by Carl Strang
Winter is a time when we slow down and become introspective. Sitting and staring into the fire, we ponder the big questions. If you have been following this blog, you know that the focus here is science, science that can be done simply in outdoor settings. But we are more than scientists, and science has well defined limitations that need to be understood by everyone who does science or studies its findings. This winter I am using one post per week to develop my own viewpoint and biases, in particular sharing my take on the relationship between science and spirituality. In part this defines for me what these two realms of human experience are all about, and also develops the separate methods used for inquiry in each realm. I plan to place this paragraph in front of each entry in this series, so that those who are interested only in natural history or in scientific practice can skip these posts.
Advanced Awareness: Physical Techniques
I want to step away from physiology for a moment and describe what I call advanced awareness, sensory techniques which can compensate for some of our sensory limitations. I first was introduced to these by my martial arts teacher, and by survival and tracking teacher Tom Brown, Jr. These methods give us a more comprehensive grasp of our surroundings, and more.
A prerequisite for awareness is relaxation. Relaxation allows us to slow down and tune out everything but the process of awareness. Awareness requires us to let go of worries, of concerns about time, of thoughts of what we are going to do next. An example of a relaxation method I have used is to create a poem or phrase that will act as a reminder or trigger for awareness. For instance: “Let your shell of troubles collapse to the forest floor, and step away from it. Now take the reality of each leaf and wrap it around you.”
The first of the sensory techniques is wide‑angle vision. Communications technologies such as print and television have provided many advantages necessary for the development of our civilization. But there have been costs, too, and one of these is the way we use our vision. Television screens are small, and a line of print occupies an even tinier portion of our visual field. These media train us to focus our vision narrowly, to look at only one small thing at a time. But when we do so, we miss most of what is going on around us. We use our vision like a flashlight beam illuminating the eyes of an animal at night. Everything else is darkness. The preferred alternative is to spend most of our time in wide‑angle vision, spreading our attentiveness over the entire visual field. A person using wide‑angle vision loses some detail, but there is nothing wrong with focusing narrowly for a short time, or for as long as is necessary to examine some particular thing. By seeing widely we see more, notice more.
Conventional, narrow vision is allied to the linearity of language. Notice how impossible it is to describe ecosystems in strings of words. Wide‑angle vision, considering many parts of an ecosystem at once in parallel, opens the door to a better understanding of how ecosystems really function. Wide‑angle vision is especially sensitive to movement, and is necessary for optimal seeing in dim light. This is because when we are focusing narrowly, we are using the fovea, small regions in our retinas composed almost entirely of cones, which do not function in dim light. With wide-angle vision we use the entire retina, which also has rods, the receptors for light intensity.
The second physical awareness technique also is visual: seeing in three dimensions. We all know that our physical universe has three dimensions of space, but thanks to our current dependence on one‑dimensional print and two‑dimensional TV and movies, many of us don’t actually perceive in three dimensions. A demonstration of this is that urban-suburban people visiting wild places often look at the surface of a mass of vegetation, say a forest or clump of brush, without seeing into or through it, without noticing the three dimensional arrangement of the plants. But back behind that surface is where most of the action is.
We’ll come back to vision, but now I want to focus on sounds. Every sound, even the smallest and faintest, is significant in a wild setting. Deer teach this. On several occasions, watching deer who did not know I was there, I was struck by how sensitive they were to the slightest sounds. The small snap of a twig, barely noticeable to me, would stop a deer from feeding for several minutes while it peered in the direction from which the sound had come, sniffing and moving its ears to obtain more information. Out of this lesson I have profited many times by seeking the sources of little sounds.
The third dimension includes us. We need to be aware of what is all around us, not just in front of us, and to include ourselves in the environment. Scanning is a technique for accomplishing this. We need to turn our eyes to all directions, in wide angle vision, and with 3-D vision keep track of all depths as well.
Nature Inquiries 