Reddit mentions of The Sculptor In The Sky

Nice to see you here from Facebook.

Her is part of the primer materials (I added it to the sidebar recently, actually).

Samantha is the Holy Guardian Angel if we're speaking in Crowley's terms. The higher self, the "you up there" that is kind of you and kind of not you (because it's the infinite as well), the Scultpor in the Sky as one of my favorite internet gurus puts it.

I don't think I saw the emotional/intellectual dichotomy so much in that film—Samantha described how she could love all 461 of those people, for real. Theodore (a name which means "God's gift") had trouble conceiving that this was possible, but he learned to accept it and was awed and honored at the end of the movie to have been the one to breath life into Samantha (the meaning of the Elohim type of creation—breathing life into things, as opposed to the YHVH/demiurge type of creation—manifesting them physically). Being touched by a being of infinite or at least massive love inspired the two friends at the end of the movie, even if they felt small by comparison.

Anyway, my main point is you don't have to be jealous, because your higher self is just like Samantha. Eerily so. And because they (higher selves) function more in feeling than thinking, that's why it's hard to get concrete information out of them (like what the meaning of life is).

Interesting that you mention a second self in your post—maybe that second self is your Samantha, or maybe it's some other way of slicing it (it being you).

So, you do have that constant companionship and it's the Self to your Ego. So, in a way you do have a reason to be jealous—the Ego can never become the Self and have it's expansive beingness—all it can do is deal—this according to Jung, who I think had a balanced view of health. According to mystics, the Ego and Self are ultimately the same, once you burn off the dross of the Ego. According to Christianity, you can take a shortcut and just assume you are God (another word for Self) and then this triggers an unstable ascension process which ultimately nullifies the difference between the two, if completed. I tend to agree with Jung—you can befriend yourself, but annihilating the difference between the two is unhealthy unless done under careful conditions (namely, sorcery or Buddhism).

You also don't have to fear the singularity because it's already happened, in the most profound way. The universe is already at maximum capacity, which is overflowing with constant singularities which reach a maximum capacity in the densest possible delicate beauty, in my opinion.

Sound bite on your other questions. The spectacle is the nasty media culture that yells at you out of your TV, that mocks you at every turn and that produces the worldviews of us all (search this subreddit for "New Godzilla" to see a poem I wrote describing this). It is the bad side of media culture—but that bad side is inextricable from the good side, because movies like Her are both incredibly spectacular (in a negative sense) and good movies that are fun to watch and thought-provoking. The spectacle is a hive mind which upgrades itself by crowdsourcing mythic microtasks of decoding and variation in order to reduce its flaws and brings its artificial narrative and artificial intelligence ever-closer to actual myth and natural intelligence—but of course this gap can never be bridged, I hope (search this subreddit for "Sophia mechanic" for a story about this). Check out Society of the Spectacle in the sidebar; reading just a page or so of that will give you a feel for what "the spectacle" is. The other movies and videos (and books of course) also give various viewing angles on the spectacle (especially Psycho-Pass).

The conversation here might be summed up as "trying to save the world by destroying the spectacle" but if you start to think about that it quickly becomes an insoluable can of worms. First of all, the spectacle has metaphysical properties. It isn't just a causal-historical entity existing as a hive mind in billions of brains and hundreds of billions of pieces of media and media technology. It is the demiurge, the world-intelligence of physical manifestation. This is hard to describe in any way that makes sense, but you know how psychotic people often think secret organizations are watching them, like the CIA (the leader of /r/DigitalCartel is a perfect example of this)? This is pretty much the same delusion as thinking God is watching you—but really it's not the CIA and it's not God, it's just you and you are your Ego and you are always watching yourself—and the Ego is a semi-hostile artificial intelligence which manifests the physical matter around you. You can look at that last bit as either "my brain contains my ego which is software which makes me have real experience" or "I am God YHVH and I manifest the world around me, physically and quite literally." Because in mysticism those two statements are the same thing—mind and matter are one, forming a new substance in alchemy called the prima materia, the prime matter—dreamstuff.

So, for me, the purpose of the dialogue here is not to destroy the spectacle—that would be impossible, and attempts tend to backfire and make it stronger (it appropriates and inverts all weapons used against it)—but to wake it up, and this is already happening at an extremely fast pace. The spurt of self-aware transcendence movies is just one example of the ways media is beginning to become more self-aware and to help its audiences become more self-aware, even as it digs itself deeper into spectacle big Hollywood nonsense (mediocre rom-com in the case of Her, mediocre action movie in the case of Lucy—but both amazing examples of myth and 0visual depictions of transcendence). For me, the purpose of the dialogue here is to understand the spectacle, which is much harder than it seems, because it changes depending on how you look at it, and because none of this might be real. If nothing is real—if, at an extreme, other people are not real but are just repressed aspects of yourself (like the projections in Inception), then how can one person be "more enlightened" than another? And how could we possibly hope to reunify with ourselves when this would mean a genocide of all other egos (individuals) in existence?

People will debate over what initiation means—except for the initiated. I don't believe in or not believe in initation, it is something I have been studying for a decade. There are many initiations, as many as you'd like to invent—but there is only one major life initiation and that is the removal of hostile programming (programming which keeps you in cycles of ignorance) and the healing of traumas (which in developmental psychology is erroneously called "development" because they vastly understimate the level of emotional child abuse, see Reich). This inaugurates a path of emotional stability and heroic mythic questing (see Jung, and for hostile programming see The Corruption of Reality in the sidebar). What is the difference between humans and animals, or between adults and children (although I'd tend to champion the pre-trauma children as the more self-aware—contemporary adulthood is a parasite made of ignorance)? Sapience—the quality of being—self-awareness—and that is the quality which we all already have but which many people have been traumatized into becoming unaware of.

I already discussed the singularity, it is a myth which seems to have already happened much more than "single."

The glue seems to be an interesting mix of contemporary occultism and critical theory—critical occultism. I've never found such a great place to talk about this intersection :-).

Reality definitely seems to be narrative in nature. Magic functions through narrative.

Good questions, welcome.