Meditations
 Meditations
The Observer Is an Infinite Regress
Martin LeFevre: Swallows are playing on the air and skimming the surface of the water. Quail cavort in the bushes along the stream ... The observer is the first division of the human mind, and from that mechanism all other division originates: 'My family and your family;' 'my tribe and your tribe; my country and your country;' 'my religion and your religion.' ... If one attentively asks oneself, 'what is the observer?' one will see that at bottom it is actually nothing but thought constantly separating itself from itself. ... The separative mechanism within the person---the alleged observer -is the basic impediment to direct perception and wholeness...
Jun 25, 2020, 1:45pm
Meditations
Toward a Non-Theologized, Non-Psychologized Philosophy of Evil
Martin LeFevre: The obvious first question is: What is evil? Though this certainly doesn't cover it, one can say evil is an egregious eruption of hate and violence in an individual or a people. ... The next question is: Does evil have collective intentionality in human consciousness? ... Something larger than the individual, or even a bigly group of people, can burst into the open and take over a person, or a nation. Evil is first an inner phenomenon before it is an outward manifestation...
Jun 20, 2020, 1:53pm
Meditations
Why Is Google Censoring My Columns?
Martin LeFevre: Contrary to what you've heard, free speech doesn't really exist in America, or on the Net. The mainstream media patrols the boundaries of acceptable narratives, and Google arbitrarily censors material. Censoring my political pieces is bad enough, but Google went too far in expurgating my column yesterday, "What Is Our Place In the Universe?" ... What's the reason? ... Is it that that anything that comes too close to the unfixed, ever-moving truth, anything that may spark actual insight in readers, has to be suppressed, because the entire edifice of so-called civilization wouldn't last a month if ordinary human beings began having ignitions of insight?...
Jun 18, 2020, 1:41pm
Meditations
What Is Our Place In the Universe?
Martin LeFevre: Now, as the fragmentation of the earth and humanity by the unwise use of 'higher thought' reaches the breaking point, pressure greatly increases for a transmutation in the human brain, allowing a new, true order of consciousness. ... That a single species should have the power to destroy the planet that gave rise to it is not just an existential mystery; it poses a cosmic question about consciousness itself. What is consciousness, as we generally know it, and is another order of consciousness possible? ... The universe unfolds from simpler orders to more complex orders; only man generates chaos. ... there is an unresolved mystery to the emergence consciousness, not to mention the irreducible mystery of life itself...
Jun 17, 2020, 3:13pm
Meditations
Movements Aren't Enough
Martin LeFevre: Too meekly in my view, Charles Blow writes in his latest column: "We must make sure that this is a true change in the American ideology and not an activist-chic, summer street festival for people who have been cooped up for months, not able to go to school or graduate, not able to go to concerts or bars." ... No change in "American ideology" is going to change anything. And if nothing deeper than massive, cause célèbre block parties is going on, the protesters aren't exhibiting anything but herd mentality. That's not cynicism; it's historical reality. Protests and movements are no longer enough...
Jun 12, 2020, 12:34pm
Meditations
The Ongoing Error of Man
Martin LeFevre: After 15 years of intensive philosophical inquiry into the question of how human disorder could evolve out of the natural order, I had a shattering experience that answered the question for me, at literally a gut level. ... I heard it first as a distant roar. In the next instant I knew exactly what it was—a B-52 taking off from nearby Castle Air Force Base, which is no longer operational. I also knew at that moment that the behemoth was going to fly directly over my head. ... The noise grew incredibly loud, and the ground began to shake. ... Beyond words, in my shaking gut, I saw: This thing is man; I am this thing...
Jun 10, 2020, 4:25pm
Meditations
Immortality Is Not the Continuity of Memory
Martin LeFevre: After the squalls that rolled through during the day, the smell of earth, new growth and browning grass are strong and sweet. Swallows play on the air and swerve close; they are the essence of joy without fear. ... Is the death of psychological thought--that is, of the continuity of memory, identity and the past--the beginning of awareness that does not die? It follows, given that the universe is permeated by an inseparable intelligence, which we can only see and feel when thought is completely still. ... The essential thing is to die while fully alive. Then, when one physically expires, awareness does not die. This is what Jesus meant when he said, "Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it."...
Jun 4, 2020, 3:49pm
Meditations
Regarding Chaos and Order
Martin LeFevre: No one with an ounce of human feeling will ever get the image of that excremental excuse for a policeman, much less a human being, kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes with his hand in his pocket. ... America has become the definition of godforsaken. That's how a president who channels more evil than any other president in American history (even more than Trump's favorite, the hater and slaughterer of Indians, Andrew Jackson), can stand in front of a boarded up church dating back to the nation's beginning and wave a Bible in our faces ... Only an explosion of insight will suffice now....
Jun 2, 2020, 4:10pm
Meditations
From a Spiritual Perspective
Martin LeFevre: The world is made, not divinely created. What humans made can be remade with insight, creativity, conviction and courage. ... That is especially true when an old order is collapsing, as it is now after one of the last struts has been kicked out by the pandemic. The question is, how deep does the crisis go, and what is an adequate response? ... It's a matter of opening one's eyes to what is happening inwardly and outwardly, and of ceasing to move headlong in a self-centered consumeristic direction as the earth and humanity go over the cliff...
May 23, 2020, 4:33pm
Meditations
The Crisis Is First Inward, Not Outward
Martin LeFevre: Sometimes the clearest way to view current events is through the lens of recent history. Contrary to the pundit class, we're not living in a different world. It's the same old shit recycled and accelerated. ... The pandemic is intensifying the crisis of human consciousness, as well as the opportunity and urgency to change course that was squandered with the end of the Cold War. ... The truth is that the US collapsed at the same time the USSR did, just internally (socially and morally) rather than externally (economically and politically) as in Russia. It's just taken this long for it to become undeniable...
May 20, 2020, 4:07pm
Meditations
Can Human Nature Change?
Martin LeFevre: The mind, as the word is usually used, means the movement of thought in the brain. But there is another meaning to the word mind--a quality of awareness and attention that transcends and silences the mind-as-thought. ... It's essential to let go of enslavement to belief systems, and not be enchained to any tradition, technique or teacher. Belief of any sort is a conditioning that binds the mind, denying the direct perception of truth and the sacred. So the first step for a serious person, a person who really wants to be free, is to question belief and tradition within oneself. ... With regard to spiritual and inward matters, there really are no teachers. One must be one's own teacher. ...
May 16, 2020, 3:49pm
Meditations
Being Is the Home of Language
Martin LeFevre: In a meditative state, without the filter of memory and the shadow of the known, one's senses are sharp and attuned, and the mind is quiet and present. Thus I found myself standing face to face with a full-grown coyote in the prime of its life, its gray bushy tail held out straight, its ears up, and its eyes piercingly alert. The encounter was at once completely incongruous, and totally natural. ... The species barrier fell away. We were simply two beings looking at each other ... For a moment, it felt as though the human being was looking through the coyote's eyes, and the coyote was looking through the human being's eyes. ... Native Americans often spoke about such experiences, and their myths flowed from them...
May 12, 2020, 3:23pm
Meditations
The Language of Being
Martin LeFevre: It was a very windy day, with gusts over 60 kilometers per hour. You would think the hummingbirds would be hunkered down somewhere. But a small fleet of them put on an incredible show around the feeder in the backyard. ... Self-knowing is the door to the infinite sublimity of life. However self-knowing is not a function of knowledge or accumulation, but of keen awareness of what one is actually thinking, feeling and doing in the present moment. Most people think they know themselves, but few are self-knowing. We can never know ourselves; we can only be self-knowing, because we're changing all the time. ...
May 6, 2020, 1:55pm
Meditations
Trump Is the Logical End of Positive Thinking
Martin LeFevre: Positive thinking takes a 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' attitude. It thereby allows evil to grow until it rules, and not just in terms of its most visible manifestation in the malignant darling of conservative Christianity. ... Positive thinking perverts the proverb, "As one thinks in one's heart, so one is," into "As I think in my head, it is." ... Thus positive thinking has provided the soil for the darkest tendencies in American society to grow. ... The Trump White House is just carrying out the same unwitting experiment to see just how long pigheaded optimism, coupled with sophisticated marketing and media complicity (in overly focusing on the narcissist-in-chief), can hold sway over the truth...
Apr 30, 2020, 4:26pm
Meditations
Are We Paying Attention?
Martin LeFevre: Some shallow thinkers say, "Our first task when we emerge from this isolation will be to remember." That is simply false. Our first task is to seize the opportunity during and after the pandemic, to question and attend to what is, inwardly and outwardly. ... Waiting is death. If we wait until the pandemic to begin to radically change ourselves, our culture, and our policies and politics, it will be too late when things return to some semblance of normality. ... It's true, we can now "see with our own eyes how ready the natural world stands to reclaim the planet we have trashed, how eagerly and how swiftly it will rebound if we give it a chance."...
Apr 28, 2020, 3:07pm
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