Page Under Construction 1. Sight: In my book I stress that hunters should hone ALL their senses. These are taste, smell, sound, touch and sight. They should strive to develop the sixth sense of subconscious, automatic, instantaneous integration of natural clues encountered during the hunt. I define this sense as the “proximity feeling” - the instinctive awareness of animal presence and the environment that allows and controls their existence, survival and location at the moment of the hunt . A human parallel example of total awareness is the individual who becomes a statesman, executive, or charismatic leader because they are able to instinctively and rapidly understand all types of people. They do not itemize list all the assets, wants, abilities, etc. of the people they meet. They instinctively can instantly arrive at an accurate summary of the people. Modern Sight: Do Not be an Ocular-centric Hunter: To where have we humans traveled in recent sensual history? We have become extremely biased toward using only sight to make judgments. I saw a most chilling example. There was the magazine photograph! Perhaps thirty thousand protesters were holding up their lighted cell phones to illuminate a dark city square. What another insight to what we have become. We must now first see something to assess and believe it. The rapid evolution of technology in the last sixty years has warped our assessing-abilities to only the sense of sight. We need only see a picture in a magazine or on the internet to induce us to buy it. Everywhere we go and every thing we do is governed by dominantly looking. We are losing our other sensual abilities. Many of us no longer really judge what we do or purchase according to its merits using all our senses. If we do not like the item, we just return it. Modern man must see things to believe them. Social scientist Dr. Carolyn Purnell (1-4-2017) points out how sight has become dominating and instinctive in 21st Century humans. She illustrates this change with the nighttime working of Paris’ central market. For 600 years it operated in the dark. Candles were expensive, the few street lights had burned out by that late trading hour, and gas lighting had not been yet invented. Shopkeepers would descend on the market after midnight when the wholesalers and growers had freshly stocked their booths. The retailers hovered around merchandise and assessed its quality, cut, and freshness in virtual darkness. They had to use all their senses to choose the proper items that would rapidly resell the next day, a day without refrigeration. The system worked because of fine tuning all the senses. The retailer had restocked their shops and gotten some sleep well before morning shoppers arrived. How did the buyers determine what to buy? They used all five their senses plus some intuition and deductions. Aromas told them where certain good were, and how fresh they may be. They felt the goods, smelled them, analyzed their textures, judged weight, porosity, water content, freshness, thickness. And all the while their ears were cocked to detect out seller nuisances, bargaining positions and potential deception. It worked – in the dark – with the use of all senses! The lack of sight was then not a crippling detriment to business. Dr. Purnelll (2017) concludes, “Enlightenment – that illumination may not have been the great metaphor of the age, but its most influential thinkers knew that senses beyond sight conveyed many more other kinds of information about the world around us [ than does light].”

Honing Hunter Senses