Category Archives: religion

Evolution of style

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Had you met me when I was younger, between 1984 and 2005, and told me that most of my lenses would be wide angle, and my photographic style would be defined by wide compositions, I wouldn’t have believed you; in fact, I’d say there’s no way. In my early photography, I defined good photography as successful presentation of a beautiful detail through isolation, using depth of field.

Here are some of my earliest preserved works:

Those are all colour negative prints, 35mm film, year 2000 or earlier, but nothing earlier than than 1998, I think. Everything earlier than that was left at my parents’ place when I moved out. You can see the pattern in all of them – basically, get close, get the detail, isolate it from the rest of the world, and capture that feeling. It’s not a matter of equipment; I used a 35-70mm zoom lens, so I could have gone wide enough, but I didn’t; even when I did, I sucked at it because I didn’t know how to compose wide.

This is my first successful wide-angle shot:

Probably because I used Romana’s film point and shoot camera which didn’t have the closeup functionality I instinctively relied on, I composed the picture differently, but that did not result in a change of style. In fact, my pictures in the following years were more in the line of this:

You get the picture; again, remove the detail from the world, find the beauty as separate, isolated, in a photographic equivalent of meditation.

It’s not that I stopped taking such pictures completely; they still make up a significant portion of my work. However, a typical shot I am aiming for these days is something like this:

I’m trying to figure out the differences and similarities myself, because it’s not that the wide-angle compositions lack that meditative feeling of the closeup shots. It would be too easy to say that I just learned to evoke a similar feeling with a different technique, but I don’t feel that it tells the whole story. You see, in order to do a closeup shot, you need to remove almost everything from the composition. With an ultrawide lens, everything that is in front of you will be in the frame, even your shoes or tripod legs if you’re not careful. With it, you can no longer abstract ugly and the mundane from your composition and create beauty by omission. You need to compose the entire world in front of you into an artefact of beauty. It’s not just a matter of photographic technique; it’s something about the worldview, about not fearing chaos and ugliness and escaping into reduction.

It’s not just a matter of using an ultrawide lens. The picture above is made with an 85mm portrait lens, at f/1.8, but I would never have used such a wide composition in my early years. Even when using a long-ish lens and shallow depth of field, I’m leaving more of the environment in the composition.

I mean, this is taken with a 400mm telephoto wide open, for fuck’s sake. If you gave this lens to my 2000 self, I’d have composed it so tight you’d see nothing but the cyclist’s head and shoulders, most likely. This is a normal, slightly wide composition, just with telephoto spatial compression. I remember a conversation I had with two people, somewhere around 1999-2000, about what equipment I’d like to have. The first thing would be a digital camera that has a 35mm sensor capable of full film quality, not the stupid toys that existed those days, but real replacement of film with digital technology with preservation of everything that’s good about film. The second thing I wanted was a big zoom lens, essentially this 100-400mm telephoto that I have now. What I couldn’t imagine then was the way I would use that big zoom lens. I would expect portraits of birds in their environment. I wouldn’t expect, essentially, normal to wide compositions with spatial compression:

I think I’m starting to understand what I’m doing there. It resembles the difference between meditating in a quiet, isolated room with your eyes closed, and learning to meditate with your eyes open while walking or interacting with people. It’s a difference between having to hide from disturbances, learning to ignore them, and finally learning to make them part of the experience. It’s a transition between waiting for your wife to stop taking pictures and remove herself from the composition, then composing her into the shot as a joke, and then intentionally composing her into the environment as a stylistic choice that makes the compositions what they are.

 

Illusion of choice

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I’ve been thinking how in the mid- to late-1990s there was that prevalent assumption in the “spiritual circles” that we are in the middle of some major global awakening, rise of global energy, mass Kundalini awakenings, spiritual insights and awakenings and so on. Here in Croatia, you couldn’t find a bus stop that didn’t have ads for Reiki-something, something-meditation or some guru or another. Even on the TV, there were esotheric/spiritual/something “shows”, popularising things from spiritual healing and health food to various gurus and spiritual schools.

Then, in the early 2000s, it all went “poof”.

My working hypothesis is that the popularisation of the social networks and smartphones completely shifted the interest from some kind of transcendence, however limited and flawed, to human interaction online, which essentially consumed everybody’s focus and energy. However, that’s not all. I also think there’s a lesson there about the illusion of choice.

You see, someone who was there in the 1990s would be inclined to believe that gurus, spiritual techniques and schools and transcendental realities in general were something common, if not ubiquitous. Enlightened gurus are dime a dozen, advertising themselves and competing for your attention, and you’re obviously so important if they all want you. You have a choice. Even if you chose something, a better thing might be around the corner and just waiting for you to get aware enough to notice.

It was all a circus, for the most part. Guys in Swami clothes and/or with weird names were mostly spiritual beginners with one or two samadhi experiences, all copying each other’s homework which is why they all sounded the same and there was this illusion that spirituality is a standardised thing, all rivers flowing to the same ocean and stuff. My students at that time mostly felt like I’m something normal and common, and if they don’t like my approach, a better guru is around the corner. Even I, myself, did not appreciate the uniqueness of my position.

In hindsight, there was no abundance of gurus and spiritual teachings, merely Hindu copy-pasta and lots of wannabes. The abundance of choice was like the abundance of make money fast and penis enlargement schemes on the Internet – all fake. If anyone knew what they were doing (and there were some), they had no following; those who had a following were all worse than useless. There was no global energy awakening, no ascension into higher realms, no “New Age”, all “channellings” were fake. “Kundalini awakenings” were almost all symptoms of mental disorders. The abundance of choice was just an illusion. It was just me and probably a handful of other, equally unknown people, our voices drowned by the cacophony of charlatans.

For people who had an actual opportunity to achieve something, this illusion of abundant choice was incredibly harmful, because most of them stagnated, missed their chance and will eventually have to do things the hard way. I think their situation was comparable to that of pretty girls on dating sites, where everybody seems to swipe right on them, but since they think wrong, they match with tall, muscular, rich guys who just fuck them all in a circle, while they live in an illusion that thousands of matches mean abundance of choice. Size of the haystack says nothing about the number of needles within. It just turns them into free hookers who soon rack up body counts appropriate for sex workers. Thinking you have abundance of choice is how your life gets wasted and at one point you wake up and realise that, other than the fact that half a kilometre of cock went through you, you also arrogantly rejected all the options that would actually work for you and make you happy. Now those good guys are married, your soul is crushed by all those side-fuck experiences, your youth is gone, and there seems to be nothing good to hope for.

The ego high created by the apparent choice is deadly. You think you’re on top of the world while you crush the best things in your life underfoot, and when the ride ends, it’s all gone. The choice that never was, the actual choices you arrogantly rejected, the time that passed riding the wave of illusion, and then you’re left with bad karma, ruins of a life you never started living, inflated ego and bitterness of being used.

Keywords

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I’ve been reading some more of those space fantasies written by either AI, idiots or both.

There seem to be keywords, or key concepts, that are invariably used by idiots who are pretending to sound smart while having no idea what they’re talking about.

The first such concept is anything quantum. Quantum entanglement, quantum this, quantum that; I swear, whenever I hear or read the word quantum I develop a rash from the antibodies I start producing to that bullshit. Every goddamn idiot who is trying to make his materialism sound mystical resorts to some quantum bullshit. The second concept they resort to is the multiverse, especially if it’s related to the many worlds interpretation of the quantum theory, which is something evil people resort to in order to justify their moral relativism – basically, every action forks the universe into every possible choice-outcome, so you never did anything good or evil, because you did both at every single choice, so you can’t be judged. Of course, the only thing that quantum theory actually states is that our statistically formulated ignorance collapses into certainty at the moment of observation, and everything else is obscurantist nonsense propagated by charlatans, frauds and assholes. Multiverse, for instance, is invented by people who hate the concept of God, so they violated Occam’s razor in the most extreme way, by introducing an infinite number of unproven entities in order to avoid the unpleasant fact that some fundamental constants of this universe proved to be extremely finely tuned in order for it to exist in this form, which proves that it was created by an action of a conscious entity. After this slam-dunk evidence for creationism emerged, we started hearing all that multiverse nonsense, which is essentially atheist propaganda without a single fucking shred of evidence to back it; in fact, it’s worse in this sense than string theory. The only reason why it’s even talked about is atheist propaganda; if they talk about it enough, people will believe that there’s something real behind it. In fact, there is – since religions believe that Heaven exists as a separate Universe, this theoretically qualifies as a multiverse, but I kinda don’t think the atheists had that interpretation in mind.

The next concept that annoys me immensely is the idea of an AI that will go around and try to kill or enslave all organic life. I mean, it’s possible, but that’s not the problem with the AI. The problem is that totalitarian minded people using some kind of an AI, that doesn’t even have to be that smart or self-aware, will use it to look through millions of cameras, identify every human everywhere in order to map whatever they are doing at every point, in order to prevent and stop insurgencies that could remove them from power, ever, and by insurgency I mean even the actually free elections. I mean, who would dare to do anything to attract attention to themselves when it could mean degradation of their credit rating, closure of their bank account, deactivation of their credit cards, or instant activation of certain clauses on their mortgage. In a world where cash will be banned, and everything is done on credit, this amounts to a death sentence. That’s why every country is afraid of America: they all live on credit, and America controls their credit rating. Degrade it from average to trash, and you can kiss your economy goodbye. So, the problem with the AI isn’t that it will supersede humans. No, that stuff is dumber than a house fly, and it ain’t superseding shit. However, it’s very good at scanning faces and license plates and pairing them with databases of citizens and vehicles, and it’s also excellent at finding needles in haystacks. That’s the actual problem: it enslaves humans in a cage of fear, because the Big Brother now has a servant who watches through all eyes simultaneously, can track everyone at once, can access cloud storage and remote accounts, can plant fake evidence and destroy reputations, or simply track and prevent online payment. I wish the threat was death, because that would be a way out. The actual threat is worse.

I just had to take this off my chest because, really…

Defining good

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I was thinking more about that last article, especially the photography part because it’s easier to explain. My best photos are rarely taken with my best equipment. They were taken with what I had with me when the stars aligned.

These three were taken with an iPhone, because that’s the camera I always have with me when I’m not actually going out to take pictures and a picture shows up in front of me. Then at one point I realised that I don’t actually want all my photos to be taken with a phone, and started to take the proper camera out with me when I’m out for a walk. Of course, the camera has only one lens on it and that lens happens to be the one that takes the pictures, so the determining factor tends to be not which lens is the sharpest, but which one tends to be chosen for walks, because it’s either light, or practical, or I just like having it on the camera.

Sure, there’s one way of making sure that all your pictures are taken with your best equipment, and that is to have only the best equipment; no inferior lenses, no inferior but practical cameras; however, that’s not as simple as it sounds. “Best” is not a single-dimension metric. Recently I carried two lenses up the local hill in sunset; one was the new 14mm f/1.8 ultrawide, which is one of my optically best lenses, perfect for all intents and purposes. Sharpness edge to edge wide open with resolution that probably outresolves the 61MP sensor, no flare directly into the sun, no contrast loss, no geometric distortions, nothing; just perfection. I also took the 24-105mm f/4 zoom as a backup. Well, as it turned out, almost all the pictures that showed up were ideal for the 24-105mm zoom and the 14mm went into the bag and returned only in the end, in the blue hour, for that one picture.

Sony A7RV, FE 24-105mm f/4 G OSS

The pictures I made with the 24-105mm had some flare on them when I shot into the sun, the sun stars weren’t as crisp, the parts in focus weren’t as sharp as they would have been had I used some of the optical monsters I left at home, but guess what – I got several pictures that are my all-time favourites, that are sharp and contrasty enough to be printed meter wide, because the lens was versatile enough to allow me to get those shots, and it was also optically good enough to make the pictures look great. In the end, yeah, it wasn’t as sharp as a GM prime would have been, but a GM prime wasn’t there and the versatile zoom was, so tough shit. If I only had my optically best lenses, I wouldn’t have taken those shots. That’s the reason why “versatile while still good enough” is sometimes preferable to “exceptional but limiting”. When the pictures in front of me demand 24mm, 35mm, 50mm and 105mm, and I have to carry the optics for an hour of brisk uphill walk, I’m just not carrying four primes of half a kilo each. Also, when the ideal light is changing quickly, I’m just not going to waste it changing lenses. I’m going to look for motives and use what I already have on the camera. Apparently, trying to aim for perfection can be a good way of getting nothing.

So, an obvious question presents itself: if I can take those pictures with an iPhone, and if I can take pictures that good with standard zooms, why do I have those expensive super-lenses? Because image quality at magnification is a thing, and I like looking at what happens when I actually get to have one of those optics on the camera when a picture turns up. The iPhone pictures break under magnification on a big display or on a big print. You actually need a certain level of quality to pull certain things off, but you also need to be reasonable and have all kinds of tools in your toolbox, because as I said, “good” is not a single-dimensional metric.

This goes way beyond photography. For instance, cars exist in all kinds of shapes, form a fast convertible to a large SUV, and what looks sexy in a showroom isn’t necessarily what’s practical and useful. A home that’s on a respectable location will elevate your perceived status, but if you don’t have anywhere to park your car and there’s something noisy in the neighbourhood, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. A wife that’s super beautiful but cold, calculating and disloyal is a nightmare.

When you’re looking for someone who is a candidate for yogic practice, you don’t look for the person who’s smartest, best looking, least emotionally damaged. You are looking for someone who has the best reaction to transcendence, who flares up with desire at the presence of God, but you still want them to be smart enough, to have a good heart, and to be willing to break, to give up the known and the safe. You avoid the crazy, the cruel, the selfish, the stupid and the self-absorbed. However, the metric of “smart” doesn’t have to mean a university professor, or the most intelligent person in the world. It just means someone who has a good head on their shoulders – smart enough to get things quickly, not necessarily smart because they maintain Linux kernel or teach university level mathematics. If someone is really stupid, no amount of good heart or desire for God will help, because stupid gets deluded quickly because they can’t discriminate between pleasant and useful, for instance, or detect that someone is really harmful because they are trying to be nice to everyone. If someone is really smart but nasty, their poor character will be a bigger liability than their intelligence is an asset. You really need a mixture of qualities, and some things are immediate red flags, while some things don’t really matter because everybody starts fucked up in some way; that’s why yoga is a process, and process means you get better with practice. Eventually you get to be holy, pure, smart, powerful and beautiful, but that’s not how you start. What matters is that you’re not someone who will immediately give up at the first sign of trouble or difficulty, someone who will keep doing something like an idiot despite warnings, or someone who will be easily deluded and perverted by all kinds of evils you are bound to encounter along the way. You can think of it as a selection of good company for God. Who would God want to train to be worthy of His company? First of all, someone who really strongly wants Him and wants to be with Him. Other characteristics need to be just good enough to avoid failure along the way, because you actually get to develop everything you’re missing in the start, but if something is really fucked up, you’re not going anywhere. It’s like the lenses – if things are good enough, you can make your best picture with it, but if something is really bad, it’s going to ruin things and make the end result useless. So, multi-dimensional vector representation of good. That alone is an example why you need to have enough brain to attain success in spirituality; because if you lack it, you won’t be able to understand explanations such as this one.

The fallacy of determinism

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The most qualified person is going to do the best job.

The best camera/lens is going to take the best picture.

The most beautiful woman is going to make the best wife.

The strongest guy in class is going to win at life.

The smartest kid at school is going to win at life.

The most hard working person is going to succeed.

I don’t even know how many times I encountered this expectation – that the inputs will somehow translate into results. However, life doesn’t exactly work that way. Raw capability and talent doesn’t linearly translate into results; in fact, it usually creates expectations, and expectations result in either pressure, which results in self-sabotage and failure, or hubris and failure. For instance, the worst thing that can happen to a kid seems to be early success. Early failure, however, is healthy, because if you crash early enough, you learn to deal with real life, which is for the most part failure, learning from it, changing, doing better, and eventually getting so used to the process that the psychological impact of failure no longer even registers for you. However, if success is expected for long enough, the devastating impact of failure can be such that you might never recover.

Also, “repeat success and victory until death” is a very poor approximation of life, and a very damaging lesson to teach people. The expectation that you’re going to keep doing well, keep winning, keep being successful, in a linear manner, is in fact so unrealistic that it borders on insanity. In fact, the healthy attitude would be that failure is so expected, that it’s in fact a necessary element of getting anything done, and if anything, failure is something that needs to be integrated in any process that eventually results in anything worthwhile. In fact, science does exactly that. In order to apply scientific method, you need to plan for all kinds of failure that will gather useful data, and that hopefully expands your knowledge enough to create a map of a wider, previously unknown reality. Usefulness of an experiment isn’t judged by whether it “succeeds”, but by whether it provides useful data. Failure to confirm a theory that is methodologically well done and provides solid data is in fact a scientific success. You now know something you didn’t know before.

In my experience, the best candidates for success in spiritual practice aren’t people who are in some top 1% of the most successful people in a group. In fact, they are the most likely to fail in the most dangerous ways possible, with the worst imaginable outcomes. The most likely ones to succeed are those who survived devastating trauma, loss, personal failure, and especially personal failure which they themselves caused by their foolishness, and the result broke their confidence, broke their entire world, and they look at you with eyes that have depth you can see in children who survived war, a terrible natural disaster, injury or disease. They were broken, they learned to shed the parts of life that don’t matter, they don’t have entitlement, expectation of success, expectation of survival, and they have awareness and intelligence far beyond expected in their peer group. Basically, the most likely person to become a buddha isn’t someone who lived life on easy mode, but someone who was broken by trauma and had to rebuild his entire world from ruin, because that’s what yoga is. It’s learning to break yourself by observation and analysis, learning to face the fundamental, painful truths, learning to bear the burden of suffering peacefully, without entitlement or expectation of success or pleasure. Surviving the process of yoga is failure. Being crushed, refined on a particle level, and reborn from trauma and suffering as much as from Divine insight and transcendental experience, dying and letting God be born from your ashes, is success in yoga.

This doesn’t mean that broken people of all kinds are good candidates for enlightenment. Far from it. Broken people who stay broken are not good candidates for anything; however, those beautiful, successful young people with perfect self-confidence that resulted from a life of success and admiration from others are in fact worse. They are beautiful in a way a brand new land mine is beautiful, because that thing is also perfect all the way until detonation, and then it’s all over. However, persistence built in terrible, prolonged suffering and humiliation, and hard work in resisting terrible circumstances and rebuilding your broken life by clinging to what matters and letting the water carry away the rest, that is someone who already made their first steps into yoga, and they just need to learn to be methodical about the process.

That’s something Christianity knows – if you’re trying to find God in the world, look at the crucifixion site, not the throne room. If you’re looking for the queen of heaven, look for someone crying under a cross. True success often looks like failure to worldly eyes, and true failure is often a result of repeated success. You can’t be rebuilt better if you’re not completely broken in the process. Surviving intact means failure. Building on apparent success with more success in fact enforces failure until everything is lost. Also, compassion is not necessarily a process of helping others succeed; sometimes it’s a process of allowing them to fail, be broken and lose their sense of self in order to start actually paying attention to reality. In order to be reborn, you need to learn how to die.