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[ by Charles Cameron — some examples of deep dreams, mechanical and spiritual ]
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In the upper panel, a claim made for the Deep Dream Generator:

In the lower panel, an image of the chakras or lotuses in the subtle body, through which the kundalini serpent rises from deep sleep to full spiritual awakening.

The “sixth level” in the chakra system would be the Ajna chakra:

The Ajna chakra is positioned in the brain, directly behind the eyebrow center. Its activation site is at the eyebrow region, in the position of the ‘third eye.’

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Deep Dreams:

Here’s what Google’s Deep Dream Generator comes up with:

Here’s an early statue of Arya Lokeshvara from the Potala Palace, dating to the 7th century and described as the Potala’s most sacred statue:

This is a detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The Temptation of St Anthony:

From one of the marvellous array of manuscripts of the Beatus commentary on Revelation:

Here’s a deep dream in words, from Hermann Hesse..

Another, from Shakespeare:

A secular deep dream..

and a deep dream — as surreal as all the rest, yet capturing “no more than” simple reality — in a photo posted today by Bill Benzon:

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Roll over, Beethoven:

[ by Charles Cameron — a second, off-the-cuff Sunday Surprise this week ]
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Here’s your basic DoubleQuotes-formatted pair of images — Rembrandt‘s Nightwatch which you’re probably familiar with in the top panel, and Bill Benzon‘s Night Light Standing Guard which I believe he only posted today:

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Consider the differences.. then, and now.

I wanted them in DoubleQuotes format to make the comparison clear — but here are larger versions of the two images, still in sizes this blog column can handle:

and:

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But for a really detailed digital looksee, click on these two links, and then if you’d like, click again for maximum magnification, very possibly too large to fit a computer screen & requiring some scrolling to catch significant detail:

Rembrandt, The Night Watch

Benzon, Night Light Standing Guard

Even better, you could befriend and visit Benzon, and view the Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Either there, or by some other means, you and I and Benzon and Rembrandt should commune. As Emerson wrote:

The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately.

[ by Charles Cameron — following on from the AI dog / ostrich, this ]
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No sooner had I posted my piece on the similarities and diffrerences between two humanly similar images — one of them identified as a dog by a neural net, the other as an ostrich — that I came across my friend Bill Benzon‘s piece, also posted today, Visual Resonance, in which he plays with Photoshop filters and a couple of his own images.

Synchronicity? Zeitgeist? GMTA?

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Here is one of Bill’s photos, which he claims “no sensible photographer would shoot”..

As Bill says:

The setting sun is low in the sky and reflecting strongly off a glass encased building, so strongly that the camera really can’t deal with it. Also, I’m shooting through the branches of a small tree or bush nearby and they show up as a mis-shaped dark area in the left half of the shot. I like to take such shots to see what I can pull out of them.

Here’s a second version, this one tweaked with a filter..

Frosted?

I think there’s a fairly peasily perceptible family resemblance there, no?

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But then we come to this one..

in which a different filter has been applied to the same image..

To my eye. this is very different from the original — almost pure jazz in fact, and yes, Billplays jazz trumpet — though the palette “seems the same”..

And then there’s this..

.. which seems to me discernibly similar to both the previous and the original images, and in fact consists, if I’m reading Bill right, of an overlay of the two of them.

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All this leads me to tentatively revise my formulation that “likeness and unlikeness appear to me to find themselves on a spectrum which approximates closely to identity at one end .. and absolute distinction at the other“, renaming my spectrum “same-same, same-diff, diff-same, diff-diff“.

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Sameness and Difference, One and Two, Three in One and One in Three — as the writer I referenced anonymously towards the end of my previous post said:

Even angels and the spirits of men were matter by Greek thinking. In a sense, there are only two substances in the universe. One is God — whatever the substance is that constitutes God — and the other is matter. Athenagoras, a Christian apologist writing in A.D. 168, tells us:

We employ language that makes a distinction between God and matter and the natures of both.

The question being asked at the Council of Nicea was …

Is Christ of the substance of God, or

is he made of matter like us and the angels?

Sameness and Difference, One and Two — we’re back in the heart of the Presocratics, of Pythagorean mathematics, of the Tao — the One and the Many.

One Another.