Robert Greene on attention, danger and feeling connected to nature

Chris Williamson asks Robert Greene about a Russian explorer and a Siberian tiger. Greene retells a story associated with Dersu Uzala, the hunter and guide in the writings of explorer Vladimir Arsenyev and in Akira Kurosawa’s film of the same name.

In Greene’s account, Arsenyev was mapping remote forest when an Indigenous hunter, Dersu, joined his expedition after meeting the party around a fire. Greene describes a guide who knew the terrain intimately and could notice signs the visitors missed.

Greene says Dersu could interpret tracks, broken branches and changes in the weather. He presents that knowledge as an example of close attention to an environment, acquired through living and hunting there.

When the party hears a tiger, Greene says, the frightened explorer reaches for his rifle. Dersu stops him and speaks to the animal; in Greene’s telling, the tiger walks away. Dersu says their friendship would have ended had the explorer shot it.

Greene interprets the story as a meeting of scientific exploration and a different, intimate knowledge of the forest. He says the explorer came to regret the disappearance of a way of relating to nature and wondered what could be gained by combining such awareness with science.

Williamson asks whether abilities people call supernatural might sometimes be ordinary human capacities people have lost touch with. Greene answers that he believes people can be capable of more than they expect and turns to a story about a mountaineer.

According to Greene, the climber reached a Colorado summit, chose an unfamiliar descent as a storm approached, and fell about 30 feet. He landed on a narrow ledge with an injured knee and feared he would die there alone.

Greene recounts that the climber heard an inner instruction to try standing up. Once upright, he spotted a possible route between ledges, felt a rush of energy and made it down before going to hospital. Recovery took months, but the experience stayed with him.

In Greene’s account, the climber spent years trying to experience that state again through climbing and long-distance running. He studied the brain and considered accounts of initiation rituals and extreme experiences in other cultures.

Greene says the climber came to interpret the experience in terms of the body’s hormonal response to danger. Greene presents the mountaineer’s interpretation of those experiences; the conversation does not establish the biological mechanism.

Greene describes another run in which the climber followed a circular route across whatever terrain lay in his way and felt a similar state near a cliff. Greene uses the account to argue that circumstances can reveal capacities people do not ordinarily notice.

He speculates that someone forced to survive alone might become more attentive to sensory information. For Greene, the question is how everyday life can leave people feeling disconnected from their bodies and surroundings.

Greene also recalls a personal experience of coming close to death. He describes it as difficult to put into words and says it changed how he perceived the world. He distinguishes this feeling from taking a psychedelic substance.

He closes with his view that people may not be accessing all the possibilities of their minds because they feel disconnected from their bodies, senses and mortality.