What shines forth to you?
What a lesson in photography teaches me about life
Hello everyone,
Happy Woman's Day! I'm sending you much much love wherever you are. So much gratitude and admiration for all the amazing women I've got to know. May you continue to spread your essence to the world unabashedly!
As you saw in the last enzyme, I've been exploring masculine & feminine essence. This week, I want to dive into the masculine essence a bit more, particularly on the topic of a sense of purpose. Where exactly does it come from or get cultivated?
It brings me to a moment this week where my friend was teaching me some photography. We were looking at the building in front of us, and he asked what I found to be most attractive in the scene. I pointed to the light bulb strings, and we just pointed our phone camera to take a shot of that scene.
The resulting photo wasn't as beautiful as the eyes saw, of course. What my friend was saying was more profound though.
"Your eyes catch on to what's most fascinating and beautiful to you. But your camera lens won't, so you'll need to find a way to hone in on what is specifically beautiful about that".
Why does that matter? Two important lessons there.
First, you have to develop your taste of what is beautiful, good, or true. This comes through a matter of paying attention closely to everything going on and honing into what's most intensely so.
Second, you've got to master the medium or tool. Whether that is painting, photography, dance, or words like me writing here, without a mastery of the medium, we won't fully realize the potential that we intuited.
As an extreme, you can have one without the other. You can have good taste, but no expression (think about intuitive and sensitive people who feel stuck for noticing a lot yet unable to express).
Or unrefined taste with a skillful grasp of medium (such as someone with great command of written English without having anything interesting to write about)
This brings me to a powerful and illuminating talk by Jordan Peterson, which is so compelling that I’m going to comment on it ala Brainpicking style.
It is about an idea often talked about yet without much clear understanding: potential.
In it, he mentions that the word "phenomena" - the things that appear to you - has a root ‘phainesthai’, meaning to shine forth.
We think we are perceiving the full reality outside of us - like me looking at the scene to take a photo - but we are only seeing a very small fraction of it.
"We’re blinded even to what’s right in front of us by the objects that we see. And we think that seeing is letting in the light, but it’s only letting in a very small fraction of the light."
Very much of what we’re doing is screening things out.
Now you can see the relevance of my friend’s photography lesson in our life. The two most important questions in both photo-taking and living a genuine life are
"What am I drawn to? What shines forth to me?" and "How might I bring it out into the world?"
Peterson continues
"If you notice that by paying attention to the things that manifest themselves to you, that shine forth as interesting, they grab you. And where you’re grabbed is where the obscuring map you live in isn’t obscuring the reality that’s underneath. It’s like there’s a hole in the map."
I love this image: what we are experiencing with our senses are not real, but only approximate maps of what is real. (Note: here is a great TEDx talk by the neuroscientist Anil Seth on this topic)
If you care about experiencing a sense of meaning and purpose in life, it’s worth looking at what Peterson is pointing to: the structure of that experience of meaning.
"If you pay attention to the things that shine forth, because what you’re seeing is the reality instead of the map, you’re gaining access to the real information that’s in the world. It’s not pre-packaged information, and because that can be false. It’s the real information flowing out from the ground of being."
The bad news is that you do not and cannot control what attracts you. Peterson comments “When your interest is seized by something, that’s your nervous system doing that. You don’t do that. It’s an unconscious force. You could even say it was the world itself talking to you.”
As my dear friend Shao Wei once told me in a moment of lucid realization "You want what you want. There is nothing to do about it". Your thoughts, feelings and even more importantly your truest desires have been there all along, waiting to be uncovered.
The good news is that what you are truly after often ends up being good for you and everyone else.
The thing that shines forth to you, that captures your attention and fascinates you is the most meaningful and in that sense, most real things.
By "real" here, we mean the sense that a HD TV is more real than a black & white one, not that the latter is fake.
I notice myself feeling a great comfort in understanding it. It means that life is ALWAYS ALREADY calling me forth in the direction of realness. It is almost that Grand Design of Life has kindness built-in.
Still doubtful? Peterson explains how we can use our life to test whether following what is most alive for us is the best way for us
"you know that because you can’t live without it. You die, you stultify, you get cynical, you get nihilistic or you adopt some wild belief system if you don’t have the attachment to some genuine life, giving meaning in your own life."
Yet if following what is most alive for us is so alluring and good for us, WHY ARE WE NOT FOLLOWING IT? Because of all other subconscious pulls from conventions we ourselves constructed in the past, all the "haves to" and "shoulds" which obscure our perception of what is most real.
"It’s a hard thing to follow that because it doesn’t necessarily put you into perfect juxtaposition with society because it’s not society. It’s not being a good citizen. It’s something else."
Indeed, like many of us know deep in our heart, if we follow what's most alive and interesting to us, we are often scared because it defines conventional social expectation. We risk being rejected by people around us for being on a different path.
Yet only by following those we can develop an edge that will contribute to the society that we were once afraid of being rejected. He went on to describe in riveting terms what exactly happens when we follow our aliveness: we become genuinely ourselves, what Carl Jung would call "individuation".
Because as you pursue the thing that guides your interest, and more and more information is revealed, then, by absorbing that information, which is learning, essentially, you build yourself into a different person, a stronger and more informed person. And a more intact person, a person with more integrity and with more strength and with more direction, and at the same time you differentiate your map. And so you’re living more and more in the real world.
What to make out of it then? Think hard about what to pursue, but most importantly, DO PURSUE. This is what I am learning the most right now, very much against the common spiritual ethos of detachment.
So as you approach your specific goal, even if it’s a culturally conditioned goal, the learning that you do along the way transforms you and it transforms the nature of your goal.
As difficult to hear as it is to me, a fellow flaky Millenial who is faced with too many opportunities, I have to admit that oftentimes the way to the other side is through the role, not around it.
He continues to use a striking example from Harry Potter and its famous game of Quidditch.
"In Quidditch, which is a game the way you win the game is by playing a game that’s sort of outside the Quidditch game. You win the Quidditch game by finding, following this thing that beckons – this golden thing (the Snitch)– that glimmers and moves around you. If you catch that, then you win the game and so does your whole team. And inside that is the resurrection stone. It’s a diamond. It’s a jewel.
The idea is that if you follow the thing that manifests itself to you is interesting. It will lead you through adversity, lead you to do things that are difficult. And as that happens, but not beyond your capacity because it’s tempered for that.
What will happen is as you hit yourself against the world, pursuing what you’re interested in, you’ll tap yourself into alignment, your molecules, your structure, internal structure will become non contradictory, like the internal structure of a jewel, which is something that reflects light that makes you hard and durable, and able to bear the terrible conditions of existence without becoming corrupt.“
I got such a goosebump hearing that part. If you listen to him, you can tell from his voice that he is becoming more real as he speaks. It's not just what he says, but what he is aiming himself towards, that makes such an impact.
Okay, so what? What to do after this eloquent exposition? Two practical applications:
How do you figure out your job, career or calling, the kind of work that you want to do and are meant to do in this life? Start by paying attention to what captures your interest, and zoom in even more to see what exactly about this that draws me in? Then begin exploring that.
How do you figure out the kind of person you are drawn to, whether it is a friendship, collaboration or long-term partners? You begin by noticing exactly what about them that gets your attention, and then begin to explore doing something small with them - a conversation over coffee, a walk and a short project. And follow what is most alive in the relationship. Sometimes it’s just talking, sometimes it’s doing something together, sometimes it’s getting physical.
A riveting talk that got a bit rambling at times, but totally worth a listen if you care about living a fuller and truer and also more impactful life. It also ended on the most beautiful and insightful quote by TS Eliot
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.”
With that, cheers to you all
Khuyen
Ps: One big update I'm almost done with the book! Final manuscript is ready next week, and then probably it would be on the bookshelves sometimes in September.