Hollow

Remember this: No One Is Born Lacking. You are not Hollow.

Disclaimer: I will probably add or take away from this because it seems like a vast topic but I don’t want to fill a void here or make one.

I was in an interesting conversation with a professional hunter that said killing is not killing. Hunting fills the hunter in a spiritual way. For the record this was a very nice man and I do not want to divulge his name. This is a brief synopsis of the actual comment yet he put it eloquently with some additional things. I did not disagree with him in the sense I didn’t want to insult him by saying he was wrong or right. That is the ethos of hunting; each hunter is different from a different perspective and belief. All you can do is compare notes.

I then paused a great pause in my mind. I thought of the Holy Trinity with the religious rituals of drinking wine as the blood of Christ and eating the wafer as sacrament to the flesh. Albeit these rituals of remembered sacrifice one could argue implied cannibalism. It’s the symbology that is prevalent not the cannibalism. My thoughts here do not lie with cannibalism but more with sacrificing to fill a void. Yes, the void……….I have heard people even in daily life refer to this place that no one can get directions to but it exists. I wondered when did life get to a point where we are taught that there is something missing inside of us. Except bacon, come on?

If you are a professional hunter,killing in three digit counts on commercial hunts,  can this still be considered a spiritually based act? Can quota replace spiritual belief in hunting? If you feel hunting is a form of filling of the spirit then there must be a void or need to take in such psychic energy. If this is the case,  when does the body count become enough to fill this void or is it the never-ending hole in the boat? How long does one have to scoop mental water before it is satisfied? Is this satisfaction temporary? Why does this condition exist at all? Do people realize they are using this condition of a void to support their argument for why they hunt? Are hunters really saying I am empty? Is this the mystery of the glass half full or half empty?

My Merriam-Webster dictionary and thesaurus defined the term void as a noun that means empty space: emptiness; a feeling of want or hollowness. Hollow?

I thought of Dracula in the 2004 Van Helsing movie when he is telling his vampire brides that he is “Hollow” as an explicative to his outward behavior of uncaring melancholy towards his brides suffering. The brides get upset that Dracula isn’t showing enough grief over Van Helsing killing Marishka.

Where does this sense of needing come from? How does hunting fill the void when in fact it does not exist?

In the beginning we are born into this world craving stimulation.  We are hungry. As an example, during cesarean sections on pregnant dogs when the puppies are born the technician must stimulate the puppies. Some practice slinging, a dose of Dopram and epinephrine then put the pups somewhere warm.

Arousal and stimulation is a requirement for physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual existence. Voids form when there is un-relatedness or a need to fit in somewhere to fill the ‘void’. Lack of arousal or stimulation can cause the feeling of a void when it is only in the mind. People at times try to make the void a physical place inside of themselves when it is not physical but mental. You thought it up.

What does this do in terms of the hunter’s psyche? It could lead to putting your faith in ideologies or following charismatic leaders that can easily lead you astray or define the concept of hunting for you. Voids are symptoms of experiencing an inner vacuum that will eventually dictate poor life choices or diminished perspective. People are not comfortable with themselves so the habit of seeking solace outside of the self could happen. Refusing to go into your center and examine why you feel that you have a void can be a scary thing. People do not like facing their demons. Hunting is a good quiet time for that. The tendency to import feelings into ourselves to feel more whole and complete can create a deeper chasm. What if you import inappropriate energy from a place and misinterpret it? Is an internally generated ‘void’ a fallacy that we feed and believe in?

When hunting can the question be asked, “Am I doing this to fill a void inside of me?”

“Am I doing this to keep up with the Jones so I can maintain ties with relationships that are only one faceted and weak?”

At times I have seen conversations where people who hunt are ambivalent towards certain ‘fillers’ from the hunting genre. Can a person promoting hunting progressively deaden others to the actual benefits of hunting by feeding them an agenda which in turn can bring out more of the feeling of void by creating a need that doesn’t really exist, only implied, sublime or in the mind?

At times in between hunting seasons there will build a vague unrest and negativity at monotony because the brain is bored. Think about it. If you took two hunters one from America and one from Africa then deny their opportunity to hunt completely by making them act as lab rats, which one will turn out more stir crazy? Could this be because certain hunters are adrenaline junkies, bored or under stimulated?

What about the creation of ‘the void’? Insert evil music here.

“One cannot create the void. A created void will not be the void; it will only be your creation. Your creation can never be nothingness, the void, because it will have boundaries. You have created it, so it cannot be more than you; it cannot be more than the mind that has created it. You cannot create the void; it must enter you.” (Osho 120)

Here you have created something non-tangible inside of yourself and now must fill a creation that should not be there in the first place. You planted your own rotten seed. Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you let someone do that to you?

I then thought what physical condition could give a person the same sense as a spiritual need or void to be filled. I thought of Vertigo and the fact I had previously watched that Dashing Jimmy Steward and Kim Novak in the movie days before.

“Vertigo due to attraction to the void, which is very common, assumes two forms. In the more active one, the patient says: ‘I have an overwhelming desire to throw myself into the void’; he may tell you, for instance, how he has to keep away from the edge of the balcony, for although he has no conscious desire to kill himself, he nevertheless has an urge to jump into the void. The second form is more passive, the patient saying: ‘I am irresistibly drawn to the void’, and he will also avoid getting close to windows or to the edge of a precipice, because everything seems unsteady and the whirlwind seems about to suck him up, not in order to imprison him as in suction related vertigo, but to make him disappear.

This vertigo in its two forms introduces excorporation as well as projection mechanisms. The attracting external void often turns out to be a projection of the patient’s feelings that he has an inner void. He has different ways of feeling anxious about, and fascinated by, the external void, depending on what he projects into it; moreover, depending on his projections, this attractive outside changes; it may be felt to be unfathomable external void, but equally well a relational space filled with riches. Between these two feelings there can be a whole range of intermediate states. The anxiety about being irresistibly attracted to this void or to this space can be associated with various representations invested with bodily references.” (Quinodoz 59)

Is this void only a feeling and nothing more?

All these questions and so little time.  In retrospect when you are evaluating your beliefs and spiritual workings of the concept of hunting and what it means to you please stop for a minute and think first; I am not hollow. I do not have a void. The reason I say this is when you think in these terms you are saying your experiences are short lived and limiting. Your memories are not. You are not a supermassive black hole that sucks everything in its center and then it disappears into the unknown. If you are hunting for yourself the experience is going to have a different meaning with compared to commercial hunting where bodies can stack up fairly fast. Reasonably you can only take on so much energy and if you are killing and not immediately ingesting animal parts then you can say you are sucking the energy force from the life of your quarry. If this is true then you are not only taking on the positive energy of life but of its death. You either take it all or nothing. You can’t pick and choose.

When it comes to having a void…..you conjured that up or someone told you it existed and you took it into yourself as a creation idea from some other source. You were not born lacking only hungry for actual food, water and stimulation. Think long and hard about that.

Written by: W Harley Bloodworth

~Courtesy of the AOFH~

Literature Cited:

Osho. The Psychology of the Esoteric. Navin Shahdara, Delhi: Diamond Pocket Books (P) Ltd, (2004). Print. pg 120.

Quinodoz, Danielle. Emotional Vertigo: Between Anxiety and Pleasure. London, UK: Routledge. (2002). Pg. 59.