Time and Timelessness in the spirit of photography

What is life?  What is photography?  How far is photography an extended metaphor for the mystical?

Lo, the Nightingale of Paradise singeth upon the twigs of the Tree of Eternity, with holy and sweet melodies…… Baha’u’llah (Baha’i Faith)

…….there’s no getting away from the fact that photography is a chaotic art, that its subject is chaos. Time can’t be posed. One click of the shutter and it’s a bird on a branch; another, and the bird has flown.

Charles Darwent in the Independent

Life is a set of opportunities  to realize, or fail to realize, our true Self.  We do this via encounters against the reality of that which is eternally good, true and beautiful.

Heschel tell us that to be human is to be conscious of the difference between what we are and what we are called to be.  That’s the reality of human beings being human – that gap between what is and what ought be.  But like so many great souls I suspect he had, for minor erring a sense of compassion, empathy and humour.

Heschel also said;

“Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine. … to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.”

What has photography to do with this?

1 Photographs potentially bridge time and timelessness.  Photographs are very pro-vocative as well as e-vocative.

2 Photographs seem to counter Heraclitus, “You cannot step twice into the same stream. For as you are stepping in, other waters are ever flowing on to you.”  They are about delusions as well as illusions.

3 They are opportunities to shift our consciousness between time and timelessness – to the reality of that which is eternally good, true and beautiful. Sometimes we do.

4 They are opportunities to self-learn, to shift from data, information and ‘knowledge’ to wisdom.  Sometimes we do. Mostly we stay with regret, nostalgia ……

5 Photographs kid us that when we view one we can see what was – when in truth we can see only what is.

6 They act like embodiments of our desire that cannot – ever – be satisfired.  (satisfired – an interesting typo in this context!)  Every photograph offers the opportunity t shift from ‘not-having’ to beingness.

7 Life and photographs are a set of opportunities to realize the timeless from within the womb of time.   Ultimately as

What’s the spiritual connection?

Eternal mystical truth and reality shows that;

“We can be happy, and serve others well,
if we realize our true Self
by detaching ourselves from the egotistic lower self –
through step-by-step becoming aware of the stillness beneath the noise,                                                                             and the timelessness beneath the time.”

This is why photography is such a complex and tantalizing extended metaphor of the spiritual life.  There is no better text to start to explore photography as a metaphor of the time-timeless conundrum than The Ongoing Moment.  I have listed some reviews HERE