Nightwalking: exploring the dark with peripheral vision - includes tips on nightwalking

Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1991 by Nelson Zink, Stephen Parks

This is a lonely place, but as we walk through it on the darkest night it's like a spiritworld. The darkness is filled with speckles of bioluminescence and ghosts left in deep arroyos by the shadows of starlight. We can't see the ground at our feet-the rocks, the sticks, the cactus, the prairie dog holes-because we're gazing at a tiny phosphorescent dot set a foot in front of our noses. Although we're not conscious of seeing these obstacles, our minds do see lthem, see them clearly and deliver sure instructions to the feet as we glide with perfect safety over rough terrain. It is like walking on faith, supported by a serene confidence, every one of our senses alert. The mind is left free to explore the night spread across the widescreen field of vision. What we are doing is Nightwalking.

IT ALL BEGAN ONE AFTERNOON A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO. We were talking about people who have the ability to see farther or more deeply or more clearly than the rest of us, those exceptional individuals who can easily master complexity and ambiguity and arrive at startling insights.

We began to speculate on the possibility that these people weren't just smarter or more creative than the average person but perhaps literally saw the world in a different manner. As we looked for direct connections between the literal and figurative meanings of words like sight and vision, it slowly became apparent that we were onto something. We reviewed the physiology of sight and discovered that neural structures exist within the eye and brain, which facilitate a way of seeing that is radically dissimilar from the one we're accustomed to using. We confirmed that there is, indeed, a neurological basis for a distinct "secand" type of sight, and that this way of seeing is available to all of us all the time. (Usually we are so absorbed with our focused vision that we're unaware of its power.) Peripheral vision.

Could peripheral vision possibly be related to Vision, to Insight, to all those capitalized powers of perception? Searching for references that might shed light on secand sight, we found that while many individuals weren't particularly aware of how they accomplished their achievements, the reports contained eery similarities. We found a succession of texts from the Taoists of early China through the books of Carlos Castaneda that spoke of a certain kind of all-seeing gaze. It was often difficult to determine whether the authors were speaking literally or metaphorically, but it was perfectly clear in the case of Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman of fifteenth-century Japan, who had the clearest and most insightful description of the powers of peripheral vision we found.

In the Book of Five Rings, Musashi refers to the two types of sight which he calls Ken and Kan. Ken registers the movements of surface phenomena; it's the observation of superficial appearance. Kan is the profound examination of the essence of things, seeing through or into. For Musashi, Ken is seeing with the eyes, Kan is seeing with the mind. The differentiation is akin to that of style versus substance.

Musashi gives instructions for developing Kan sight: "It is important to observe both sides without moving the eyes. It is no good trying to learn this kind of thing in great haste. Always be watchful in this manner and under no circumstances alter your point of concentration."

While Musashi certainly didn't understand the physiology of sight, he was acutely aware of the difference between cone and rod vision. We reviewed the science of vision and read that the retina of the human eye is composed of three distinct areas: the fovea, macula and peripheral region. Each area performs a distinctive visual function and contributes to the sense we call sight. Because these different functions operate simultaneously and blend into each other, they aren't normally differentiated. The fovea is a small circular pit in the center of the retina packed with an unbelievable concentration (160,000 cells per square millimeter, an area about the size of the head of a pin) of color-sensitive receptor cells called cones, each with its own nerve fiber. The fovea enables the average person to see most sharply within a circle less than an eighth of an inch in diameter at a distance of twelve inches from the eye.

Surrounding the fovea is the macula, an oval body of color-sensitive cells. Macular vision is quite clear, but not as clear and sharp as foveal vision, because the cones aren't as closely packed as they are in the fovea. We use the macula for reading or watching television, among other things.

Moving away from the central portion of the retina, the character and quality of vision changes radically. The capacity to see color diminishes as the color-sensitive cones become more scattered. Fine vision associated with closely packed cones, each with its own neuron, shifts to a coarser vision in which two hundred or more of a different type of receptor cell - the rods are each connected to a single neuron, The effect of the connections between rods is to amplify the perception of motion and light while reducing the capacity for distinguishing detail.