Are There Two Or Three Movements In Human Life?

Since ancient times, it’s been said, “Man is the measure of all things.” In truth, the measurer of all things is man. Nevertheless, is there an immeasurable spiritual reality beyond the human mind?

To a contemplative, a belief in God or a belief there is nothing are two sides of the same coin. A belief is just a belief -- a fixed idea that prevents insight.

A nihilist however, doesn’t simply believe there is nothing beyond the darkness that humans generate. He or she believes that life is meaningless and dark.

On the other hand, a cynic, or if you prefer, a realist, maintains that there’s nothing true in this world. They acknowledge that there are true moments – the laughter of children; a genuine smile from a stranger; an act of kindness. But they believe there is no movement of goodness and justice in this world beyond the fictions and wishful thinking of idealists.

Only a fool would say the world is not dominated by injustice and darkness. The question is: Is there only man-made darkness, and the potential for its negation within the individual?

Nihilism represents and propagates the biggest lie that humans can tell. It is the idea that there is nothing spiritually true in life, that beauty is a happenstance and essence is a delusion. That is simply and egregiously false.

One can be a total cynic about man, and still not be a nihilist; but one cannot be a nihilist and be anything but a total cynic about life and humanity.

Where this world is concerned, there may be only the momentum of man-made darkness and madness, but life and nature are a movement of inexhaustible and infinite beauty.

One has only to passively but intensely watch the mind and heart into stillness to come into direct contact with an ineffable sublimity at the core of life and the universe.

So is there only the darkness of psychological thought, and its total negation in the individual, which brings direct awareness of beauty and great peace? (That isn't a duality and conflict, because the negation of the former allows the space for the latter.)

Or are there those two movements as well as another movement, flowing from individual negation and life itself, to bring about a breakthrough in consciousness?

I watched a movie in the last few days that was at once an entertaining horror flick and a disturbing philosophical treatise on evil. It’s called “The Night House.”

In a boat in front of their lakeside home that he built, a man shoots himself. The note he leaves behind for his wife reads, “You were right, there is nothing. You’ll be safe now.”

The widow returns home after the funeral and immediately finds the house haunted with what she thinks is her husband’s presence.

Discovering that she didn’t know her husband of 14 years at all, the woman first finds evidence of affairs. And then, in a rotting, ramshackle cabin on the other side of the lake that her husband also built, she stumbles on a number of women’s bodies.

The movie goes off the rails at this point, because rather than flee in horror, she returns to her nice house and misses her husband terribly. She then has a palpable, sexual encounter with what she believes is her husband’s spirit.

“I’m not Owen,” the entity says ominously. It turns out that the woman had a near death experience following a car accident at 17 in which she encountered “Nothing.” But this “Nothing” wants her back. And it had pressured her husband for years to kill her.

To fool It, Owen killed half a dozen women that look like his wife. When that no longer works, he kills himself to save her.

That doesn’t work either, and “Nothing” presses the woman to shoot herself in the rowboat just as her husband did. As I said, the movie is interesting, but it goes off the rails.

Nonetheless, the interesting point the movie makes is that Darkness is actually nothing. There’s no claim of anything beyond darkness, only that evil exists and that it is nothing, a totally nihilistic movement.

That’s true. However there is something immeasurably greater when the movement of thought/darkness is negated within one.

No belief system or meditation method can bring that benediction. Indeed, even the desire to bring it has to be negated for the sacred to come to one.

Darkness and evil are man-made, the byproducts of the horrible misuse of higher thought. Sublimity and sacredness, on the other hand, have their origins and dwelling completely beyond the human mind.

The universe is not irrational. And it would be irrational that communion with immanence is only for the very few. That is available to every serious, sensitive, self-knowing human being.

Martin LeFevre
Lefevremartin77 at gmail

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