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Today I found out that one of my friends wipes his dog’s butt. Indeed. After each poop, he cleans his dog’s rump, first with a wet napkin, and then with a dry one.

His rationale for this behavior is rather detailed, and I won’t get into it here. Suffice it to say that it would make a nice YouTube video.

The reason I point this out is that we humans seem to have an almost irrational fear of all that is natural. And what we fear most is what is natural in ourselves. This is rather sad, because what is the most natural in ourselves is also the most wonderful in ourselves.

Let’s Go Into the Wild!

Let’s take off all our clothes and run naked into the woods. Let’s not come back for a while. Just wander about in the wild places for a few weeks and see what unfolds.

Few of us would do this in real life. Wild places are dangerous, and it’s almost ludicrous to think that we could go out there without carrying an astronaut’s load of equipment. We’d have no way of communicating if we had an emergency. No medical treatment. No way to prevent getting lost. No pizza!

During my three months in the woods, I got to spend a lot of time ‘all natural’ in the wild places. I was also lucky enough to watch numerous people come for week-long wilderness immersion classes. What I discovered in myself, and what I got to see in other people, was a transition process. I was able to witness the human animal removed from all of its safety nets, and thrust into a fearful land where nothing seemed familiar. I was able to witness the human animal transition from a civilized state toward a wild state. And in myself, I was able to see the transition become complete.

When we venture into the woods without cell phones, tents, clothes, or weapons, we encounter three elements of our personal psychology. We encounter boredom, we encounter fear, and we encounter discomfort.

Boredom

One woman who came for a week immersion told me afterwards that mid-way through the week, she wanted to stand up and shout out, as loud as she could, that she was so bored she could scream.

We might very well encounter the same thing in our naked exploration of the woods. We’ve just come from a life where we have constant responsibilities and constant distractions, and now, nothing much is happening. For hours. For days. Perhaps for weeks.

What we realize as we come to terms with our boredom is that we all have a ‘speed’ at which we move through life. You might call it your ‘Frenzy Factor’. This FF isn’t intrinsic, however. It is something you set for yourself. And if you don’t take control of it, your culture will set it for you. Any guesses what the modern default FF is? That’s right. As fast as possible. And always getting faster. Many people today need a constant stream of music, television, talk radio, video games, and other diversions, or they simply get bored.

Boredom, we discover, is nothing other than the sensation of slowing down. It has an opposite sensation – stimulation – which is the sensation of speeding up. Because we’re surrounded by influences that urge us to speed up, most of us get used to the feeling of stimulation. And since our culture gives us the message that boredom (which we might also call ‘quietness’) is negative, we seek to avoid it, and get very uncomfortable with it.

The result is that our lives tend to become a constant speeding-up process. We get more and more conditioned to higher levels of stimulation, and the culture feeds our need. At some point we reach a threshold where the culture is outpacing us, and we ‘get old’ and start listening to 80’s music and watching movies from our teenage years because the modern offerings are just too frenetic.

Conversely, in the wild places, everything slows down. To our minds, conditioned to constant stimulation, it seems like nothing is happening. There is nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Just an entire day stretching before you where there’s nothing to do but eat some berries and listen to the wind move through the trees.

This slowing down happens automatically in the woods. It’s also one of the benefits of meditation, or a monastic life in general. Without our televisions, radios, cell phones and computers, we slow down. We can start to make sense of some of the experiences around us, because our experiences aren’t constantly crowding upon each other in an endless, boisterous heap.

Fear

When we go into the wild places, we find out how great our fears truly are. Do we live fearful lives? The woods will tell us.

The first fear is that of simply going out into the wild places. It’s not so much the people-eating animals or the fear of getting lost or being physically uncomfortable. Those fears can be real, but usually there is something much deeper and more frightening.

We’re afraid of what we’ll encounter in ourselves.

We all have an intrinsic wisdom. No one has to tell us that heaven or hell is not a set of circumstances, but rather a state of mind. We know this. And that’s why the wild places can be so scary. We know we’ll encounter ourselves. We’ll encounter feelings of loneliness. Our minds will be still, and we’ll see what’s really going on in there. We’ll be confronted with real-life emotions – not just emotions induced by watching a movie or listening to a song. We know that if we just stay inside our houses and our cars and our lives of distraction, we can insulate ourselves from these powerful realities. Why face them if there is no need to?

Perhaps we could sum up the object of our fears by observing that what we’re really afraid of experiencing are the sensations of pain and discomfort.

Discomfort

If we observe our lives, we’ll notice that most of our energies go toward insulating ourselves from perceived discomforts. We have organized an entire culture in which we can go for years on end without ever experiencing hunger, thirst, significant illness or infection, or unpleasant fluctuations in environmental temperature. We’ve even designed a system to eradicate emotional discomfort.

If it’s unpleasant outside, we can move from our cars to our buildings to our houses and never have to feel rain on our skin, cold on our flesh, or excess heat. If we feel a little ill, we can pop a pill. If we’re hungry or thirsty, there is almost always food or drink available. And if we’re experiencing uncomfortable emotions, we can watch a movie, take an anti-depressant, or listen to some upbeat music.

The result is that we create an ever-more comfortable cushion around ourselves, and begin to develop a fear of anything uncomfortable.

Naked in the wild lands, of course, we have no access to comfort. Our blankets are made of itchy, sharp leaves. Biting insects assault us every moment of every day. Food isn’t always readily available. Sometimes water is scarce. Sleep is often impossible as we’re driven nearly mad by mosquitoes and the emotions that rise to the surface when it’s pitch dark and large creatures are moving through the underbrush around you.

All of our insulation is gone.

Our Civilized Self

If we look at our civilized self, we find a creature that is soft, insulated, and afraid. And we’re so protective of our insulation that we’ll wage violence to protect it.

We may feel comfortable within the confines of the imaginary world we build around ourselves, but as soon as that world is shaken, we’re liable to topple. Our state of being is one of constant distraction, constant stimulation, and constant attempts to hide from anything uncomfortable. We engage in this distraction and hiding until life forces something upon us that shatters our world. This might be war, or the death of a loved one, our own imminent demise, or an encounter with emotions that we’ve been trying to suppress for years.

These tragedies will shake things up for a bit, but as time passes, we’ll usually just try to re-build our imaginary world as best we can and retreat once again into our insulated state. You see, our civilized self is convinced that problems can only be solved via more insulation.

Our natural self, conversely, is foreign to us. When we enter the wild places, we experience a transition from civilized to wild. And the transition can be painful, simply because in the wilds, all of our insulation is torn down.

We entered the woods naked of body, but after spending some time in the wild places, we also start to become naked of mind.

Our Wild, Natural Self

What is a wild human like? Our civilized selves, of course, paint a fearful picture. Dirty, brutal, and lawless, the wild human is violent without provocation, temperamental, and probably carries around a club with which to kill anything it encounters.

What we’re failing to see is that we don’t really have any examples of wild humans to base these assumptions on. We just have an image in our minds of cavemen. And some anthropologists will even tell us that those cavemen cowered in fear when it thundered outside, and lived mean, base lives of superstition and brutality.

And yet, what does the evidence say? These ‘cavemen’ learned how to create fire. If we think we’re so superior, go out into the wild for a day and see if you can start a fire without any matches or other manufactured fire-starters. These ‘cavemen’ gathered plants from an untamed wilderness, and hunted mammoths with tools made of stone and bone and wood. Would you be brave enough to do that?

Conversely, we know civilized humans all too well. If a creature is to be called ‘brutal’, ‘fearful’, or ‘violent’, civilized humans surely have earned themselves these titles.

The Wild You

What would you be like if you spent a month in the wild places, naked and alone? What would happen when your insulation was stripped off and you saw your fears for what they were? Hunger, which you previously avoided at all costs, is seen to be nothing more than a sensation in your belly. Cold, which was always so terrible in the past, is just a shivering of the flesh. And your worrisome emotions, which you spent so much time working on in the past, are just little motions in the mind, much like a breeze through the trees.

What do you think would be left if you stripped everything away? Would you discover a bloodthirsty beast eager to ravage the world? Or would you discover a quiet, peaceful creature who is intelligent and aware? This is the ‘you’ who has complete freedom. No laws. No responsibility. No society to tell you what is right and wrong. What would you become?

I was able to witness the answer to that question over and over. I witnessed it to small extents in those who came for short times to experience wilderness immersions, and I was able to witness a complete transition in myself as I plunged fully into ‘wild living’. The answer was startling. Stripped of our insulation, unbound by laws and expectations, we become more peaceful, more aware, and more compassionate than we can imagine.

How Does This Happen?

Does this happen automatically when we go out into the wilds? Not always. It’s a simple enough dictate to leave our clothes and equipment behind, but it’s not so easy to leave our mind-baggage behind. So when we go into the forests, we carry it with us. And out of our fears, we’ll tend to hold onto that baggage. It would be possible to live for years in the woods and never let go of it. It all depends on how willing we are to really see our fears and to stop trying to feed them.

But if we don’t cling with all our might to our fears, the transition can happen swiftly and magically. And the strangest thing of all is that it doesn’t happen via effort. It happens because our insulation requires work if we want to upkeep it, and when we stop working, it tumbles down. What’s left when it all falls away?

Something wonderful.

What we discover in the wild lands is that our usual life, which we think of as normal and boring, is actually a constant, sustained effort. It begins when we wake up in the morning, and lasts until sleep finally claims us each night. We’re not aware of our effort, because we have been doing it all day, every day, for years on end. No matter what our life is about – whether about earning money, or self-development, or discovering enlightenment — we are engaged in this effort.

In the forests, it’s easy to see that there is no need for this effort. And as we sit for hours next to a stream, it’s easy to cease that effort for a little bit. This is a slowing-down process, and we may encounter boredom, but in the woods there’s not a lot to do, and eventually it becomes too much effort to fight the boredom. What happens is that we ‘give up’. We don’t give up in the sense of collapsing into our negative emotions or just letting our fears take reign. Instead, we give up in the sense of seeing that our daily effort is just a lot of pointless work – work that creates our negative emotions and fears.

When our efforts cease, all our mental baggage falls away, and we breathe an immense sigh of relief, because we had no idea we were striving so hard all the time.

At last, we discover that our regular, naked, natural selves are perfect as they are.

Going Back

This is all fine if we’re living in the woods, with no concerns except getting some food for the day and perhaps building a nicer shelter to sleep in. But what about when we come back from the wild lands, put our clothes back on, and re-enter the civilized world? How can we keep this natural self when we’re surrounded by responsibilities, by clocks, and by constant distraction? And how can we share with others what we discovered in the woods?

We’ll explore the process of ‘coming back’ in the next article.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Awakening and Reality. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.