I read a lot into nature…

I study the natural world around me carefully; a lot of my joy in taking photographs is that it helps me to ‘see’ what’s there in more clarity. It’s remarkable what being considered with a landscape can do, and how it deepens your sense of truly ‘being there’.

Such acts of considering were central to what the philosopher Gurdjieff taught… You had to be in life in a different way, to really experience it. When I publish my images I sometimes get comments showing that something of what had been ‘seen’ is shared by others who view the images.

To consider is to put aside that separate sense of ‘me’ and simply flow into and with the act of being in that place, that situation, that landscape. Our being becomes the involvement with the act of observation, not the identity with it.

I don’t exactly look for ‘portents’, I’m not a trained shaman – though I have good friends who are – but I do believe that there is an intelligent alchemy – an active process of teaching and learning – taking place.

And then there is reaction. There are two faces to an experience: the duality because of our insistence that our ‘I’ is separate… There is the perceiving of the object(s) of that experience, then there is how it is received in what we take as the self.

That reception is a reaction – in most cases. When it becomes refined into something else, it takes on the stature of a space and separation-less act of what the ancients called gnosis; a ‘gnowing’ so powerful that it is more real than the apparent object under consideration.

©Stephen Tanham 2022

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog