The day is very hot. Every swimming hole and sandy 'beach' I pass along the creek that runs through town has adults and kids cooling off. And today is a weekday.

Finding a shady spot where the creek is too shallow to swim, I'm just starting to experience silence and solitude when two cars pull in upstream on the park road. At first they're quiet, probably eating lunch in the vehicles, but then more kids than I can count pile out of the cars with the drivers.

Just then a large bird with an elongated brown neck flies by fast just above the water, heading downstream. The gang of people must have scared it up from below the bank. Some time later I spot it stalking something on the other side of the creek. It's a bird I've never seen before--a Little Blue Heron.

It moves with great precision and stealth across the stones, but above all with total concentration. Its eyes are fixed on something in the shallows in front of the stones. I can feel the intensity of its focus, and its concentration sharpens one's awareness.

Suddenly it makes three quick steps, leaps, and grabs something from the water. A frog, a fairly large one at that!

It takes the heron half an hour to eat the amphibian, slowly positioning it before swallowing it in two quick gulps. When it leaves the shallows and stands upright on the stones, its neck is no longer elongated and thin, but there's a distinct bulge at its base.

All the while 7 or 8 kids are playing in the water just 50 meters away, and making a tremendous racket to boot. One's awareness includes the noise of the children however, and there's no conflict.

The juxtaposition of watching the Little Blue Heron eating the frog and hearing the shouting children does seem a little surreal though. Then one realizes that understanding both is essential, because they go hand in hand.

There has to be space for animals on this planet, not just for more and more people. More importantly, what kind of world are our children stepping into? Things are already unstable and completely out of balance.

Intellectuals who insist that they don't know what the future will be like are lying to themselves, and to us. This is the future; it will be like this, only more so.

What will it take for humankind to move in the direction of balance with nature, and with each other?

It isn't just the environment that's in crisis-climate change or the oil gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Nor is it the economy, national or global, and the absurd disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor all over the world.

It's human consciousness itself that is in crisis. Only the individual can radically change the consciousness of man. Only when enough people light the fires of insight within themselves, will the collective material of content-consciousness begin to burn. That will be an inward revolution, unlike anything that has ever occurred before.

Jesus' mission utterly failed, though some trace of his true teachings carry on. Siddhartha partially succeeded, but the revolution in consciousness went no further than India, before Buddhist tradition took over there, in China, and in Japan. And Mohammed seems to have wanted to first set down a text (like the Bible after Jesus), rather than bring about a revolution in the human heart.

Whatever the truth of these teachers, the world is what has become, and humankind is headed where it's headed. It's up to ordinary people now. But what can one person do?

Each person, taking complete responsibility for the totality of consciousness within them, finds that their consciousness is the consciousness of humankind. Each of us has our own measure of material, but we are all drinking from the same increasingly polluted aquifer.

When one works every day to keep one's own well clean, one is cleaning, to some degree, the consciousness of humankind. The individual is the only factor that can bring about radical change. And there can be no correct common action without there first being true individual action, arising from awakening insight within oneself.

Learning the art of methodless meditation, which is inherently solitary, and learning the art of dispassionate questioning with others, are the core actions. Everything true flows from them.

Photo M LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He welcomes dialogue. martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net


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