A Day Of Contrasts Between Darkness And Light

It’s the 4th of July in America. This year the United States marks 248 years since independence from the English monarchy. Only fools are celebrating it. 

For the Supreme Court has just made the United States of America a constitutional monarchy, according powers to the presidency that would have made the founders gag. 

Abraham Lincoln’s closing line in the Gettysburg Address echoes like a dirge to Americans that still have ears that can hear and hearts that can feel: “That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” When a people perish, as they have in this nation, a government of the people must inevitably perish.

Such national considerations have become much less important in light of the colorless kaleidoscope of crises facing humankind as a whole. Thousands of years of civilization, and tens of thousands of years of prehistory have culminated in planetary polycrisis. 

Is there a root cause, and can it be addressed, much less redressed by the living generations? 

It can if we look below the surface level of current events and national politics, and stop confusing human social and political systems with the natural order. Conflating man-made systems with natural systems only exacerbates man’s decimation of the earth, and does nothing to remedy humankind’s increasing social and psychological pathology. 

The latter – the human mind and consciousness – is what is destroying the former -- the natural order. Combining them by saying things like, “How rising emissions distort our political ecosystems is not nearly as well understood as the scientific certainty that they are heating our world,” just increases confusion. 

It’s true that we need to examine “the feedbacks of the climate crisis on governance.” But if we have no insight into the underlying cause of the fragmentation razing both the earth and human institutions, we cannot deal with either.

Placing the climate and ecological crisis in the context of national and international politics, or even politics at all, is to be shortsighted to the point of obtuse. We have to look a lot deeper than “the battle between those who want to fix what is broken and those who want to keep breaking."

We even have to look deeper than “the industrial era, which has strapped both the right and the left into the straitjacket of national self-interest and capitalist economics.”

Humans evolved along with all other life on earth, but using the adaptation of “higher thought,” we’ve been able to separate ‘things’ from nature and recombine them for our use to an incredible degree.

However psychological separation and alienation from nature and each other have their roots in the unwise use of the evolutionary adaptation of symbolic thought. 

Humans are the only species on this planet that operates in terms of separation, and from that false psychological foundation, we have fragmented the earth to the point of ecological collapse. 

With insight into the movement of thought within ourselves, we can resolve, at an emotional, philosophical and political level, the conflict between humans and nature, as well as the conflict within and between us as human beings. 

At first I thought the hummingbird buzzing around me as I sat beside the stream was attracted to my turquoise T-shirt. But the second time it came around, hovering at eye-level, I knew it had to be for some other reason. 

The tiny bird came back three times before assuring itself that I was OK, and it could safely sit in its tiny nest just over a meter away on a slender branch overhanging the edge of the creek.

The nest was so small and well camouflaged that even after spotting it, I had to scan to find it again. Initially the slightest movement sent the hummingbird darting away, but after a while it didn’t move even when I took a drink of water. 

It was incongruous to watch a creature with such a high metabolism and wing speed sit stock still in its nest. But there it sat, its long beak facing upstream, one of its miniscule eyes facing me. 

For the last half hour, I sat with the immobile hummingbird a few feet away.  A growing, impersonal love for all life enveloped me, and I started to wonder if the hummingbird’s unblinking little eye was the selfsame eye of God. 

Just then a huge brown and white stipple-winged hawk swooped down, filling my entire field of vision. Its motionless wingspan was as wide as my outstretched arms, and the tip of its left wing was less than an arm’s length away as it flew by at eye level. 

It landed on a branch overhanging the stream directly in front, but only stayed a second or two before flying downstream. 

Meditation is simply the ending of the movement of thought through passive watchfulness gathering non-directed attention. When thought ends, separation and time ends, and non-personal love is.

To the end of my days, the meditation with that tiny bird, ending with a visit by one of the largest avian species, will remain imprinted on my heart. 

Martin LeFevre

© Scoop Media