I sit under the dead sycamore tree until the continuity of thought, as memory and association, word and image, is extinguished in non-directed attention. Thought-based consciousness is as dead as the tree over my head, and it is killing the Earth and humanity.
The magnificent bifurcated sycamore of a decade ago is a leper tree of broken limbs and leafless branches now. The sycamore’s slow death over the last ten years has coincided with the destruction (so-called development) of the habitat where you would encounter long-eared rabbits, pheasant, various hawks, even coyote and rattlesnakes.
Across the creek, a small flat is strewn with garbage left by a homeless encampment. Homelessness is a huge problem in America, and the junk is a reminder of society’s gross inequalities and apathy where the poor are concerned.
It’s a good place to camp, even during the rainy season, though the creek swells to a torrent during heavy rains and inundates the flood plain.
The sycamore had been one of my favorite places to meditate for years, and a few years ago I met a fellow who had built a little encampment. He had been an electrician, and pointed at the monster houses on the ridge miles away and flatly said, “I wired some of those houses.”
We talked a number of times across the stream. He was smart and kept himself clean. I helped him out a bit, asking in return that he clean the place and not leave any junk behind. One day he was gone, and the place was clean as a whistle.
In the last few years there’s been a big increase in people camped along the little creek, leaving enormous piles of junk behind. The city cleans things up after the rains every year, but it’s even worse this year.
A quarter mile behind me sits the ugliest courthouse I’ve ever seen. And for acres in all directions around it, god-awful retro-industrial apartments, houses and offices have been constructed. There’s even a big, reconstructed barn in the middle of the mess for concerts.
I happened to talk with the local developer once in the new development, and asked him if there was any vision for the hodgepodge of offices, restaurants and apartments. Everything seems designed to convey an anti-aesthetic sense, which compounds the sadness of the loss of the habitat. The developer, one of this small city’s two billionaires, spoke nonsensically about community.
Meditation can only occur when one remains with things as they are, within and without, and allows oneself to feel sorrow and thereby transcend it. But in writing this piece, I recall standing after an hour’s meditation under the living sycamore, when the place was wild, luminous with the numinous, as a flock of swallows swirled around me and took turns gliding down to touch the stream.
During the meditation today as the sun went down, there was the insight that when thought is completely quiet, and there is no movement of memory and association, word and image, a benediction comes. It’s a great paradox, but what people call God can only be when thought is completely, attentively still, and cannot come when one is seeking it.
By God I don’t mean a voice from on high, or some fatherly or motherly ‘Supreme Being.’ I mean that which is totally beyond words, the actuality of the sacred that suffuses the Earth and infuses one’s being when the mind is completely silent.
It’s a very strange thing that the evolution of symbolic thought should both give the human brain the capacity to commune with the inviolability and intelligence that imbues the universe, and be a tremendous impediment to it.
Functional thought is not the problem however. Psychological thought, with the self at the center of the detritus of experience that orbits it, is the impediment.
It’s also the source of division, conflict, gross economic disparity, war, and the fragmentation of the Earth and the destruction of its integrity and diversity.
Is there a remedy for psychological thought’s destructiveness? Yes, the stillness, peace and insight that come with self-knowing attention in the mirror of nature.
Though having an inner life is arduous, and brings risks, mindlessly continuing in outer-directness just increases the deadness within.
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