Exploring Our Place In The Universe

The afternoon was gray and chilly, with only the saddle-shaped opening to the canyon visible in the hills beyond town. But for a few precious minutes, brilliant light flooded the land, illuminated the hills, and cast the white bark of the sycamores around me in gold. 

Beyond personal interpretation or imagination, a reverential quality came over the land and flooded into one. One felt, perhaps as never before, that when personal identity is negated in passive awareness and non-directed attention, the Earth is suffused with the love of creation.

Suddenly it began to sprinkle in the immediate vicinity. With the sun still shining near the horizon behind me, a partial rainbow appeared over the hills. The brain became very quiet, without a flutter of thought. The “I,” with its problems, concerns and questions, dissolved into the nothingness that it actually is. An ineffable sacredness suffused the land and infused the attentively quiet mind/brain.

So why does one’s brain revert to the noise and sorrow of thought rather than remain silent and unburdened? Except during meditation in a relatively quiet spot of nature, one’s brain, like most people, is occupied with thought and the mental and emotional residues of thought.

Is it “my thoughts,” or just thought? There is no such thing as “my thoughts,” because there is no such thing as “me.” There’s just thoughts, revolving around a center called “me.”

Thought is a collective thing, with a background of the culture, social media, and human consciousness, and a foreground called “my thoughts.” Overall, it’s like the noise of a busy freeway that never stops, and rarely slows. But for the emerging human being, the spaces between thoughts and the stillness of the mind are of the essence.

Does the brain revert to thought-based consciousness because the habit of psychological thought is tens of thousands of years old, and only so-called mystics experience states of seeing and being without the filter of symbols and memories?

Or is it because the human brain is “hardwired” for symbolic activity, and the state of unmediated perception is a rare exception, pejoratively labeled “mystical experience?”

Doubtless both. So there’s a gap between people who experience temporary states of “samadhi,” and the rare, fully illumined human being, just as there’s a gap between people in whom thought actually falls completely still, and the vast majority of people who indulge in busyness. Neither temporary states of samadhi nor busyness are good enough anymore however.

Is it that everywhere in the universe where life evolves brains possessing “higher thought,” where potentially intelligent creatures emerge that have broken the bonds of ecological niche to consciously manipulate their environments, there is the tendency to fragment the seamless wholeness of their planets, as humans are doing to the Earth?

Clearly brains such as ours are necessary to be consciously aware of and participate in the cosmic mind. The ultimate paradox is that the silent, conscious awareness of being requires the evolution of creatures possessing symbolic thought, but thought then becomes the greatest impediment to communion with the cosmic mind, in the end idolizing itself as “Artificial Intelligence.”

As smart as crows, orcas and bonobos are, the human brain is almost certainly the only brain on this planet with the capacity for conscious awareness of the numinous, the immanent. So it isn’t science and technology that make us human beings, or even language, art and culture, but awakening our spiritual potential.

Einstein said, “I have no better expression than the term “religious” for this trust in the rational character of reality and its being accessible, at least to some extent, to human reason.” “To some extent” is right. Reason is necessary, but as the Age of Enlightenment crashes down around us, clearly reason is not sufficient to understand and transform ourselves.

Einstein was deterministic, maintaining that “Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control…we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.”

Though that may be true on a cosmic scale, beings with the potential for cosmic consciousness contain a creative, indeterminate feature, which has nothing to do with choice and free will, and everything to do with wholeness and insight.

There is beauty in the paradox between temporality and space-time, in which the brain inescapably exists, and experiencing the silent and timeless ground of being when thought, knowledge and experience are completely still.

Though it dominates the human brain and is destroying the earth, higher thought is not the entirety of the brain anymore than man is the entirety of nature.

Meditation is the spontaneous stillness of thought in all-inclusive, choiceless and undirected attention. Only when the brain is completely quiet can it contact the infinite silence and creative emptiness of Mind.

Martin LeFevre

lefevremartin77@gmail

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