Meditation Is Mutation

Suddenly everything was very vivid – the many shades of green along the banks of the creek, the play of light and shadow, the sound and sight of the rippling stream.

An intimation of the sacred came, an essence beyond all conception and verbalization. It comes only when the mind is completely still and empty. One cannot seek or recognize it, but one can see and feel it with all one’s being when it happens.

Why does immanent sacredness flee from seeking it? Because seeking is out of need, and need is from the illusion of the separate ‘me.’ Thought is separation, and all separation must end for it to be.

In short, need arises from the self, thought and time, which have to cease operating completely, if only temporarily, for the nameless to be. Recognition is inherently of the past. One cannot recognize what is new, and the benediction is new every time it comes to a totally empty mind and quiet brain.

It’s strange that the world is as it is when the earth is so beautiful and embodies the sacredness that imbues the universe. Does beauty beyond the mind of man, beyond even the forms and expressions of natural beauty, have anything to do with this world?

At present, it appears that there is only the darkness of the world and human consciousness, and the potential for complete negation in the individual.

Given that the vast majority of people either believe human nature is immutable, or that it is mutable to the point that there is no such thing, it’s shocking to read a sentence like this:

Mutation, total revolution, takes place only when change, the pattern of time, is seen as false, and in its total abandonment mutation takes place.

To my mind, that sentence is pregnant with meaning and questions. During almost every meditation (that is, passive observation) at streamside, there’s an unexpected moment when thought and time suddenly stop. Then all one’s senses and entire being are fully present. It feels like one spontaneously steps through a portal from a two-dimensional world into a multi-dimensional universe.

By way of reentering the world after climbing up the short, steep bank, I make a journal entry overlooking a meadow, where the short path down to the creek and a frequently traveled path that parallels it meet.

Without any barriers, there’s strong fellow feeling. Previously, people would sometimes make a comment ranging from, “You look really comfortable there,” to “I’ve never seen anyone fit so completely into their environment.”

Lately, I’ve only been encountering conduits of collective darkness. For example, the last few times a sun-withered woman about 40, who’s a doppelgänger of an estranged sister, has walked by at different times of day. She not only looks like my sister, but also puts on the same false-friendly front. Yesterday I quipped, ‘we have to stop meeting like this.’ Rather than elicit a genuine smile, her phony smile was instantly replaced by a stunned look.

The day before yesterday, a woman with two large dogs that had just defecated where the paths converge, looked up from her pooping scooping and asked as I approached, “Are you ok?” Have you noticed that often when someone asks that question, it means they aren’t ok?

As fine as I am with solitude, the monastic life has never interested me, except as a philosophical and contemplative curiosity. Even so, given what the world has become (basically more of what it always has been), I understand monasticism’s temptation now. There isn’t a culture left where the sacred and mundane are in some semblance of balance.

Yes, there’s a lot of talk about “being in the present.” But the difficult little secret about being in the present is that one can only be so when time ends, which means when thought falls completely still. And that, apparently, is still very rare.

Returning to the question of human nature and mutation, human nature boils down to the domination of thought and psychological time inwardly and outwardly. Does mutation mean the irrevocable ending in the brain of thought as the ground of our existence, subsumed by attention and awareness?

Life, indeed evolution itself, is insisting with increasing intensity that humans radically change. The more Homo sap fragments the earth and ourselves through the unwise use of ‘higher thought,’ the more the pressure grows for transmutation.

However if the intrinsic intent of the universe is to evolve, through random processes, brains with the capacity for communion with Mind (that is, brains with the capacity to “bring the benediction”) why is it so difficult and rare?

Martin LeFevre
lefevremartin77@gmail

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