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Archive for the ‘perception’ Category

Creative reality

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, philosophy, photography on August 13, 2019| Leave a Comment »

I took this photo a long time ago up at the Bracklinn Falls in Scotland. As you walk through the woods from the car park, you hear the roar of the water long before you can see it. Once you reach its banks, or stand on the bridge, the “new” bridge from 2010, the “old” one having been washed away by the power of the water in a storm some years before, you can hardly hear each other speak for the noise.

There’s a hint about the power of water in the volume of the noise. There’s another hint when you learn the history of the bridge, see the height of it, and wonder about the day the stream turned into a torrent and destroyed the old one. I’m old enough to remember standing on the old, iron, one. I never imagined it could be washed away. The new bridge, is, I think, even more beautiful than the old one.

What caught my eye in that first scene, was the shape of the rock.

It looks like there is a giant mouth opening up to swallow the water.

In fact, many of the rocks here smoothly sculpted by the power of the water. They are beautiful. The water itself does not run smoothly over this section of its path. It is never still, never quiet, and constantly breaks into foam and bubbles. It’s sort of counter-intuitive to think that water can shape rock, yet it’s obvious too because we see that all around us, whether we are looking at cliffs along a coast line, the rocks along the banks of a river, or even stones which lie at our feet.

One of the things which so delights me about these scenes is realising how the rock has become the shape I’m looking at only by interacting with the water.

It hasn’t grown to that shape all by itself.

Because it reminds me that nothing is the way it is all by itself. Everything we see, everything we are, emerges from an infinity of experiences to become the way it is today.

When I look at these beautifully fashioned rocks I see a relationship. I see a history of water and rock. I see continuous motion.

Which isn’t what you’d expect to see when you look at a rock!

Wow! We live on such a creative planet don’t we?

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Creation

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on August 9, 2019| Leave a Comment »

What do you see when you look up at a sky like this?

The first things to catch my eye are the patterns in the clouds. I just love seeing these ripples, waves and swirls. I can delight in densities and the transparencies. I love how the blue beyond shows through and appears as lakes, streams and rivers in the white land of the cloud.

Then the next thing that happens for me is noticing that some of these patterns here look familiar. They remind me of something else, in the same way that sketches and doodles do, in the same way that paintings and photographs do. My eyes are drawn to the blue zone in the cloud which I can easily see as a pair of lungs – well, I’m sure that’s at least in part due to my working as a doctor all my life – but the idea of a pair of lungs breathing this cloud into existence delights me! Bear with me for a moment longer, because, and this comes and goes for me, I can then see what looks like a head above “the lungs” with a face looking out towards the right hand side of the image. Sometimes that looks SO clear to me that it almost spooks me out! And then I look again and I just can’t see it.

If you’ve been reading the posts on this blog for a bit, you’ll know what’s coming next……the image sets of a train of thought for me.

This time what I start to think about is creation.

I love to see clouds emerge, change, and disappear before my very eyes. So often they look like a work of art, like a piece of performance art. I see it happen and it amazes and delights me.

This, I think, is the essence of the Universe – creation.

The Universe has been creating since its beginning. As best we know, first elements, like hydrogen and helium, then clouds and densities which form into stars, those sources of all the elements we know….and so on, with the rest of the Universe Story…..right up to the creation of the Earth – as far was we know, the only planet like this in the entirety of existence – yeah, I know, people tell you that there are chances there are other Earth-like planets out there somewhere, but we haven’t found any yet.

And on this Earth, creation continues, with the elements forming into molecules, molecules combining and synthesising to create cells, and so to living organisms, no two organisms living identical lives……to the most complex of living organisms in the universe (as best we know)….human beings, no two of whom have ever been, or ever will be, identical.

And so to this day, this day which has never existed before, and will never exist again, where every event, every experience, every body, is new today.

Creation. It’s the essence of the Universe. It’s the essence of Life. The constant, never-ending, creation of novelty, of emergence, of uniqueness.

Yep, all that from a cloud…..how’s that for a creative thought?

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What’s coming?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, psychology on August 7, 2019| 2 Comments »

Sometimes when I look out over the vineyards I can see the rain coming. Like a swathe of grey chiffon dropping down from clouds in the sky to soak the green vines below, or like the wet fingers of the rain gods lightly stroking the face of the Earth.

It’s quite beautiful.

It’s like change manifesting itself, the future showing its hand.

Of course it means it’s time to take the washing in from the line, or to head indoors until it passes, but sometimes, it just appears, then disappears again. I can see it just there on the other side of the vines, then within a few minutes it’s gone, never having come this way at all.

It’s a daily reminder that the future is not predictable.

The French philosopher, Michel Serres, wrote that human beings are creatures which anticipate. He said we are always looking ahead, imagining what might be there, what might be coming our way. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. I know that if I stop to watch my thoughts for a while, some of them are memories, some are old patterns of thought passing through again. But often they are anticipations, thinking ahead to later today, to tomorrow, to next week, month or even the years ahead. None of which exists yet. None of which I can be sure of.

In fact, I’d say that even when I am practising a focus on the present I discover that much of the here and now content of my mind is anticipation – planning, expecting, wondering what if this, and what if that, anxieties or fears, hopes, desires or longings.

Isn’t it strange that we give such attention to the unknown, and unknowable, future?

Yet, isn’t that perhaps one of our greatest strengths? The one which gives us not only the ability to plan, but the power of creativity? The one which enables us to imagine another world? Isn’t that where we get our ability to be prepared, as well as our ability to be active agents of the future?

Wondering what’s coming next isn’t necessarily all about worry and fear. It can enable us to cope, to adapt. And it can allow us to manifest our own creations.

 

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Positive Intention Attention (PIA)

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on July 20, 2019| Leave a Comment »

See this little bird? She’s a redstart. There are a pair of them who spend a lot of time in my garden in the summer months. I first spotted a male a few years back and was struck by his distinctive call. I even got to imitating it and “having some conversations with him” – well, I know, that’s pushing it a bit far. I’ve no idea what he was telling me and I suspect he had no idea what I was telling him. After all, I’m not even sure, myself, what I was telling him! He disappeared over the winter and then reappeared the falling Spring. I heard him before I saw him, and I had a hunch he recognised me.

Can wild birds recognise individual human beings? I read a report of a study recently which suggests that they can. I can’t say that surprised me. I have a strong feeling that we have become familiar to each other.

Since then he’s come back every summer and this summer, in particular, his partner has been about a lot too. I find that pretty much any time I go out into the garden to sit and read, that within a few minutes one of the pair, or occasionally, both of them, turn up nearby, watch me for a bit, then hop down onto the grass, getting ever closer, before nabbing a fallen mulberry or something and flying off.

This photo here is a rare success. As I sat with my book I noticed her on the fence post and slid my phone from my pocket to grab a quick shot. Then she flew off.

Now, I have no idea how much of this is my imagination but I do get a good feeling when one of these little birds comes to join me for a few minutes. And that got me thinking about the importance of relationships in life. How important it is for us to form and experience bonds, not just with other people, but with other living creatures, whether they be birds, trees or flowers!

I think these bonds we form have a special quality. They enhance life, they add flavour to the ordinary day, they “enchant” us. Literally. So how do they come about? Well, I’ve got a theory.

They come about through a particular kind of attention – “Positive Intention Attention” (PIA) – I think when we pay attention with positive intent that we create bonds, bonds of mutual benefit, “integrated bonds”, healthy, life-sustaining, life-enhancing bonds. That’s what I mean by “positive intent” – an intention to create bonds of mutual benefit.

So, I’ve decided that’s what I want to do more of, every day – pay Positive Intention Attention to the experiences, events and phenomena of the every day – and, by doing that, I have a hunch, the every day will become just that bit more extra-ordinary…..

 

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The past is in the present

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on July 10, 2019| 2 Comments »

One of my most favourite cities is Segovia, in Spain. Perhaps its most striking feature is the Roman aqueduct. It begins as a pretty average sized wall, then column by column, arch by arch it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, straddling the town below until it reaches the old castle.

In this first part houses have been built on each side of it. I don’t think I’ve ever come across such an astonishing structure running right down the middle a street!

One of the first of the town’s squares lies at the foot of the aqueduct just as it reaches its greatest height.

I find this SO inspiring! Here’s what it got me thinking last time I was there…..

Throughout my career as a doctor I saw time as linear. Perhaps because the second half of my working life was in a specialist centre for people with chronic (long term) conditions, I commonly heard patients tell me of the traumas which they had experienced prior to becoming unwell.

I was never someone who bought into a mechanical, linear view of human beings, or of life. Every patient I met convinced me that all these chronic ailments are multi-factorial. You could never say that “this” caused “all that”. But there was one question I frequently found revelatory.

“When were you last completely well?”

Sounds an easy question, huh? But, actually, it was often difficult, and took some time and conversation to find the time, perhaps even several decades ago, when the patient last felt completely well. I’d then ask about the year the patient moved from wellness to illness.

“Tell me about that year”.

It was often a year of significant trauma, or the culmination of many traumas. I don’t think that meant that the patient’s illness could all be attributed to that trauma, but it was a starting point in making sense of their experience and beginning to find the way forward.

Sometimes patients were clearly stuck with these unresolved hurts. Again and again they’d think about those times, feel bad about them all over again. Others were so traumatised that they were living lives of fear, continually looking ahead and wondering “what if….?” “what might happen?” “how will I cope if….?” and things like that.

In both of these scenarios I’d draw a straight line – and say, the left hand point of this line is your date of birth, the right hand, the date of your death. We know the first, and have no way of knowing the second. But right now, today, you are somewhere along that line. Where is your attention? Where is your focus? Because if it’s to the left of today, it’s in the past, and that doesn’t exist any more, except in your memory. If it’s to the right, it’s in the future, and that only exists in your imagination. You can’t have your attention in more than one place at a time, so what if you draw your attention into the present instead? How might that feel? And we’d then explore ways of living more in the present reality, than in the past traumas and future fears.

I think it was often helpful, but now it seems somewhat simplistic to me. Because I now see time is not as linear as I thought. In fact, seeing cycles and seasons of time makes rather more sense to me now. As I experience a place like Segovia I realise that the past doesn’t go away. It doesn’t disappear into memory. (and memory is not an artificial place anyway….it’s no dusty filing cabinet with the drawers all locked)

Rather the past is always present, always here, and always now. It fashions our every day. It colours our every experience. It sets the tone of today. It constantly challenges us to respond to it, to adapt. In fact, that’s how we learn isn’t it? By having an awareness of the past in the present? If we forgot and discarded everything we experienced how could we learn anything? We adapt by carrying with us the past into the present.

And although this is even more challenging, the future is here now too. Not least because the future is, in one sense, a “multiplicity of singularities” – a set of possible paths, which are, at least in part, fashioned by this present moment, and by each and every decision and action.

I don’t think the past goes away. I don’t think the old “time heals” is true in the sense that it makes the past go away. Instead I think we learn to adapt to it. When we become aware of the past in our everyday we have the opportunities to create new responses, new strategies of living under it’s influence.

OK, so, this is not where I thought this post would go when I pasted in those photos of the aqueduct! But here’s a related thought – how does the presence of the past in today, as we see in this colossal aqueduct stretching over Segovia, shape, fashion, influence, inspire, challenge, stimulate the thoughts, feelings and actions of the people living there?

And so, of course, even when the past isn’t as obvious as this aqueduct, how does it’s presence today influence our experience of today?

Here’s the final part of that story – we don’t heal just by shifting our focus, we heal by becoming aware, aware of the past AND the future IN this present day, and realising we can change how we respond to that. Realising our current patterns aren’t fixed. We can alter them.

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Patterns of reality…..branching

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, perception, philosophy, photography on July 7, 2019| 2 Comments »

I noticed this on a wall recently. First, I find this beautiful. I find it very appealing. Second, it expresses one of the commonest, most fundamental patterns in the universe – let’s refer to it as branching.

Because I’m doctor, I often start by thinking about the human body, and in the body there are many, many examples of this branching structure. Perhaps the most obvious in the respiratory system. We breathe in air and it travels down the trachea (some people call the trachea “the windpipe”). After a short distance it branches into two tubes, one heading to the left lung and one to the right. From there on there, the pattern repeats, branching into smaller and smaller passageways, until, the smallest ones end in little bunches of grapes, called “alveoli” (OK, I know, they aren’t actually grapes! They just look a bit like that!) Similarly, the vessels which distribute the blood around the body, start from a big one right out of the heart, which branches into smaller and smaller vessels, the further away it gets from the heart, till in the tips of our toes and fingers, in the skin, the vessels become hair like (“capillaries”). The blood then gets back to the heart following a similarly patterned set of vessels (“veins”) coursing along the tiny ones, which join together to make bigger and bigger ones, till one big one channels all the blood back to the heart.

Does that pattern remind you of anything? The journey from mountain springs to river estuaries perhaps? Or trees!

Sometimes I wonder if that’s one of the reasons we find trees so appealing? That they echo one of our most fundamental internal structures.

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Reality is relationships

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, philosophy, photography on July 5, 2019| Leave a Comment »

This made me stop. It looks like two trees who got together a long time ago, and have continued to grow, relate, entwine, even dance and kiss together ever since!

The physicist, Carlo Rovelli, says “the universe is made up of networks of kisses, not stones”

He also says

I think that quantum theory can make sense as it is: we just have to give up some cherished metaphysical prejudices and accept the deep relational aspect of nature that the success of the theory has revealed

Another physicist, Lee Smolin, says “the universe is a network of events”.

Asked about his theory he says

It’s a theory about processes, about the sequences and causal relations among things that happen, not the inherent properties of things that are. The fundamental ingredient is what we call an “event.” Events are things that happen at a single place and time; at each event there’s some momentum, energy, charge or other various physical quantity that’s measurable. The event has relations with the rest of the universe, and that set of relations constitutes its “view” of the universe. Rather than describing an isolated system in terms of things that are measured from the outside, we’re taking the universe as constituted of relations among events. The idea is to try to reformulate physics in terms of these views from the inside, what it looks like from inside the universe.

 

Aside from physicists, daily life begins to take on a different flavour altogether when we shift our focus from things to events, from objects to relationships, from separate items to connected contexts.

Try it for yourself, see what’s it like to focus more on kisses, relationships and events than on “stuff”.

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