the fantasy of the "pure observer"

East 19th Street, NYC, 2013

Robert, This photo makes me wonder about conditioning and breaking out of it, seeing it at work, not attending to it. Don't we take credit for our beliefs, despite the fact that they are just memory and conditioning talking-talking as if the “me” were not itself a product of this process? Isn't this very process at play in whatever I imbue with meaning(I included)? Isn't any attempt of mine to break free of conditioning just more conditioned behaviour?

I’m reminded of a passage from Gogen I read the other day—"To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things". Your photos have so much to say. The earlier one of the crumbling headstones cracks me up. Not only do we die, but even those hard marble monuments to us morph into other things. I visited an old cemetery where my grandfather was buried in northeastern Montana. You could hardly read half the stones, and that said a lot. Thanks for the space and black and white photographs.

Hand Made Tortillas, 2024

Thank you. It is not, I’d say, a matter of “breaking out of conditioning,” but more a question of understanding that one is conditioned and always will be in one way or another. This is bad news for people who like to feel entirely in control, and even worse for people who want to believe that they know “the Truth” or who imagine at least that their guru knows it or the priest or the holy book.

In an earlier conversation, I presented the image of a child standing in front of a mirror while his mama said, “Look, Sweetie. That’s you.” That transaction, I joked, is where all the trouble starts—the conditioning about who and what “myself” is.

But in fact, the trouble starts long before that. Toilet training, for example, which begins early in life, bears upon one's self-image, needs for control, subsequent sexuality, struggles with guilt and shame, etc. That is conditioning that no amount of logic or so-called spiritual practice will ever entirely remove.

So one “forgets the self,” not by trying to forget it, nor by claiming that it does not indeed exist, nor by going all non-duality about it and pretending that since “we are all one,” personality has nothing to do with the “real me.”

As I see it, those approaches lead to a cul-de-sac, a dead end. And that cul-de-sac is filled with people who imagine they have a handle on “Truth” while misusing ideas and practices to compensate for and disown the parts of themselves they would rather forget or do not even recognize consciously in the first place.

Looking deeply into conditioning, one sees that one is forever limited to seeing the world from a particular point of view. Inherited structures and tendencies hard-wire aspects of that point of view—the particularities of the human nervous system, one's early childhood experiences, and even the languages we use, the subtexts of which are as invisible to us as water is to a fish.

Yes, one's point of view can shift, develop, and mature, but that does not mean it disappears entirely, leaving a "pure observer." That's a spiritual fantasy—part of the hypnotic trance of transcendence.

Suppose one recovers from that fantasy. In that case, one stops trying to escape from human limitation and just lives it out, moment to moment, subject to countless influences, including conditioning, until the story ends with death (or continues in Heaven with Jesus, if you believe that stuff).

That “just living it out” moment by moment is, I assume, part of what Dogen meant by “actualization by myriad things.”