Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy
Finding our way to The Way one situation at a time. I don't know how great it will be, but I expect it will be interesting, and I look forward to it going on past all reason because wonder is just that way. Are you coming or not?
If we want to find the right king of people, we only have to be the right king of people and they will find us.
Why don't we all make it our life's work to be the right kind of person? All it takes to know what constitutes the right kind of person is to make a list of the qualities we look for in seeking the right kind of person. Then, be what we seek. Nothing to it.
How about we start right now?
There are people in charge of things who have no qualifications for being in charge of anything. Who have impure motives and malevolent intentions. And are a threat to everyone they perceive to be not like them. And the rest of us have no way of protecting ourselves from them. This may be the way the Native Americans felt in the presence of the United States Cavalry. But, other than that, things are just fine.
Where do we turn when there is nowhere to turn? That is not tantamount to sticking our head in the sand? Where do we go for comfort and consolation? The people who sell alcohol must be doing a booming business. Which makes alcohol the equivalent of sand.
Where does Gaza turn in its chances with Israel? What does Ukraine do about Russia? What is called for here, now? What does "success" look like in circumstances such as these? We go through the motions as long as the motions are left to us, and then what? The people Trump is deporting are not much worse off than the people Trump is not deporting. We are all awaiting deliverance. In the meantime, I recommend taking refuge in the best company we can find and riding it out together. It is good to be with you, and with you, and with you...
I'm sending my images to a stock photography company, thinking that I would prefer that they collect dust on an external hard drive in a cardboard box in one of their closets than in one of my closets, which would become one of my daughters closets in due time. It is my way of eternalizing my body of work. This is on of the images making the We Transfer journey from here to there, along with all the rest of the worthy ones. I am enjoying the process of finding, re-processing, and sending them to their new home--and is a good way of coming to terms with my own passing, as good a way as I can imagine of "achieving" "eternal life."
On another level there is the matter of reflecting on our life that we all need to do daily, to the point of new realizations, and a shift in the way we go about our business before we die. To live cognizant of our living is the best way I can imagine to go about dying. So, I endeavor to live today the way I lived yesterday in terms of being who I say I am and doing what I think is called for, where, when and how it is called for, and keeping the self-deceptions and the BS to an absolute minimum.
How are you coming along with that? The best of luck with it all the way the rest of the way!
What guides our boat on its path through the sea?
It can't be "I want."
What does wanting know?
There is nothing like wanting to screw things up worldwide forever.
If we are at the mercy of wanting, we would be better off if we just stop right now and don't do another thing until we can get wanting in its rightful place.
Wanting's rightful place is wanting not to want anything that has no rightful place in our life. The rightful place for anything/everything is what is called for here, now.
Wanting what needs to be done is quite legitimate. Wanting what it is time for is the right kind of wanting. Wanting what we have no business having? Not so much.
"If I just didn't want the wrong things, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, in the wrong way, I would be so much better off in so many ways." That realization contains all of the elements of a really fine country song.
And the only antidote I know of is the right kind of silence in the right place at the right time. If we are ever going to want anything, let it be that. No?
"God doesn't help us, God doesn't hurt us. We live our own lives." -- Rebecca Dollar, 3rd grade.
"A little child shall lead them," Jesus telling it like it is.
The children know. And, we know. But we dismiss what we know because of what we have been taught.
"That we are sinful to the core and going to hell for sure if we don't believe that Jesus died to appease God's need for Justice."
We know that is stupid from the start. #1 We did not sin. There was no Garden of Eden. No Adam or Eve (Where did the dinosaurs fit in to the Eden story?). All of that was embellished and placed in the Bible by the Church of Rome before 397 CE, and the lie took hold and everyone believes what they know is not so. It's time to stop the nonsense. And #2 there is no pay off for being good, because how good is the good that is good with a payoff in mind? That is not good! That is a bribe!
What possible stake could God have in any outcome? "God wants this, God hates that (Gays and Abortion, for instance, always what those saying what God hates hate). God doesn't love, God doesn't hate. God is the background, eternal, AAAUUUMMMM of the Cosmos. Circumstances beget circumstances. Planets collide. "Time and chance happen to us all," according to the Bible. And it is all the same to God. God doesn't have preferences. God doesn't issue decrees or judgments, and couldn't tell you who won the 1928 World Series.
We are here for the joy and wonder of being here. We are here to be who we are, doing what is ours to do. If we are forsaking ourselves to do what Mamma says do, that is our bane, shame and burden to bear always. We have from now to our last breath to get it right by being who we are and doing what is ours to do. In the time left for living. Why waste a second?
There is doing what we have to do to pay the bills and make a living. Beyond that, there is being who we are, doing what is ours to do. In addition to that, there is doing what is called for, when, where and how it is called for, in each situation as it arises. And that's it. So where does all the noise and confusion come from? Why all the trauma and drama? What is with the complexity and dissatisfaction?
The Buddha died from eating poorly cooked pork.
How enlightened was that?
Enlightenment is not a steady state of being.
False assumptions never announce themselves in advance.
We can't take anything for granted.
What are we overlooking here, now?
What is interfering with our being awake, aware, alive
to what's happening now, moment to moment, day to day?
If you said, "Ten thousand things!" you would be close.
Training ourselves in the art of seeing/hearing/knowing is on-going and everlasting. We do that by looking/listening/asking/
seeking always and forever. Practicing being tuned into now
all the time.
What interferes with that? What keeps that from happening?
We are always here, now. Why not BE here, now? Aware of what is here with us now? Stop throughout each day to be aware here, now. Make that our practice. Why not?
This adventure of writing a daly reflection has opened before me as an exploration of myself and our (corporate/universal) need for this kind of exploration/realization/awakening/ enlightenment worldwide. Everything will do that if we let it.
Everything is a portal, a port-key, a threshold to ourselves if we have the courage/luck to see what we look at, and keep seeing/looking all the way. Forever.
Nature and nature photography will certainly do that, will lead us to ourselves, who we are, what we are about… Joseph Campbell liked to say that reflection leads to new realizations.
It has been a recent realization to me that God is not a spiritual being, but a psychic reality. As you may know, I am a Presbyterian (Church USA) minister. I retired after forty years and six months in the business, and I threw God away around my third year into “the business.” And, am still working out the implications of that act and the realization that produced it, and realizing along the way from there to here, that all enlightenment is like that.
Enlightenment is not the end of the road, but the beginning, going on and on forever… So in sharing my photographs, and my philosophy with you, we are playing like two children in a sandbox, with “achievement” being not a part of the equation at all, any more than realization is the achievement of reflection. It is just the game. The game is that way. And on we go...
And this image of the sun rising is a great symbol of what we all are about, whether we know it or not. Waking up. Seeing as though for the first time (T.S. Eliot, "We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time." From Burnt Norton).
An aside: T.S. Eliot also said, in "At the still point of the burning world,"
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
Making Eliot the prophet of these times, all of the time.
And sunrise is a wonderful image of what we all are about, waking up to the realization/enlightenment/awakening/etc of who we are and what we are about, by playing our way there forever, ongoing, never-ending, looking/seeing/knowing/doing/being/becoming forever. Which is the point. The still point. Of it all. No?
Allowing things to play out according to their own drift and flow, while applying a light touch to influence direction and reduce impact, is the age-old secret of parenthood, as demonstrated in the black-and-white television classic, "Father Knows Best," and suggested in the first edition of the Tao Te Ching, on page after page.
Taking a disinterested interest in the outcome time after time produces a better outcome than "pushing the river" and insisting on My Way Now!
Integrity is the solid ground of being.
Every natural thing is just what it is.
The Buddha is celebrated as "one thus come."
Like a new-born baby.
Popeye the Sailor Man's theme was "I yam what I yam!"
It is the most important thing to be.
Integrity, Sincerity, Authenticity.
The Holy Trinity of human behavior.
And the goal is to be that spontaneously, automatically,
in response to the circumstances as they unfold before us.
Why is that difficult?
The church came before the Bible--specifically the Church of Rome which took the lead in establishing the official version of the Bible in 397 CE. Which gave the Church 397 years to fine-tune the version of the Bible that was declared, by the Church, to be "The Word of God," but which actually was the words the Church declared to be the Word of God.
And who stood to gain the most from the Word the Church declared to be "of God"? Why, the Church of course. The Jesus the Church said was "the way, the truth and the life," was defined as such by the Church which became, in so saying, the way to the way, which, in effect, made the Church The Way.
The Way proclaiming which way to heaven and life ever lasting, and which way to hell and life forever experiencing the tortures of lakes of lava and agony beyond description.
And, when Jesus was said to have said, "Come to me all who suffer and heavy laden, and I will give you rest," who but the church was there to receive the weak and weighed down with sin and shame, and who but the Church to announce them saved.
And how did the church profit from its position? In all ways great and small! And is still so doing to this very day!
And, to this day, Jesus stands before all the Cosmos, saying, "You have heard it said, but I say unto you!" And what does Jesus say unto us that is not what the Church says that Jesus would say, but the "word that is in our hearts and in our mouths, here, now"? We discover that for ourselves by dropping into the emptiness, stillness and silence, like the Gnostic Christians who gave the Church of Rome such opposition throughout those 397 years the Bible was being perfected and finalized, and waiting in the silence for what arises, emerges, appears as direct and immediate revelation/realization/awareness spoken by Psyche to Psyche, from heart to heart, knowing communing with knowing, without the intrusion of the Church pronouncing what is in the Church's best interest for us to hear. Or, as Jesus would say to us, "You have ears to hear--use them! You have eyes to see--open them!" And so it is from this time forth and forever more. We have eyes, use them! We have ears, use them!
Jesus did not say, "You all are sinful so your eyes are blind and your ears of deaf because of your sin!" But the Church said that--and is still saying it. And what do we say is the question!
We are not individuals born to have what we want and do as we please. We are Psychic wonders living to express and enjoy the amazing experience of being one with all living things in a universe where life is a miracle able to reflect on and realize the awe of being self-reflective forms of energy--and we waste our time and our life striving to have our way at at the expense of everyone else.
We have only contempt for our opportunity, and toss the contemplation of who we are and what we have been given aside, in the pursuit of wealth and power in order to gloat over who we are on our way to death.
We are born to be stupid and ruthless then die. May we at least have the wherewithal to die ashamed and appalled, having lived only to deserve a Wailing Wall for our failure to be worthy of life through our few generations of being alive. Who will join me in saying "Amen"?
Addendum
Here follows an interesting addition to the above:
If one were to do an internet search for "The most Godlike place in the world," They would get a reply on the order of, "That is too subjective to answer," then they would get a list: Vatican City, Jerusalem, Mecca...
And if one were to ask for the most Godlike people in the world" they would get a list of powerful people throughout history.
I am shocked awake by Google's idea of Godlike. It would never occur to me as being powerful, like Superman. I am thinking, "kind, gentle, meek and mild, compassionate, generous, considerate." All of which fits right in with the way today's post began. We are godless because we don't know who God is/would be. That's one for the books! Geez.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy