characterized by a focus on objects. Mental postures involving greed, acquisition, consumption, excess logic, analysis, preoccupation with time, and the use of categories and language fall into the survival mode. That mind-set’s capacity to appreciate wider reality, he said, was like a hand trying to grasp water by making a fist around it. The closing hand can’t retain the liquid.
Deikman also observed experimental subjects in another, complementary mental state he called the “receptive mode”—one characterized by intuition, openness, and an attitude of relaxed allowance. Subjects in that state reported holistic sensory experiences with more vivid details and colors and a blurring of boundaries between physical objects. They also claimed to experience a sense of connectedness to their environment. Deikman wrote that while a person was in the receptive mode, “aspects of reality that were formerly unavailable” and “new dimensions of the total stimulus array” were able to enter his or her awareness. He compared the receptive mode’s capacity for appreciating reality to a cupped hand scooping up water. The hand is able to retain the liquid.19
The science concurs with what mystics in traditional cultures have always known: that the reality underlying appearances is not accessible to our conventional senses. In Middle Eastern and Islamic cultures, to use one example, groups of mystics known as Sufis have often referred to a hidden reality, of which our world of appearances is but a partial manifestation. According to them, our survival-oriented brain and culturally conditioned mind narrow our vision, thereby preventing us from seeing a much wider reality that functions more holistically. But unlike most contemporary scientists, Sufis have always known that when those constricting mental postures are loosened or relaxed in a certain way, it is possible to get a glimpse, or more, of that bigger picture. This same psychological knowledge was systematized by the Sufis, as well as by mystics in other cultures, adjusted for the local context, and taught as science. The important point is that according to traditional psychologies, even though we are usually cut off from the bigger picture, it is still possible for us to tap into it—even if for most of us it’s often just a random flash in the pan.
Might there be a link, in some cases, between the emanations of the unseen universe, its fits and starts, and the things we occasionally feel, see, or experience that are out of the ordinary? Could it be that what some people register as a Sasquatch is a mental signature, a blip, representing an impulse from that reality beyond? A frequency to which the mind is open in certain states and which it interprets, symbolizes, and personifies as a hairy wild person—especially when we’re in or near nature?
If a mind that is somehow rendered “receptive” enough comes across a flicker of stimulus for which no innate pattern exists as a match, the brain would naturally search for another pattern that comes close enough under the circumstances: in this case a Sasquatch. This might explain why Bigfoots are most often seen by accident but are never deliberately found or captured. The late scientist and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer René Dubos once wrote: “Man converts all the things that happen to him into symbols, then commonly responds to the symbols as if they were actual external stimuli.”20 Perhaps Bigfoot hunters and investigators are chasing the symbol, the mental representation that is generated in the minds of Bigfoot eyewitnesses—the Sasquatch itself—after the fact. When people who see a Bigfoot in a transcendental way then choose to search for the creature afterward, they are really looking to relive, or recapture, a moment of expanded awareness that has long since vanished.
If rare and elusive physical Sasquatches exist, Deikman’s ideas still hold. Deliberate sleuthing, investigating, and chasing after the Sasquatch would be “survival mode” activities that narrow our perception—we see less overall as a result. By contrast, people who see or experience Bigfoots by accident (the vast majority) seem to be, more often than not, in a more receptive mode—something that exposure to nature can definitely engender. Even hunting, which is otherwise a survival mode activity, can involve many hours of sitting in tree stands and perhaps getting into a meditative, or receptive, frame of mind. Many hunters report seeing Sasquatches under those very circumstances.
It’s just as William Housty said to me at Koeye: as with anything in life, if you try too hard to find something, you’ll be hard-pressed to succeed. But as soon as you stop trying, your odds suddenly change.
I meet