Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on September 9, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Sometimes I think it’s good to have an image to focus on for a short meditation. I especially like the kind of image which is initially beautiful and engaging, but which then draws me in to see more and more, the closer I look.
Try this one.
I see the swan. I see his reflection. I see his shadow on his reflection.
Multiple layers. Multiple perspectives.
Enjoy!
Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on August 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »
The earliest form of photography was the daguerreotype (named after its inventor, Monsieur Daguerre). It was a process which captured images onto silver coated copper plates. It didn’t involve using negatives and every single “print” was a one off. They couldn’t be duplicated or transferred onto paper.
The daguerreotype was remarkable for the accuracy of the image produced. It was sharp and detailed (you could use a 50x magnification lens to look at part of the daguerreotype and see crisp details). Partly because of its accuracy it was initially used as a “scientific instrument” and found in laboratories, but as the technology became more portable the taking of portraits, landscapes and cityscapes soon proliferated.
As photography developed, an artistic intention was soon brought to it. The newer processes of making negatives and printing onto paper, were quickly taken up by artists.
I’m a keen photographer, as I’m sure you can tell if you browse through this site. I’m also very curious about how we experience the world and how we communicate our experiences to other people. Recently I’ve been wondering about the differences between “representation” and “manifestation”.
Just as the daguerreotypes were great for re-presenting what could be seen, I think we often believe that is what we are doing when communicate our observations and experiences to others. Certainly in scientific publication, the scientists are trying to “re-present” what they have observed as “objectively” as possible.
However, as it’s not possible to experience any “out there” from anywhere other than “in here”, there is always an aspect of “manifestation” to the “representations”. Every “re-presentation” involves some “manifestation” of the subjective experience of the person who is making the image (or writing the document).
Maybe in all Art we can see these two aspects – there is some re-presentation of what the artist experiences (including what he or she observes) – but there is always some degree of manifestation too. I wonder to what extent Art could even be said to be primarily a way of manifesting the subjective – a way of a human being making manifest the otherwise invisible, unique, personal experience of the world.
Look at the image I’ve placed at the top of this post. It’s a photo I took in a “beau village” in France. It’s a sign to show that the water here is drinkable. But it isn’t just a sign. Even the way the words “eau potable” (which means drinkable water) are carved reveals something of the creator of the piece. And what about the shell? Why is that there? The shell is the symbol of the pilgrims heading to Compostella. So this is a drinking fountain to help quench the thirst of the pilgrims. That manifests something of the artist’s world view doesn’t it?
Saint-Exupéry said
So how are you going to manifest YOUR unique, invisible, essential experience of reality?
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on August 19, 2014| 1 Comment »
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul.” – John Muir
Just as we are constantly influenced by what’s inside us, so we are constantly influenced by what’s around us.
One of those influences is beauty.
A recent article in The Atlantic looks at the influence of beauty on happiness.
Beauty tends to feel like something that must be found in special places—parks and museums, galleries and exotic cities. Lunch is not a place one would normally think to look. But finding beauty in normal activities can bring deep happiness to life, studies show.
“In a paper titled, “Untangling What Makes Cities Livable: Happiness in Five Cities,” Abraham Goldberg, a professor at University of South Carolina Upstate, and his team conducted a statistical analysis of happiness in New York City, London, Paris, Toronto, and Berlin.”
In addition to the usual “Big Seven” influences (wealth, family relationships, career, friends, health, freedom, and personal values), Goldberg found that what makes people happiest is the beauty around them.
It seems part of humans’ appreciation of beauty is because it is able to conjure the feelings we tend to associate with happiness: calmness, a connection to history or the divine, wealth, time for reflection and appreciation, and, perhaps surprisingly, hope.
Beauty, famously, is “in the eye of the beholder” and maybe some of the images I’ve included here are not what you might find beautiful (but I do!), but what interested me about this article was not just that beauty can be found in big works eg architecture, great paintings etc, but also in everyday small objects and scenes.
I also especially liked the quotations towards the end which highlight a very interesting aspect of beauty – it’s connection to anticipation, or hope…..
“So long as we find anything beautiful, we feel that we have not yet exhausted what [life] has to offer,” writes Nehamas. “That forward-looking element is … inseparable from the judgment of beauty.”………… As the 18th-century French writer Stendhal wrote, “Beauty is the promise of happiness.”
Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography on August 16, 2014| Leave a Comment »
It seems the way are brains are made we are predisposed to notice patterns.
The scientific method is based on noticing patterns, describing them, and, in particular spotting patterns which repeat. Patterns which repeat give us the ability to predict – not just what might happen next, but what might happen if we take a particular action. In other words we can use what we learn from pattern spotting to manipulate objects. But there are no patterns which ALWAYS repeat and none apply in ALL contexts of time and place. The danger of pattern spotting is to generalise and turn repeating patterns into “laws” or “rules”.
Science can easily go wrong when it hardens into arrogance…….the arrogance which often arises out of conviction.
A good doctor recognises a pattern of symptoms and signs, makes a diagnosis, takes an action known to be likely to produce a particular desired outcome, but retains their awareness and curiosity to seek new patterns, to reconsider their assessment of the patterns and tries different actions when the first one fails to achieve what the doctor was trying to achieve.
After all, even weather patterns are unpredictable…..
Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, photography, science on August 14, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Just seeing – vision – amazes me. We know so little about how it happens.
At university I learned about the visual cortex – the area of the brain which processes the signals from our eyes and created the images we “see”. I remember being strangely surprised to think through what it meant that light waves hit the backs of our eyeballs and then that energy was transformed into electro-chemical signals which sent information back along the “optic nerve” and how the exit point from the eyeball where the nerve goes off to the brain received no light information at all so should always be present a gap in the image we see. But there is no gap to see! Our brains seamlessly, instantaneously and constantly process all the information from our eyeballs and creates this experience of moving images which never have any holes in them!
We now know that there is a lot more of the brain involved in creating images for us than we previously thought. Read this wikipedia article for starters.
So, what amazes me is not just how we experience this seamless visual image, but how we instantly know what we are looking at. Take a look at these photos I took of people on the Miroir D’eau in Bordeaux. The first one is taken pointing the camera at a mirror which is reflecting the image from outside the building I’m in. People are in the mist created by the water spray. The second is outside with me actually on the Miroir and the people in the mist. The third is a shot taken after the mist has settled.
In all three shots we know we are looking at people. Sure, as the images become more clear we can see more detail, but isn’t it interesting that we have a pretty good idea of what we are looking at right from the first image?
Wow! Isn’t the ability to SEE just amazing? And how wonderful that we continue to learn how we do that. We often forget that our level of understanding is just our current level. It’s never complete. It’s never the “full story”. What more will we learn even in my lifetime?
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on August 12, 2014| 6 Comments »
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on August 11, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Ripples stimulate my thinking about influences – how every action we take has “unintended consequences”; how the future can never be predicted because emergence is a characteristic of all Life; and how the past appears again in the present as a co-creator of what we experience today.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on August 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »
In the A to Z of Becoming, one of the verbs beginning with an “F” is to feel.
To feel something means at least two distinct yet inextricably connected things in the English language.
Firstly, it refers to the sense of touch. Look at the moss covered rock in this photo. When I was actually in the forest and encountered this, I found it impossible not to touch it. Some surfaces, some textures seem to beg to touched and feeling them is both an experience of pleasure, and a voyage of discovery. Our bodily sense of touch allows us to feel things in this way. We can feel objects and we can feel the sensations which arise within our own bodies. For example we can feel hot or cold, heavy or light, stiff or supple.
Secondly, we use feel as a verb related to emotions. If you hurt someone’s feelings, you are upsetting them emotionally. We can say we feel happy or sad, anxious or relaxed.
What strikes me is that these two variations of feeling are inextricably linked. The verb, to feel, is a connecting word – it joins our bodies to our psyches.
We see this best in the way we use embodied metaphors in our language. If I say I feel hot and bothered, then I am probably experiencing both an increased temperature and a feeling of irritation. If I say I feel comfortable then I’m probably referring to both a feeling of physical comfort and ease and a mental state of relaxation. Tension is felt in the body and the mind at the same time.
There are many psychology studies which have examined this linkage. One of the ones which most surprised me was where the subjects in the study were asked by a researcher to hold a cup as the went up together in the lift to the room where the study was to take place. Sometimes the researcher had a hot drink in the cup, sometimes a cold one. At the end of the study session each participant was asked what the thought about the researcher and those subjects who had held a hot drink felt much more positive about the researcher than those who had held a cold drink. (You might like to think about that next time you’re having a meeting!)
Dan Seigel describes a meditation exercise he calls the “wheel of awareness” – you can read, and/or listen, to it here. You can try a variation of it focused on feeling –
Sit in a quiet place, get comfortable and close your eyes.
Take a deep breath in, filling your lungs with air, then slowly let the breath out, until your lungs are completely empty. Repeat that three times, then bring your attention to the physical sensations you can feel. Can you feel the ground under your feet? The cushion you are sitting on? The arms of the chair you are relaxing in? Does the room feel warm or cool? Take your time just to notice each of these feelings. Notice them, then return your awareness to your core.
Next, bring your awareness, methodically, to the sensations arising within your body. This section of the meditation is often described in mindfulness practice as a “body scan” (you can read the detail elsewhere, or here)
Finally, notice the feelings which are arising, or are present, in your mind. Notice them, name them, then return your awareness to your core.
Stop when you want to. Open your eyes, and, if you like, write down in your notebook a description of what you have just experienced. What links do you note between the feelings or sensations arising from the external world, those from within your body and the feelings which are present in your mind?
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on August 6, 2014| Leave a Comment »
There’s something special about islands.
Looking back over the water to the land you’re just leaving……
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography on August 5, 2014| Leave a Comment »
What’s this? What are you looking at here? What do you see?
Sometimes we just see a part of the world from a different angle, an unusual perspective. Then when you take a photo and look at it later, you see something even more different from when you were actually there – in this case, what strikes me when I look at this photo is how there seems to be a face there – but I didn’t notice that at the time.
Heroes Not Zombies 