to see clearly is poetry
John Ruskin, Tree Study 1845
Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two individuals. The one will see a lane and trees; he will perceive the trees to be green, though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines, and that it has a cheerful effect; and that’s all! But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the cause of beauty, and penetrate the minutest parts of loveliness. He looks up, and observes how the showery and subdivided sunshine comes sprinkled down among the gleaming leaves overhead, till the air is filled with the emerald light. He will see here and there a bough emerging from the veil of leaves, he will see the jewel brightness of the emerald moss and the variegated and fantastic lichens, white and blue, purple and red, all mellowed and mingled into a single garment of beauty. Then come the cavernous trunks and the twisted roots that grasp with their snake-like coils at the steep bank, whose turfy slope is inlaid with flowers of a thousand dyes. Is not this worth seeing? Yet if you are not a sketcher you will pass along the green lane and when you come home again, have nothing to say or to think about it, but that you went down such and such a lane.
~ John Ruskin
Quoted in The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton
John Ruskin at the awakened eye website:
seeing clearly and telling plainly
the soul of the whole
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson at the awakened eye website
Photograph by Alan Larus
the realization of not-two-ness
It is [the] flash of realization of not-two-ness, that is both the centre and the endpoint of our human experience.
In every seed of every weed, in the knee-joint of a dead wasp’s leg, the structure of the Whole of Reality is laid bare for those who have eyes to see.
Our brain filters out the overwhelming poignancy of this Structure of Reality, of the Divine, as it manifests in all that is.
The eye, however, when it awakens, sees all things as “unseparated” from itself, to speak with Eckhart.
~ Frederick Franck
The Awakened Eye
Photograph: Laurent Schwebel
the process of perception is one of creation
Perception underpins all human behavior and helps interpret sensory information to make sense from the senseless. The brain, to create meaning where there is possibly none, processes perception from the unperceived and thought from the unthinkable. The process of perception is in fact one of creation. What we perceive is not what is out there or within. There is no inherent value in the incredibly complex patterns of light that fall onto our eyes, and yet we see coherent forms and motions that enable us to survive. Exploring the nature of perception can help us glimpse life beyond experiencer and experience, perceiver and perception.
~ Science and Nonduality website
This year’s Science and Nonduality Europe Conference is only 5 weeks away.
Hop over to the website and register now!
SAND13 EU - “The Science and Mystery of Perception”
Doorn, May 28th to June 3rd 2013.
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Instead of saying, ‘An observer looks at an object’, we can more appropriately say, ‘Observation is going on, in an undivided movement involving those abstractions customarily called “the human being” and “the object he is looking at”.
~ David Bohm
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The observer is the observed.
~ J Krishnamurti
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There is no separate, inside self and no separate outside object, other or world. Rather, there is one seamless, intimate totality, always changing when viewed from the perspective of objects, never changing when viewed from the perspective of the totality.
~ Rupert Spira
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wherever the eye falls is the face of creation
Wherever the eye falls
is the face of creation.
~ Sufi saying
Photographer Mitchell Doshin Cantor, who is also a Zen teacher and member of the White Plum Asanga, has joined the artisans’ gallery at the awakened eye website.
Mitchell currently leads the Southern Palm Zen Group in Boca Raton, Florida. He is also a long time student of Peter Matthiessen.
The study, practice, and teaching of Zen have contributed as much to my photography as has any practical instruction. Fortunately, photographers who were technically rich as well as spiritual masters have guided me. I have received great benefit from their teachings. I now wish to share my photographs so that others can be enthused to trust life and its voices, audible and inaudible, in ways that these teachers have helped open for me.
Bridgewood Buds
There is … no need to ask what the image means nor why or how it was taken. For me it is enough to relax into the power of the moment the shutter is pressed or the printer is activated; to have no fear of trusting the truth of that moment.
~ Mitchell Doshin Cantor
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Please also view
Mitchell Doshin Cantor’s website:
listening with the eye
and his page at the awakened eye website
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