What Are We Undertaking To Do?

Three perfectly stacked symmetrical domes -- a pyramid of cumulus clouds -- form in the saddle upcanyon. They dissipate and disappear in a few timeless minutes.

I am almost certainly the only one to see them, and in that fact, plus the realization that there will never be another cloud formation exactly like it, there is a feeling of how fleeting life is.

The volcanic cliffs above and great slabs of pillow rock in the gorge below, which appear so permanent, are actually as fleeting as the clouds. Indeed, the earth and its sun are essentially as fleeting as a life; only the moment holds eternity.

For two hours, plus the half-mile walk into the stupendous meditation spot, one is completely alone. Despite the canyon being just outside the city, not a single person passes on the rocky path behind me, or is visible for the miles I can see up the canyon and across the gorge.

The only sign of man is a barely visible single strand of wire between toothpick telephone poles on a ridge well over a mile away. With the updrafts of late afternoon, a pair of vultures effortlessly circle. coming close enough to see the pattern of their underwings.

The immensity of the brown slopes in the distance, of the vertical cliffs across the narrow gorge, and of the huge slabs of volcanic rock lining the chasm just beyond my feet, is overwhelming in a self-obliterating way. After an hour, the intensifying solitude brings forth a subtle though unmistakably primal fear.

After all, for tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, to be cast out into the wilderness meant almost certain death. With the exceptions of mountain men and solitary explorers in the modern era, people didn’t go into the wild and live alone except on vision quests.

Most people are isolated now, but few take the time to be completely alone. Even a couple hours alone without any sign or sound of human civilization brings forth things that few have the urge to question and remain with.

One often hears the tired refrain, “humans are social creatures.” In an age of conformity and collapse however, it’s our capacity to be truly alone that gives us our uniqueness and is the wellspring of insight and renewal.

After an hour of intense, passive watchfulness, one begins to feel the age of the earth, and sense the people who gazed upon these same formations for thousands of years before the first white men ‘discovered’ California. The sheer cliff that looms over this area evokes ancient people, who almost seem carved into the rocks.

How many people, how long ago fixed their eyes, minds and hearts upon these same configurations in the canyon, and saw their ancestors in them, as I am seeing them reflected to me today?

Death sits lightly on the dry slopes and dark volcanic rocks. It waits without waiting for everything and everyone. When it isn’t separated from life, death is a tangible reality in every moment, as old as the earth and older than the universe.

The original psychological separations of man have persisted for hundreds of thousands of years. They are: the observer/self; time; and death. It’s past the time to end them within ourselves.

In feeling, beyond conceptions and words, the unknowable eons of the earth in places like this, one directly contacts death as a movement beyond man, and beyond time.

Given the implacable and intensifying crisis of man’s consciousness (as the mind of thought recreates itself in its own image with AI), is an evolutionary breakthrough possible? And if so, does it occur within the individual, or with self-knowing individuals igniting insight together?

Clearly a conscious transmutation is urgently required. Are enough human beings doing the inner spadework (beyond the absurd notion of ‘my consciousness’) to allow a transmutation to occur in the human brain now?

After reluctantly leaving the overlook of the gorge, I spot a man three hundred meters down the trail. As he nears I see he has a long-lens camera strapped around his neck.

When we meet on the trail, I say amiably: You are the first person I’ve seen in over two hours. “Nothing wrong with that,” he replies. Not a bit, I add. To which he laughs and repeats, “Not a bit.”

Gratitude To The Unknown Instructors

What they undertook to do

They brought to pass;

All things hang like a drop of dew

Upon a blade of grass.”

Yeats

Martin LeFevre

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