[Image: “Family Portraits IX,” one of a series by the photographic team known as Inka & Niclas (Inka and Niclas Lindergård). The series comprises what might be otherwise conventional natural-landscape/family-portrait photos (sometimes with their children, as here). The difference: the human subjects were dressed in full-body reflective garb, and illuminated with strobe lights in such a way as to minimize the effect of the lighting on their surroundings. Some, like this one, were taken in dark settings; others, in broad daylight. Overall, the photos simultaneously haunt and disquiet — bleached-out cousins of the human figures graven, in 1945, on the walls at Hiroshima.]
Funeral Music
(excerpt)8.
Not as we are but as we must appear,
Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
Desire life but as they would have us live,
Set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
Each distant sphere of harmony forever
Poised, unanswerable. If it is without
Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or
If it is not, all echoes are the same
In such eternity. Then tell me, love,
How that should comfort us — or anyone
Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,
Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.
(Geoffrey Hill [source])
…and:
At a certain point we need to grow up; we need to look inside ourselves for our inner guidance. There are things most human beings know; they just don’t want to know them. They know deep down that certain things in their lives are working or aren’t working, that certain parts of their lives are functional and others are dysfunctional. But sometimes, as human beings, we don’t want to know what’s not convenient. So we pretend not to know.
(Adyashanti [source])
…and, from whiskey river‘s commonplace book:
What’s Not Here
I start out on this road, call it
love or emptiness. I only know what’snot here: resentment seeds, back-
scratching greed, worrying about out-come, fear of people. When a bird gets
free, it doesn’t go back for remnantsleft on the bottom of the cage! Close
by, I’m rain. Far off, a cloud of fire.I seem restless, but I am deeply at ease.
Branches tremble; the roots are still.I am a universe in a handful of dirt,
whole when totally demolished. Talkabout choices does not apply to me.
While intelligence considers options,I am somewhere lost in the wind.
(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])
…and (in slightly different words):
The easiest way of illuminating this term [“grades of significance”] is by means of a classic example of the diverse responses and grade of significance that an object may elicit. For example, an animal may see an oddly shaped black and white object, a tribal person a rectangular flexible object with curious markings. To a Western child it is a book, while to an adult it may be a particular type of book, namely a book that makes incomprehensible, even ridiculous claims about reality. Finally, to a physicist, it may be a profound text on quantum physics…
What this example so nicely demonstrates is that when we cannot comprehend higher levels of significance, we can blithely believe that we have fully understood something whose true significance we have completely missed. As Schumacher pointed out:
…All levels of significance up to the adequate level, i.e., up to the level of meaning in the example of the book, are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real… When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level (or the grade of significance) of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.
This raises an arresting question: What higher levels of significance, what profound meanings and messages, does the world give us that we are overlooking?
(Helen Palmer [source])
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