Sean Mitchell

I was playing around with some photos I took on my iPhone and thought I’d share a few with you.

This first one I took and just emailed to myself.  Consider it the regular shot (with minor filtering in Paintshop Pro 7 — yes, I bring it old school).

And this one…also taken with my iPhone and used the Instragram iPhone photo app to give it it’s effect.

This last one, below, that is a little green looking I applied the Scratchcam iPhone photo app and there we have it…

Hope you enjoyed the photos, I had fun playing.

So you know I can’t just walk away from this post without throwing some hippie-mindset atcha.

Let’s talk filters on reality.  We start with input from our world but quickly put filters on things, events, etc until it becomes very different from ‘what is.’  How do we get back to knowing reality and ‘what is?’  One book I recently finished, the Discourse Summaries by S.N. Goenka, has you start with meditation on the breath.  I found it useful and here’s a short quote from it:

“On this path, whatever is unknown about yourself must become known to you. For this purpose respiration will help. It acts as a bridge from the known to the unknown, because respiration is one function of the body that can be either conscious or unconscious, intentional or automatic. One starts with conscious, intentional breathing, and proceeds to awareness of natural, normal breath. And from there you will advance to still subtler truths about yourself. Every step is a step with reality; every day you will penetrate further to discover subtler realities about yourself, about your body and mind.”

Of course it gets way deeper than that, but this statement gives some decent rationale as to why to begin with focusing on the breath when beginning a Vipassana meditation practice.

Anyways, I dig it, hope you dig it…and more importantly I hope you have an awesome rest of the day.