SEEING: an erotic philosophy of visual perception, Part 1, Light's creatures Introduction Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life.
The realm of light and vision is a realm of great personal delight to me, and I want in this workshop to share some of that pleasure. I believe it is also philosophically important as one instance of our larger circumstance as humans - the circumstance of being physical bodies embedded in a vast, minutely self-organized physical universe that creates and sustains us. The senses are the base of all our connectedness and intelligence: they are where everything starts - imagining, speaking, making, and thinking itself. Vision is our most complex and comprehensive sense. It has a long evolutionary history and has had millennia of cultural elaboration in the arts and crafts and then in science. We have recently come to know a lot more about how human and other bodies do vision. We have also come to know a lot more about how the universe does light, and how these two kinds of doing are related in the experience and meanings of vision. These new kinds of knowing can reorient us - they can help us reframe ALL knowledge so it integrates better across disciplines. They can help us understand better what we are and where we are. They can make us less confused as humans and they offer us new possibilities for joy and participation. The embodiment hypothesis The first post-Christian synthesis of a new world view, a synthesis without a male god in the human image
For Merleau-Ponty, it is the body - the organic, sensitive body itself - that perceives the world and, ultimately, thinks the world - not some interior and immaterial mind. this perceptual "pact" between body and world as the very foundation of truth in history, in political thought and action, in art, and in science. The creation of meaning, value, and purpose is no longer accomplished by a ghostly subject hovering inside the human physiology. For these things - value, purpose, meaning - already abound in the surrounding landscape.
At the beginning of this reframing is one radical hypothesis: that humans are not made of two separate, separable kinds of things, body and 'mind', or body and 'soul', or body and 'consciousness,' or body and 'spirit,' but that all of these - mind, soul, consciousness, or spirit - are functions of body itself. Things a body can be and do. One advantage of this vision is that it lets us see ourselves as at home in the world, integrally part of the world, thoroughly adapted to the world. When we emphasize human at-homeness in the world, we also give ourselves a basis for human unity. Along with all of our local myths and stories we have one enormous, magnificent shared story, the story of the 16-billion-year long self-creation of the cosmos, and within it the further story of life becoming intelligent within it. I'm wanting in these two workshops to tell stories about vision as part of that larger story. I'm wanting to inspire you with an instance of transdisciplinary study that includes art, science and personal experience - physics, philosophy, ecopsychology, evolutionary history, painting, photography and film, astronomy, and more. I'm also wanting simply to tell you there is much more to see than you have yet known how to look for. Here is our opportunity in this life: we are physical beings in a physical universe. We are sentient by being just that. Great feats of sentient response and sentient invention become possible to us by construction and reconstruction of our bodies and surroundings. I. Light: the fabric of the One Old English, Proto-Germanic leuht- The most common term for "universe" among the ancient Greek philosophers from Pythagoras onwards was to pan (The All).
1. Light in Western monotheist cosmology Western monotheist cosmology starts like this: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. - Genesis 1.1: 1 There are something important to notice about this version, apart from the fact that creation is imagined to be by a sort of male person. It is that this story has heaven and earth created first, and then light. In contemporary physics heaven and earth cannot exist before light, because there is a sense in which they are in fact MADE OF light. 2. Medieval light metaphysics met·a·phys·ics The branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality. From the Greek meta phusika, meta, after + physis meaning Nature (from which we derive the word physics. Certain religious scholars of the 1200s, for instance at Oxford, influenced by translations of Greek and Arabic philosophical and scientific writings, began to look for ways to conceive of light as the source of the entire universe. developed an account of the generation and fundamental nature of the physical world in terms of the action of light Neoplatonic doctrine that the One, identified with the principal of light, radiates from itself as nous (the intelligence that is the foundation of the sensible world) in the same way that the sun radiates light. In their accounts, which are previous to the development of physics, there seems to be a sort of intuitive groping for something like a more contemporary light metaphysics. 3. What is light? Maxwell 1868 "strong reason to believe that light itself is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the electromagnetic field according to electromagnetic laws." a. The whole electromagnetic spectrum. supravisible and subvisible light My first work in the region of invisible lights made me realize how in the midst of luminous ocean we stood almost blind. in following lights from visible to invisible our range of investigation transcends our physical sight
Visible light is radiating electromagnetic waves at a certain very restricted range of frequencies that human visual systems are responsive to. On either side of this narrow range is a vast range of much faster and much slower wavelenths. The whole range is called the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetic spectrum - all energy that moves at the speed of light through a vacuum at 185,000 miles per second The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of all possible frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, "covering wavelengths from thousands of kilometers down to a fraction of the size of an atom. The long wavelength limit is the size of the universe itself, while it is thought that the short wavelength limit is in the vicinity of the Planck length, although in principle the spectrum is infinite and continuous." Waves of different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum - ie waves of different frequency/wavelength/energy - interact with matter [standing waves] in different ways.
b. But what is electromagnetic radiation? An oscillating electrical charge will create around it a region of oscillating electrical and magnetic fields; and these fields in turn create oscillating electrical and magnetic fields around themselves; and so there procede outward from the original charge radiating spheres of electromagnetic fields. It is a spherical wave. It is not a thing, not a piece of matter, but an influence - or a potential - something that would act if there were an appropriate receiver for its action.
So light is spoken of as a substance, but is more accurately imagined as a patterned propagation of potential effect. c. How is light different from matter? It's not so different, because 'matter' - the parts of the universe made of molecules and their atoms and the subatomic structures of which atoms are formed - are also electromagnetic or electromagnetic-like patterns. The simple way to explain the difference wd be to say that structures we think of as matter rather than light are light held in relatively stable patterns. If we think of matter as made OF space rather than IN space, then we can imagine the universe as a weave of relative tensions and relaxations, patterns that hold and patterns that constantly flow. Light is electromagnetic structure traveling. Matter is electromagnetic structure holding fast. "Light fills our universe." - No, light IS our universe: light as wave motion in space. Light is somehow the whole close-woven volume. The fabric of the One is a fabric of standing waves and traveling waves, influencing each other everywhere and continuously.
Light's travel always begins at a source and moves out in straight lines in all directions (except when it curves, but that's another story).
It travels through a transmission medium which may be a material substance (solid, liquid, gas, or plasma) or in interstellar space may be space itself. The luminiferous ether. While substances like air or water are not required for electromagnetic waves to propagate, those materials can be affected by, and affect, them.
We see light, and we see things by means of light. Everything we see by means of light is seen because it has reflected light. For most things this reflection is a diffuse scattering from microscopic irregularities on the surface, or inside the surface, of the object. Reflection is the change in direction of a wavefront so that the wavefront returns into the medium from which it originated. Different substances/surfaces have different reflectivities because of their molecular structure, ie the kind of standing wave pattern they are. For most kinds of bodies, some of the perturbing effect enters the body and some is reflected back into the medium. When it enters it either passes through without altering that body (as in a transparent thing like glass), or it alters the structure of the body in some way, or a combination of both. The apple absorbs the rest of the visible spectrum and simply allows some of the longer and shorter wavelengths to pass through unchanged. One of the effects of absorption is heating. Increased temperature is increased motion of for instance the molecules of something. Another is photosynthesis.
II. Light's creatures 1. Awash in light Like the denizens of some brilliant ocean, humans are awash in light. Light fills our universe. In the deepest of night, in the farthest reaches of space, light is there. Yet we are strangely unaware of its presence. It may be that, for humans, light is so central to our perception that nature is forced to make us unaware of it.
Milky Way Shadow at Loch Ard Gorge To see the Milky Way's glow create shadows conditions need to be just right. The surroundings must be nearly completely dark, with no bright artificial lights visible anywhere. Last, the shadows can best be caught on long camera exposures. In the above image taken in Port Campbell National Park, Victoria, Australia, seven 15-second images of the ground and de-rotated sky were digitally added to bring up the needed light and detail. A close inspection of the water just before the rocks will show reflections and shadows in light thrown by our Milky Way galaxy. An unusual triangle of light is visible this time of year just before dawn, in the northern hemisphere. This triangle of light is actually zodiacal light, light reflected from interplanetary dust particles. Zodiacal dust orbits the Sun predominantly in the same plane as the planets: the ecliptic. Zodiacal light is so bright in the north this time of year because the dust band is oriented nearly vertical at sunrise, so that the thick air near the horizon does not block out relatively bright reflecting dust. Zodiacal light is also bright for people in Earth's northern hemisphere in March and April just after sunset. The eye is responsive to visible light, but the rest of the body -the skin, and deeper tissues too - is responsive as well, and to longer and shorter wavelengths than the eye. What are we responsive to, what are we transparent to? We don't know everything about ourselves by any means. - We also, being made of the kinds of things that can emit electromagnetic wavelengths, can be sources of light. Light in the visible and ultraviolet spectrum is emitted from a biological system and detected by biological probes as part of the general weak electromagnetic radiation of living biological cells. 2. Sun and earth a. Our day-star When I go outside and feel the heat of the sun I think about the fact that I'm feeling the heat of something that is 93 million miles away.
De-light Fire festivals, sun celebrations. Light and happiness: we are the sun's creatures. the great round sun-days of July and August View of the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light from the Sun-staring Solar Dynamics Observatory. The false-color image shows emission from highly ionized iron atoms. Loops and arcs trace the glowing plasma suspended in magnetic fields above solar active regions. Imagine a pipe as wide as a state and as long as the Earth. Now imagine that this pipe is filled with hot gas moving 50,000 kilometers per hour. Further imagine that this pipe is not made of metal but a transparent magnetic field. You are envisioning just one of thousands of young spicules on the active Sun. Pictured above is one of the highest resolution image yet of these enigmatic solar flux tubes. Time-sequenced images have recently shown that spicules last about five minutes, starting out as tall tubes of rapidly rising gas but eventually fading as the gas peaks and falls back down to the Sun. Wikipedia summary:
Huge Solar Prominence Eruption The Sun rotates once about every 27 days. We may yet get a glancing blow of particles from the eruption, but it will have no major effect on Earth - maybe some aurorae - because the coronal mass ejection's cloud is so dispersed when it gets here. But it doe carry some magnetic field from the Sun and that at times can upset satellites, navigation, and communications a little.
Someday the Sun will become a red giant and incinerate the Earth. Not any time soon, of course. 5 or 10 billions of years from now. Our universe is young. If it is a closed universe, the earliest time at which it could come to an end is the year 2000 billion. It is now the year 13.7 billion. This universe has hardly started. We have not made a dent in the fuel for stars, hydrogen. The ratio of hydrogen to helium is essentially the same as it was in the beginning. Solar wind The Earth is constantly immersed in the solar wind, a rarefied flow of hot plasma (gas of free electrons and positive ions) emitted by the Sun in all directions, a result of the million-degree heat of the Sun's outermost layer, the corona. During magnetic storms, in particular, flows can be several times faster; the interplanetary magnetic field may also be much stronger. The the interplanetary magnetic field originates on the Sun, related to the field of sunspots, and its field lines (lines of force) are dragged out by the solar wind. That alone would tend to line them up in the Sun-Earth direction, but the rotation of the Sun skews them (at Earth) by about 45 degrees. Earth's magnetosphere is formed by the impact of the solar wind on the Earth's magnetic field. It forms an obstacle to the solar wind, diverting it, at a distance of about 70,000 km, forming a bow shock 12,000 km to 15,000 km further upstream. The width of the magnetosphere abreast of Earth, is typically 190,000 km, and on the night side a long "magnetotail" of stretched field lines extends to great distances. The magnetosphere is full of ions trapped as the solar wind passes the Earth. Perturbations in the solar wind increase this flow of ions. The excess moving along field lines and eventually accelerated toward the poles are responsible for changes in the aurora. NASA could soon travel through space with the use of gigantic solar sails - some as large as a football field. Solar sail propulsion technology bounces light off giant, reflective sails made of lightweight material 40 to 100 times thinner than a piece of writing paper. The continuous pressure provides sufficient thrust to perform maneuvers, such as hovering at a point in space and rotating the space vehicle's plane of orbit, which would require too much propellant for conventional rocket systems.
It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force, you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spriit until you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
Aurora Borealis, Aurora Australis - the Polar Lights An aurora (plural: auroras or aurorae) is a natural light display in the sky, particularly in the polar regions, caused by the collision of charged particles directed by the Earth's magnetic field. These phenomena are commonly visible between 60 and 72 degrees north and south latitudes, which place them in a ring just within the Arctic and Antarctic polar circles. When the solar wind meets the earth's magnetic field a shock wave forms. Inside the shock wave is a turbulent region in which is another definite boundary, the magnetopause. There are aurorae when VA layer is overloaded with electrons that cascade downward. b. Earth shot through with the light of continuous creation At more than four billion years old, earth stretches a third of the way across the history of the universe, a third of the way back to the Big Bang itself. Many of the stars you can see on a clear winter's night are younger than the planet beneath your feet. For almost 90 percent of its history the planet has been inhabited and shaped by life. The biological mechanisms that first operated in the dawn of life animate the creatures of the Earth to this day, forming an unbroken chain at least 3.8 billion years long. Life has watched continents crash together and tear themselves apart; skies glowing like bright coals; tropical seas frozen into stillness: it has endured. An unending spate of pure luminous energy pours from the Sun in all directions. Eight minutes downstream at the speed of light, part of this extraordinary flux crashes down on the Earth in a 170,000-trillion-watt torrent. Most is absorbed; this is the energy that drives the winds, makes the waves and currents flow, heats the rocks and warms the sky. A very small fraction of this energy is caught, not by rock and wind and water, but by life. It is this sunlight, endlessly refreshed, that flows through your coffee, your veins. The Earth is open to the sky. Energy from elsewhere floods through it shot through with the light of a continuous creation.
3. Evolution of visual systems a. The situation of seeing: aspects of distal perception perception must be studied as an attribute of an organism and its environment taken together
Compare proximal and distal perception. Touch is a form of proximal perception: it is perception of something we are in direct contact with. Hearing is usually a form of distal perception: perception of something that is at some distance from us. Vision is also distal perception: we do not see what the eyes are in contact with, which usually is air, or sometimes water. They ARE in direct contact with a medium that is carrying electronic waves that have been PATTERNED either by a light source, or by reflection from objects at a distance. Distal perception of objects always has four participants: the light source, the objects themselves, the medium, and the perceiving body. Illumination, forms, form transmission, and bodily restructuring. What does an evolved animal body need to see: what, when and where; later on, also who; later on maybe why. It does not need to see how it sees: it does not need to see the means by which it sees. It needs to see objects and events. We could say that evolution requires the situation of sight to be crystalline. b. Co-evolution Reliable, relevant restructuring. The things there were in the world to see have had a part in forming sight. We have coevolved with natural environments, the places that constituted our homes, for some 2 million years. We are old; our brains for 90-some percent of human history, up until the last ten thousand years or so, have been most engaged in hunting and gathering. The Other is woven into the form and function of our brains and bodies ... 131 the things we see ... have crafted and shaped the very eyes with which we perceive 132
For instance the fact that berries are a different color when ripe would be a reason to evolve color vision. c. Systems not organs [ protozoan] Remember this image when considering more complex visual systems. Think of the visual system as more than the eyes - as the whole circuit from sensory response to action through complexifying levels of nervous system evolution, and moreover as all the sorts of action that are needed to look as well as see. Perceptual response is global, integrated.
Brain and muscles - phototropism in plants, tissues change in response to light
Our eyes begin with pigments, which are chemicals that change in response to light.
The evolutionary story of human vision is interwoven with the evolution of the entire cortex, the entire nervous system. The eyes are not autonomous organs, and the way we see things is profoundly influenced by what we hear or even taste of those things, by the way we imagine their textures would feel to our fingers or against our skin. Indeed, vision may well be the most synaesthetic of the senses - the sense most thoroughly infiltrated and altered by the participation of the other senses. xvii.
Every new structure has had to happen in the context of every structure that's already there. In early creatures are quite segregated from each other. [neopallium of the jumping shrew] In later mammals the direction of evolution has been toward always more complex global integration across the senses. Visual response in humans is extraordinarily interwoven into the whole cortex. [cortical areas active in eye movements] A fascinating new finding about later primate vision is that a new visual system has gotten built onto the cortex while the old system is retained. The two systems can be called the what and where system. They take separate (but corsslinked) paths through the cortex and have quite different functions and characteristics. [macaque mother using the what system] III. Knowing by seeing There's the ordinary knowing by seeing that we do every day, but visual perception is also the basis of a series of elaborations: native elaborations like imagining and thinking; technological elaborations of many kinds; paravisual elaborations like clairvoyance; scientific metaphor. 1. Conscious and unconscious seeing Vision is only partly conscious. By means of vision we are able to know more than we know we see. ego-consciousness as being surrounded by a multitude of little luminosities ... the state of the unconscious the star-strewn heavens, stars reflected in dark water, nuggets of gold or golden sand scattered in black earth.
Once perception is understood in this light the notion of "extra-sensory perception," itself a contradiction in terms, may be recognized as the necessary by-product of the contemporary assumption that ordinary perception is an entirely mechanical phenomenon. If we assume that the senses are merely passive mechanisms geared to an environment of random, chance events, then any experience of direct, non-verbal communication with others will inevitably be construed as a bizarre event that takes place in some extraordinary dimension outside the material world. But what if the living body, when healthy, is in constant communication with the space that surrounds it? What if the senses are not passive mechanisms but active, exploratory organs evolved in the depths of a living environment? We have only to consider the amount of chemical information regarding Our eyes and our ears are capable of discriminations far more subtle than those to which we normally attend. When these organs are taken together with organs of taste, smell and touch, as interactive components of a single synaesthetic perceptual system, we may discern that the living body is a natural clairvoyant, and that extra-sensory perception is not extrasensory at all. We may be able to learn to see consciously what we earlier knew by means of vision but unconsciously. 2. Virtuosic seeing The things we need to see (and have seen) in a lifetime alter our ability to see. There is exceptional seeing of many kinds. a. Trackers Tom Brown, a well-known tracker, sees tracks on hard rock surfaces. By looking at tracks, he knows if an animal is hungry, if she has just eaten, if she is newly pregnant. I am told that he can tell from a single set of tracks if there has been a miscarriage, if she is troubled or uncertain, if she is about to run or change direction. .. in the realm of subtle sensation, the Kalahari Bushmen know when a visitor is arriving, still several miles away, by feeling a vibrational change in their hearts... Charles could also, from half a mile across the savanna, name any of the 120 baboons we followed. He could predict, from a subtle shift in the color or texture of a baboon's skin, the exact day on which she would be most fertile. And like Tom Brown, he could, in fact, see every phase of the female cycle. 15 Aboriginal adolescents able to identify the individual footprints of two hundred, often three hundred, clan members
b. Women seeing other humans For example, in Ida May Gaskin's Spiritual midwifery, seeing the new-born infant's distress and well-being. 3. Assisted seeing a. first instruments There was a spectacle shop in Italy by 1286. Telescope 1590. The 17th century turned out to be tremendous in the history of light. I betook myself to observations of the heavenly bodies with incredible delight.
The Sidereus Nuncius is a short treatise published 1610, in Latin, by Galileo - it was the first scientific treatise based on observations made through a telescope. Sometimes translated into English as The Starry Messenger. A leap in scientific understanding that came with the development of perspective drawing during the Renaissance. b. NASA's cosmos NASA images taken by the European Southern Observatory's camera and telescope at La Silla, Chile or Hubble Space Telescope, etc. The Red Rectangle Nebula from Hubble How was the unusual Red Rectangle nebula created? At the nebula's center is an aging binary star system that surely powers the nebula but does not, as yet, explain its colors. The unusual shape of the Red Rectangle is likely due to a thick dust torus which pinches the otherwise spherical outflow into tip-touching cone shapes. Because we view the torus edge-on, the boundary edges of the cone shapes seem to form an X. The distinct rungs suggest the outflow occurs in fits and starts. The unusual colors of the nebula are less well understood, however, and current speculation holds that they are partly provided by hydrocarbon molecules that may actually be building blocks for organic life. The Red Rectangle nebula lies about 2,300 light years away towards the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros). The nebula is shown above in unprecedented detail as captured recently by the Hubble Space Telescope. Heart and Soul Nebulas in Infrared Two bright emission nebulas nicknamed Heart and Soul can be found in Cassiopea. The image was taken in infrared light by the recently launched WISE telescope. Infrared light penetrates well inside the vast and complex bubbles created by newly formed stars in the interior of these two massive star forming regions. Light takes about 6,000 years to reach us from these nebulas, which together span roughly 300 light years. Dust Sculptures in the Rosette Nebula Visible above are globules of dark dust and gas that are slowly being eroded away by the energetic light and winds by nearby massive stars. Left alone long enough, the molecular-cloud globules would likely form stars and planets. The above image was taken in very specific colors of sulfur (shaded red), hydrogen (green), and oxygen (blue). 4. 'Seeing' - visual imagining as seeming to see Seeming to see - dreaming, imagining, hallucination, hypnagogy, reading and story-telling, synaesthesia. An example of particular vivid seeming to see is hypnagogia, which is visually quite different from dreaming. a. Hypnagogia flares, sparks and cloud-like forms-known as 'entoptic lights', 'phosphenes' or Eigenlicht Aristotle spoke of the "affections we experience when sinking into slumber" In the third century AD, Iamblichus, the Neo-Platonic philosopher, wrote of the "voices" and "bright and tranquil light" that came to him in the "condition between sleeping and waking" and which he believed were a form of "god-sent" experience. There is much evidence to suggest that the alchemists of the Middle Ages made use of a form of hypnagogia during their lengthy preparations and distillations. Russian journalist and philosopher PD Ouspensky explored and wrote about a "half-dream state, in which he both slept and did not sleep". His 'half-dream' states filled him with a sensation of "astonishment" and "extraordinary joy" because he could see and understand how dreams were created: I am asleep. Golden dots, sparks and tiny stars appear and disappear before my eyes. These sparks and stars gradually merge into a golden net with diagonal meshes which moves slowly and regularly in rhythm with the beating of my heart... The next moment the golden net is transformed into rows of brass helmets belonging to Roman soldiers marching along the street below. I... watch them from the window of a high house in... Constantinople... I see the sun shining on their helmets. Then suddenly I detach myself from the window-sill and... fly slowly over the houses, and then over the Golden Horn in the direction of Stamboul. I smell the sea, feel the wind, the warm sun... The following types of visual hypnagogic/hypnopompic imagery are most common: (a) formless (e.g., waves, clouds of color); (b) designs (e.g., geometric and symmetrical patterns and shapes); (c) faces, figures, animals, and objects; (d) nature scenes (e.g., landscapes, seascapes, gardens); (e) scenes with people; and (f) print and writing (e.g., in real or imaginary languages). Seeing of faces is very common. Faces may range from the beautiful and the pleasant to the hideous and the terrifying. These faces are often characterized as being extremely lifelike and often seem to be looking at the observer. The Journal of Parapsychology, June 2002, published a research paper on the relationship between the not quite dreamlike states that occur in the moments between waking and sleep and reports of seemingly paranormal, or anomalous, experiences. Some experimental studies have found that hypnagogic imagery is conducive to telepathy. There are a number of well documented cases of ESP and crisis apparitions that have occurred during the hypnagogic states. 5. Metaphoric seeing There are things we see easily and very well because we are the sorts of bodies we are, with the sorts of history of necessity and contact we have. Those kinds of native ease can be used to understand other sorts of things. Scientific visualisation, mathematical visualization. Systematic allegorical visualization, for instance a savant boy's use of an imagined landscape as a calculating device, in AS Byatt's 1978 The virgin in the garden. Stories about developing visual intuition, for instance the use of computer visualization by the mathematicians working on chaotic dynamics. "Information visualization and interaction to allow users to see, explore, and understand large amounts of information at once." 6. Seeing by knowing If we know what we are looking at, we can see the Milky Way we can see it as our galaxy's horizon rather than just an unusually thick scatter of stars (Paul Churchland 1989). 7. Seeing the visual system itself Since all of the necessary parts of the situation of seeing are always present at the same time, we can learn to see them consciously in the whole of our seeing.
There is an exact sense in which when we see clouds moving we are seeing ourselves. We are really seeing clouds, but we can do so in a way that simultaneously lets us know something about our own bodies. For instance we can see that the structure by means of which we are seeing must be changing in some way that exactly correlates with the changes we are seeing. Seeing different colors of grass in a field in turn. Jurij Moskvitin's stories about learning to see the effects of visual subsystems. In his little-read Essay on the Origin of Thought, Moskvitin desribes how he came to observe "states of mind when consciousness is kept somewhere halfway between the waking state and dream." Moskvitin became aware of strange "sparks" and "smoke-like forms", which "upon close and intense observation became the elements of waking dreams, forming persons, landscapes, strange mathematical forms..." The sparks, Moskvitin writes, reminded him of "the tips of waves glittering in the sun" which on prolonged observation appeared to be "strange rings and nets moving swiftly over the waves." 8. Ecstatic seeing A mystic's vision of the whole cosmos as light: The whole world is white light. light entering head and body as if a quiet wave of light has broken out from her and foamed up over everything that sea, and a wave of it, and all the other waves too pouring light into us different lights for different needs She is completely crystalline, every outline clear, sharp, crisp soft, fiery tenderness has broken all over my being, a fire-water of love a clear, crystalline sea of soft fire looking at the sea from within it seeing myself breaking and glittering in a thousand waves before me. All morning this breaking and glittering had gone on in me. The child is a dolphin in the sea of light. each thing was made of the same substance, was moving and breathing and shining and emerging in and from the same vast, quiet, Body.
9. Not seeing Thinking about seeing inevitably also has to go to not seeing. a. bad theory Our theories of seeing and perception in general have worked against an understanding of pleasure and knowledge in seeing. Each of the contemporary sciences, then, must still pay lip service to a model of perception constructed in accordance with seventeenth-century notions of the mechanical nature of the physical world and the absolute separation of mind from matter. One important reason for our prolonged adherence to an obsolete model may be the fact that, although it does not describe perception as we actually experience it, this model does describe perception as we need to conceive it if we are to continue in our cultural program of natural manipulation and environmental spoilage without hindrance of ethical restraint.
b. Personal fear In any moment different ways of looking can alter what we can see - looking quickly, looking slowly. Looking away. c. Cultural poverty The things we have seen in a lifetime have altered our ability to see. Industrialized and commercialized surroundings must form vision to be shallow and incoherent, and with vision the rest of the cortex, and with it the whole of the body, and from this shallow and incoherent history of contact will come more depthless and unintelligent surroundings.
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