Umwelten again, but cleansed

The senses constrain an animal’s life, restricting what it can detect and do. But they also define a species’ future, and the evolutionary possibilities ahead of it. For example, around 400 million years ago, some fish began leaving the water and adapting to life on land. In open air, these pioneers—our ancestors—could see over much longer distances than they could in water. The neuroscientist Malcolm MacIver thinks that this change spurred the evolution of advanced mental abilities, like planning and strategic thinking Instead of simply reacting to whatever was directly in front of them, they could be proactive. By seeing farther, they could think ahead. As their Umwelten expanded, so did their minds.

An Umwelt cannot expand indefinitely, though. Senses always come at a cost. Animals have to keep the neurons of their sensory systems in a perpetual state of readiness so that they can fire when necessary. This is tiring work, like drawing a bow and holding it in place so that when the moment comes, an arrow can be shot. Even when your eyelids are closed, your visual system is a monumental drain on your reserves. For that reason, no animal can sense everything well.

Nor would any animal want to. It would be overwhelmed by the flood of stimuli, most of which would be irrelevant. Evolving according to their owner’s needs, the senses sort through an infinity of stimuli, filtering out what’s irrelevant and capturing signals for food, shelter, threats, allies, or mates. They are like discerning personal assistants who come to the brain with only the most important information. Writing about the tick, Uexküll noted that the rich world around it is “constricted and transformed into an impoverished structure” of just three stimuli [heat, touch and scent]. “However, the poverty of this environment is needful for the certainty of action, and certainty is more important than riches.” Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.

Ed Yong. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, pp.7-8

When Aldous Huxley wrote his astonishing 1954 study of the effects of psychedelics on the human mind, The Doors of Perception, he pointed out that the human brain and nervous system, in their normal configuration, function so as “to enable us to live, the brain and nervous system eliminate unessential information from the totality of the ‘Mind at Large’.” Under the influence of mescaline, however, the “miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence” becomes apparent, unfiltered, just as it is.

Now of course this is not an escape from the sensory component of the human Umwelt – we are still constrained by the information our senses can respond to (mescaline cannot enable us to see in ultraviolet, or accurately to sense the earth’s magnetic field) – but it is at least a partial escape from the functional processing of that information stream that presents us with the familiar, usable world of the everyday. As Huxley himself pointed out, it is possible to perceive directly Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, the untrammelled isness of things, the being-itself that our minds dissect in order to construct our daily lives; in itself, it is, as William Blake remarked, infinite: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Absent hare-brained theories of medieval magic mushroom culture, Eckhart was not under the influence of psychedelics. The contemplative technology of unenclosing humankind has millennia of research and development behind it, and as texts like The Cloud of Unknowing reveal, it was highly developed in at least some strands of medieval European monasticism. To see things as they are to our unedited senses – through our own cleansed Umwelt – is as basic a human ability as breathing; only most of us have forgotten how. As Eckhart Tolle points out in our own time,

Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something — anything — and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the “isness” of all things. Move deeply into the Now.

You are leaving behind the deadening world of mental abstraction, of time. You are getting out of the insane mind that is draining you of life energy, just as it is slowly poisoning and destroying the Earth. You are awakening out of the dream of time into the present.

The Power of Now, p.63