Martin LeFevre: Our Place In the Universe

For at least 100,000 years, since ‘modern man’ first emerged from East Africa, we have been as we are—tribal, self-centered, and dominated by the adaptive strategy of ‘higher thought.’

Now, as the fragmentation of the earth and humanity by the unwise use of symbolic thought reaches the breaking point, pressure increases greatly for a transmutation of consciousness.

That a single species should have the power to destroy the planet that gave rise to it is not just an existential mystery; it poses a cosmic question about consciousness itself. What is consciousness, as we generally know it, and is another consciousness possible?

On one side, many take false refuge in the idea that humankind is unimportant, an infinitesimal speck on a speck in space. But the very fact that humans evolved along with all other life, yet have started the “Sixth Extinction,” begs the question: What is the place of a supposedly intelligent species in the universe?

On the other side are people (often so-called religious people) who insist that the previous five extinction events (defined as “a sharp decrease in the number of species in a relatively short period of time”) mean that nature is destructive, so we should expect man to be. Does one really need to point out that there is a vast difference between a natural event and one caused by an allegedly sentient species?

Conventional atheists or New Agers say that ‘we humans are infinitesimal,’ and that our destructiveness is evidence that life is a chance event against a background of chaos. But something mysterious (the lesser mystery of consciousness in need of resolution, without denying the greater mystery of life itself) is happening with the emergence of a sentient species.

Of course, we can wait until astrobiologists confirm that the emergence of life is as much a property of the universe as the formation of planets. (Astronomers have so far discovered close to three hundred ‘exo-planets’ orbiting distant suns, a few in ‘habitable zones’ probably with water, like earth.)

In the lifetimes of many people alive today, astronomers will discover, I posit, that rudimentary (single celled) life is quite common in the universe; that multi-cellular organisms are quite uncommon; and that sentient, potentially intelligent species such as man, are quite rare. Many people believe that we’ve already been contacted by extraterrestrials, and that they ‘seeded’ human civilization, or are about to invade it.

We may be being watched, but my hypothesis is that all sentient life passes through the same crisis of consciousness that humankind is presently experiencing. Those that make it have neither the capacity for inter-species conflict, nor the desire to interfere with the processes of transmutation in sentient species on other planets.

This hypothesis is testable because if science discovers that life has emerged twice in our own small solar system—say, on the ice-crusted ocean that is Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons—it would mean that life is abundant in the universe. Of course that still leaves the question of sentient life, but the probability of us being alone then drops to nearly nil.

However I’m not nearly as interested in the question of extraterrestrial life as I am terrestrial consciousness. The brain that gave rise to religion and science is the same brain that pits the religious mind against the scientific mind. However neither science nor religion can solve the human crisis, because both are the product of a dualistic consciousness—symbolic thought.

Besides, we can no longer put off the urgently pressing question of the fragmentary nature of consciousness as we know it. The human mind has divided animal and plant species from the wholeness of the earth’s ecosystems to the breaking point. And in doing so, we have also divided ourselves to the breaking point. Can we resolve the crisis of human consciousness in time to preserve the integrity of the planet, and ourselves?

The universe did not begin in chaos, but in silence and order. ‘Chaos,’ in the cosmic sense, flows out of order. Chaos in the human sense flows out of the disorder generated by thought. The two conditions are completely different, and have no relationship.

An invisible world exists in the fewer and fewer spaces between the man-made world and the earth. If one doesn’t have contact, indeed communion, with that world (or ‘non-world’ if you prefer) of nature every day, one totally loses one’s way as a human being.

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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