Michael: What I find with life in general is that there are various intersections where if you take a left turn, your life unfolds a certain way, you take a right turn, your life unfolds in another way.
At that particular time, I had some kind of idea that I was interested in psychology. There was a university program I’d been accepted to, and I was literally on my way out the door on the final day of high school. I went into the library because there was a friend there that I wanted to ask to sign my yearbook.
I sat across the table from her and I said, “So, what are you going to do next year?” And she said, “I’m going to Sheridan College of Art and Design to study graphic design.” And I said “Oh, can I see what that’s about?” So she showed me the school catalogue. As I flipped through it, I noticed that they offered creative photography.
And somehow my mind just snapped open.
It was like a message came in from the universe or somewhere which said, “Do that!”
Then she said, “What are you going to do”, and I said, “I guess I’m going to study photography”. And she said, “I thought you were going to study psychology.” And I said, “I guess not!”
All of my conceptual thinking had led me to think I wanted to be a psychologist. It sounded cool and I was mildly interested in it. But somehow in that moment there was a gap, and in that gap what I was actually supposed to do with my life managed to be communicated to me. And I really never looked back.
Within two days I was at the college applying. Strange the way it worked out; the fellow who was supposed to interview me, the head of the program, was sick that day and wasn’t there. Instead I was interviewed by Joe somebody, who ran the darkroom who had no credentials for accepting students at all.
It was like he was asleep. He asked why I wanted to take this photography course for three years, and I said, “I guess I’m really interested in photography”. “Where is your portfolio?”, he asked. “I don’t really have one but I have a photo of an airplane”, I said.
At that moment it was like he was taken over by something or someone. “He said, OK, you’re in.”
In a sense, in both of these situations there was a gap in the situation and I was uncertain about anything.
In both moments that gap that was very deep, and maybe it had always been there, lurking in the background waiting to be communicated. It felt like I was being pushed into it, like I had been taken over as well.
I never had any interest in photography, so how could I just suddenly think, “So this is what I am going to do with my life”?
I felt that someone or something in the universe was giving me a message. “This is what you’re gonna do next; the psychology thing is not going to work out”.
That’s how it worked— the gap was huge.
Some people have their life worked out, and then some situation happens. They get sick, somebody gets sick, somebody dies, this and that, and the whole journey changes. But this was not that something relative that had happened – it was more absolute.
It was out of the blue, out of nowhere. And I think that’s maybe how it is sometimes, that what we’re supposed to do finally manifests one way or the other.
Somehow, I simply heard, “Here’s what you are going to do”.
1976 – Meditation and The Birth of Miksang
Years later, in 1976 when I started exploring Miksang, I began a process which took place over four or five years. In the beginning I gradually began to break away from traditional photography, and then, over a couple of years there was a rapid development of myself and Miksang.
What inspired me was that I began to practice meditation. As a result, I began having more and more gaps and experiences of fresh perception. I spent each day sitting and walking around in my backyard, noticing what I was seeing and sometimes taking a photograph (as shown in the following images).
Over the next year and a half I was exploring was the foundations of form: colour, light, texture, pattern, line, space. Also I was giving myself very limited areas to explore to undo my long-standing habitual ways of seeing the world, which I had developed in part through my education at a visual art school and through my experience as a commercial photographer.
Six Months in the Backyard 1980: An Interview by Julie DuBose
Julie: When you were in your backyard and were working on seeing without all your templates, how did you start? Did you meditate first thing in the morning?
Michael: Yes, and I was meditating a few hours a day.
Julie: Let’s just talk about the actual experience of going out to the backyard in the morning.
What was the first thing you would do?
Michael: It was what we now call ”The Practice of Transcending Boredom.”
Julie: You would just look and look until you began to see things with clarity?
Michael: I realized that I didn’t have any interest in the big highlights anymore, so I went out to my backyard which had next to nothing ‘artistic’. It had a garden, a hose, some grass, the back of my house, the front of my garage, and a fence. I thought if I looked and looked that I might discover the nature of direct perception.
Julie: So did you take photographs when you were looking? What were you seeing that you photographed?
Michael: Mostly it was of grass, a garden, a garage, the back of the house with bricks and windows.
I knew if I was going to see anything, I would have to look more deeply.
Julie: How did you know what looking deeply meant at that point? We are talking about a long time ago.
Michael: I had had flashes of perception even back in 1976 and I have the images; (see above) the red mailbox, a swing in the back yard in the snow, a clothes pin on the line; they all arose out of absolutely nowhere. They arose in my eye and mind and moved me deeply. I experienced a sense of connecting deeply with something that I had never seen before. During this time, those experiences were random and unpredictable.
I felt there must be more to this kind of seeing, but I didn’t know how to deal with it, how to begin, except to take a stab at it, and the stab I took was to start going out to my backyard trying to see.
My instinct was to use the model of meditation—don’t move, stay still.
I didn’t go looking for something or somewhere special.
I stayed in that familiar environment and I looked and I looked and I looked—because it really offered next to nothing ‘photo-worthy.’
That was my training.
I had a little sidewalk that went from the house to the garage and I looked at every single aspect of that sidewalk over six months.
And I shot it and shot it. Every day it was different.
Julie: So your discipline was to keep coming back to the same thing and looking at it again and again.
Michael: Absolutely.
Julie: And then how did you know when you were seeing it fresh?
Michael: Once it started happening, I could feel that I was losing my grasp of what I thought I was seeing, and I knew it was is nothing I had ever seen before. It penetrated me and I realized that I had actually gone beyond boredom. I had to get back to some sort of ground Zero. If I had gone to the laneway first, I would have just made pretty pictures of interesting things.
18 Months in the Laneway 1981 – 1982
Michael: When I began to go to the back laneway, I started using the model of walking meditation. The laneway was four blocks long. So I would go out through the garage, shut the door, and start walking. I would walk and walk. All I was trying to do was keep my feet on the ground, my mind in the moment, and my eye on what was happening. This went on for 18 months, a year and a half, everyday walking meditation, walking with eye and mind in sync, camera in hand.
In the laneway, what created synchronization of my eye with my mind was, to begin with, primarily texture. Texture was the first thing I started noticing. Then I starting noticing light, then color, then pattern.
My memory is that after I left the backyard and went to the laneway and started walking, the first thing I noticed was form before labels.
I wasn’t thinking anything. I wasn’t thinking, “This is it, now I understand it”. It wasn’t like that. I could see somebody’s garage door as form and the thought that it was somebody’s garage door didn’t come up in my mind.
Julie: So you had an experience of non-thought first.
Michael: Absolutely, raw non-thought. But then, when I looked at the door and if I was going to photograph it, I had to understand what I was really seeing. And in this case, there was color, but there was also patterns.
I began to intuitively break down the experience of the form. Sometimes I would see the garage doors as color, sometimes as light, texture, or whatever, sometimes it was a moment. It was all kinds of things.
I spent the next 18 months in the laneway behind the house. I had two young children and after school we would walk up and down the laneway, and they would entertain themselves while I was looking. I took hundreds of rolls of film.
My children quickly tuned into what I was doing. They didn’t have any problem seeing at all. My daughter Sarah was five and she was shooting pictures that were very simple and direct with her little Instant camera, like this one:
One of the strongest experiences I had during this time was with my son Ben, who was three years old. One day he was up ahead of me and then came back dragging his little car and found me.
He said, “Daddy, I found something you’ll like.”
At the end of the laneway, lying on the street was a big maple leaf. It was completely smeared with gasoline, shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow—it was amazing.
What was more amazing was that he didn’t have any concept that gasoline on the leaf was a bad thing—he just saw a rainbow. That experience was very profound and showed me just how unburdened seeing could be.
This whole backyard/laneway period took two years. That time was really good for me because I was beginning to dissolve my filters. For me, the primary filter was photographic concept—what you “should” see. For some people, the reason they can’t see is that their internal dialogue is so strong. That wasn’t so much the main barrier for me. It was more that my eye had been prejudiced. Having been trained in a particular way, I had taken on the rules of composition and content. That was my main obstacle.
I didn’t have any sense of what I was supposed to look for. I didn’t have any assignments or anyone directing me. What I was doing was exposing myself to the world of form in its most basic aspects.
Before this period, the only thing interesting to me photographically was drama and how to manipulate things to appear to be more than they were. By going out to this laneway where there was dirt, old cars, fences and garages, my old educated eye didn’t see much, but my new eyes started noticing form directly.
Later on, when I was asked to teach a contemplative photography course, I went back to those slides and realized that what I had been seeing was color, light, texture, space, pattern and so on, and at that time I didn’t have any conscious thoughts about those things. It was all “fresh or not fresh.”
That is what that whole period was about. The perceptions were fresh or not fresh, one-way or the other. It was about waking up, not about taking better photos. I was having a real experience of perception rather than a buffered, predictable experience.
It was the most joyful period I had had in my life. Seeing became a really deep passion. Any spare time I had, I was out in the laneway. I could not wait to get there and explore because I realized how fresh the world could be, free of conceptual glue. It was just wonderful.
2016: A RETURN TO THE BIRTHPLACE OF MIKSANG
In 2016, I returned to the so-called birthplace of Miksang as we know it – the laneway in North Toronto where I spent 1981 and 1982. I began by looking into the front door of the home we used to occupy, and then photographing my reflection. It was all a bit hard to recognize the whole thing, as the home we lived in when the children were young had been completely torn down and rebuilt.
The laneway, which is three or four blocks long, had not changed all that much. You would never know that 35 years had passed.
On my walk today I did have a lot of memories and realizations. First of all, as I have said many times to many people, I was totally on my own. It was a lonely journey. There was no one there.
I had not yet met one of my Buddhist teachers, who during a ceremony in which I became a Buddhist, gave me the name Miksang which means “Good Eye”. I had no Miksang friends or students at that time as I did not share or teach Miksang until 1983.
On the day of my return to where it all started, I realized that this laneway was not all that special, it just happened to be the one I was in. It could have been any laneway anywhere.
The birth of my Beginner’s Mind had been the only special thing happening.
On the other hand, the laneway did offer all the components of the Miksang levels to explore. When I look at the images from that time and the images from today, I can clearly see the origins of all the Miksang Levels, although they were not consecutive or linear as they are presented now. They arose in a much more random fashion.
There was certainly a lot of emphasis on the aspects of form which, at some point, became the first course of Miksang, Opening the Good Eye. There was a lot of Space and Simplicity mixed in from the beginning. There was Making Contact which arose from so much inner stillness and paying deep attention to my experience. There was much more Heart of Perception than I remembered. It was present from the beginning. And the Cutting Loose mind was also mixed in from the very beginning. During this period I explored and developed the entire Miksang curriculum as it is today.
When I returned I remembered how it all unfolded. It was all unified into one mind of seeing.
Another realization I had was that there were no people involved for a number of years. There were no people or events in the laneway to photograph. People began to appear as subject matter in the early to mid 1990’s. It is hard to photograph people until there is a lot of stillness and stability of mind and eye. It is remarkable to me that photographing people was not involved in those early years of developing Miksang. That was because during the entire 18 months of exploring the laneway, I never saw another person. It was very peaceful.
So, that was today. It was wonderful. It was also filled with a lot of sad joy with many memories of the wonder of discovering something so fresh and awake in such an ordinary place.
I miss the simplicity of that journey, and I am grateful that it has given us a way to teach and inspire our students to appreciate their ordinary world.
Here are some images I took that day in 2016.
