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When we leave the wild lands and come back to civilization, we discover something curious inside our minds. We discover that we have a peculiar way of considering civilization to be the ‘real world’, and the natural world to be a sort of ‘escape’.

It’s all fine and well to escape into the woods for a month, but it’s definitely an escape. Sooner or later we have to go back to the realities of paying our bills, meeting our social obligations, and putting money into our retirement fund. Our families, our jobs, and our life’s desires all dwell within the world of civilization.

Consider for a moment how you, personally, view the above ideas. Does the civilized world hold this aura of ‘reality’ for you? For most of us, it does. And this is an important thing to notice.

It displays to us the light in which we consider our natural selves and the natural world.

Our civilized world, of course, is a product of human consensus and imagination. It seems solid to us, but it is in fact quite fragile. War, natural disasters, a well-designed computer super-virus, or any number of other events could bring our civilization crashing to the ground at any time. Indeed, history is a repeated cycle of societies rising and falling. If we examine closely, this ‘real world’ is but a precarious balancing act to which we all rather desperately cling.

The natural world (and I’m not talking so much about trees and streams, but rather about the discovery of our natural self — a direct perception of reality), on the other hand, is the only thing we can ever count on. It remains reality, despite the condition of the world around us.

When we find ourselves thinking that going off into the woods is escapism, it brings us full circle to inquire into the sanctity with which we regard civilization.

Coming Back to the ‘Real World’ of Civilization

Discovering our natural selves in the forest is not all that different from the moments of clarity or ‘awakening’ we sometimes seem to spontaneously experience in our lives. Whether it’s a month of eating berries and climbing trees, a sudden glowing awareness during our yoga, or a flash of perfect insight during meditation– we hold, for a moment, a brilliant gem of awareness. In that moment, everything is clear. Our doubts have evaporated. There is no question that confounds us. The world is perfect, and we understand exactly what all these teachers have been trying to show us all along. It’s so simple! Why doesn’t everyone see this?

And then, after a few seconds or hours or days, it strangely evaporates. Often we’re left with the sensation of having held the most perfect treasure, a treasure that has suddenly and inexplicably left us. Our greatest fear is that it has left us forever.

When coming from nature and re-entering civilization, this transition is fairly easy to understand. All of the insulation we needed to function in society simply fell away during our stay in the wild, but now we come back and feel exposed. Loud noises, demanding people, and all the rushes and stresses of society come at us in a barrage, and what are we to do but rebuild our insulation?

Here is where it’s important to take honest stock of our idea that nature equates with escape and civilization with reality.

The reason we are apt to re-build our insulation is not because civilization is intrinsically full of distractions. It isn’t.

Civilization seems full of distractions because we grant so much importance to civilization. We consider it real, and take it quite seriously. In doing so, we self-create a situation in which we demand that we focus our attention onto these ‘important’, ‘real’, and ‘serious’ things. Because civilization takes itself so very seriously, we’re soon blindly following instructions to focus on one important matter after another.

Feed the kids. Pay the bills. Answer the phone. Write that email.

The demands pile up, and we’re soon left with the feeling of drowning in life. Our awareness and our natural self are left behind and forgotten, and we re-enter the world of frustration, anger, stress, and loneliness.

Does this mean we shouldn’t do these things? Should we just sit around and drink beer? Not at all. The key is not that we ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ do anything. The key is simply becoming aware of our most basic ideas about what is real and important in life.

Encountering our wild, natural selves via a wilderness experience can be so transformative that we are never again fooled by civilization’s wiles. We finally see things clearly. Immersed in the moment, we discover that things aren’t moving any faster in civilization than they were in the woods. In any given moment, we can notice that not much is going on. It’s impossible to feel stress, because everything has acquired a remarkable levity. And oddly enough, within that levity we find that we can actually attend to matters with more compassion and awareness. Before, we were upset with our wife because she was behaving irrationally again and getting angry about stupid, silly things. But now we see her as she is – without expectations. She is what she is in this very moment, and for the first time we find that we can actually pay attention to her, instead of only to our ideas about who she is and how she should behave.

The result is that we can pay perfect attention to those matters which were drowning us before. Paying the bills, answering emails, and feeding the kids all become part of the joy of pure living. We no longer act from a sense of clinging urgency, but rather from a perfect awareness of where we are.

But what about when we haven’t had a month or two to become fully immersed in our natural nature? What about when it’s only been a brief flash of clarity?

Really, these moments are essentially the same as ‘becoming wild’. Our natural self has peeked out, because for whatever reason we mixed up our stew of life just right and our insulation fell away. But it’s bound to come back, because right away we begin to apply thinking to the situation. ‘Am I enlightened?’ ‘Will this stay?’

Notice that when we ask these questions, we’re creating a new and clever way of re-invoking our demand to focus on ‘important realities’. And the most ‘important reality’ of life is to come to an understanding of the meaning of it all. Everything else pales beside this, because we’ve been taught that if we could just become enlightened, then all of the problems of life would dissolve.

Instead of Just Being, we’ve created an idea of the ultimate holy grail in life. More important than money, lovers, or status. Enlightenment! If only we could get that!

Do you see what we’ve done? Just as our natural self begins to peek through, we fully engage our civilized idea that the world is about problems and how to solve them. With enlightenment we’ve stumbled upon the greatest solution ever!

As soon as we think that, we have begun to re-build our cloak of insulation.

Holding On To Our Natural State

So how do we keep this natural state?

The answer is that we can’t. I’ll repeat that.

We can’t.

Our natural state is something we are. It’s something that is discovered without technique, without will, without desire. Any application of effort to achieve it guarantees that we’re heading down the usual road of creating imaginary problems and then trying to solve them.

So how do we make this happen, darn it?!

Let’s Play

We’d probably have the best time of it if we tried a little play. When we go into the woods, that’s what happens. We discover that the whole idea of taking things seriously or not taking things seriously is just another of those strange ideas we’ve adopted as ‘real’. Out in nature, things just ‘are’. This ‘are-ness’ is very close to our idea of play. (Not our adult sense of play, as in ‘being something you’re not’, but in the childhood sense of play — total immersion in the expereince of what we are in any given moment.)

The idea of play becomes even more useful once we come back to civilization. It’s also useful in our pursuit of enlightenment. The methods I use on this site ask us to engage in a sort of play. They ask us to look at the things that we take to be ‘real’ and important, and to play with them. You might think money is real and important, and because of that you feel anxiety or stress because of money. (Or glee, if you win the lottery.) But if you sit down for a little while and think about what money really is, it takes on a tragicomic quality. It’s just imagination, and yet we humans kill each other over it. In moments, we’re laughing at the thought that we ever took money so seriously. At the same time, we see the reason others take it so seriously, and can feel perfect compassion for them.

The question I asked at the beginning of this article (regarding how we frame civilization as reality and nature as escapism) is perhaps the most important one you’ll ever ask yourself. In your answer, you’ll experience the weightiness with which you regard the imaginary rules of civilization.

This is our fundamental delusion – that the arbitrary creations of our culture are actual realities.

We can examine these delusions, but if we’re examining in order to achieve a solution to our problems, we’re just creating the system we’re attempting to dismantle. Instead, just play at observing for observing’s sake. Have fun! Pick an object, such as a car, and ask yourself ‘what is this?’ See what answer you come up with. Challenge your answer. Challenge your new answer. Leave nothing unobserved, nothing taken for granted.

If we were to go out into the wilds, we wouldn’t find our wild selves because we went out to find them. We’d only find our wild selves because that’s just the sort of thing we find when we’re naked in the woods.

If we quest after enlightenment, we won’t find it because we’re looking for it. We’ll only find it because that’s the sort of thing we find when we journey into our minds.

The tool of our journey is simple awareness. And awareness is much like play. It can’t be forced. It’s actually what you’re best at naturally. When you were little, you understood this (without having to voice it or conceptualize it). Play is something you lose yourself in. It’s just fun.

Awareness is the same. When we experience that flash of clarity, don’t pay it a bit of extra attention. It’s nothing special. Just keep playing. Find some new object in your world (try your best friend this time) and play around with discovering who they really are. When you’re ready for some really exciting play-time, sit down and try to figure out who YOU are!

When you’re natural in this way (for play and awareness are synonymous with your wild self), you’ll discover naturalness for yourself. But when you have a driving need to find the answer and discover your natural self, you’ll often tend to re-create, over and over, the very trap you’re attempting to escape.

In Conclusion

There and Back Again. The key is that you never left. You can’t escape your real self. All you can do is fight with all your effort to pretend you’re not present, not awake, not aware. If you think you’re not in the Now, examine things a little. Sit down somewhere and try your best to be sometime other than Now. If you think you’re not Aware, try to turn off your awareness. If you think you’re not enlightened, try to be something other than the self you’re being right now.

Stop trying. Start playing. It’s what your wild nature is already doing in this very moment. It’s time to see that there was no ‘There’ to go to, no ‘Back’ to arrive home to. No ‘Again’ in which a given experience can repeat itself.

Your journey is already done.

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