The Order of Things

Standing in the back of a small truck, I have spent the last few days driving through Auroville to collect various things for the Pottersmarket. These small trucks are the big brothers of the tuk-tuks. Sometimes you see six or seven dozen people standing on them when another big festival is coming up. They are a popular means of transport for people in the villages when they travel long distances together to be close to the gods. It is surprising how safe this feels, because actually it is extremely dangerous, you would think in the West. It seems safe to me because no one relies on the technology. Apart from a steel frame, a diesel engine, wheels, a transmission, etc., there is not much to it. It is a tool used by people who look out for one another very well. Everything is borne by consideration and caution, by care and compassion. I would rather rely on that than on an algorithm or fully automated systems. For in this human interaction, shared consciousness becomes perceptible. When you move through the world like this, there is an endless laughing echo from all sides. The world seems to be held, and to be in harmony. If things do get precarious because someone on a motorcycle is on the phone and has not heard the horn, or because the cow in the road stoically refuses to be disturbed, then you feel a little compassion for the person who has fallen out of synchronicity and brought about a collision of forces.

© Christoph Klütsch

The same goes for the shops selling metal goods in Pondycherry’s narrow lanes. The clattering of pots, many people speaking at once, the arrangement of the shelves, their contents, which in the end are sometimes simply sold by weight after all. All this brings forth a different kind of communication. Verbal coordination in English is much more direct. But the courtesies and emotions, the recognition of the other, compassion and gratitude, but also frustration and impatience, all this is in facial expressions and movements of the head. The positive emotions tend to be in facial expressions and head movements, the negative ones in the hands. An upward-facing open hand with a questioning look, for example, seems to mean “Why are you making me feel this negative energy?” This communication can be found again in dance, in the mudras, the movements of the hands and body that function like Jantras, geometric figures that can be read energetically. The sounds of the language, by contrast, are soft and flowing; the language of the Tamils is one of the oldest in the world, as old as Sanskrit, but unlike Sanskrit it is spoken in the villages too, not only in the universities. The sound of its syllables can be found again in Carnatic music, whose extreme rhythmic and mathematical complexity makes the untrained ear quite dizzy. And ultimately, of course, all this points once again to the cosmic order. I am beginning more and more to see that the world we live in derives from another reality that encompasses it. Everything leads back to the Upanishads. In meditation this becomes certainty. To the rational mind of the West, that may sound strange. May ChatGPT give this mind what it seeks. In India, fear of ChaptGPT is answered with laughter. It is entirely clear, an unshakable certainty, that computers are no competition for the soul; they are powerful tools, nothing more. Recently I asked ChatGPT—after a longer conversation about Aurobindo, Deleuze and the Upanishads—whether the path of the Upanishads and meditation is accessible to AI: