There Is No Such Thing As Collective Wisdom

On the same day the college basketball tournament called “March Madness” ends, the eclipse madness culminates in America. Only people with no relationship to nature flock in the millions to experience four minutes of a celestial event that scared the bejesus out of indigenous people.

“Undeterred by gloomy forecasts of low cloud cover and rain spoiling their view, hordes assembled in the US from Texas to Maine, clutching safety glasses and cameras with solar filters, in readiness for the rare spectacle,” the Guardian reports in its headline article today.

“Hordes” is right. One level, the truth lies just outside the path of total inanity: “Officials say they expect an estimated $1.5bn tourism boost from what will be the country’s biggest travel day of the year.”

However the pull of the short-lived collective craze has “proven costly for many, with surging air fares and exorbitant hotel rates…and long-held bookings canceled and resold to new customers at up to three times the original prices.” The American way.

The city of this perceived mystic lies well away from the penumbra of spiritual penury giving rise to eclipse madness. As one who experiences stillness and awe in nature on nearly a daily basis, there is something ineffably sad about empty people needing to book flights and drive for days to experience a few minutes of wonder.

Meanwhile, it grows more likely by the week that the good and great American people will elect the mad and malevolent Donald Trump. Naturally the national media is not connecting the dots of this three-sided madness.

Instead the narrative is how predicting the path of the eclipse confirms the wonderfulness of science, when it’s actually, at best, about communally experiencing wonder beyond the knowledge of science and technology, and the stultifying known of everyday experience.

The talking heads end their reports by citing the number of people making marriage proposals and having weddings during the eclipse, or how disorienting it was for people, “like they were on a new and unfamiliar drug.”

On the other side of the debased coin that passes for spirituality in America, you would think that evangelical Christians, the core supporters of a doomsayer-in-chief for president again, would see the swath of daytime darkness as the finger of God moving across the continental United States from Texas to Maine.

But for the darkest zone of the American people, who serve the lord of darkness and call him Jesus, they are so lost they’re buying bibles from the anti-Christ for $59.99.

You can hear the panic creeping into the tired voices of the non-Trump commentariat, which have only shopworn narratives to sell as the country careens toward a second Trump term.

If one takes the most generous view, why were all these people spending all the time and trouble to experience a few minutes of a periodic event that supposedly objective reporters called supernatural?

Because so many Americans know nothing but busying themselves with adapting to an utterly meaningless and lifeless materialistic/consumeristic culture, and because they never know a moment when thought-time stops. No wonder they went to extreme lengths for a taste of timelessness.

Nonetheless, we can bring about the phenomenon of ending thought and time every day. Doing so is the wellspring of authentic wellness -- beneath and beyond the fad, not to mention the multi-billion dollar wellness industry.

Healing and renewal flow from stillness and silence of thought and time (which are the same thing), not from the illusion of time standing still as day turns to night during the day.

What we have in the United States is a near total eclipse of the heart. Sentimentality, and silly mass movements and crazes, cannot bring light back into the deeply shadowed soul of America.

The heart, mind and brain are renewed from within, not by any outward phenomenon, however awe-inspiring. If even 1% of the eclipse chasers learn the art of negating the observer, the ‘me’ and thought-time, then the money spent on the zip-line of this national whim will be worth it.

Will that bring enough light into the darkness that threatens to engulf the entire land? Perhaps. But even if it’s too late for the USA, and the totality of darkness that Donald Trump represents is inevitable for America, the rest of the world does not need to follow.

One nation, under Beelzebub’s bozo, is dispensable. What matters now is the whole of the earth and humanity.

Martin LeFevre

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