Meditations
 Meditations
Countries Are History When Speciation Is Required
Martin LeFevre: New York Times ... "Climate Change Is Not World War." - by Roy Scranton - ... "The problem of climate change is the problem of how and whether human beings can live together sustainably on this planet." ... (This) cannot be divorced from the imperative of ending the dictatorship of division, fragmentation, militarization and violence ... Leading scientists in a summary paper last year stated, "the changes needed to stabilize the earth's climate require a fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions." ... Therefore without radical change at the core psychological level, humans will neither live in basic harmony with the Earth, nor live in basic harmony with each other...
Sep 19, 2019, 5:07pm
Meditations
The Senses, What Is, and Truth
Martin LeFevre: An early morning rain, the first real rain in a few months, completely changed the atmosphere along the creek. In a single day, the season went from summer to autumn. ... The current intellectual fashion is to suppose that human knowledge and wisdom are synonymous, which no person, observing alone, could possibly discern. ... I strongly question this attitude toward truth. To my mind, thinking together does not involve putting pieces together. In fact, thinking together isn't a matter of knowledge at all. ... The mistake is in equating knowledge and perspectives with insight and wisdom. ... The fundamental problem is that we don't understand the nature and limitations of knowledge...
Sep 17, 2019, 4:34pm
Meditations
Renaissance or Enlightenment?
Martin LeFevre:
There is no historical analogy for the present age. Talk about the Earth as macrocosm of the deforestation and devastation in indigenous times on Easter Island all you want, humankind has never faced anything like the total challenge we now face at every level. ... Logically, a renaissance is inherently inadequate to meeting an unprecedented challenge. The present crisis of humankind is unprecedented, and therefore a rebirth will not suffice and does not apply. ... We're living in the sum of all dark ages, with consumerism, technology, pharma and propaganda developed to such a degree that the vast majority of people are comfortably, even gratefully dead. Except that people need more and more stimulation to escape from personal and collective misery...
Sep 15, 2019, 3:26pm
Meditations
Prediction Is Easy; Preparation Is Hard
Martin LeFevre: As one of the few columnists in America that predicted Donald Trump would become president, and why, and that he would be the worst president in American history, I have a sense of terrible foreboding as the 2020 election heats up. ... The disaster and drift of American foreign policy since the 9.11 attacks have morphed into the chaotic whims of a deranged president. 'American leadership' has become a joke, and the worst actors are filling the vacuum. ... The question for human beings all over the world at this point in human history is this: Can the psychological revolution essential to change the disastrous course of humankind ignite now, or will the stultifying darkness of the old consciousness of man continue to rule?...
Sep 10, 2019, 5:19pm
Meditations
The Crash of Civilizations
Martin LeFevre: It's strange how one can sometimes have more in common with people that hold opposite views than one does with people who hold very similar views Such is the case with Buddhism, a 'God-less' religion with which I have much sympathy, but little simpatico. ... The belief in a paternalistic, patriarchal, all-knowing 'Creator'-in other words, monotheism-is a projection from humankind's adolescence that has become one of the biggest stumbling blocks to spiritual growth in the 21st century. ... It is no coincidence that both sides in the putative 'clash of civilizations'-Christianity and Islam--hold the same core belief. Despite all the talk of shared Abrahamic roots, the belief in a single, distinct deity is the most divisive idea that the human mind has ever fabricated...
Sep 8, 2019, 5:30pm
Meditations
There Is No Creator Separate From Creation
Martin LeFevre: There is no creator separate from creation. Monotheism is as immature as polytheism. ... To come upon the intelligence that imbues the universe, the petty past has to effortlessly fall away in a gathering intensity of attention to the present. One has to completely let go of the projections of the mind as beliefs and ideas about God, whether from conditioning, society, or one's own previous experience. ... As things stand, only man's darkness is operating effectively. Immanent intelligence didn't "allow" the present hellishness of America and the world to happen. The intelligence of the universe can only operate through us, so whether we create hell or heaven is up to us...
Sep 2, 2019, 4:03pm
Meditations
Localism Is Furthering Fragmentation
Martin LeFevre: The underlying illusion of localism is that we can return to a romanticized past, and that the unprecedented challenges to the Earth's viability and to the human prospect are not unprecedented, but have precedents that we can look to and take comfort in. ... That is false on the face of it. If long-distance transport, communications and capital collapse without a true global civilization emerging, then the present globalizing hellscape will be replaced by a fragmented, Mad Max hellscape, not some "let a thousand flowers bloom" ideal of localized harmony. ... Localists rightly equate our profoundly unbalanced, unjust and dystopian international order with "widespread assumptions about progress and economic growth leading to a better future." There is no global order however, just a crumbling, post-World War II international order with globalized aspects...
Aug 28, 2019, 4:00pm
Meditations
Horses Can See Things People Don't:
Martin LeFevre: What happens during methodless meditation is simply this. One watches everything outwardly and inwardly without judgment or interference, letting the senses open fully and harmonize. ... Take the time to remain with what is as it unfolds in nature and the world---the shallow, rippling creek; the unseen crow cawing nearby; the people passing by on their bikes or on their cells or both. ... Having entered that unsought state a few years ago, two women also approached on horseback. Without even turning around at the picnic table, I could feel the awareness of the horse a few feet behind me. Then it stopped and refused to move. ... When I turned, the horse was looking me in the eye, in that way horses do. It was refusing to budge, though the woman kept squeezing its flanks with increasing impatience. ... "Speak," she nearly shouted, "it doesn't know what you are." ... (I) replied, "Hello horse." The animal immediately resumed its gait...
Aug 27, 2019, 9:28am
Meditations
Climate Change and the Crisis of Consciousness
Martin LeFevre: The man-made ecological crisis includes climate change, oceanic pollution and depletion, and the "Sixth Extinction" of animals and plants, among other devastations. This crisis defines our age, and threatens to define us as a species, at least for the foreseeable future. ... The reason that an adequate response to man's ecological crisis is so vexing is that it requires a radical change in human consciousness itself. ... The question is, has the disease of consumerism spread too far, or is there a chance for our age? ...
Just after taking my seat at a secluded spot next to the 'beach' in Lower Park, a hummingbird appeared and hovered to my left. When I slowly looked up, it moved directly in front of me, staring me in the eye with one its tiny eyes...
Aug 27, 2019, 9:11am
Meditations
The Eastern Graft and the Western Mind
Martin LeFevre: Many Americans these days believe they have absorbed Eastern wisdom and are all but enlightened. But the Eastern graft onto the Western mind has been superficial and unfruitful. ... A quarter century ago, there was reason to hope that Eastern insights into consciousness could bring new life into Western spiritual enervation. That's beyond wishful thinking now, and nears delusion as America descends deeper into a toxic brew of division, fear and hatred. ... The question is no longer what will happen in America, or even Western civilization. It is: Is there is an opening for humankind to change course in our age?...
Aug 15, 2019, 2:20pm
Meditations
Critiquing an Art Critic's Religious Experience
Martin LeFevre : It's a commonplace that religious experience is deeply private. Not because we are separate individuals, but because inner phenomena, by their very nature, are not social phenomena. ... When someone does disclose his or her religious experience however, while denying that it is such, something is amiss. ... It's not about "labeling." It's about conveying such experiences in such a way that discerning readers, during these hellish times, understand that religious experiencing is not a particular, personal thing, but a universal capacity of the human being. ... For an art critic to deny he has had a religious experience in a chapel designed by Matisse would be risible if it wasn't so heartrending. Even so, beauty that's recreated by even the greatest artists cannot approach directly experiencing the beauty of untrammeled nature...
Aug 10, 2019, 5:04pm
Meditations
The Brain's Untapped Capacity for Insight
Martin LeFevre: "Brain actuated control," or, in plain English, a direct link between thought and machine, presents the possibility of either freeing the human mind, or permanently enslaving it. The trends in both history and present society do not bode well for the first prospect, that of human freedom. ... By merging the brain with the computer, we will lose capacities and potentialities we are only beginning to discover. The brain has abilities we don't haven't explored, much less understood. Therefore caution and questioning are the order of the day. ... Scientists are discovering what so-called mystics have always known-that the human brain has a capacity for awareness that goes far beyond the physical boundaries of the skull. ... What is essential is the brain's capacity for awareness and insight, which is the foundation of wisdom and understanding. This capacity is completely distinct from thought...
Aug 8, 2019, 1:50pm
Meditations
There Is No Escape
Martin LeFevre: The key to awakening authentically meditative states, and inducing the radical shift in consciousness that is urgently needed for human survival, is allowing space and time for passive watchfulness. With self-knowing, the division between the observer and the observed ends. ... Nature, which is utterly indifferent to humans, is crucial to meditation and transformation. The earth is a mirror enabling the brain to gather attention to the movement of content-consciousness within one. ... Humankind appears to be at the limit of tens of thousands of years of accumulative thought-consciousness. Clearly, the earth, and the human spirit, cannot take much more of the cumulative consciousness of man...
Aug 4, 2019, 2:35pm
Meditations
Truth Is Not a Kaleidoscope
Martin LeFevre: Mary Magdalene seems to be all the rage these days with women such as Kayleen Asbo, who gives compellingly clear and evocative lectures such as "Gnostic Gospels Image of Mary Magdalene." ... There are three issues in play here---the failure of Jesus' mission and the riddle of his last words; the relationship between Jesus and Magdalene and its meaning for equality between the sexes; and the nature of truth, whether it is dynamic and singular, or many-sided and kaleidoscopic.... Taking the last first, since it provides the foundation for the first two questions, the overwhelmingly conventional idea that the truth is a matter of combining perspectives, which scholars and sophisticated people say we must 'honor' (usually while not stating and holding up their own for inquiry) is utterly unworkable. ... If truth is a matter of perspective (either 'my truth' or multiple viewpoints), there is no such thing as truth. Truth is dynamic and singular...
Jul 23, 2019, 4:33pm
Meditations
When Evolution Is Revolution
Martin LeFevre: In the science fiction classic "2001, A Space Odyssey," HAL, the all too human-like computer, malfunctions and kills the hibernating crew members, and then snuffs out the life of one of the two waking astronauts. Then, as the sole surviving astronaut disables its higher functions, HAL begs for its precious Higher Self's continuation. Was "2001" a prophetic metaphor for our time? ... Nature operates in a dynamic, infinitely complex and ever-changing order, in which all systems are seamlessly interconnected. How then could humans evolve as the overwhelmingly dominant species on this planet and become a planetary scourge of fragmentation and disorder--the very antithesis of the cosmic principle of wholeness? ... There's an innate urge within healthy human beings to understand our place in the universe. ... The problem is the division, fragmentation and disorder generated by thought, which don't exist in nature....
Jul 22, 2019, 3:21pm
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