Salon.com > Erik Davis

Amma’s cosmic squeeze

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:13:00 +0000

The Mata Amritanandamayi Center is a cluster of gardens, ponds and institutional buildings nestled in the dry and rolling hills of Castro Valley, a rural area that lies about an hour east of San Francisco. For most of the year, it serves as the sleepy North American outpost for the empire of good works that surround the superstar Indian guru it's named after, who is best known as Amma. But twice a year, the Mother herself sweeps through, and the place is transformed. For a couple of weeks, thousands of devotees come to sing and meditate and stand in Disneyland-worthy lines to receive Amma's signature blessing: a great big bear hug.

I show up a little after noon, and Amma has already been at it for hours. Scores of devotees wait in line, while hundreds more mill about the center's large meeting hall. Charitable booths lie on one side of the space, with a well-stuffed shop of clothes, books and geegaws on the other. Roughly two-thirds of the folks are white, with the rest largely South Asian; like Amma, most are wearing white. The hugging saint herself, a full-bodied woman as brown as the Virgin of Guadalupe, is plopped down in a comfy, low-key thronelike thing at the foot of the large stage that lies at the far end of the hall. Amma is embracing her flock, many of whom believe that she is literally a goddess.

The Matrix way of knowledge

Wed, 21 May 2003 19:00:00 +0000

The most curious feature of Warner Bros' official Matrix Web site is not the handful of jaw-dropping "Animatrix" clips, but the collection of high-quality philosophical essays by heavy hitters like Hubert Dreyfus, Colin McGinn and the cognitive science superstar David Chalmers. These essays, which hash out Descartes, Mahayana Buddhism and the proverbial "brain in the vat" problem, are all the evidence you need that the Wachowski brothers' original 1999 film has vaulted into that curious category of Big Think mainstream sci-fi films -- and that they want the "kickass" sequel to extend the beard-pulling.

No one is surprised when filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky or Chris Marker or Stanley Kubrick use future shtick for metaphysical purposes, but it's another thing for Hollywood action fare -- designed to reap big bucks from the popcorn crowd -- to create a space of inquiry into philosophical, political and spiritual questions, however "comic book" the frame. Movies like "Blade Runner," "Robocop," "They Live," "Minority Report" and the "Alien" and "Terminator" flicks have managed, sometimes through no fault of their own, to edge toward the profound. But the Wachowski brothers made it to the top of this heap with the most lucrative sci-fi action empire to feed the questioning, and questing, mind.