Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses Snyder's poem in terms of Robert Bly's concept of "double consciousness," as well as shamanism and Zen Buddhism.

In the volume of poems he selected and introduced entitled News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness (1980), poet Robert Bly sketches a history of poetry in terms of the kind of human awareness it expresses. What he calls the "old position," which includes most poetry written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, assumes that consciousness existed only in humans and was best expressed through reason, or the intellect. Nature was separate from humans, who believed themselves to be superior to it. Bly calls this period "the peak of human arrogance." During the romantic era in the early nineteenth century, there was a concerted attack on this position...