The Present Crisis And The Transmutation Of Man

We drove to the end of the gravel road into the canyon just beyond town, and parked near the locked gate a half-mile from the gorge. Walking in on the rocky path, we stopped frequently to take in the volcanic slabs of the gorge, and look at the fading lupines and poppies.

There's a spot with a spectacular view down the narrow gorge and east into the widening canyon. As we sat, vultures flew by at eye level, 75 meters above the rushing stream. They soared and scanned, flapping their huge wings as little as possible, conferring a feeling of timelessness without aimlessness.

It was a splendid couple of hours in the canyon, so close to town and yet still possessing a wild, primitive beauty. Sheer cliffs loomed above the canyon, and below, at the bottom of the narrowing gorge, black lava shone in the sunlight, polished by thousands of years of rapidly flowing water.

It's often said that we humans are social (and more pejoratively) political animals. But in truth at bottom we are psychological creatures, creatures of separation, symbol and memory.

Since we've now made machines in our own image, machines that have surpassed us in memory and the limited intelligence based on memory, what are we now? Can we be beings of insight?

The evolution of so-called higher thought (that is, conscious, symbolic thought) was clearly a necessary step and threshold in the evolution of a brain with the capacity for silent awareness of the earth and universe. But paradoxically, symbolic thought is also the greatest impediment to silent awareness.

Clearly symbolic thought is such a powerful evolutionary adaptation that the creature in whom it evolves strongly tends to view life and the universe in terms of it. Which is to say, in terms of separation. That's an existential mistake of the highest order, and lies at the root of man’s alienation and destructiveness.

Even so, as destructive to the integrity of the planet and diversity of life on Earth as Homo sapiens has become, we’re still a potentially intelligent species that has the capacity to grow into an authentically intelligent species. But since no religious teacher, however illumined, has changed the basic course of man, we have to work out the conundrum of higher thought for ourselves and within ourselves.

So why is it so difficult and rare for humans to transcend thought? Why do division, conflict and fragmentation increasingly define the human condition? Do creatures of symbolic thought tend to become planet killers wherever they evolve in the universe, or is Homo sapiens an incorrigibly thought-bearing species?

It’s absurd to believe, in a universe as unimaginably huge as this, that man is the only species in which symbolic thought, with its scientific and technological capabilities, evolved. Or that we’re the only species that has made the existential mistake of separation that thought, a separative mechanism, tends to impart. Until humankind makes that transition to the intelligent use of higher thought however, we won't belong to the kinship of intelligent species in the universe.

Authentically intelligent species are not species with unimaginably advanced science and super-sophisticated technology. Rather, they're beings that have attained an integrated insight into the inherent limitations of thought and knowledge, and a deepening communion with the cosmic mind and each other, even as they develop increasingly extensive scientific knowledge and sophisticated technology.

The human brain is exapted for insight, which means that the capacity not only for insights, but a silent state of insight. However the transmutation from creatures of thought (that is, psychological separation and memory), to human beings of insight and understanding requires diligent self-knowing and non-accumulative learning.

Whether transmutation happens slowly or quickly within the individual and species, it's never a matter of time. As with bringing about a completely quiet mind, there can be no illusion of 'later' or tomorrow.

There is tremendous urgency. Homo sapiens faces the greatest crisis in our evolutionary history on this beautiful planet. Though the crisis is millennia and more in the making, it is self-made; and since it’s self-made, we have it in our power to meet it.

Martin LeFevre

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