Intuition and the Creation of a Better World
Peer, Kevin
Buddhism has helped me to develop a more intimate relationship with the nature of my own mind. I have learnt through meditation practice that thoughts come and go of their own accord, endlessly. That’s just the nature of mind. Between and underlying those thoughts, however, is a great stillness. Access to this stillness has been a great ally to me in making films.
When I’m practicing cinematography from this open, alert stillness, the most remarkable things arise. I’ll suddenly have an impulse to turn around and look in another direction, and there’s the very thing I was looking for: there’s the moment just before the sun peeks through the branches and illuminates the side of the elk, or there’s the expression on the face of the Tuareg as, seated on his camel, he turns. I’m able to engage these wonderful gifts that arise, because in that moment I’m living from a place that is infinitely more expansive and inclusive than the thought-box of my head.
Kevin Peer. ‘Sacred Cinema: Molly Hollenbach interviews Kevin Peer’ in Resurgence, November/December 2004, No. 227, p. 53
