My Negative World...

I was remembering recently when I was very young, and discovering the afterimages one could make on one’s eye-lids, by staring at objects intently, then closing one’s eyes tightly. It was like having an internal camera, I thought, with you developing strange pictures from the photographic negatives in your mind. I remember being amazed that you could ‘see’ something so differently, just by looking at it another way.

A few years later, the first documentary I saw on the Turin Shroud reminded me of that same experience; an ordinary-looking piece of ancient linen revealed startling images, when, with the newest technology of the 19th Century, photographic negatives were first made of it. The sensation these negatives caused reverberated well into the next century; the shift in perception it triggered in some is no doubt reverberating still.

It made for fascinating, if slightly hallucinogenic, viewing; a plain object visually inverted, which in turn inverted my idea of that thing. Is it not strange when we are shown a familiar object in an unfamiliar way? It struck me how easily we fool ourselves into thinking the world is just as we perceive it, when we may hardly ever perceive it accurately in the first place, be it with our eye or our intellect, our science or our philosophy, our culture or our religion.

As a child, I was never struck with unease by the inversion of colours and shapes that these mental ‘negatives’ created; the bliss of ignorance is no proper explanation for my being able to thrill at it all then, because age has brought only a widening of my horizons with no automatic increase in the wisdom needed to understand those horizons. Indeed, until recently when I began to actively practice daily meditation, mounting unease and fear had begun to cause me to want to stop looking to my horizons quite so much, or quite so anew.

A need to cling to the familiar, to crystallise perceptions and ideas, to polarise intellectual and political positions, to accept a little dogma and other ‘received wisdom’; all this seemed to be a necessary and intrinsic part of growing up, settling down and getting on. Limit your horizons, don’t look too closely or too differently, and the unease might, well, ease.

I’m finding there may be another way to see the world again; rather than reduce my horizons, how about I just reduce my fear? If I can keep remembering how it felt to see the world inverted when I was young, then I am also remembering who I was then and what I could be again in future, if I just stop getting in my own way.

Because it may be that fear is also just an afterimage, a photographic negative of my world; If I keep in mind that when I was young I had nothing to fear from seeing the world differently, and only wider horizons to explore, then I may have begun to make my whole Negative World a place of positive beauty and wonder once again.