Astonish Me!

I am still amazed at the ups-and-downs of life. I am talking about the experience that rolls out in our heads. Life itself is too abstract. How I feel shapes my experience. When in the grip of the feeling it is all there is. I am lost. Remembering to think outside the box gives me back some control but most of the time feeling dominates and the experience is life.

Alexey Brodovitch, the visionary art director at Harper's Bazaar in the 1930s to the 1950s, egged young Richard Avedon: "Astonish me!" Photographs can't be just good or even perfect. They have to astonish the viewer. No matter how sophisticated the viewer is, the photographer must find that angle, that perception, that once-in-a-lifetime composite of light, shapes and emotion, that boggles the mind. To astonish is not so complex but harder to accomplish than we can imagine. 

Astonishment is to my mind that quality of experience when every object in our mind's eye shimmers with unadulterated delight. What adulterates it? Every other feeling. The image possesses its own emotion, the capacity to cause feelings to arise in the viewer but to create the image demands sincerity beyond the ordinary. We must lose ourselves in the imagination. We can't stay in our little world and expect to find God there. To be astonished is to experience God as others have known him so many other times before.

In Buddhist terms, to experience God is to experience the elemental. Asian philosophers write about the five elements—earth, air, fire, water and space. Of these is everything we experience composed. Practicing meditation one examines what appears to be whole but is really just a composite of past experiences that keeps us from seeing dynamic nowness. Now is eternally moving. It is nowhere because when we grasp at the moment it is gone. 

"Do you know the word 'temporary'?

It means 'only for a little while.'"

John Buccino's little collection of songs, Grateful, is one of my favorites. In the song, Temporary, he hits upon the same theme I am writing about today.

"Everything is temporary...

If you learn this though

You won't feel so sad:

A playmate, a tearstain

A Christmas, a dad

The best times

The worst pain

All temporary."

In meditation we learn to watch each temporary moment come and go. We learn what earth is, what air, what water, what fire, what space: everything is temporary. A product of the practice is we rediscover astonishment. Accepting and letting go we find each new image suddenly and eternally bathed in the vividness of what I think of as life beyond experience. Each whiff of fragrance, each nub under our fingertip, each curlicue of line, all partakes of a brilliance that photographs only aspire to possess.

The heart of experience seems to me best described only in paradoxes. No wonder teachers of old spoke in riddles or parables. Between the polarities of yes and now there lies only appearance. To get to the underlying reality we must forego the easy path of holding on to what is temporary. In the endlessness of space where no feelings find a home we find the adoring face we search for all our lives. It is our own face but not really. We see beyond the appearance to what the finger points to that gives rise to the incessant hunger that drives us relentlessly, ever unsatisfied, foolishly most days.

"I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,

A stage..."

Thus Antonio explains his sadness to his friend, the merchant in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. 

When we find amazement our lives spontaneously take on an evangelical thrust. Its shimmer pervades not only our experience but seeps outside it to affect other experiences. If we seek meaning, amazement more than fits the bill. Let go and astonish!

In the Beginning

My background is Christian. My mother and her family were staunch supporters of the indigenous church, the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, that split from the Roman Catholic Church as part of the Filipinos' struggle for political independence from Spain in the 1860s.

As a child participating in what was often referred to as the Aglipay church (Monsignor Aglipay was the first presiding bishop of the fledgling church) was central to my experience. It felt like the one real thing in my life. The teen years changed all that. Education can corrupt our naiveté and cause a disruption in our seamlessly whole worlds. As I learned about other peoples and cultures I began to question the notion of a personal God especially one whose image is that of an old man with long white hair and flowing beard who commanded plagues and catastrophes to visit his people whenever they went against his fickle will.

It wasn't until I came to America in my late 20s that I slowly came to terms with a dreaded label, atheist. Christians in the Pagan world of the Roman Empire before Constantine established Christianity as the state religion were known as atheists, non-believers. They didn't believe in the gods and goddesses of the Roman pantheon, refused to offer them the sacrifices required to maintain civic health and power. The cycle has come full circle.

I don't think of myself as an atheist, a term Christians assign to those who don't believe as they do. Belief, I've come to realize, is at the heart of much of the world's conflicts. As we move inexorably into closer contact with other peoples and individuals on our shrinking planet we have to contend with differing beliefs on a practical level. No man is an island anymore but a decided part of the main.

I created Spirit Writes on my iWeb as my depository of contemplative writing on Spirit—the values, motivations and stated and mostly unstated goals that while not accessible through the physical senses nonetheless shape and give meaning to our daily struggles, what Buddhist call dukkha.  I intend to continue this exploration at blogger.