It has been a while since anyone said that ordinary things like cups or shoes have magical powers to enlighten us about the universe.

Initiates to the Eleusinian Mysteries knew that ears of grain symbolized the fertility of Earth, and religions have always had sacred objects – shrouds, masks, menorahs – that had hallowed significance for their followers. But it wasn’t until 1945, when Heidegger uncovered what he called “the fourfold,” that someone observed that the ordinary objects beside us bring critical aspects of existence together into an imminent whole, and should therefore be our standard for what is real.

Familiar things like jugs, bridges, shoes were not just useful tools. They were not just pieces of equipment to be employed for a job and then put back on the shelf or thrown away. They had what he called a “staying” power, the ability to make us gather around them and focus on their integrity, their presence, and above all, their hidden dimensions. When this non-practical aspect was beheld, he argued, utilitarian goals were replaced by a feeling of embeddedness in a reality enfolded by four realms of
significance. Earth. Sky. Divinities and Mortals. Things do not just serve us. They serve Being, which means that if we want to know what existence is, we should let things be what they are, and try to fathom their deeper meaning.

This awakening to the metaphysical aspects of the furniture of our lives got lost among all the other questions raised by Heidegger’s thought — his critique of modernity, his attempts to resurrect Being, his anti-semitism. But “things” actually became more important to him as time went on, and as he sought alternatives to the dismal wasteland created by American and Soviet technology. Unlike earlier, when he maintained that humans were necessary for reality to exist, he began to think that “things” had a thing-hood of their very own, independent of whoever made them or how they were used, and that this thing-hood offered a way out of the world as presence created by modern technology.

I didn’t know anything about Heidegger when I started to experiment with perception back in 1963. When I first began to think about “things,” I was totally unconscious of philosophy, and given my bent towards classical music and poetry, would probably have had a difficult time understanding it, in any case. I was an undergraduate at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, an intellectual hobo obsessed with “seeing” because my family had recently decamped to Jamaica, and I was still recovering from the shock of moving from a quiet, well-organized Canadian suburb to a beautiful but raucous tropical island. I was also a musician, having recently given up long-held plans to become a professional violinist. While happy to have finally made a decision about what to do with my life, I was feeling a lot of uncertainty about the world and my new direction. Would I still want to play Brahms if I studied chemistry? What would happen to my “soul” if I gave up classical music?

I had been inching closer toward “things” ever since I saw all sorts of “new”
things in Jamaica – palm trees, breadfruit, cowrie shells, dreadlocks, tin drums, patties, saris, Austin Minis. The island was a mishmash of races and nationalities long before ethnic diversity became PC in the north, and I was surprised by how much I liked living in a place where everyone looked different from everyone else. Though my life was very protected — never once using public transportation— I was fascinated by what I could see from my mother’s car and wished that I could somehow enter the space where everyone else seemed to be living such a noisy, emotional life. I was too young (and too afraid) to go out on my own, so instead of breaking free, I looked at the things on the other side of my cage and tried to figure out where they came from. Who brought them here? Where were they made? What did people do with them?

Later on, in Sackville, where I was far away from big cities and traffic and alien cultures, “things” became even more compelling when, in the stillness of a small town in an underdeveloped province, I saw their edges and corners against the backdrop of the huge Bay of Fundy sky.
It was suddenly as if they were on stage in New Brunswick, the main show. After class I would wander down dirt roads and let myself experience the life that was there. I found the remote stillness of the Tantramar Marshes fascinating. Ploughs, wooden fences, farms, fields – then silence as the marshes spread out, like a distant country, a dark glistening plain lying next to the horizon. The skies were beautiful. As I walked in and out of town, I felt like an intruder breaking in upon glorious scenes of peace and tranquility and I would often stare at them for long periods of time trying to soak up their meaning. There were rarely any people or signs of people. Maybe once in a while an abandoned house. Or a car.

Under the weight of all this natural life and beauty, I began to
wonder if I too was not just a thing?

I too would live and die and go back to the soil just like these fences and ploughs and dilapidated farm buildings. I might do a little writing or work in a hospital. But after that, what was there? Why were we here if all we did was grow up, eat a lot of food, get a job, make money, grow old and fall apart? Surely there was more to it than that? It could not be that this was
all there was. Not when everything is so beautiful and when we feel so much?

Another question that bothered me was the difference between nature and
“civilization.” How could it be so silent and gorgeous out here on the marshes where nature was slowly passing through the seasons (and water was slowly seeping into the soil,) and so noisy and crazy back in the Women’s Residence?

What was the connection between these two venues, these two theatres? How did modern life get to be so different from nature? I knew about evolution and the long story of our branching off from other primates, then other hominids, then homo Habilis, Erectus, Neanderthals, and finally Sapiens about 200,000 years ago. But this was a different question. This was about the distance between us and nature and why the two worlds had spread so far apart. What was the meaning behind our having developed the know-how to build cars, heat homes with oil, erect tall skyscrapers, create atom bombs? When nature was already super intelligent, it seemed dangerous to be departing so radically from the rest, and I felt a real sense of dread about the future. The world always seemed to be careening towards some kind of brink — nuclear war — race riots. Was it because we had overstepped important boundaries, and now we could not go back? Were humans dangerous? But maybe I was missing something. Maybe the answer right in front of me but I just could not see it?

I took a look at what was right in front of me, and what I saw was a beautifully integrated scene subtly interwoven into a tweed-like blend of shapes and colours and illuminated by a gentle light – rocks, twigs, stones, clumps of grass. They looked back at me but did not say anything. The impasse was mutual. With the exception of Loren Eiseley, the books I had found in the Mary Mellish Library did not say much about rocks and twigs.

The Experiment
So what was I to do? Since “things” were all I had, maybe I should look at them more closely? They were in the same predicament that I was – upright and naked (figuratively speaking) on the surface of the earth with no hot wires to Central Office. Could I use them to figure out what was going on?

You can see where thinking perceptually prompts you to cross some boundaries. The world is not divided up according to academic subjects or owners or brand names or time on the bestseller list. It is not riddled with abstractions that take your attention away from what is close at hand. It is free and whole and irrefutably present, and it is all you can do to take it in. Observe it. Respect it for what it is. Appreciate it. To do anything more aggressive would be to take it apart, to cut it up, and that takes your attention away from seeing what it is that you are in, in the first place. To perceive, you must stay silent because that is the only way to hang
on to the prize of being where you actually are. Not ideas but the thing itself.

One day, I decided that if I could just see where I was, I would have a better sense of what was going on. The situation was obviously too big for me to fathom, so the best I could hope for was to get an angle on it. Catch a sighting. Sneak up on it. I knew from experience that life looks different depending on where you are located (and whether or not you have eaten breakfast). So to get a sense of the whole that I was in, maybe I could bring my knowledge of different points of view within the universe all together in one place? How would I do that? I pick one thing and look at it from as many points of view as I could think of.

I know this sounds implausible. How could a thing show you where you are in the universe? Don’t you need something more technological for that? But it rested upon three assumptions, all of which were reasonable and that made perfect sense to me at the time.

One is that things are worth looking at in their own right, independent of their usefulness to me or anyone else. Instinctively, I knew this, probably because I grew up in a family of artists who were always oohing and aahing over some new find and asking me to admire it. Our house was full of treasures we had bought or found, and there was an unspoken rule that no one ever threw anything away because it might mean something to someone. It was not difficult for me to think that something I held in my hand that could have telepathic powers.

My second assumption may be a bit harder to digest. I decided that I was just another thing. I could talk and move and play the violin, but in terms of physical integrity and location there was not much difference between me and a thing, and I would become a thing after I died. So if I could just get over my pride in being human, I had a mirror to my own physical location. Just as a thing had tops and sides, I too had tops and sides. Just as a thing could sit on a table, so could I. If I was in the universe, so was a thing. We both existed on the surface of Earth, so if I wanted to see where I was, all I needed to do was look at a thing because where it was, I was too.

Finally, I assumed I could imagine Earth and the universe. This was the most challenging of my conditions, and I prepared myself by remembering places I had been and looking at what James J. Gibson calls “aids to comprehension” – space art, drawings, maps (there were no photos of other planets in 1963). The proportions had to be accurate so I took note of sizes and distance and tried to learn as much as I could about the composition of planets so that I could see them in my mind. All I had were travel books and magazines like National Geographic. But I made an inventory of all the places I knew existed – deserts, mountains, oceans, jungles, forests, then planets, comets, galaxies, and the immense distances between them. I put them all together into a file in my mind I called “the Universe,” and added images to it when I came across something particularly memorable. I wanted to feel them at my back when I looked at a thing so that I could see where it was.

The Result
My preparations were a bit strenuous, but the actual experiment turned out to be a lot easier than it sounds, though why what I did worked is still a mystery to me, and I wish someone would explain it to me. I seem to have found a way to access another viewpoint on the world, another dimension. Basically, all I did was keep my eyes glued to a small stone I picked up from the road, and think carefully about and where it was in relation to other places I knew existed at the same time. Where the stone had been and what it had witnessed over the decades and centuries. How it fit into the larger context in which we all lived. I used the stone as anchor point and reached out in my imagination to bring in faraway cities, countries, landscapes, planets, galaxies. I lay images of all these places on my stone, one by one, in ascending distance.

While imagining Europe and South America was not that hard, because I had been to Europe and experienced what it felt like to be on another continent, the effort to visualize places like Jupiter or the Milky Way taxed my brain, and I had to stretch my imagination to its limits to see landscapes that were alien and had unfamiliar chemistry. The effort made me totally allocentric. and I lost my sense of self.

My brain staggered under all the data I had given it, and I knew I could not hold it together for very long. But I laymanaged to maintain it for a few moments and then something happened I could not have predicted. The framework through which I looked at the world around me suddenly expanded. A door suddenly opened. I no longer existed in a space with just three dimensions. The sticks and stones around me were no longer just by the side of a road outside of Sackville. They were in a much bigger space — a huge magnificent, terrible space with corridor after corridor of light and power streaming down on tangible surfaces like a thousand spotlights. It was as if everything around me had a dusty yellow plastic covering I did not know existed removed, and was now reborn into another reality, a bigger reality. An extra dimension had been added to the place where I was, and objects projected and receded with a sharpness that stunned me with their unbearable presence. I ceased to exist as a person and became the area that surrounded me which was huge, vast, infinite. I was an atom, an electron, a proton, a point in empty space. The world had ballooned in size and I was just a little spot of consciousness the size of a berry.

How do I know it was another dimension? Because height, width and depth were no longer there. The framework through which I normally saw things was missing. The world was totally un-enclosed, and I felt exposed to the universe as if I were naked on a stage. In fact, that is exactly where I saw I was. On a stage before an audience I could not see. The world was actually quite fierce, and I’d been a fool to think I could handle it.

Heidegger thought the fourfold. Earth. Sky. Divinities. Mortals. He got the metaphysics of it right. He just did not perceive it.

The difference between thinking something and perceiving it is very great. When you perceive something you see an order that was previously invisible.

I put the stone back down on the road and let the marsh air bathe me with its gentle touch. What had I done? Why does everything look so different now? Have I just had “a vision”? But what was it? Everything is the same, just bigger. I was in a bigger place than I thought. And more beautiful.

I tried to calm my thoughts as I walked slowly back to town. Closed doors and windows nodded kindly as I passed by. As I neared the campus, I thought about telling people what I had done, but then I could not figure out what to say. That “things” were not as dull as everyone thinks? They could help you see where you are? I could feel the foreheads wrinkle. I decided to keep it to myself for the time being. However, I was still a student and as soon as I returned to class, multiple currents of talk and debate on every other topic but perception soon swept me away. Within moments I had forgotten what I saw. And though it would return to me at night and I would lie in bed wondering what I had done to find the world so liberated like that, so free and gorgeous, the difficulty of finding the right words to explain it was insurmountable. I would lose my train of thought, and sleep would soon overtake me.

Afterthoughts
Many years have passed since I looked carefully at a rock near the Bay of Fundy and having studied and repeated what I did many times, I now have two thoughts.

My first thought is hopeful. The shift from mid-grade realist to involuntary mystic was a shock, and I have more respect now than I had before, for people who claim to have witnessed something abnormal. Where we are is very, very strange. There are so many things about it that we do not understand, it is wise to keep our minds open. The universe has hundreds of dimensions, and we humans normally only perceive three of them.

But I have also come to realize that the reason why my little experiment worked is because I was working with “things.” Things are not us but they are like us, which means they can stand proxy for us and still not lose their independence, their separateness.

My little rock was totally unchanged by my switching places with it in my mind, and after I put it back on the road, it continued its existence as an object on the surface of Earth in a tiny piece of New Brunswick for many years. It is probably still there. Even if I were able to smash it into a thousand pieces through the mental force of my thinking, those pieces would still be sitting by the side of the road because that is what things do. They are here beside us. They don’t disappear within sixty or seventy years the way we do. They continue. Not forever. Eventually they break down into their chemical elements and are absorbed into another thing – the atmosphere or the soil. But that just confirms my point. Things are different enough from us to be separate, but they are like us enough to be here on the surface of the planet. That means if we want to figure out what is going on, we should study them.

My discovery that things can be used to perceive where we are bowled me over, not because it put me in touch with God or whatever, but because it let me in to the universe. Things are compasses to the universe if you know how to look at them in the right way. Of course, the reason why they can do this is because they are in the universe, so they are really just mirroring back a situation they are already part of. But their constant availability and their fundamental neutrality means that they do not interfere with the connection between their existence and the universe, the way we do. They are not living, suffering beings with a point of view. They are things.

What this means is that we have a tool to get our bearings. We have something to release us from the claustrophobic, sometimes barbaric, multi-layered chatter of human life. We have a doorway into the nonhuman. Of course, we go back to the nonhuman eventually because that is what death is. And you could say that we already have a doorway to the nonhuman in the work of scientists who probe the galaxies with their instruments and bring back physical data.

But by using a “thing” to see where I was, I got out of one place and into another bigger place. I experienced the annihilating power that everywhere surrounds us, without using a machine and without dying. I experienced it myself, which means I got a taste of the mysterious power and beauty we are up against. I saw myself how small we really are.
Not only that, I saw that we are on a stage. There is a set-up. This would be hard for an instrument to detect because it involves the sense of being watched which can only be felt by living creatures. There might be a way to digitalize the sense of being watched, but it still wouldn’t be the same because computers are not sentient. They are not mortal.

This is the difference between science and naked eye physics. There is material that each method grasps that is beyond the other. I cannot see neutrons and electrons, but nor can electron microscopes see what I call the set-up. Humans are still good for something.

My second thought is darker. It is that language is a problem. I couldn’t see the set-up before I did my experiment because language had hijacked my perception. My perception did not adhere to what exists. Now it does.

This is a difficult observation, too complicated to go into here, and I apologize for introducing an idea which I am not going to explain. Let me just say that language is probably a virus. It is at least “terminally dysfunctional,” to use Derek Bickerton’s phrase, given what we have done to the planet under its guidance, and we are only now beginning to understand its effect on our brains. I intend to say more in the future about its ambiguous presence in our lives.

So if language is a problem and things are doorways to the universe, how do my two thoughts fit together?

I can only say this because I looked at a thing in relation to the universe. But switching places with the rock exposed me to something too huge for language to represent. By looking at a “thing” in the largest context I could imagine, I freed myself from the framework through which I normally see rocks and roads and motels by the highway, and let myself into the real distances and real powers that are “out there.” The yellow plastic that I saw was language. Language is necessary for me to have a self, to get control over my life, to live in a community. But out from under it, or away from it, the world is no longer divided up into rocks and trees, classes and universities. It’s united in one huge phenomenon that dwarfs me and makes me feel very small.

What my experiment near the Bay of Fundy showed me, was that if the perceptual experience is big and powerful enough, language stops functioning. Faced with something it cannot represent using the concepts and grammatical structures that are its usual currency, it seizes up. This is good news if language is a virus because it means we have a counter to its insidious control over our brains.

Finding the words to say this much has taken me many years because what I uncovered defies quick verbalization. I had to figure out how to explain it before I could talk about it. That took considerable reflection on language and perception, as well as lots of research. But now that I have studied them both, I can share what I found with others.

What I uncovered when I looked at the little rock in New Brunswick is the presence of the universe here on earth. I call it “the universe on earth.” It left me speechless. Stupefied is a better word. It totally changed my perspective, and made me extremely suspicious about language. It also made me curious about the set-up. Who or what is watching us? I think its gaze is benevolent, but I am not sure.

If people want to find the universe on earth, they should become less cavalier about the “things” in their lives, and start taking them seriously as a form of being. This could have a beneficial effect in many ways, not least on how we treat the planet, but on how we feel about ourselves too. We are not just machines. We can see something that machines cannot see. We can see the set-up. The world is not just a material place. There is something else going on here that is very strange, and things allow us to see it because they are compasses to the universe. They show us where we are, and where we are is so astonishing, language is stunned into silence.