Martin LeFevre: The Soul of the Universe

A group of guys are swimming in the creek at my sitting spot, so I walk a couple hundred meters upstream and put my pad down across the stream from a picnic site. There is a lone cyclist there, and the minute he leaves, a family descends on the place, complete with dog and yellow raft.

Despite initially suspicious and disappointed looks at finding a stranger sitting there, they go about their business, and I stay put for the time being. They seem like a nice family. The older girl smiles as she enters the stream with her younger sister, a girl of about eight in a pink bathing suit with matching pink water shoes.

Carrying her doll, she boldly crosses the creek and heads right for me. As she approaches, she says, ³Land ahoy; then, stepping onto the bank a few feet away, she adds, ³Coming ashore. She s a fearless little card, I think as I smile at her.

Leaving the spot to the family, which, by this time, has unloaded a large amount of stuff from a gargantuan vehicle, I move again. My final prompt is a portable grill, which is placed on top of the BBQ at the site. I return to my first choice, which thankfully has been vacated by the dudes.

To my exasperation, the older sister and brother pull the big yellow raft downstream nearly in front of me. I wait for the commotion to die down at the raft, which it does after 20 minutes or so. Then, watching without a Œwatcher, meditation ignites.

Do humans have a soul? Does the word Œsoul have any meaning at all?

V.S. Ramachandran, a brain scientist at the University of San Diego, says, there may be a soul in the sense of ³the universal spirit of the cosmos, but the notion of ³an immaterial spirit that occupies individual brains and that only evolved in humans‹all that is complete nonsense.

The notion of soul in the Christian tradition is inextricably linked to Œman s special place in creation, and the ludicrous projection that Œman is made in the image of God. But the fact that we humans are matter and energy, and evolved along with all other life, does not mean, as many scientists and secularists believe, that the universe is merely mechanism plus randomness. Creation did not begin and end with the Big Bang, but is going on all the time in nature, without the need to postulate and project a Creator.

The vast bulk of theology boils down to the veneration of self, thought, and the things made by thought. Humans used to worship golden calves; now we worship iPhones. Religionists and secularists aren t nearly as different as they think. Indeed, believers and atheists are two sides of the same coin‹a cheap metal stamped with some image, made by the mind of man.

Is the cosmos aware? Obviously the moon and stars aren t aware, but there is awareness beyond the mind of man in the universe. Indeed, one has the feeling in the meditative state that awareness both preceded the birth, and will be there after the death of the universe. Is awareness God?

It has become fashionable to blur the difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, to pretend, by pointing to the gradual, seamless transition from animals to humans, that a gulf does not exist. But facile reasoning from scientific fact will not so easily resolve Œthe riddle of man.

Yes, humans evolved along with all other life. But how is it that all other life moves in a dynamic, inextricably related order, while humans are generating increasing disorder, through fragmenting the earth, and ourselves, all to hell?

When the human brain is silent, through undivided attention to the movement of thought, it comes into contact with the background awareness of the universe. That means the individual brain‹not Œman, not humans, not thought has the capacity to be a conscious mirror of the mystery of ongoing creation.

And that is the real meaning and purpose of meditation‹to fully awaken the latent capacity in each of us to receive that to which the word Œsacred points.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre @sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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