off topic

I started doing something ‘serious’ with photography about forty five years ago. I was dedicated, technically proficient, but aimless, and never got any further than scraping the surface of the art. …

I am not a victim of my past, unless I choose to let the ego run my mind — which is what I usually do because the ego does not want me to remember that I really have a choice in lending the power of my mind — the immeasurable strength of my belief — to either the fear of ego or the Love of God. …

What I’ve come to like about photography is that it’s all about appearances, playing with the make-believe that passes for reality. Images are closer to the stuff that dreams are made of than words. …

I could make photos without ever using a lens but I could not produce anything worthwhile without a creative state of mind. As a photographer that’s my most valuable asset, the stuff I couldn’t do without. …

To experience beauty is to feel a deep, spiritual, joy, because beauty is the recognition of a transcendent quality in life, a flash of truth breaking through the dense clouds of egoism in our mind. …

Most of what we learn in life is not really worth remembering. That realization is in itself a great relief. If you then also happen to find that you’re never too old to learn about everything that does not matter at all, your life is becoming lighter, and also more meaningful. …

If I really want to stick to the facts, I can only say, “I don’t know whether I exist.” Is there really such a thing as a self? And even if there is, I don’t know whether there’s a real world outside my own mind. …

The stories I tell make my past, my future, my world. The world is not something solid: it’s made up only of the stories I’m telling myself. Everything that happens is a projection of the mind. …

Can a photographer make truthful images of reality, or is that nothing but a beautiful myth? When photography was invented almost two centuries ago, our concept of reality was rather simple and roughly equivalent to the world we see. …

When I’m photographing unselfconsciously and intuitively, joyfully present in the moment, the camera becomes an extension of the mind, it behaves as consciousness itself. …