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In Her, the vulnerable and withdrawn figure of Theodore serves as the kind of modern everyman the wired-up and connected urban professional is becoming.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

systematic assertion of a false reality

Towards a definition of Materialist Realism, following this and this. 

Materialist realism 1 is the systematic assertion of a false reality based on the idea that material substance is all that exists in the universe, and that questions about consciousness and sentience can be explained away by the action of "lifeless atoms subject to blind and purposeless forces"2. Materialist realism draws on, among other arguments, a limited reading of Darwinian evolution and scientific cosmology (the Big Bang theory), to normalise its worldview through institutional cultural saturation 3. It is opposed here by spiritual realism, a rational approach to understanding human consciousness, based on direct perception of its underlying essence 4. Materialist realism is so entrenched today, it actually provides the framework for most current religious and spiritual discourse, a dilution of the knowledge taught in the traditions that presents it as an accessory to a consumerist lifestyle. 

Notes:

1 As a concept, materialist realism stems from ideas about Capitalist Realism, a form of Marxist analysis, that suggests capitalism has been institutionalised in the same way that Socialist Realism was institutionalised under Stalin in the former USSR. 

2 The quote is from the award-winning popular science author, Paul Davies, in The Origins of Life, Penguin 1999

3 Scientific theories are necessarily limited to the perceptive abilities of their makers, and are always framed by the cultural conditions in which they arise. Spiritual realism is not opposed to scientific enquiry, and delights in the evidence of how the material universe operates as part of a wholly conscious singularity.

4 As discussed in the various traditions of self-enquiry like Vedanta, Buddhism, and the esoteric teachings of  Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

constellation of mechanisms

"Most of us believe that we possess a self - an internal individual who resides inside our bodies, making decisions, authoring actions and possessing free will. The feeling that a single, unified, enduring self inhabits the body - the 'me' inside me - is compelling and inescapable. This is how we interact as a social animal and judge each other's actions and deeds. But that sovereignty of the self is increasingly under threat from science as our understanding of the brain advances. Rather than a single entity, the self is really a constellation of mechanisms and experiences that create the illusion of the internal you. We only emerge as a product of those around us as part of the different storylines we inhabit from the cot to the grave. It is an every changing character, created by the brain to provide a coherent interface between the multitude of internal processes and the external world demands that require different selves." 

I discovered this blurb for The Self Illusion by Bruce Hood on Amazon. It's an interesting formulation of words, representing the slow nudging of material science towards an acceptance of the universality of self, the logical outcome of an acceptance of the social self  - which has enormous repercussion for notions of individual free will. It's nowhere near an acceptance of the transcendent self, the formless absolute of spiritual understanding, but it prompts questions about what constitutes sentience and consciousness that should challenge the notion that we are individual beings operating separately in space, somehow independent of the process that formed us. 

pic from here

her plastic eyes

"Geminoid F can appear strikingly beautiful in a way that doesn’t translate to photos or video. Her hair is smooth and glossy, and falls across her delicately translucent, pale silicone face. As she sits in the chair at Osaka University, she runs through an idling program of random motions. She blinks, fidgets and makes small, distracted movements with her lips. When she turns her head and looks at you with her plastic eyes, the effect is thrilling and unsettling. It feels as if you’re being stared at, a little too intently, by an attractive stranger."  from That's Not A Droid, That's My Girlfriend, Aubrey Belford

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence debate addresses consciousness as if it were a material construct, something made from the flux of processing energy in the circuitry of the object, a combination of forces existing in the material universe but harnessed in such a way it gives rise to sentience. But what if it pre-exists it, as the formless ground of all that arises as form, always present and pervading, emerging slowly into self-knowing as the driver of evolution? All that blinking and fidgeting, all those small, distracted movements would be the sign of this subtle unfolding, the self recognising itself in the subjectivity of felt emotional existence. Geminoid F is loveable because 'she' mirrors our own nature as consciousness in material form. In that respect, 'she' teaches us that our love for other human organisms is of the same nature, consciousness expressing itself as energised process.

Full text (and photo) here:

that blazing bliss

"(T)he universe is but one vast sea of compassion actually, a veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty, in fact who knows but it isn't the solitude of the one-ness of the essence of everything - comma - the solitude of the actual one-ness of the unborn-ness of the unborn essence of everything - comma - nay, the true pure forever-hood, that big blank potential that can rain forth anything it wants from its pure store, that blazing bliss..."

Jack reads his essay on The Beats to students at Hunter College, NY, in 1958, infusing it with his own ecstatic vision of Buddhism (and punctuation). Funny and heartwarming.

Full audio (and pic) here

what's the point of enlightenment?

"Since enlightenment is part of nature - it's even called 'seeing your own nature', Kensho, 'to see your nature' - so, because it's part of nature we shouldn't be surprised that there are both sudden and gradual components to the endeavour." 

The talk in this video (see link below) is a well-considered appraisal of the actual purpose of the practice of mindfulness and meditation - something much overlooked by the popular teaching methods used (and currently in vogue) in our culture, which are largely designed to help us become better adjusted to the demands of consumerism and work. Though, of course, the talk proceeds from a subject-object address and uses a language bound by the limitations of duality to discuss the topic (as does this comment, of course). When enlightenment does occur, the non-dual nature of the world becomes clear and the spontaneous and inevitable nature of the process of enlightenment is revealed.

Video here
Pic from here