Sebastião Salgado

       Here’s a short slideshow of seveteen photographs taken by one of our species finest human beings: Sebastião Salgado.  Born and raised in Brazil, Salgado obtained his PhD in Economics in France and worked for investment banks that help financed development projects in Africa.  He then turned to photography, capturing some of the most haunting images of modern man and humanity to have ever been produced in a dark room.  After witnessing the horrors of the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, Salgado took a break from photography and returned to Brazil where he restored deforested land, started the Instituto Terra, and opened a National Park.  He returned to photography in 2004, this time focusing on non-human animals, and is now fighting to save the world's trees.  If you want to feel bad about how little you’ve done in your life, check out his inspiring TED Talk.  

Sebastião Salgado and his wife, Lelia Wanick Salgado:

Image from: http://lounge.obviousmag.org/venturarte/2013/08/a-arte-captada-pelas-lentes-de-sebastiao-salgado.html

Alan Watts on Looking at Others and the World

This first excerpt is transcribed from The Web of Life lecture from the Out of Your Mind Lecture Series, Alan Watts brings up a funny notion about sea shells critiquing other sea shells, and ties this into a larger, more serious concept related to the way we humans tend to separate ourselves from the world around us.  He says:

I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing – something to be condemned – to take your own individual life seriously in dead earnest, and to have all the problems that go with that.  Do understand that being that way, that being a real mixed-up human being is a manifestation of nature that is something just like the patterns on the waves out here, or like a sea shell.  You know we pick up shells – I always keep one around as sort of an example for many things – and say, “My goodness, isn’t that gorgeous? There’s not an aesthetic fault in it anywhere, it’s absolutely perfect.”  Now I wonder, I wonder if these fish look at each other’s shells and say, “Don’t you think she’s kind of fat?  Oh my, those markings aren’t really very well spaced.  Pssshhh.”  Cause’ that’s what we do, see we don’t realize that all of us in our various goings on and behaviors and so on are just as marvelous – more marvelous, much more complicated, much more interesting – all these gorgeous faces that I’m looking at, you know every one of them – some of them supposedly pretty, some are supposedly not so pretty, but they’re all absolutely gorgeous.  And everybody’s eyes is a piece of jewelry beyond compare. Beautiful.  But we have specialized in a certain kind of awareness that makes us neglectful of that.  You see we specialize in more or less briefly concentrated, pin-point attention.  We look at this and we look at that, and we select from all the things we might possible be aware of, only certain things.  And as a result of that, we leave out of our everyday consciousness, generally speaking, two dimensions of experience;  one: amazing beauty of experience that we never see at all, and on the other hand, a very deep thing:  the sense of our basic identity, unity with, oneness with the total process of being.  See, because we are staring, as it were, at certain features of the landscape, we don’t see the background.  And because we get fascinated with – you know I could go into details of this shell, as I said, and put myself in the mind of a conch or whatever it is that lives in this thing and say, “Hmm, that’s not so not hot that one,” Like that you see?  And so, I wouldn’t see the whole thing!  But when I look at it like this, when anybody looks at it like that we say, “Oh my God isn’t that gorgeous?”

 Image from:  Aaron Dames, Divided Core Media

In philosophizing about the idea of reincarnation, Alan Watts makes some interesting (although possibly impossible to prove) points about the way that sentient objects perceive see things around them.  This is from a lecture called Every Incarnation is this One, from the Out of Your Mind lecture series:

And the Buddhists thought that one over, and they said, “Crazy…we found a way of samsara – the wheel of birth and death.”  And somebody one day said, “But, isn’t that rather selfish?  You get yourself out, what about all the other people? Don’t you have any feeling of compassion?”  “Oh yes,” they said, “Of course.  We forgot that didn’t we?  Let’s come back again, and uh, help all these people out.” Then they got very sophisticated about it and they said, “Look, if nirvana is release from birth and death, then they’re opposed, and so nirvana and birth and death go together and they will have to imply one another.  So you’re really only released if you see that, if you see that nirvana and birth and death are the same thing.” 

Now I’m gonna pull a fast one on you.  So every time an incarnation occurs, it feels like this one.  See, it might be quite different – we might we reincarnated in another universe as beings in of altogether different shape, see?  Not at all like human beings, but because we were used to it we would feel that that was the human shape.  We would say, “Well that’s natural, obviously, obviously, that’s the way things are.”  So naturally, if you appeared in the form of a spider, you would look around at other spiders and say, “Well yes, of course, this is, this is a natural place to be in, this is the human shape.”  Something that is not us looks at us and thinks we look perfectly terrible.  I mean imagine how you look to a fish: clumsy, cumbersome, stupid looking thing.  Whereas a fish is so elegant and graceful and can slide through the water so beautifully.  The human beings can’t even swim properly. 

So don’t you see, that in every world that comes into being, or could come into being, it seems just like it seems now, and every species that you could belong to would seem like this one.  It would have its up end of what is highly intelligent, and its low end of what is not so intelligent.  You would be aware of superior forces and inferior forces; otherwise you wouldn’t have the idea of mastering a situation unless there were situations you couldn’t master.  Now we are not aware of species of beings above us unless you cultivate those forms of psychic awareness when you think you’re in touch with angels or something of that sort.  But the things that appear to be above us are great natural processes, only we think they’re rather stupid, only very tough, too strong for us: earthquakes, the elements, also some little ones, see the virus is a very troublesome being.   And this is where a human being really finds himself at his wits end in dealing with molecular biology.  So, you know, if the monsters don’t get your, the ministers will – the insects, you see. 

But at any rate, whatever level you’re on, it always appears to be the same one.  Now we...therefore, naturally, don’t we, we feel we’re in the middle.  We feel, for example, with the telescope, that there is a world greater than us that is infinitely greater; we feel with the microscope there’s a world below us that’s infinitely smaller, and we seem to stand in the middle.  Of course you seem to stand in the middle, every creature stands in the middle because if you stand on a boat in the middle of the ocean and you turn around through an angle of three hundred and sixty degrees, you will see the same distance in every direction.  That’s because you see, and your sensitivity to sight or the intensity to light is the same in every direction, so you’re in the middle.  You’re always in the middle.  Where else would you be?  In other words, anything that perceives anywhere is always in the middle.  Anything that grows anywhere is always in the middle.  It’s betwixt and between.  And the middle always has, therefore, extremes.  It has extremes in space – as far west and as far east as you can think, as far on and as far back.  And there’s always a beginning and there’s always an end, just as there’s a left and right, or a top and a bottom.

Photo by Karthik Keyan, http://www.flickr.com/photos/karthik_the_macrographer/

Alan Watts - A Natural Satori

Transcribed by yours truly from The Inevitable Ecstasy (Part One) lecture, part of the Out of Your Mind lecture series (click here for the audio):

Back in 1958 I was in Zurich, and there met an extraordinary man by the name of Karlfried von Dürckheim.  He was a former German diplomat, who had studied Zen in Japan, and when he came back after the war, he opened a meditation school and retreat in the Black Forest.  And he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what, a lot of my work has to do with people who went through spiritual crises during the war.”  And, he said, “You know, we all know when a person’s in an absolutely extreme situation, and they accept it, there is a possibility of a natural satori.”  And that’s what I mean when I was explaining that when one gets to an extreme – that is to say to the point when you realize there is nothing you can do about life, nothing you can not do about life, then you’re the mosquito biting the iron bull.  Well, so in the same way he said, “Look.  You heard a bomb coming at you, you could hear it whistle, and you knew it was right above you and headed straight at you and that you were finished.  And you accepted it.  And suddenly, there was a strange feeling that everything is absolutely clear.  You suddenly see that there isn’t a grain of dust in the whole universe that’s in the wrong place.  That you understand completely, absolutely, totally what it’s all about, cause’ you can’t say what it is.”  But he said in so many cases the bomb was a dud, and they lived to tell the tale. Or he said you were in a concentration camp, and you’ve been there so long that you gave up all hope whatsoever of ever getting out.  You were just going through this miserable, boring, degrading grind week after week after week; nobody paid the slightest attention to you as an individual.  You knew you would never get out, and you accepted it, and suddenly something changed.  This extraordinary feeling: freedom.  Or he said, you were a displaced refugee. You had lost your family, you didn’t know whether they even existed, you were miles from your home, you didn’t know whether it existed, you had lost your job, your very identity.  You were absolutely nowhere, and you accepted it, and suddenly you were as light as a feather and free as the air.  Now he said, so many people have had those experiences and they’d talk about them to their families and friends, and they’d say, “Oh well, you were under terrific pressure and you probably had some hallucination, you know?”  Well he said, “I am showing those people that so far from having a hallucination, those were the few, few occasions in which they woke up.”

So you see this is always the opportunity presented by death.  That if one can go into death with eyes open, and have somebody help you if necessary, to give up before your die, this extraordinary thing can happen to you.  So that from your standpoint in that position at that time, you would say, “I wouldn’t have missed that opportunity for the world – now I understand why we die.  The reason we die is to give us the opportunity to understand what life’s all about – by letting go, because then we come to a situation that the ego can’t deal with.  When we are no longer hypnotize by that, then our natural consciousnesses can see clearly what all this universe is for. 

So therefore we have missed this golden opportunity by institutionalizing death out of the way, instead of having a socially understood acceptance of death and rejoicing in death.  Now I could imagine that one person would want to rejoice in death in an entirely different way from another.  Like, um, let’s say a wedding – is a rite of passage.  There are certainly some forms of celebrating a wedding which I would find a total bore, and quite offensive; other ways would be good, I would enjoy it.  So everybody, in other words, I’m not saying that you’ve gotta get mixed up with a lot of people coming laughing around you and giving you presents and cards and everything because you’re going to die.  Heh heh! But, I’m only indicating a general thing, that the doctor, the ministers, the psychiatrists, and above all us – really owe it to our friends to work out an enitrely new approach to death.  Because what has happened you see, from earliest childhood the child learned that great-uncle was dying, and saw the family put on long faces and say, “Aahhhh, that’s too bad.”  Even Christians, who think they’re going to go to heaven, you know, they get absolutely morbid, more so than anybody else about death because heaven as they all know is a very boring place.  And so, this frightful thing, “Oh this death, you know.” And one understands that for the living, to lose someone you love, or even for a dying person to worry about what on Earth my wife, my children, my whatever are going to do without me… One can understand  a certain worry in that, but nobody’s indispensable, and there comes a point when you have to say, “I’m sorry, but I am completely going to abandon responsibility for anything, because there is no further way I can do it.”  This is another way of that surrender.  And then the curious thing that occurs is the moment all that is dropped, suddenly it dawns on you that to be important, existence does not have to go on any longer than a moment.  Quantitative continuity is of no value.  How long can you hold your breath?  Who cares? 

       So, it follows from that you see, that if any one of us, without being shocked into it by being bombed or put in a concentration camp, could at this moment be as one about to die, genuinely and honestly, we would understand the mystery of life, because death is the - in a certain sense - the source of life.  Just as we see in nature when the leaves fall from the trees they mold and rot, and this supplies hummus from which more plants can grow, it’s a cycle like that.  But in every way, symbolic and otherwise, human beings try to stop that cycle.  Unamuno said, “Human beings are the only species that horde their dead.”  And therefore with the ghastly art of the mortician, we try to make the body unpalatable to the worms, and so to stop life, as if to be eaten in due course were an indignity to the human being, whereas we eat everything else and we give nothing back.  So that is a kind of a social symptom of our profound disorientation with respect to death.  We think death is unnatural, and furthermore, we think birth is a disease, and send the mamma to the hosptial for the most unnatural, weird kind of parturition.  In other words, more and more one regards the healthy and inevitable and natural transformations of the body as pathological.  I can imagine, you know, people having sexual intercourse on an operating table to be sure that the whole thing is hygienic.  Ha ha!  You know, uhh, everything about us like that has become over-interfered with by specialists, and less and less the province of our own preferences.  It’s very very hard indeed to die in your own way, without some blasted bunch of relatives that come fussing around and insisting that you go to a hospital, that you get fixed with the tortures of being fed through tubes and things to keep you alive indefinitely and waste the family savings.  It’s even a crime to commit suicide.  Now this is simply nonsense.  It’s this perfect panic to survive at all costs.

A Few Thoughts on Death

     In his 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Stanford, Steve Jobs said, “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.”   There is a chance he realized later that this is not true, for in 2010 a handful of the one million people successfully committing suicide each year were doing so by jumping out of the windows of iPad manufacturing factories in southern China. 

     According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 55 million people die annually.  That's roughly 150,000 people every day; 20,000 of whom are apparently children under five years-old who die in and as a result severe poverty (hunger, poor sanitation, disease, polluted water, or a combination thereof). 

      We’re all going to die, and as far as we know there’s nothing waiting for our souls on the other side.  Not only will we each die as individuals, but it’s highly likely that the human species will one day go extinct, thus following in the footsteps of 99.9% of all the species to have ever lived on Earth.  Therefore, it’s vital for one to both seize the day and live in moderation.  It’s likely that the majority of people alive today endure harsh economic and physical conditions that inhibit them from being free and living up to their full (or near-full) potential. This disparity among humanity makes it even more imperative for those who can help to step up and do so.  This same principle of lending a hand to the less fortunate also applies to the natural world – which, barring the occasional natural disaster, plague, or animal attack, has proven to be largely defenseless in the face of decimation by humankind – that we depend on for survival, and should largely be respected as equally as other humans.  And, assuming life matters, this ultimately becomes one of the most pressing questions related to the existence of our species, which has been endowed by evolution with intelligent minds capable of contemplating our consciousness and altering the environment to our preferences: Are we going to kill each other and ourselves directly (nuclear holocaust) or indirectly (resource depletion; burning holes in the atmosphere, poisoning the land and water, etc.), or are we going to get our shit together in time to avoid self-destruction, which would leave open the fashionable possibility of being destroyed by an alien race.

      Yet it is hard to help others unless you can and have helped yourself, and even then your sphere of influence may be limited to a small field.  That's okay, do what you can.

      One more point on dying.  Let’s say I live to be one-hundred years old (I think this is a fair age to presume a healthily individual will live to, unless he or she dies of an unnatural cause or kills themselves).  That means that I have lived nearly 30% of my life.  My “life battery” is around 70% and is steadily declining. In my view, the last 30% doesn’t count because after seventy everything moves in slow-motion and you forget everything anyway, so you’re pretty much done by then.

      Here are two mortality-related excerpts.   The first is written by Edward Abbey and comes from an awesome book published by the Sierra Club Paperback Library called The Best of Edward Abbey.  Edward Abbey edited the book and I highly recommend picking up a copy.  This is from an excerpt called Cowboys:

      Roy is a leather-hided, long-connected, sober-sided old man with gray hair, red nose and yellow teeth; he is kind, gentle, well-meaning, but worries too much, take things too seriously.  For instance, he’s afraid of having a heart attack, falling off the horse, dying there on the sand, under the sun, among the flies and weeds and indifferent cattle.  I’m not inferring this – he told me so.
      What could I say?  I was still young myself, or thought I was, enjoying good health, not yet quite to the beginning of the middle of the journey.  I listened gravely as he spoke of death, nodding in an agreement I did not feel.  His long yellow fingers, holding a cigarette, trembled.
      Roy’s not Mormon and not much of a Christian, and does not honestly believe in an afterlife.  Yet the manner of death he fears does not sound bad to me; to me it seems like a decent, clean way of taking off, surely better than the slow rot in a hospital oxygen tent with rubber tubes stuck up your bodily orifices, with blood transfusions and intravenous feeding, bedsores and bedpans and bad-tempered nurses’ aides – the whole nasty routine to which most dying men, in our time, are condemned.

            And what follows is the cool forward to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, A Space Odyssey:

      Behind every man alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.
      Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local Universe, the Milky Way. So for every man and woman who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.
      But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many - perhaps most - of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first apeman, his own private world- sized heaven - or hell.
      How many of those potential heavens and hells are inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest of them is a million times further away than Mars and Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling - one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.
      Men have been slow to face this prospect. Increasing numbers, however, are asking: "Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?
    Why not, indeed? Here is one possible answer to this very reasonable question. But please remember: this is only a work of fiction.
      The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

            If you’re interested in reading more articles about death, I’d recommend you track down a copy of the New Scientist magazine special report on death.  Also, check out the tracks “Willing to Die,” and “A Happy Death” in the World as Emptiness Part 2 section of the Alan Watts lecture series Out of Your Mind, as well as "A Natural Satori," part of The Inevitable Ecstacy Part 1 lecture. 

Here are some pictures taken by Vince and Logan of our midnight excursion to the Calvary Cemetary in Bodega.

Lastly, this seems like as good a time as ever to insert a poem:

Heavy waves of emptiness
Crash upon thy heart
They erode the soul
They leave you cold
And naked in the dark

Waves of fear and suicide
Waves of deep unknown
Will strike you down
And you will drown
In the ocean blue alone 

The salt of tears
The promised years
The world at the shore
All fade away
Like sunny days
As you sink to the seafloor 

What is in the waves, you ask
That bears such heavy weight?
‘Tis shattered dreams
‘Tis sights unseen
And the risks you failed to take.

-Walter Lloyd Waterson

Alan Watts on Attachment and Love

From The Fundamental I, part of the Out of Your Mind lecture series.

So you see, there’s really nothing to worry about.  Cause’ the – the important you is perfectly indestructible; it’s what there is.  Our comings and goings, our fortunes and misfortunes are a sort of mirage. The more we know about them -- the more we know about the world, the more diaphanous it seems, and therefore everything in the world has the characteristics of smoke; you know when you blow a cigarette or pipe or something and a cloud of some and you see it in the sunbeam, and it’s full of whorls and designs and all kinds of marvelous things going on, and then slowly it disappears.  Well everything’s just like that.

You know there are two attitudes you can take to that state of affairs.  You can say, “sour grapes, it’s all a lousy, wretched trap.  And I – here I am and I’m given all these feelings of love and attachment and joy of life, and then I fall apart.  My teeth drop out, my eyes become feeble, I get cancer or cirrhosis of the liver or something, and then it all falls apart, and it’s too bad."  Therefore, therefore don’t become attached to things, don’t enjoy life.  Treat it, holding it off like that – just like a very, very firm person who’s been jilted and says, "never again will I get mixed up with love because love hurts.”

But on the other hand, a weaving of smoke can be very beautiful, provided you don’t lean on it, provided you don’t try to preserve it, catch hold of it – then you destroy it.  So exactly the same way -- there’s nothing in the way of form that you can lean on, that you can grasp.  And if you see that, then the world of form is very beautiful.  If you let it go.

To love people, you see, if you’re husband and wife, you must let each other go.  Otherwise the marriage is either going to break up, or it’s going to be hell.  If you love a person, you say to that person, “Look.  I love you, whatever that may be –  I’ve seen quite a bit of it, and I know there’s lots that I haven’t seen, but still it’s you and I want you to be what you want to be, and I won’t be happy if I’ve got you in a cage – you’d be a bird without song.”  And they’re likely to go on loving each other.

A separate/related quote on love to boot:

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.  

-Jiddu Krishnamurti