Photography influences our propensity to experience reality visually. Professional photographers are more likely to identify subjects of interest because they are actively looking for them. Lately I have been pondering this in the context of awareness and consciousness. The cultivation of seeing can help us change the way that we view reality. But the heightened awareness can also be inimical to our mental state or spiritual purposes. For example, an instagrammer who loves to publish viral photos will always be on the look out for them. The eye and center of consciousness shifts in accordance with one’s intention. If I have a prior conception of the unity of all beings, I might look for expressions of that; if I have an ideology of compassion, I will be seeking a compassionate vision. In every case, this is about finding ways to support established opinions or conditioning: My prior opinion determines the way I see reality. I look at and photograph the world from a certain viewpoint.

A slightly different result emerges from observing reality, deciding what is essential to it, and then finding a way to express this understanding in a photograph. In Let us Now Praise Famous Men, the photography deliberately shows the humanity and stature of people who the world thought of as being simply poor and downtrodden. If the vision comes from a genuine perception, rather than simply illustrating an earlier held belief, then the photography becomes an authentic record. Or does it?

A person who inhabits a post-industrial society has an everyday experience of a plain, utilitarian and modern urban space. When such a person visits places that are quite different, such as small European towns that have scarcely changed since the Middle Ages, what is remarkable to him are the ways that this reality differs from what he’s used to. He is likely to look for charming ways that express the otherness of this reality. The result is a clichéd superabundance of images of stone arches, cobbled streets, colourful window boxes, etc. It becomes almost obligatory to take a certain kind of picture; one resembling the paintings and postcards sold in the tourists’ shops. But such photography reflects a selective vision that does not necessarily express the reality lived by the local inhabitants.

I wonder how many times I have tried in my travel photos to exclude cars and other modern elements because they look incongruous in the reality I would like to capture. This reminds me of the famous Starbucks coffee cup that was spotted in a Game of Thrones episode.

Then there are photographic attempts to juxtapose the ancient with the modern, such as photos from India of robed monks speaking on cell phones. These are contrived with a certain purpose in mind.

It is a truism of the modern world and of the ubiquity of cameras that our desire to record, post and share what we see frequently interferes with our ability to truly be present in our experiences.

When I first embarked on a trip outside of the European and North American reality I was used to, I decided not to take pictures at all. At the time I was thinking that photos are only poor shadows of the reality experienced, and one should rely upon memory instead. To photograph reality is to change it; there’s the quantum mechanics law, according to which it is impossible to observe reality without interfering in it. Lao Tzu, my inspiration of the time, had said, “one who excels in traveling leaves no wheel tracks”.

But maybe another approach is deliberately to make photography a participatory experience and, rather than attempt to capture reality or a version of it, to make images that are themselves objects of creation. Instead of taking a photo of a street, one may take a certain detail and then enhance it or superimpose it upon another image. This may be done to reflect an inspiration felt at the time, with no attempt to stay close to the perceived reality. This kind of photography well expresses the knowledge that every attempt to capture reality is doomed from the beginning; that viewing is always interpretation. As one could expect, there are many cringe-worthy web sites devoted to the subject of art photography.

It is almost inevitable that whatever we do has been done previously and probably better. This is, after all, an era in which several hundred people climb Everest every year, millions of people descend upon the world’s cultural capitals and every aspect of human endeavour becomes hackeneyed and trivialized.

In the end, I find that, social media and messaging services not withstanding, I take or make pictures mainly for myself: either as an aide-mémoire, or because in some other way it pleases me. Nobody – not even family members – is interested to scroll through a whole album of travel photos. Maybe our grown children will look back occasionally on the photos taken of them when they were young.

Photography is not just about the product; it can also be an exercise in seeing. Engaging in it gets us in the habit of opening our eyes and trains our visual acuity. There is no guarantee that what we capture digitally will express anything of value, but it is certain that if our eyes are half shut, we are less aware and less alive to our surroundings.

I spent the last few days messing with servers on Kamatera’s VPS hosting. After abandoning the attempt to set up an Epicyon fediverse instance, I tried to re-utilize the same server for the blog and photo galleries. I’d chosen a NGINX based server, and somehow I couldn’t succeed with it, so eventually I gave up.

Next, I tried a Caddy server image offered by Kamatera. I didn’t manage with that one either; though Caddy is supposed to be really easy, I couldn’t get through the set-up. It might have been easier simply to take a plain server and to install Caddy myself.

Eventually, I chose a server image based on Ubuntu with Apache and PHP pre-installed – a configuration that I understand best. But, as I was quickly to discover, these server-related components weren’t fully present on Kamatera’s image. At least, they weren’t working. First I found that A2ensite wasn’t there, then that PHP wasn’t functioning, so basically I needed to install or reinstall all of the server bits.

After a few hours, I got it all set up again, including the emacs org-mode based blog and galleries. Now, as before, publishing a blog post only requires me to compose it, press Alt-X and type “pub”: that rsyncs everything including the posts and any media I’ve placed in the local directories to the website. That’s about as easy and painless as you can get – and it automatically provides me with a full local backup. The only actual disadvantage is not being able to publish something directly from a phone. It’s no doubt possible, with an ssh app and a bit of configuration, to publish photos over Android to the server, but not blog posts, due to the dependence on emacs. What I can do, is draft posts on my phone, using Orgzly, and then transfer them to my computer.

I think I’ll leave it basically at that, rather than risk being over-ambitious and spoiling my configuration again. There’s only so many times that one can go through the process of reinstalling a server and setting everything up without being driven to a place of “what’s the point?”

For social media crossposting, I’ll depend on Disroot’s Pleroma server and Twitter. But for that to be significant I would have to build up a follower base again, and I lack the energy and self-confidence needed for that.

From my photo blog, the view from YS’s apartment in Jerusalem.

Read Write web

I was just reading the definition of the “Read Write web”, which was a revolutionary concept in the early 2000s – the idea that browsers could be used not just to consume content but to create it, and I was thinking again about blogging. Having set up this blog on the new server and finally reinstated a passwordless command for updating it within emacs, I realized how important this step was for encouraging me to write.

I think that whatever system one uses – and there are so so many today – it should preferably be frictionless; both for composing and for editing. That should be obvious, but not all blogging platforms are easy to use. WordPress, one of the most popular, still makes it quite hard to blog, presenting many confusing options that must be daunting to newbies. Facebook is also not frictionless; especially if one wants a post to be formatted in a certain way. And editing after the post has been made is sometimes difficult or impossible. There are some platforms that don’t allow the editing of posts, or seem to frown upon it, for the reason that reactions are sometimes made to an earlier version of the post. The problem could be solved, in the case of social media, if the platform would obligate mentioning that a post has been edited and allowing the perusal of earlier versions.

Besides frictionless composing and editing, a blogging system should respect users by making it easy to do backups and export data. WordPress is okay with this, provided that one uses plugins. I have not lost any of my blog posts made to WordPress and have been able to move posts from one server to another. Hubzilla and Zot based systems have nomadic identities, so that it is possible to move easily to another server or even use two identities simultaneously. Where I have lost Hubzilla posts I have only myself to blame. Fediverse servers go down all the time, because they are run by individuals rather than big corporations. One needs to be ready for this to happen and, outside of Zot, it is difficult or impossible to remain in control of one’s content and social media contacts.

This static blog under emacs orgmode maintains local plain text and html versions of every post. The Blazeblog sytem I was using previously created a separate directory for each post and made the post the index file of the directory. I found that aspect rather cumbersome and prefer to have plain text versions of all the files, kept locally in a single directory.

There may be ways to improve this emacs system. When one day I grow more knowledgable about the system I might add excerpts and other features, assuming that I stay with the same system.

There is still no way to make comments. The only time that I used comments was when I was using the Hubzilla to WordPress cross-post plugin, which allowed the transfer of comments between the two systems. I stopped using it becasue there were certain unrelated issues with the plugin, related to formatting.

I am still deliberating on the issue of whether to use the obvious possibilities of distribution of posts through links in the fediverse or Twitter but, in any case, my posts are not very appealing; I’m blogging mainly for my own pleasure.

One tendency that I want to avoid is the cultism that goes with many of the platforms, particularly alternative systems like Mastodon, Hubzilla and Gemini. I do not want my posts to be read or taken as evidence simply of allegiance to a given platform. If we are not posting to “walled gardens,” (which at least in some cases is actually a good idea) we are netizens of the open web, an anarchic and heterogeneous conglomerate. The particular method we use to post to it is irrelevant: we use whatever platform we find to be convenient or aligns with our concerns.

Last night I was reading through the archives of their semi-internal weekly news sheet “News and Notes”, and I see that the township is still in turmoil; a situation that seemed to start at the end of last year when the new Secretary tried to roll over all objections to complete the Crown Road project.

The atmosphere of conflict has continued during the intervening months with the attempt by the secretary and chairman of the Auroville Foundation to replace the existing management teams with new people and to sack employees who had held key positions for decades. Workers were locked out of their offices, computers confiscated, hard-drives erased and the entire internal communications disrupted. Email accounts were compromised, FIRs were taken out against previous committee members, meaning they were threatened with jail; visa renewal recommendations were cancelled, and there were orders to put a stay on new decision-making.

Although it’s hard from the outside to understand all the nuances and intricacies, let alone the justifications, for all this, obviously the township is in crisis and the residents must be anxious about the viability of their continued existence in Auroville. I don’t envy them.

From the outside, the processes there seem to parallel what is happening in India as a whole. Under the guise of improving “law and order” and internal security, there is the attempt to undermine democracy, establish authoritarian rule, stifle opposition, etc.

Whatever justifications can be brought in in the case of a nation, this kind of behaviour is obviously not the way to advance a community that is based on spiritual values.

And yet in-fighting and bickering has been there from the beginning in Auroville. It seems that the community has not developed strategies to overcome this. Few spiritual and religious groups do, in fact manage to mitigate human failings through spiritual practices or community-building. Krishnamurti ridiculed the hypocrisy of these efforts.

If one is an aspirant caught in such a hostile spiritual environment, the only way to preserve one’s morale and sadhana may be to stay clear of all this negativity. But then, the question arises why one would stay in such an environment if it is not providing the mutual support that was the whole reason for establishing the community and for remaining there? It is probably better to strike out on one’s own.

Sadhaka Dharma

I think that a sadhaka should not have any truck with the politics of a country. He must, of necessity, live in some country because that is the way human society is arranged. He is entitled to choose the country of his habitation, but, having done so, should remain detached from the affairs of state and be, as it were, indifferent to its political processes and the machinations of its rulers.

For peace of mind, that has to be the way. There are responsibilities that fall to the general population but not to the sadhaka. I think the sadhaka needs to be aware of what’s happening but at the same time, must remain emotionally detached, as well as intellectually disengaged.

This is an elitist way of looking at the issue, perhaps. Certainly not everyone can enjoy the luxury of living in this way. It is to be hoped that citizen involvement will remain strong, in order to safeguard democracy and human rights. A sadhaka who exempts himself in this way lives a somewhat parasitical life, just as he is parasitical in some other ways. Nevertheless, the rules are different for a sadhaka.