Gabriel Furshong spent a night in total darkness at the official Dark Sky Sanctuary in Montana’s Medicine Rocks State Park to report on the experience for Earth Island Journal. As the sky darkens and Furshong is unable to see his hands, his body, or the ground beneath him, he begins to experience an altered and empowering kind of consciousness, one in which he’s disabused of the limiting beliefs that sight can impose.
I could not see the grass growing beneath me or how I was encircled by it. I could not see the textures of trees or stones. My feet and hands, too, were dark, apparent only as moving parts of a larger darkness. The daytime singularity of things had gone. All was merged and ambiguous; borders were no longer enforced. Until dawn, there would be no fix for my impulse to categorize things according to their differences.
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