Metaphysical Tracking: The Oldest Ecopsychology

1. What they did

The author, from Alfred University in New York state, looks at a side of tracking that trackers often keep to themselves: experiences that seem to go beyond what the physical senses can explain. He places these within ecopsychology, the use of nature to understand and heal the soul.

He draws on five sources: the ethnographic literature on hunter-gatherers, his own training by professional trackers, reports from his students, his own experiences, and stories told around wilderness campfires. From these he describes the three most common kinds of what he calls metaphysical tracking:

• Remote tracking: “seeing” an animal’s tracks, or the animal, far away, without being there.
• Auric-residue tracking: sensing energy or information that an animal is said to leave on the ground they walked on.
• Spirit tracking: feeling as if one has become the animal, thinking and sensing as they did.

He proposes that all three come from an “energy body” (also called the astral or etheric body, or aura) that connects the tracker with the animal being tracked. He then describes how these experiences change trackers’ lives, answers five objections skeptics might raise, and suggests ways the ideas could be tested.

2. What they found

Remote tracking

• Accounts include a Kalahari Bushman who “sees” lions and tracks far away; an old hunter in Labrador who sat under a blanket gazing at bear tracks, “saw” where they led, and found the bear; Blackfoot trackers who track animals in their dreams; and Dene hunters who “see” in dreams where their path will cross an animal’s.
• The author describes a master tracker who correctly told a student 30 yards away that the stick he had placed was at the heel of a red fox track; a tracking teacher whose students meditate on where a cougar is and then find their tracks there; and his own experience in a hide-and-seek tracking game, when he “saw” the hidden person’s tracks loop back into a grove of trees where the person was hiding.
• He suggests remote tracking could save time and effort in hunting, law enforcement and search and rescue.

Auric-residue tracking

• He describes tracks as carrying traces of the animal’s “soul substance”, and compares this to psychics said to “read” objects at crime scenes.
• Sensations reported on such trails include glowing orbs, silver and gold ribbons, tingling, pressure and pulls. He describes a deer trail that lit up like a silver ribbon on a dark, overcast night.
• Heat is the most common sensation: he describes students shedding hats and coats while tracking intensely in freezing weather. He links this to !Xo hunters, who say a burning feeling in the forehead means their quarry is just ahead, and to the sayings “warm trail” and “hot on the trail”.
• He says his students, holding their hands over a track, regularly do better than chance at judging the animal’s sex, age, hunger, thirst and other traits. No figures are given.

Spirit tracking

• Trackers describe forgetting the physical tracks and feeling they have become the animal. A Bushman tracker says that when running down a kudu, “I really was a kudu”.
• The author describes smelling distant wood smoke while tracking a red fox into the wind, and wondering whether he was smelling with the fox’s senses. His students tracking deer say they suddenly want to “bed down under some pines”.
• He describes feeling the pain of wounded animals while following blood trails in hunting season, and picking up a menacing feeling from human tracks leading to the site of a drinking party, after which he learned a fight had nearly broken out there. Some spirit trackers recommend “shielding”, especially when tracking humans.

“Soul shift”

• These experiences often lead to deep personal change. Trackers’ stories tell of changed jobs, marriages and homes. Many, he says, then turn to protecting the wildlife they have come to know, so that “their psychology leads to ecology”.

3. What they concluded

• The author concludes that tracking can be a doorway to transcendence, and that metaphysical tracking may be something evolution built into humans to help them survive by hunting.
• He answers five objections:
• It is all made up: similar accounts come from across the world and across centuries.
• It is the “magical thinking” of traditional peoples: modern technicians, biologists and engineers report the same experiences.
• Trackers are reading very subtle physical cues: he takes this seriously, but says such skill grows with years of experience, while metaphysical experiences can happen to beginners and young children.
• Trackers know the landscape unconsciously: he says many of these experiences happen on new landscapes.
• Trackers are reading each other’s minds: the experiences also happen when tracking alone.
• He suggests two studies: comparing equally experienced trackers, with and without training in remote viewing and seeing auras, on how many tracks they detect; and surveying trackers on their metaphysical experiences and their major life changes, to see whether the two are related.

4. How tracking was or was not used

No field study was done. The paper is about trackers’ experiences while following tracks: wildlife tracking (fox, deer, cougar, bear, kudu, springbok), trailing wounded animals by blood, and tracking people in search and rescue, police work and tracking games. Accounts come from the author’s own tracking, his students and other trackers, and published sources.

5. Tracker or observer certification

Reported but not validated. The author says he was trained by professional trackers and teaches tracking himself. Others are described as a “master tracker”, a tracker who solved over 500 cases for police and park officials, and tracking teachers. None of their skill is tested or certified in the paper, and the claimed results (such as students doing better than chance) are not backed by data.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• Techniques described from tracking schools and traditions: meditating on where an animal is now; staring at a track in a trance-like state; holding a hand over a track to “read” it; role-playing the animal to experience the landscape as they do.