Regarding Randomness And Significance

During a break between storms battering California again, mountains of white, gray and black cumulus slowly traversed an azure sky, changing into countless different shapes every moment.

Driving back after a meditation in the parkland, I stop at a light as Dvorak’s “Largo” movement “From the New World” begins playing on the radio. Even from the car, the beauty of the clouds is overwhelming. The sight of them, with the soaring and melancholic music, brings time to a stop and a tear to the eye.

The darkness sweeping over the world is all wrapped together, but it’s a wrong question, at least to begin with, to ask, what can we do? Embedded in that question are reactions of fear and desperation, which, while understandable in the present climate, have to be negated before one can see what, if anything, can be done.

It has become essential to be still for a little while every day, and feel the beauty of the Earth and vastness of the universe. Not just to give one perspective, or even renewal, but to draw insight from the infinite well of the immeasurable.

Though it’s fashionable to say we’re just specks on a speck in space, that’s no more valid in the scientific age than when people believed man was the center of creation during the reign of organized religion.

The Earth, if one sets aside one’s knowledge and experience and looks afresh at nature every day, is endlessly wondrous. Out of the approximately 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, nearly all with planets circling them, how many life-bearing planets as beautiful as the Earth?

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Life, as science is about to discover, is as intrinsic to the universe as star and planet formation. But planets with life as diverse and astonishing as the Earth’s are undoubtedly very rare. That means, unless one is a hard core materialist that believes life is totally random and meaningless, that the Earth is significant in the cosmic scheme of things.

By extension, but without an appeal to special creation, it also means that the human brain, as the pinnacle of four billion years of evolution on the Earth, is significant in the cosmic scheme of things. The question of why man is making such a mess of this planet is on us.

There are three great fallacies in considering the significance of the human brain in the cosmos. The first, a leftover from Christian theology, is that “man was created in the image of God.” Even in my early teens, I felt that if that’s true, it must be one miserable God.

Fortunately, given its absurdity on many levels, the idea of special creation, except for fundamentalists of the Christian right, has fallen away.

The second fallacy is to think in terms of size and scale when considering significance. To make scale primary is to make meaning a matter of measurement. Measurement is a function of our vaunted cognitive abilities; the supreme irony is that the thought machines we’ve created are refuting human pride.

The third fallacy is an insistence on total randomness. The idea that life, and the evolution of potentially intelligent life like Homo sapiens is completely random, forms the basis of the materialistic belief system.

Carried to its logical end, the idea of total randomness has given rise to the intellectually dishonest theory of the “multiverse” – the notion that there are an infinite number of universes existing side by side where all possible random permutations occur.

The advantage of the belief in a completely random, materialistic universe is that one doesn’t have to grapple with how and why humans are destroying the Earth.

Man is viewed not as a glaring exception to the seamless wholeness of nature, but just an accident of nature, ruling the Earth like the dinosaurs before they went extinct. Of course, the dinosaurs didn’t cause catastrophic climate change, or bring about the mass extinction that wiped them out.

To anyone with a contemplative and philosophical bent, the human brain has a virtually untapped capacity for direct perception of inviolability. Seeing and feeling the beauty and wonder of the Earth is nourishment for the heart as much as healthy food and decent housing are nourishment for the body.

So even if fantasies of free energy and material abundance for all could be realized, they could never fill the hollowness and hatred of this society and world. At bottom, they grow out of a lack of relationship to nature.

Scientific knowledge is vital, and advances in technology are good, but experiencing the numinous is the most important thing an individual can do. Not just for oneself, but also to keep the human heart and spirit alive during these times of terrible transition.

Attention is of the essence, and urgently needed. I’m speaking of attention that is not a function of intentionality. Deeply understood, there is no control over attention, either by individual “agency” or manipulative algorithms.

Right observation, which is observation that includes but is not led by or filtered through the observer, gathers all-inclusive, non-directed attention.

Such attention quiets the mind-as-thought and opens “the doors of perception” to the Intelligence that suffuses the Earth and cosmos.

Martin LeFevre; lefevremartin77@gmail

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