In my 30s and 40s, I competed in 100-mile endurance races with my horse, Gypsie Wings. In this article, I want to describe the horse-human embodiment that makes for a successful partnership in a grueling sport. The archetype of the Centaur represents this ideal embodiment—where the human being bleeds into their animal nature, and becomes one with the horse. The human becomes more surefooted, more instinctual, both sturdier and faster, with greater reserves of power. When they are going “all out” you experience a sense of flying on the ground. There is a palpable sense of the impact of each hoof with the ground, drawing energy from the earth, and while climbing, you sense being pushed forward and upward by the enormous kinetic energy resources of the earth.

If the human is a reliable partner, the horse gains an advantage, too. While the horse is focusing on the here and now, on what is under foot, the human acts as the horse’s periscope and radar. The rider opens her awareness to the surrounds, to what is up ahead, always on the lookout for course markers that are hard to spot and easy to miss, especially when moving at a fast pace. The course often meanders through rough terrain, deeply wooded forests, and long meadows where you can lose time by wandering aimlessly. Sometimes, when you are lost, you ask the horse to lead you back, but in this case, the horse is going backwards, not forwards, and when you find the trail again, the horse is not sure which way the race course goes. In this moment, the horse defers to you. However, in a good partnership, the horse gets to decide what “gear” to drive in, except in this case we call the “gear” a “gait.”

Walking is too slow to be suitable for most races, except when jogging down a steep slope, which is usually done with the rider off the horse, running alongside.[1] Most of the choices the horse has to make are between trotting or cantering. The horse is very stable at the trot, and much less so at the canter. While trotting, there are always two alternate feet on the ground, stabilizing both front-back and side-to-side axes; whereas at the canter, the horse rests on a single foot only, on two of the three beats of the gait.[2] Since a good race over 100 miles is completed at an average 12–14 mph, the canter (10–16 mph) must be used more often than the trot (8–10 mph).

There is of course a faster gait—the gallop. In endurance riding, there are only a few short sections of the course that are suitable (long, low inclines, and sturdy footing) for galloping. But, if she has enough energy, the horse likes to be let loose to gallop, as it lengthens and relaxes the spine, and releases pent-up energy for running.[3] Galloping these sections is requisite to raise the average speed. Through training and practice, the horse learns how to choose her gaits, the human learns how to ride them smoothly and with as little impact on the horse as possible, and the horse learns to read the rider’s body language and trust her perception.

When everything is in sync, the experience of effortless, seamless flow is so overwhelming that you can enter a state where you do not so much feel that you are moving through the landscape, but that the landscape is moving toward you, and all you are doing is responding, making small adjustments to your gaze, posture, and “seat.” Here, perception is pared down to the resonance of bodies in space—an anticipatory state of seeking to satisfy sensorimotor-perceptual desire through mutual felt-sensing. In their ground-breaking book Enaction: Toward a Zen Mind in Learning and Teaching, Masciotra, Roth, and Morel (2007) describe a state of “deep interiority” as becoming one with nature. In combative sports, this means entering into a relationship of interiority with the opponent where both fighters form a unity in which it is difficult to ascertain attack from defense, since their bodies express a single movement. Together they create a spielraum, a space of possibility, where shifting balance opens and closes affordances for action. The combatant with the greater skill will perceive affordances that do not exist for the other fighter. This is because an affordance is neither merely an objective or subjective aspect of the situation.

Taking advantage of an affordance—something offered by the world—depends upon perceiving it, and perceiving it depends upon having the skill to take advantage of it. My dog perceives the turkeys as being nearby because he can run the half mile across the rolling hillside to get to them before they take flight. Where I can only perceive a shear granite wall, Alex Honnold can see a clear path up to the top, because he has the skill to execute the climb. There is no linear development in this equation. Perception does not lead to practice which leads to skill. Rather, the modes are entangled holistically into cognitive events that grow.

The notion of deep interiority explains the seamless unity of horse and rider running an endurance course. Sensorimotor fields blend. The perceptual signals I am receiving are transmitted through my body into the horse by micro-gestures. The curvature of my neck, spine, and hips traces an arc in time. My hips are with the horse in the horses’ present moment, attending to staying loose, fluid, and centered as the horse maneuvers the uneven ground. I sit not on the horse, but hover above her, with my feet in the stirrups, I half-sit above, allowing my knees and hips to absorb and distribute the rhythmic shockwaves that propel us forward. My neck and gaze point to the future, which lies along the path, or somewhere up there around a corner. The horse intuits the future as “up ahead, but not yet here.” The line of my spine lays out the transition path in between. She too feels the undulation—the rhythmic curves from eye to neck to spine, as they trace the path along a time-space continuum.

This continuum is much like the three-phases of Husserl’s temporality: retention, present, and protention. Husserl thought of these as mental events associated with conscious intention. And yet they arise through unconscious processes of embodied enaction that expresses time through the undulating cadence of the sensorimotor action-perception cycle. Changes in the cadence correlate with changes in perception of the flow of time and density of space. To understand this dynamic, we need to add in another variable—the process philosophical notion of duration. Duration refers to the a-temporal, a-spatial dimension of awareness. It too has a cadence that begins with intentional desire and ends with a perceptual-sensorimotor event that satisfies it.

Take for example, the notion of still hunting as a metaphor. Imagine a heron fishing off the bank of a pond. The heron stands motionless, but its body stays lively, ready to strike. The heron’s body is processing continuous microstates of action—small undulations in balance and position. The heron’s perceptual system is on high alert for visual and auditory sound and motion, but also for the haptic sensations on its feet. This composes an intentional state, that of catching something suitable to eat. Duration refers to how long the heron remains in the still hunting space. It could be interrupted by distraction, or lack of the capacity to remain on high alert. The extent of the duration can be thought of as the depth of concentration (perceptual acuity) times the width of awareness (perceptual reach). The passage of time and density of space varies with the expansion and contraction of the duration. As duration increases, clock time speeds up, psychological time slows down, and spatial dimensions expand. Through a process of sympoiesis, the horse and human become a single interbeing, whose temporal durations are entrained, cadence to cadence, body to body. The duration speeds up or slows down depending upon the terrain, pace, and perceptual activity that arises to compose a whole experience. It is an experience that mystics speak of, which I know very well, from these occasions and others like it.

Cognition in the wild depends on deep affect-laden streams that constitute the core embodied felt-sense. The felt sense is obstructed by emotions, which are thoughts (stories, narratives) that we compose, as overlays onto body sensations. The thought that you might be winning, or the thought that you might be falling behind, or the thought that you should-of-this or should-of-that in preparing for this race. These thoughts are not inherent in the horse’s mind, but they do cause the rider’s body to constrict, and the horse’s body to seize up in response. As a result, both horse and rider sustain injuries to joints and muscles. An endurance race must be run in a completely relaxed state. One hundred miles of joy. Joy in the heat, joy in the rain, joy at the gallop, joy at a slog, joy at sunrise, joy in the moonlight. Joy is the metric of excellence. Joy is the exuberance that comes through the flow of energies from the sensorimotor core—the proprioceptive, interoceptive, and exteroceptive systems of the body that compose the affective state of the animal—to perceptual affinities that flow forth to sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and touch emanating from the world. This is the “allocentric” mode of being of Zen, or what Ulrich Neisset refers to as the “ecological self,” which Evan Thompson (2020) describes as “the experience of being an active bodily agent geared into the immediate physical environment and connects to the phenomenological idea of bodily self-awareness” (115), and it is what I refer to as the “core self,” the set of non-egoic potentials that are laid down by deep evolutionary processes. Wild cognition, the tacit knowledge that is given through the sensorimotor-perception-action cycle, is one of these potentials.

In early childhood, the core self organizes experience into the primary schema of self, other, and world. The schema unfolds through pattern-recognition processes in the sensorimotor-perception-action cycles (Gopnick 2000, 2010, 2017; Schore 1994). As the child moves their body, they discover some patterns co-vary, some patterns vary, and some patterns are invariant to the movement of their bodies. These discernments are extremely refined in the infant. Consider,­ for example, the role that variance plays in the early attachment-attunement processes and affect regulation processes in the infant-mother relationship (Schore 1994). The mother must reflect back to the child that she is capable of monitoring and understanding the child’s internal affective and sensory state, and as such varies in response to changes in the child’s states. The mother must reflect back an adequate marker that signals that she herself is not experiencing the same state. The overall pattern must be one that varies; it must include response-with-variance. On the one hand, then, too little difference in variance (i.e., not enough marking) does not enable the child to separate their own internal states from the internal state of others, potentially causing attachment disorders. On the other, too much indifference (little or no response) causes the child to look indifferently on the other, causing disorganized attachment, leading to other developmental issues.

The persistence and persistent resistance of objects enables the child to develop into a sense of separate self and distinct environment, into the world of objects. Failure to resolve this difference leads to psychoid personality disorders.[4] To be a functioning person, means to parse experience effectively into self along with others, in a world of inanimate objects. The experience of deep interiority and periods of ecstasis and flow that accompany wild cognition, erode these boundaries.

When rider and horse are in perfect attunement, their bodies covary, and the sense of self and other dissolves. When sensation and perception are attuned, the fault line between perceiver and objects drops, and the experience of “perceptual participation” arises. Wild cognition opens up a kind of surround-sound sensorimotor awareness where the difference between moving through space and having space move by you is diminished. It also opens up a kind of perceptual relativism, where one is no longer so sure that they are moving in relationship to inanimate objects, but that the contrary—that the objects are moving in relationship to you—becomes equally plausible. The rhythmic motions of the horse-human body becomes a stationary cycle in a space of flying objects.

Consider, for example, a room with two columns. If you open your perceptual awareness in a certain way, you will see that, as you move back and forth, the columns will “move from side to side” relative to each other. This so-called parallax effect is considered by some to be a illusion. However, it serves as an affordance within wild cognition, and is the basis of Gibson’s (2015) ecological theory of perception. When you combine parallax with interiority, you have the experience that the columns’ movements are covarying with the movements of your body, and as such, the sense of self, intentionality, and duration, bleeds into the other and out over the world. This is the essence of cognition in the wild!

Let me give you another example. The Polynesian and Micronesian seafarers employed these features of sensorimotor-perception-action feedback loops as wayfinding techniques to cross enormous swaths of open ocean. They did not employ a Cartesian coordinate system as a mental model to navigate. They did not even experience themselves as moving through space, but rather, they moved through time, while the stars, oceans, winds, and birds moved toward and alongside them, effectively incorporating the parallax effect to see that the islands were also moving (Hutchins 1995). These “moving islands” were named etak.

From a Westerner’s perspective, the canoe might be moving along a line from west to east, marking distance. From the view on the canoe, the canoe is ground zero, the still point, and the island moves across the horizon “backwards” marking time.

The image of the etak reference island moving along just below the horizon can be quite naturally tied to the passage of time. Part of the knowledge that a navigator has about every voyage is the amount of time he can expect the trip to take under various conditions. . . . In terms of the movement of the reference island, this means that the island will move from a position under the initial bearing to a position under the final bearing in [the expected time]. (Hutchins 1995, 85)

Notice from the description how the seafarer experiences the movement of the island as marking time. Furthermore, as Hutchins describes, no real island is actually necessary. On voyages where there are no real islands that serve as reference islands, the seafarers imagine one or more etaks by giving them an imaginary bearing that correlates to positions on the arc along the horizon that traces the rising and falling of stars from dusk to dawn.

Now consider the true story of a small Hungarian detachment unit sent into the icy wilderness in the Alps during military maneuvers in Switzerland (Weick 2001). The troops were lost in a storm for two days, and the lieutenant who sent them out had given up hope of finding them. But on the third day they returned to base camp. How had they found their way? “One of us found a map in his pocket.” They reported. “That calmed us down. We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm, and then with the map we discovered our bearings. And here we are.” However, when the lieutenant took a look at their map, he was astonished to see that it was not a map of the Alps at all—it was a map of the Pyrenees! “This incident raises the intriguing possibility,” Weick (2011) surmises, “that when you are lost, any old map will do” (345–346).

Sure, it was helpful that the map was similar to the actual territory, but Weick argues that even a map of Disneyland—although harder to develop a shared plausibility around its usefulness—would still provoke action and observation that would have made some clearer sense of the situation. The soldiers would have at least known “we are not yet here,” and moved forward, until they could match what they observed, sensed, and felt, with some mark on the map. They could have, for example, labelled the peak they were looking at “Magic Mountain” and used that as a bearing. Here the distinction between a location, position, and bearing is important. A location is signified by a coordinate on a map. Without an accurate map, location is meaningless. Position refers to the triangulation between where you are, and other features in your locale. So while location is specific, position is relative. Bearing refers to the direction you are moving, relative to a fixed point, such as the North Star, compass direction, or visual (or imagined!) feature in the landscape. Imagine being in a meadow. You can take a bearing by looking straight ahead at a tree on the far side, and then turning clockwise until you are looking in the direction you are headed. The degrees that you turned (out of the 360 degree circle) is your bearing. Those are the same 360 degrees that correlate to the stars as they arc across the night sky.

The metaphor is useful for sensemaking in real life situations that are too complex and uncertain to know, which means you can’t have an accurate map to navigate them. You start by discerning the features of the landscape, by first becoming intimate with where you are. The first task is to cognize this “here” by realizing its salience. In his poem “When Lost in the Forest,” David Wagner describes this here-ness beautifully:

Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here.
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger.
Must ask it permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes.
Listen.
It answers.
I have made this place around you.
And if you leave it
You may come back again
Saying . . .
“Here.”
No two trees are the same to raven.
No two branches are the same to wren.
If what a tree or branch does
Is lost on you,
Then you are surely lost.
Stand still.
The forest knows where you are.
You must let it find you.

All the while you are exploring, you are gathering information directly from the territory. You are learning. When Bob Engle, the executive VP of Morgan Guarantee, heard the story of the lost Hungarian troops, he told Weick “Now that story would have been really neat if the leader out with the lost troops had known it was the wrong map and still been able to lead them back.” (2001, 346). This should give us confidence in the ride we are facing. We know our maps are bad, outdated, and splotched with imaginary features. Still, it seems we can lead.

People say there is a meaning crisis and a war on sensemaking. When I think of how we might tackle this problem, I often think of cognition in the wild. My side view proposition here is that perhaps what we think are the “mystical” or “superpowers” we need today, are not somehow capacities up there, in our evolutionary future. Perhaps what we need, mostly, is to recover capacities lost to our evolutionary past. Capacities such as cultivating a deep inner compass, becoming intimate with our sense of place, and trusting that we can wayfind without a map. Instead of worrying about where we are, focus more on how we are, how we are journeying together, and why we are moving in the first place. Wu-wei as “effortless action” was a spiritual ideal in early China. The great texts make it clear that wu-wei is a state of harmony, one that contains complex cognitive and somatic elements that involve the integrated training of the body, the emotions, and the mind (Singerland 2003). It represents the state of the doer who has unified subjective and objective reality into a single dynamic movement, as a result of having achieved clarity. This “true clarity,” Singlerland describes as

an illumination of the actual landscape before one’s eyes that serves to guide one through it, and is thus always intimately and inextricably tied to action. Thus, in place of the representational model of knowledge exemplified by the “gaze” of a subject acquiring theoretical knowledge of an external order behind the phenomenal world, the Chinese instead emphasize a sort of knowledge appropriate to a subject already engaged in the world through the medium of “the act.” (4)

Like cognition in the wild, wu-wei entails the mastery of a set of practices that restructure both one’s perceptions and values, where cognition does not mean the grasp of abstract principles, but the ability to move through the world and human society in a manner that is completely spontaneous and yet still fully in harmony with the natural world. The ancients understood wu-wei to be ordinary in the sense of “part of the natural order,” and yet hard for an ordinary person to achieve. Even back then they perceived wu-wei as something lost to the past, something the sages had perfected, that humans no longer understood.

Today we would say that cognition in the wild is something that evolution had perfected a long time ago, that is lost to us now. There is of course an ethical component to this. The sages thought of wu-wei as a feature of the supreme Dao, and so the consequences of such action were guaranteed to be virtuous. Today, however, we might repel from the parochialism it implies. We might say something like, “If I only responded to my local environment, then how would I ever know there was poverty, plight, and pollution around the globe?” I have thought about this for a while now, and I want to stand our ordinary way of looking at ethical globalism in the light of a wild cognition. I am proposing that it is because we have lost the ability to perceive that things have gone wrong right in front of our very eyes and that our troubles keep on doubling up to global scales. This is a matter of dispositional resistence—the inability to let in what is painful to see and inconvenient to address.

Domenico Masciotra, W. M. Roth, and Denise Morel (2007) identified three capacities that we need to make sense of and act to create a better world. They call it “enaction.” According to their model, cognition is the ongoing process of transforming oneself and world into a spatiotemporal field of action. This involves three distinct kinds of embodied intelligence: dispositional, positional, and gestural.

First, dispositional intelligence refers to one’s whole being, to what is most deeply rooted and enduring in one’s intentional-motivational processes. It refers to the level of physical, affective, and mental capacity to allow more of reality into one’s field of awareness, corresponding to the question of how available am I to the present, unfolding situation. Dispositional intelligence is a matter of self-mastery and self-realization, of whether or not I can bring my whole being to the present situation in its full complicity of self, other, and world. Dispositional intelligence is therefore a kind of depth dimension.

Second, positional intelligence, on the other hand, refers to a width, or range of possible responses I can offer to the given situation. It is an intelligence that knows where to be and how to move toward the position in this moment that can best respond to a variety of possible positions unfolding in the next moment. It is situational fluidity.

Third, gestural intelligence corresponds to the breadth of sensorimotor actions that can be skillfully applied as a response to the moment. Taking the three together, we have a modern understanding of wu-wei as open, available, skillful action that unfolds spontaneously in spatiotemporal fields of action.

Like wu-wei, cognition in the wild is an ongoing search for coherence. Its key components—affect-laden impulses, perceptual desires, and sensorimotor actions—correspond to dispositional, positional, and gestural intelligences in the enactive approach. Furthermore, these three in turn correlate to the notions of autonomy, relationality, and agency in self-determination theory (Ryan and Deci 2017; Roy 2016, 2017, 2018).

I have come to think of them as pointing to a deep meta-pattern, or set of protocols that I call a “cognitive widget.” Like a widget in a software program, a cognitive widget is the minimal set of protocols that code for the pattern we know as “cognition.” The notion of widgets in cognitive phenomenology might be useful in releasing the complexity of how we frame the problems we face and construe potential solutions. To think in terms of “phenomenological widgets” around sensemaking or meaning, for example, might help us get straight to the heart of the crises we are experiencing. This approach allows us to maximally decompose complex holistic phenomenon into fundamental, operational “wholes” at deeper, more powerful levels of engagement.

We could turn back the tide of hypercomplexification in the ways we conceptually model action, into simple, actionable practices to improve the capacities—the intelligences, skills, and coherences—that deploy them. In this way, we would move toward sensemaking as mindful simplexity, a fusion of meta-cognitive thought with actions that simplify. Mindfulness offers a way to perceive the meta-patterns that constitute the phenomenological widgets, and helps trigger grounded, swift action to reduce the (apparent) complexity that arises out of higher orders of conceptualization. This would allow us, in complex unchartered realities of our modern world, to realize the salience of affectual, perceptual, and sensorimotor processes in cohering a sensible reality. “Mindful individuals,” note Timothy Vogus and Ian Colville (2017) “attend closely and continuously to their surroundings, richly interpret them, and swiftly adapt their actions according to their present understanding. That is, they process the cues observed more fully or, in other words, increase the vividness with which people interpret their surroundings. . . . In other words, mindfulness enriches sensemaking by broadening attention, deepening interpretation, and fostering regular updating” (345). Note here, they are describing another widget: attending, interpreting, adapting, as a protocol set for mindfulness. A widget is like an autocatalytic set that activates particular dynamic states we call “experience.” In a similar vein, John Vervaeke (2019) has designed several “widgets” that work together in complex ways to drive salience realization.

As we approach the midterm of the 21st century, we are losing our hold on individual meaning and ways of making sense together. As modern people, we keep looking for more sophisticated maps to show us where we are and where we have to go. This is untenable in a time between worlds (Stein 2019). As moderns, we conceive of reality as a linear advance, where everything in the past is “primitive” and everything in the future is “progress.” At the end of his days, Jung saw that exactly this incessant assumption of progress was the scourge of man (Kingsley 2018). “Honestly,” writes Kingsley, “to want to face, then keep facing, the darkness of our Western culture—where we are, are heading, have come from—one would have to be mad.” He continues,

Without even realizing it, we are completely on our own. It was we ourselves who manufactured this peculiar myth called progress, where things are meant to get better. Of course there is no reason at all or bothering about origins when we are supposed to be managing so much more effectively, more efficiently, every day. From the first moment a baby is able to gurgle, this is what is trumpeted in its ears. (230)

Amidst the crises of today, we are completely caught up with where we are going and how to get there, completely ignorant of the meaning and purpose at the source of all life that was established at the origins of existence itself. We sit upon the past like a boy-king sits upon the throne of his entitlement, taking everything for granted, and becoming bored. We literally cannot see what we feel we are entitled to. The awareness of what we have inherited, from the depths of our evolutionary past, should stun us with the overwhelming sense of gratitude called “sacredness.” “There is a hidden reality we all share,” says Kingsley, “in which every slightest thing has its proper place, its beauty, function, integrity,”

It’s the landscape of our own true nature that contains the more detailed instructions and guidance for just what’s needed. And the loss of that sacred landscape, which once had been our life force, is the initial ecological disaster from which every other environmental catastrophe outside us inevitably follows: as a matter of course. (228)

This paper has presented a side view of cognition in the wild, proposing that the capacities we need to confront the complex metacrisis of our times, are already situated deep in our evolutionary inheritance, and represent what we are chasing when we go off running away from the past, hoping to encounter the mystical and the sacred somewhere in the emergent future. A meta-cognitive concept like the phenomenological widget, or other similar heuristics that identify deep codes or protocol sets that catalyze powerful, embodied experiences, can help us design practices to reclaim sacred, practical wisdom skills like cognition in the wild.

Notes

[1] The walk is a four-beat gait that averages about 7 kilometres per hour (4.3 mph). When walking, a horse’s legs follow this sequence: left hind leg, left front leg, right hind leg, right front leg, in a regular 1-2-3-4 beat. At the walk, the horse will alternate between having three or two feet on the ground. A horse moves its head and neck in a slight up and down motion that helps maintain balance.

[2] The 1, 2, 3 beat of the canter consists of (1) single leg behind, (2) alternate front and back legs, (3) single leg in front.

[3] Any good sport horse has an instinct for running with other horses, to keep up and to race ahead.

[4] It is scary to think of the impact that interactive screens have on the child, since smart user faces are built to co-vary with the child, creating an illusion of psychic equivalence. The same psychological factors are employed with virtual reality cameras that project your actions onto images of bodies elsewhere, creating the illusion of OOBE.

References

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———. 2010. The Philosophical Baby. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

———. 2017. The Gardener and the Carpenter. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Masciotra, Domenico, W-M Roth, and Denise Morel. 2007. Enaction: Toward a Zen Mind in Learning and Teaching. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

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