Meditations
 Meditations
The World Is On Fire; Be Nothing, and Then Act
Martin LeFevre: Does the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which could not have come at a worse time, and proves that metaphysical factors are fully in play in our day, signal the end of what was best in America, or the beginning of spiritual and political recovery? ... In other words, will the death of this extraordinary human being and Supreme Court Justice rouse the recovery of America's soul, or is it an even greater loss of it? ... The size of an economy, or the strength of a military, does not determine the greatness of a people, but rather their capacity to hold the challengers of humanity in their hearts and minds, and act for the betterment of humanity.
Sep 20, 2020, 11:16am
Meditations
The Earth Is Mirroring Man
Martin LeFevre: The world is a terrible place, and the Earth is mirroring the sorrow of man. It isn't just that the mechanisms of the Earth's ecological systems are under dire stress from man's runaway fragmentation of 'the environment.' Rather, nature is reflecting, to anyone who can still see and feel, how woefully destructive we are as a species. ... We need to turn inward in a true way. Turning within doesn't mean hiding out from bad news. The primacy of the inner life sounds solipsistic to those who don't have one, just as passion is equated with outrage to the superficially minded...
Sep 18, 2020, 2:13pm
Meditations
Which Kind of Apocalypse?
Martin LeFevre: It's often been said that what begins in California spreads to the rest of the country, and the world. God help us if that's still the case, because it feels like we are experiencing the leading edge of the apocalypse here. ... So which sense of apocalypse is it, "the complete final destruction of the world," as described in the biblical book of Revelation, or a true revelation, an unveiling and unfolding of things not previously known? ... Perhaps that depends on the few who still care, and whether they can step into the breech...
Sep 13, 2020, 11:32am
Meditations
Bridging the Epistemic Divide
Martin LeFevre: Of late I often begin a political conversation with liberal friends and acquaintances by asking, "Have you heard the phrase, 'Own the Libs?" ... "Own the Libs" means deliberately triggering reactions in liberals, enabling Trumpers to "own" them, so they don't have to own their own stuff at all. ... It is a diabolical psychological device designed to allow the Trumpian projector to justify his or her darkness by getting hated liberals to react first. ... So-called Christians who support Trump and the 'Own the Libs' tactic make a mockery of Jesus' injunction: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"...
Sep 5, 2020, 4:24pm
Meditations
Why Is Everything Whole and Holy Except Man?
Martin LeFevre: The smartest animal on the planet other than humans is the Orca, otherwise known as Killer Whales. They aren't whales at all, and the 'killer' adjective is species projection. ... It's said Orcas seem to understand humans, perhaps recognizing us as the top predator on Earth, as they are of the sea. ... Dolphins have shown what anthropologists call self-awareness---the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror as individuals. Are Orcas, who are much smarter, self-knowing? ... Like self-awareness and self-knowing, intelligence and smarts are two different things. This distinction, between self-aware and self-knowing, is a crucial one if Homo sapiens is to grow into beings worthy of the name we've given ourselves ('wise humans')...
Sep 3, 2020, 5:07pm
Meditations
An Adequate Response to Climate Change
Martin LeFevre: The half moon is blood red tonight. ... Under the smoky skies, ominousness pervades the atmosphere day and night ... No scientist has any idea how much carbon the atmosphere can absorb, or how much human filth the oceans can take before nature reaches a tipping point, and there is ecological collapse. ... To be blunt, if there is no choice but to "adapt to the new world of the Anthropocene," our age is doomed. As the saying goes, and psychologists know, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." ... Essentially, climate change reflects and intensifies the crisis of human consciousness. Meeting it requires radically changing from self-ignorant, tribal humans into self-knowing, holistic human beings...
Aug 27, 2020, 5:02pm
Meditations
Transmutation, or The Sum of All Dark Ages?
Martin LeFevre: So what exactly makes humans different from other animals? ... We're able to consciously manipulate our environment by removing 'things' from the ecological mesh, but like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, we cannot stop, and so are fragmenting the Earth all to hell. ... We're able to study things scientifically by standing apart from them, but we're unable to wisely, justly and sustainably apply our exponentially increasing body of knowledge. ... Is it because we are only able to know ourselves when we end the ancient habit of separation?...
Aug 22, 2020, 3:58pm
Meditations
Questioning Together Ignites Insight Together
Martin LeFevre: During the pandemic I've been participating in three online dialogue groups, two based in the US and one in the UK, all loosely based on the Dialogue Proposal of the late physicist/philosopher David Bohm. The intent is to hold a space, think together, and listen for insight, but personal perspective carries the day on both sides of the pond. ... The Edinburgh online group, perhaps because it's Scottish-based and traced, has some real heft. Two women organized and convene the monthly, 3-hour dialogue, and both are philosophers. ... Solitary meditation is ongoingly foundational, essential to radically change oneself, while questioning and igniting insight together is essential to change the disastrous course of humankind...
Aug 18, 2020, 3:58pm
Meditations
Nature, Silence and the Sacred
Martin LeFevre: As one of America's greatest religious philosophers, John Muir, said: "Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature." ... When thought and time end, one sees and feels the ever-present actuality of death, without a trace of morbidity or fear. Death is in every breath, in the expiration of the cells within the body. It's an inextricable part of nature. In fact, death is the ground not only of nature's continuous renewal, but the wellspring of the ongoing creation of the universe. ... Thought, by its very nature, divides life from death, and fears it...
Aug 12, 2020, 2:11pm
Meditations
The End of Man and the Beginning of Humanity
Martin LeFevre: This past week the world commemorated one of the grimmest anniversaries in human history---the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 200,000 people. Today is the 75th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. ... Despite the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,' which was formally adopted at the United Nations three years ago (though unsurprisingly all nine nuclear powers, as well as Japan and Canada astoundingly, aren't signatories), we are on the cusp of another, much more dangerous nuclear arms race. Will humanity ever rid itself of these ultimate evil weapons of war?...
Aug 9, 2020, 11:09am
Meditations
Localism and the Non-Locality of the Universe
Martin LeFevre: At the quantum level, there's a principle called non-locality. It refers not only to "the profound interconnectedness of the universe," but to something called "entanglement," a phenomenon whereby electrons even far apart instantly affect each other. ... How does non-locality pertain to human consciousness as it is, and as it could be? ... Mystics not only understand the principle of non-locality and the misnomer of "entanglement" (really disentanglement) intuitively. ... Of course such experiencing is opposed to our everyday experience of locality, of being a separate self, belonging to a separate group in a particular place. However that is our conditioned cultural experience of reality...
Aug 6, 2020, 2:21pm
Meditations
The Colliding Congruencies of America and China
Martin LeFevre: Conventional thinking has it that America and China have two fundamentally opposing systems that are on a collision course. However the ossification Chinese communist authoritarianism coincides and complements the emergence of American capitalistic authoritarianism. ... Are both systems in their death throes? ... The underlying similarities between the dying American model and the purportedly rising Chinese model are evident to anyone who looks below the surface layer of the news and propaganda churn. ... There's tremendous urgency for insight...
Aug 4, 2020, 5:10pm
Meditations
Every Human Being Is Responsible for Saving Humanity
Martin LeFevre: Human consciousness is in tremendous crisis, and many people are turning to science for insight and clarity, hoping science can show us the way out of the mess man has made of the Earth and the world. ... However science cannot provide the requisite insight and radical change anymore than organized religion could. Perhaps science can disabuse us of false ideas, but irrationality and tribalistic identification are obviously much stronger than reason and scientific knowledge. ... Like the pandemic in America, it seems it seem we're on our own, which doesn't mean applying more of the disease of individualism. ... David Bohm, a physicist-philosopher with whom I was fortunate enough to dialogue ... is coming into favor nearly 30 years after his death...
Aug 1, 2020, 2:22pm
Meditations
Talkin' Bout My Generation
Martin LeFevre: Few generations in the history of civilization have shown more promise in their youth but been more of a disappointment in their adulthood and aging than my generation, the "Boomers," spanning the years from 1944 to 1964. ... We started a counter-cultural movement, only to sell out en masse. We set out to change the culture, only to generate an increasingly reactionary backlash beginning epitomized by Ronald Reagan and Bush Senior, followed by Bush Junior, and now the miasmic Donald Trump, interrupted by the Clinton and Obama interregnums...
Jul 30, 2020, 4:05pm
Meditations
Listen...Education Means to Draw Forth
Martin LeFevre: I climb up to within a hundred meters of the dark volcanic rock along the rim of the canyon, walking slowly. ... A line from Thoreau comes to mind: "There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man." ... Whether humankind changers course in our lifetimes or not, the awakening of intelligence in the individual is essential---sine qua non. A true individual is as the word literally means-not divided. A drop of water contains the ocean. ... Education is not merely the transmission of knowledge and the preparation for a career. Education literally means, "to draw forth" the potential of the child....
Jul 25, 2020, 4:01pm
|
FountainofLight.net