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Cultivated by Noah Carton Kramer
MEDITATION ON ARNOLD'S PHOTOGRAPH IN THE NONDUAL
When we look at perception relationally within an indeterminate field of ever-reaching transcendence, we realize that perception is always a lived, embodied perception; that is, it is not a representation of mind, but a living interconnected experience. For me, this is a wonderful way to perspectivize photography, even within its ostensibly contained field. We turn towards the photograph and engage in a relationship, which says, don’t think, look. We might even say, listen, taste, smell, and feel, too. And it is at the moment of contact between visual consciousness, an organ, and the object of perception that the synergy and complexity of perception changes through one’s emotional life. Not by what we perceive but participating with perceived objects. This perception can never be labeled as exclusively subjective, illusory, or in the body.
And so, the photograph, as a process of expression presents us with, as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty would say, “the extraordinary combination of cognitive acts that are in fact utterly contingent, but which bear an aura of eternity.” This is emptiness in all its fecundity and fragrance. Expression is just this: disparate but not independent cognitive acts of an embodied being thrown into the world, being surrounded by rich possibility and image, to express itself, to say I exist. This is the living emptiness or non-dual experience as authentic.
MORE MEDITATION UPON LOOKING AT ARNOLD’S PHOTOGRAPH: LANGUAGE
MORE MEDITATION UPON LOOKING AT ARNOLD’S PHOTOGRAPH: LANGUAGE REACHING INTO THE NONDUAL
Regarding perception, it feels rather cliché to speak about the interplay of color, light, and shadow when presented with a photo, but rarely do we express the synaesthetic fullness that is, in the perception of lived experience, the ordinary flow of the “secret life of things.” Though the body temporarily rests in what we would perhaps unwittingly call the subjective, the body is never separate from the world perceptually living it. Anything less is representation, an idea of the world of things. And this is the fundamental dualistic illusion known as the subject/object split. Stop and listen. Notice how the sunlight and shadows play through the tree yellowing the landscape.
As we deepen in the perceptual landscape, we are more aware that we are living with it. It’s not that the dualistic doesn’t exist; it is just no longer rendered the reality of an isolated mind. In nondual perception, things have coherency but within the context of excess, that is, the world we experience is ceaselessly spilling over. And because there is a multiplicity of sense-directions, our perceptual fields are indeterminate, or ambiguous. We’re all now familiar with the term, Gestalt. In the Gestalt’s complex field, there is a focus on the tree against the building or sky, both of which recede into the less determinate background. And so, in the nondual, no longer are we suffering under an Aristotlean collection of substances devoid of life! We instead live through the perception of living experience in synergies, symbiotic fields, dynamics, and fluidity. And, of course, interconnectedness. To paraphrase Thich Nhat Hahn, each object of perception is made of non-object elements. It is empty of self-existence and so full of everything else.
And to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, Take the tree against building and sky. “It contains more than the sense-qualities presented. It has an outline which does not belong to the background and which stands out from it; it is stable and offers a compact area of color, the background [of sky] having no bounds, being of indefinite coloring [and the sidewalk] running under the tree. The different parts of the whole, for example, the portions of the tree nearest the background possess besides color and qualities, a particular sense.” That is, they are intentional, having directionality. The tree bears meaning within because of the complex relation between the tree and its background. The tree has a sense of density, a sense of depth, a sense of running on with open possibilities. There is a sense that the car has another side and a front that I could see if I were to walk around it in that direction. And I have a sense that I could enter any of the three doors of the building, one running behind the tree. This is what is meant by meaning-laden perspectives that engender a variety of affective and behavioral responses. We are affected by what is both presented and concealed.
Besides the basic intentionality of perception is how I open onto things that transcend me and my thinking. This is what Merleau-Ponty calls a “contact with otherness.” Things that are distinct from me draw me out of myself as I form new ideas about these transcendent things. When it comes to “thinking subjects,” I open to them too as I emerge from my individuality. This is the beginning stage of intimacy and reveals the relationship of perception to psychological development. But, that’s another transcendent and intimate story.
thank you for
looking and seeing. I completely agree that seeing is not a passive business. The mind reaches out to make sense of the stimulation that comes. And thank God. That engagement is life. It feels so good and you just need to let it happen. It is not a matter of will. That is how the world is so intensely beautiful. Photos crystallize this for me.
MORE THOUGHTS ON LOOKING AT ARNOLD'S PHOTOGRAPH
The essential problem with a “classical” psychoanalysis, that is, one that attempted to replace metaphysics with a scientific method and understanding of human functioning is that the living, synergistic and dynamic aspects of the human being somehow gets lost or relegated to a partial abstract representation of mind or embodiment. Indeed, mind and em(bodi)ment are artificially and irreparably separated as a result of “analysis.” Not that analysis, as a method of deconstruction is wrong or specious, but in order for it to serve the understanding of humans being, analysis must function at the level of language itself, sublating the dualistic representations of reality (vis-à-vis conceptualization) rather than the nondual lived reality of interconnectedness that language obscures.
The disembodied mind of representation is theory about mind, not the embodied spirit of mind that “makes”(i.e., intentions through directionality) and lives in the senses and experiences embodiment as the “necessary condition” and vital source of perception. Emptiness (non-existence rather than non-reality), the interconnectedness of phenomena, manifests in perception as the incessant surging up and receding of things in the world. And because nothing exists independently, there is an infinite array of perspectives that living perception takes up. In the “real” world mind/body has the capacity to open and close to things, including mental events. The challenge, however, is when the so-called perceiver “believes” in a fixed, independent self (and this self’s body) that is fundamentally different from other objects. This deluded sense of permanence engendered in, for example, my inability to walk around my body or leave it behind, or look into my own eyes, gives us the impression of permanence and thus leaves mind resistant to other variations of perspective.
Thus, embodiment itself, and the brain that “orders” it, without language to challenge the singularity of its perspective, is both the perceptual source of survival and suffering. Affectivity, or emotions, the responding to and thus opening up of perception to the world, must have bi-directionality, that is, respond to both the outside and interior of one’s consciousness in order for embodied consciousness NOT to overlook itself. When we say that someone is “unconscious” or “unaware” or “ignorant,” we literally mean that they are forgetting (repressing) themselves. It is true that I cannot walk around my body or leave it behind, or look into my own eyes, but I can through language overcome these structural limitations of perception by cultivating “self” awareness, which enables me to “look” around, behind and, most importantly, inside my self in the knowing of nondual experience. What I mean is that the limitations of perception are only limitations from the perspective of dualism, the perceived reality of independent, discrete, fixed parts, including space and time.
From a nondual perspective, the organized, complex interconnectedness of living perception reveals a “frontier” of contact and transcendence superordinate to the dualism of objectivity and biased subjectivity. This can be demonstrated again, for example, as we experience Arnold’s photograph as it participates in our perceiving.
At home, in silence
I want to reach out, bring words up from the silent center, to build that bridge that connects and makes where I am and where you are, one. I am sitting on my balcony, on a warm June day, listening to the waterfall in the pond, the sound of a worker’s drill down the alley, the birds flying overhead, and glancing from the corner of my eye at a big, fat, happy squirrel dancing upside down on a bird feeder. Butterflies are moving from flower to flower and now, a neighbor is driving her car into her parking garage. I have finally turned from the novel I was writing, turned full circle, waved it goodbye, bowed to an old voice that belonged to someone I once thought I knew, but who clung so fiercely to an old vision that the vision became concrete and I hardened along with it. I thought it would be difficult to let go, that I would crumble with self-doubt and a deep sense of failure, but instead, the new silence is the voice. I seem to have few words, to have receded behind language - I don’t know – perhaps I am starting all over again, learning to speak one word at a time. When I start to speak I am greeted only by silence – a stillness. I don’t know what it is I have to say, what it is that I want to say. I do not know what is next. What is next is the future. This moment is only this………………………………. I am at home today. No work. No going to the hospice. Few immediate chores. This vast open space slowly gets smaller, as if a spotlight is shining on this one tiny spot. Here. I am. And I am not. It is all a big question.
NONDUAL PERCEPTION AND RILKE
No poet has so brilliantly breathed the nondual into language as Rilke. As I re-read my posts, I immediately think how Merleau-Ponty would agree with Rilke's theory of perception:
Breath, you invisible poem! Pure
continual exchange of our existence
for the world's extent. Counterbalance,
wherein I rhythmically recur.
Solitary wave,
whose ocean I become by degrees;
you sparsest of all possible seas -
what space you save!
How many of these spots of spaces
were inside me already! Many
a wind is like a son to me.
Do you recognize me, air, you so full of my former places?
You, smooth bark that girds,
roundness and leaf of my words.
Sonnets (II,1)