To endure and flower as human beings we must learn how to dig our own spiritual wells

As a hot wind blows out of the northwest, a pheasant bobs warily through the tall grass across the dry creek. The skies are clearer than they have been in weeks and the sun floods the land with a pale, golden light as it slides quickly toward the horizon.

The day is over, and a thin band of orange glows along the edge of the world. The outline of the foothills becomes darker as dusk deepens. It is a consummate hour for meditation.

For the first half-hour, the wind blows steadily, whipping the nearby sycamore trees. But suddenly it ceases, and the hush of evening comes over the land.
At the precise juncture between dusk and night, a snub-faced owl that makes its hidden home in a tree about 100 meters away leaves its perch.

With great slow beats of its wings, it arcs away, a few meters from where I sit. Its noiseless flight is like a bow stretching taut against the sky.
Bicycling back, questions resurface regarding how to inwardly survive in the juggernaut of this global culture of death.

When a particular culture is more or less intact, people derive spiritual and psychological sustenance from their traditions, rituals, and relationships with members of their own kind. "Kith and kin" is an old expression that refers to the mosaic of family and community that used to comprise the only world most people knew.

In the West, that richness of culture (both good and bad) is a fading memory. And in America, there is a bottomless emptiness of being, which people desperately try to fill with every form of escape (especially a pious patriotism these days).

Religion was not merely a facet of people's lives in traditional cultures; it was the warp and woof of their existence. People lived within a context, of which their religion was an integral part.

Not that I am romanticizing traditional religion and culture, since ignorance, barbarity, and ethnocentrism have always been the order of the day. Even so, what will take the place of the old form of culture?

It has become fashionable to speak of diversity, plurality, and multi-culturalism. But to my mind these are almost meaningless words, referring to things that are either already lost (such as diversity); or ideals meant cover up conflict (plurality and multi-culturalism).

So what is the person who wants to remain inwardly alive to do?
Some believe that art can sustain them. But art is the expression of a living people and culture, or it is merely another commodity.

Some believe that the answer is adhering to "God and country." But that is merely reactionary, and only hastens the moral and social decline in a given society, while generating conflict with other peoples.

Some believe there is just the ego, and we all have to market our own separate, superficial selves. But self-centered activity is the root and branch of the human crisis.

Clearly, as traditional cultures are assimilated into the dark globalizing culture, to endure and flower as human beings we must learn how to dig our own spiritual wells. Clearing away the rotting debris of inherited culture and reaching, through negation in attention, the infinite wellspring of life, is the daily spadework of meditation.

In such a "culture" that presently exists in America and is spreading around the world, I don't believe anyone can inwardly survive without learning the art of meditation. But when enough people in the world do learn how to truly meditate, a completely different kind of culture will be born.

Martin LeFevre

mglefevre@earthlink.net

The author welcomes comments.

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