this form of higher realization, Sat-Chit-Ananda is opened up. The whole is wonderfully complex, rich and beautiful and does much more justice to our human existence than the dominant reductionist view of so-called enlightenment and is described by the 7 rivers or deep waters. Of course, there are also the gods, but that's another story for now. I am concerned here with memory.

The Vedas have opened up these higher levels. They are passed on orally from generation to generation. This is why they are also recognized as intangible world cultural heritage. This knowledge comes from a vision and is passed on immaterially, like the Olympic flame. It bears witness to an origin in the oldest coherent texts of mankind.

Memory and consciousness

Just as art bears witness to an inner experience, or invention is often based on inspiration, our spiritual existence is linked to a vision. The question of the meaning of our lives is not answered in causal chains or deductions. This question points to a different context. How is such a vision possible and what kind of memory is necessary for it? I am not referring to the memory capacity to memorize c. 25,000 verses, but to the question of the kind of consciousness that is revealed here.

The mind can move freely within the levels of consciousness, it can roam from one place to another at almost infinite speed, jump through time and open up new worlds - all this at least in the memory, the activated memory. But it is more than just getting lost in memories. The states of Sat-Chit-Ananda are real. India is of people who have given up everything to open themselves to this gift, to achieve bliss and immortality in the here and now. Bergson distinguishes between a pure memory and a habitual memory. Pure memory captures the memories that shape us, that are unique, that stand out from everyday consciousness. That goes in the right direction....

Our mind, our consciousness can participate in a greater consciousness, can actualize it. It seems to me that we misunderstand this as memory, and perhaps it is also the case that we first have to grow beyond our memory in order to attain real consciousness. Memory is then not the search in one's own individual memory of habit, but spiritual experience. Because everything is always already there everywhere. It is only a matter of access relations.

Reference:

Joshi, Kireet. The Portals of Vedic Knowledge

Bergson, Henri. 1990. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books.

I would like to take part in the deliberations on Diagrams connect. I mentioned some problems of logic. Now I became aware of a passage from Aurobindo:

"Logic, by its very nature, is intolerant even of apparent contradiction; its method is verbal, ideative; it accepts words and thoughts as rigid and iron facts instead of what they really are, imperfect symbols and separate sidelights on truth." (Aurobindo Isha Upansiad p. 570)

For a while, I was taken with the logic of possible worlds. David Lewis is a philosopher we discussed in the advanced seminar. In 1986 he published On the Plurality of Worlds. The basic idea is a radical answer to a major problem of logic in epistemology. If true propositions refer to facts in the world, what do false propositions refer to? Davis Lewis's answer, somewhat abbreviated, is that there are actually no false propositions. Sentences can only be false relative to a world. A sentence such as "There is a tree outside my window" is true if there is a tree outside my window. If another person says this sentence in a place where there are no trees, the sentence is false. So it depends on the context. Very few sentences are universally true. These include, for example, mathematical propositions.

Counterfactual sentences

When sentences are used in the 'right' context, i.e. when they refer to facts, they are true. They mean what is the case. It is, of course, a little more complicated. Alfred Tarski came up with a nice puzzle in 1936: the Indefinability sets.

"Informally, the theorem says that the concept of truth in a language cannot be defined with the means of expression of the language itself. The proof is based on the so-called Tarski propositions, self-referential propositions of the form: I am an element of M for a set M. If one chooses the set of all false propositions of a system for M, the construction of a Tarski proposition leads to a contradiction: a true proposition that is unprovable in the system. From this it can be concluded that the set of all true propositions of a system is not definable within this system." (Wikipedia)

The problem is not trivial. What do propositions mean that cannot be proved? We now have to deal with two kinds of problems. First, the question of what sentences mean in the wrong context, and then the question of what sentences mean that are unprovable. David Lewis says that these and similar problems are very easy to solve. There is an infinite number of worlds. All propositions are true, just not necessarily in our world. If a sentence is not true here, then there is a world in which the sentence is true, it's just not my world. I have no relationship with this world, we do not share the same space or time, there are no causal links or other mechanisms of action that connect these worlds. But they must exist because they are sayable. Everything that is sayable is therefore true, i.e. it is the case, i.e. it is real - in one of an infinite number of possible worlds. But are these again countably infinitely many worlds or uncountably infinitely many worlds (i.e. infinitely many worlds in the class of natural numbers, or more, i.e. in the class of rational numbers, or even irrational numbers)? The puzzles continue...

A self-transcending materialism

This fascinates me because David Lewis is serious about it. The logic here goes beyond itself, so to speak. That's great. It seemed like a proof of God to me. Physics has similar ideas about the multiverse, dark matter, the theory of everything or whatever else is growing in the colorful garden of those searching for the grand unified theory. The cosmos is much more complex than we can perceive or think. We really don't know the vast majority of it. Edwin A. Abbott actually made a very funny point with his classic from 1884 "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" pointed this out.

The universes are probably much crazier than we can dream of. And I am always impressed by the fact that the Vedas already knew this:

Gilles Grimaître visits Auroville for a few days during his Pro Helvetia artist residency in Bengaluru, Chennai and Pondicherry to engage with Carnatic music. The program he chose for the evening from Dec. 17^th, 2022, was a passionate, loving introduction to usually not so accessible Western avant-garde music.

Grimaître started off with Johannes Brahms - Drei Intermezzi op 117, some romantic crowd pleaser, followed by a more challenging piece by Olli Mustonen (*1967) called 'Jehkin Iivana'. Nobody would know the composers he selected after Brahms for the evening unless you are a very dedicated avant-garde music enthusiast, he said. But he wanted to show that avant-garde music can be fun and playful. We all smiled and laughed, when he played Daniel Moreira (*1984) - Rhythmic Study no 4 ("Ludvan ven Beethowig"). Moreira plays with Beethoven's 'Für Elise', which almost everyone who likes piano music knows. He cuts and samples, loops and collages pieces in such a light and playful way, that we lose all fear of contemporary music.

Gilles Grimaître plays Daniel Moreira Rhythmic Study no 4 (Ludvan ven Beethowig)

I recognized Moreira's teacher, Marco Stroppa, as a friend of mine also was a student of him. His students are funny, serious, eloquent. Gilles Grimaître played with astonishing lightness, joy and precision.

The next piece was by Beat Furrer (*1954) - 'Voicelessness. The snow has no voice'. Grimaître laughed when he said that he chose that piece as a Christmas tune for Auroville. Snow around Christmas may be a rare event here and should trouble us deeply if it ever happens. The piece is sincere, concentrated, I saw the snowflakes dancing, losing any sense of time, there was no beginning nor end, no dramatic structure or storytelling, just meditative, minimalistic concentration.

Gilles Grimaître plays Beat Furrer Voicelessness The snow has no voice

After the piece, it took Grimaître an eternity of stage seconds to come back into the room. The intensity of concentration was palpable. The last piece was special, it was written by a composer from Ukraine, and we might guess why that fits into the year 2022. It was written many years ago by Valentin Silvestrov (*1937) called 'Davos Lake', for the Davos festival. There was a concept to play piano concerts one on one. The piano player would play for 5 minutes for one person in a small room. I thought that this is pure capitalism. But when I heard the music - so tender and heartfelt, intimate, and loving - I saw it as a guerilla tactic, to melt the hearts of the listener and create an intimate connection between performer and audience. This concept came up during Corona again, i.e. at the Kammerorchester in Stuttgart.

The encore was Frank Zappa's 'The Black page' the avant-garde rock star, with classical training and the enfant terrible of the hybrid music world that blurs genre boundaries and doesn't care about high and low brow culture.

Thank you for a beautiful, joyful, memorable evening at the end of the year, that was globally so troubling.

-

Organic:

Gilles Grimaître was born in Geneva in 1988 studied improvisation and took an avid interest in composition and contemporary music. He entered the Hochschule der Künste Bern where he continued his musical training with Prof. Pierre Sublet. He also studied the organ with Pascale Van Coppenolle and composition with Xavier Dayer. As a soloist and chamber musician, Gilles Grimaître performs regularly in Europe. He often plays with Ensemble Contrechamps, Collegium Novum Zürich, Ensemble Proton and Ensemble Modern. He specializes in the accompaniment with vocalists, working often as an opera accompanist. He is also an active improviser and plays in the experimental band [bleu]. Gilles Grimaître won the first prize at the 2013 Nicati competition for contemporary music and received scholarships from the Marescotti Foundation, the Irène Dénéréaz Foundation and the Gabriele De Agostini Foundation. He was scholarship holder at the International Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt/Main for the academic year 2013-2014.

https://www.ensemblelemniscate.com/gilles-grimaitre

I started meditating as a teenager or student, I still vaguely remember my first meditations from that time. Strength and calm, concentration - mostly at night. They were very special moments. I didn't do it often. As a student, I continued to meditate very irregularly. I remember some of these mainly 1-2 hour meditations as if they had just happened.

I was always at a loss for words (when I forced myself to name it, I reluctantly said transcendental), and I didn't have anyone to talk to about it. Those around me quickly signaled to me that they thought it was strange, and so I only talked about it once. A flatmate meditated with me, which was good. Sometimes I met people who told me about 'exercises', about 'methods', which often sounded empty, technical, without any real experience. I then avoided these conversations. And so in the end I never really talked about meditation.

It's different here in Auroville. Meditation is normal here. It is not talked about much, but there is a common understanding that it is good. If you tell people that you have just come from a good meditation session, you are greeted with a smile. I like the fact that many people locate meditation in Aurobindo and in the Vedas, the roots of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Last week, a woman came into the Center Guest House who seemed to come from another world. She had an incredibly strong charisma. And although I'm actually quite shy, I boldly sat down at her table. The light in her attracted me - Namaste. We spoke more often over the next few days.

She was very present, spoke almost blissfully about her spiritual path over the last 10 years and her doubts, about meditation, her seminars and her art. It was so light and authentic, sincere and radiant that I couldn't escape the magic. After a few days, she told me that she had just come from a month-long seminar that essentially consisted of silence and meditation. No wonder she had this aura, although I'm sure she had it before and will have it again. But it was so concentrated...

An encounter that gave an impetus for growth

I forced myself to keep my distance and still reacted to her, she noticed and was pleased. I responded with active dreams, my own meditations and the impulse to go swimming alone. The beach was wonderful, the water calm. I wanted to feel the elements. I swam out into the sea and was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of small, jumping fish that jumped on my head, in my eyes, in my mouth and on my nose. I laughed heartily - for minutes. I felt like I was laughing with the cosmos. It was a deeply spiritual experience. Back on the beach, a fish fell out of my hair and I gratefully brought it back into the water. I briefly told her about it afterwards, she smiled and said: "So you had an experience of pure presence, nice..."

Two days later, during a meditation, I saw why I am in Auroville. I see differently, think differently, am more intuitive. A lot of things feel so right - when I allow myself to reduce the local and global political conflicts to my scope of action.

She said she had come out of the month-long seminar to share the light. That's nonsense, of course, isn't it?

"the eye thinks even more than it listens" (Deleuze)

I now remember that before I started reading Deleuze, I had been working on process aesthetics. I made a 100-page manuscript, with notes, quotations, structural sketches. I wanted to get away from the idea that art consists of objects that are perceived in a particular way, because this gives rise to two essential strands of thought: 1) what constitutes an object that we call art, and 2) why is the perception of art different from everyday perception? There are countless theories on both strands, some combine them, some opt for one, others for the other.

But somehow I was always suspicious of this: the relation Art object perceiving subject. There is this dualism again, which some have tried to radically resolve by choosing one of the two sides of this relationship at the expense of the other. A dispute between idealism, materialism and empiricism. Philosophy, it seemed to me, had become quite bogged down. The field of philosophical aesthetics is not wrongly considered unmanageable, sometimes soft and inconsistent, something for philosophers who enjoy the adventure of thinking more than the search for truth. And that's what it's all about, the pleasure.

Art

I have found a way to do this without having to abandon aesthetic thinking. It seemed to me that the only way to counter this dualism was a different ontology. An ontology of process. I read H. Bergson and N. Whitehead and searched the art world for works of art that addressed this. Works of art that had time as their medium suggested themselves: Film and interactive installations. It seemed to me that an essential aspect of this art was the transition from one state to another, from one image to the next ("Film is the truth - 24 times a second", Godard).

Or between letters. Here I found Paul de Marinis Messenger (1998) and contrasted this with Nancy Holt & Richard Serra's "Boomerang" (1974). Both are works that stretch language to such an extent that the spaces between the letters and words become perceptible. A deeper reflection then showed me that these spaces are actually just as meaningless as the letters and words themselves. Meaning, sense, statement, beauty, reflection of - what exactly? They point to the process of thinking and communication itself. For me, this was the approach to art that is not based on any kind of representation. Because here, too, in this fatal concept of representation is the fall from grace of dualism.

"This is the dark thought I have had about representation for so long: we are immersed in it and it has become inseparable from our condition. It has created a world, a cosmos even, of false problems such that we have lost our true freedom: that of invention." (Dorothea Olkowski, p.91)

It was this sentence that suddenly opened the door to a different way of thinking for me. I wanted to go back to the origin, the origin of language and expression, not as something strictly defined, but as an act of creation.

Process aesthetics

This creative act is a process that always remains a process, it does not produce an object or subject, but a never-ending process. Creating art, receiving art, documenting and preserving art are all just phases of a process within which what we call art manifests itself in different ways. There is no art, only an aesthetic process, the reflection on which I call process aesthetics. As I mentioned above, I had gotten myself quite tangled up.

In essence, however, I hold on to the direction of thought, and found a kind of echo in the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze:

"Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter." Gilles Deleuze - Difference and repetition p. 139

This encounter, what is it? On an everyday level, we are familiar with it when a work of art somehow speaks to us, whatever that may mean.

I think that thinking about process aesthetics and Deleuze's adventure have now led me to the Upanishads. Here, in a cyclical and interacting thinking, the self encounters myself. It is perhaps also precisely the tautology that is at the heart of idealistic theories of self-consciousness such as Hegel's.

The whole thing is a process that has no essential meaning at any time, it stands for nothing, it represents nothing, it merely exists in order to experience itself.

Om Namah Shivaya

Olkowski, Dorothea. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

I am slowly approaching Sanskrit. On Thursdays, Nishtha holds a seminar on the Rigveda. The joint recitation in Sanskrit, the detailed analysis of the translation, Nishtha's philological reflections and the explanations on the psychology of the gods open up access to these 'sacred' texts.

I remember my Latin studies, the Indo-European roots, the sounds that echo in the ragas, phonetics as a declaration of existence, language as sound and vibration, communication as rhythm. The breath of life, yoga, vitality, thinking in levels of movement and the transcendence of this level to the Self (Atman) held in the Self (Brahman). All of this is fueled by my study of the Upanishads. So much so that yesterday I took Gilles Deleuze off the shelf again. In his book "What is Philosophy"The second chapter is called 'Plane of Immanence'. It is this 'Plane of Immanence' that philosophically built the bridge to India for me, purely intuitively, because I didn't understand it. I talked about it for years because I wanted to understand it. I knew I didn't understand it, now I see why.

Language

I have never really thought about concepts. That sounds strange, because I have analyzed language (Frege, Saussure, Derrida, etc.), I have dealt with the content of language (Husserl, H.N. Castaneda, Quine, N. Goodman, etc.), I have analyzed the aesthetics of signs (Pierce, Danto, Welsh, Bense, etc.). In my reading, language is always part of consciousness, only as conscious speaking, reading, listening does language make 'sense'. Ultimately, then, it is about theories of consciousness. In short, I have thought about the function of language, its reference, the ability to communicate, its social, political, sociological implications, without really thinking about the nature of concepts. What do I mean by that?

Ideally, language is structured in grammatically 'correct' sentences. These sentences have a structure (in the simplest form subject - predicate - object). They correspond to a meaning, i.e. the content of the sentence that we are trying to communicate or that we think we understand. The dominant 'Western' language-analytical philosophy is now primarily concerned with the question of which sentences are true and which are false. To do this, of course, it must first be determined under what circumstances sentences can generally be true or false. It is therefore a question of the relationship of propositions to the world and the relationship of propositions to their meaning, and the relationship of meaning to the world. This is no easy task, and in order not to lose the thread, philosophy is oriented towards logic. The common root of logic and language lies in propaedeutics. All other sciences can then be tested for their claim to validity on this foundation.

What's wrong with that?

Diagrams and concepts in teaching

I thought a lot about diagrams when I was teaching in the US and used them in my seminars. I was skeptical about them during my studies. It seemed lazy to me to express a lack of conceptual acuity through diagrams. Diagrams - so I thought - are always shown when something complicated cannot be expressed clearly. I had been trained to believe that this conceptual clarity was achievable as a long-term goal - a core idea of the Enlightenment. The term 'Term' is thought of in very technical terms. (See Frege Function and concept from 1891). For Frege, terms are predicates capable of truth, or something like that... there is unspeakable trench warfare.

Deleuze, on the other hand, says very clearly that concepts are not unambiguous, that they overlap and have anything but clear boundaries. They exist on one or many different levels (planes):

"Philosophical concept are fragmentary wholes that are not aligned with one another so that they fit tgether, because their edges do not match up. (...) They resonate nonetheless, and the philosophy that creates them always introduces a powerful Whole that, while remaining open, is not fragmented: an unlimited One-All, an 'Omnitudo' that includes all the concepts on one and the same plane." (p.35)

"Concepts are like multiple waves, raising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them" (p.36)

"Concepts are the archipelago or skeletal frame, a spinal column rather than a skull, whereas the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts." (p.36)

Every great philosopher, every epoch has its own plane. There are many planes. The Renaissance is different from Romanticism, Kant is different from Nietzsche. It would be absurd to think that the same terms mean the same thing in different contexts. In his late work, Deleuze is concerned with the different levels (planes). The 1000 plateaus were perhaps the experimental kit for this.

Levels (planes)

What is a level and what is a concept? I think that this is the core of Deleuze's thinking. For him, concepts are agile, planes are the 'dimensions' in which they operate. The level (plane) of immanence is absolute. Deleuze's thinking is alive, it changes, not only for him, but in itself. Film is thinking - also a plane on celluloid. How does a concept emerge, how are connections created between concepts, how do thoughts constitute a view of the world?

For me, Deleuze is a philosopher of immanence. How do habitats (territories) form from geological strata? How does a living being define its habitat and how, when and why does it leave it and how does it then transform itself? What does it become (Becoming)? Can it come back (territorialization and de-territorialization)? How does communication take place within it (rhythm), how are milieus formed?

My suspicion?

My suspicion is that Deleuze's thinking is not so far removed from the Vedic worlds of thought. The project is exciting. The Vedic scriptures were only passed down orally for centuries before they were written down, and they are still little understood today. I like Sri Aurobindo's reading, which contrasts the Western reading of soulless scholars with the elemental force of spiritual thought in India. Whether this is always philologically correct is not for me to judge.

In any case, Aurobindo activates the Vedic scriptures. He brings out their philosophical rigor, embeds them in human experience and spiritual thinking and shows that this is the beginning of philosophy. This beginning does not appear in the form of a delicate emergence, but powerfully as a vision of essence, as an enlightened vision of a spiritual truth that attempts to answer the central questions of our existence. In this sense, the Vedic scriptures are more than philosophy for Aurobindo. They contain philosophy but go beyond it, not irrational, mythical, ritualistic and barbaric, but clear in their address to our existence. Where do we come from and what is our task? To answer this truly is the attempt of the Vedic scriptures.

I see resonances in the levels (planes) of the Vedic scriptures and Deleuze's levels (planes). The gods of the Vedas and the unleashed concepts of Deleuze are not so dissimilar. The philosophy of immanence feeds both. Everything is one. It is about understanding life.

OM TARE TUTTARE

The last time I seriously asked myself what I should do was during my studies. I studied philosophy and I was often asked what I wanted to do with it. What a stupid question, I always thought. It's an inner urge, almost a compulsion that you can't resist. Every such attempt must fail, there is only one way forward. So it wasn't really a question of what me should do, or what to do, or how the world can be saved.

Thinking

Rather, it was the question of his own existence. What to do with one's life? What does it mean to live and for what? How can you approach this question? For me, that was philosophy. For me, doing what meant thinking how? Now I am asking myself this question again. It's nice to be able to ask yourself this question. It is not easy for many people to allow themselves to ask this question.

I am reading the Kena Upanishad. Who sees while seeing, who hears while hearing, who thinks while thinking? That really is a good question. I have long tried to look at this from the tradition of enlightenment - and have repeatedly come up against the limits of thinking. How could it be otherwise? The Kena Upanishad only has a limited philosophical answer.

However, instead of trying to explain how it can be that my material body can think and then consider the question of why, the line of thought in the Upanishads is different. How can it be that the universal consciousness presents itself in such diversity?

The question that then arises for the individual remains: What to do? But it is a different way of thinking: instead of understanding oneself in a functional and enlightened way, Indian wisdom is about being carried. Which thought, which consciousness, which insight, which life is realized through me? I meet many people here who have discovered this question for themselves, and some of them have also answered it for themselves - sadhana.

I listen without judging. People open up here quickly, very deeply and honestly. I laugh a lot, am enchanted and moved by the stories, deeply moved... I hear stories and insights from people who have given themselves completely. Often this is not easy, some are privileged, others not at all, it has nothing to do with it.

Senses

So I ask myself again, how do we think? Who thinks while thinking? Who hears when hearing? Who sees while seeing? There is only one thinking, one hearing, one seeing. When I think and you think and we think together and others listen to us think, what is actually happening? When you and I listen to a concert together, or when you and I and others look at an exhibition to see what the artist has seen and wants to show us, what is happening there? What is manifested in the words, the music, the painting, the architecture? Why can we (not) learn from history? Who has the knowledge of a library?

These questions are so obvious, and we just as obviously don't have a starting point for an explanation. We then say that this is culture.

Life

Life has always been there, even before atoms. The Big Bang was the coming into existence of what? Electrons? Hardly.... Matter thinks (AI), it has memory (DNA), in its interaction it overrides the laws of space and time. When science says something like this, it's always in the sense that it sounds strange, but don't worry, we'll explain it away. The Grand Unified Theory, but without consciousness, without life in a sense worth living. It seems to me that the more knowledge we accumulate, the less we understand. We no longer even understand the questions.

And my sadhana? Listening. It is one of the most difficult arts. It is only possible with a reduced self and an expanded self, but hardly at all with an ego.

OM MANI PADME HUM

If you would like to delve a little deeper into the Kena Upanishad, please refer to this: Sri Aurobindo Vol 18

"For, if there were no such necessity of Mind in Matter, if the stuff of mentality were not there already and the will to mentalize, Mind could not possibly have come into being out of inconscient substance." (p.35)

I remember always staring into the fire since I was a child. Many people do that, I think. There is something fascinating about fire. In the Vedas, Agni is the god of fire, one of the five elements alongside water, air, earth and ether. The Greeks also have these elements. I didn't understand this for a long time and found it 'unscientific'. I thought of the elements in terms of physics and chemistry, and that only makes limited sense.

Mythology

Within mythology and spiritual knowledge, however, this is actually perfectly plausible. In the Upanishads, different levels of consciousness are distinguished. The general, eternal consciousness, i.e. consciousness in itself, formless, all-encompassing, indeterminate - the Brahman. Then there are the individual forces, energy, will, love, knowledge etc.. These are conceived as forms of being, as gods, as a heaven of gods. Atman, the individual self, emerges from them. It dwells within us.

That sounds very strange, old, glorified, unscientific... but it is actually phenomenal, undeniable. We have a will, we love and hate, we know and let ourselves be deceived.... We cannot explain this scientifically. We try to do so using functional models (e.g. Darwinism) or reductionist models (neuroscience) or systematic observation (social sciences). However, these models ultimately attempt to reduce what defines us to a material, systemic or structural level. Our assumption is that once we have explained it away, we have solved the 'problem'. What kind of strange idea is that?

But there is actually no dispute about the existence of these phenomena. Only instead of visualizing them as computer models, the Rishi, the seers of the Vedas, gave them the names of gods. They saw their existence and accepted and named them.

Visualization

So perhaps we should stay with the pictures of the Rishi for a moment.

Pure existence expresses itself in order to recognize itself - through an act of creation. In science, we call this the Big Bang. In cosmology, we are making good progress in describing the formation of matter, galaxies, planets, etc., and there is certainly a lot more to come. The computer animations are inspiring, the space images based on complicated algorithms are breathtaking. The narratives about quarks and electrons, gravitational forces, strings, space-time and the curvature of time are fascinating and actually incomprehensible to non-physicists. We accept the interim results of scientific discussions as truths that are popularized on YouTube channels. Einstein, Hawking and others are our Rishi. The experts have understood something that we cannot comprehend or verify. Only the peers, the scientific colleagues or the Rishi community can really judge whether this is nonsense or real knowledge.

4000 years ago, images were gods. However, these mental images of deities are much closer to our experience than the abstract technical images. They describe our living world more precisely, their insight is deeper because it draws on experience. The Vedas accept consciousness. They understand that consciousness in isolation makes no sense in a human existence. This is the core problem in the monotheistic traditions. How can the immortality of the soul be explained?

In the Vedas, every consciousness is part of one. It's actually not that complicated, just incredibly difficult to understand, because it presupposes that we don't take ourselves so seriously, that we see ourselves as part of a whole and act as such. Immortality lies in the insight of not seeing ourselves as the center. The path to this is meditation.

Experience

For me, it is important to stay at the level of experience. That doesn't limit science, on the contrary, it gives it new material. I was interested in fire, energy, the sun and the power that moves everything. The energy that destroys and at the same time transforms and moves everything. An energy that is fed by sacrifice, because wood, for example, burns in a fire, generates energy and leaves ashes behind. The ashes are smeared on the forehead in temples in India, over the third eye, the seat of knowledge.

When I sit in front of a fire, I see this energy, I feel it in my face, on my forehead. A wood fire is so bright that it doesn't blind me, but it casts a spell over me. It is danger and a sign, energy, power and destruction. I see in fire the elemental force of the universe, the image of the sun, the symbol of purity and clarity.

Om Namah Shivaya

I have known for many years that I would like to practise yoga, but have never done so. Similar to meditation, I didn't feel ready for it or was put off by Western esoteric forms that ultimately see both meditation and yoga as self-optimization.

Meditation and yoga are philosophical, spiritual and ultimately transcending practices to overcome the self, to open up to a greater consciousness. This all seems so clear now. My 'study' of Indian philosophy is slowly taking shape and I realize that my days are getting shorter and shorter. I am starting to learn a little Sanskrit. Reading the Upanishads and the Vedas in German and English in Sri Aurobindo's translations shows me how deluded, ignorant and short-sighted all the theories of the West are. Aurobindo's 'Notes on the Mahabharata' (Sri Aurobindo Vol 1 'Early Cultural Writings' p.277ff.) is a wonderfully sharp attack on European culture that is absolutely worth reading. It is one of his early texts, and the disappointment and anger at European arrogance can be felt here quite unfiltered. A lifestyle without meat and alcohol, getting up early and good, open conversations with great people all contribute to this.

Holistic yoga

Anyway, yesterday I went to my first Yoga class It wasn't exactly a beginners' course. But I've been toying with the idea of attending the class for weeks. It's a holistic approach that incorporates pranayamas/ pranavyayamas/ mantras/ mudras/ asanas/ meditation. I was surrounded by demigods of the art of yoga, yet everything was so easy and light-hearted, no one seemed to have to exert themselves, although it was quite obvious that most of them had been practicing yoga for many years. For me, of course, it was almost impossible to follow, but the combination of breathing exercises, mantras, concentration and meditation, body awareness and rhythm made me almost forget about time and my own limitations. I don't think I've ever pushed myself so hard without realizing it.

Perhaps this wonderful queue that greeted me on my way to the canteen at lunchtime inspired me to practise yoga in this form. But actually, all of life is yoga.

It was a magical four days. The Auroville Film Institute has a residency with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar was organized from 7 to 10 November 2022. It took place in the Bhumika Hall, Bharat Nivas Auroville.

Dhrupad - the movie (1983)

Ustad Bahauddin Dagar is a rudraveena player. His family has been playing the instrument for 20 generations! His father and uncle (Zia Mohiyuddin Dagar and Fariduddin Dagar) were true masters. There is a wonderful movie about it Dhrupad by the Indian director Mani Kaul. Mani Kaul is strongly influenced by the forerunner of the Nouvelle Vague Robert Bresson, among others. Mani Kaul's film is a milestone in Indian film history. His film opens with a shot of Ustad Bahauddin Dagar as a young boy. It was a charming idea of the Auroville Film Institute to invite Ustad Bahauddin Dagar to Auroville to learn more about Dhrupad Gayaki and the Rudraveena.

Ustad Bahauddin Dagar radiates incredible modesty. He stands on big shoulders and only started learning the rudraveena late in life. He gives international concerts himself and is a true guru. He brought two of his students with him. Among the participants were many music students who had been waiting for this workshop for two years, as it had been postponed several times due to the coronavirus.

Master class

At the beginning and end of the workshop, Ustad Bahauddin Dagarist played the Rudraveena. The recordings are linked here. I have been listening to ragas for a very long time without knowing much about them. I learned a lot about the origins, the connection back to the time of the Vedic scriptures. We learned about the complexity of the instrument, which has been perfected over thousands of years. Ustad Bahauddin Dagarist illustrated the music theory and playing practice on the Rudraveena himself.

On two days we learned about riyaz (practicing): Early in the morning before sunrise (on Wednesday at 4:30am and on Thursday at 6:30am) the voice was 'warmed up'. This started with Kharaj, practicing the lower register of the voice. Singing OM together has a very meditative component through the voice formation effect and lung capacity training. This was followed by complex rhythm and melody exercises.

I suddenly realized how rich this tradition is and that it is sad that this form of music is still seen as something exotic. For me, after this workshop, it is part of the world's cultural heritage. But it may take a while before it is recognized as such.

Closing Session - Residency with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar from 7th to 10th Closing Session - November 2022 session Opening Session - Residency with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar from November 7 to 10, 2022 session On Practice - Residency with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar from 7th to 10th November 2022 Afternoon session - Residency with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar from November 7 to 10, 2022 session

Film - Dhrupad - Spirituality

It was a revelation. Philosophically, I was interested in the fact that the rhythm in the ragas was described several times as flight - in the film and in the discussions. This reminds me of Deleuze, his idea that rhythm is an element that connects, things that vibrate in rhythm are connected. A rhythm that is perceived attracts, starting with mating behavior in the animal kingdom, if not geologically and cosmologically in the orbits of stars and pulsars.

Mani Kaul's film works with random elements, it is not narrative. The music and the images interact respectfully, the organization of the shots is complex, individual elements refer to each other within the film's timeline (line of flight). It is clearly musically conceived. It is a film that captures and preserves the philosophy of the ragas. It is itself music, thought, spirituality, concentration and insight. For Deleuze, the Filmstrip itself, i.e. the medium of the film, concrete material thinking. In Manu Kaul's film, it is pure spirituality... immanence.

Dhrupad

Follow Ustad Bahauddin Dagarist on Instagram and its Website.

For many years now, my mind has been filled with emptiness most of the time. My memory is not good either and I often repeat words or phrases in my mind without knowing why. Often it is simply experience in a word in an endless loop, like a mantra so to speak.

This worried me a lot for a long time. I tried to find excuses and justifications for it. For example, that I worked a lot mentally and my mind was simply exhausted, to the point of burnout. I told myself that my memory wasn't working properly or differently because I live, think, feel and experience in three languages. How do we store experiences, thoughts and knowledge in our minds? If I experience, learn, recognize something in one language, can I recall it in another language - without distinction? And if my mind repeats a word, 20, 30 times, because it stumbles over something, can't quite categorize or grasp it, is it because the mind is slowing down, confused?

But above all, I didn't know how to categorize the emptiness in my mind. I always thought it would be desirable for the mind to be constantly active, productive, busy. Looking into the world and perceiving it as such seemed unproductive to me, lazy. I justified it as a break, as gathering strength and coming to rest in order to be productive again. Is there any way to increase this, I asked myself.

Discomfort

So I have felt a sense of unease in my mind for many years. This emptiness and the mantra-like repetition of words, the search for information in a linguistically confused memory, all this now seems to me to have been an indication that the productivity demanded by society is causing me discomfort. It is as if something is stirring in my mind that eludes this false consciousness. For a long time it felt like a weakness, a failure. My socially conditioned self condemned these moments. Something didn't seem to be running at maximum performance.

Now I realize that something is emerging here that cannot be suppressed. It is a different consciousness. An awareness of a different context, contemplative, meditative, spiritual, seeing. It is a consciousness that withdraws from everyday life, leaves the self behind, sheds the constructed biography as such. It is quite natural that the mind's mechanisms for accessing one's own memory then no longer function. The mind no longer wants to do this, and if I try to force it, it resists and becomes tired. In my case, this other consciousness, a more alert, selfless, seeing one, has wanted to go to India for many years. It wants to go home.

Homesickness

Something inside me was homesick. Now it's here in India. Everything feels strangely familiar. The sounds and smells themselves foreign, the fact of their existence not. The people around me (not the tourists) do what they have to do with a great serenity, everything seems to be in an organic flow. Namaste.

Synthesis

It took me a long time to take this step, to admit all this to myself. This is happening here on a different level, not through an intellectually critical attitude towards society - I have cultivated that for decades - but through a spiritual insight, a return home.

Yesterday I attended a seminar on the recitation and interpretation of Rigveda mantras. Starting from the Sanskrit original, different translations by Sri Aurobindo were compared. I was not expecting this intellectual rigor and it opened my eyes to the importance of delving into the source texts. These mantras feel as if I have chanted them many times a very long time ago. I feel the same way about some Gregorian and Byzantine music, as well as ragas, Jewish chansons, and Simon and Garfunkel...

Viewing direction

Of course, I wonder whether this retrospective is really the answer to the global challenges. I think it is in many respects. If we really want to change something, thinking about the status quo is wrong. Tying climate targets to one year in the past is wrong (although it is a right and pragmatic first step), just as peace cannot be tied to maintaining national borders (although aggressively crossing them is of course wrong).

Much more fundamental, and actually more important, is the why. How do we see the future of humanity? And that can only mean that we allow the plurality and diversity of people to develop in harmony with our environment. And this driving force that allows us to develop is not a status quo, it cannot be prosperity or capital.

We need to get away from the materialistic and economic way of thinking that we have misunderstood since the Enlightenment. I have spent years teaching myself that my mind does not exist and is just an illusory by-product of a neurochemical process that I do not understand. I have spent decades trying to understand art as a theoretical discourse reflecting the principles of perception, and I have spent a lot of time trying to understand social processes as a system that follows the logic of information processes. I really ask why I have done this?

What was the purpose behind it? The only thing I can think of is the progress of science and the rise of the information age. We have built a world on these reductionist principles of thinking, the result of which we are now seeing. It has created a global elite that can indulge in any pleasure and has plunged much of the world's population into abject poverty. All this has been paid for by nature, which is on its last legs. I really don't think that discussions about Engeriespaarlamps will get us out of here.

Global awareness

We need to start thinking about what we are doing here. We have a huge task ahead of us to work on global awareness. We have to activate all the resources we have for this. I think that is perhaps one reason why fundamentalist positions are resurgent. They are being reactivated in order to understand their core. It is not very surprising that this is being abused by power. But we can only synthesize this through dialogue. Building walls to consolidate the status quo is completely the wrong approach.

It is the emptiness in the mind that creates space to meet the other, when we leave the self behind, diversity in unity becomes possible.

I didn't take much with me to India, a backpack full of clothes, books and technology. But I packed a good pair of headphones and have now bought an external cell phone hi-fi sound card from Tempotec for the USB-C output, it wasn't cheap, but it's excellent. I was delighted when it arrived today and of course I tried it out straight away. What a mixed experience.

The music immediately evoked memories, I revelled in the music. I thought of Husserl, who describes very nicely how present consciousness always consists of memory (retention) and expectation (protention). This also makes a lot of sense for music, it is important to remember what has happened in the last few seconds or minutes and it is important to anticipate that it will continue, even if perhaps in a completely different way. Otherwise you simply can't listen to music. But this seems to be the exact opposite of what meditation is all about.

Listen

In order for me to shed my little self, I have to realize that the self does not actually exist, that its senses do not belong to it, that in seeing there is only seeing itself, in hearing only hearing itself. The mind has thoughts, but they themselves are only thoughts. The now-consciousness, as Husserl describes it, cannot belong to any ego. So who is listening? The small self that takes itself far too seriously?

Consciousness can only be true in its surrender to the Self - Brahman. In the old and new scriptures this is called bliss. Listening to music in a state of meditation, what can that be? The recognition of structures, composition, expectations and memories, all these are the very elements of consciousness that need to be stripped away. So is listening to music a path that leads away from cognition?

Or is there a higher function in listening to music? Is being immersed in music, the state in which we are completely music, gliding through time with it without thinking, but still completely and utterly in music, a state similar to meditation? Is this fulfilled listening to music bliss? Of course, it is only rarely possible to immerse oneself in music in this way. Sometimes it can take on a trance-like state, sometimes a highly concentrated awareness of a world context. It is created by the interplay of a composer's composition or a tradition, the performers and the listeners. In the technical recording, the relationship is distorted, but still exists in principle. From a semiotic point of view, music is always an abstract reference to the world and at the same time the most direct of all communication - birdsong.

Shafts

On another level, we are dealing with sound waves in music (light waves in visual art). We ourselves are probably made of an atomic lattice that consists of 99 % of nothing. There is no ego that perceives something else. There is only the level of immanence, pure existence in which these forces interact. It's nice that this creates the illusion of an ego. I like that, but it is a fallacy, or at least a truncated view. This ego that shines forth in these force fields is an ego that transcends immanence, it can establish connections with distant things, across space and time. This is perhaps what Deleuze calls deterritorialization and the flight of the line. So I listen in this network. Perhaps to listen to music is to become aware of oneself as selfless.

Atman

But is it possible to reach the level of Brahman consciousness with music? Is the round dance of the gods, are the heavenly sounds, the requiem and oratorio witness to a divine consciousness? In Christian church music, it is probably only ever a sound space of the afterlife, a space that can only be reached after death and of which the music provides a foretaste. That is a little sad. I have an image of harp-playing angels sitting on clouds.

The task of Atman in Brahman, the realization that everything is only one, is quite another. India is loud, the fanfares in the temples screaming, the Ragas on the other hand, contemplative and meditative. I always have the feeling that it's not about an artist, but that something is being manifested here. A bit like the OM choir. It's the opposite direction. It is not the human being who creates a baroque space in which the divine is sung, but the divine consciousness descends through the performance. Or to put it another way, immanence flows through, flows through itself.

P.s.: I am writing this while listening to Schubert's String Quintet in the recording with the Quartetto di Cremona hear.

Yesterday I saw two millipedes mating. It was pretty much the most fascinating thing I've seen in a very long time. The creatures intertwined, rubbed and entwined, there was rhythm, devotion, engulfment. The two met by chance and after a few minutes moved on in different directions. An encounter. They were two life forms that united to give birth to more life.

A Life - One life

I then reread Deleuze's last essay today: "Immanence: A Life", Deleuze wrote this shortly before he threw himself out of the window, he was seriously ill. I read this essay many years ago, around the time my father died, if I remember correctly. Now, reading it again, I realize why I was so moved at the time, and I also realize that I really didn't understand almost anything back then, as the 'wrong' underlining alone shows.

I've had a bit of a crisis over the last few days, wondering whether Sri Aurobindo's ideas aren't perhaps a little too crazy after all. And at the same time I also wondered whether Deleuze's thinking in its monistic, empirical orientation might not be the opposite of what I am discovering here in India on my journey into spiritual philosophy. And then this essay begins like this:

"What is a transcendental field? It can be distinguished from experience in that it doesn't refer to an object or belong to a subject (empirical representation). It therefore appears as a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self."

The rest reads like a commentary on the Upanishads.

Brahman

I keep coming back to it because these writings are simply incredibly profound. Deleuze describes the self here as subjectless consciousness, as a pure flow that forms the transcendent field. This field is the ground of everything - Brahman (?) - everything is formed out of it. Subject and object together, the subject never without an object to which it relates. Experiences, experiences, memories, moments and episodes are formed here. They are born in immanence. Deleuze writes one page further:

"Were it not for consciousness, the transcendental field would be defined as a pure plane of immanence, because it eludes all transcendence of the subject and of the object."

I know that this all sounds very complicated, these are terms that often seem suspect because they stand for a way of thinking that many do not understand and those who move within it argue a lot about it. It's just that in the context here, these make a lot of sense to me. I was at Matrimandir this morning, I didn't know I was going to open this book today. A friend here came along, he found the whole thing quite elitist and unnecessary, he was referring to the architecture. I found it exciting, in my practice I focused on the chakras.

Immanence

Meditation is ultimately about sharing the very consciousness that Deleuze describes as pure immanence. Whether this is really possible remains to be seen. Mediation is, however, an attempt at approximation. If it succeeds, according to the Upanishads, then we experience immortality at least for that moment. And that is the only way to jump out of the window. I'm serious, it's really not the most obvious conclusion, and not recommended for imitation. But it's amazing how close Deleuze comes to the Upanishads here, it's as if his entire philosophy is based on them.

"This indefinite life does not itself have moments, close as they may be one to another, but only between-times, between-moments; it doesn't just come about or come after but offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness."

Further reading:

I recently listened to a podcast on the subject of dreams and was once again very surprised. The head of the sleep laboratory in Mannheim says that anyone can train themselves to remember dreams. At least I can, so that's true. But what really surprises me is the reduction of dreams to the subconscious. Dreams would only use stronger images to draw our attention to working on something that we neglect in our waking consciousness. It's a pity and sad, and at the same time indicative of how pathetic this idea is.

I'm thinking about this again today because I was reading the Upanishads again. The short Mandukya Upanishad speaks of four states of consciousness: Vaishvanara (the outward-turned senses), Taijasa (the inward-turned senses in the sense of contemplation or daydream or dream) Prajna (deep sleep i.e. unconscious oneness) and Turiya (the superconscious state, infinite peace, boundless love). I was so impressed that I initially had to sleep the whole day.

Sleeping

I've often told the people I've spent loving nights with that sleeping is consciousness research for me. I don't think anyone really took me seriously. And I didn't take myself as seriously as I should have either. I always had to think of Marcel Proust's 'Search for Lost Time'. The first chapter in Swann's world describes waking up and consciously staying in this in-between world of waking up. This world is a very special place for Proust, and it has stayed with me ever since. I didn't read more than the first 4-5 pages, because it seemed to me that everything had been said. I then devoted the second half of my studies to the philosophy of consciousness. I only understood a lot of things when I was asleep.

In the Upanishads, sleep is a meaningful access to the world, to the self of the world, in which we are not separate. Immortality is the state of deep meditation. Mastering dreams brings us closer to the Self, to Brahman. At the same time, I am now reading Satprem, I find him a bit suspect, but his description of what happens in the different stages of meditation and forms of consciousness speaks to me from the heart. For Satprem and Sri Aurobindo, the core of meditation is to quiet the mind. Only when it is calm and no longer resists Brahman is it possible to allow the organizing power of consciousness. Thinking only interferes with this. This also happens in sleep and in dreams.

I see this as a counter-design to the sleep laboratories that try to instrumentalize dreams for the value creation efficiency machine. Instead, the dream gives us access to a consciousness that far exceeds our small sense of duty.

Sleep is wonderful, it unites us with the self. It is a high form of cognition.

Happy Diwali

Diwali

Today I was in a choir lesson. What happened there was a very intense shared experience. I'll try to describe it as objectively as possible. We (around 60 participants) started with breathing exercises, 'warmed up' our vocal chords, sang four-part chords and scaled the pitch. The choirmaster pointed out that we were not here by chance. We were in Auroville because something had drawn us here. I think most of the people in the room understood what he meant, for others it might be a little difficult to comprehend. It's a bit like when we like something that others don't like. Many can't understand it at all, some meet it with tolerance and only very few can put themselves in the other person's shoes in such a way that the other liking becomes understandable. But it is actually only understandable if we share the liking.

So there was a certain consensus: we all came to Auroville somehow because we wanted to be here. Many share a spiritual openness.

OM

So the choirmaster reminded us. Now that we had warmed up our voices, discovered the diaphragm and abdominal muscles, tried out the basic principles of breathing technique and remembered why we were there, the real part began. Singing OM in chorus, sitting three times and standing once. The instructions? Leave your ego outside, don't feel embarrassed, sit together in silence for a short time (about 1 minute) and wait for someone to start with a sound. What developed from this was indescribable. A complex harmony, with microtonal shifts that repeatedly allowed polyphonic circling of harmonic centers. It was singing together, merging into ONE highly complex voice. It was deeply meditative and at the same time activating.

The spiritual overtones of this singing are the thought that we are all the same, and this unity of being in the sense of the Upanishads manifests itself in Brahman. Further up the overtone scale of spirituality, the sounding of a music that did not exist before, not a composition, not an individual or collective improvisation, but a sound that uses the participants only as a medium. The sound itself, the sound waves, even further up the spiritual overtone scale, is a harmony that can also be found in Sri Aurobindo's texts. At this point at the latest, I find it difficult to keep up. But who knows, perhaps this is an atman of Brahman, an avatar speaking here, the supramental manifesting itself. Why not? It's always better than the idea that money rules the world 🙂

Today I was at a place for village children with special needs (Deepam). Someone from the guest house here had invited me to accompany her. It was a kind of ceremony as part of Navarathri in honor of the goddess Saraswathi - she stands for education, prosperity and success. In India today, the objects needed for work were purified and consecrated as a form of thanksgiving. Offerings were brought to them and songs were sung. In the therapy center, in addition to figurines, books and other toys, these were also the accounting books with the donation file. In a second stage, the school bus arrived. It drove over lemons and pumpkins were smashed on the road.

I have taught for many years, sometimes lecturing, often discussing with students, occasionally criticizing. I tried to inspire, to share knowledge and skills, to give advice and to help with the search. I never taught, nor did I educate. I considered it a privilege to be allowed to teach. I rarely punished students for wanting to learn from me. That's absurd. If they didn't do what I expected, then either I wasn't clear enough or I had the wrong expectations.

Doors

Some teachers see themselves as gatekeepers, they want to determine who meets arbitrary quality standards. If you want to position yourself at a door, then my idea has always been to give the people who want to go through this door a good idea of what to expect and to think together with them about whether they want to go through this door or whether they would rather take another one.

I am not a teacher, and certainly not a special needs teacher. But what I saw today gave me a lot (to think about). I was happy to be able to share this space. I saw so much joy, laughter, consideration, attention, intuition, fun, togetherness and confidence that my heart became very light. What is happening here? What words can I use to describe it? And what does this have to do with teaching? Some young and committed people started 30 years ago to look after people with special needs under a tree. Now it has become a very solid and inspiring place - another moving story.

Who is actually learning from whom here? And what are we actually doing in all the other schools all the time?

I have always resisted the word mediation. I was suspicious of many things about it. At the same time, however, I have always practiced my own forms of meditation without calling them that or without having learned them.

For me, mediation includes: a.) contemplation, i.e. immersing oneself in a thought and specifically tracing thought impulses on a topic, circling around until the mental image becomes clearer and appears before the inner eye. b.) paying attention to one's own breath. This makes you aware of your own body. This means that by consciously breathing in and out, the body also straightens up, the spine is relieved and one's own physical existence becomes conscious. With this awareness of existence, new levels of consciousness can then be opened up. c.) In transcendental meditation, the self connects with the general consciousness and can now take on almost any form. The concept of becoming is exciting in this context. The self can now merge completely into another. For example, the self can open up or it can mentally transfer itself to another space or time. The thoughts are free. These are forms of meditation that I usually practise for half an hour.

During longer meditations in the lotus position of up to 1.5 hours, completely different things happen. This also has something to do with the pain that the sitting posture brings with it. I sit through the pain, so to speak. This leads to a kind of trance. This borderline experience transcends the separation of self and world, in it I find a reality where everything is in harmony.

India

In India, I feel like I can write this down without sounding like a dreamer. It feels natural to do this and also to talk about it. Perhaps my longing for India also has something to do with this. I have the feeling that I can give my consciousness space here without having to justify myself. These experiences are simply allowed to be and do not have to prove themselves against the reductionist constraints of a materialistic philosophy. Rather, being here allows me to explore consciousness in the first place and, from these experiences, to understand the constraints of the Trinity, capital and neurobiology as such.

I am not a machine and I don't want to be seen as one.

A beautiful description of what meditation can be can be found in the Shvetashvatara Upanishads Chapter 2. in: "The Upanishads. Introduced and translated by Eknath Easwaran" ISBN-10: 3-442-21826-8 p.294f.

On a boulevard in Paris, café and bad music, sun and lots of people. So many people want to be seen. They are busy, sexy, cool, knowing, adventurous, sporty, educated, cultured or indifferent. Many want others to take notice. They see themselves as what they want to be. Perhaps they live their lives in a certain way, happy and content, or alienated and bored, outcast or privileged. That's the beauty of Paris and other big cities, that people show themselves how they want to be, how they want to be seen.

Open spaces

Of course, this also somehow reveals an alienation, a dissonance. The free spaces that we take for ourselves contrast with the - usually larger - spaces in which we are not what we want to be. This gives rise to a whole industry. You want to be different? Try it, for a price. Express your individuality by buying something very special that others haven't bought. This is capitalism and consumerism. It's common knowledge, and we all think we're above it, and of course we're not.

I find the urge to want to show off, to be noticed, to get attention, much more exciting. Why do we do that? We are probably looking for Encounterswant to greet the other - Namaste. We probably want to overcome loneliness, or at least interrupt it. We don't actually want to participate in capitalism, we want to take part in the adventure of consciousness, celebrate it with others, share it. And we want to dissolve into it - in intoxication and ecstasy, Dionysian. We want to put the logic of the system, its functioning and efficiency up for discussion. Nietzsche sends his regards, but also Bataille.

So I'm sitting in a café in Paris, my backpack packed, tonight I'm flying to Auroville. And of course I ask myself why I have to write this in a blog now. And why I have to fly to the other side of the world. Check your privilege. And why am I writing so much in the first person?

Goodbye

I seem to be serious about this. Many years ago, I told anyone who would listen that I was done with capitalism. Just as I have been saying goodbye to Christianity for even longer. But for me that meant living in the wrong place, because I didn't manage to develop a real alternative for myself. There are not many places on our planet where this is attempted. It's not enough for me (anymore) to have a critical attitude, and I also don't find it acceptable for me to collect resources within the system in order to redistribute them individually. Giving comfort is not my style either.

We have to act, it can't go on like this. It's bad for the environment, but it's also bad for us. This is so often glossed over in today's debate. It's not just about saving the planet, it's about saving ourselves. We don't just need new ideas from engineers, but also from philosophers and spiritual thinkers and seers. Perhaps we don't need new ideas at all, but could remember old ideas and think about how we can adapt them in an increasingly complex civilization. What would a world without capitalism and without colonialism and crusades look like? Why do so few people think seriously about this?

I have no idea what to expect on the next stage. On verra, we will see. Aurobindo sang about fire, it is essential for seeing. I hope that I don't emerge as a phoenix from the ashes, as the same as before. That would really be a tragedy. Rather, I want to become fire myself, to remember that we are made of molten stars.

Yesterday, after many years, I finally went to the village center of Roubion. Vilém Flusser lived here for many years. I quoted his books a lot in my seminars and used them as a basis for discussion. Especially his philosophy of photography. Flusser is a wild theorist. He wrote a lot about images, media, language, technology, signs, history... It seems to me that he was always thinking about how thinking works. How words and images are created in our heads and how much this has to do with technology, e.g. photography or digital media. He talks about the universe of technical images.

Imagination

Our thoughts often move in images of the imagination... They correspond to a medium: when we communicate, we use language, text, images, photography, film, sculpture, in short media, technical and artistic, scientific and fictional. These media are always based on a technique. Writing and drawing, printing, an algorithm, digital representation, etc. How is this connected? Our thinking, the media and their technical conditions? How does our thinking change technology (progress), and how does technology change the production of new media? And how do these new media in turn change our thinking?

This whole process is not at all clear, and anyone who says he or she has understood it has basically not even seen the problem. Flusser is always alive in his thinking, he has a deep historical dimension, a great understanding of technology, he understands the dynamics of media use and the social effects. His philosophy attempts to grasp the core of human thought technically, semiotically and historically. This is an incredible project. It is not modest, nor is it without contradictions.

Flusser has always been an inspiration to me, but at the same time I have always missed something. His thinking is basically materialistic. His philosophy is one of the most exciting in the field of semiotics and media theory. He sometimes talks about a historical consciousness and a magical one. He always talks about it very abstractly. He is not a consciousness theorist. His world is technical. It is important to read him in order to understand our time. Personally, however, I am now concerned with other thoughts.

If you are now in the mood for Flusser, you can find more here... https://www.flusserstudies.net/

What should I take with me to India? I want to live a different life, in a different society, with different ideas and goals. It's warm there, life will be simple. Apart from the basics like a few items of clothing, I'll need my technical devices such as my laptop, cell phone and camera. And what else? A good flashlight, because the country lanes there are not lit. And books... There will also be a number of libraries there. I haven't read for 'pleasure' for a very long time. I read a lot of 19th century novels as an undergraduate: Brontë, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Goncharov... In high school it was the ancient dramas of Sophocles or classics like Shakespeare, but also Hesse. I enjoyed reading plays, they were intense, fast-paced and stimulating.

Since I have been using the Internet, and I have been doing so since the beginning of the Netscape browser, my reading has changed. I read less linearly, jump around more, read a lot at the same time. As a result, I sometimes feel dizzy and need books as an anchor. The books that accompany me are always books that are highly condensed in theory. I also read them very slowly, usually only a few pages, then I have a lot to think about again. I don't understand how people devour complex books. Books that interest me represent a whole cosmos of thought. Such a cosmos is difficult to grasp. It's a bit like traveling. Some people want to see everything, to have been everywhere, they collect stories and photos, and yet they haven't really been there. Other countries, cultures and languages take time. You have to approach them slowly, wait for an invitation, be polite and respectful.

Once again, consumerism is probably the guiding principle here. It is linked to capitalist exploitation, which apparently serves self-expression and earns social points. I've always been suspicious of that. Sure, I also like to be entertained and consume media because it's fun, distracting or simply generates great feelings. But this distraction is not sustainable for me. I don't remember movies or books or places etc... I'm interested in how something has changed my thinking. How I have become something else. Encounters with books and places trigger a change, I am a different person after a real encounter, or a different animal, or a different work, depending on who wants to perceive themselves and how...

24 books, an interweaving, an experiment. An artificial juxtaposition. What would a dialog between Deleuze and Aurobindo have looked like? Would they have had anything to say to each other?

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?

I have been waiting for some time. Actually, I like waiting. Waiting is a space and a time in which there is nothing else to do but wait for time to pass. As a rule, you can't do much else except read or talk or think. Waiting times are therefore always free spaces for me. I prefer to wait in community centers, for example, where everyone is equal. Together with others, I am in a room where there is nothing to do but wait for time to pass. This shared waiting allows for real encounters.

There is always something amazing about an encounter. An encounter takes place when there is a counterpart who reciprocates. The most beautiful kind of encounter is one that is completely free of objectives or expectations. In this context, Deleuze also talks about encounters with art. That surprised me at first. Because an encounter, I always thought, is intersubjective. Two questions now arise: can art be intersubjective, and are art spaces such as museums perhaps also waiting rooms?

A new life

My wait at the moment is a long wait. I have been waiting for a few weeks to start a new life. The waiting is determined by applying for a visa. This visa application process - embassies and consulates as well as other government agencies - is in a different time dimension anyway. It has something Kafkaesque about it, its own logic, which has become quite detached from the processes of the outside world.

So this long wait makes encounters possible, but again in a completely different way than I thought. People react very strongly to my waiting. Many perceive my move to start a new life as a challenge. They reflect on their own situation or have the feeling that they can now tell me things that they might not otherwise tell me, as I am leaving their world anyway. But perhaps they also hope to get to know a different perspective through me. Whatever the case, I have quite intense encounters. I pour my heart out and others open up.

An encounter, meeting, participating

Participation seems to me to be an important element of the encounter. In order to encounter the other, this openness is important, to leave oneself (Deleuze sometimes speaks of a de-territorialization) and to become something else (Metamorphosis). When I'm traveling on the train, for example, or looking around me at a concert, sitting on a park bench or in a café, I often see people who are also looking around them. Many are looking for an encounter. We are often too shy to actually talk to each other, but the first encounter has already taken place: Opening up to the other, and the perception of the other.

It seems to me that we have forgotten how to really participate. A smile or a brief word, a bit of sympathy. In India, people say NamasteThe encounter is expressed in this greeting. It is not about wishing each other a good day or greeting God, but about seeing that the other person is also part of what makes me who I am.

What does that have to do with art? Everything.

Highways have always been special places for me. Most of the time I wasn't under time pressure, I rarely had to get from A to B in a certain time. Rather, highways are travel routes. I find myself there in intermediate states, a kind of no man's land with an infinite number of possibilities. That opens up thinking spaces. They are often simply empty. The brain is busy moving safely in traffic. It's a pleasant way to keep busy, the mind is busy and alert, a mistake would be fatal. If I am understretched or tired, I drive a little faster or slower, or take a break. This creates a kind of equilibrium.

In this equilibrium, other thoughts can sort themselves out and spin away unnoticed. Only occasionally does my consciousness hold on to a thought. This allows thoughts to find their way without immediately encountering the usual thought filters. I always get to know myself a little anew on the highway, or remember a former self.

Then there is the physical space. This is either familiar and therefore triggers associations that are triggered from outside, so to speak. Or it is a new space that invites you to dream and arouses curiosity. Personally, I always find this positive. I don't really experience any fear or unpleasant feelings on the highway, although I do sometimes think about unpleasant things, that's for sure.

This space of movement, travel, association, gentle stimulation and alertness almost always makes me think about my childhood at some point. After all, I grew up in a country where people drive a lot. It would be nice if that changed soon, and I'm trying to drive less myself. It's no longer in keeping with the times, and it's actually a bit irresponsible.

So this space is a given space. It is not creative or free. It is a space with strong conditions. I like to immerse myself in this space to see what other spaces I actually want to free myself from. It's probably the case for many people that we dwell on our thoughts while driving and want to change our lives in some way.

I like being on the highway. Traveling on the highway is a metaphorical place, a physically metaphorical place - a physical metaphor. I used to think a lot about theories of linguistic metaphors. What do they mean, what is their linguistic reference, how do they work... especially in art and literature. Metaphors are words that mean something different in a certain context than they normally mean. That is exciting!

Traveling on the highway is the opposite of a simulation, and yet these spaces function similarly: simulation spaces and travel routes. Both spaces mean something that they are not actually.

Life is so complex and there are so many different ways of living. There is no right or wrong way to live. Life is a gift.

But what do you say about the negative energies, the destruction and aggression, the greed and resentment? That's all part of it. There is only acceptance. But acceptance does not mean approving of everything, nor does it mean tolerating everything. If a community decides to establish rules and sanction the violation of these rules, then this is also a form of acceptance. As humanity, we signed the Charter of Human Rights with the United Nations in 1945. A lot follows from this, above all how we should treat each other, what is ok and what is not. Acceptance does not mean that we should not and cannot try to change the world.

The excluded

In recent generations, so many discriminated minorities have fought for their rights because they have either violated the norms or been exploited, or both. This discrimination is, of course, the exact opposite of acceptance.

But when a person decides to change their life and leave the so-called status quo. Then the status quo society speaks of a dropout. But isn't it much more the case that people who have decided not to change the status quo have dropped out of life? They remain in a state of rigidity. We probably somehow need traditions, rituals, structures and rules in order to function as a community. And part of these structures may be that they cannot be changed arbitrarily and individually.

There is a relationship here. People who are excluded from mainstream society and people who want to leave it. Why are some not allowed or do not want to participate in this discourse in a society? Is this merely a question of the normal distribution curve (Gauss), or are there structural blind spots in the majority society?

Decay and preservation

History shows that there have been many societies that have fallen, some of which were defeated by enemies or destroyed by natural disasters, but some of which also fell due to decadence, internal conflicts or bad decisions. Above all, however, it shows that there are an infinite number of different forms of society and that value systems can change radically.

Most societies have functions of priests, philosophers, artists, shamans, intellectuals etc. who have a special position. They are not involved in the distribution of tasks in everyday life, the production processes and distribution mechanisms and have a reflective function. They keep the archives, develop new ideas, offer interpretations in conflicts. Ideally, they are the protectors of wisdom, of knowledge treasures. They are involved in a different time, have access to a different consciousness. They see the before and after of societies. They are therefore essential, revered and feared at the same time.

Radicals

These special positions that they occupy are free spaces in a society. New rules of the game are tested here. These playgrounds are subject to special protection. Changing their places is vehemently defended by society. Not everyone is allowed to play along. And if someone 'drops out'? Then he or she is also saying that this system of free spaces no longer works. The most sacred place in society is being called into question. This is also vehemently defended.

And the dropout? Has she not tried hard enough and just not found the right place within society? Did she just give up too soon? Maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and would have found her place in another life. Or maybe not. Maybe there is simply no place for her in the current society. Maybe there are these blind spots.

Hermits, autonomous communities, monasteries and gurus mark positions in the world that elude current societies. They cannot be assimilated. In this respect, they are radical. (I am talking here about peaceful positions and not revolutionary positions). These peaceful positions occupy a satellite position.

They have a luminous power and show the cosmonauts the way.

During meditation, I often watch my thoughts, let them come and go and try to slow them down. Thoughts come and go, and often I don't understand where they come from and why they are replaced at some point by a completely different thought. What chain of associations is at work here? These chains of thought seem to be random, triggered by experiences that still resonate and are processed further.

It reminds me of a philosophical thought. It starts with an observation by Henri Bergson. He describes the cinematograph, an apparatus from the late 19th century that can both record and play back films. The cinematograph records many images per second. In film theory, we talk about 25 frames per second, so let's take this figure. In other words, 25 images per second. When so many images are projected one after the other, we have the illusion of movement, that is the magic of cinema. Of course, the movement is only in the gears of the cinematograph, the perceived movement of the objects on the screen is a lie. Bergson is very clear about this. Cinema cannot capture life. The Elan Vital is not found in the movie theater. That makes sense at first.

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was somewhat more optimistic. The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility is concerned with this. Photography threatens painting, perhaps... I'm not so sure. The aura would be lost in the technically reproduced image, yes, probably... but this is where Benjamin's reception often ends. But it gets interesting with Benjamin afterwards, when he talks about the cinema. The 25 frames per second free the actors from the constraints of the stage, other narratives can emerge through editing, space and time become the object of artistic creation. Art makes creative use of the cinematographer's possibilities.

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze takes this to the extreme, so to speak. His books on cinema are legendarily incomprehensible. He begins with a discussion of Bergson's cinematographs. Deleuze shares Bergson's analysis, but Bergson's mistake was not to have thought the idea through to the end. The individual images, which can only create movement as an illusion, do not have the task of copying reality, of being alive. They are, according to Deleuze, thoughts on celluloid. Cinema is pure philosophy, the filmstrip is fixed thought. Nowhere else is thought captured in such a real way as in the cinema. Thinking about cinema is therefore doing philosophy. This is why Deleuze's analyses of films are so incomprehensible. If we are looking for the story behind the movie, then we are completely wrong with Deleuze. But if we understand film as a philosophical medium, then Deleuze has set the bar very high.

When I meditate, I sometimes watch my thoughts. This reminds me of Deleuze's 'film theory' (he would probably never have called it that). With Deleuze there is no theory, for him there is only thinking itself. He has contributed a lot to this, and as he himself says in his ABCDaire, you can consider yourself very lucky if you have found a handful of new ideas in your life. The movement of thought is an adventure, philosophy is its purest form. Theory: your death. Reading Deleuze means thinking him differently. To refer to him would perhaps even be an insult.

In 2016 I went to India for the first time, I called the trip ReadingDeleuzeinIndia2016, I removed the year and it became the title of this blog. Why in India? Because Deleuze's way of thinking is ultimately deeply spiritual. He would disagree, but perhaps he would be pleased.

I always had a stomach ache with an atomistic world view. We learn at school that the smallest components of the universe are atoms. Now physics has moved on and we are talking about protons, electrons, positrons, quarks and strings etc. ... ... But at its core, the idea remains the same: the world is made up of the smallest pieces of matter. This is such a widespread idea that few people doubt it, i.e. doubt the exclusivity of this world view. I expressly do not want to question physics, chemistry or other natural sciences. I just want to ask why we have accepted for ourselves that this science has the last word on ultimate questions.

Of course, there is always a counter-narrative. Panta rhei is what Heraclitus, a contemporary of Plato, called a principle of eternal flow. We cannot step into the same river twice, everything is in flux, i.e. everything is constantly changing, there is no fixed structure to the world. We cannot break it down into its individual parts. The universe is a process. Our lives are constantly changing, and I don't just mean the fact that we are getting older every second. If there is one thing that has always existed, it is change.

Paradoxes

What drives the world? What drives us? Henri Bergson spoke of Elan Vital, a vital momentum, a force that drives all life. Bergson dealt with Zeno's paradoxes, e.g. the tortoise, which cannot be overtaken by the fastest runner of antiquity - Achilles - in a scientific description. The idea is that if the tortoise gets a head start because it is slower, then by the time Achilles has arrived where he started, he has already run a little further. Achilles now needs some more time to get there and so on... Achilles gets closer and closer to the tortoise, but never overtakes it. Mathematically, this is a correct theory. But it is not the case that Achilles never overtakes the tortoise. This riddle was also formulated at the time of Plato and Heracles. Great mathematicians are still biting their teeth on it today. Why does our scientific description not fit reality?

Because we think in fixed units instead of perceiving the process. Panta rhei, Elan Vital. I realized here why I had a stomach ache with the atomistic model. We dissect cadavers to understand life. Science (Scienzia) is a technique of dissecting, of dividing. It is reductionist in nature and explicitly not holistic. But why do we allow such a specialized technique as science to dominate our world view, our self-image and our creation of meaning? Just because science is excellent at what it does does not mean that it can do everything.

Process and awareness

I talked about processes for many years. I had a question ... It wasn't so clear to me myself, so it wasn't surprising that many of the people I discussed it with ended up being confused at best. After all, my hobbyhorse was the philosophy of consciousness and art theory. Why was I talking about processes all the time - natural processes, technical processes, perceptual processes, processes of consciousness? Because there doesn't seem to be anything else, I thought. Art is a process, life is a process, the universe is a process. It was clear to me, but I couldn't find a theory in which I felt at home (apart from Alfred North Whitehead, whose mathematics I really can't keep up with). It seemed to be a topic that everyone somehow knew about but nobody could explain. Just like time. Everyone talks about it, but no one understands it.

Everything is consciousness. That would explain it - not just phenomenologically, but spiritually. Elan Vital - vitality.

I love complexity, but sometimes I also love radical simplification - to get some clarity. For example, the history of ideas in the visual arts. In Europe, after the great migration of peoples, the history of art can be sketched as the history of ideas in a woodcut:

• In medieval art, stories were told visually - mainly the stories of the Bible. Most people could not read, let alone Latin or Greek. The wood panel painting of the altars is therefore a kind of comic, and just as free in the spatial order, perspective and relationship of the objects.
• In the Renaissance, construction principles of the mind were applied: Central perspective, color theory, visual effects such as sfumato, etc... The point was to show that artists could construct an illusion.
• In the Baroque era, the space was contained. The church space was folded, the senses stimulated, the painting seduced, the (art) objects stood for themselves.
• In the Rococo period, the nobility was amused. Sometimes very poor taste and interior design served as a spectacle - courtly, decadent.
• Classicism was an ethical correction. The classical values and principles of antiquity were revived.
• Realism was now, for the first time, really about artistically capturing the world as we think it is. Pretty and ugly, banal and uplifting...
• In Impressionism, then, the philosophical reflection on our own perceptual apparatus. After all, we can only depict what we perceive. The reality beyond our senses eludes representation.
• Abstraction, which is not really an abstraction at all, is about inner forms of the mind.
• ...

A list of such radical simplifications could be made as long as you like. But it is nice to see that there is a dialectical movement here. Something new is tried out until it is recognized that a limit has been reached. The design principles are reversed. This is progress, we say. The 'European elite' is getting 'better'. There may be something to this history of ideas, but what is visible here? What cannot be formulated at certain times and why? Are Delacroix's drawings not pure Impressionism? Is Grünewald's portraiture not pure realism? And is the formal language of medieval art not pure, concrete art?

Art theories

Who told this story? Vasari, Gombrich, Panofsky? Why was it told this way? And who had previously collected and sorted it out in the cabinets of curiosities, the private collections of lords of castles and priests in church halls? And what was burned during the revolutions that we never saw again afterwards?

I have always had a philosophical interest in the media of art. I rarely looked at artists' biographies. I always found the philosophical art criticism of Roland Barthes, for example, more exciting, or the philosophical theory of Danto, Deleuze or Foucault. Here, too, a long list could be compiled; here, too, it is not about the individual details. The perspective is important. Art is created in the viewer. For me, art has always been not only an aesthetic experience but also mental work. That has now changed for me.

The history of progress or reflection, of expertise and contextualization, philosophical media analysis and any kind of value creation, ideological superstructure and power structure are increasingly losing my interest. Art is dead, long live art. This was a popular motto not only in the avant-garde era. It expresses how a society deals with art. It is an object, a very interesting object, but an object. The spiritual in art, as Kandinsky, for example, saw it, is lost in the history of ideas. The museums as secular temples of art and the galleries as capitalist, ideological amplifiers drive the spiritual out of art. If art lies in the viewer, then it is everywhere, but least of all in museums, galleries, churches and collections.

Expectations

But perhaps my expectations are simply too high. I learned that art is the highest good in our culture. It is where human experience, knowledge and education, perfection, pleasure and reflection come together. Art is the highest art. It deserves respect, it is inspiration, perfect in genius and incomprehensible to ordinary people.

Perhaps we should take art off this pedestal again and let it lose itself in arbitrariness as a craft. But perhaps we should also expose art for what it is, always a lie. After all, I can't eat a painted apple. But for me, art is one thing above all: an object of meditation. Art is concentration and openness. Art demands interpretation through contemplation. Only then is it alive. I can find it everywhere, including in museums, galleries, churches and collections.

Black holes are a mystery to us. I am not a cosmologist and deal with black holes in a popular scientific way with a philosophical interest. They mark a limit to our imagination. Gravitational force influences space and time, says science. Concentrated at a single point, it compresses matter to its pure substance, squeezing atomic nuclei and electrons together to form a mass (atoms consist essentially of emptiness). This mass attracts everything with its incredible gravitational force, bending and distorting space and time.

The black hole is surrounded by a threshold, an event horizon. Once this is crossed, there is no turning back, i.e. light is no longer reflected but absorbed. So we cannot see what is happening inside. Something similar seems to apply to time and space. Although black holes can move through our space-time, they themselves are virtually outside of it - which is really beyond our imagination. There seem to be a lot of them in our universe. Most galaxies seem to have a super large black hole at their center.

The limits of imagination

The physics of black holes poses countless puzzles and paradoxes. Above all, however, they reveal a limit. Our thinking is linear, i.e. our sense of time is in the now, which extends over a moment. It is situated within a temporal sequence, namely a past that preceded it and a future that is anticipated and will occur. The same applies to space: our imagination tells us that we can, in principle, move infinitely far in all directions within (3-dimensional) space.

These assumptions are wrong. They are nullified by black holes. For Kant, space and time were therefore categories a priori. In other words, they determine our perception and are not themselves the object of our perception; we cannot say anything about their actual nature. We move in space and time, but do not perceive them ourselves. Space and time shape our thinking, we cannot overcome them within our thinking. This makes it difficult to think about black holes.

But black holes are there, and for our thinking they fall into the ontological drawer of things we don't understand. Other things in this drawer are death, consciousness, spirituality. Black holes are similar to these things because they mark the limits of our imagination. However, they are also very different. We only know about black holes through science, outside of science we have no access to them. We only know death, consciousness and spirituality from our experience; science has little access to their essential qualities. Science's statements about death, consciousness and spirituality are unsatisfactory and reductionist.

Perhaps all 4, i.e. black holes, death, consciousness and spirituality, mark event horizons in different ways.

Speculation about other dimensions

I would like to speculate a little. If black holes are not part of our space-time, but are present in it at the same time, then perhaps they are part of another dimension. Perhaps there is an arrangement of black holes in another dimension that have an event character there. Perhaps our spacetime is just a property of another dimension.

In quantum mechanics, every atom 'knows' about the other atoms in the universe. The so-called interaction describes the phenomenon. If I change something in one place in the universe, the constellation of the universe as a whole is changed. This means that the information that something has changed is present at the other end of the universe, otherwise the laws of physics would be suspended. This complex information density is also annulled by black holes. What happens inside a black hole has no interaction with our space-time. Only the gravitational force of the black hole itself has an effect. Here, too, we quickly reach the limits of our imagination. Black holes also appear to be information holes.

But if our world is not primarily physical, but spiritual, how do black holes in the universe fit in? Do black holes also form spiritual holes?

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?

The forest is a wonderful habitat. I recently heard a little story about a man who whistled a tune whenever he entered the forest. The animals recognized him after a while and accepted his presence. They no longer ran away and sometimes even greeted him. We usually don't see the forest as it is because we often disturb it. Today I was in the forest. Instead of going for a walk as usual, I meditated a little and then took a short nap on the forest floor. It's dry here, so dry that there are hardly any ants, the ground is soft, the air is clear after the brief rain yesterday. It is cool in the shade, the streaks of light pleasant. The trees do not wander, they are rooted in their being. They are not restless. They grow differently in a collective than when they stand alone. As a collective, they take each other into consideration, give each other space, which can be seen in the canopy, the branches and the spacing and in the root kingdom. There is a kind of altruism in the root kingdom. Large trees help small ones to grow, as the small ones do not yet share the light in the crowns. A tree as part of a forest is in communication. Trees seem to communicate with each other through scent messengers. I become calm in the company of trees. Life is possible without running around.

There is something incredibly calming, timeless and connected about sleeping in the forest. In the forest we find rhizomes: similar plants that connect, but also different plants that connect. Gilles Deleuze did not use the rhizome merely as a metaphor for thinking, but thought as part of a rhizome. As a philosopher of immanence, trained by Spinoza, he is an elusive, materialistic, non-reductionist creative mind that I would like to read in India. My suspicion is that his philosophy resonates with the spirituality of India, the Hindu complexity and philosophizing in the forest of the Upanishads.

Cézanne drew and painted Mont St. Victoire over 80 times. From different perspectives, but essentially just the mountain. This mountain has been there for a very long time, it exists in another time. The fruit fly has one day to live, then it's all over. If we extend our time horizon, we think in generations. A few hundred years seems a lot to us; our cultural history began 5000 years ago. For a mountain, that's practically yesterday. What do we see when we see the same object at different times of day, in different seasons, in different moods and from different perspectives? Ourself, the perception of another? But never the mountain itself in its existence.

We know the moment, a lifetime, an epoch, we think about paleontology, geological time and cosmic times or chronons. How do we relate to this? How can our imagination reach these layers of time? Moreover, why do we explore the past and imagine the future? The synthesis of my experienced past and my expected future shapes the now. Only in this entanglement of time do we experience ourselves as individuals. But when we concentrate on the moment - the pure now - and lose our ego in meditation, we overcome it and are now fully present.

It is this contemplative experience of time when we look at the stars, or listen to the waves or crickets, the experience that our consciousness is always part of time other than the now.

It was a tour de force. Breaking up the apartment, moving house with friends, putting things in storage, reorienting ourselves before starting a new chapter. Leaving the familiar, breaking the status quo, doing what is important and right without compromising. But that also means suffering and inflicting injuries, breaking things and planting new ones.

It's just strange that some friends feel the same way. The world is a different place after corona. We no longer want to live the way we did before. Disillusioned, midlife crisis, utopian thinking, realizing wishes, experiencing our own mortality, losing certainty. An open and sometimes frightening future, war, climate crisis, dying democracies, new world order.

All these forces come together in Provence. A historic landscape, rich in culture, war and love, beauty and destruction. Starry skies, glittering... that makes you humble. To perceive change not as a threat, but as a necessity. Acceptance.

On the long drive, I had a conversation about speculative thinking. What is it supposed to be? How can we do it and why? I ask more fundamentally: isn't the cosmos the realization of all possibilities? Both in the past and in the future. The whole of time and all possible worlds in one reality. Immanence. Only the power of consciousness flows through this. To become conscious means to create connections, only in this way is speculative thinking possible, only in this way are we free. It is not the atoms that are the nuclei of the universe, but consciousness.

I am currently undergoing a metamorphosis. At a meeting the other day, someone said that this was a wonderful group of caterpillars. I was taken aback. He said, yes ... soon these will be butterflies.

A friend once said that metamorphosis is proof of God. How else could it be explained that a butterfly emerges from a caterpillar in purely evolutionary steps? Is such a leap in complexity even comprehensible in evolutionary terms? I am not a biologist and I was only interested in this as a thought experiment. I don't believe in a Christian God anyway.

However, the idea of metamorphosis has been with me ever since. Something very complex is transformed into something else extremely complex. I am interested in how this works with ideas. How can one idea give rise to another? Does this have anything to do with creativity? Does the 'old' idea have to die to make way for a new idea? Does the caterpillar die when it becomes a butterfly?

In the West we have the idea of the subject, thoughts arise from it, ideas are in it, its energy is the driving force... That seems unlikely to me. Is it not perhaps rather the case that it is a greater consciousness, a divine consciousness or absolute spirit, an immanence that acts cosmically? Isn't it perhaps more likely that everything has always existed simultaneously? All possibilities are real and we can only experience a small part of them?

Can we immerse ourselves in this great consciousness and become aware of our participation?

I've been asking myself a lot lately what I should do with 'my' old ideas. Should I write them down, preserve them, transform them, allow them to metamorphose and document them? It seems to leave its mark here on this blog.

Some time ago, I was talking to a friend about the fact that I was saying goodbye to many ideas. I told her that I - quite unscientifically - visit my memories and think about why I no longer find certain ideas interesting, that these are often ideas that I dealt with in my studies. Great ideas! From Kant and Hegel etc. She was quite taken with my story and asked if I was writing this down. I said: Why? I'm saying goodbye. She was disappointed. Did she want to check whether I was right to leave these ideas behind me? Did she want me to share myself so that others could follow, or did she just want me to become a fellow writer? SHE advised me to start a blog.

The idea I said goodbye to when I talked about it was no small idea. It was Kant's idea of the transcendental ego. The idea that there must be an ego that can accompany all my thoughts. This ego not only makes me aware of these thoughts, but also integrates them into an identity. At the same time, however, this ego is not merely part of my conscious world of experience, in which case it would be fleeting, lost in sleep. I realized on a long train journey to France that there must be something similar. An anchor point, so to speak. From here to Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit. However, I realized that I was no longer interested in idealism. Especially German idealism. Consciousness in Germany is romantic and dangerous. It is subjective.

That's why I now read books from India. I find cemeteries fascinating and suspicious. Strange anchorages.

When I was a teenager, I had lost my heart to someone who lived in Rome. I traveled to the Eternal City with no money, no plan, it was supposed to be a surprise. That went somewhat wrong. We ate a pizza together, otherwise I had a lot of time to myself. I spent many hours on one of the hills looking up at the sky. I thought about Einstein. What else. Everything else seemed too trivial. There, for the first time, I had an awareness of the whole. Not that I understood Einstein, although I felt like I did: looking up at the starry sky, I realized that everything is connected and interacts. That energy, matter, space, consciousness, time - everything is connected and can be transformed into one another. I still remember that moment today. It seemed so clear to me, so indisputable. As a result, I lost my self. From then on, it made no sense at all for me to speak of a self. Identity now seemed to me to be an ideological construct that was only valid on passports. The foundation for my philosophy studies had been laid.

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.