And yet, I love it so

After hours of nightly contemplating the immense depth and amount of corruption, incompetence and insincerity I have the doubtful honour of being allowed to witness and which affects my life on a daily basis I felt like I needed a shot of Heavy Metal to keep my mind from further spiralling into negativity again. Metal has always been my drug of choice which helped me kill the pain of living in this age, and I am aware of it for quite some time. As a consequence, I stopped listening to music almost completely for a few years.
There is yet another quality to Metal that I was not aware of, which I was constantly seeking to apply, though: to have someone scream at the evil in man and to have them shout with rage, and spit in the faces of the gods that failed. 

Seeing things a bit different today, my return to screeching guitars, galloping basses, thundering drums and voices like air-raid sirens became sort of an amusing bed-in which presented me with the question who these people were shouting at. The greed, the ignorance, the imposture, the make-believe, the displays of incompetence in compensating for incompetence*, they are all rather laughable than enraging. We are players in a charade called Auroville, and if we didn’t have it all backwards it could be such an enjoyable experience, like a child’s birthday. And you out there who would smirk or snort at my utterings, you are completely right, though probably for the wrong reasons. For you are like us, because we are like you.

(* German = Inkompetenzkompensationsinkompetenz. I accidently found this in a dictionary and just couldn’t resist. Yays for compound words!)

I. R. Rational

At the end of my last posting I asked the question, Leaving culture aside, not negating it, but looking beyond it — what do we see?
This sentence came as sort of a surprise to me. I have been playing with the eye sight metaphor, intending to point at a view that overcomes the separation at the core of our crises. Yet what popped up was a genuine question that went one step further and to which I did not have an answer myself: who are we?
I better go pondering the more personal version of it first… lol

Roadrunner

Last night I thought, When I am in a state of delusion I am running in circles; that means, I am on a path going nowhere – as opposed to when there is clarity and I am on an path to Nowhere. Any way (sic!), there is nowhere to go; I am, we all are, there already.
Woke up this morning to find that it is true; so far, I have reached nowhere.

Introducing myself to FB

I sat down to write a few lines about me in the “about you” section. Then I noticed there is nothing to tell. The beauty of cleaning the cow shed, the excitement of cataloging books, the joy of grinding away over a translation… the things that usually occupy me are both ordinary and special to me – but to whom else? Years ago, before… you know…, Auroville, I used to write lengthy essays into unheeded blogs. Now I find hardly any word worth uttering, and I really don’t know who I am.

Nevertheless, having joined you here, I guess you do deserve a few sentences.
I came to this place in order to find out whether another way is possible (well, surprise, it is). I needed to look into a few questions, call them the ‘VIQs’ in life, and I needed to do it way deeper than before, up to the point where things are put into practice (check √). And I found that Auroville – AV, for short – is a paradise for those seeking the hell of doing just this, and that it is a hell to those looking for a paradise to rest their aching souls.


I picked up work in a farm where there are cows and chickens to be looked after. I do love the beasts; sometimes they even love me back. There is a rich diversity of other stuff to do, like general clearing and cleaning, typical garden work, construction related tasks, administrative jobs. Keeps it interesting for three friends and me.


The public library here provides another field of work: selecting, classifying, cataloging, and ordering books, a collection of already 40,000 volumes from all fields of knowledge and entertainment.


And then there is translation which, over the years, evolved from occasional small jobs to… books.


None of these activities are done for a living. Thanks to AV’s framework I am able to offer my time for free, as a service, a gift, a meditation. I am doing things because they need to be done, they should be done, and because I can;
Now if you find that odd or unbelievable, give me 100 Rupees and I’ll tell you about the horrors of having to earn money.

Divine conspiracy

Some thoughts that appeared after reading “To be a true Aurovilian”, a text given by The Mother.

1) They say, “Good things come to those who wait”. In Auroville (or any spiritual community) the right thing comes along as soon as there is a need for it. A typical example would be the balance created by the flow of goods and services within a gift circle, where the gift tends to go where the most urgent need is, so that everyone’s needs get met.
The sense of possession distracts the trust in that “mechanism”. Instead of asking, “What can I give? How can I make your life more wonderful?” the possessive mind focusses on, “How can I get the most? What is in there for me? How can I preserve my stuff?” and thereby nourishes greed, building up severe imbalances of wealth and power.

2) Material life, along with personal identity, is like clothing. It is covering the surface of the actual body. We can pretend that there is nothing beneath the fancy surface and then even forget that we pretend, but the psychic body, as well as the physical one, has needs that ought to be met. If we don’t satisfy our hunger, the body will get weaker, become ill, and eventually die.

3) There is a difference between needs and desires. Needs are asking for the most basic elements that keep us alive. We can live without satisfying desires, the stuff we wish for, but we cannot last long with our needs unmet. Desires are like addictions. Sometimes they feel like urgent needs, but actually they just distract our mind by keeping us in constant movement in pursuit of excitement.

4) There is another difference, between desires and aspiration.
How do you know that the thing you wish for is coming from a higher consciousness, your true inner self, and is therefore sincerely aspired; or when is it merely a desire of the ego?
If your ego desires something you will hardly be able to let go of it. You cannot accept a “no”. When your desire gets satisfied new desires arise shortly after. If it does not get satisfied, you cannot give up the idea without feeling pity, frustration, grief, anger, and/or victimization.
The one who aspires is not dependent on specific results. There is no attachment to a certain outcome to an effort. He does not force others into accordance. He is not frustrated in case of failure; aspiration means acceptance of, and surrender to, the supreme reality (or fate, or the ways of the Universe, or God’s will, if you wish. One of my fellow newcomers called it Divine Conspiracy.)
Although the powers of the Universe sometimes seem to plot against your plans, like the gods of ancient Greece, in the end it always turns out that the right thing did happen when you failed. We must fail in order to understand what works not. We must fail in order to learn how to accept failures. We must fail in order to realize we cannot possibly go against the will of the Divine Consciousness (or the laws of nature, or God’s plan, if you wish) and hope to succeed in that. The Supreme has its ways, and we better trust in its general benevolence.

As an example, after having heard of Auroville I was quite on fire. At last a place where I would be free, where I would fit in, where I could put in my energy and my efforts for the benefit of mankind. It finally turned out to be the right decision to come here, very well in line with the plans of the Highest Consciousness; but looking back from today’s point of view it started primarily as one of my ego’s desires. By the teachings of Adyashanti, and also during my first stay here, as a guest, I learned that life in general, and this place especially, is not about me, my liberation, and my development in the first place, but about serving a higher truth. Only along with the sincere aspiration for the realization of that truth comes my liberation as an individual. I had to develop trust into the idea that everything will turn out as it is supposed to be, and the Aurovilians, creating the welcoming atmosphere in this township, helped a lot with that. It actually worked out for me, not only as a concept, but in various experiences.

Still the question remained, “Am I enforcing some self-centered mental idea, or am I supposed to be here?”
So, is it desire or aspiration that makes me want to join Auroville? Now that you know the difference you can imagine what I went through since my discovery of the place. I was looking for ways to be absolutely sure. I didn’t want to fool myself. How could I tell that my motivation was sincerely based in the realm beyond rationality, beyond the ego? How could I ensure I was not deluding myself?
Not to be attached to become a citizen was the ultimate test I could take, and when I realized that, I several times tried again to get in touch with a friend who recently seemed to refuse talking to me. By word of mouth I had the impression that he was not too well off now. A few years ago he helped me financially, so this was both an opportunity to bring back the non-abusive part of our former relationship and find out if I was ready to give up Auroville in case my friend needed the money more urgently than I did.
After four previously failed meeting appointments, another three attempts to re-establish contact were unsuccessful – completely. It was disappointing that a chance for reconciliation has been turned down, but I had to accept that. At least there were no more doubts about sincerety, and at the same time my path to Auroville has been confirmed.

The observation of the movements of mind and body during that period of time raised awareness of similar situations when the ego pretends to have a “need” that “must” be met under any circumstances. It is so much easier now to identify the diversion and counter it by taking a step back. Suddenly there is openness towards the results of my attempts to achieve my goals. What are my petty ideas compared to the work of a higher truth? Suddenly the pressure and the frustration dissolute. And life becomes beautiful in each and every moment.

The weight of consciousness

Due to some changes in my personal life I have been silent for a while. I also think that this situation is going to continue. The reason is that, after quite some months of staying back in old Europe, I have finally moved to Auroville where life is less about talking rather than about being and doing. Waking up with the sun, working on a garden / farm in the early morning hours, doing other necessary stuff around noon, learning and meeting people in the afternoon, going to bed on sunset. Life is simple in the sense of being intimately connected to the cycles, means, and methods of nature. It is close to how it is supposed to be. So I am on my way and I like it.

Auroville is a very special place. Of course it is. That’s why I am here. It is a township the description of which would take voluminous books, or thousands of witnesses’ statements, but still you wouldn’t get what it is like to live here. You got to feel it yourself.

The thing with any description is their subjectivity. Which is not a bad thing. Quite the opposite. It is just that people tend to unintentionally reveal much more of their worldview than making an appropriate description of Auroville. Maybe it is the dissimilarity of its ways, compared to our countries of origin, maybe it is Auroville’s openness towards all sorts of experiments that makes us project our values on everything we experience round here, like a slide on a blank screen.

What we see in Auroville is exactly what we expect to see. We behave accordingly and as a result we receive the corresponding reaction of our environment. So our egos, our superficial selves materialize in the outside world which verifies and reinforces the projection we started out with. I witnessed this mechanism in almost every person I have been talking to. The more misanthropic their mind is, the more they critisize Auroville for its failures. The more materialistic their worldview, the more business opportunities they see. The more altruistic they think, the happier they tend to become here. Just a few examples out of a multitude.

It can be quite fascinating to consciously toy around with this insight, as a way of finding out the way your thoughts are altering your experiences, or as a way of discovering aspects of Auroville that previously haven’t come to the mind.
Personally, I prefer not to judge other people’s behaviour. I see quite some greed and selfishness – I also see aspiration towards human unity and desire for learning and improving things. I see aberrations, malfunctions, messing up  – I also see some success with building a new kind of society.
But foremost I see loads of opportunities to develop, inwardly and outwardly. Auroville offers to its inhabitants opportunities you usually don’t get elsewhere. As long as you stay focused on things going ‘wrong’, e.g. other people’s selfishness, expanding bureaucracy, rising prices… (you name it) you  will miss the whole point of this project: that this is about improving the world by improving yourself. Don’t wait for others to get on track; don’t wait for the situation to become more favorable. The time is now, and it is up to you to do as much as you can to make your life worth living while at the same time you make the world a nicer place for everyone.

The Wall: Live in Berlin

Life is like a big city, a Metropolis such as Tokyo, or Sao Paolo, or Los Angeles, with broad streets and narrow pathways, with huts and individual houses and huge towers, parks and rivers also.
On my way through it, I pass bridges and crossings with thick traffic jams. What am I going to do when I get stuck? Shall I make a turn? Better walk on my own or follow the crowd to the underground? Take the bike? Watch my step in darker corners? Look out, a stop sign! – Nevermind, I don’t care about those.

As a child, I played in the streets, mindlessly but with a vague sense of danger. Don’t let yourself get hit by a car, Mama said. Don’t take sweets from a stranger, either.
As years went by I discovered more and more of the streets in the quarter and roamed the city as an adolescent. It was exciting; still a lot to see and get familiar with, and the fact that my life was like Berlin, surrounded by walls and fences with barbed wire atop, did not matter as much as you might think. For my visitors, Berlin was all about THE WALL. But for me, the wall was such an ordinary feature that I couldn’t care less. Like all of us, I earned my first Marks by joining the construction team, even. It is safe to say that we ‘Berliners’ were somehow proud of our wall. After all, it was necessary to protect us from evil forces outside.

Then came the day when I realized that things went worse. Still, the shop windows were filled with tons of bright-coloured stuff to purchase. But many people lost their jobs, their homes. There were more beggars on the streets than ever before, also junkies and bootleggers, whores and thieves… and of course the police and military, trying to suppress the spreading unhappiness.
Our family didn’t do too well, either, although we still had a living. But it was all too obvious this was not going to last. Suddenly, the existence of the wall became a hurting reality. My world was finite, narrow, with each road ending in a blind alley. There was nowhere to go. Maintaining the wall had drained the city of its energy. Berlin had become a prison. Me, I got dizzy from banging my head against the wall; some guard shot at, and injured me, and from inhaling heavily polluted air, I was suffering of chronic sensual numbness.

It was at this point in time, when I discovered a second-hand bookshop somewhere in a remote corner of Berlin people rarely used to go to. The ‘KDW’ was way more popular those days, although less people than ever before could afford to buy there. Anyway, the bookshop turned out to be extremely interesting to me. Browsing through its shelves I found the wisdom of ages. At first I passed by without noticing; soon enough I would return. The thing that completely changed my blurry, distorted imagination of the city was a visionary map of a future Berlin. Yet to be built were a couple of new axes, some more parks, and an extended version of the wall. Wow. That felt liberating. Much more space for us in store to proceed with our lifestyle, if only we wanted to conquer it.

Quite life-changing were a couple of historical maps, and the one that showed today’s Berlin: though it may seem to contemporaries that a city is a static feature, it actually grows and changes over time. Once, it was simpler. Once, it was not divided. Once, there was no wall. Almost unimaginable. New buildings got constructed, then amended, torn down, rebuilt, replaced. New alleys appeared, others got buried under glass and steel, depending on the needs of the citizens. There are countless winding ways to get from A to B (or C, or D, or…); there have been countless others in the past. But the one thing that never changed throughout the centuries was the main boulevard, a vast alley running almost straight from West to East, from dusk to dawn, from fear to love. Each section of it shows various landmarks and has a different name. Depending on your position, you would find traders, or priests, or members of the administration. Some people would spend a whole lot of time in museums; others stroll through the park. There, a couple of kids with their headsets on, music loud, bored to death with the concrete reality of highrises. Passing-by workers throw angry glances at the lazy bunch.

Back on the streets after having left the bookshop with a much clearer picture of the situation in mind I would notice, that most people were either skipping sides aimlessly, getting lost in the vastness of the city, or they were heading West. Me, fascinated by the features shown in the old maps, I wanted to go East now. That meant swimming against an endless stream of people violently pressing me to follow them to the factories. The wall was forever, they insisted; ain’t no bulldozer big enough to tear it down. Come with us.
Needless to say I didn’t.

It took only little effort. The forces of imagination found a way, and the wall, too large for one individual to remove it by force, crumbled and fell where it once barred the main alley. With nothing but a backpack in my hands I headed east.

From time to time I return, although it hurts. There’s still ties to where I once was home. After all, I am not intending to leave Berlin too soon. I like to speak of the places I found beyond the wall, what they look like to me, the stories they tell me, and the new directions awaiting the traveller to explore them. If I were a leader person, I’d like to be a guide giving my services for free. So many people got stuck in their ghettos and slums, working class capsules like bird cages, apartments apart from reality, and castles to-be in the sky unable to float high enough to cross the walled border.
Yes, I’d like to be a guide, but I am untrained in applying first aid to the homesick. So I remain just humble me, nothing more but a road sign pointing from nearby a viewing platform to an alleyway most people dare not enter; each traveller is responsible only for himself, and most would rather starve their soul to death than take the risk of running into one of the self-appointed guardians of the status quo or the pit-holes near and beyond the wall.

Despite all that, numbers of refugees are increasing. That’s good news. From what I saw behind the iron curtain, there is the chance we can make it to a new way of life, a new Berlin, that might resemble a garden rather than a city. People are much kinder there in general. I have faith. And whenever a guard stops me to ask about my business, I reply, “I want to be there, more than anything”, and take a pass.

What do we actually need?

I seem to have a phase of disorientation lately, resulting in either not knowing what to think (and therefore write), or alternating between multiple ways of looking at the world. The dissolution of wrong and right combined with the study of various solutions to the current crises do me no good, some may say; although I guess this is the only way for me to eventually get rid of a sickening belief in the concept of control over my environment. During the past two years I have learnt to let go of the idea that, by controlling money flow, people’s view of my person and the world, and other variables, I could finally reach a stable state of security, a safe ground to plan the future on. I was taught to believe in the power of control – and believe I did.

The concept of control is an illusion. After all that has gone ‘wrong’ in my life, all failed plans and relationships, hardly anyone around here knows better than me. (I owe everyone hugs and apologies for having been mean, I guess.) Still it ain’t easy to accept and let things come my way, awashed as I am still by Western culture. To naturally let go means to have faith, trust and belief in fate, especially the ways of people. I admit to have a deficit in that field, a deficit that, thanks to Auroville, is not quite as awful as it used to be.
Back in Europe, where I am currently stuck, I am also stuck with developing ‘skills’ like those mentioned above. For how can you trust people in a competitive society, i.e. an everyone-for-themselves system of constant fighting, battling, and warfare? Can people whose whole life is based on againstness and who make a living out of destructiveness show you how to love and feel loved? Would you ask a priest to learn programming?

It sure takes a peaceful environment and a loving teacher to develop the qualities mentioned above. You cannot do it all by yourself in environments like the one I have been in all my life. Therefore my longing for a fundamental change in the ways of the world. And yes, there is an emphasis on ‘my’, as I might share this longing, this need, with other fellow creatures, but can only speak for myself. When I once adopted Jacque Fresco’s vision of a resource-based, fully-automated civilization, I had the dream of cutting off the crap, preserving only the best of nowadays’ society. But shortly after, I had to learn that, right when I got where I was intellectually going, the road was still stretching a long way in front of me.

Yes, there is the need for a very different social environment, but no matter how you put it, the way there starts with a thought, feeling or intuition, rather than with an action.

If we are able to survive the next 100 years, The Venus Project may very well become a reality. But the longer I go into the subject of improving the world and ourselves the more I doubt the necessitiy of having a civilization at all. If we ourselves did the work that sustains our lives, it would be the ultimate means to reconnect to the foundations of existence and the happiness of being one with what we separated ourselves from as “environment”. It would be the ultimate means to free ourselves from governance and 8 hours or more a day of alienating work. Instead, we’d spend just 2-4 hours on occupations we care about, and that were really satisfactory as they make us learn, grow and survive. It was civilization that made work such an uncomfortable experience. It was civilization that made us needy and greedy. It was civilization that created organizational structures bigger than a single individual can handle. You hardly find people complaining about such things in tribal, spiritual or buddhist environments for instance – which are based on contentment with what IS rather than what could come.

Under such conditions there is no need for insurances, money, global markets and all the like. There is also no need for cities, industries, robots and all the technologies that endlessly distract and amuse our minds, separating us from the real world around us, and that demand for solutions to problems that haven’t been there in the first place.

We know that people can be happy without possession. We know that we can be happy with living off the land, not wanting anything but a little bit of company. In fact, it is the wanting that makes us (and others) suffer, for it creates discontentment; in other words unhappiness; in other words conflict with our situation.

All that boils down to the question: What do we actually need? How did we ever come to the idea we could not live without all the stuff that surrounds us today, along with made-up concepts of “society”, “institution” and “civilization” that have materialized in our lives without any basis in the material world whatsoever?

Of course we are a species that doesn’t like to relinquish even the slightest bit. It would be hard to change ourselves to being content with less stuff than we own today. But isn’t that exactly the walls we are running into all the time? People refusing to give up the pieces of shit they have, despite accurate information of a better world where there is no ownership, no fight, no oppression?
Then how much does it actually take to make our existence worth living?

I’d say, it is just a change of mind on the deep spiritual level – which no technology in all the world will be able to bring about. Whether or not there will be highly developed technology in the future hence doesn’t make a difference in bringing about such a process. On the level of ideas I am not against the direction of The Venus Project in so far as we want the same: The end of the monetary madness giving path to something much more healthy.
It is only that I highly doubt we’ll be able to trigger a general paradigm shift as long as we are organizing at the millions, while using technology as a means of control. To learn how to govern yourself you would want to live with and by yourself; to learn how to heal the world you would actually have to stop treating it like disposable, dead lump. To know what is real we have to get rid of the symbol, the word, the rational logic, and “get in touch” again.
How do you do that within our culture? – You can’t! It is the culture’s aim to keep you off this path. It provides no means by which to achieve it, even destroys you if you try too hard. You cannot change it as a whole, yet need a place to stay.

And there I go, off into the wilderness, into communes, or whatever my path may be. As I leave, as we leave one by one, the culture of competition, againstness and destruction dissolves, and society falls apart in yet another way than the self-defeating rip-off of nature’s gifts.

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