Light coming from behind the subject,toward the camera lens, so that the subject stands out vividly against the background. Sometimes produces a silhouette effect.
When we look at each other, what do we see?
In a moment, a person, any person, stands before you and they are only what they are. And yet, in an instant you already have a story for them. This story is about culture and how it assigns meanings to physical traits, mannerims, ways of speaking. This story is also about you and your personal history and how you've been conditioned to react to a face, a hair style, a body, a voice.
When you look at a person, can you really see them? Not the beauty, not the ugliness, but the unlabeled beingness that they have. They simply exist. Right here, next to you, in this space and time. For a brief flash in the history of the universe, they are here and you are here. Can you see them now? What will do you with that information?
The ground of being, as I mentioned in the first essay in this series, "A is for Ambient Light," is the very field of existence that we all share. It has many manifestations. One of them is love.
Do you want to know love? I do. I don't know what love is or what it could possibly mean. I know compassion, and I know detachment. Love alludes me. Maybe, with the help of Erich Fromm, we can try to understand that ground of being as a universal synthesizer and the same place from which love springs.
Buddhism doesn't traditionally deal directly with the Western concept of love. They break the world down in different ways. So, why complicate these nice, clean, Buddhist concepts with a wild card like love?
Because maybe in the West, this is a way in, a way to understanding what it means to go beyond the dualism of self and other, to move into the nondialectical. In the nondialectical, instead of the structured thoughts of the world being based in opposites, those ideas and things in the world that appear separate are actually one.
But seeing this is hard. Feeling it is harder. It requires a softening of the mouth, a stilling of the heart, a calming of the mind. It requires the vision, both physical and metaphysical, to blur at the edges and expand. When we can learn to keep an eye to the ground of being, the light that suffuses pure existence becomes a sort of back lighting to the subject standing in front of us. We see both it, and the illuminating background, more profoundly.
Photo courtesy of Richard Wright
