True Abundance

Friday, 11 April 2025, 7:23 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

It’s an hour before sunset and the Earth has become strangely quiet and still. There’s just the slightest movement of the new green leaves in the big olive tree next door. And I can’t hear the freeway, from which there’s usually a din at this time of day.

I’d been thinking and writing on the patio, but the stillness and silence made the activity of the mind seem sacrilegious. In listening between and beyond all sounds, the background silence of the universe becomes part of one’s being. Everything is included in it – a dog barking in the distance, a woman’s laughter on a street a block away.

It doesn’t matter if this essence has always been within us but we lose touch with it, or it is not in our natures and we awaken to it. All I’m sure of is that without it, all the material abundance in the world is meaningless, vacuous and barren.

The zeitgeist in the United States at present is what it must have felt like to people with awareness in Germany before World War II. Americans carry on, but I see fear and dread in my countrymen’s eyes, and you feel a collective heaviness and uncertainty in the grocery stores.

The international economic rules that the US wrote after the war are being upended on the whim of one dark, deranged and power-addicted man. As a tariff war escalates with the other economic superpower, China, the former leader of the free world is planning for war along with a nation that has bombed a strip of land it controls into rubble, killing over 50,000 children, women and men in a futile attempt to wipe out terrorists and tyrants.

What is our response to the chaos and madness of a world of which we are inextricably part?

Meditation, spiritual friendship and philosophical inquiry are essential, the wellspring of right relationship and action. But the left is spiritually and philosophically AWOL, unable to respond with any depth to the crisis, which is essentially inward, not outward.

I read a strange sentence today that turns the materialistic idea of abundance on its head: “Time is petty and cannot weigh abundance.”

True abundance is wholly an inward phenomenon. And while one can physically live without it, as the vast majority of Americans have for decades, if not our entire history as a colonising and westward expanding nation, one cannot inwardly survive much less thrive without this indefinable abundance.

Contrast this attitude with a book called “Abundance” that has just come out by a well-known American liberal, which the progressive media in the US and UK has received with praise bordering on hosannas. Its premise that more material abundance will remedy the hellish authoritarian descent in this country is risible, but such is the failure of insight and imagination by the left at present.

The great achievements of progressives –in civil rights and women’s suffrage for example – had spiritual sources and sustenance in their day. Perhaps the greatest failure of the left in the last 50 years is its adherence to a secular, materialistic and rigidly atheistic worldview.

Rather than nurture and bring forth a spiritual dimension without dogma and organised religion, the left has ceded the entire field of religion to the Christian right. Drawing the wrong lesson from Jimmy Carter’s defeat in America, progressives embraced secularism. Ever since, the core premise has been that improving the material conditions of enough citizens would be sufficient to induce them to vote in their economic interests. How has that worked out?

The strictly secular approach has not only deprived the left of its traditional sources of support and sustenance, it has left progressives with no answer to growing Christian nationalist extremism over the last 30 years. People don’t need religion, but they do need an inner life. So the more consumeristically hollow American life became, the more people, especially rural whites, were drawn to archaic and perverse forms of religiosity.

Even the emergence of a blatant totalitarian, backed by his Faustian base of Christian nationalist extremists, has not brought about a basic reexamination of core premises on the left. Hence a book like “Abundance” doubles down on the dumb idea of a technological utopia.

But just what is inner abundance, where does it come from, and why does it have nothing to do with time?

Though in one sense inner abundance is completely subjective, individual and private, it’s also universal, non-individualistic and public. That is, public in the root meaning of the word – “relating to the people as a whole.”

Time is the continuity of thought. Continuity is the succession and accumulation of psychological memory, which underlies the illusion of a separate and permanent self. There is no time in nature or the cosmos, just the opening out of energy, matter, life and consciousness, inextricably emerging from the ground of death.

Therefore to attentively end the continuity of psychological memory and the delusion of a permanent self is to end time. And to end time is to allow the ineffable and true abundance of life and death to flow into one.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail