How a television screen illustrates the mystery of pure potential

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

Meister Eckhart

Have you ever become so absorbed in a movie that you completely forgot the screen it was projected on?

We laugh.
We cry.
We become frightened.
We fall in love with characters who don’t actually exist.

Analogy

Throughout the entire experience of watching a movie or television program, something fascinating happens: We stop seeing the screen itself. There’s an analogy that’s sometimes used to signify the difficulty in attempting to image the Absolute, God or Pure Potential. It’s fairly commonplace, so I was surprised when someone on the spiritual path said she’d never heard of it—and it helped. Since I happened to have a photo of my television screen I thought I’d share that perspective here.

A bare movie or television screen with nothing projected onto it is “pure potential.” It can display an infinite number and variety of images, tell an infinite number of stories and can be conceived of as having the capacity to showcase the full range of nature’s evolution and human history. A difficulty arises when an image—any image—is projected onto a screen. The projection is so compelling, so attention holding, the surface of the screen becomes invisible.

Right now, instead of seeing words on your screen, try to see its surface. Being limited with five senses, we only see and attend to whatever is projected onto the screen. Whenever we’re attending to a movie or television program we’re seeing its infinite imaging potential manifesting a particular image—reality. We don’t see the source. Just so in life, we don’t see the Source. When images are being projected onto any kind of screen, it’s nearly impossible—except by imagination—to discern its texture or smoothness.

Science

At the subatomic level, quantum physics describes the “collapse of the wave function,” a mathematical description of probability (potential reality), where an observer’s expectation (consciousness) “collapses” that potential to display a single, definite reality.

The Great Mystery

Another familiar metaphor makes it clear why our senses don’t “see” God or the Absolute reality—fish don’t see the water they swim in. Just so, for us the divine isn’t “out there,” somewhere in the cosmos or beyond it. It’s existence or “being” itself, so present and pervasive we have to train our consciousness—usually though meditation and contemplation—if we’re to become aware that we and the reality we experience is a projection of  IT.

We call it “The Great Mystery”—How our local (personal) consciousness “collapses” or manifests a particular reality from the nonlocal consciousness that permeates the cosmos.

Practical Consideration

What are images that are being projecting onto our media screens? Are they helping us to become aware of Source—the divine presence in all that exists? Is the content awakening us to our higher potentials, encouraging or inspiring us to give our gifts to consciously co-create our preferred reality? Are we paying too much attention to our screens and not enough to what goes into the images (consciousness) that’s projected onto them—and how it’s affecting our lives?

Perhaps the deepest purpose of contemplative photography isn’t simply to make photographs that capture the world in a compelling way, but to awaken us to the luminous Presence from which the world continuously arises.

____________________________________

My other sites:

David L. Smith Photography Portfolio.com

Ancient Maya Cultural Traits.com: Weekly blog featuring the traits that made this civilization unique

Spiritual Visionaries.com: Access to 81 free videos on YouTube featuring thought leaders and events of the 1980s.