Martin LeFevre: The Meaning of Life

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At the only sandy ‘beach’ in Lower Park, a big group of parents and children frolic in the water. It’s a lazy summer afternoon when the temperature reaches nearly 110 degrees.

At One-mile, where the creek has been dammed for decades to create a huge public swimming pool some 200 meters long and 50 meters wide, there are more people in the water and on the grass than I’ve ever seen.

Though the sun beats down relentlessly during hottest part of the day, it’s tolerable in the shade beside the stream. Butterflies flit over the creek, and birds land on the rocks at mid—stream.

It takes the better part of an hour for meditation to ignite. During sittings in nature there is no goal. But there is intent—to quiet the mind, and cleanse the heart. After a few days of difficulty and distress, the body itself yearns for rebalancing and renewal.

Describing meditation is inherently intellectual, but since it’s not an intellectual process, there is no means by which the mind can awaken it. So there is something of a contradiction in my writing about it. But hopefully the writer, and the reader, can see beyond the contradiction that language itself imposes.

So what is meditation? Why does one usually require nature to awaken it? (Perhaps others don’t, but I’m sure that techniques and methods are inimical to the spontaneous combustion of meditation. And ‘group meditation’ is an oxymoron.)

The mind-as-thought mediates experience with symbols. And words, images, and memories—the residue of experience—pile up in the mind and heart, clouding perception and corrupting feeling.

As we get older, the accretion of experience—all the hurts, sorrows, unresolved conflicts, and unnecessary memories—grow and slowly shrink the mind and heart. These accretions, as much or more than poor diet, also affect the body, making it insensitive to inner and outer stimuli.

Therefore, understanding and applying the art of meditation is more important than any other health maintenance practice. Indeed, in one sense, meditation is inner hygiene.

But since any form of effort prevents the meditative state from happening, what can one do?

Take and make the time to do the most radical thing in this society—nothing. Simply let go and observe. Don’t watch your breath and all that other nonsense; just listen and watch, outwardly and inwardly.

Nature is the best mirror. If one sits and is passively aware in a relatively quiet place where one isn’t likely to be disturbed, the senses soon become attuned to one’s surroundings. Then, by allowing the same inclusive, undirected awareness to turn within, one is able to watch thoughts and emotions as they arise—without judgment or interference—which means, without the watcher.

This is the highest action of which a human being is capable, and it has nothing to do with discipline. That word, discipline, normally means to force oneself to do something for the sake of something else--a rough means to reach an exalted end.

But the root meaning of the word discipline is a far cry from its usual first and second definition: “Punishment; training to act in accordance with rules.” At bottom, discipline simply means: “learning, from the Latin, discipulus—pupil.”

Having negated the observer in the observation that’s quicker than thought, one finds that thought/emotion is a single stream. In attending to the stream without division or effort, the pollution of the past within us flows by and cleans itself.

It’s not so difficult to understand the toxic smoke the mind secretes. We see it manifest in the world every day on the news, and feel it, if we are at all aware of ourselves and others, in dead and darkness-saturated cultures like the North American culture hearth, in which hardly an ember still burns.

Space in the mind is the most important thing. Without it, there is only the continuity of thought. Life, as most people know it, is thoughts strung together in an unbroken chain. That way of living absolutely prevents freedom, and eventually sinks us into the muck of the human past.

The deepest intent of the human being, and I daresay, life, is complete liberation. One leaves, however briefly, the polluted stream of content-consciousness in the unwilled phenomenon of meditation.

Duality does not exist in nature, only in the human mind. Anyone who has sat silently and alone under an open sky as the sun slides below the horizon and dusk descends can attest that life is a seamless movement. The evolutionary gift of symbolic thought, not understood, is what has made the world into a dualistic and desolate place.

People who talk about the desolation of extending life, as opposed to the non-existent duality of the quality of life, project and belie a fact unseen within and outside them.

But as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

- 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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