Martin LeFevre: The Life of the Mind, and Heart

Fifteen meters upstream, a merganser mother preens on the rocks as she stands guard over her three chicks playing in the shallows of the creek. Out of the water she appears quite large, irrespective of the brown baffle on her head. Her spotted brown chicks, on the other hand, are tiny.

A steep bank, dense with brush and ivy, shields the mother and chicks from the runners and cyclists on the park road above them. Fifty meters upstream a mallard couple, with no offspring as yet this spring, sits on the stones in the middle of the shallow creek.

After about 20 minutes, the merganser mother leads her little troop upstream through roots and downed branches along the edge of the creek. She plies the water as she swims against the current, her head just below the waterline as she scoops for insects. The plume of feathers along the crest of her cranium throws off the water so efficiently that it doesn’t appear wet when she raises her head.

For most of the sitting in a fairly secluded spot of the park, a gray squirrel perches silently in a nearby branch overhanging the creek. It seems to never take its eyes off one, and every now and then it taps its foot nervously.

Toward the end of the hour, small pieces of fruit begin falling from the tree over the creek. At first they splash into the water at a surprisingly rapid rate, but then they begin falling around and even on one. The squirrel is eating, and it’s either making a gift or a statement to the human sitting in its territory.

Imperceptibly, the mind/brain leaves the stream of time. Time, which has no meaning without the clock outwardly and becoming inwardly, stops. The rippling water envelops one, and content-consciousness recedes into the petty thing that it actually is.

The stillness and awareness put one deeply in touch with the ever-present actuality of death. Without a trace of morbidity or fear, the fact of death feels as close as the water and stones. Drinking from that fathomless well, one is regenerated and renewed. Truly, if one would fully live, one has to learn how to die each day.

Operating in the continuity of thought, the brain becomes encumbered and encrusted with the past, and thereby grows old. If one energetically but passively observes the entire movement of the past within one however, attention gathers, thought spontaneously stops, and the brain is renewed.

Perhaps the incidence of Alzheimer’s would be significantly reduced if people learned the art of meditation, which has nothing to do with techniques and methods of quieting thought.

As both a contemplative and philosopher, I have long grappled with the right relationship between these two seemingly incompatible dimensions of one’s being.

The contemplative’s concern is with the ending of thought. Not in the cloister of the monastic’s world of tradition and repetition, but integrated into ordinary daily life.

To me contemplation means both the energetic and effortless quality of being in which there is an essential stillness of all that one knows and has experienced, in this and however many previous lives.

Doing philosophy, on the other hand, obviously requires thinking. It may be thinking that arises from and is anchored in questioning and observing, as opposed to knowledge and tradition, but it is still thinking.

In my view, doing philosophy is similar to the scientific enterprise at its best, in that there is a drive for insight into the big questions. Unlike science however, true philosophy does not rest on, or even presuppose knowledge as a means or as an end.

As the ancient philosophers pointed out (although Western and even Eastern philosophy has largely lost sight of it), philosophy is not about the acquisition and expansion of knowledge, but the growth of insight, understanding, and wisdom.

Both contemplation and philosophy depend on a deep feeling of ‘I don’t know.’ But where the philosopher’s ‘I don’t know’ is a starting point to finding out, the contemplative’s ‘I don’t know’ is a tremendously pregnant and dynamic beginning and ending point of stillness and silence.

Thinking, which is obviously essential to doing philosophy, can take place in the context of emptiness. That means that thoughts and thinking arise and fall back, not into the stream of the past, but into the infinite ocean of silence.

- 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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