I can understand your vision — the wilderness is so tempting in its ability to get us in touch with the juiciness of life. As you mentioned, it’s also more and more difficult to find a place to get in touch with our wild selves. You can imagine the headlines — “Naked Wild Man Arrested in Buffalo County Forest. Thinks He’s a Large Squirrel.”

=)
Kenton

Anyway, were you all really naked together?

Your account of journeying into the wild and how our civilisation has veiled our natural self and our recognition of it is just excellent! As always, Kenton.

But the best is yet to come, I think. I could swear you were talking directly to me in your last paragraph.

There was a bit of nakedness, but usually just when swimming in leech-infested waters. =)

Sweetwater,
Kenton

Reading your article really makes me want to just stand up and go somewhere wild, but then I realize that I’m surrounded by concrete stretching for miles on end in every direction… all built by people’s desire for isolation from the natural.

However, are we not then confronted with physiological fears of the body?
In this hierarchy of fears you seem to indicate that survival fears are more significant and are a return to the “natural self.” Yet, either way, our fears keep us imprisoned to Body as “self.” In our social environment the body-mind needs to be entertained. In the wilderness the body-mind needs to survive. Both just different forms of fear. Right?

It seems to me that either way you look at it there is attachment to the needs of the body. But, is the “body” the natural self?

I can sit for hours next to a stream, but sooner or later, I need to focus on where my next meal is coming from, and other bodily needs, and there will probably be fear involved in that focus.

I certainly agree that wilderness immersion can RADICALLY alter perspective/perception. However, I don’t agree that this return to the gross needs of the body is are “natural self.” Either way we’re still locked into a belief that the body is the “self.” However, there is no doubt that survival fears are more fundamental and the lines are less blurred as in psycho-social fears. I’m inclined to believe that a return to the “natural self” is the complete freedom from all bodily fears since it is the realization that I’m not a body. No?

Help me out here!!

Thanks.
mike S

Vitor — you must be in the midst of a pretty large city! It is strange, isn’t it, that we humans seem to almost be obsessed, sometimes, with re-shaping the world to fit our current cultural needs. I suppose our trash problems are the result — the cultural needs are always changing, and we’re in a constant race to keep up. New roads, new cars, new computers. What an odd way for us to choose to live as a species.

Thanks for your comment!

Sweetwater,
Kenton

Thanks for the great question!

This confusion seems to arrive out of the question of ‘what is self’. We often hear that ‘waking up’ is synonymous with discovering that we are not our body (or our thoughts, or our emotions, or any other aspect of what we usually think of as ‘me’). It’s important to remember that once we start to form an idea of what our ‘true self’ is, we begin to chase ideas.

When I wrote ‘Everything You Hear About Enlightenment Is A Lie’, my intent was to remind people that our ideas will always fail to capture awakening. It is just as true to say ‘I am my body’ as to say ‘I am not my body’ (or ‘I am Unity’, or ‘I am non-dual reality’, or any other idea we’d like to attach to it). Our words can’t capture the experience – they can only point us toward it. Since most of us think we’re our bodies, it helps to point us in the other direction, even though this other direction is no more ‘true’ than the former.

The key with a true wilderness immersion is that you get totally in touch with your body. Not the idea of body that is now forming in our heads as we read the word ‘body’, but with the actual experience itself. And if any of us could experience the actual experience of anything – whether body, an emotion, or a paperclip, we’d directly understand what this ‘awakening’ is.

We encounter the same problem when we consider the issue of fear. From our normal perspective, we can only imagine that even though nature might seem peaceful, we’ll still need to feed ourselves, and that the need to feed is a sort of fear. Immersed in the illusion of a Will, we cannot imagine that humans can act without the benefit of ego-based impulses. This is why people often mistakenly assert that if we were to become ‘self-less’, we would not do anything. Without any desires or drives, why would we cook good food, reach for new experiences, or do much of anything besides drink cheap beer? But the startling discovery we find in our ‘natural self’ is that we can act as naturally as a tree or the wind.

Zen folks have been trying to put this intention-less action into words for a very long time. We’ve all heard the saying; ‘When hungry, eat, when thirsty, sleep.’ (Which perhaps was actually the quote of a Taoist teacher, if my memory serves me correctly). This is what the words Mushin or Wu Wei are suggesting. Again, our mistake is to interpret this Mushin as a concept, and try to figure out how this could be, rather than simply discovering this experience for ourselves.

These things – fear, the distinction of natural self vs. civilized self, the identity or non-identity of self with body – these arise because we are so immersed within the aforementioned insulation that we can’t see outside it. Wilderness immersion is simply one more way that might work for some of us to discover what happens when this insulation falls away. By re-phrasing this as ‘natural’, my hope is that we can let down our tendency to form these ideas into an intellectual framework.

The message here is that our natural self is so apparent and so simple that as soon as we apply words or ideas to the situation, we’ve lost sight of things. The discovery lies in the ‘just being’, but while wrapped in our insulation, that will be a very challenging thing to do.

Sweetwater,
Kenton