Will the human race go the American way?
From Martin LeFevre in California
At nearly 8000 feet in Lassen National
Park, surrounded by volcanic cliffs on three sides, the small lake is a dark,
mirror-like jewel, unspoiled by human hands. As a faint breeze comes up,
brushing its grassy edges, little birds dart to and fro, and a solitary hawk
circles twice overhead.
Rocky outcroppings looming around the mountain lake rise 500-1000 feet above the
little meadow. There is an unapproachable stillness here. It is so quiet you can
hear the water bubbling up on the edge of the lake from gases emanating far
below the surface. A rich, golden brown carpet of reed-like grasses extends well
beyond the lake.
A mile further on, a larger lake fills most of a meadow. There is a tremendous
feeling of space and peace. One usually has to travel much further to find such
pristine beauty in other parts of the High Sierra. Leaving, I spot dried bear
scat, almost the size of beer cans, full of the remnants of red berries.
What is the value of wilderness? Certainly wild places are not just playgrounds
for the rich. They are untainted areas where ordinary people can preserve,
renew, and enrich the spirit in a global culture hell-bent on exploitation and
destruction. Man is overrunning the Earth, so wilderness must be preserved, or
in fifty years the only wild places left will be at the poles.
In America and much of the West, an unarticulated misanthropy has taken hold.
Many people have given up on humanity, not realizing that since they are
humanity, they are giving up on themselves. The human ability to separate seems
to know no limits. We ceaselessly separate ourselves not only from nature, but
also from ourselves.
But don't get me wrong; I think a little misanthropy demonstrates a healthy
respect for reality. The path to loving humanity is forged by crawling through
dark tunnels of disgust at the history of Homo sap.
The divisiveness and fragmentation that are tearing this planet and the human
spirit asunder are the result of the human mind. That is, our vaunted cognitive
abilities. Symbolic thought and its productions are the self-projected gods
humans actually worship. Selfishness and slaughter, in countless forms, seem to
have always been the primary motivations of our species.
I can't help wondering where it will all end. Will all peoples, and so the human
race, go the way of the American people, and become inwardly dead, regressing to
the most self-centered and superficial pursuits? Or are we witnessing the
darkest hours before the dawn of a new human being, with a silent minority
bringing about a transmutation in consciousness?
Life is demanding that each person who would retain their heart and soul attend,
understand, and thereby quiet the beastly mind. The word normally given to this
process is meditation, but the word doesn't matter. Being self-knowing, and
knowing how to observe the mind, is what matters.
Meditation requires communion with nature, but it does not demand wilderness.
The true meaning and value of wilderness is that there are places left alone,
out of recognition that nature and God are infinitely greater than the human
mind.
By having a relationship to nature, even through a patch of sky or a solitary
tree, each of us can touch silence where we live. Sadly, however, the vast
majority of people mindlessly fill their time with work, entertainment, and
recreation.
The impetus for awakening the silence and insight of meditation is the universal
religious impulse for realizing what is completely beyond the greedy, noisy,
ceaselessly active human mind. That is what will save the individual, and
humanity, from the rapacious effects of the present globalizing culture.
martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net
The author welcomes comments.
