The Mystery of Consciousness

The mystery of consciousness is as old as there have been people conscious that they were conscious. However most people, including philosophers and scientists, don’t know what they mean by consciousness. That confusion is compounded when speculating on whether animals other than humans are conscious.

The term consciousness can refer to anything from sentient creatures like humans, to ‘higher’ mammals such as elephants and orcas, to the awareness that pervades all life and the universe as a whole.

Buddhists ascribe sentience to all animals, and say even lower forms of life are sentient. Scientifically and philosophically however, sentience refers to being conscious that one is a conscious being. Traditionally, it’s referred to as self-awareness — awareness of self, as distinguished from self-knowing.

Given this definition, I’m quite sure that only humans are the only sentient animals on this planet. That doesn’t mean that other animals don’t have consciousness, just that they don’t have awareness of self.

Clearly, to have awareness of self a creature has to have constructed a self, or at minimum possess an image of oneself as a distinct individual.  

The mirror test is perhaps the best indicator of self-awareness in this rudimentary sense. The experiment involves placing a mirror before a captive chimpanzee or other animal in such a way that it becomes accustomed to its reflection. After some days, the experimenter then paints a large red dot on the forehead of the chimp while it’s asleep (a process requiring a mild anesthesia!).

When the chimp awakens and sees its reflection in the mirror, it will pause, touch and study the dot, thus indicating it has, at minimum, a before-image of itself stored in memory that does not conform to the image now being reflected in the mirror.

Not all primates indicate this basic level of self-awareness, but neither do human babies. At some early point in our development however, we form an image of ourselves. Unlike chimps, that image becomes more and more complex, entrenched and detrimental to our development as human beings. We assume it has independent reality, and call it ‘me,’ the self.

We thus get stuck in images of ourselves and others, which prevents direct perception and insight, which are always of the moment. The rutted images eventually stultify the brain.

Would we say that the chimp, because it has rudimentary awareness of itself, has an inner life? Of course not. An inner life pertains to subjective experiencing, the capacity to ask questions about existence, consciousness and transcendence.

All humans have this capacity, though few develop it throughout their lives. To ascribe it to even the smartest animals on earth does not fit the evidence or common sense, which doesn’t make us separate or special.

Therefore it’s seriously silly to say, “Before my kitties arrived in my home, I rarely had occasion to consider the inner lives of nonhumans.” Such a statement fills a feeling person with sorrow, since the writer, like so many people, apparently has no inner life of his own.

“Does my cat even understand that she is — does she, in the way René Descartes conceived it, possess knowledge of a self?”

No, our cats or dogs do not “possess knowledge of a self,” because they neither are possessed by a self nor do they possess knowledge about the self. That isn’t to say animals are ‘automata,’ as Descartes conceived them, “essentially mindless machines.”

In short, because even the smartest animals, such as orcas, lack a subjective experience of a conscious self, or the subjective experiencing of life (which aren’t the same thing), it does not make them devoid of consciousness.

On the other hand, it’s the height of anthropomorphizing, as well as reductio ad absurdum, to maintain there is “reason to suspect animals possess consciousness because we are animals and we possess consciousness.”

No matter what putative philosophers of consciousness say, consciousness is not just a “felt quality.” Cats, dogs and many other animals have limbic systems much like ours, but that certainly doesn’t mean that they feel and suffer as we humans do, much less “feel what it’s like to see the sun set or smell the rain on a spring morning.”

The misguided intention in recent decades is to erase the quantum distinction between humans and other animals. Doing so has taken us further from self-understanding, and done nothing to diminish the “great moral catastrophe of food production facilities all over the world routinely treating nonhuman animals as Descartes saw them, as machines without feeling or experience.”

Rather than speculate about the inner lives of cats or dogs, we should be tending to our own inner lives. The tremendous number of  ‘zombies’ in America and other countries ready to kill for their dear leader attests to an inner deadness that’s all too common in this culture. The subsequent need, in Republicans and Democrats alike, drives people into extreme sports, drugs or whatever just to ‘feel alive.’

People who speculate on the inner lives of animals, or worry about the future ethical treatment of robots that will purportedly have consciousness, don’t understand their own minds and the human crisis.

We should be asking: How are we humans different from other animals, which allows us to exercise such destructive power over them?

Consciousness as we know it is dream, based on separation and symbol, from which it is difficult to awaken, requiring diligent awareness and questioning.

Awakening to the dream of thought-based consciousness is analogous to awakening from sleep as one is dreaming. One believes, as one is dreaming, that the dream is reality. At the moment of awakening, one realizes the dream wasn’t real.

When one is a state of heightened awareness, there is a spontaneous quieting of thought and silence of mind. That state, while fully awake, produces the same feeling about ‘normal’ consciousness, that waking up from a dream produces about sleeping consciousness. In both cases, one was asleep, and for a moment at least, one awakens.

The question I’m grappling with is this: Given the silent state of awareness in which psychological thought is not operating is true consciousness, why does the mind/brain revert to the dream state of thought? Is it that the brain has lived in a simulacrum of consciousness, based on symbols and memories, for so long that the flame of attention goes out even after the most intense meditations?

That isn’t just an individual contemplative and philosophical preoccupation. If we humans cannot make the transition to true consciousness, the crisis of consciousness now shared by everyone in the world will only intensify and endarken everyone’s mind and heart, at least for the foreseeable future.

Martin LeFevre

The post The Mystery of Consciousness first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

Talking About God Again

The smoky haze was so bad today you couldn’t see the foothills just beyond town. There was only a faint smell of smoke from the wildfires here in northern California however, and the air quality, surprisingly, wasn’t bad. Even so, there’s a seeping sorrow in the murky skies that goes beyond physical unpleasantness.

Just as one became present beside the stream in the parkland, a bright yellow bird landed on a nearby branch. It only stayed for a couple seconds before flying off, but it was enough to open the gates to meditation. The mind grew as still as the leaves, which didn’t so much as flutter a millimeter in the penetrating stillness.

Though in the middle of town, it was very quiet. The quiet brought stillness, and the stillness ushered in the silence that’s always there, beyond the noise of man the sounds of nature.

There’s a benediction beyond words and concepts, beliefs and religions. There was only a spontaneous reverence, bottomless mystery, and an all-encompassing love that thought, the mind of man, can never know. 

How easy it is to lose sight of the truth, especially during these dark, dismal days, that nature is not of man’s world, but is perpetually unknowable and mysterious, no matter how much knowledge humans accumulate and how much man fouls the earth.

The illusion of selfhood falls away with passive awareness of the movement of life: the gently flowing stream reflecting the late afternoon light off its flat stretches; the curious birds that fly up to share a moment of creaturehood; even the motionless leaves, dust-coated after months without rain.

Why, if the self is an illusion, is there such a strong assumption and feeling that ‘I’ am in control of ‘my’ actions?

As heretical as it is to our individualistic, post-modern ears, there’s a direct relationship between the strength of the assumption of selfhood and the fragmentation and folly, disorder and darkness of society.

Secondly, if God, in any sense of the word, is actually primary, why is the world so hellish?

Christians with their Bible and beliefs about Jesus are no closer to resolving these riddles than pre-agricultural peoples with their myths and spirits.

Sunday priests and preachers say, “I stand up in front of everyone and proclaim the presence of an invisible God.” In truth, at best they proclaim the existence of an invisible God, which is rarely present in their churches.

God supposedly flows through Roman Catholic and spinoff Protestant priests. That’s one of the originating Big Lies of Christianity. As everyone should know by now, priesthood confers no holiness.

There have been very few human beings who could convincingly make a claim that the spirit of God flowed through them. Jesus was one to my mind. Buddha was another (though God by a different name). But God automatically incarnating through a line of priests, Catholic or Protestant? That’s absurd, even blasphemous.

It’s half-true and misleading to say we are “habituated by my daily life and our broader culture to focus on the ‘horizontal’ or immanent, aspects of life — those things we can observe and measure without reference to God, mystery or transcendence.”

There are two, quite antithetical meanings to the word ‘immanent.’ The first definition, and the way I use the word, means, “indwelling, inherent, as in, ‘beauty is not something imposed but something immanent.’”  

God in this sense is not an entity apart, a Creator, but that unnamable essence that is present every moment in every magnificent cumulus or lowly blade of grass. God is not just potentially within us, but actually within everything.

In a fully conscious way, God is latently present in every person, but thought and self, belief or unbelief, block communion.

Priests use the word ‘immanent’ as opposed to transcendent, in keeping with its second definition: “being within the limits of possible experience or knowledge — compare transcendent.”

In truth, immanence and transcendence are synonymous, not opposed. All human beings have the capacity for the mystical experiencing of God. And yes, the experiencing of what we call God is always mystical, in the sense of irreducible mystery, beyond knowledge and previous experience. 

Therefore to a person of mystical experiencing, it seems childish to proclaim, “Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” Besides the needless reminder of God’s blessedness, the Christian Trinitarian conundrum is unnecessary and nonsensical.

It’s deeply disingenuous to say, “let’s discuss our deepest questions, longings and loves and the rituals and habits that form who we are and the way we walk through the world,” while actually holding up “the Bible that remains the same.”

The Bible, or any other scripture, however inspired, are, like churches themselves, composed and constructed by the human mind. And in this world and age at least, belief systems and dogmas are inimical to human freedom, as well as communion with the numinous.

Martin LeFevre

The post Talking About God Again first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

Worse Than Vietnam

Incompetence. Lies. Contradictions. Callous disregard for life. And a defiant refusal to admit mistakes. No, that isn’t a description of President Trump’s modus operandi, but President Biden’s handling of America’s exit from Afghanistan.

“I don’t need an exit strategy,” Trump once said. President Biden obviously didn’t think he needed one from Afghanistan either. Setting his jaw, Joe was initially at sea as the tragedy of his and America’s making ended in chaos. 

Biden seems to have found his political sea legs in the last couple days, but the images he’s counting on fading as fast as yesterday’s headlines persist. Even conservative commentators draw a parallel between the Falling Man and the boy falling from the wheel well of the military C-17.

When his moment of truth came, Mr. Empathy blamed the Afghans for not continuing to fight our war after we ignominiously left 20 years later. As tens of thousands of Afghans that did our and our bidding waited desperately for cargo planes to carry them to safety from the Taliban, the last vestiges of America’s reputation lay in tatters on the tarmac.

Year after year we heard the refrain, “Afghan girls and women are being educated, and given career paths that were never open to them before.” The moment the US military snuck out of Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night, that fig leaf dissolved into its constituent meaninglessness, and the clock was instantly turned back 20 years on Afghan women and girls.

The chaotic reversion to the monstrous medievals that America left Afghan females to makes a mockery of Biden’s claim that America is back and ready to lead the world.

Biden continues in his grating certainty that he did the right thing in precipitously pulling out, giving the false binary choice between America’s sudden disappearing act or fighting a full-scale and endless war. But he’s just proving that America never really cared about the Afghan people. All that mattered in the end was that no more of “our soldiers” die in the war we started.

For 20 years I’ve waited to read these words from an American ‘hero’ that returned maimed in body and/or mind from the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

“Without those of us who volunteered, there’d be nobody to fight these wars. I long to appear before the young man I was, slap his face and tell him to take a different course. ‘You’re going to die over there,’ I want to say. ‘Not in body, but in spirit.”’

Many nails were driven into the coffin of the American spirit in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it had perished over a decade earlier, after the straw that broke the Spirit’s back with the first Gulf War. Yet that’s still seen as ‘the good Gulf War.’

The epitaph, “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires” dates from a time when men carried shields and swords into battle. And in the so-called modern age it certainly proved true for both the British and Russian empires, as it’s now proving true for the American Empire.

(Photo by Shakib RAHMANI / AFP) (Photo by SHAKIB RAHMANI/AFP via Getty Images)

The question is, what now? Not for America, but for humankind? Proof that civilization doesn’t progress lies in the fact that we’re still talking about and having to deal with the consequences of empires in an age when they have become utterly irrelevant and destructive to the human prospect.

The US-made international order is past its use-by date. Moreover, the cornerstone of the present world (dis)order – the separate sovereignties of 200 nation-states – is completely untenable, irredeemably contrary to humankind meeting the global challenges like the Covid pandemic and the climate crisis.

Nationalism is merely tribalism scaled up. And in this interdependent world, nationalism is fragmenting into petty, party tribalism, ushering in a resurgence in authoritarianism all over the world. We need look no further for evidence than the fact that a significant portion of the American citizenry is openly calling and preparing for another civil war.

Nature is forcing the issue of the limits of man’s stupidity. This is the true binary now: continue to fragment the earth and ourselves all to hell, or begin from the emotionally held premise of the wholeness of humanity, despite, indeed b because of how fractured as man is.

That, on the political level, is the meaning and urgency of psychological revolution.

Martin LeFevre

 Link: “I Was a Marine in Afghanistan. We Sacrificed Lives For a Lie”:

The post Worse Than Vietnam first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

Malta She-Devil

My sister Sharon and her ex-first husband Mike lived on Santorini Island for 5 years.  Mike was a certified scuba diver for an archaeology team.  This later inspired my sister Sharon to become a certified scuba diver when she eventually moved to Florida.  While living on Santorini Island, an island that some theorize could be part of Atlantis, Sharon and Mike had the opportunity to visit Athens, Greece; Sicily; Rome, Italy and the mysterious island of Malta.  Sharon describes Santorini Island as paradise on Earth.

MALTA SHE-DEVIL

Thomas Atkinson from Devon, England says that he visited Malta in 1982 with his wife.  While exploring some of the underground dwellings, his wife was pushed by an invisible force and scratched across her chest.  Thomas and his wife saw a hideous ghostly image of a woman, who was hissing at them.  As they watched this ghost, this demon, it simply faded away into nothingness.  Guillaume Laurent of Marseille, France was visiting Malta in 2002.  While he and his buddy Marcus was exploring the underground complexes, they came upon a woman standing alone, facing a wall.  The woman sounded like she was crying.  Guillaume went up to the woman  to see if anything was wrong.  The woman turned around quickly and placed a sword underneath Guillaume’s throat.  The woman then laughed and vanished before their eyes.  Guillaume asked a few locals about this strange demon creature and one local called the entity the Malta She-Devil.  Guillaume is positive that the Malta She-Devil is some sort of demon that roams the underground of Malta.  Special Note: HPI Forensic Artist William Carlisle drew the above shown drawing of the Malta She-Devil.  

MALTA’S ANCIENT ALIEN THEORY:

The mysterious Mediterranean island of Malta lies south of Sicily and is home to megalithic structures built by a mysterious prehistoric society. Some ancient astronaut theorists believe that an intellectually advanced race of extraterrestrials created these magnificent underground structures and the structures seen above ground.  According to various archaeologists and scientists, these massive blocks even pre-date the Great Pyramid of Giza. Just who were the people that built these sophisticated structures? Local folklore describes Malta as being the home of giants and the legendary one-eyed creature known as Cyclops.  These massive stone structures are credited to the Nephilim, the fallen ones.  Looking at these structures, one can only conclude that only an advanced race of people could have made these structures.  Even now in modern times, we would have an incredible hard time duplicating the complexity of these structures.  Ancient Astronaut theorist Giorgio Tsoukalos when investigating Malta, looked at these giant stone structures, unexplained rock carvings and mysterious elongated skulls.  Giorgio sees only one direction for these incredible finds.  There has to be an extraterrestrial connection.  All of the legends of Malta, explain that an advanced race of giants created all of these structures.  I tend to believe in Malta’s legends.  There is always a foundation of truth to all legends and myths.   There just can’t be any other explanation for how these megalithic structures were built.  My sister Sharon would tell you that these structures would take your breath away. 

INFORMATION FROM THE NET:

“Archaeological evidence suggests that around 4,000 BCE, the people of Malta and Gozo began building with the purpose of ritualizing life and death. The Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, one of the first and most famous of such complexes, is an underground network of alcoves and corridors carved into soft Globigerina limestone just three miles from what is now the capital city of Valletta. The builders expanded existing caves and over the centuries excavated deeper, creating a temple, cemetery and funeral hall that would be used throughout the Żebbuġ, Ġgantija and Tarxien periods. Over the next 1,500 years, known as the Temple Period, above-ground megalith structures cropped up throughout the archipelago, many with features that mirror their subterranean counterparts.

Whatever remained of the above-ground megalithic enclosure that once marked the Hypogeum’s entrance was destroyed by industrialization during the late 1800s. Now, visitors enter through a modernized lobby, then descend a railed walkway and move chronologically through two of the site’s three tiers, glimpsing along the way evidence of the structure’s dual role as worship and burial place.”
Below is a report I received by email from Matteo Palmier.  Matteo does not tell us about a story about The Nephilim or a story about a she-devil.  He tells us a ghost story and this ghost named the Blue Dolphin House Specter still haunts the island of Malta today.  Below is Matteo’s story…..

MATTEO PALMIER IN HIS OWN WORDS SAYS:

The Blue Dolphin House: Malta Ghost Story
“It was during the time of the British rule in Malta when two drunken sailors were walking along the streets of Valetta, when upon reaching City Gate, they were accosted by a beautiful woman wearing the traditional Maltese costume, the ghonnella. She asked them if they could accompany her home. Even though they didn’t feel like walking much, they partially consented because they felt fascinated by the beautiful lady. They followed her and when they reached the house in St Ursola Street, she asked them if they could help her inside as she had left the key inside.

The soldiers were bewildered by such a request but nonetheless decided to help out the mysterious lady. After some time one of the naval men managed to clamber inside where he found the key. When he managed to open the door for the lady and his friend, the lady took off her ghonnella to reveal beautiful black locks. When she started to light the house, the splendor and richness of the house left them gaping. Now that they were in the company of a beautiful lady and in a magnificent setting, they felt more relaxed. However, as time drew nigh, they felt more weary and left the house. One of the sailors realized he had left a very expensive silver cigarette case inside the house and they decided they would call again on the morrow to get it. The next day they were shocked to find the same house in a very dilapidated state. They were told by one of the neighbors that the house was said to be haunted and that sometimes they could see the house lit from outside.

This house is still abandoned in St. Ursula Street In Valletta, Malta and when you pass at night you feel the chill, coldness and even if you are lucky you can also see the light, since it is still haunted and if you have the guts you can take a peek inside one of the windows still present!

You have the picture of the house attached …… this is real and in Malta many people know this story.”

Paul Dale Roberts, HPI’s Esoteric Detective
Halo Paranormal Investigations
www.cryptic916.com/
Sacramento Paranormal Help
www.facebook.com/HaloParanormalInvestigations/

The post Malta She-Devil first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

Scams Run Out of Costa Rica Prisons

Despite seizures of phones found in prisons and even the blockage of cell signals, scams are still being run out of prisons in Costa Rica. This is done in an organized way that crosses borders. 

It’s been 10 months since cell blocking started as a way to combat the scams but inmates found ways to circumvent each restriction that was put into place.

The Fraud Section of the Judicial Police traced calls and discovered some of the methods used. Satellite phones, wi-fi, and lines from countries like Panama and Nicaragua were used. There are collaborators outside the prisons too.

Other Central American countries notified Costa Rican authorities of scams committed in their nations by people with Costa Rican accents.

7,000 attempts by inmates to connect to a cell signal were blocked so far. Additionally, 803 phones have been confiscated.

The Ministry of Justice is open to collaborating with the Judicial Police to take further steps to stop these crimes run out of Costa Rican prisons by those deprived of liberty. 

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Buried Documents in Costa Rica

The Judicial Investigation Organization has unearthed documents purposely buried in Grecia. The documents, buried in the municipal cemetery of Grecias, may be related to the Cochinilla Case.

The set of documents found were covered by folders and affected by humidity. Still, the OIJ says there is clear evidence found. The documents were found at a site where the municipality usually disposes of waste from street cleaning. 

The mayor said that officials of the road technical unit ordered the burial of the documents and went on to explain “There has never been a directive from the Mayor’s Office to do such a barbarity.” He says he was alarmed to hear that officials of the road technical unit were behind the crazy order. 

Still, the documents were found because of a complaint made by the technical road unit, not about them. Their version states that the directive came from the Municipality. They were able to show exactly where they buried the documents. One added that they are bills, including for some works by Meco.

The mayor says the events would have happened in a previous administration and he will be completely open and make sure that “the people who made mistakes come out to the public eye.”

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Reimagining California’s Purpose

The global pandemic and the intensifying ecological crisis have been exposed and shattered beyond restoration rotten norms and untenable normality. Yet America’s mainstream columnists aren’t writing about urgent global challenges, but sticking to literally provincial perspectives.

They ask questions like, “What is California for when summertime, the season in which the Golden State once found its fullest luster, turns from heaven into hell?”

Such a question adheres, to the point of meaninglessness, to two of the unstated commandments for MSM columnists: thou shall remain superficial, and not address fundamental issues; and thou shall write in terms of particularities of place, and not ask the big questions. There are exceptions of course, but as the saying goes, the exception proves the rule.

My intent in this column, as a longtime Californian, is to take up the question of California’s purpose from a deeper perspective.

The reader may ask, isn’t talking about the “purpose of California” inherently silly? Hasn’t California, from its formative years of Gold Rush hysteria, always symbolized the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?

It’s true that the westward expansion of America found its fullest expression, and both finest and foulest flower, in California. In my neck of the smoldering, charred woods, the last ‘wild’ Indian, Ishi, wandered into the town of Oroville about a century ago after his small tribe had been driven and slaughtered down to just him.

On the other hand, John Muir was the spiritual wellspring and political founder not just of the Sierra Club, but of the environmental movement itself. Reading his luminous writings when I came to California as a young man, and hiking the Sierras when Muir would still have recognized them, I felt to my marrow what Muir meant when he wrote of “the Range of Light.”   

And after a memorable high-country backpacking trip starting at Hetch Hetchy, the inundated valley adjacent to Yosemite Valley that Muir said surpassed even Yosemite’s beauty, I also understood what killed him. 

Though Hetch Hetchy was within the boundaries of the first national park, it was dammed in the early part of the 20^th century to provide water for faraway San Francisco. From then on, truncated waterfalls filled a huge reservoir, marring Hetch Hetchy’s magnificent cliffs with a bathtub ring only miles away from where millions of people gawk at Bridal Veil’s majesty.

Ishi, representing literally the last remaining member of California’s 300 distinct tribes, represents one part of California’s history. And the mounds of hydraulic waste around the streams and rivers of Oroville and a hundred other Gold Mining towns (as industrialized strip-mining replaced the miner’s pan) are remnants of California’s original purpose.

John Muir’s religious feeling about California’s beauty represents another side, indeed another dimension, which gave rise to a national and global environmental movement.  

Now that there can be no doubt which side is winning the battle for the earth, nationally and globally, it’s fitting to ask here at the terminus of the American dream: Is there a newfound purpose for California?

The dead-enders who still follow “the former guy” believe California’s problem is not enough of man, irrationally believing that the climate crisis is not the cause of the wildfires, but lack of “forest management.” They prove that Neanderthals are still among us. But reasonable people realize that the Europeanization of California’s (or for that matter Oregon and Washington’s) forests is completely unworkable. 

So can California, which prides itself as the world’s fifth largest economy if it was its own nation (as much of the rest of America often views it), stand for something larger?  

Kiwis love to say, “New Zealand punches above its weight.” But California punches way below its weight. Why is that so?

I’m not advocating for secession, which on the psychological level has already occurred internally in America anyway. I’m advocating for leadership that encompasses all dimensions of human experience, beginning inwardly with a religious feeling for the sanctity of wilderness and a viable, diverse Earth; and expressed outwardly in a new ‘Manifest Destiny’ of political vision that encompasses the world in an age when national, much less provincial perspectives have become ridiculous.

California is much more than its weather, and our thinking has to go beyond that superficiality, despite and because of how manifestly dire the weather has become. Can California lead the way in redefining humankind’s relationship to nature, and each other?

Californians, finding themselves at the epicenter of the human ecological and identity crisis, know that isn’t a rhetorical question, but the first one that must be honestly asked and held.

Martin LeFevre

lefevremartin at gmail.com

The post Reimagining California’s Purpose first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

New Shop in Juan Santamaria Airport in Costa Rica

Those passing through the Juan Santamaría Airport will notice a new shop called Blue Zones Nicoya. The company sells products created by artisans, SMEs, and farmers from Nicoya.

Travelers can purchase any of 1,500 products from the brand or from Guanacaste. Products include coffee, chocolate, honey, condiments, handicrafts, jewelry, textiles, personal care items, pet accessories, and much more. Also available are teas made from little known herbs that are widely used in Guanacaste as well as honeys that are mixed with fruit. 

Some of the honeys available come from Reserva Conchal and Palo Verde. They recently won gold and silver in the Quality Honey Awards in London. 

The store is already a success in the Daniel Oduber Airport. It directly generates 15 jobs and supports over 60 Costa Rican small and medium enterprises. Tourists seem to like having this chance to purchase something that is more than just a souvenir but also makes social sense, helping Costa Ricans make a living in these hard times. 

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Child COVID Deaths in Costa Rica

On August 3 and 4, Costa Rica lost a three-month-old baby and an almost 4-year-old boy to covid related causes. Both had predisposing diseases but doctors confirm the deaths were related to covid.

The baby had been infected with covid but passed the quarantine period. His death is considered associated with covid, while the child’s passing was deemed directly attributable to covid. 

The pandemic has claimed the lives of eight minors in Costa Rica. Five of these deaths occurred during the second year of the pandemic. In June, the hospital warned us that an increase in cases is being experienced. Among the causes is a greater relaxation of hand washing and social distancing practices.

The hospital reports a secondary disease that could cause more impact on the hospital than covid. It’s called the Children’s Multisystemic Inflammatory Syndrome by Covid. It causes inflammation in various parts and affects multiple systems at once, for example, the cardiovascular, circulatory, gastrointestinal, and respiratory systems.

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The Sad Prevalence of ‘Force Quit’

The skies are white and hazy from the huge wildfire still burning out of control in the mountains just east of here. But surprisingly, there is no smell of smoke. Breezes off the Pacific are blowing the ash-filled clouds from the incineration of nearly half a million acres to the east. Denver has some of the worst air quality in the world.

Living in the eye of the hurricane of California’s drought and wildfires, it’s hard not to feel that the apocalypse is upon us.

Two mountain towns, the first the small, Gold Rush town of Greenville, have burned to the ground, leaving only a few homes and a commercial structure or two standing. Though no one was killed in Greenville, emotionally charged memories of the fire that leveled the much larger nearby town of Paradise a few years ago, killing 85, are flooding back for everyone in the region.

I grew up on the Great Lakes, and though I still love California when it’s not the fire season (which is starting earlier and getting worse every year), I sometimes wonder what I’m doing here. My best memories are not of body surfing on Pacific swells, as exciting as that is, but of languid swims in Lake Michigan at the foot of Sleeping Bear Dunes.

The effects of the ecological crisis on our psyches and spirits, even if one resides where natural disasters haven’t yet occurred, are impossible to measure. Even harder to sort out is how much of what we’re feeling is personal stuff being forced up, or overwhelming cultural darkness that materialism, consumerism and hedonism can no longer push away, or just a reaction to the planet’s primal scream at the hands of man.

If Providence exists, it’s getting harder to discern. Perhaps this is where faith beyond beliefs and strength beyond will is tested. But I understand, as I haven’t before why so many people have given up on humanity and think only of ‘me and mine.’ Even so, I would rather die than quit on life and humanity.

A telling, disturbing phrase from an intelligent woman during a phone conversation struck me today. Speaking of her own and many others’ experiences as a therapist at this time of intense human crisis, she said too often things get to a point of “force quit.”

She spoke of how “most people won’t stop, slow down,” and so life, in the form of trauma of one kind or another, forces them to. What is it about this culture, and human nature, that makes that a sad fact?

Why do we prefer “predictable patterns of chaos” than to “sit with the self,” and in so doing, bring insight and some measure of peace within?

Given that man is running out of room for error in plundering the planet, I asked, is the “phenomenon of force quit” happening to humankind as a whole? After all, it has never been more apparent that the havoc humans are wreaking on the earth we are also wreaking on our own psyches and souls.

One way or another, our relationship to the earth is reflected back to us, individually and collectively. When we re-orient ourselves toward the wholeness of nature, we begin to feel whole within ourselves.

Arriving at my meditation spot beside the stream, I find it clean and quiet. Though I’ve only had five hours sleep, passive awareness, flowing from simply listening to the sounds and watching the play of birds and butterflies, light and shadow, gathers intense attention.

The morning brightens at the same moment the mind lets go and lightens. As if for the first time, I see the emerald light reflecting off the gently rippling water from the dense foliage at streamside, and the blue sky poking through the haze. Life is always new; only humans make it old.

Thought is time, and time is thought. When the mind-as-thought effortlessly yields to unwilled attention in the mirror of nature, the mind falls deeply still, and psychological time ends.

Then there is a completely different quality to the mind, indeed, a different consciousness altogether. There is love that does not come from a personal source, or the individual or collective mind.

That inexplicable love is the wellspring of creation, indivisible from life and death.

Martin LeFevre

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