I have changed my worldview perhaps 4 or 5 times in my life. It is an exciting, absorbing and extremely strenuous process. That seems like a great deal to me; some people may never have left the worldview they were born into. Studying philosophy actually demands it. You should not do it too often, and ideally you grow with each new change.
To say goodbye to a worldview, to open yourself to a new one, you have to leave many ideas behind. It is not easy to say goodbye to ideas that have guided you for years. Nor do you wake up one day and think that everything you have believed for years is wrong. Rather, a feeling creeps in that something is not right, that certain questions remain unanswered, that things you found interesting suddenly become boring. For me, these are mantra-like states. Over the past few years, for example, I have had a thought almost every day: ‘I am done with capitalism’ This sentence has been in my head again and again. But what follows from it?
The Transition
For me, this meant that I could no longer go along with certain things. In very practical terms, I no longer felt comfortable working for an expensive private university. Nor was I interested any longer in things that followed purely the logic of capital; this also meant that I lost interest in certain subjects. I looked at the many shelves of my books and found only very few still interesting … At the same time, I felt drawn to new ideas. Specifically, the books of Sri Aurobindo. I read him slowly, but for years now I have actually read only him … His ideas lead into an entirely different world of thought and experience. Then I am very careful. Some authors are seducers, have quick answers and try, in a somewhat missionary way, to impose a world of thought. I find that dangerous. You have to be careful there.
How can you build new convictions that contradict old ones? To be able to let go of old convictions, I simplify them. I ask myself, what is their core and why have they lost their appeal for me? I reduce complexity, simplify, to gain clarity. That is the beauty of simplicity. Since my worldviews always consisted of solid philosophical systems, I could not simply find careless mistakes in their thinking. Rather, my concern is to weigh their implications. What does a worldview mean for the planet? Or what questions are neglected within a worldview, or dealt with only evasively? My little category of Kiss goodbye entries here is a small collection of anecdotes.
So something became clear to me today. As I said, this is about radical simplifications. When reading Aurobindo’s commentaries on the Isha Upanishad, I feel that all of this is clear, that something is being expressed here that contains a higher truth. I find that almost uncanny, because this world of thought is complex, comes from a different cultural sphere, presupposes an incredible amount, and actually you cannot really understand it properly if you do not know Sanskrit. I am therefore infinitely grateful that I am able to read these texts here with a friend who is not only a true Sanskrit expert but a kind of guru to me, who gives me orientation as I try to find my way in Aurobindo’s world of thought. So something became clear to me today. In the great traditions of Western thought there are different basic attitudes. A kind of axiomatics, basic assumptions on which everything is built. For example, I am familiar with the following traditions of thought:
- A worldview based on empirical experience, on things given to me through experience. These experiences are the starting point for understanding the world. Everything given in my experience must be rationally explicable. ‘Trust only your senses’ is the shortsighted mantra. This worldview is dominant, since it has become a driving force particularly outside philosophy. Politics, economics, the natural sciences are driven by it.
- Another worldview is based on rationality. Only what can be explained rationally is valid. At first this sounds almost identical to the first, but it has radically different implications. Here it is about the structures of our thinking, about transcendental structures: logic, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, a priori assumptions, etc…. The most diverse ideologies can be derived from this kind of rational thinking. If you change the premises by looking at a different body of data, while leaving the lines of argument essentially unchanged, radically different worldviews result—communism, capitalism, fanaticism, fascism. They all have a rationality of their own that, in everyday terms, is not rational at all. I think the Second World War illustrates where that can lead.
- A third cluster of worldviews follows the basic assumption that local systems of knowledge exist. A postmodern worldview that endures contradictions and values change. For me, this is processual thinking. It changes constantly because the world also changes constantly.
This is certainly only a small selection of possibilities. But I think these three paradigms are sufficiently distinct, as there are also many disputes about them in the specialist literature.
It now seems to me that all these ways of thinking converge in Aurobindo’s thought, though under different conditions: Empirical experience is given through a profound analysis of the senses that is phenomenologically precise in that it encompasses the constitution of different states and levels of consciousness (Kena Upanishad). It is rational in the sense that Aurobindo opens up the mystery of the Vedic scriptures and shows that the spiritual insight of the Rishis is rational, but also goes beyond rationality without becoming irrational (Isha Upanishad). It simply includes other forms of knowing and states of consciousness. And his thinking is connected to processual thinking, since it describes the evolution of spirit (The Life Divine). In Aurobindo’s analyses, all three forms of thinking always come together. His ‘system’ is interwoven. Everything related to everything else, and that has to be so, the world, consciousness, full consciousness, nature, the gods, the Self—Maya, Puruscha, Satcitananda, Prakriti, Brahman, Atman…
It seems to me that this is roughly how a worldview can shift or be replaced by another. This means that the previous worldview is transformed in one’s personal thinking.
What helps: Meditation, living in another country in another society, spiritual growth, and the courage to leave gaps for the moment.
p.s.: Instead of a reductionist view of consciousness, and instead of orienting meaningfulness along the movements of capital accumulation, the Vedic scriptures contain the basic principle of vibration. It is the energetic principle of the universe, it is the basic principle of sensory perception. The synchronicity of vibrations in perception allows conscious perception and a translation into sounds and language. What decisively shapes our existence as human beings is our consciousness. It is differentiated into at least 7 levels, and the attempt to reduce it to information processing seems to me masochistic, self-denying, externally determined and misguided.
