The Enlightenment Is Dead; What Is True Enlightenment?

Friday, 2 May 2025, 10:55 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Instead of scaring up a couple of ducks as I bike down the dirt path to the creek, I surprise a man standing in the middle of the stream. He is foraging in the hip deep water, but I don’t ask why. We say hello and I sit a little way upstream to watch the sunset.

Though near the horizon, the sun is still shining with brightness and warmth. Swallows are playing in the air and skimming the surface of the water. Quail cavort in the bushes along the stream, and I hear pheasant squawking in the fields.

Life is exploding around one. There is no division, outside or inside, not even as “outside and inside.” At my feet, a mother merganser with her brood of 7 new chicks swims upstream. She spots me and hurries them along. Gazing beyond the fields to the canyon and foothills, I see them as if for the first time.

Passive observation vies with insistent questions for preeminence in the mind, but after a while the questions give way to silence and reverence. Standing after an hour, there is the feeling of something beyond words and all description. The mind is still and empty, and there is non-personal love.

The brain has the capacity to observe without the observer. But just what is the observer? And what part does it play in the division, conflict and fragmentation of the world?

These are crucial questions, not only for awakening the meditative state, and for psychological health and healing, but for ending the fragmentation of nature and division between people.

The observer is not some higher version of our consciousness, but the original psychological separation of thought. It is the engine of man’s separation, giving rise to the separate self and our alienation from and fragmentation of nature.

As the first division of the human mind, the observer is the basic mechanism from which all other divisions originate. Conflict, war and gross economic disparity flow from the division between “me vs. you” and “my country vs. your country.”

Operating functionally, the inherently separative nature of symbolic thought is not a problem; in fact, it’s the cornerstone of the human adaptive pattern.

But carried over to the psychological dimension, “higher thought” inevitably generates division and conflict, alienation and fragmentation. And as long as thought dominates the human brain, there will be war, poverty and ecological destruction.

The misnomer of the Enlightenment was the attempt to constrain and control thought, through reason, and channel it into productive science and technology. Celebrated even in art, the Enlightenment has, in one sense, succeeded beyond the founding philosopher’s imaginations.

However the Enlightenment that began in 1715 was a temporary fix of the inherently separative nature of the human mind. It has run its course, and a vital redefinition of enlightenment is now urgently needed, or darkness will rule for the foreseeable future. The insights of the ancient East are instructive, but they cannot be grafted onto the dead trunk and roots of Western civilization.

To do science, the observer may be indispensable, though as Shrodinger’s cat illustrates, scientific observation has a logical limit. Psychologically, the observer is comprised of the filter of memory and choice from prior experience and conditioning, turning on the illusion of a separate, permanent self.

If one passively observes the movement of thought in the mirror of nature, one sees that at bottom the observer is actually nothing but thought continuously separating itself from itself. A useful trick of thought becomes the existential trap of the mind.

Self-knowing attentiveness reveals that the observer is inextricably part of the entire movement of thought; one only subjectively and mistakenly experiences the observer/self as separate.

Therefore defining “observation in philosophical terms as the process of filtering sensory information through the thought process” is a good definition of the observer, not of observation. It assumes that the observer and observation are the same thing, when in fact they are completely distinct phenomena.

Indeed, true observation only occurs when the observer has been negated. That’s because the separative mechanism within us of the observer is an implacable impediment to direct perception.

The observer is an infinite regress that never sees itself because it is always removing itself from the field of observation. Thought doesn’t see itself separating itself from itself, which is what allows the observer to be continuously experienced as an entity apart. Then what sees through the illusion of the observer?

Passively observing the observer, the whole brain catches it in the act of infinite regress, and there is the transformative insight that the observer is in actuality inseparable from the entire movement of thought. At that moment the separative trick ends, and one’s basic perceptual process changes.

In this action of attention, “I” don’t do anything, since any action of effort or will from the “me” sustains the observer. Gently but persistently questioning the workings of one’s mind while attending to the entire movement of thought ends the primordial habit of psychological separation, at least temporarily. One renews the insight through methodless meditation every day.

The brain is so accustomed to looking through the lens of the observer (having done so for tens of thousands of years) that it falls back into the habit whenever there is inattention. That’s why being mindful -- aware of what one is doing, thinking and feeling in the present -- is so important.

Passive observation negates the observer and ignites the fire of attention. The fire of attention in turn burns away the extraneous material and useless content of memory and emotion. Then there is the experiencing of Silesius’ humorous, koan-like poem:

God, who love and joy

are present everywhere,

Can’t come to visit you

unless you aren’t there.

- Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail