Happy Hunting Grounds

When something cannot be described using words or graspable analogies, how can that something motivate people to seek it? Yet such is the case with ecstatic experiences. Those who report them use words like these: “It cannot be described!” “It transcends all that we know!” “Ineffable!” This can—and is—rendered into dreary technical jargon: The very means we try to use to describe or understand it are also the very veils that hide this unutterable Wonder. More amusing, sometimes, are imaginative aggrandizements like this: Compared to it the greatest Joy that you could possibly experience is like a tiniest black ant hiding at the bottom of the deepest canyon in the deepest ocean in the darkest hour of the longest night. Etc.

I much prefer descriptions of the world we get from some of the Native American tribes. They spoke of the Happy Hunting Grounds. Not sophisticated? Catering to the already excessively sensuous nature of humanity? — Or could the Happy Hunting Grounds be much closer to the truth than the Unimaginably Ineffable reached by extreme and towering mortifications after uncounted lives of failure? The Happy Hunting Grounds can at least be described in some ways. The greatest of humanity’s ecstatics utterly fail to communicate. What they say reminds me of a perfectly-wiped blackboard: we’re staring at nothing at all.

So who is closer to the truth? Could the ecstatics have it right? Or dare we trust the Iroquois? Well, here I would begin by pointing out that the Iroquois were an exceedingly sophisticated people; the Iroquois League had features of government that, if we could reproduce them, would please us indeed—but would also impose disciplines incompatible with a consumption culture. Let’s not dismiss the Iroquois, the Cherokee, or the Algonquians just because we’re ignorant of them and managed to erase them (for a time) from the cultural landscape.

Meanwhile there are some genuine problems with the ecstatic view. If the ecstatics are right, radical discontinuities are present in the cosmos. This comes into view when we compare the life we know in this dimension, the efforts we’re supposed to make to reach salvations, and the rewards we are supposed to gain. Effort and reward are incommensurably disproportional. It does not matter which cultural tradition we consult. Eternal damnation or eternal (but indescribable) bliss? Eternal suffering in rebirth after bloody rebirth, old age, etc., over and over again? Unless in this life we make so heroic an effort of the will to extinguish ourselves that we suddenly become divine? When incommensurability is present, it becomes problematical to speak of meaning. The Arbitrary raises its head—however benevolent its visage.

Over against that Ungraspable, the Happy Hunting Grounds make a lot of sense. The way I see it, life here and life beyond must have some differences, to be sure—but also some continuities. Without both, meaning disappears. In the Happy Hunting Grounds, hunting is still necessary—but it is easier, happiness is greater, the game is ample, and easier to catch. The myth projects a transition to a higher sphere in which the features of the mental landscape retain some element of recognition—not this life here and then an indescribable flash of light. I’m inclined to trust humanity’s traditional views against the extreme experiences of those who assault heaven with boundless fury determined to rob it of its secret. I find it interesting that ordinary people, reporting on near-death experiences, also suggest the kind of continuity the Amerindians did by speaking of hunting grounds. People who’ve undergone an NDE are themselves transformed by the experience, predominantly for the better. And they do have something to say—although, to be sure, they also have difficulties putting that world into the language we use to describe this one.

My own views of the ecstatic are fleshed out here. To give it a brief summary, it appears to be contact with something analogous to energy, experienced as extraordinarily powerful and positive. It appears to heighten benevolence and intellect—but fails to bestow knowledge. It is interpreted as contact with a person—but only by some. Among the traditions, the Sufis are cautious about it, their teachers frown. And official Catholicism (although derided for this) does not rush to embrace the experience either—and quite rightly so.