A Photographer's Karma

This article is about the life and work of a photographer, and about the karmic consequences that this work brings. In truth, what follows concerns not only photographers but creative people of every kind, because in modern society — the society of the internet and multimedia — the result of almost any creative work takes the form of a photo or a video.

Let us look a little more closely at the creative process. Whatever field it is applied in, it passes through the following stages:

1. The stage of accumulating experience. Experience can be intellectual (knowledge), physical (various bodily practices) or psychic (emotions and impressions). It is worth noting that acquiring experience is not always positive in nature. On the contrary — the most valuable, the richest and most singular experience is, as a rule, gained the hard way. At this stage the deep foundation for future creativity is laid.

2. The stage of making sense of experience. A person adapts the experience they have gained to their own life and personality; that is, at this stage experience turns into life wisdom. Not everyone passes through this stage consciously, but I want to stress that for a mature creator, self-awareness and work on oneself are simply indispensable. Why does this matter so much? Because when the conscious stage is skipped, life experience usually never gets cleansed of the negativity that the stage of accumulating it was bound up with. A person never comes to understand that

What matters is not who caused my suffering, but what the cause of my suffering is.

At this stage the outlines of the future creative idea appear.

3. The stage of imagination. The development of artistic imagination can be described as finding new forms for old content, or as a new conception of an old subject. Inventing new things or situations is valuable only to the extent that it serves to interpret the old — that is, the universal — theme of human experience. In fact, artistic imagination unfolds most fully when the content of ordinary objects and well-worn stories is carried across to the viewer. In essence, the artist tries to see, in their own way, those images in the surrounding world that resonate most closely with their soul. Let me recall that seeing the spiritual within the material comes most naturally to adherents of pantheism (I have touched on this before in my article "The Messenger's Gift and Foresight").

At this stage the creative idea takes shape.

4. The stage of realizing the idea. Here everything seems clear — the photographer takes pictures, the painter paints, the writer creates their work, and so on. The crucial thing is that in 99% of cases all of it gets posted on the internet for everyone to see.

5. The stage of viewing. And this is where it gets most interesting. Every creative work has a particle of its creator embedded in it — of their experience, their mood and their thoughts. In the act of perceiving it, viewers take on at least a little of the author's thoughts and mood. A positive work will lift even its depressive viewers; a negative one will sink them into still deeper depression. At this moment the law of Karma — the law of cause and effect — comes into full force: the author of the work begins, little by little, to be repaid in the same measure by which they influenced their viewers. Of course, the consequences for the author from a single person contemplating the work are vanishingly small — but there are many thousands of such people.

Here is a vivid example: this photo of mine has been viewed by 75,000 people, and over my career I have made more than 1,000,000 such photos for my clients. So work out for yourself the influence of a single photographer on their viewers…

If the author is talented — and all the more so if their talent borders on genius — then the influence of their work on the minds and souls of their viewers is especially strong. At this moment the artist faces the danger of turning into a Dark Messenger: a perverter of lofty and luminous ideas, answerable for crippling the transphysical paths of thousands and millions. Such a creator faces an afterlife in one of the deep worlds of Retribution — for instance, this one:

There can be no body there, not the slightest hint of any soil or surroundings. One thing alone does not go out there: the spark of self-awareness. This purgatory is called Dromn: the illusion of a terrible non-being. And what draws a soul into Dromn is not evil deeds, not bloodshed, but merely the karmic consequence of active unbelief — a militant denial of the spiritual, an active affirmation of the false idea that the soul is mortal. The mystery of this strange and seemingly disproportionate punishment is that all these acts of will, while the person was still alive, in effect sealed the breathing passages of the soul tight shut, as if with stoppers; the result was an even greater weighing-down of the etheric nature than even particular crimes bring about, taken in isolation, in themselves. To the prisoner of Dromn it seems that there is nothing anywhere, and that he himself is not — exactly as he had pictured it during his life. And only with the greatest effort, and only after a very long time, can he come to terms with the staggering fact that the self-aware "I" does not go out even here, in absolute emptiness, against all reason and common sense. And at that point he begins dimly to understand that everything might have been otherwise, had he not chosen this non-being — or half-being — himself.

— Daniil Andreev, "The Rose of the World"

By the way, all these infraphysical matters easily explain the articles in any country's criminal code that deal with punishment for socially dangerous acts — or, say, "disorderly conduct." To people with only a surface acquaintance with the law, it seems very strange and cruel that for a harmless article or photo on the internet one can get a longer sentence than for murder.

Too abstract, you'll say. Where are the examples of Dark Messengers? Here are a few of them:

• Politics: Niccolò Machiavelli, author of the famous self-serving way of life captured in Machiavelli's own words: "The end justifies the means."
• Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche, who with his ideal of the superman distorted and profaned the very ideal — which his age ought to have brought to consciousness — of uniting in a single free personality the highest giftedness with the highest power and the highest righteousness.
• And, of course, photography: Helmut Newton, the famous photographer who elevated his dearly beloved pastime of photographing tits and bits into a genre of fashion art :)

Always be attentive to your soul; cleanse it of negativity. Create only in moments of genuine spiritual elevation…

We must make good out of evil, because there is nothing else to make it from.

— Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, "Roadside Picnic"