From the Horizon to the Centre

May 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Look to a distant point on the horizon. Look straight at that point such that the point of focus is in the dead centre of your visual field. Give that point as much attention as possible. Bring your hands up and hold them out in front of you with arms extended forward. Place your palms together and hold the focus of your attention between the tips of your fingers. Keeping your attention central, move the point of your attention closer, away from the horizon and towards your self, moving your hands downward and keeping the point of focus between your fingers. You will trace a narrow line from the horizon to your feet. Take your time over this and give all your attention to the focal point. When you reach your feet (you will be looking down now, and you may be leaning over with your neck bent), place your attention at the tip of your toes. Gradually allow your attention to move up your body, taking in your feet, your ankles, your knees. As you move your attention upwards, let your hands separate so that they mark the limits of your body, the limits of your attention. Move slowly upwards past your thighs, hips, stomach and let your hands widen to mark the edges of your widening attentive gaze. Your body is occupying more and more of your visual field and it looms larger than almost anything else. As you give attention to the parts of your self that are above your chest try to mark the extent of that self with your hands. You will find your arms widening to their maximum extent, encompassing the entire visual field, as if your body was curving outward and upward. You may find that a strange reversal takes place at this point and the body/self which you have been measuring as an increasingly large object in the world suddenly becomes a frame which contains the world. The hands that have been marking the extent of your attention now mark the edges of the world and your attention, your self, is everywhere. The one point of attention on the horizon of your experience has seamlessly become the all of that experience.

It is significant that the all which you now attend to also contains the one that you began as. From one perspective you are clearly in the world, and central to it, yet from another perspective the world is also in you, totally and completely. This paradox can be resolved in the recognition that our consciousness is not characterised by the stasis of being this or that, here or there, somewhere or everywhere, but by its movement between one and the other, and its existence at every point between.

It is also significant that your journey began at a single arbitrary point on the horizon, and there are an infinity of such points. Each of these points, separate and distant, can be tracked back home to the everthing inside.

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The Past is a Blinding Mirage

June 2nd, 2007 Fred McVittie

You are standing on the deck of a ship moving through a wide ocean. You are looking out over the stern toward the distant and indistinct horizon, and the wake of the boat forms a V in front of you, widening and spreading, with the waves rolling over each other, casting up droplets of spray merging into a mist. The boat is ploughing toward its final destination, and though you do not turn to look in that direction, you know the journey well. In your mind you can call up the route the boat is taking, see the landmarks, the buoys and lighthouses, the familiar entrance to the familiar port. You know what disembarking will be like and you know the sights and sounds of Home. Your attention is fixed on the wake and the horizon however, and the direction of your gaze is always away from Home. As the boat travels in one direction, your mind travels in the other. You imagine that the V of the wake is drawing you in, that you are falling toward the distant and indistinct past, all the places the boat has been and all the places it could have been.

The future is already written, it is the past that is a blinding mirage.

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Mappa Mundi

June 24th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Medieval and pre-Medieval approaches to knowledge tended to focus on the revelations provided by canonical and theologically approved texts, rather than observation or what we would now think of as scientific experiment. The writings of Aristotle, for example, were a key source of revealed truth for hundreds of years after his death, even when the ‘facts’ he related were self-evidently incorrect. Knowledge in this period was therefore detached from personal experience and existed in a kind of transcendent realm of pure ideation.

Although much has changed, it could be said that much knowledge that we routinely draw upon today is similarly detached, not because of any reliance on received wisdom, but because the knowledge itself has proceeded beyond the point where it can be accessed directly. Much contemporary knowledge, particularly in the sciences, is only able to be comprehended through conceptual tools such as mathematics and metaphor.

For a brief period between then and now however, say the period marked by the birth of Galileo and the death of Newton, knowledge came into brief contact with lived experience. In the 16th century, the burgeoning fields of science began to open up and their key model was that of the mechanism, of medium sized objects moving at medium speed. This is the model Newton refers to in his Principia, a model in which the movement of planets and apples can be described by the same laws, and before the disembodied oddities of galaxies and atoms began to be realised. This is a time before the mathematisation of science, when proof of a concept or theory was demonstrated not by reference to mathematical axioms but by experimental demonstration.

If history is a voyage of discovery, this brief period marks the crossing of an invisible, but nevertheless real, point on the globe. For that moment scientific knowledge and personal experience stood together on the deck and looked out over the waves. No longer transcendent and not yet abstract, the truth of knowledge is the truth of the body, and whilst the distant horizon may be indistinct, here at the centre of human experience all is clarity and light.

EMBO Rep. 2005 April; 6(4): 306–309. doi: 10.1038/sj.embor.7400389.

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Horizon of Experience

June 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Imagine that all knowledge, both that we can directly experience and that we cannot, as existing on the surface of a globe, a globe as large as the Earth itself. Now imagine yourself standing on a plain on that globe, or on a savannah, or on the beach. Perhaps you are watching a sail diminish into the distance as it catches the wind from the coast. You are standing at the centre of your experience, and at the centre of all that there is, and all that it is possible to experience. A zone of embodied understanding. Close by you on the sand are the objects and events which you have the most intimate experiential knowledge about. You can touch, taste, smell, hear, handle, caress, weigh these objects in your hands and feel their textures. Your knowledge of them is direct and embodied. More distant objects, the lighthouse, the sail, like the tree at the bottom of the garden and like the moon, are still available to you, but less so. You can see the sail and hear the wind flapping the canvas, but cannot touch it or taste it from where you are.

As our thoughts and perceptions strain to see the ship as it approaches the limits or our zone of embodied understanding we find a natural boundary, a horizon beyond which our direct understanding cannot reach. This limit is the horizon of human experience bordering the zone of embodied knowledge. Beyond this horizon lies all the knowledge of this world that is outside of direct experience and that we can only access using indirect means.

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The Fearless Circle of Pascal (exercise)

August 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie

1. Place a person at the centre of your gaze.
2. Imagine a circle around that person’s feet, as if they are standing on a large dinner plate.
3. Make that circumference larger so they are standing at the centre of a circle that is the size of their outstretched arms, say 5 - 6 feet in diameter.
4. Make the circumference larger still, and keep enlarging it until the perimeter of the circle reaches the point where you are standing.
5. Imagine the circle around the person with yourself at a point on the periphery of that circle.
6. Enlarge that circle even more so that it extends beyond you and you are completely enclosed within it.
7. Widen the circle around the person until it extends beyond the room, beyond the local area you are in, right out to the horizon.
8. See the person standing at the centre of their world, a world which stretches away in all directions to the horizon, and see yourself in that world. Notice how close you are to the person.
9. Extend the circle around them beyond the horizon, and keep extending without end or boundary, concentrate on the action of extending the circle, not on any end point to this extension. Notice how close you are to the person.
10. Never stop.
11. Repeat this exercise with a thousand people.
12. Repeat this exercise with a rock, an animal, a tree, a star.
13. Repeat this exercise with the thing you love the most and the thing you most despise.
14. Never stop.

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