Hatching of Self

"As an object prone to fertilization, the egg is an appropriate symbol and metaphor for the idea of potentiality. It is pre-creation chaos waiting to become cosmos. In psychological terms, it is the preconsciousness of the given culture – the collective being waiting to be made conscious of itself. To quote psychologist Marie Louise von Franz, 'we can easily recognize in it the motif of preconscious totality. It is psychic wholeness conceived as the thing which came before the rise of ego consciousness, or any kind of dividing consciousness'. In short, the egg is a symbol of pre-differentiation, differentiation being the essence of the creation of anything. The egg contains within itself male and female, light and dark, all opposites in a state of union. It is perfect entropy and signals the existence of creative power from the very beginning. By extension, the cosmic egg is a symbol of the individual’s preconscious state before the process of individuation allows for the hatching of Self."

- David A. Leeming (1937 - )
Cosmic Egg

A Moment or Two to Just Be

"While I sit here, I don’t beg to be somewhere else; I’m not pulled away by the future or by the past. I sit here, and know where I am. This is very important. We tend to be alive in the future, not now. We say, ‘Wait until I finish school and get my PhD; then I’ll really be living.’ Once we have it – and it wasn’t easy to get – we say to ourselves, ‘I have to wait until I have a job for my life to really begin.’ Then after the job a car, and after a car a house. We aren’t capable of being alive in the present moment. We tend to postpone being alive to the future, the distant future, we don’t know when. It’s as if now is not the moment to be alive. We may never be alive at all in our entire life. The only moment to be alive is in the present moment."

- Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 - )

Postscript. The picture above was captured not with my "real" camera but with my iPhone, whose ability to capture scenes such as this continues to impress. I was on a short "day job" related trip to the beautiful town of Newport, RI, and had a few precious moments of magic hour light at the Sachuest Point National Wildlife Refuge (just a few miles from the center of town). I was initially despondent over having not taken my real camera (and rationalized the "complexities" of mixing business with pleasure; what, with a laptop and pounds of technical notes already stuffed into my carry-on). I then got even more melancholy over having neglected to take my other "real" camera that I bought specifically for this purpose (an absurdly tiny but equally as absurdly capable digital camera I wrote about earlier this spring). But then I remembered Thich Nhat Hanh's sage advice (quoted above). Stilling my mind as best I could, and clutching my iPhone, I managed to find a moment or two to just be. 

A Little Round Grain of Rock

"I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Star Maker

Symbols, Signs, and Time

"We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Universal Patterns

"Every unique thing in nature is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world. In geometric harmony of the cosmos there are ways that resemble, there are universal patterns, from blood vessels, to winter trees or to a river delta, from nautilus shell to spiral galaxy, from neurons in the brain to the cosmic web. A whole universe of connections is in your mind – a universe within a universe – and one capable of reaching out to the other that gave rise to it. Billions of neurons touching billions of stars – surely spiritual."

- Alejandro Mos Riera (1978 - )

Two Worlds

"There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters."

- Neil Gaiman (1960 - )
The Books of Magic

Postscript. This is a different view (or diptych-ed views) of the same Rocky Brooks Falls (near Dosewallips State Park, on the part of the Olympic Peninsula that faces the Hood Canal in Washington state) I uploaded a different picture of a few months ago. While, as I described in that earlier blog post, the falls themselves are almost embarrassingly easy to get to (since they are less than a 1/4 mile away from a small parking area), maneuvering in and around the falls in hopes of finding a better composition than the obligatory "Here is what my wide angle lens can capture!" is difficult; well, at least it's difficult for a 60yo with 59 years or so of wear and tear on the knees :) With the help of one of my sons (who was kind enough to act as a carry mule for my camera bag and tripod), I managed to catch either one or two non-obligatory shots (depending on how you slice the diptych) from a point well in front of the main falls (from which the bottom-most part of the falls is invisible). I think that while each "part" works well on its own, as an image, they are self-contained enough that the diptych adds a bit of contextual "interest." The relatively small area into which these falls descend has the remarkable property that just about any spot one stands on seemingly offers a veritable infinity of "different" compositions. Though it is, in truth, far more typical than not for photographers to feel this way about any spot (!), I have found this particular waterfall to be blessedly infused with this magical property more so than most. Despite having already taken close to a hundred different shots during our two trips (thus far), I am already looking forward to my next visit :)

Optimal Experience

 

"The theory of optimal experience is based on the concept of flow—the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

...

When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

...

The key element of an optimal experience

is that it is an end in itself."

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Postscript. Sadly, the deeply inspirational Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi passed away on Oct 20, 2021. He joins an (equally sadly) growing number of spiritual/aesthetic mentors of mine that I have never had the pleasure of meeting in person (the last such being John Daido Loori, who passed away in 2009). I have written of applying Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" to photography a number of years ago on this blog (almost exactly 13 years ago, to be precise), but the wisdom and insights he leaves behind are of course timeless. Here is a link to a great TED talk that Csikszentmihalyi gave in 2004. May your soul forever revel in eternal flow, Mihaly!