I did not read my way into uncovering the presence of the universe on Earth. I was curious and found it. But Loren Eiseley and Rachel Carson and, believe it or not, Oswald Spengler’s Decline Of The West, were what I was reading at the time that I developed my technique, and these books were part of the platform from which I took off, as it were. Later on, I found authors who confirmed my research or extended it in new directions. For example, Derek Bickerton showed me how language interferes with what we perceive, and this explained to me why the presence of the universe here is hard to find. I also spent an inordinate amount of time reading philosophy because I wanted to understand how perception got buried. A fool’s errand. Perception gets buried because people talk too much. But the original experiment was conducted without teachers and without much in the way of intellectual preparation. I was eighteen and had not yet been to college. This means that educated people may have to unlearn a bunch of stuff if they want to imitate what I did. No book or article can substitute for just looking.

Rachel Carson (1961) The Sea Around Us. (New York: Signet Science)

Annie Dillard (1990) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper Collins)

Edwin Dobb (1995, February) “Without Earth There Is No Heaven” Harper’s Monthly 289, 33-41.

Loren Eiseley (1959) The Immense Journey (New York: Vintage)

Martin Heidegger (1967) What Is a Thing? (Chicago:Henry Regnery)

National Audubon Society Pocket Guide (1995) Planets and Their Moons (New York: Alfred A. Knopf)

Norwegian film series “Wild North” (2015)

MORE ACADEMIC

J. L. Austin (1962) Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford:Oxford University Press)

Derek Bickerton (1990) Language and Species (Chicago:University of Chicago)

Edmund Blair Bolles (1991) A Second Way of Knowing (New York:Prentice Hall)

William James (1977) “Percept and Concept — The Import of Concepts” The Writings of William James, ed. by John McDermott, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)

Hilary Putnam 1999 “The importance of being austin: the need for a second naïveté”
the threefold cord mind, body, and world (New York: Columbia University Press)

Scientists distrust human perception. They believe it is unreliable and varies too much with age, gender, education. Humans should not be used to make scientific observations. Machines are much better at picking up on the truth about physical reality.

But while machines may be good at uncovering Earth’s mathematical basis, they do not detect its phenomenological display all that well because they can only focus on one thing at a time. For example, the purpose of binoculars is not to grasp the whole of a setting. It’s to make faraway objects seem closer. And while cameras and goggles are good at capturing images of what humans see, they impose a framework on it that distorts its full 3D – 350 degree nature. Neither captures anywhere near the full panorama humans are exposed to, and sometimes pick up on, on a daily basis. We are much better than machines are at seeing the world as a whole all at once — earth and universe. This is because of our education and because we also see more aspects. Human vision depends on knowledge as well as data. We use what we already know to see with, whereas machines just have previously designed receptors for physical inputs. Because we know more about the physical world than machines do, we see more than they do when we look at it.

Even though our vision may not be as accurate as a machine’s, the world as seen by humans is bigger and deeper.

In this experiment you are going to try to perceive the scenes in front of you and around you more deeply than you normally probably do. You are going to try to see yourself existing on Earth in the universe. You are going to try to see where you really are.

The scenes in front of you are vivid and complex. They entail a combination of all kinds of different entities as well as layouts depending on where you are. Since these entities and layouts can be extremely distracting, choose to do this in a setting that is simple and quiet so that you can concentrate. The top of a building. A hill in the country. The desert. An uninhabited lake. You want a vista on the planet. You don’t want to spend time untangling yourself from stuff that is not relevant. So look for a place where these three things are clearly exposed — Earth, the universe and yourself.

How will you see yourself? Hang on, and I will show you. In the meantime, get yourself ready for the effort by thinking about three things — The universe. The planet. And things. Things? Yes, objects, preferably natural ones like leaves, rocks or twigs. You won’t believe how powerful they are.

And be prepared for a shock. The space around you is going to change.

THE UNIVERSE
First off, think clearly about where you really are — in the universe. Look at pictures of other planets, galaxies, stars, black holes, and try to wrap your head around the huge space that is out there.

Where we really are is hard to think about. But force yourself to become conscious of its vast distances and strange dead entities. Imagine yourself out there surrounded by all that “empty” space. Other planets are not like Earth. They are often devastatingly cold (Pluto) or else so hot with molten rocks and lava you could not touch them without burning up yourself (Venus). Their inhospitable surfaces repel life. Bare rock surfaces pockmarked with impact craters, ice, volcanos, uncharacterized debris, dust — there is nothing of the beautiful green scenery many of us enjoy. Even if we live in the north where there is less daylight, and where trees and plants do not grow, loners still survive if they are skillful because Earth gives them water and wildlife, whereas nothing lives where there us no hydrogen and oxygen. Bring these weird unfriendly places into your consciousness by looking at images of the surface of Mars, Saturn, Pluto.

Think about trying to survive on them. These are our neighbours in this vast alien space we call the universe. They are just a tiny part of an entity so vast and strange you couldn’t imagine anything weirder. Cold. Dark. Explosions. This is where we live. In a huge expanding tank filled with dead rocks. It is very beautiful in a cold glittering kind of way.

THE PLANET

Go Outside. Find a place where you can see and feel the planet. Get away from other people, talking, music, cooking. Find somewhere quiet. You may have to leave the city, or almost, because you want to see the sky, to feel the ground under your feet, to locate the horizon. You want a vista on the planet so that you start to see it as an object on which you happen to be standing. You want to expose it as an object so that it can affect you and lead you to the truth about your situation.

To get a sense of the planet as an object in the universe you will need to do some remembering about what it includes. Photographs like this help:

But they don’t capture what Earth feels like as a place because they are taken from outside the planet whereas you need to think about Earth from the inside. You need to become the planet and feel its many landscapes and geological formations as your coat. Your skin. You are trying to fathom what it means to exist in the universe so you need to be conscious of where you are, and then where you are is.
So imagine different landscapes —

oceans, deserts, glaciers, forests. If you have travelled, pull up images from your memory of places you have visited. If you haven’t seen much of the planet, go to the library and look at magazines like National Geographic or else books of world photography, and try to find images of landscapes on each continent — North America, Africa, Europe, Asia. Watch documentaries like “Wild North,” David Attenborough’s “Our Planet.”
You want to see where you live — on a planet that has thousands of different terrains and billions of situations for living — as many situations as there are living beings. Try to see this in your imagination. You want to get your head around how much life there is and where it is happening because this is where you are.

THINGS
1. Both natural and man-made things are extremely interesting. They take up physical space on Earth.They undergo the same weather, sun and moon that we do. For a set amount of time they endure before decomposing. They are seen by us in various settings. They adorn human structures. They lay unused or abandoned after use. They are often expendable. The surface of Earth is littered with things that have been used by humans. Humans become things when they die. Earth sheds trillions of natural objects that lie, float, stand, sit or get lodged somewhere indiscriminately. Man-made or natural, things are a large part of the visual scene that presents itself to observers on Earth (and elsewhere.) They witness everything that happens and has happened.

2. At the same time that they are part of visual space for humans on Earth, natural objects are also in the universe. On account of their location on the surface of the planet, they exist in the large dimension that includes everything that exists. Simultaneous with their existence on Earth, they exist in the fathomless, boundless space that contains all reality, as far as we know. They do not just wait for humans to use them or see them. They have another, separate existence that is independent from human contact.

This separate existence is not obvious because we are used to thinking of objects instrumentally. We are not accustomed to considering them as having their own lives. Humans have a tendency to incorporate everything into their consciousness and do not always recognize the separateness of the physical world. Gravity holds things down so that we look at things at eye-level. Visual search stops at the horizon. We do not recognize the other location of things, which is in the universe.

3. Because things unite mind and cosmos, they make excellent tools to measure the depth of the universe’s presence here on Earth. They are available for us to contemplate at eye-level. At the same time, they exist on the surface of the Earth which is a planet in the universe.

So spend some time examining objects or things. If they are man-made, think about how they were put together, how they were manufactured. If they are natural, how did they evolve. What is their history? What are they made of? Who have they belonged to? How did they get to where they are right now? Take them seriously as a kind of being. They are not alive the way we are. They cannot talk. But they are experienced witnesses, and with imagination you can see the scenes they have encountered over the years. You want to fathom what it means to exist on this planet, so think of things as a form of existence that is full of clues to the past and the present.

All things are witnesses, but for this experiment it is easier to work with natural things — rocks, leaves, twigs — because natural things are still integrated into the planet.

You are going to use a natural thing to see where you are.

I write and talk too much. The irony is, what I usually write and talk about is perception, which is the exact opposite of writing and talking. So I contradict myself. I recommend one thing but I do another.

It’s not because I don’t see the contradiction. It’s because I don’t know how to promote perception any other way.

Why do I want to promote perception? Because I think it’s buried. Otherwise, there would be more astonishment at where we are.

You can see the irony of the situation. I talk too much about not talking, whereas it seems that other people do not talk about not talking enough.

What do I mean by perception?

I mean that power we have to pick up on the scenes around us, the chairs and tables and windows and streets and all the other beautiful things and places that are looking back at you right now. Perception is our link with these. It is our link with what is. It connects us to the physical reality of human civilization on the earth. But it doesn’t just feed sensations into our brains. Perception is a form of thought too. It helps us make sense of landscapes and horizons we see and hear every day. It finds an order there that was previously invisible.

It’s not a gift or a talent that just a few people have. Everyone has it more or less. You couldn’t survive without it. If you are alive you perceive.

The trouble is, it doesn’t get the priority it deserves. It usually takes second place to what we think or what someone else thinks. And then we lose our connection with reality. People would rather talk than do almost anything else. Talk is automatic. You are alive, you talk. You’re dead, you don’t talk.

Case in point. I’m not perceiving right now. I’m talking.

But why would you want to perceive rather than talk?

Because where we are is fantastic.

When I was 18, I figured out how to see something that permanently altered my sense of reality.

I was an undergraduate at Mt. Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada, a biology major.

After months of chewing over various questions like the purpose of thinking, what music is, why the planet is so beautiful, I finally decided that to really understand what was going on, I had to see where I was.

How do you see where you are?

It’s not obvious.

In fact, if you take into account all the other places you are in at the same time that you are, say, sitting on a park bench in Fredericton, it’s hard to see how you could cram that much geography into your brain, not to speak of larger dimensions like the universe that don’t take kindly to being condensed.

And yet, I think I found a way to do it. I found a way to include the universe in my perception of the world around me. I had to stretch my imagination dramatically and focus on a single object (a rock) for a fairly long time. But I figured out how to bring the bigger realities I knew about from my reading and talking into the situation I was actually living in. And while you might think this was a ridiculous, fun-destroying  thing for young woman doing, and why wasn’t I hanging out with other undergraduates in the Student Lounge, the experience was utterly transforming and showed me something so amazing I have spent the rest of my life trying to figure it out.

I am now 67, and not for want of trying, I still haven’t told anyone how I did it. Or maybe I should say, I haven’t told anyone who got as excited about it as I am. Maybe I didn’t present it very well? Maybe they didn’t understand what I was talking about? Or maybe they weren’t interested enough in it to nail me down on what I meant?

Who knows? But I created this website to give myself another crack at sharing the little glimpse of heaven I first had in 1963. I figure there have got to be at least two other people in the world interested in seeing where they are, and if I can just find them, I’ll close the circle.

If there is no one at all, it’s too late to have my head examined. But I think there will be someone. We live in dramatic times and it has suddenly become excruciatingly important to see beyond your own small circle of needs into the needs of future generations and the planet as a whole. The fate of Earth now hangs on how many of us (read North Americans) act to reduce our GHG emissions. If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels now, hundreds of thousands of people will die and Earth will become uninhabitable for millions of species. There is no guarantee that if I share my vision of Earth as a weirdly concocted, deliberate viewing arrangement for another intelligence, North Americans will give up driving their cars, and fossil fuel companies will switch to renewables. But if I don’t share it, enviros won’t have what I think is an important asset. A resource. And it won’t be on record that someone long ago thought we are in a set-up that looks as if it is being watched.

By “share my vision” I do not intend to gobble up your scant free time with page after page of writing. I want to show you something, not tell you about it, which means perception, not language.

I may post stuff to prep you for the switch from language to perception, because your perception is probably buried, and you may not realize that we have to unbury it in order to see clearly. Language is an extremely powerful module. It is the representational system we use to think with, and we use it to talk too. Its machinery dominates everything we do. In fact, in many ways, language is the problem. It is out of touch with physical reality, and has created a secondary reality that has taken us over a cliff.

But my intention is not to tell you this. There are already plenty of people who suspect it and you can read their books online or in the library. I may create another blog entitled “Language is a Virus.”

But right now, I want to get you out of language and into the stunning, unbounded, nonhuman dimension that is waiting. I may have to use words to show you how to find it. But after that there will be nothing to say because the universe on earth cannot be talked about. It can only be perceived.

Is there enough time to take this detour into perception? Shouldn’t we be out blockading pipelines and sitting in at government office buildings?

Yes. But we also have to sustain ourselves. We have to nourish ourselves so that resistance continues for as long as it takes. We are stewards now, stewards of the workplace and stewards of the planet. And to muster the energy we’ll need to keep on fighting back against ignorance, stupidity and greed, we cannot depend on quinoa and organic smoothies, or at least only some of the time. We need something stronger than that. We need an energy so dependable and beautiful it gives us joy to receive it. We need an energy that constantly reminds us of the huge drama we are in. Are humans going to survive or not? For that we need the energy that powers the universe. And by tapping into its presence here on earth, we draw on a never-ending, renewable source that will support us as long as there is a universe to be in, which is to say, long enough.