Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance – Jedi Walking

TM & © Lucasfilm

In Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance we began our investigation into peripheral vision.

Before I get into the continuation of this topic, if you’d like to find out about The Physiology of Vision, here’s a good Cliff Notes on the subject.

Application of Peripheral Vision – Does it Work?

What Musashi was saying in the Book of Five Rings was that peripheral vision was a dynamic type of sight. It had been in all the physiology texts, but it had been overlooked it: we are most sensitive to motion in our peripheral field. Peripheral vision is made for movement!

So the problem is how to create a visual point which would remain fixed while one moved. Here’s what you can do: attach a nine-inch stick (wooden, plastic or similar) with a bead at the end, pinned on the bill of a ball cap. (You’ll want the bead about 12” from your eye).  You can turn your head from side to side and move around, all the time focusing on the rod tip. This would also satisfy the requirement of holding one’s focal point constant and not on the object observed. It was an easy way to achieve Musashi’s insistence on cross-eyedness.

He had apparently taught himself to focus and keep focused on an imaginary point during life and death sword battles. There must be something to the technique or else he wouldn’t have used it. While sword fights might be a little extreme as a means for testing this…at least for beginners :-), you’ll needed an activity that requires that your peripheral vision be operative to insure your safety. So try this…hiking over somewhat rough terrain, this will do the trick.

A friend of mine nicknamed this Jedi running.  He actually progressed to running over rocks, logs, streams, etc. while in this vision state.

A  Beginners Guide to Jedi Walking

Selected a path that is wide enough to be safe, yet has other opportunities for more challenges…a fire road works well.  Most of the time a fire road has hiking trails that offshoot from it. Remember to put your cap on before you start your walk.  This is also another good reason for a remote road…nobody will see you and think you’ve lost it.

Keep your eyes always focused on the bead, you’ll soon become too engaged with the immediate difficulty of walking through uneven terrain to worry about what you’ll looked like anyway. Everything you’ll see in your central area of vision around and in front of the rod will be doubled.  This is an illusion caused by binocular vision.

To illustrate this point, hold your finger about six inches in front of your nose. Stare at your finger and you’ll notice that everything in front of it and to several degrees on either side is doubled.

So while watching the bead at the end of the rod, it will appear as if the straight path you are walking will always be approaching a “Y.”  Sometimes the path will run straight between two rocks, the two rocks will become one the moment your foot, aimed to step between them, comes directly down on it.’

Stop the Double

There are three solutions for dealing with the doubling of the path and images.

• 1- Tilt your head to the right and up, so that the line of the path, for example, is seen “undoubled” in the left portion of your peripheral field.  Peripheral vision is unfocused, so there’s no doubling unless viewing something very close to the eyes, in which case central and peripheral visions overlap.

• 2 – Guess.  The real rock is probably not on the right or the left, but between the two.

• 3- Trust Yourself.  This means don’t think about it, use your intuition, or as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, “Use the Force.” The brain – unconsciousness mind – knows exactly where the ‘real’ object is even if your eyes and conscious mind don’t.  Left alone it will deliver unerring instructions to your limbs. This may seem like a wonderful revelation if you’ve never experienced this before. To understand that a virtually unknown part of you knows much more than you think you ‘know.’ This most likely will be the first of many challenges to what you’ve long assumed to be the supremacy of the consciousness mind….the implications of this should be exhilarating!

You may have looked silly as you continue slowly walking the rocky trail; shoulders hunched, chins extended, staring so intently at your little bead, yet inside you’ll be feeling ecstatic. It will as if your eyes and chests had opened up wide, and in the process some previously inviolable boundary between yourselves and the landscape will have evaporated. Everything will simultaneously become peaceful and scintillating. Your sense of balance and muscle control will be so acute that the ground will seem to rise up and gently join your feet with each step.

In time you’ll gain the confidence that you can walk in unfamiliar territory using only your peripheral vision.  What will look like, to your conciseness mind, as abstract quality of peripheral sight, will provide plenty of information to your unconscious mind, allowing it to guide your feet automatically and unerringly over and around rocks, dips and rises in the ground, and protect your body – your eyes in particular – from contact with tree branches.

As you continue to Jedi walk you’ll become aware of the limits of your peripheral vision.  You might want to create a simultaneous awareness of the whole peripheral field–nearly 180 degrees horizontally, perhaps 130 degrees vertically.

In tricky passages requiring special attention, you’ll find you can concentrate your awareness on the lower center area in your peripheral vision; this will slow your progress and you’ll still have a magical feeling.  You will, however, have to be alert during this phase, although alertness will seem to expand automatically when locked in peripheral vision.

Other senses will awaken as well.  You may notice that your hearing, balance and touch expanded, as if each sense had a peripheral realm of its own. Concurrently, the perception of weight will shift lower in the body, to the hips and on down to your feet.

After a bit you may want to try Jedi running.  You’ll find that it will intensify the thrill but surprisingly without a rise in anxiety. When you trust yourself you can push yourselves into unsure situations where footing will be tricky.  This will confirm that you can negotiate obstacles with almost effortless flow.

You’ll also find that when standing close to something, i.e. a tree it will appear the same, whether viewed with peripheral or ‘normal’ vision. There may also be a shift in time perception.  A time lapse of what will seem like several moments between the apparently automatic actions of your feet as they avoid an obstacle and our consciousness of their movement.

After a couple of hours of walking you will be deeply relaxed. The source of this pronounced calm: Walking while relying on your peripheral vision requires that your conscious mind trust the unconsciousness mind, and this inter-mind trust is the part of the essence for this relaxation state.

You may find that your hands will have warmed and swelled slightly. This might be an indication that active employment of peripheral vision might also stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. You also experience a sense of time distortion; it may feel as if you’d been out about an hour when in fact you’ve be walking around for more than two hours!

All this without ingesting any “teaching plants” 🙂

In the next installment I’ll go into how this process can help with night vision and how when the consciousness and unconsciousness mind are in rapport magical things can happen, like ease of personal success, peak personal performance and quantum personal growth.

Please let me know what think about this topic and your experience with peripheral vision in the comments below.