ILLUSIONS .....

Lake Mackintosh Tullah - what is real and what is illusion?

Here we have the reflective waters of Lake Mackintosh. They are stained a rich tea-brown by the acid peat bogs and tea tree swamps of the wilderness of the Cradle Mountain National Park. The tannin in the waters gives it brilliant reflective qualities, giving the light a hint of glistening mercury and the sky a beautiful hue of indigo.

a shadow of an ancient gnarled tree?

They give the lie to illusions, distorting objects to contorted new “realities” that can appear to the naked eye a honest “reflection” of what seems obvious to our minds. Perceptions are always viewed again a background that gives them a context in which to compare. The background here is the oily calm of the lake surface, but minute ripples radiating out from several directions in layers over each other belie this. The eye is sure that its point of reference is indeed flat giving back a true reflected image of trees above. These tiny radiating wavelets in fact distort the image of the tree almost beyond recognition. One can notice the bleached tea tree branch that also pierces this background, this point of reference. It adds a further complexity and “layer” to this reality that is truly three-dimensional.

What is the lake and what is the forest, where is the sky?

How life is like this photo! My perceptions are all based on my own experiences, often limited often deeply distorted or even completely wrong. Today we live in a world that is so literal. We live in an increasingly complex society so its natural to crave simplistic answers to very complex questions, as there are too many questions. What we have to question though is our “background”, our yardstick of comparison indeed correct and not also deeply distorted. Is our vision of the problem to narrowly focused and indeed missing the bigger picture? Its then hard to realise what is an illusion, as we have to judge everything in context of our own experiences or accept concepts we don’t always understand blindly. Its important to question always and not accept things in this way as many things we are fed as fact are merely others erroneous or distorted opinions. There is no easy solution to this, but what it does teach us, like this picture, is that we must surely question everything we hear and see. So much of our world is an illusion.