Spring, Consciousness, and Transformation

Meditations - From Martin LeFevre in California

Spring, Consciousness, and Transformation

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Big splashes of poppies, lupines, and a half dozen other wildflowers carpet the green slopes in the semi-protected canyon just outside of the city.

The oaks that dot the hillsides have just begun to bloom; their branches evince both winter’s fallowness and spring’s promise. The sky is opaque, which makes the swaths of color all the more vivid.

A big man, with his wife and two young children trailing behind, walks up the gravel road carrying a bundle of orange poppies as thick as he can get his hand around. Though illegal to pick the state flower, ignorance, while hardly bliss, has led him amiss.

Sitting at the lip of the narrow gorge, with the sheer faces of the canyon into which it’s cut a few hundred meters to my right, the stream rushes up to one’s ears. Though the water has gone down considerably since the last rain two weeks ago, the volume and power are still impressive.

Some may wonder what the point is of listening to roaring streams or babbling brooks when the human condition is so dire. But the only things that babble are people; the brooks, streams, and rivers are silent, speaking only of remedy.

The remedy to this, the sum of all crises, is self-knowing and transformation, both in the individual and the collective consciousness of humankind. There is no actual division in consciousness; it is one thing (like the net), and a transmutation in the microcosm must affect, to some degree, the macrocosm.

Of course self-knowing is the last thing most people want to do. So many people have consciously or subconsciously decided that feeling is just too painful. So they have numbed themselves beyond human recognition.

There was a segment on the news the other night about a worldwide fad of swimming with sharks. Not viewing them from shark cages mind you, but without protection of any kind.

The participants in this new ‘extreme sport,’ some of whom are young parents, speak of the “challenge to stay alive” while tiger sharks or hammerheads swim inches away from them. The truth is that people swim with sharks so that they can feel alive again.

In the past, when cultures and peoples died, people broke up into bands and moved on, creating another society in a new wilderness. Now, with no new lands left to denude, there’s only a pointless wanderlust. Travel to foreign countries, especially exotic ones, also makes people feel alive—for a while. Of course, then they have to return to their homelands, and themselves.

Few care to ask what is becoming of humankind. Fewer still to find out if the inertia of the past can be radically changed. The cumulative past suffocates the present and overshadows the future. But that’s a subconscious given, not something to bother one’s head or heart about.

Except that there are limits to the fragmentation that the earth and human spirit can withstand at the hands of man, and we are quickly and undeniably approaching them. So the old questions have a new urgency, beginning with: What is the relationship between the individual and the collective?

We like to think we’re unique individuals, but since the separate self is the first illusion, the true individual only comes into being when he or she steps out of the stream of content-consciousness. Short of doing that, we’re essentially just interconnected nodes on the net.

Memory, association, and accumulation (cognitively and emotionally)—in other words, the past—is our consciousness. When there is undivided attention to the movement of the past within oneself, without the illusion of the separate observer and self (which are inextricably part of the movement), then another kind of consciousness altogether comes into being.

Most people now realize that there has to be a transformation in consciousness. Contrary to what the wishful thinkers believe however, it is not happening. On the contrary, human consciousness is getting darker and darker, sucking more and more ‘individuals’ into the vortex of deadness that has become man.

But in practical, even political terms, what does psychological revolution mean?

The identification with ‘my country,’ ‘my race,’ or ‘my group’ is very ancient, indeed, as old as man. But now that there are seven billion humans and growing, there is no more room on earth for such childishness, since identifying with any particular group is clearly destroying humankind.

The beginning of transformation therefore means letting go of identification--of nationalism, of religious and of racial definition. There is no choice now—continue to devolve as humans, or grow into human beings.

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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