Rope seen as a snake - musings on reality and visualisation

Today as I walked back from the lab to my office I saw a flash of incredible blue on the ground. Thinking it was a really beautiful butterfly I stopped to investigate. It was a piece of plastic... but for a few more moments it still looked like a butterfly - and beautiful too - then the illusion faded and it was just plastic.

I found myself thinking that this was somehow an important message about visualising - seeing a beautiful image in the common-place. But a piece of plastic doesn't hold one's attention for long once one sees through the illusion.

I've been having a discussion on another forum about photography and honesty. Contrary to many, I think photographs cannot lie - but they can fool the stupid - well, the casual observer.

There is an Indian teaching story about a rope that is mistaken for a snake. Nisargadatta Maharaj says - To know that consciousness and its content are but reflections, changeful and transient, is the focussing of the real. The refusal to see the snake in the rope is the necessary condition for seeing the rope.

So is photography a lie? Is it promoting illusion and keeping us from the real?

For me - photography, like all art, is a pursuit of beauty. The rope, the plastic - they are no more real than the snake, the butterfly. The sense of beauty in art is what is real.