Martin LeFevre: What Change Really Means

The animal spotted me jogging up the path in the park. It stopped and turned about 75 meters ahead, and then again at 50 meters. It was the size and shape of a dog, but moved like a cat.

I saw it scoot into the brush around the turn, and didn’t think I’d be able to confirm its identity. But as I made the turn, and looked to the right, there it was, just 10 meters away, standing on a log. A coyote!

In 15 years, it’s the first coyote I’ve seen in Lower Park, which follows the creek and runs about a quarter mile wide through this college town of around 100,000 people.

Having had a sitting before the run that ignited a meditative state, one’s senses were sharp and attuned, and the mind essentially quiet and present. So I found myself standing face to face with a healthy coyote in the prime of its life, its gray bushy tail held out straight, its pointed ears up, and its eyes piercingly alert.

I could feel its curiosity and intelligence, as we stood motionless for some seconds staring at each other. The species barrier did not exist. We were simply two beings looking at each other, an animal in its natural state, and a human in a meditative state.

Then something happened that was quite natural at the moment, but later, as I ran, seemed quite extraordinary. For a moment, the mirroring was so clear that all separation between the human being and the coyote disappeared altogether. For however many seconds, one was looking at the man through the coyote’s eyes, as well as looking at the coyote through the human being’s eyes.

A cyclist came riding up the path 100 meters away. Though out of the coyote’s line of sight, in the next second it was gone. The opening in time and space, the dimension beyond species and worlds closed, and one returned to the world of cyclists, runners, and dogs.

Native Americans often spoke about such experiences, and their myths flowed from them. The coyote figures prominently in these myths, for some tribes mainly as a trickster and fool, for others a transformer and creator.

According to Crow and other Plains traditions, the coyote was second only to the Spirit Chief itself in its powers of creation. “Old Man Coyote took up a handful of mud and out of it made people.” The Miwok of the Central Valley and western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California “saw the coyote as an essential force in the creation of the earth.”

Other tribes, such as the Chinook, see the Coyote spirit as responsible for bringing death to the human world. The Hopi saw the coyote as a thief who stole their sheep under the cover of night. Often associated with traits such as greed, impulsiveness, recklessness, and jealousy, many coyote myths were highly sexualized, but those stories offended the sensibilities of European settlers.

All myths are about humans and their place in nature, as well as their powers on earth and in the world. Into the coyote was projected the core imaginative power in humans, a power, for good or ill, which seems to put us almost on a par with creation itself. The Crow said “Old Man Coyote named buffalo, deer, elk, antelope, and bear. And all these came into being.”

It’s interesting to contrast Prometheus, who in Greek mythology was seen more as a culture hero than trickster in stealing fire from the gods to give to humans; and the coyote spirit, who was often seen more as trickster than a culture hero in stealing fire from the stars or sun.

A word that is often associated with the coyote spirit is demiurge, which, fittingly, means either “a powerful creative force or personality,” or, “a deity in Gnosticism and other religions who creates the material world and is often viewed as the originator of evil.”

Whether as creator, trickster, or culture hero, the coyote spirit in Native American mythology stands in for the core contradictions of the human mind itself.

Ruled by that mind, tens of thousands of years of human history are coming to a head. We have remained psychologically unchanged as ‘modern humans.’ There is no cultural evolution. We were fully equipped when we emerged from the mists of East Africa about 100,000 years ago to build cathedrals and all the art within them, as well as replicate thought with computers.

As humans, we drove our cousins, the Neanderthals, into the sea. We hunted the giant fauna in North America and Australia to extinction, just as we’re presently doing in Africa.

We will have a new brain, or the old one will destroy the earth and humanity. We can and must consciously transmute into a new species, one in which the duality, destructiveness, and arrogance of thought gives way to stillness, insight, and humility.

The new human being will create the new culture. Not one based on division, belief, and tradition, but on insight, creativity, and collaboration.

There is no plan; this is not some imagined utopia. There are only the countless fissures that awakening people will find in every crumbling edifice of the old cultures, civilizations, and nations of the world.

Through those fissures, many lights will shine, and we will create the world anew, more in harmony with nature than even the indigenous cultures of humankind’s childhood, and much more in harmony with each other.

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher. More of his work and an archive can be found at the Colorado-based site Fountain of Light (fountainoflight.net). martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net

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