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Meditations - From Martin LeFevre in California

The Dilemma of Man

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As the New Year begins in northern California a cold, wet fog envelops the land. But the sun burns off the shroud by early afternoon, and shirtsleeves become the order of the day.

Things change dramatically again as the sun goes down. The temperature drops precipitously, requiring coats and gloves. Fortunately, I come prepared after riding the bike to the edge of town to watch the day end beside the stream.

An orange band of color clings to the horizon after sunset, and a filigree of bare branches in the western sky look like a spreading network of veins reaching upward. The scene evokes mystery, reverence, and affection for the earth and all life on it, including man.

A small falcon passes overhead. In the silence of being I stand, and watch the kestrel perform its sublime search pattern over the fields. It passes in front of the huge blinking antenna towers, and seems to land on one of the guide-wires as it hovers for ten seconds or more.

Then it flies a short distance and hovers in place again, flapping its wings in a quick but effortless motion as it scans the ground for prey. After moving across the field in this manner for some distance, the kestrel tucks its wings back and suddenly plummets—parachutes almost—to the ground.

In all of nature I have never seen a more exquisitely graceful motion than the flight of a kestrel falling gently to earth from a hundred or two hundred meters above. Unlike its cousin, the peregrine falcon, kestrels don’t dive bomb from extraordinary heights to punch their prey out of the sky, but scan the ground for mice or rabbits, and attack with silent stealth.

The ending of thought in undirected but intense attention, if only for a few timeless moments, renews and restores one’s spirit. Living in terms of the continuous chain of thought, which is how most people live out their lives, is slow suffocation. Only by learning how to die to thought each day can we truly learn how to live.

Clearly, the evolution of ‘higher thought’ was both a necessary precondition for experiencing the awareness of the universe, and a tremendous impediment to it. This is the dilemma of man, and it is probably shared by all sentient species, wherever they arise in the universe.

Humans are bringing about only the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on earth. Think about it: In three and a half billion years of life, a sentient species that is inextricably embedded in the network of life is extinguishing animal and plant life at a rate only seen with comets or meteors striking the earth!

This is not just a human conundrum, but also a cosmic one. It goes beyond the self-centered issue of whether life exists anywhere else amongst the billions of galaxies, to the very deepest spiritual and philosophical questions of ‘intelligent life.’

How can one species, which evolved along with all others, have so much power? Is ‘higher thought’ a meaningless mistake of evolution, or is it a stage through which some sentient species pass, and others do not?

There must be creatures on other planets, with separating and manipulating brains like ours, who have faced the same existential crisis that humankind is now facing.

I propose that some species possessing ‘higher thought’ are transformed in the crucible of self-understanding, to live in harmony with nature on their planets (and by extension, the cosmos), while others remain incorrigibly divisive and fragmenting, and fade away. Will humans join the pantheon of awakening species, or fail and go extinct?

That word ‘incorrigible’ is an interesting one. The definition of it is: “Somebody or something that is impossible or very difficult to change.” Of course those are two very different things—impossible and very difficult—and it isn’t clear at this point which one applies to humankind.

We are humankind, and so cannot stand apart from it and analyze it. But we can see ourselves from a higher perspective.

Is the transformation required of the human species a matter of balance, or is it something much deeper and more radical? Obviously it is something greater, since the very existence of man’s gross imbalance on this beautiful planet, and the callousness with which humans kill each other and other animals, begs the question.

Humankind may be standing at an ultimate crossroads. I feel the universe, and the intelligence that permeates it, wants us to succeed, wants us to make the transition from a smart ape to a wise human being. But only we ourselves, as undivided human beings (literally, in-dividuals) can decide which way things will go.

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- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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