David Peat

92 From Certainty to Uncertaintyfloating in space and seen from outside, was at the same time the hometo all of us. Irrespective of our color or creed we were all indissolublylinked together within its global web of ecology.One of my books, The Blackwinged Night, examined the dramaticchanges in human consciousness that took place during the late MiddleAges and early Renaissance. It showed that a revolution in what itmeant to be human within the world was precipitated by a radicalchange in the way people pictured and represented that world. TheMiddle Ages, for example, saw changes in representation in everythingfrom perspective in painting to notation in music, from map-makingto double-entry bookkeeping. Giving people new mental tools to representaspects of the world around them meant that they could nowexternalize and objectify that world. Proceeding in this way they couldtreat the world as external to themselves and as something to be contemplatedwithin the imagination. The world now became an object tobe manipulated within the theater of the mind, rather than an externaltangible reality. This also meant that people could gain increasing controlover the world around them, yet always at the expense of a loss ofdirect involvement. The more we objectify the world, the more we arein danger of losing touch with that sense of immediacy felt by activeparticipants in nature.The Act of SeeingFrom the moment we open our eyes in the morning, our acts of seeingare so automatic that we are barely aware of them. The world is simply“there.” It is present to us. We see it without any apparent effort. Yet acloser examination of the mechanisms of human vision reveals to usthat the act of seeing is highly intentional and by no means simply“photographic” as we may suppose. It is as if we are constantly reachingout into the world to caress its forms and textures with our eyes.What’s more, a great deal of what we see arises out of what we expectto see. In other words, no real distinction can be made between seeingwith the mind and seeing through the eyes; the two are inextricablyintertwined.