As an inherited instinct, hunting is deeply rooted in human nature. Around the world in all cultures the urge to hunt awakens in boys. They use rocks, make weapons or sneak an airgun out of the house to kill a bird or small mammal. In many cases the predatory instinct appears spontaneously without previous experience or coaching, and in the civilized world boys often hunt despite attempts to suppress their instinct.

The fundamental instinct to hunt may link up with the spiritual. An analogy is falling in love in which eros, the sexual instinct, connects with agape or spiritual  love. Initiation on the path of love changes our life irreversibly. Henceforth, we shall know the meaning of authentic love experienced with the totality of our being.

When we fall in love, the instinctive or primal self merges with the spiritual. It is a vertical convergence of subconscious to superconscious, lower to higher.

Hunting is how we fall in love with nature. The basic instinct links up with the spiritual, and the result is that we become married to nature. Among nature pursuits, hunting and fishing connect us most profoundly with animals and nature. As Robert Bly said in his best-selling book, Iron John, only hunting expands us sideways, "into the glory of oaks, mountains, glaciers, horses, lions, grasses, waterfalls, deer."

Hunting is a basic aspect of a boy’s initiation into manhood. It teaches him the intelligence, beauty and power of nature. The young man also learns at a deep emotional level his inseparable relationship with nature as well as his responsibility to fiercely protect it.

Essentially, hunting is a spiritual experience precisely because it submerges us in nature, and that experience teaches us that we are participants in something far greater than ourselves. Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, described the hunter as the alert man. He could not have said it better. When we hunt we experience extreme alertness to the point of an altered state of consciousness. For the hunter everything is alive, and he is one with the animal and its environment.

Though the hunter may appear from the outside to be a staunch egoist dominating nature, on the inside he is exactly the opposite. He identifies with the animal as his kin, and he feels, as Ortega said, tied through the earth to it. The conscious and deliberate humbling of the hunter to the level of the animal is virtually a religious rite.