Into the Wild: A Zen perspective

Almost everyone has heard of, if not seen, the film Into the Wild. This film is based on the story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who gave away his law school college fund money and set out on the road to get away from civilization. After much wandering and full of half baked ideas glorifying the natural life garnered from the writings of Thoreau, Jack London, Tolstoy and others, he found his way to Alaska where he spend three months in the wilderness, living in an abandoned bus near Denali National Park. With few wilderness survival skills he simply starved to death.

The movie is very well made, the filmmakers are clearly very skilled in their art. The narrative of the film is sympathetic towards the young man’s perspective and adventures. But let us take a closer look and we will see that this man’s story as depicted in the film reveals many misconceptions of our popular culture about who we are. It is a case study in the foolishness of the romantic age we live in.

First let us acknowledge what makes sense. Christopher’s hunger is real; his needs, the needs of young men, are simply not addressed in modern society. They have been senselessly declared morally bad and are sometimes criminalized. Young men full of testosterone are adventurers. Going out of college straight into law school and then the politically correct cubicle hell corporate office misses many necessary steps in a young man’s psychic development. Many young men do feel a genuine need to be wild for a period of time, to experience risk, to take up ashes, to do kitchen work, to do physical labor. They have a strong need to bond with older men of the tribe who are not their fathers, older men who can be mentors, who can teach them what it is to be a man, to be a leader. Modern society provides few sensible outlets for this, or is even prepared to acknowledge it.

But the lessons implied in the film are missing much. Let us look closer

- It is suggested that Christopher’s rejection of society is moral. He really does love people but is frustrated that there is evil in the world, frustrated that people are not always nice. He thinks by getting away he is doing something noble. Look closely and we can see that this is really the vanity of the narcissistic adolescent. He wants people to be what he would like them to be and nothing they do for him can be good enough. Just like the proverbial kid who refuses to play the game if he can’t hit the home run and goes home with the bat and ball, Christopher wants everything to be his way and easy or else he won’t play.

If anything the people Christopher meets are extraordinarily kind to him - a random unwashed stranger - far more than one would expect. Everywhere he goes people talk to him, befriend him and even feed him, he can pick up part time jobs whenever he likes. Even the police officer who gives him a thrashing for stowing on a train is, while over the top, just doing his duty. What would a society be like if everyone was stowing away? Who would actually build the trains and do the job of running them? The truck drivers who give him rides are all doing jobs, they are on schedules that they are required to keep. They are not escaping anywhere. To expect that you can live off the kindness of people forever is not reasonable and unfair to the people you are relying on.

Christopher’s problem reflects the horror of the choice society; the choice society which suggests that taking only the parts of others that are convenient to you is actually a worthwhile way to live, it can actually be a fulfilling experience.

To genuinely care about other people you must care about them in their entirety, not just the parts you happen to like at the moment. A friend is a friend regardless of what the prevailing mood might suggest. If you love someone you love them entirely including the faults they have or when they happen to be annoying or sad.

Aside from the extreme narcissist, this kind of choice life will only leave you feeling fragmented, disconnected and alone. The street goes two ways; people will only want to be with you for the parts of you that they like, they will reject you when it is not convenient for them to care about you. You end up coming under a perverse pressure: you have to always be on, always be happy even when you are not, otherwise you will lose your friends.

Christopher’s story then suggests someone who is an emotional personality, likely to identify himself with and get overwhelmed by his emotions. Here is the master Osho on the subject. The emotions that come with this kind of personality are worthless, they have no significance whatsoever.

- Cinema can make even the most boring and mundane things seem romantic. Soft focus camera, good angles, makeup, folk guitar music give everything that sexy romantic feel. But of course the actually reality is very different. There is nothing glamorous or romantic about surviving by yourself in the outdoors. It is hard, hard work.

People who lived in the wild before industrial civilization like the Native Americans were certainly able to enjoy it, but it took great life training and discipline to do so. Each person had to learn skills that the tribe required and the there was no room for the individual ego, you did what was necessary. There was no room for narcissism.

- Living in the wild without any schedule suggests a free spirit but the reality may be the opposite. Often people who are unable to adjust to the requirements of others are the biggest controllers. In the wild Christopher could control his daily schedule and had to answer to no one. While freedom from the clock is something everyone dreams of and is part of the appeal of the ‘natural’ life, the conclusion one can’t help making from the story is that he was the ultimate unhealthy control freak, incapable of sharing anything or accommodating anyone.

- Having rejected the structure of life that he associates with civilization, Christopher takes up the form of being in the wild all by himself convinced that it will feel more free and, initially at least, it certainly does. However, while there are some forms that willl be more suited to our natural temperament than others, any feeling of freedom as defined this way can never last. While the memory of the annoyances of the old form are fresh the new form will feel liberating but once that old memory fades the new structure will be just another structure - with aspects that are pleasant and aspects that are annoying. The new structure also carries in it the seeds of its own destruction if you come to it out of a negative. For if you come to something not to engage with it joyfully but to get away then when this new thing becomes annoying you will want to run away again.

- Christopher gets many of his life plans from books he has read. They suggest to him what he should like, what he should feel. Of course this is nonsense. You cannot feel what you should feel, you can only feel what you actually do. A Zen story goes like this: a great philosopher comes to a Zen master and tells him he cannot understand all that Zen mumbo jumbo. The Zen master presents the philosopher with a full cup of tea. Then he asks the philosopher to pour more tea in it. The philosopher is dumbfounded. How is this possible? The cup is full. Indeed says the Zen master. And so your cup is full with your philosophical ideas. How can you learn anything new then? Empty your cup first.

So Christopher arrives in Alaska with a head full of ideas of what he should experience. These ideas of what we should experience, which we get from books, television, movies and other people too, can prevent us from having our own experience. When watching a sunset if we think this is a sunset or if we already have an idea what the sunset should be we will have missed the experience. We can either watch the sunset or we can think this is what sunset should look like.

Try this little experiment. Meditate for five minutes focussing on your breath. Then make a cup of tea and sip it slowly without any preconceived ideas of what the tea should taste like. Let its taste be what it is. Make a mental note of what the experience was like. It may come in handy later.

- The movie ends with a moral message when Christopher realizes in his final moments that happiness is only real when it is shared. Of course when he was with people he made a great effort to not be happy.

Whenever we say happiness is X we will feel good briefly trying to make X happen and when we get X we will be miserable again. Happiness is not some ‘thing’, it cannot be pursued. You will be happy when you are happy, sad when you are sad. You can only know what happy is when you know what sad is. So the Zen masters tell us, when you are happy be happy completely, when you are sad be sad completely. Sometimes you will enjoy being with people, sometimes not. And come to meditation! Be a witness to your happiness and sadness, your moods. Then a distance will come between you and your emotions and this distance will be extremely pleasant.

Romantic ideas, at least as expressed by our modern zeitgeist make us slaves to the immediate moment. We believe what we feel in the immediate moment is real and must be acted on. But in order to create anything that can give us a more long lasting sense of satisfaction and accomplishment we have to be able to bypass what we happen to be feeling at the moment. Wise men of all time have observed this.

A more genuine, lasting love may be possible but it can only happen after the immediate feeling has passed away, after you have gone past the rush of immediate attraction or repulsion, after you are able to see past the veil of your immediate ego to what lies beyond. Then and only then will you begin to attain to a lasting sense of bliss, of ‘freedom’.

All romantic ideas are lies. Your ideology is not real, your theology is not real. Nothing you think or believe can match the overwhelming indifference of mother nature. As Osho reminds us we are but pilgrims here on this planet. Just guests, here briefly, then gone.

So taking out all the faux morality and bogus romantic glamour Christopher’s story in the end becomes a story of a grand adventure, nothing more, nothing less. At least he had the guts to take it and hopefully he enjoyed it too. He died at the peak of the adventure and possibly may have chosen to do so rather than return to his old life. This is not that unusual in human history; people in warrior tribes have been known to seek exit at their peak rather than let the inevitable decline of age render their capacities useless.

A grand adventure, hopefully laughing all the way. What’s yours?