An Excerpt:
Chapter 2:
The Hunter *
Hunting is the master behavior pattern of the human species.
--William Laughlin
The Alert Man
Until about ten thousand years ago (an iota of evolution) we were all hunters
and foragers, living in daily intimacy with all surrounding life. That
evolutionary period of competitive success and brain enlargement, achieved
through organization and the use of tools, has profoundly affected the engrams
(neural connections) of our psyche. The brain of our forebears rapidly enlarged
over a relatively short time. By 100,000 years ago that hallmark of our species,
"a disproportionately enlarged brain size, " was found in fossil cranial
cavities. It is small wonder then that hunting stirs deep recesses in our
consciousness and brings up a sharp awareness of this connection. In those
thousands of centuries when modern
Homo developed, alertness was a prime necessity, for both attack and
defense. That awareness can still result in a vibrant state where all senses
become more acute, and time and space merge into a feeling of unity.
In his
Meditations on Hunting, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset
describes the state of awareness in what we know as the Hunter's Trance.
He (the hunter) does not look tranquilly in one determined direction, sure
beforehand that the game will pass in front of him. The hunter knows that he
does not know what is going to happen, and that is one of the greatest
attractions of his occupation. Thus he needs to prepare an attention of a
different and superior style--an attention that does not consist in riveting
itself in the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and
avoiding inattentiveness. It is a "universal " attention, which does not inscribe
itself in any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term
for this, one that still conserves all the zest of vivacity and imminence:
alertness. The hunter is the alert man.
"Not presuming anything, " as we shall see, is part of apophasis, the emptying of
the mind. Ortega y Gasset associated the development of the capacities of
observation and alertness in the ancient hunter to the evolution of the
intellect. The sensory processes among many traditional hunters are, to us,
extraordinary. From those sentient qualities arise a deep understanding of the
world around them, qualities that at some time, long ago, we "civilized " human
beings must have also possessed.
Part of this knowledge, acquired by Ortega's archetypal alert man, is not just
the mystical connection with his quarry but also with his environment. In
another example of the hunter's trance, a friend told me of this experience when
stalking Wapiti elk in the Sawatch Range of central Colorado.
"One day in May I set out at dawn, alone, to track a herd of elk up into the
foothills of Mount Princeton. There was still plenty of snow and muddy terrain
to follow the herds migrating to upland pasture. I came across fresh tracks of
several elk, including one bull. The morning was bright and sunny with a slight
wind in my face, assuring me of getting a reasonably close approach to my
quarry. After perhaps an hour of slow and careful tracking, I came out on a long
glade, fifty yards wide. If the elk were nearby they would detect my crossing
the snowy and slushy meadow. It remained for me to be completely still and pay
complete attention to the opposite hillside. I felt now their presence and
somehow knew that they felt mine. As I stood there, the sense of time remarkably
changed. What seemed like minutes I found later to be over an hour. At the same
moment an intense feeling of the clarity of the scene swept over me. All my
senses seemed to sharpen to an exquisite razor's edge. I heard the tiniest
sounds of distant streams and rustling leaves as if magnified in a celestial
amplifier. Everything seemed closer to me and I felt, amazingly, a sort of
merger of myself with everything, a sense of belonging. I was connected with
everything in that panorama, the grass, trees, rocks, insects, birds, the elk
that I knew were quietly moving uphill, out of my sight. I felt a great rush of
emotion, a joy of being alive, the chance to exist along with everything else. I
will never forget that day. "
The hunter's unfocussed alertness, his trance, is similar to the attentive form
of meditation practiced in Zen Buddhism. The word trance means precisely what
the Latin roots say; trans = "across " and ire = "go, " in sum, "to move across
"
or "to pass over " the object. The Oxford English Dictionary goes on to define
trance as "a state of mental abstraction from external things. " The hunter,
however, is certainly not disconnected perceptually from "external things. " His
whole being is directed toward a quarry, he is the alert man with "universal
attention, " unfocused, aware of all yet somehow filtering out what is extraneous
or irrelevant. The blocking or diversion of those external and internal signals
sharpens his senses. This sensitivity to each subtle sign of nature is a direct
precursor to intellectual awareness, and this state of mind is not unique to the
hunter. As will be seen, it is a phenomenon common to many who search. It is, as
Ortega y Gasset maintains, a state of mind that is the ground for the creative
process. The external world as perceived by the hunter is drawn into his inner
vision, which leads to a feeling of union with all that is outside, in fact,
with the cosmos itself.
The Zen practice of
shikan-taza resembles the Hunter's Trance in that the mind is
brought to a heightened state of awareness, intensely involved in the object of
its attention. Yet simultaneously the participant can be peculiarly detached,
but centered into the ground of his being. This acute sensitivity of awareness
lies at the heart of a mystical state from which energy can flow into
extraordinary physical and mental achievement.
* Rerprinted by permission of the publisher, Bear & Co. Copyright C 2010 Carl von Essen. All Rights Reserved