Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy

As a photographer, if the weather doesn’t go your way, you look for photographs anyway. And that is a good carryover to the rest of life. Why do we make such a thing over having our way? It is eventually going over into, “Okay, now what?” anyway. Why not just switch what we want into exactly what we have and treat it as though it is what we have always hoped we would be able to deal with? Attitude and perspective are everything. The sooner we square ourselves up with having a way being an invitation to gloom, sadness and woe, the less of that we have to deal with. By preventing our preferences from becoming anything more than that, we set ourselves up for enjoying the next best thing, or the one after that, without flipping out, listing to starboard and winding up on the rocks.

What to do here, now is always a poser, making emptiness, stillness and silence all the more important. Joseph Campbell liked to point out that reflection leads to realization, and that is the aim of meditation and the essence of enlightenment.

How much quiet, reflective time do we have in a day? Emptying ourselves of everything that interferes with silent stillness opens us to what waits to be seen, heard, known, embraced and invited into our life. From there, allowing nature to take its course opens us to our life and to possibilities we might never have considered from the standpoint of forcing our will and our way along the way.

Scientists have observed particles emerging from empty space (Googleit). Particles attract particles, circumstances beget circumstances, give it enough time, and here we are. No creation, no “plan of salvation,” no fall, no redemption, no being lost, no being saved… It’s all projection, imagination, made up, fabricated, like ghosts and goblins, heaven and hell. “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted or transformed.” And one way energy can be transformed is into matter. The material universe comes from the immaterial universe. Over long stretches of time.

It has always been known by indigenous peoples everywhere that the visible, physical, world is grounded upon the foundation of the invisible, spiritual world. Spiritual is not found in the doctrines and dogmas, the Dharma and sutra’s, but in the realization of what we know without being told anything. Enlightenment and realization are the same thing. Just as intuition and Psyche are the same experience. When we are experiencing intuition, we are experiencing Psyche. Living in light of, out of, at one with our intuition is as spiritual as it gets. Ask Jesus, or the Buddha.

When I don’t know what to do, I wait for clarity by dropping into emptiness, stillness, silence until something shifts and everything falls into place permitting the Way to become apparent, waiting for me to shift into the flow and circumstances take it from there. Being aligned with the flow of things means sensing/knowing what’s what, what’s happening, and what’s called for here, now in each situation as it arises. And that requires distancing ourselves from what we want to happen. Getting ourselves out of the way of the Way is the most essential and least desirable thing we can do from birth to death, and doing it is like dying, again and again. Reflecting the theme of death and resurrection as the primary, recurring, experience and is the threshold from one way of life to another, and the essence of “turning the light around” in transitioning from one to another.

What this means in “real time” (here, now is real time), is that being spiritually awake, attuned, enlightened is moving into how things are and out of how we want things to be. Arriving is leaving. Yes is No. How awake we want to be is how dead we must become. Resurrection is Death. We die to live and live to die in that each birth requires a death and each awakening requires a dying. And that is the flow of life from metaphor to reality. From actual birth to actual dead and buried. All our life long. Are we up for it? If not, we enter the in-between state of neither being quite dead or quite alive. Zombies between worlds. Where most people spend their time.

We need a financial buffer/cushion so that we are not on edge all of the time, anxiety ridden over how to pay the bills each month–and how to manage that is out of reach for a large percentage of the world’s population. Jesus could talk about the love of money being the root of all evil, but he doesn’t say a word about the lack of money being evil itself. I would like to hear Jesus’ take on how to arrange for enough money to make life livable. I know the government could do a much better job helping make ends meet for everyone in the country except for those in charge of things who are against “handouts” and “entitlement programs” (When reducing taxes on the wealthy is not seen to be just another “entitlement program”). I don’t know how we can be so far apart in our ability to see need and do what we can to lessen it, but it troubles me greatly. Particularly when we are spending millions of dollars on war and a pittance on help for the poor. How far we are from a world where things work like they ought to!

Waiting for things to fall into place is being attuned to what is called for here, now, and doing what needs to be done in the service of the time and place of our living. Tending the requirements of life as it is right here, right now is fundamental to all that follows. Just meeting the needs of the moment is the firs step into the rest of our life. Things fall into place around us meeting the moment as the moment needs to be met. What is waiting on us to act? Start there. Do that. One thing will lead to another and before we know it, things are falling into place in a wu-wei kind of way.

Appalachian Trail — Rhone Mountain, Catawba Rhododendrons, Fog

You could do a lot worse than ordering my eBook, The Way of the Buddha, from the Kindle Store on Amazon, and reading it slowly, perhaps out loud. I think it will cost you $2.00. That’s a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Happy is a point of view. A perspective. An attitude. A way of seeing what we look at. It is what we do with what we are handed. It starts with not taking anything more seriously than it deserves. And it moves into doing what is called for in each situation as it arises, when, where and how it is called for, and letting that be that. As Lao Tzu said 500 years before Jesus said, “Be like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field,” “Do your work and step back, let nature take its course.”

Striving to force our way on, through, in the world… Hammering, banging, pushing, shoving to get what we want doesn’t want the way we think it will.

See what’s what and doing what can be done about it, and letting that be that is the way of the natural world. Streams flowing to the sea sometimes dry up and have to wait for the rain to fall and fill its course with enough water to proceed along its way to its eventual destination. We have to wait for what is needed to have what it takes, or change what we want. And that means squaring ourselves up with how things are, doing what is called for and letting that be that, in a “Here we are, now what?” kind of way.

Speaking of ways, the way to square ourselves up with what’s what is the way of emptiness, stillness, silence and solitude. Sitting and waiting for “now what” to become clear, that we might do what is called for in ways appropriate to the occasion throughout what remains of the time left for living.

The heart of Taoism is seeing the truth of who we are in the moment of our living. Living with nothing to want and nothing to hide, open to the here, now, free to do what is called for when, where and how it is called for. Because it is called for and something, someone, depends upon it.

What is the here, now asking for that we can provide? Why wouldn’t we ask that question and be open to its answer? What do we have that the moment needs? Why wouldn’t we provide it?

I would like to hear what my father would have to say to that question beginning around my 1st birthday. “What do you have that the moment needs? Why wouldn’t you provide it?” Answering that question throughout the birthdays of his five children and his wife. We would like to know. We deserve to know. Though we do know. We need to hear him say it. “Because I am the only one who matters here. And why aren’t you all who I want you to be?” We need to hear that from him.

Perhaps, you know someone like that?