Society works to make us believe that we’re small, insufficient, that we have to run on the fumes of worldly ambition, that we’ll be doomed if we don’t buy what it sells and strive for its peer approval and prizes.  On the other hand, countless religious texts, artworks, books of psychology and philosophy throughout the centuries have tried to tell us what a crushing load of crap that is.  Yet despite the fact that in books, in films, in history, we see the story of our deeper and grander struggle, and even though we smile or applaud like mad when the movie hero or heroine triumphs, we  fail to see ourselves — I mean, really see ourselves — in those dramas.

Don’t we realize what’s being shown about us when Luke struggles to believe that he’s strong with the Force, or when Neo flinches from the notion that he’s really The One and not just some corporate cog named “Mr. Anderson”?  (And it isn’t so much a matter of “believing in yourself” as it is of believing what is in you and what you are in — what your self truly is.)  Most of us never escape that cage of socialization and skepticism.  We’ll nod our heads as we watch Julius Caesar or read the Gospels, yet we’ll still refuse to heed our spouse’s intuitions or the warnings in our dreams:  We’re like Julius Caesar, continuing on his way to the Capitol despite Calpurnia’s alarming dream.  We’re like Pontius Pilate, ordering the strange Galilean to be scourged and crucified despite Mrs. Pilate’s warning not to harm “that just man” because she had “suffered many thing in a dream because of him.”  We’re too worldly, too sophisticated, too afraid of embarrassment to turn aside just because a still small voice speaks to us out of the shadows.

For some of us, it might be valuable enough that certain photographs can help induce a state that leads us to write an inspired line of poetry.  But that’s not the end of the matter, not the limit of what is tapped when we can summon the genie from the invisible spaces inside the bottle.   Many of the most important successes that I’ve had in legal practice weren’t born from deductive analysis or legal research.  While I could explain why a strategy might work, or, afterwards, why I thought it had worked so well, the plan had simply come to me — while shaving or driving or thinking about something else — just as a line of poetry might.

Most of us have heard the stories from science and technology, too, about great discoveries that came through one of those sudden flashes from Who-Knows-Where.  The ground that proves fertile may have been watered with study and training, but the plant works its way up, unseen, in darkness.  We’ve all had moments of inspiration, and if you’ve paid attention to them, you know that they come to you as much as from you.

Not from just reading, but from my own experience, I know that the state that I keep describing, the state that certain photographs can help to induce, is brother or sister to states arrived at in other ways as well:  by Zen meditation, by Tai Chi practice, by intense surrender to certain works of music, by sustained contemplation of the forest or the sea.  Such states are sought and used in order to help Japanese businessmen solve corporate puzzles, to help hospital patients to endure their pain, to help wu shu practitioners break piles of bricks without injury to the hand or head that delivers the blow.

But the danger of this kind of “practical” testimony — about things that you might become able to do — is that it can become a kind of spiritual materialism.  As Zen masters sometimes say, the meditative state is the goal in itself.  That state of deep calm and tender alertness and rich satisfaction is both a door and a corner of the great hall into which it leads.  It’s a part of the antidote for war and cruelty and greed.  To the extent that we can find joy in the sound of wind through the woods or breath through a bamboo flute, or glory in a green pepper edged with light, we won’t feel impelled to murder others in order to multiply wealth that we already have, or to beat up strangers or foreign countries in order to prove that we’re “real men.”

One of my favorite photographs is a Bill Brandt portrait of the writer Robert Graves, seemingly caught in the state that I’ve described, disturbed in the act of artistic creation.  The image rivets me.  I recognize what’s happening inside it.  Look at those eyes.  They’re pointed at the camera, but they’re still staring elsewhere, wide with seeing or searching for marvels.