Recent storms have burnished the air, and the canyon, hillsides and volcanic rocks stand out in sharp relief, accented by clumps of white clouds that fill half the sky. The beauty is so overwhelming that it’s hard to string two thoughts together.
To my right, the sheer cliffs about a half-mile away seem to press down upon one. A meter away, the gorge plunges about 75 meters to a rushing stream, and the sound pours over the lip as the water rushes around large rocks below. A panorama of hills and precipices stretches for miles before me, and the world seems very far away.
A strange animal passes by at the same level across the narrow gorge, about fifty meters from where I sit. It is gray, with a long, fluffy tail, a small head and pointy ears. I’ve never seen a creature like it before. It glides more than walks along a line just below the edge of the gorge. It stops and stares at me. It’s a fox!
Usually it takes a while, without having a goal or employing time, for passive observation to completely quiet thought and allow meditation to ignite. But today, from the moment I sit down, the mind yields, and there are spaces between thoughts. The beauty obliterates the ‘me’, and at times I’m unable to move. The Greeks had a name for such a state. They called it “aesthetic stasis” — being moved to immobility by the splendor of the earth.
The sun is low in the western sky behind me. Suddenly one of the cumulus clouds, which make up a good portion of the sky, obscures its warm rays. I watch transfixed as the cloud’s shadow falls over the stream and the sheer rock-face on the other side of the gorge, and then lifts as if a curtain was being slowly raised.
After not seeing another soul for an hour, I look over to see a couple standing about a hundred meters away. They are staring at me for some reason, and as I turn, the fellow waves with a friendly, full wave, like you would to an old friend from a distance.
The woman stands in front of him, and doesn’t see him wave, so when I wave back she waves in response. It strikes me as funny, and them too. They remain for a few more minutes looking down at the gorge, and walk away. Can meditative states be unintentionally conveyed between people?
At the beginning of a hike, as I cross the first of a trio of streamlets that pass through some heavy underbrush, a wild turkey precedes me on the path. The turkey stays a short distance ahead of me as I climb the rise, which affords an unobstructed view back down the canyon. As I stand there, the wild turkey, which is a surprisingly large bird, makes a complete circle around me, at times passing only a couple meters away, before ambling down over a rock.
One of the most important distinctions we can teach children, which most adults lose sight of as they grow older, is the distinction between nature and the world. The world is a man-made reality, the manifestation of the human mind, whereas obviously humans did not make the earth.
Though this is the simplest, first, and most crucial distinction, the relationship between the earth and the world is exceedingly difficult to understand. We project our worldviews onto nature, whether “tooth and claw” or Rousseauian romanticism, and then project our conflicts and confusions onto others.
Scientists say that within the lifetimes of today’s children, humans could drive half of the animals on earth into extinction. The very fact that one species has the power to do so raises the most fundamental questions. Can the human brain, caught for untold millennia in fragmenting consciousness that’s destroying the earth and humanity, leave the stream of man’s dead consciousness and free itself at last?
One definition of sentience is being conscious of consciousness. In that sense, Homo sapiens is probably the only sentient species on this planet.
“Higher thought” gave us sentience in this sense, along with the ability to remove ‘things,’ accumulate knowledge, and manipulate nature.
However, higher thought is being surpassed by the thought machines we’ve made in our image. AI cannot save us from ourselves, and if we don’t ignite insight beyond thought, it may well destroy us.
There is a tremendous urgency for human beings who haven’t deadened their hearts to regularly leave the stream and think together, so children can grow as human beings on an earth and in a world worth living in.
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