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Nuances
Phillip Pulfrey
In memory of my father
and for Jérôme,
my surrogate son.
Meditations on Perception, Expression and Reality
We take a handful of sand form the endless landscape of awareness
around us and call that handful of sand the world.
Robert Persig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I have been contemplating this particular perspective on the lake
for twenty years.
A landscape constructed from momentary glimpses, grafted
on to fragments of memory; pieces of a whole from which we are
separated by time and perspective.
The camera pastry–cuts a rectangle from its seamlessness and
analyses it into a grid of numbers. The unique moment of choice
engraved in the memory of silver salts is replaced by the dynamic
potential of the pixel; a tool for the considered hesitancy of a
Cezanne: “is this what I saw, and at what moment ?”
We record a pattern of numbers; open to translation through
process: screen, printer, paper; each offering its own particular
interpretation.
We may, perhaps, slip through a breath of time; glimpse the
divine, by entering deeper into this mystery of the moment,
heightening our awareness, grasping change and changelessness
across the nuance of nature, time, vision and memory.
Dynamic Process
The Buddha taught that beyond this world created by our own
senses and limitations, the phenomenal world dissolves into a
dynamic process. The true nature of reality lies beyond the realm
of language and linear analysis.
Helena Norberg–Hodge, Ancient Futures
In particular, it is the function of the beautiful to be, so to speak, an epiphany
of the Absolute and formless void which is God. It is an embodiment of the
Absolute mediated through the personality of the artist, or perhaps better, his
‘spirit’ and his contemplative experience.
Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
Waiting to grasp the ungraspable, you exhaust yourself in vain. As soon as you
open and relax this tight fist of grasping, infinite space is there – open, inviting,
and comfortable.
Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
We need to realize that the tacit
contains experience, the unconscious,
the unknown, the limitless – in short,
reality – and that the explicit is merely a
map of experience.
Michael Polyani, The Tacit Dimension
Intellectus
One does not see or sense, or perceive in isolation – perception
is always linked to behaviour and movement, to reaching out
and exploring the world. It is insufficient to see; one must look
as well.
Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars
Wabi–sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and
something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper
circumstances, context or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.
Leonard Koren, Wabi–Sabi for Artists, designers, Poets and Philosophers.
The old philosophy distinguished between knowledge achieved
by effort (ratio) and the knowledge received (intellectus) by the
listening soul that can hear the essence of things and come to
understand the marvellous. But this calls for unusual strength of
soul. The more so since society claims more and more and more
of your inner self and infects you with its restlessness. It trains you
in distraction, colonizes consciousness as fast as consciousness
advances. The true poise, that of contemplation or imagination,
sits right on the border of sleep and dreaming.
Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
“The secret of Zen is just two words: not always so”
Shunryo Suzuki Roshi
The Present Moment
Seeing is the most arduous thing that
a human being can undertake, for it
calls for a disciplined, alert mind. But
most people would rather lapse into
mental laziness than take the trouble
to see each person, each thing in its
present moment of freshness.
Anthony de Mello, Awareness
If everything we see is changing, what can we identify in this process as ourself ?
We can see what concepts or body image or deep sense of self we hold as “me” or
“mine”, as who we are, and begin, and begin to question this whole structure. And
perhaps, in deep stillness, we can come to that which goes beyond our limited
sense of self, that which is silent and timeless and universal.
Joseph Goldstein & Jack Kornfield, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom
Zen is liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes
obvious that there is no other time than the instant, and that the past and the
future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co–existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.
T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets
We almost never see reality. What we see is a reflection of it in
the form of words and concepts which we then proceed to take
for reality.
Anthony de Mello, Taking Flight
Reality
I saw that reality might not be a fixture – crudely, inescapably there – but a
continuing, spontaneous enterprise of the imagination. It might be shaped,
remade, revalued again and again through each act of perception, each
inventive gesture of relationship.
Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding
I had the strange hunch that nature itself was not out there, an object world eternally
separated from subjects, but that everything external corresponded vividly with
something internal, that the two realms were identical and interchangeable, and
that nature was my own unconscious being.
Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows. Are you imprisoned by
your concepts ? Do you want to break out of your prison ? Then
look; observe; spend hours observing. Watching what ?
Anything. The faces of people, the shapes of trees, a bird in
flight, a pile of stones, watch the grass grow. Get in touch with
things, look at them. Hopefully you will then break out of these
rigid patterns we have all developed, out of what our thoughts
and our words have imposed on us. Hopefully we will see. What
will we see ? The thing that we choose to call reality, whatever is
beyond words and concepts.
Anthony de Mello, Awareness
The art of meditation, prayer, space – call it what you will – creates a distance from
ourselves; the perspective of seeing that the products of our own mind are but
that, and embracing another framework of scale and time; ourselves in context of
the universe and eternity. We bow to the brain; we forget, or ridicule, our potential
for other forms of knowing.
How do you decide when to stop looking at something ? It is not
like a book, page after page, page after page, end. You give it
your attention, or you don’t.
A.S. Byatt, Elementals
The soul craves depth of reflection, many layers of meaning, nuances without end…
Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
ORIGINALS
an originals production
© Phillip Pulfrey 2006