Self Disclosure

In response to the photo (shown above) that I posted yesterday on FB, one of my friends asked if I had a new camera because the color looked a little different. About a year ago, due to some problems with the camera that I was using, I purchased a new one, the Nikon D5300, and began exploring some of the “effects” it offered. This has increasingly involved taking multiple shots of the same thing and then “playing” with the versions using the editing options in Photo in my Apple computer. Usually I take a “normal” image using one of three settings: “Auto,” “Aperture-priority,” or “landscape.” Frequently, I also take a second photo using a special “Effect” called “HDR painting.”  

        By taking photos with different settings and making visual edits, I’m continually reminded to wonder. For example, what is real? How can we invite more beauty into our daily lives? As elaborated below and as evident in my blog over the past year, such questions and explorations serve to open further visioning into the manifestations of the Divine.

        The new camera got a major workout during our trip to the Southwest in Spring 2018. The trip featured special attention to the art of Georgia O’Keeffe which likely complemented my fascination with the camera’s HDR-painting effect. Photos of the trip and its attention to Georgia O’Keeffe were fashioned into a blog and video. Subsequent blogs, such as Golden Snowflakes, have elaborated on the connections among my current photography and reading.

        Perhaps this exploration provides a career for retirement. My bookshelf overflows with riches that offer guidance. For example, open on my desk this morning is “The Eye of the Heart” by Frithjof Schuon to a passage marked on p. 4:

“The symbolic transposition of the visual act onto the intellectual plane provides a quite expressive image of identification through knowledge: in this process one must indeed see what one is, and be what one sees or knows: the object in both cases is God, with the difference that He appears as ‘concrete’ in the first case and as ‘abstract’ in the second.”

       Doesn’t this connect with the two kinds of photos I take? And then Schuon explicates beyond words I might dare to use but that encourage me further into the “world of imagination.” Schuon continues:

“But the symbolism of sight is universal and is therefore applicable also to the macrocosm and to all its degrees: the world is an indefinitely differentiated vision whose object in the final analysis is the divine Prototype of all that exists, and conversely, God is the Eye that sees the world and which, being active where the creature is passive, creates the world by His vision, this vision being act and not passivity; thus the eye becomes the metaphysical center of the world of which it is at the same time the sun and the heart. God sees not only the outward, but also—or rather with all the more reason—the inward, and it is this latter vision that is the more real one, or strictly speaking, the only real one, since it is the absolute or infinite Vision of which God is at once the Subject and the Object, the Knower and the Known. The universe is merely vision or knowledge, in whatever mode it may be realized, and its entire reality is God…”

Schuon’s footnotes on these pages amplify with similar passages from Hindu, Christian, and Native American texts (see especially footnote 14, p. 9, from a “wise man of the Ogalalla Sioux” on “the Eye of the heart, Chante Ishta… The heart is the sanctuary at the center of which is a small space where the Great Spirit (Wakan Tanka) lives, and this is the Eye of the Great Spirit by which He sees everything, and with which we see Him”).

        I’m also encouraged in venturing into an apparently never-ending path by Chittick’s introduction to “The Self-Disclosure of God.”

“One of the reasons for Ibn al-‘Arabi’s extraordinary stress on the importance of imagination is his attempt to make people aware of the disservice to understanding done by rational extraction and abstraction. Not that he does not appreciate reason. On the contrary, he considers the rational faculty one of the two eyes with which the travelers to God see where they are going, and without both eyes they will never reach their goal. However, much of the Islamic intellectual tradition—like the Christian and post-Christian—has employed reason to separate the bones from the flesh. In effect, this destroys the living body.     Too often, in the case of studying Ibn al-‘Arabi, ‘getting to the point’ is to kill. To get to the point is to bring about closure, but there is no closure, only disclosure. Ibn al-‘Arabi has no specific point to which he wants to get. He is simply flowing along with the infinitely diverse self-disclosures of God, and he is suggesting to us that we leave aside our artificialities and recognize that we are flowing along with him. There is no ‘point,’ because there is no end" (p. xi).