to feel its own grandeur

"Us, these beings that have been created, that are looking up at the Milky Way, we are in fact products of the Milky Way. It's the Milky Way looking up at itself and wondering what it's all about. What does this imply about somebody like Walt Whitman admiring a beautiful sunset? ...Walt Whitman is a space the Milky Way fashioned to feel its own grandeur. Instead of our eyes being the result of chance mutations can we see them as created by the cosmos in order to perceive itself."

from Bodhisattva of the Biosphere, by David Loy on Buddhist Geeks

This is a passage from the keynote address to the 2013 Buddhist Geeks conference in Boulder, Colorado, USA. Along with much of the rest of the talk it represents an advanced view of spiritual practice in the modern, urban age. I would question, however, some of the assumptions implied by the language as it goes on, especially when he talks about humans choosing to live a certain way (to make the world a better place, for example). If we are the cosmos regarding itself through the agency of the human body, with all its interconnectedness with everything else within the totality of our formless essence, then how can we have separate agency, a concept implied by the term choice? As with other similar podcasts (Secular Buddhist, Present Moment, Daily Evolver etc) the discussion is rooted in political and social concerns and is primarily interested in psychological and physical wellbeing rather than spiritual enlightenment, which unfolds under the cosmos's own volition and reveals the lack of individual agency in our actions and thought as we transcend the limited mind.

The focus of discussion on limited concerns is often presented as a way to avoid the disconnect an emphasis on transcendence and other-worldly escape can produce, and to root practice in relationship with the world as it is. But true transcendence implies that we are embedded in the world of form - it cannot occur if we are not. It arrives after we have exhausted our attachment to gross physical objects - a naturally-occurring process of experiencing desires at their most intense and moving through them to a new perspective where we become rooted and yet unattached. Then we express the reality through our body, practising loving kindness, not as a choice, but because it is our nature. Talks like the above demonstrate a lack of a fully evolved perspective among modern practitioners, and though they represent an unfolding of our collective awareness, they are limited in their message.

pic from here

there is really no sky

"Experience has the knack of fooling us on a regular basis. We see the sun setting every day, but we know very well the sun never sets. It is the earth rotating backwards, which gives us the experience that the sun is setting in the horizon. The sky looks blue, but we know that there is really no sky and neither is it blue. There are many such examples where our experiences are false. The same is also true of how we visually perceive the world. Science has taught us that the light is reflected from any object in this universe that we observe, and travels to the retina in our eye. There are 120 millions rods which are sensitive to black and white and there are about 7 millions cones which are sensitive to color. These rod and cones convert the incoming light into an optical signal. This optical signal is transmitted to the visual cortex in the human brain. This is the end of the journey of the perception process. There is no explanation as to what happens to the optical signal and how the brain decodes the optical signal and reconstructs our visual world. Science also never tells who is at home within the brain who finally sees the reconstructed visual image. Who is final observer of this image? I guess this idea of the final observer has always been outside the bounds of science because there is no way to empirically record the observer’s existence. Anything “subjective” is discarded in the scientific world." 

This well presented observation goes to the heart of our deluded sense of the world. But the idea that we encounter the world as individual objects experiencing phenomena that are obviously not occurring is embedded in our everyday language and thoughts, through common speech acts, through educational discourse, through legal procedure and scientific and philosophical enquiry. All literary text manifests the same and amounts to the expression of a state of ignorance, from popular fictions to the so-called great works. Where do we ever encounter a scene in which a protagonist is truly seeing the world the way it is? And is it ever possible to write such a description?

Pic from here

incredibly precise injunctions

“We do not have any analogue in the Western tradition to the methods devised, mostly in the Buddhist tradition and the Indian tradition generally, where you have incredibly precise injunctions about how to train attention upon the mind itself and make discoveries about the character of first-person experience. Now its true that those are embedded in classical explosions of religious bullshit and so you have Buddhism and Hinduism which when you go through the front door you encounter a garish display of religiosity. But the truth is you can get into the core significance of these practices without believing anything on insufficient evidence, without accepting stories about miracles or karma and rebirth or anything else that will strike a student of science with being unwarranted.”

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and other anti-religious books, who has pursued contemplative experiences himself, makes an atheist case for self-enquiry in the Eastern traditions in this video interview promoting his new book Waking Up. You can hear the first chapter read by the author here. He makes a good case and one which I agree with on the whole, though for me his atheism is limited and fails to fully grasp the questions raised by its own system of thought. If consciousness/mind is our fundamental experience of the world, and if the universe has produced this experience through its constantly unfolding processes (as he asserts in the interview and elsewhere), then consciousness/mind has to be a fundamental property of the universe. What is the difficulty, then, in understanding that there is a unitive, universal consciousness underlying the singular, personal mind? Especially as he and other scientists are able to show that the idea of a personal agency in thought and action is an illusion, and that the universe acts us rather than that we act separately from it, somehow freed from and above its processes (a mystical notion if ever there was one). 

pic from here

coarse and tendentious atheists

Some decent points made by John Gray here in his review of Richard Dawkins new autobiography. 

"Quite apart from the substance of the idea, there is no reason to suppose that the Genesis myth to which Dawkins refers was meant literally. Coarse and tendentious atheists of the Dawkins variety prefer to overlook the vast traditions of figurative and allegorical interpretations with which believers have read Scripture. Both Augustine and before him the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria explicitly cautioned against literalism in interpreting the biblical creation story... It was only around the time of the Reformation that the idea that the story was a factual account of events became widely held. When he maintains that Darwin’s account of evolution displaced the biblical story, Dawkins is assuming that both are explanatory theories—one primitive and erroneous, the other more advanced and literally true. In treating religion as a set of factual propositions, Dawkins is mimicking Christianity at its most fundamentalist."

pic from here

he swoons in the embrace

Here's the trailer for the current Spike Jonze movie, Her, set in the near-future. It zeros in on the developing love between the main character, Theodore Twomby (played by Joachim Phoenix), and his computer's operating system, voiced to alluring effect by Scarlet Johansson - her part replacing that of Samantha Morton in the original shoot. It was Morton who played the Pre-Cog, Agatha, in another near-future film, Minority Report, a human with the gift of foresight kept in a condition of physical stasis, so her uncluttered mind is available for incoming signals.

In both films, the disembodied female intelligence serves as a kind of omniscient other to the needs of the male leads, who in the latter film pursues about-to-be criminals, and in the former, a meaningful resolution to heartbreak. It is, in that sense, a modern revisiting of what in the early Gnostic tradition was known as Sofia, a feminization of the formless absolute that encompassed all the contradictions in the world of form. She is best represented in the extended verse scripture, The Thunder, Perfect Mind, from the Nag Hammadi gospels.

In Her, the vulnerable and withdrawn figure of Theodore serves as the kind of modern everyman the wired-up and connected urban professional is becoming. Desirous of deep relationship, but hurt by, and wary of, the limitations of corporeal attachment, he swoons in the embrace of a feminine voice that so mirrors his needs he loses sight of the designed reality it has been constructed to serve.

As I suggested here, the otherness of robotic mirroring teaches us much about the nature of human affection, and what is actually occurring when love surfaces as an experience of heightened life. It also shows us that however much our technological capabilities advance, our fundamental needs remain the same.

pic: here

created for ghosts

Just up the road, its bright-cladded facade framed by the south-facing windows of my flat, the North Block of the Park Hill flats is fully refurbished and occupied. Walking on the newly-laid grit road that runs along its front most every day on my way to the railway station, or coming and going from town, its an important part of the lived urban experience, influencing how the world is viewed. New road lamps stretch up and lean across above. Red-painted and thin they create an arch along the rising hill crest that looks out over the city of Sheffield to the west, where a bank of square and oblong buildings, glass grids locked in concrete and steel, are markers of a state of mind. 

Often there might be a resident or two walking down the incline from the entrance to the flats, where the quick-moving lifts drop and rise, or workers from the design offices on the two lower floors of the next block along, it's upper floor apartments not yet open for occupation. But mostly it's people crossing in front, walking down into town or back home to the undeveloped flats in the southern blocks or the shared houses beyond. New residents or not, the look, the ambience, is regular. We are everyday small-city people. Natives or immigrants, we wear the uniforms of our age - jeans, trainers, boots, hoodies, parkas, leggings. We keep our heads down, mostly, against the regular wind, the rain, and because often we're weary. With our bags of shopping, our freight of everyday anxieties. 

We live in the world of small desire - the need to put food in our bellies, gain shelter from the cold, connect with others in our immediate communities of shared life. What we are not are the people projected by the marketers who sell the Park Hill project to potential buyers. In that bigger desire world there's a utopian future, where it's always sunny and dirt never clings to anything. Everyone is healthy, fit and freshly dressed in perfectly-fitting clothes, the render ghosts of an idealised dream. Provided for in architecture, embodied in structure and design - yearning made tangible. And the desire is always for a greater vision than can be accommodated by immediate reality. It's how marketing works. Our collective need interpreted and catered to, rendered in mocked-up photographs and drawings, accompanied by slogans and blurbs, the language capturing an overarching, driven ideal - “courageous, bold ambitious”, “a new beginning, a new vitality”. 

The bright cladding of the re-built facade (the flats were gutted to their core structure) suggests the sunnier, exotica of the South of France, where utopian architecture like this has its signature building. And I'm aware that Park Hill has its roots in a metropolitan socialist vision of happy workers living together in affordable state-owned homes, and that the basic structure accommodated that dream (easy-access passageways and two-floored interiors imitating traditional dwellings), even as it insisted on modernist materials (concrete) and engineering (uniform grid, high-rise). And that today's vision is driven by a private ownership that adopts that dream and re-interprets it for a new utopia of young urban professionals, their high-tech skills forging a new world of globally-connected wealth creation. But just like the earlier dream, the current dream betrays an excess of desire, a psychological projection born of a commonly felt lack. All over theworld this is the urban environment we live in and the discourse we're sold. But reality always occurs in the present and is always mundane. The body insists on that even if the mind can't stop imagining something warmer, more comfortable, happier and meaningful. 

I quite like the way the flats look. I like the new grit road. It's much better than the old pock-marked tarmac road that hadn't been improved in 50 years. I like the people that come and go. We recognise each other, nod, say hi. Like humans everywhere, we need to connect as we go about our lives. But there's a disconnect and a sense of exclusion from the visions the environment embodies. A newly-forged capitalist realism incorporates and replaces the old socialist realism in this iconic building, a site of contending discourses, but both of those ideals are realisms rooted in projected futures thought up by fantasists. The actual reality occurs in a permanent present, where we move across surfaces and under facades created for ghosts. 

pic from here
some pics of the reality here