Category Archives: religion

Lessons

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I had one instance of good fortune with the butterflies today and tried to take the best of it; almost came home empty handed, but then two butterflies started their dance above the road and…

I took those with the 135mm, because the 100-400mm was too much for me to carry, considering what kind of an astral shitstorm I have to deal with; hiking up hill is hard enough, and doing it with a big setup was too much for today.

The lesson from this as well as the previous hike is that all it takes is one. One scene, one butterfly, a few seconds of opportunity, and if you have the equipment with you, failure turns into success. Just a few seconds of a window of opportunity. If that didn’t intersect with me, I’d come home empty handed after carrying heavy gear up hill.

I wonder what lesson I would have learned had I climbed that hill twice with multiple kilos of equipment on me, and in both cases that one lucky opportunity didn’t arise. Would the lesson have been “fuck this, I’m not carrying this stuff here again”? I’ve seen this in business; occasionally, some people just get lucky and end up with money, and then they think they are competent and successful; they try again, and they fail, again and again, because they learned the wrong lesson. They didn’t understand how lucky they were, and how rare and improbable success was, and how little it depended on their own competence. People seem to learn wrong lessons from success, and, quite likely, also from failure. They might think there’s something wrong with them, but maybe they did everything right and those butterflies didn’t perform for them at just the right time when they walked that road, and they came home with an empty card. All those “spiritual teachers” in the 1990s talked about how this world is a school and we are here to learn lessons, but they don’t actually seem to be the good and useful lessons, when I think about it. We learn that certain things don’t work, and others do, but what we actually learn seems to be more degrading than helpful, because receiving spiritual feedback from a place designed by Satan and inhabited by morally flawed beings works exactly as you might expect it to. For instance, I learned early on that I will be beaten up, insulted, humiliated, ignored, ridiculed and degraded regardless of what I do. The feedback will always be negative, so I might as well do whatever. It took me a while to un-learn that lesson, because I almost became human garbage and a criminal, resulting from my parents’ stellar upbringing. 🙂 My brother, on the other hand, learned that the path to getting what he wanted is to play victim and whine loudly, blaming me, and then I will be beaten up and he will get to play with my toys. Since he never actually practised yoga, he never unlearned that lesson, and he’s still thinking in terms of blaming me for his misery in order for the fundamental law of the Universe to be triggered, where I will be beaten up and he will get my toys.

Do you know how I un-learned that harmful lesson from my childhood? The one that I’m doomed regardless and feedback will always be negative, so I might as well do whatever? I decided that the first part is indeed correct: the feedback I receive is probably always flawed and I can’t rely on it in order to correct my actions. However, I also decided that the second part, where I might as well do whatever, will result in utter doom. It would harm me terribly. So, I needed to think of a way of correcting my actions without taking human feedback into account. I learned to judge my actions against an ideal – good people that I know, good characters from literature or film, holy scriptures. Darshan of God, ultimately. I understood that my life is not a performance for others, because others will not be able to save me if I fail. There was no use in emotional signalling; just understanding what was wrong, and fixing it. Repeat ad nauseam. No audience. No use in whining, or feeling bad or depressed about mistakes. Just fix them, and align with the template of perfection, that is of course constantly updated. Fuck up, fix, repeat. No audience. No useful feedback. Just deception and false information from the outside, stuff that’s meant to discourage, harm and degrade, stuff that will praise me when I’m doing poorly and ridicule me when I’m doing everything right, with just enough randomness to make it completely useless. Do what God would do in my place, not what gets me praise from humans, because humans are sinful, deluded, ignorant, evil or just fucked up. They will criticise what they admire because it hurts them, or they will praise what they find pathetic, because it makes them feel good.

Being able to stand in the presence of God and feel like I belong there. That was the motivation.

Also, I assume that I’m probably doing everything right, and the lack of results is merely a normal thing if butterflies haven’t crossed my path by chance. Thinking that you’re doing something wrong just because there are no results is like thinking your camera choice or photographic skill need to be improved if you came home with an empty card that day. Were there any butterflies around? No? If so, how is the absence of butterfly pictures surprising? Correcting your course too often, and based on unreliable feedback, is not helpful. For instance, Biljana was with me today and she came home without any good pictures. Why? Because we were both very tired on the way down, under terrible astral pressure, and when those butterflies appeared I went after them, fiddled with autofocus modes until I found something that managed to lock and track, and kept them under rapid fire for half a minute or so. Biljana was just too tired to give a fuck about butterflies at that point and left them to me. 🙂 What conclusion should she draw from this? None at all. She did everything right. Doing everything right, however, doesn’t mean that you’ll have good results on any given day. Another day, she might have excellent pictures and I will have nothing. What conclusions should I draw from this? Absolutely none. Learning lessons from everything is highly overrated.

 

Quantum immorality

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People will think of all kinds of things in order to anesthetise their conscience; basically, convince themselves that it doesn’t matter what they do, so they are fine. I think I’ve heard it all, talking to all kinds of amoral and godless people over the decades, but probably the most brain-dead thing I’ve heard is using the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory to justify amorality.

Many-worlds interpretation is very popular in Hollywood, but it’s otherwise sheer nonsense. Basically, it solves the Schroedinger’s cat paradox in a non-probabilistic manner, by stating that in every quantum function collapse junction the universe forks into versions where every possible outcome is the reality. Essentially, you get a universe where the cat is alive, and the universe where the cat is dead.

Ignoring the fact that the quantum function doesn’t extend past the microscopic realm and translates very poorly into the macroscopic world of Einsteinian gravity, the amoral pieces of human garbage who want to be perceived as cool, scientific and educated, extend this principle into the sphere of moral choice, so at every moral junction the universe forks into various versions, each containing a version of you that made one possible choice. So, as you made every possible choice by the obligatory nature of the many-worlds split, a question of morality doesn’t even present itself. In every choice where you could do this or that, you did both, so there’s no actual choice involved.

So, let me deal with this very quickly. First of all, collapse of probabilities into certainty doesn’t actually have anything to do with reality; it only deals with our ignorance, that collapses into certainty at the point of revelation. Schroedinger’s cat is never 50% alive; it’s always either completely dead or completely alive, and it’s just our ignorance of its condition that collapses into certainty; basically, all probabilities collapse into either 1 or 0, at the point of revelation. Opening the box with the cat doesn’t fork universes, it reveals the actual reality so that we can stop playing with probabilities, which are merely quantification of our ignorance.

Second, quantum anything doesn’t really work on a macroscopic scale, or there would be a quantum theory of gravity, or a great unified theory of everything, that would combine the two. From what I can tell, quantum indeterminism looks very much like what happens when you try to play at the limits of resolution, according to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem of sampling. You get aliasing, or indeterminate result. No, when you try to photograph high-frequency detail of fabric with a photographic sensor, the aliasing you’re getting isn’t a sign that universes are forking. It’s just that your sensor is being “outresolved”, which is usually solved by introducing a low-pass filter in front of it, which will slightly blur the detail right at the Nyquist-Shannon limit. This stuff is a common bane of digital photography, and some manufacturers are making versions of their cameras with or without the low-pass filter, so depending on what you photograph you may choose between the sensor that will not create moire patterns on textile, or the sensor that will resolve more high-frequency detail in nature, and you don’t care that the detail at the Nyquist-Shannon limit will be “false”, because in most cases errors will statistically disperse and not be obvious.

Third, let’s assume, against all reason and evidence, that the universe actually does fork at every decision point. So, there’s a universe where you died at every point where you had a close call. There’s a universe where you bought bitcoin when its price was in cents. There’s a universe where that girl you had sex with got pregnant. There’s a universe where you died from covid. There’s a universe where you did all the right things at the right points, made all the right choices, aligned yourself with God to such perfection that you attained apotheosis.

So, my question is, why are you not that person? If the best version of you is in some other universe where it forked out due to you making different choices, how is this interpretation of your situation different from just saying that you fucked up, or that the best version of you dripped down your mom’s leg?

Rather than the many-worlds nonsense, I would say that you are constantly pruning the tree of your options and choices. With every fork in the road, you lose the version of you that would have happened had you taken the other road. Since you can’t go back in time, that possible version of yourself is lost; it collapsed into non-reality at the time of choice. If you didn’t buy Bitcoin at $1, that’s not coming back, and you can’t swap places with some alternative you in a parallel universe where you did.

Which brings us to my next point: if you can’t swap places with the version of you that didn’t fuck up, pretending that there’s a version of you that did everything well, which neutralises the version of you that fucked up everything, has no practical utility. You are not a sum of all your parallel selves that made all possible choices; you are a result of pruning the tree of choices into a specific outcome that is you. This is what it actually is, and pretending otherwise is as useful as pretending that you did actually get into bitcoin early, or that you bought gold at 1000 EUR per oz. If you didn’t, you didn’t. Possibility collapsed into reality at the moment of choice, and now you are the sum total of your choices. If you pruned your tree of choices wrong, and ended up with a bonsai shrub of utter doom, it is what it is.

In other words, no theory will get you out of the quagmire of wrong choices, and you are free to prove me wrong by swapping places with the version of you that did everything right. Otherwise, you might as well have put in the effort to become the best possible version of yourself, rather than try to theorise a way out of your loserdom.

Antichrist

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I was just thinking how it became exponentially harder to find actual, uncorrupted, correct, human-sourced information since the AI plague. Pictures, articles, drawings, YouTube videos, it’s all mostly AI slop. And then I thought how this is the worst thing you could possibly do in this world: increase the haystack of corrupted, distorted, worthless nonsense through which you would need to dig in order to find a needle of truth. If you’re not already correctly informed and educated before the AI plague, it might now become technically impossible to find your way.

It’s not a new phenomenon; it’s always been this way with spirituality, for instance. With everybody copying each other’s homework and creating derivative work, it was always hard to find genuine sources. Also, standard methods of finding out the truth, such as identifying overlap and common denominator in multiple sources, are unreliable, since they lead you to the most copied and iterated-upon material, which may or may not be true at all.

I faced this dilemma long ago, before I even started writing publicly: am I just making it harder to find actually useful stuff by increasing the haystack, or am I writing things that are the best available stuff, a positive contribution even in comparison to the best things out there? So, I remained silent until I was sure that what I’m saying is the needle, and not hay.

I was thinking about Antichrist last night – what would that even be. One definition that crossed my mind is that the opposite of Christ is a common man, sinful and devoid of the spiritual vertical, materialistic and of darkness. Another definition would be that it is an eloquent and charismatic preacher of atheism and materialism, who increases the darkness of the world that traps people, blocking the light of God and leading people astray, to be destroyed.

But then it dawned to me; the point of Christ is a visible, obvious beacon of God’s light that breaks through the darkness of this world and shows the way out, like Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth. This was reinforced by the fact of his resurrection, so that he would be set apart from the fakes and the wannabes. He is a needle in the haystack. Anti-christ is the haystack.

The dawn of AI and the dawn of the Antichrist might well be one and the same.

Madness

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It’s not that Trump was previously known as a paragon of mental balance and sanity, but this message he sent today…

…no words. Mad; very mad.

It’s like he and his entire team are smoking weed wrapped in pages torn out of a Bible that was soaked in LSD.

I can’t even tell whether he means it, because other than being a madman, he’s also a liar. But based on the general picture, I’d say he was waiting for the military to assemble a suicide team that will go into Iran and come to a bad ending, and his next response will be nuclear. After that, I don’t know. All hell breaks loose, I guess.

In the mean time, I’ve been taking some pictures.

I kind of half-broke my right hand leaning on the bed with too much weight behind it and over-extended two fingers. Not broken, but some ligaments are either stretched or something, and since I keep using the hand, it’s not healing quickly. Carrying a camera around in that hand doesn’t help, so I had to begin carrying it around my neck like in the old days. It does work better with the lightweight setup, though.

It’s Easter today. It commemorates the Light coming into the darkness of this world, tearing into it and leaving a permanent scar. People treat it like it’s the Easter Bunny and eggs day. You’re supposed to remember that God showed you that death is not the end, not have a pagan celebration of spring abundance or similar stupid materialistic bullshit.

 

Misapprehension

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I was thinking about something in quite a roundabout way, so please bear with me.

I’ve heard photographers talk about “3D pop” effect of certain lenses, and initially I didn’t understand what they are talking about, because it’s stupid. Then I understood what they were saying, but I still think it’s stupid.

You see, the so called “3D pop” effect in a picture isn’t caused by the lens, it’s caused by the light and what it does in a scene. If the light is “flat”, basically if the weather is cloudy and the whole sky is a softbox, the volumes in the images aren’t being lit in ways that show their 3D nature. Also, lighting can help separate the planes; if there’s a vehicle in the mid-plane, and it’s lit horizontally by sunlight, and the mid-plane is additionally separated by the depth of field, it’s going to “pop”, appearing quite three-dimensional.

The effect is magnified if the lens is sharp and contrasty, so that the shadows and reflections are precisely defined, and there is no haze in the image.

The effect is reduced if the lens is not stopped down correctly, if the depth of field is too shallow or too great. If it’s too shallow, it doesn’t encompass the whole motive in focus; if it’s too great, it doesn’t allow the foreground and background to fade, isolating the motive and allowing it to stand out. So, basically, for the most part it has nothing to do with some magical property of Zeiss or other lenses; it’s about illumination of the scene and basic photographic technique. People who talk about this have noticed that something is going on, but they mistakenly think it’s about the lens.

3D pop with the most basic 50mm lens

Why am I talking about this?

I was wondering why the American Christians are so aggressively helping Israel, when the modern Jews are by definition the part of the Hebrew religious community that is defined by their rejection of Christ. One could say that the Jews accept most of what Christians call the Bible, which is technically true, except for the fact that they reject the part that matters most to the Christians because it defines their entire faith, and they accept the part which the Christians have included for the sake of historical context, to explain why Jesus was important, why his teaching is exceptional, and why there was no salvation without him. Essentially, in order for the solution presented by the Christ to be understandable, they had to show what the problem was, and the problem was exactly the part of the Bible that the Jews believe in, while the solution is the part they vehemently reject. By all rational standards, the Christians should not like the Jews very much, and historically that was exactly the case. They thought of them as slanderers of Jesus and Mary, as blasphemers and liars, and considering what was revealed to me recently, that seems to be exactly the case. So, why are the American Christians so intensely supportive of Israel?

From what I can tell, they think the world will end when the conditions described in the Revelation of John, also known as the Apocalypse, are fulfilled, and since it’s all about the events that are happening in the territory presently known as Israel, they concluded that a Jewish state needs to exist there in order for the battle of Megiddo to take place; the Harlot, Beast and Antichrist to be revealed and destroyed by the second coming of Christ, and the world to end.

The problem with the Revelation is that it’s part rehashing of the Old Testament, part insane rambling. It’s the part of the Bible most beloved by crazy people, and it’s obvious why. Some part of it might indeed be prophetic or inspired. Most of it, however, is raving madness. If you’re informing your worldview by that text, you have a serious problem.

A large number of people are doing exactly that, and they are going even further: they are actively working on making it come true, by setting up what they see as necessary conditions for the second coming of Christ. This unfortunately isn’t without precedent, because Jesus did certain things “to fulfil the scriptures”. Essentially, it’s like “predicting” that you’ll die on a certain day and then killing yourself so that you get to be a prophet.

Essentially, those people seem to think that God is somewhat stupid and can’t seem to get his shit together about the end of the world, so they’ll get out and push, basically. They’ll set up the conditions described in the Bible as preceding the end of the world, and they will even make the battle of of Megiddo take place. Not only that: they will even make other things described in the Revelation a reality, as if to bring reality closer to their religious framework, and then use that as an argument – “you see, it’s all coming true!”

You can see why I started with the story about the “3D pop” effect. People tend to perceive something real, but then confuse all sorts of things and derive all sorts of weird conclusions, and I see this sort of weird thinking everywhere. In this case, I’m afraid, we have a weird cult of American crazies who are trying to enact Armageddon so that their JeeeEEEzasss!!! would finally come, and they are used by another cult of Jewish crazies who are trying to enact the supposed conditions for the arrival of their Messiah. Both think God is stupid and senile and needs to be prodded a little because he can’t seem to get his shit together, so they need to get out and push.