Peripheral Visions

with single vision.
    Most of the time we are orthodox in our cultivated unawareness of our bodies, but even a neurologist can be shaken by the realization of how deeply perception is shaped by forces of memory, desire, or expectation, other than the messages of the senses. Oliver Sacks wrote of an episode in which his brain simply lost the knowledge of an injured leg—the opposite of the experience of amputees haunted by phantom limbs—and had to learn it anew. One of the common experiences of LSD, they say, is the experience of looking at one’s own hand and seeing it as if for the first time, different, transparent, the blood moving in the veins. But hands, however wonderful, must be kept in use to work, scratch, caress—only occasionally, each time newly marked by age and labor, to be signs of revelation. We need both the numinous and the practical. We need to be aware of our own hands in more than one way, to cultivate the fruitful vision that repeatedly finds wonder in hand or stream or cloud.
    Sometimes when I talk with friends who spend hours in formal meditation it strikes me that they are seeking therapy for a wounded capacity to attend. As a society, we have become so addicted to entertainment that we have buried the capacity for awed experience of the ordinary. Perhaps the sense of the sacred is more threatened by learned patterns of boredom than it is by blasphemies.
    In our society, some experience altered states of consciousness through hypnotism or drugs or breathing techniques, but using these mechanisms also makes it possible to dismiss the experience by attributing it to an external force. Still, the actual content of a hallucination, the symbols and images it works with, must come from somewhere, and some of the perceptions of altered states of consciousness must be present at other times, but suppressed. Even knowledge gained through experimentation with drugs has a reality.
    Other societies have elaborated psychological and physiological ways of altering consciousness and nuanced ways of sorting out and classifying experience to fit the needs of individual and social life. Monastic visions (some of them produced by fasting) could be judged by comparing them with orthodox doctrine, some attributed to divine and others to demonic forces. In the Islamic tradition, mystical poetry is full of the metaphors of erotic passion and of intoxication; these metaphors depend upon genuine similarity. The poetry is a reminder that the oddities of perception—the illusions—that occur in love and inebriation represent added ways of seeing the world.
    In attending deeply to children and trying to empathize with them, as in studying other cultures, one is constantly reminded that these beloved strangers are behaving in ways that are only intelligible if their world is recognized as differently structured, laid out according to different landmarks. Much of the time we are busy trying to talk children out of their perceptions, giving them the correct answers, the ones that are widely shared and fit neatly into familiar systems of interpretation. The fable about the princess who saw blue can serve as a reminder of the negative potential of the encounter between the generations, the talents that are suffocated, the imposition of particular kinds of societal blindness. It takes adult effort to turn bright, open children into a sullen underclass or into compliant factory workers, to keep life in shades of black and white and avoid new learning.
    I doubt that I would have invented the fable of the princess who saw blue if I had not suspected that, for all their power and cleverness, there were things I could see and know that the grown-ups could not. But the larger plot of this chapter is one in which I as an adult am learning from my own memories of childhood and using them to communicate more widely, feeling my way toward a sense of the world that includes both the empirical and the intuitive. Learning, we build on existing knowledge. It often becomes necessary to find a prior wisdom, an earlier layer of learning, to strip off some distorting overlay and combine the recent with the old in Fibonacci ratios of awareness.
    In the end, for the fable to make sense, the awareness of color must work its way through the entire fabric of experience. The webs of perception and meaning that human beings construct tend toward integration. What does not fit is likely to remain invisible, unnamed, unattended to. Colors are not