Radical Change Requires Going To The Root

Except for a car pulling into the gravel parking area a half-mile away, or a truck backing down the gravel ramp to launch a kayak across the lake a half-mile away, there isn’t a man-made sound. Paradise Lake is a reservoir, and no gas-powered boats, or dogs, are allowed. Unintentionally therefore, the little lake is a true sanctuary.

Somehow the thick conifers that surround the lake escaped the fire that consumed the foothill town and thousands of acres six years ago. The misnomer “Camp Fire” burned down to the edge of the reservoir at one point, but unlike everywhere you turned on the drive in, no burn scar is visible.

Every natural sound is amplified at the lake, with the reservoir reflecting each birdcall against a backdrop of staggering silence. A light breeze creates small ripples on the water, geometric patterns that dance and delight in the mid-afternoon sun. It’s so quiet you can hear tiny waves lapping the shoreline.

A female mallard swims back and forth 10 meters below the bench where I sit. Later, a male mallard, paddling the other way, leaves a long, V-shaped wake. A hawk circles above the lake, with each tightening spiral going higher and higher.

A woman in hiking boots passes by on the trail behind me. Her face radiates joy, and when I make the common but heartfelt comment, ‘beautiful day,’ she responds with feeling, “Yes, it’s astoundingly so here.”

This is the kind of place where you find yourself holding your breath after sitting still and listening for half an hour. Every thought, whether petty or profound, feels utterly unfitting in the all-encompassing silence. Indeed, the movement of thought seems like blasphemy in a place like this.

There is stillness, silence, reverence and joy as the mind grows as quiet as one’s surroundings. Thought slows to barely discernible ripples on the surface of life, and then, seen as a clear impediment to experiencing immanence, ceases altogether.

Time, which is synonymous with the movement of thought, ends when thought ends. And when the mind-as-thought ceases operating, the Mind-of-awareness is. The human mind has to fall completely quiet to perceive the wordless, nameless actuality beyond thought.

Why, if this silence is the essence within and beyond nature, and that essence is sacredness, God, or whatever one calls it, is it so rare for humans to experience it? Is it because we are so dominated by thought that we subconsciously presume there is only the fabricated reality of the human mind, so the actuality of silence doesn’t exist for us?

Thought generates reality, which may or may not align with things as they are. Thought has nothing to do with actuality however, and can only impede and prevent the brain’s perception and reception of it.

Scientific and practical knowledge are the rightful domain of thought, but conditioning and habit are the prison of the known.

To literally go from the sublime to the ridiculous, reality has become so distorted in the United States that meteorologists, suddenly seen as government stooges by millions of Trump followers, are facing death threats because Trumpers bought into the absurd fabrication that the US government is creating and controlling hurricanes.

Since so few can say with confidence what the facts are, much less what the truth is, even incontrovertible facts like hurricanes are now subject to the whims of interpretation.

Things have become so crazy that the same people who believe climate change is a “hoax” now believe that hurricanes are being generated and controlled by the federal government.

This is not just a feature of political and civilisational breakdown, but of the breakdown of the human mind. Completely unanchored from nature, reality has become a hodgepodge of contestable facts. No longer grounded in shared reality, people become easily manipulatable, and fascism has an open field.

As fact-free zones aren’t just confined to America, the “create your own reality” crowd isn’t solely the purview of the right. Many people on the left hold “speaking my truth,” as sacrosanct, as if truth is personal and variable.

(Which isn’t to say that truth is collective and fixed. Rather, perceiving what is, from which insight into the fluid truth of things flows, can only take place in the present moment.)

“Shared reality” is called that for a reason. In the past, different peoples in different cultures had different shared realities. Now however, the entire range of human reality has become distorted, which is both cause and effect of this mad world.

The root of the world’s chaos is not just politics, or social media and information pollution, or capitalism, or the Agricultural, Industrial or Digital Ages. The root of man’s disorder is the cumulative misunderstanding and misuse of the evolutionary gift of symbolic thought. There is no choice in our totally fragmented, globalized world but to radically change.

Clearly, the human mind has created different realities in different cultures over the course of history and pre-history. But those realities, which were synonymous with shared cultural traditions, have broken down and can no longer keep pace with accelerating changes in technology and information in a globalised culture.

There is another basis for creating flexible, non-fixed orders of social reality, one that does not draw from the past but flows from the individual drinking from the infinite well of actuality.

Passive watchfulness and non-directed attention to one’s mind and heart in the mirror of nature allow the spaces between thoughts to grow, and the complete cessation of the movement of the mind-as-thought.

AI be damned. Realising our true potential is not only our birthright as human beings; it has become essential to our survival as an aspiring intelligent species.

© Scoop Media