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Asking
the Big Questions
From Martin LeFevre in California
The question of where man went wrong has vexed philosophers for
millennia. It was my obsession for the first 15 years of my adult life.
I came of age during the NASA moon program. Indeed, my first non-family
memories are of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Mercury Program.
America’s heroes now are soldiers who kill and are killed in undeclared,
‘asymmetrical’ wars, but back then, Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and the
early astronauts were real boyhood heroes. They risked their lives by
being blasted into space atop unreliable rockets to catch up to the
Russians, who had already orbited Yuri Gagarin.
My teenage friends and I developed a passion for science fiction, and as
we followed the race to the moon, we began asking larger questions about
man’s place in the universe. We went from the scintillating tales of Ray
Bradbury’s Martians to the cerebral meditations of Arthur Clarke and
Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
In high school, I also began to question and investigate the Catholicism
with which I had been inculcated (Mass in Latin every day before school,
plus Sundays, n of course!). Finding out what a corrupt crock the Church
was, I came down one Sunday at 17, when it was still a mortal sin to
miss Mass that day, and announced to my stunned parents that I wasn’t
going to Mass that Sunday or ever again.
Some months after that, I had my first so-called mystical experience,
which confirmed that spirituality had little or nothing to do with
religion. I had been asking for weeks: What is this observer that always
seems to be separate from what it observes within oneself? Watching a
robin in the backyard one day, there was an explosion of insight, and I
saw that thought is continually separating itself from itself, and that
separation is the very essence of thought.
In that moment, all division dropped away, and the bird, in all its
beauty and interconnectedness, was seen and felt. I realized I had never
actually seen anything before, but that all one’s perceptions had been
filtered through the distorting prism of conditioning.
After that I began to ask: Given that the universe, and all life, are
part of a seamless whole and dynamic order, and that humans evolved
along with all other life on this planet, how did humans become such a
factor of destruction and disorder?
The environmental movement was just beginning, and concerns about
pollution and the extinction of animals were starting to take political
form. Global warming hadn’t yet even showed up on the radar. But one
could see where things were headed, if you cared to look.
I read everything I could in Western and Eastern philosophy on what used
to be called ‘the riddle of man,’ but nothing satisfied. My question
became a quest.
Finally, after 15 years of persistent inquiry, there were a few new
insights. Having worked at various jobs and finally accruing enough
credits to get a college degree, I naively approached the deans of
various philosophy departments on the West Coast, including Stanford,
Berkeley, and Davis.
I had the now laughable idea that academia actually meant what it said
about a doctorate being original work. Politely, one dean told me I’d
have to “jump through the hoops,” while another said that “there is
nowhere in the world” I could place my insights into an academic
context.
So I wrote to David Bohm, the physicist blackballed during the Manhattan
Project, whom Einstein had called his “intellectual son.” I then
attended a weekend of intensive dialogues in a group with him in
southern California, during which we inquired into many things
concerning the human condition.
To my surprise he approached me after the dialogues were over and said
he had received the letter laying out my new ‘theory of human nature.’
We talked about it a bit, and I bluntly asked him, “do you think I may
have done it, finally resolved the riddle?”
“Yes, I think you may have,” he said. With the academic rejections still
fresh in mind, I then asked, “What do I do with it?”
“Just don’t make another philosophical system out of it,” is all he
said. I saw what he meant. That conversation ended my academic
ambitions. But the insights stand.
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