What to Do?

The last time I seriously asked myself what I should do was during my studies. I studied philosophy and was often asked what I wanted to do with it. What a stupid question, I always thought. It is an inner urge, almost a compulsion, that you cannot oppose. Every such attempt must fail; there is only a thinking forward. So it was not really the question of what I should do, or what was to be done, or how the world could be saved.

Thinking

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

I am reading the Kena Upanishad. Who sees in seeing, who hears in hearing, who thinks in thinking? That really is a good question. For a long time I tried to consider it from the tradition of the Enlightenment—and again and again came up against the limits of thinking. How could it have been otherwise? The Kena Upanishad, too, has only a qualified philosophical answer here.

But instead of wanting to explain how my material body can think, and then being able to consider the question of why, the direction of thought in the Upanishads is different. How can universal consciousness present itself in such multiplicity?

The question that then arises for the individual remains: What to do? But it is another direction of thought: Instead of understanding oneself functionally and in an enlightened way, Indian wisdom is concerned with being carried. Which thought, which consciousness, which insight, which life is realized through me. I meet many people here who have discovered the question for themselves, and some of them have answered it for themselves too – Sadhana.

I listen without judging. People open up quickly here, very deeply and honestly. I laugh a great deal, am enchanted and touched by the stories, deeply moved… I hear stories and insights from people who have surrendered themselves entirely. Often that is not easy; some are privileged, others not at all, it has nothing to do with that.

Senses

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

These questions are so obvious, and just as obviously we do not have the starting point of an explanation. We then say that this is culture.

Life

Life was always already there, even before the atoms. The Big Bang was a coming into existence of what? Electrons? Hardly…. Matter thinks (AI), it has memory (DNA), in its interactions it suspends the laws of space and time. When science says something like this, it is always in the sense: that sounds odd, but don’t worry, we will explain it away yet. 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. This is possible only with a reduced Self and an expanded one, but hardly at all with an ego.

OM MANI PADME HUM

Those who would like to go a little deeper into the Kena Upanishad are referred here: 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 mentalise, Mind could not possibly have come into being out of inconscient substance.” (p.35)