First published in The Great Outdoors Magazine, Jan. 2004.
I am floating on the surface of a warm tropical sea. The burning sun beating down on the skin of my back and shoulders, my face submerged in the tepid rolling waves, mask and snorkel on.
Below me, in about 10 metres of water, I see a catering-size corned beef tin on the sandy lagoon floor. I take a deep breath flick my flippers into the humid air and dive down. The pressure increases in my ears and I let out bubbles to compensate, I kick hard to keep the vertical descent going, reaching out for the can. I struggle to hold my depth, my natural buoyancy drawing me towards the sky. Before I get to the tin I fall, upwards.
As I fly towards the sunlight it goes dark. I am in shadow, above me is a school of brilliant coloured fish, thousands of them, a flourescent cloud as far as I can see in every direction. Suddenly, the entire school changes direction and swims away, the sunlight streaming down like a scene from a biblical painting is startlingly restored, and in seconds I surface like a cork.
Now I am high and wide on a wild autumn day, adrift in the rolling plains of a Derbyshire moor. Clouds skip across a cool blue sky in a sharp north-westerly. Occasional fat, heavy raindrops splash down, change to a thunderous burst and then stop-dead with alarming precision. Sky Larks fight to hold a position in the wind. Over my head comes a dense, black, apocalyptic storm cloud of swallows, swarming like bees. In the shadow of a second they have all turned simultaneous to a new course, reconsidering their path to warmer climes. I am spellbound by the magic of it all.
Now I am sitting in a lecture by the eminent biologist Professor Brian Goodwin at Schumacher College in Devon. He tells us that experiments have been done using high-tech filming equipment, which prove that in a flock of birds, or a school of fish, the directional changes that take place are often simultaneous. These creatures do not respond to each other in sequence, they respond instantaneously, as if they had all responded to the same stimulus, even though frequently this stimulus was only known to a small proportion of the crowd. As soon as one chose to change direction, they all did.
One explanation for this kind of behaviour is offered by Oxford University scientist Rupert Sheldrake, who explains it as being down to ‘morphic fields’. Sheldrake suggests that while our biological brain is inside our skulls, our “mind” dwells both inside and outside the body. This is how we know who’s on the other end of the phone before we pick it up, why dogs know when their owners are preparing to come home from work hours before they actually arrive home, even at random times of day. It also explains telepathy, synchronicity (coincidences), ghosts and clairvoyance – things that are all well documented as proven phenomena but that are as yet unexplained by popular science.
Morphic or mind fields are like magnetic fields. They surround us and just like the ‘energy’ of a crowd at a concert or football match, they combine together into a shared mind, a shared energy. The psychologist C.G. Jung referred to this shared part of our mind as the ‘collective unconscious’ – a part that we share with each other often without being aware of it. This sharing can transcend both time and distance, so that a culture can develop a ‘mind’ of it’s own as it develops through history, with subconscious information being passed on through the generations.
Interestingly, for any sceptics amongst you, this phenomenon of mind being both inside and outside our biological bodies is now also supported by contemporary quantum physics. Some sub-atomic particles can exist in two completely separate places at precisely the same time – when one is stimulated in one part of the world, the other responds despite being thousands of miles away.
If Sheldrake is right, then landscapes have ‘mind’ too – the collective mind of everything that is present in a place. When you are in a landscape, it follows that this mind includes your own. I have shared this mind, and I have heard other people refer to certain places as ‘special’, ‘magical and ‘sacred’, full of uncanny occurrences and strange ‘sensations’. In fact, I am almost embarrassed to tell you about the frequency of my experiences with these metaphysical fields. I am hoping that you will have experienced them yourself, will already know what I mean?
I have written before about the fuzzy edges at the periphery of wilderness where mind and matter seem to merge into a single sublime reality – the bliss we experience out there in the heart of wilderness. If you buy this magazine, then you probably recreate outdoors, and if you recreate outdoors you must have experienced this bliss. The great sadness for me, having spent so much of my life held like a note of music adrift in the giant cathedral of wilderness, is that many people simply can’t accept that there is more to our experiences of wilderness than is known by science, by biology and chemistry, physics, glaciation, plate tectonics and material fact.
But this is only a sadness when it is important for me to feel conventional or approved of. The rest of the time I don’t care! I have experienced Sheldrake’s fields – Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’; Freud’s ‘Oceanic State’; Maslow’s ‘Peak Experience’; Bucke’s ‘Cosmic Consciousness’, James’s ‘Mystical State’; Lévy-Bruhl’s ‘Participation Mystique’ (the list is endless), first-hand. And it is evident that many others have too.
We share our minds with the world around us and we are deeply affected by our collective thoughts. We operate on ‘gut instinct’, we achieve through team ‘spirit’, we weave our lives around coincidences that lie far beyond the mathematics of probability – and then we deny it all as rubbish because it doesn’t fit into our scientific, technocratic, hard, secular worldview.
This is why wilderness feels so good: Because we can relax back into being fully functioning human beings; we can give up wasting all that energy trying to maintain a world that is meaningless and shallow; we can run naked through the collective field of dreams.
This is a great post, Thanks!