Eighty-Six Days of Solitude: A Selection from Mike Spencer Bown’s The World’s Most Travelled Man (2018)

“Civilized people are clueless. Hunter-gatherers get it, but they are scarce nowadays. There is a human nature attuned to living with the band back at camp—social life in the band with family, friends, and rivals is something we have evolved a social and conceptual mindset to cope with. But this amounts to precisely half of what it is to be human—there is a flip side, an entire second half to human nature, which is the human nature sculpted for use when alone in wilderness. Few people ever experience it. This second human nature fascinated me.

To experience this second human nature, you must go alone to deep wilderness, without seeing people, speaking, or seeing human structures. Human structures and altered landscapes are like manifested thoughts. You can feel the concepts and the human striving behind them—to look at them is to be reminded of others. If you are alone but around artifice made by the hand and mind of man, you don’t get the second human nature, bush-mode; instead you get its miserable cousin, cabin fever. Same goes if you are with or near another person, unless you can salvage some fractional bush-mode by being exquisitely in tune with that person and so communicate without speech.

But get away from all artifice and everyone else, and the changes are profound. After ten days you’ll feel a simple distortion of your unexamined obsession with time—time will stretch like rubber, and you’ll no longer know or care if it has been eight or twelve days, as the sun and the moon phase come to mean more than the date. This is not an especially mind-bending result, but it is the first sign of your conscious and unconscious reversing polarity. After a few weeks your world starts to become interesting; you begin to lose a habit that you don’t even know you have: the habit of compressing your thoughts so that they are succinct enough to put words to them, an absolutely essential precondition for speaking.

When you never speak, those parts of your mind get repurposed. Something over a month without speech or human contact and the transformation is complete—dismissal of concepts from one’s mind, and a weakening of the self, such that you have no longing or habit for either. In two more weeks your waking and sleeping are similar. If you sleep on the forest floor like I did, open to the elements save for a bit of an overhead shelter to keep rain away, your mind can experience reality as you sleep, and if you dream, as I once did one drizzling night, that a deer tiptoes across the mountainside, eating tiger lilies, in the morning your eyes behold, as mine did, the missing line of lilies. What you dream is real. Similarly, during the day, instead of thoughts, daydreams will float in your head, and by following your dreams, all necessary things will be done, in the times and order that is best, all without thought . . . rather, you are in the same flow as reality, and you don’t ever feel the need to flap or fuss.

If you are making a mistake or blundering into a dangerous wilderness situation, you will experience a vision that will correct your path as long as you heed its deep meaning. Hereafter your bushcraft is like something out of this world, or maybe deeply of this world, an altered state of consciousness, the other way to experience what it is to be human.

I could intuit the identities and intentions of any animal moving in the forests around me or on the slopes above by the reactions of squirrels and chipmunks and birds. Wolves and deer and moose gave away their species by how ‘thick’ their legs sounded stepping through shrubbery in the next meadow over. When, during my mind-bending personal record of eighty-six days of solitude, a black bear tried to spy on me, off to one side, through 40 metres of dense brush, while hiding behind a black stump and poking out only a black ear and one eye, I turned my head, gazed into its eye for a fraction of a second as a sign of mutual awareness, and walked on without breaking stride. It was as if my mind could recognize anything amiss in the patterns of wilderness around me, and the disturbance in the background pattern would emerge and come to my attention as if by intuition.

At times I would play a game with deer, where the goal was to approach them, undetected, by moving inside the gaps in their consciousness. If you are fully in tune with nature, you’ll note that deer cycle through various states of consciousness, and in the gaps you can draw closer, as long as you are downwind. Attend especially to their browsing state, and also one of the other states, a faux browsing state, as these are the most important. In the faux state they appear to browse, but they are secretly doing a scan with all their senses. When a deer is in this state, move not a muscle, not even your eyeballs; then, when the deer thinks itself safe and sinks into full browsing, with its sensing dimmed to save brain power, slink ever so silently forward. When again it attends—in fact, a split second before it forms the intent to shift states, which will be at irregular intervals—freeze without forming the notion to freeze, but freeze.

The game was to approach a deer like this until it was within arm’s reach, but rather than touch the deer, I would wait till it went into the most alert form of consciousness, where it lifts its neck and does a full eye and ear swivel and scan, and then flick my eyeballs to one side, nothing more, to expose the whites for a split second. Frantically, the deer would bounce away through the bush, probably astonished that a huge animal such as me had appeared beside it: magic.

I’m sure that these experiences are common to humanity, as other people I’ve talked to who have spent long stints in the wilderness tell me similar tales. And I’ve yet to meet anyone who has done more than sixty-five days alone in this way and maintained an ego. That is to say, we all enter a mode where our days and nights of dreams and aspirations are no longer filtered through any kind of self or ‘me.’ There is no such entity as ‘me or I’ after this point. And when you go back to civilization, it’s a long slog back into the mindset needed to deal with chattering people and their world of battling, thrusting, concepts, and artifice. Usually it’s one for one: if you had minimal human contact for five months, it will be five months of strenuous effort, equivalent to learning a foreign language, to flip back to normal, during which time you’ll appear to others to be ‘bush-crazy.’

Some of the effects of bush-craziness are minor and easily dealt with. Your expressions will be exaggerated; you’ll have to tone them down. And you’ll find you will have to be careful in shops not to knock over shelves, especially if you fell into the habit of careening off tree trunks for controlled descents down forested slopes. But this is nothing compared to the most mind-bending effect that comes with being around other people again. The part of your mind tasked to deal with others, closely twinned if not co-mingled with the deactivated self, wakes up with such fury that you attend with a laser focus to every expression, every word spoken or not spoken, in order to determine what was implied and when, who might have mimicked earlier wordings or reflected earlier facial expressions, and what subtle clues to group dynamics were thereby revealed.

Furthermore, civilized humans come across as all bluster and crassness, trampling one another’s feelings, working angles on the psyches of their friends and lovers with all the subtlety of demolition crews with crowbars and dynamite clearing slums for an expressway. If you don’t cultivate compassion, and see how civilization is so demanding of time and attention that it is necessarily quick and dirty, you might end up with a dim view of civilized humanity, which is especially troubling as you know that you’ll fall into the same habits once your ‘self’ is up to strength and wrestles you back to the city mindset. What does this have to do with travel? For me, everything.”—Mike Spencer Bown, The World's Most Travelled Man: A Twenty-Three-Year Odyssey to and through Every Country on the Planet (2018)