At a northern corner of California’s Central Valley, the creek along the edge of town, dry half the year, is running full after winter rains. Sitting on the bank as the sun slides below the leafless tree line, passive awareness quickens attention, and the watcher ends in the watching.
A mallard pair, feeding in the sedges along the opposite bank, slowly makes their way upstream. The brown-feathered female leads, and the multi-colored male follows her, keeping a close eye on the human sitting on the bank a few meters away.
Despite trash in the creek and along the banks, and recently built apartments blocks behind one, thought yields to effortless attention, and a meditative state ensues. Spontaneously, the chattering mind falls silent.
In that state of stillness, one feels, beyond words, an all-encompassing intelligence. It isn’t imagined, since all faculties of thought, including imagination, have ceased.
Meditating in nature doesn’t lead to worshipping nature, but to experiencing the undeniable actuality of beauty and essence.
Time stops as the sun hangs on the horizon like a brilliant orange ball. Sunset is a recapitulation of death every day. Allowing oneself to emotionally experience its actuality, one fearlessly gains a deepening insight into death.
And with direct contact with the ever-present actuality of death going on inside and outside us every moment, the heart is healed and the brain is renewed.
At the end of his book, The First Three Minutes, the Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg wrote, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” As a reviewer noted, “Weinberg paints a picture of our universe as a vast purposeless place in which we can see no evidence of a point for ourselves as human beings.”
Such a view, all too commonly accepted as a fundamental truth these days, contrasts with religious believers, who see “the universe as inherently purposeful, and humanity’s role as central.” Viewing the universe in terms of the personal dimension, they see humans as the goal of creation.
More nuanced religionists, such as Father George Coyne, a Jesuit priest and astronomer, intone, “When I hold the hand of a dying friend, and see the expression of hope and joy — even at the moment of death — in that friend’s eyes, I can see that there is a meaningfulness to existence that goes beyond scientific investigation.”
Though Weinberg paints a picture of a “chilling, cold and pointless universe,” he insists “we human beings give the universe purpose by loving each other, by scientifically discovering things about nature, by creating works of art.”
“Faced with an unloving and impersonal universe,” he implausibly says, “we can create for ourselves little islands of warmth and love and science and art.”
That view is remarkably similar to religious believers, and neither holds up. Both the pointless universe and the human-centered universe are projections of thought and self.
Another scientist, Avi Loeb, the head of the Galileo Project and founding director of Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative,” goes further by conflating the supposed pointlessness of the universe with loss of 65 of his relatives in the Holocaust, as well as the countless soldiers and civilian lives wasted in war.
Then he contradictorily proclaims, “The reason I seek a higher intelligence in outer space is because I do not find it on Earth.”
These worldviews don’t accord with deeper meditative states and the experiencing of immanence. During higher states of consciousness, when non-directed attentiveness totally quiets thought, one directly experiences the wholeness and holiness of life on Earth.
There is no thought without memory, words and images, but when thought is completely silent, there is Mind.
Why is the human brain so dominated by thought, and limited by consciousness based on words, images and memories, which prevent unmediated awareness and experiencing of beauty and immanence?
I don’t know, but the idea that the universe is pointless and purposeless is just the flipside of the idea that it is personal and human-centered.
And the notion that humans “give the universe purpose by our personal love for each other, by scientifically discovering things about nature, and by creating works of art,” does not begin to resolve the existential crisis of human consciousness, which has politically manifested so painfully at home and abroad.
However randomly and rarely, does the universe evolve brains with the capacity to be fully aware of an intelligence that inseparably suffuses the cosmos?
In any case, the evolution of higher thought is both the last threshold for the highest awareness and a tremendous impediment to its realization. That’s our paradox to resolve within ourselves, rather than continuing to strike out at real or perceived enemies.
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