Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy

Who/what serves as the supreme authority in your life?
Who/what do you live to serve,
make/keep happy with you?
Whose happiness with you 
constitutes the sole purpose of your life?
Who/what do you live to please?
Who/what do you strive to please/serve every day?

The question of authority is the central question.
Get to the bottom of it.

Why do you think the way you think?
Value what you value?
Believe what you believe?
Do what you do?

What is your essential motive?
The primary reason you are the way you are
and not some other way instead?

Who/what is guiding your boat
on its path through the sea?

If you were the only person who mattered to you
how differently would you live?

What keeps you from reclaiming yourself
and living your life
the way you think your life needs to be lived?

What keeps you from declaring 
your own emancipation proclamation?
And being/becoming the person 
you know you need to be
in the time left for living?

Where does courage come from?

There is seeing
and there is projection,
delusion,
illusion,
(Where does that line lie?),
deception,
impression,
perception/misperception
(Where does that line lie?),
gas lighting,
propaganda,
lying,
...
to the point of knowing/notknowing
(Where does that line lie?)
and how do we know we are seeing
what we are looking at
and how much more is there
to what we apprehend/comprehend
than we imagine?

Did someone say "imagine"?
I was just thinking about that.
How do we know where the line lies
between what we think is so,
what we imagine to be so,
and what is so?

And who says so?

And what informs our response
to our life as we experience it?

There is truth
and there is denial of truth.
And where does that line lie?

And who is to say so?

We live on the basis of our impressions
and assumptions,
our presumptions
and our "informed" opinions
about hearsay, rumor and gossip.

It is all smoke and mirrors,
"vanity and chasing the wind,"
"waiting, waiting,
for the mud to settle
and the water to clear."

Where do you go to sit and wait?
How often do you go there?
Low long do you sit?
How do you know what you think you know?
What makes you think so?

Did someone leave it here
and walk away?
Did it drift in pushed
by some long forgotten hurricane?

I want to know all of the stories!
Of every thing, 
every animal,
every person
that ever has been and will be.

That's what I'm going to spend heaven doing.
Forget angelic choirs,
praise and glory.
I'm bored just writing the words.

I want to know the stories!
If there is no place for stories in heaven,
I am going to hell,
because heaven without stories would be hell,
and maybe hell has stories,
and some really good ones at that!
Making it heaven for me forever!

Life is an optical illusion.
We live with a foot in different worlds,
on different paths.
It is like this and that at the same time.
The Buddhists like to say, "All is one."
Everyone else knows it is anything BUT one.
The Buddhists even admit it
with their, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."

There is "the Buddha" and there is "not the Buddha."

They also say, "If you meet an elephant on the path,
GET OFF the path!"

There is "the elephant" and there is "not the elephant."
And it pays to distinguish between the two.

On another hand, also a dichotomy,
they would be happy to affirm Einstein's postulate
that it is all energy
(Rocks, etc. are composed of atoms
with whizzing electrons at their center) 
and "energy can't be created or destroyed,
only converted or transformed."

Which is to say, "It is all one."
"Two-ness" (Or "multifaceted-ness") is "One-ness."
And, it is also two-ness (or multifaceted-ness)
at the same time,
depending on how we look at it,
in a now you see it, now you don't kind of way,
like an optical illusion,
which is dependent upon duality to work.

Not that it matters.

Unless you like balance and harmony,
serenity and tranquility,
and enjoy the idea of oneness being multifaceted-ness
(or duality being non-duality)
the way energy is a rock
at the same time.

All we need is a sounding board.
We all need a sounding board.
Someone who can hear what we have to say
and encourage us to keep talking 
until WE hear what we have to say.

When WE hear what we have to say,
it changes everything.

So. We can write it out, as I do here,
to you who are serving as my sounding board.
I am writing as though you are listening,
and you can do the same thing
to imaginary sounding boards,
just saying what you have to say,
several times a day,
clarifying it as the day wears on,
so that you are clear yourself
as to what you are saying,
and are able to reflect on that
until you come to new realizations
which produce a shift in attitude
and orientation
resulting in mid-course corrections
and adjustments
creating mild to dramatic differences
in the way you live
just because you took the time
to hear what you have to say,
in a regular and reliable way
throughout each day.

I listen to myself at night,
ranting and writhing at terrifying
possibilities and threatening turns in the road,
saying only, "I wonder what I will do about that,"
and "I wonder how I will handle that,"
and "What will ever come of that,"
and by morning everything is all clarified
and I am ready to do what is called for
in each situation as it arises,
having prepared myself for the absolute worse
throughout the night.

Makes the day a breeze,
getting it all said at night.

Wisdom is merely
a life-time from birth to death
of experience and reflection
to the point of realization
applied to here/now choices
and decisions.

What experience is
and what it means
in light of previous experience
applied to present experience--
including the cumulative exprience
of the species--is wisdom
at work in our life.

And it depends on 
the right kind of reflective use
of emptiness, stillness and silence.

It is thinking in the right way
about what's what
and what its implications are
for here, now
in each here, now that comes along,
including thinking about our thinking.

It is awareness of awareness
expanded to include all of life
throughout time.

The people who do that best
are the wisest among us.
Including "the little child who leads (us)."

I do not know many people
who are content with 
doing what is called for
in each situation as it arises.

Everybody has an agenda.
A plan.
An idea of how things ought to be.
They live in the service
of what's in it for them--
of what they stand to gain or lose
in each situation as it arises.

They have opinions
and a will in the service
of most of them,
either for or against.

Pushing/forcing/striving/endeavoring...

Willing even what cannot be willed.

And reacting emotionally to everything.

Living in the simple service
of what is called for
does not rank anywhere in their list
of things that are important.

Thinking is the source
of all of our troubles today,
and every day.

Our troubles disappear "like that"
when we change the way we think about them.

Thus, thinking is also the solution
to all of our troubles today.

Changing the way we think
changes everything.

See how many different ways 
you can think about the things
you normally think about.

If you sense trouble arising,
change the ways you are thinking about it.
Disappear it running toward you
in mid-stride.

A little poof here
and a little poof there,
here a poof,
there a poof,
everywhere a poof, poof,
oh, my mercy!
Changing the way we think
will change the world!

There is only being who we are,
doing what is ours to do,
the way only we can do it.
In each situation as it arises.
No matter what.
What's the problem?

Oh, wait! I see!
Having our way--right?
Getting what we want,
when we want it--right?

What does thinking about 
what we think about
keep us from thinking about?

That's called diversion,
distraction,
escape,
denial.

Which is where we spend most
of our time, no?

And not being who we are,
doing what is ours to do
in each situation as it arises,
no matter what. 

Right?

People like Donald Trump
cannot comprehend the reality 
of restraints, confinements and limitations.
To them, money can solve any problem,
and they buy/threaten/force/coerce/extort
themselves to whatever they want.

Well. Money can't buy weather.
Or shutdown volcanoes.
And paying our enemies to not attack us
has not worked for anyone throughout time. 
There is a limit as to what money can do.

But limits don't sit well with Donald Trump.
He takes to yelling a lot
and telling people, "You're fired!"
As if that can keep the oceans from rising
and the desert from taking over Texas.

Better for us all to learn to take "NO!"
for an answer,
and live with what needs to be lived with
for the true good of all.

If sound advice could be heard and applied
by those with a will to power and control,
the world would be a safer, saner place
for all through time.

It isn't that we don't know 
how life should be lived.
It is that we don't care for anything,
anyone, other than ourselves--
as in the story of the Garden of Eden.
The theme of the ages,
apparent from the beginning.

We have to do our own work,
live our own lives,
assisting one another
with our work and our life
as we are able
in light of the corporate good
and see what happens
and what we do about it
in service to our sense
of what is called for,
and see where things go over time.

Conversations regarding the corporate good
are essential to the cooperation 
of each other toward that end,
and that's where it gets sticky.

Groups and individuals will tend 
to develop wealth and power
that is disproportionate to that of the whole,
and will tend to run things in their best interests,
to the disadvantage of those with less wealth and power,
and the corporate good will be lost
in the service of individual/personal good,
and here we are.

Equality, equanimity, justice, freedom, well-being,
and the best interest of all concerned,
where everyone has what they need
and no one amasses more than they need
is the ongoing effort in the cause of balance and harmony
that has been lost in the production
of massive wealth over the past 150 +/- years.
And no one is in charge of evening out the scales.
Individual honor, restraint and service to others
is an easy casualty in the contest for wealth and privilege,
and there are none to right the wrongs in society and culture.

We are left with "circumstances begetting circumstances,"
and things having to work themselves out through wars and 
power struggles with environmental necessity limiting
what can be done and not done over time.

Welcome to the kingdom of greed in the land of the blind
generating conditions requiring individuals to find their 
own way and shape their own life within the givens and requirements they are handed as best they can.

It is up to us to find communities of like-minded people who support and encourage one another through the options and choices of our lives toward peace, serenity, tranquility, balance and harmony in light of our original nature, our inherent virtues (What we do best and enjoy doing most) and our intrinsic intuition for the good of ourselves and each other all our life long.

We are seeking communities in the service of the common good, and the internet is the most likely place to start looking--or to begin creating one "just like that" out of the ether.

Making sense of things 
is a full-time job.
And we can't ever be sure
we've been successful.

We take everything on faith
in this world.

We trust ourselves to our intuition
and take our chances.
Our biggest chance is being right
about how we read/understand our intuition!

Too often, it seems, she says 
exactly what we want to hear.
Which is to say our thumb is on the scale of truth,
tipping the outcome in favor of our wishes/want/
desires and fears.

We aren't even truthful with ourselves!
And our intuition never abandons us
or leaves us bereft.
But is always there
as the hills from which our help comes,
hoping we will be receptive 
to what she offers.

May it always be so!