April 23, 2017

Ray Grigg in his book The Tao of Zen, "A clarity of insight occurs when perception is unconstrained and unregulated by the controlling character of culture.  Suchness is awareness without sanctions, without restraint, without interpretation or organization.  It is pure awareness, pure experience dancing lightly in the whole freedom of absolute emptiness."

Social Media creates distrust, confusion, obstructs any spontaneity with its power of absorption.
Social Media lowers your belief in your ability to create and confuses the senses with repetitive dribble.

It creates a barrier between you and your subjects by limiting your horizon to a set amount of other people to follow.  Why follow anyone?  Create your own images and discuss their relevance in today's commercialized for market theater of the greedy eyes of look at me!

Social media moves you away from not toward your subject, your purpose.  As you look at social media sites your time becomes flashes of banal subjects usually making fools of themselves.  This creates a disillusment toward the human race.  Gives us the necessary ego power to think we are better than them.

Your time wasted without moving forward toward your goals.  Your life is now tangled with an excess of distant friends and tweets that don't really constitute a relationship because you are not there in person talking but using an intermediary that conquers your voice with sound byte formula's of less speech.

Ultimately you end up taking the shortcut to your goal which leads to a rushing forward from the scene and measuring success by the number of images taken. The new mantra in today's got to know now revelations is run and gun image taking without the personal unique touch each of us brings to the scene.

The most common subjects are the hardest to see and respect.  We have been conditioned to see beauty through the eye of conformity.

The hardest to understand and to create purposeful images are those you begin to feel on a deeper level, those images you have to make, because they absorb your thoughts with openness and clarity that you must explore in your own new direction.

We see the common, the over populated image uploads of the same subjects under the same lights copy cat examples of lazy thinking.

Our memories of past moments flow into our conscious moments of actuality pushing out the desire to explore the ordinary objects that are waiting for you to actually take the time and see them.  To move on to something more deeper to reveal in this ordinary moment.

Our inner selves must absorb and open up to the outer natural world in order to project your inner vision.

Your personal history is your vision when creating worthwhile images.

When you connect with your past you can let go of the clutter of foggy words and move beyond the static voices that hinder your exploration of a new path.

You must connect with new currents from a foundation of where you have been and move with excitement, fear, anger toward new visions of image freedom.

Take this freedom of accepting the world as it is and express yourself through you new voice in your own words and images.

Strength of will pushes you forward toward your truth.  It moves you to get up early on those cold mornings and pack your camera gear and drive miles to seek your destination.

Social Media is quick and shallow. It seems now that surface reflections determine depth of character.  Just by reposting a comment you get more likes and seem to be the golden eye of envy from others.

The only deception is loss of yourself in social media.  The only way to survive is seeing your own self worth and your own character and your own willful purpose and by exploring these you will create images that mean foremost something to you.