Philosophers Don’t Specialize

Feeling rather low after staying up past midnight watching the news, I stepped into the backyard to look at the stars before going to bed. There was a stupendously clear sky to the east, the clearest night sky in months given the wildfires still burning in northern California. The sight stopped me in my tracks.

Orion, a fall and winter constellation at this latitude, had just risen above the horizon. High above it I could see nearly all ‘seven sisters’ of the Pleiades. A waning moon hung between the two constellations, bright though not diminishing the brilliance of the stars.

Instantly everything but that beauty and mystery fell away, all personal and political problems. I stood agape, and gratitude welled up within.

Whitman’s poem came to mind:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, 


When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,


When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,


How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,


Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,


In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, 


Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

With reluctance I came in and went to bed. I awoke with fundamental metaphysical questions. The questions haven’t yielded liberating insight, despite the urgency to find out.

However the distinction and relationship between the contemplative life (intimated by Whitman’s poem) and philosophical inquiry seems clearer.

Twenty-five years ago when I was asked what I do, and I replied ‘I do philosophy and write,’ I invariably received a blank stare. These days nearly everyone seems to think they’re a philosopher. It’s true that everyone can do philosophy, but there are still very few true philosophers.

‘Academic philosopher’ is an oxymoron, but there is no other kind in America. Philosophers are born and arduously develop; they’re not made and trained. I wouldn’t wish being a philosopher on anyone, even as I wouldn’t want to do anything other than philosophy.

A person who relentlessly questions things and searches for the truth is not just a rare bird, but rather a freak. As much lip service is paid in this culture to ‘critical thinking,’ and ‘question authority,’ authentic philosophers are seen as gadflies, unrecognized even as philosophers.

Part of the reason is that true philosophers don’t specialize. A philosopher is not an ‘expert’ at anything, but rather the ultimate generalist, asking questions that cut below and beyond particularities of place and time, culture and conditioning.

Since most intellectuals, including many putative philosophers, believe that there are only particularities of place and time, culture and conditioning, a genuine philosopher has no place, at least in this culture.

Is it that philosophers are only needed during the formation of societies, or during their collapse?

Despite the parlous condition of American culture and Western civilization, specialization, expertise and scholarship continue to take precedence over wholeness, simplicity and childlike inquisitiveness.

The essential flaw of Western philosophy is that relies too much on reason and rationality. The seemingly unbridgeable gulf between contemplatives and philosophers in the West has its roots in the conception of philosophy as an entirely intellectual endeavor.

In actuality, daily stillness of mind is essential to doing good philosophy. Indeed, the essence of thinking is stillness, which means complete attention and not thinking at all.

To build thinking and philosophy on thought is to build a house of cards. That’s why no system of philosophy has ever withstood the test of time.

Certainly many philosophers have had original insights that have advanced civilization, East, West and Middle East. Western civilization owes its foundation to the ancient Greek explosion in philosophy. But Western civilization has run its course, even as it has overrun the world.

Scientific and skillful knowledge are accurate accrual of the past. Most of the knowledge we have is useless and prejudicial however, the conditioning from personal experience, which often involves personal hurts and racial privilege or oppression.

Racism and white privilege are a fact, but a philosopher does not make it the lens through which he or she does philosophy. To insist that lighter skinned people cannot understand the experience of a darker skinned people, and therefore there must be a distinct philosophy for black and brown people, is to deny the existence of philosophy, which is universal in its questions and concerns.

A true philosopher ‘reinvents the wheel.’ Not to build a better wheel, but because asking the perennial questions anew, however many times they’ve been addressed before, is the wellspring of inquiry and new insights. Moreover, there is no such thing as ‘accumulated wisdom.’ 

There cannot be clear thinking unless one deeply sees the place of thought. The essence of clear thinking is not any kind of thought process, however logical. The essence of clear thinking is observing without thinking or thought.

Can one think without the thinker? Yes, just as one can observe without the observer.

The thinker, like the observer, is inherently conditioned, whether by culture, family, experience or knowledge. Thinking on things, which is essentially a matter of questioning, can be done without the lenses of conditioning, experience and knowledge.

Philosophy is not about the accumulation of knowledge, however scientifically accurate, but about insight and understanding, which are always of the present.

Martin LeFevre

The post Philosophers Don’t Specialize first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

The Vampire Almanac (book review)

Comments:  Whoa!  This is a smorgasbord of vampire information.  I mean you get everything in this book about vampires. Let’s open the book and take a look inside to see what we will find.  In the beginning of this book, the author explains his fascination with vampires which gave birth to his first book called The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead.  And now we have The Vampire Almanac: The Complete History.  Walking into this vampire universe of every vampire imaginable, we get the origins of the vampire.  How did it all begin? Find out in this book! 

If you want to know how the crucifix plays a role in the vampire mythology, all of the info is in here.  What I really enjoyed about this book is that the author discusses the crucifix and how some vampires are not affected by the power of the crucifix.  There is information on Miyu a manga heroine that is similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  You get all of the intel about mirrors, garlic, vampires turning to dust, etc.  There are historical figures mentioned in this book from Henry Steel Olcott, founding president of the Theosophical Society to Mary “Mollie” Flancher known as the Brooklyn Enigma.  The connection of the Goth culture to vampirism is documented in this book.

There is info on Elizabeth Bathory who bathed in virgin blood to maintain her youthful appearance; the Vampire of Croglin Grange; Vlad Dracul; Blacula; Kali the Hindu Goddess that was known to consume blood; the Penanggalan who could release her heart and entrails so she could fly and seek out her victims; the Aswang – Filipino shapeshifter; Gilles de Rais – famed knight that was a companion to Joan of Arc; Mona the Vampire (animated character); Barnabas Collins (one of my favorite vampires from the Dark Shadows soap opera); Saint Germain (immortal and possible vampire – real character); Vampira (Horror Host and vampire); Vampire Hunter D (one of my wife’s favorite characters); Blade (bad axx vampire killer); Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Underworld; The Queen of the Damned; Lestat; Edward Cullen; The Munsters (was grandpa really Count Dracula?); True Blood; Carl Kolchak: The Night Stalker; Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot; Penny Dreadful; Batman (yes, even Batman is included in this book!); Morbius – the Living Vampire by Marvel Comics; Preacher by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon; Vampirella and much much more!! 

If you are into vampire movies or vampire TV shows, I truly suggest that you get this book for your library, it is filled with informative vampire information.  The author really did his research in putting this book together.  As a paranormal investigator, I had to deal with a few vampires.  I interviewed real vampires in San Francisco.  I investigated the murder sites of Richard “The Vampire of Sacramento” Trenton Chase” and if I had this book during those interviews and investigations, I would have been 10 steps ahead in the game.  This is a vampiric bible of information.  If vampires fascinate you, then get this book!!  If you need more information on where to find this book, email Rockelle Henderson at:  Press@RockInked.com

Name of Book: The Vampire Almanac
Author: J. Gordon Melton, Ph.D
Publisher: Visible Ink Press
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by: Paul Dale Roberts, HPI’s Esoteric Detective
www.cryptic916.com/
Reporter for Costa Rican Times:
www.costaricantimes.com/category/topics/ghosts-supernatural

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Learning From Darkness Within, Dispelling Evil Without

These days it’s hard to tell whether a commentator given to exaggeration is speaking with hyperbole. Nothing surprises anymore, and everything seems leveled out by stultifying sameness.

Take this sentence for example. Is the writer speaking with acute exaggeration, or does he mean what he says? “While many fresh occupants of the Oval Office are supposed to light a few scented candles and rid the Resolute Desk of the prior occupant’s stench, Biden was supposed to perform an exorcism.”

Clearly, the writer isn’t serious, and doesn’t understand how close to the truth he comes. He’s taking poetic license to distance himself from the realities of evil, which go far beyond Trumpian “dynamics.”

Twice more the pundit uses theological language for literary and political and effect. When “Biden stepped to the podium at the United Nations on Tuesday to deliver his first speech to the General Assembly as president…he had to prove that the exorcism had taken.”

His next sentence confirms that he’s willfully naïve about what is happening in America: “But here’s the thing about Trump’s possession of America: It was made possible by untended sentiments among many voters.”

There you have it in a nutshell, the standard liberal/progressive worldview. “Trump’s possession of America was made possible by unintended sentiments,” when in truth, America’s possession by intended sentiments made Trump possible.

A large majority of conservatives and Republicans have given themselves over to the darkness that permeates American culture, while hatefully projecting it onto Democrats and ‘liberals.’

Such people exemplify Jesus’ injunction, “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of yourown eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Democrats and liberals, on the other hand, “choose” to ignore evil, or downplay it, or play word games with it, as the writer above does.

Other pundits are taking an almost fatalistic attitude, writing things like: “It was always possible, theoretically, to manipulate the rules to seize power from the voters…all Trump needs is a rival slate of electoral votes from contested states, state officials and state legislatures willing to intervene on his behalf, a supportive Republican majority in either house of Congress, and a sufficiently pliant Supreme Court majority.”

The writer’s supine, self-fulfilling attitude is clear when he falsely and foolishly adds: “In this world, the voters, as filtered through the Electoral College, no longer choose the president. If that happens, it would be a revolutionary change.”

No, that would not be revolutionary change, and it is reactionary to say so. Such a totalitarian scenario would merely be a continuation and culmination of the long decline of America. Given the present zeitgeist, revolutionary change is required to prevent descending into flat-out fascism.

Without echoing the usual cliché about ‘all evil needs,’ are there enough people who still give a damn urgently to stand against the pervasive evil in America? Or it will continue to grow and manifest again in even worse form, whether that’s in the form of “the former guy or not.”  

What can be done? We have to first and always begin with the darkness within ourselves. That includes withholding our reactions when confronted with evil, which is a very difficult thing to do.

Many people of the progressive persuasion believe that evil doesn’t exist except as we perceive or project it, or that we ‘attract’ it by the darkness within us. That too is willfully naïve. Evil attacks self-knowing people who are genuinely facing and cleansing themselves of their own inseparable portion of darkness. Is that why so few do?

In any case, there’s no choice now but to face and own the darkness within oneself, and meet and stand against evil when one encounters it.

Evil is collective darkness plus intentionality. It hates stillness and silence, insight and understanding.

Inner and outer darkness (and when it comes down to it there is no difference) can be the best teacher. Evil draws out the worst within us. By remaining with the anger, hatred, fear and violence that is buried within nearly all of us, we learn. And in non-accumulatively learning, we turn the tables on evil, and defeat it.

In not reacting (by watching one’s inner reactions like a hawk), there is space and stillness, and one sees how to respond intelligently and effectively to evil.

Perhaps then even those who believe that liberals drink the blood of slaughtered babies can turn around and begin to face themselves.

Martin LeFevre

The post Learning From Darkness Within, Dispelling Evil Without first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

The Nation-State Is Dead; Long Live Humanity

The Republican Party has gone mad, and the feckless Democrats are all that stands between American democracy and the abyss. But Joe Biden is a throwback. And like all throwbacks in a position of power at a time of crisis, he’s dangerous.

Yes, Donald Trump was a bigger and much more malevolent throwback. Whether his perverse presidency was a constitutional collapse averted, or a prelude to ‘legal’ tyranny depends on whether enough Americans adequately address the rot in the body politic as a whole, now.

That means indicting Trump and a raft of his co-conspirators for the coup he tried to mount before and after the January 6 Capitol riot. (The ‘insurrection’ wouldn’t have succeeded even if the mob had succeeded in its intention to “hang Mike Pence,” but Trump would be in jail, where he belongs, rather than continuing to incite violence at his wretched rallies.)

Besides holding Trump and his co-conspirators accountable however, we have to deal with the joker we have.

America now has the worst of both worlds at the border – thousands of Haitian and other desperate people packed together under a freeway because they believe they’ll be allowed into the USA under the Biden Administration, while Biden continues with Trump’s inhumane treatment and worse…men on horseback herding people like cattle.

Biden’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan, which he still touts as a success, proved that when it comes down to it, America abandons its allies, and slaughters families with its drones on its way out.

France, America’s oldest and truest ally (Britain became our lapdog under Blair), recalled its ambassador for the first time in the history of American-French relations. The French speak of the Biden Administration’s “lies,” “duplicity,” “brutality” and “contempt,” and say they see no substantive difference between Biden and Trump.

Meanwhile, China and Russia sit back and laugh, believing they are winning the ideological war between the compound authoritarianism of the East and the declining and decrepit democracies of the West. They are blind to one reality and fearful of another.

Whatever games nations play in the 21^st century, it’s one interconnected, interdependent world now. And authoritarian regimes are stable…until they’re suddenly not.

The fact that America’s vaunted legal system hasn’t indicted Trump for inciting violence and sedition attests to the fact that the putrefaction is not just in the Republican Party, but in American society and polity as a whole.

And if the United States, being irredeemably polarized at home, cannot lead itself out of its own morass, how is Joe Biden going to “lead the world with unity in facing global threats at this inflection point of history,” as he said at the UN?

Biden believes America is still a force for good in the world, when in fact America has been a force for ill in the world for the last 30 years.

Biden believes America can lead the world with respect to the climate crisis, Covid, cybersecurity and a dozen other global challenges, but his policies echo Trump’s America first mentality.

Biden believes that America’s national interest is synonymous with humanity’s interest, but that’s a willful delusion and flagrant falsehood.

Biden’s speech to the UN General Assembly rang pathetically hollow as a last gasp of American exceptionalism. Though largely unspoken, the same language and approach to the Cold War with USSR still informs the Biden Administration’s attitude toward China, a much more formidable foe than the Soviet Union (except with respect to nuclear arms, which the PRC is rapidly equalizing).

Nations serve their own interests, and no nation’s interests aligns with humanity’s interests as a whole. There was a time when the United States honestly led the world with respect to the rule of law, international norms and standards and human rights. But George Bush shredded whatever veracity remained of the old order with his invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and “you’re either with us or against us” mindset.

Barack Obama might have been able to steer the United States back on its previous, imperfect course, but he was too morally weak to do so. Joe Biden, Obama’s Vice-President, is worse, because, as the set of his jaw and tone of his voice often indicates, he’s the last true believer in American righteousness. 

The USA cannot lead the world, anymore than the PRC can. The world is caught in the ultimate Thucydides trap as the climate crisis intensifies, and America and China seem hell-bent on war.

We return to first principles, which for the West means the misnomer of the Enlightenment. Contrary to Hobbes on one hand, and Locke on the other, there is no ‘state of nature’ of man, either as tooth and claw, or individual freedom.

Ever since the emergence of ‘fully modern humans’ about 100 thousand years ago (the foundational philosophers of pre-industrial Western civilization knew nothing about human evolution), people have been alienated from nature. The traditions and rituals of indigenous peoples offset the alienation wrought by thought to some degree, but all restraints are now off, and man’s self-regard and rapaciousness are in full flower.

The Enlightenment’s reliance on reason as a social, economic and political cornerstone and counterweight has run its course. The choice we face in the present is not between ‘passion and reason,’ against a Hobbesian or Lockean background of the state of nature, but between the awakening of insight and the continued decline not just of the West, but of the spiritual and intellectual capacity of the human being.

Can the false hope of rationalism and secularism give way to new philosophy for humanity?

‘The Enlightenment’ began in France. Can France subsume its ‘sovereignty’ to a United States of Europe, and can the EU subsume its sovereignty to the true sovereignty, that of humanity? If so, humankind will make the turn in time.

Martin LeFevre

The post The Nation-State Is Dead; Long Live Humanity first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

Psychological Thought Is Noise

There was nary a man-made noise as I listened with delight at streamside to the gently flowing current and various birds. Unseen, passive watchfulness gathered undirected attention. An hour passed quickly, almost unnoticeably.

True meditation occurs when goal-less, effortless awareness of the outer and inner movement induces spontaneous stillness of mind.  Just as the phenomenon of meditation began however, someone started up a tree shredder on the other side of the hedge across the creek.

Tree shredders are to leaf blowers as jet engines are to blaring car stereos. They assault not only the ears but the entire body.

Naturally I reacted, first with a physical jolt, then with anger. But the timing was so obvious, and such things happen so often while meditating in the park or backyard, that it’s beyond coincidence.

Since people don’t start up generators (like my unseen neighbor when I take a meditation in the backyard) or tree shredders to annoy me, what is going on?

Is there a movement of the ‘dark metaphysical’ in human consciousness? That is, is there collective darkness, plus intentionality, of which the individual conduit is unaware?

I feel yes. And we cannot avoid darkness anymore than we can avoid noise. One has to meet both, as they arise, inwardly and outwardly, while allowing daily space for a healing, sacred silence to be.

The sounds of nature and noises of man hold tremendous meaning, if one knows how to listen. Normally, we react with recognition, annoyance or indifference to sounds and noises. People living next to railroad tracks or freeways can become inured to the extreme noise, even though it affects the health of the body.

The human being requires regular periods of stillness and silence. Not just because before the Industrial Revolution we dwelled amidst the sounds and silences of nature, but much more importantly, because silence is in the nature of things.

Acoustically speaking, the ‘Big Bang’ is the greatest misnomer. There are no sounds in the vacuum of space, and there was no explosion in any case.

The universe was not created at some point and is winding down or speeding up like a comic clock, but is being continuously created from infinite depths of silence. This background silence is synonymous with deathless death, the everlastingly mysterious ground of all energy and matter that gave rise to the universe in the beginning, and in its perpetual beginning in the present.

The human being communes with this inseparable ground of death, creation, love and God with the complete silence of thought.

It’s strange how the evolutionary cognitive development – symbolic thought — that gave us the neural capacity for conscious communion with the sacred, is a tremendous impediment to realization of cosmic intent.

Being at one with divine silence is the highest capacity of the human being. To the extent that we only hear the noise of man, outwardly and inwardly, we are incapable of ‘hearing’ this silence.

I live where the din of freeway traffic varies according to weather conditions and time of day. Sometimes the traffic din is overwhelming; sometimes I can’t hear it at all. I’ve come to feel that the freeway din is the noise of human consciousness made manifest.

The thing about listening to one’s reactions to man-made noise – generators, leaf blowers, motorcycles, freeway din, etc. – is that it makes silence that much sweeter.

When thought spontaneously ceases in intense, non-linear attention to ugliness and beauty, to noise and stillness, one feels the cosmic womb of silence.

The self-made darkness dominating human consciousness does not want us to commune with the immanent sacredness that pervades nature and the cosmos. Can one face and rise above it?

Though a meditative state was beginning as the tree shredder started grinding branches into wood chips, I took it in stride after the initial reaction of shock and anger. I didn’t get up and leave, but remained with conditioned and emotional reactions, as I had enjoyably done during the previous hour of salubrious silence.

There was a hint of fear, I admit, and the question, ‘what the hell is going on?’ To my surprise however, the mind was not jolted out of a meditative state, but remained calm and curious.

Suddenly the shredder stopped. The external silence returned, and silence deepened inwardly. A small, white-headed tree climber flew up and circled the beech in front of me. I felt an explosion of affection.

Martin LeFevre

The post Psychological Thought Is Noise first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

The Imperative of Self-Knowing

Nature abhors a vacuum, and as American culture has degraded beyond recognition and repair, an entire industry of retreat centers, yoga studios, meditation teachers and life coaches has sprung up. They haven’t helped.

The ancient dictum, know yourself, has been mined out by the mindfulness movement. That’s allowed the darkest voices in the corporate media to proffer spiritual and philosophical rubbish such as, “Is Self-Awareness a Mirage?”

Standing on the shoulders of pygmies, a second-hand thinker concludes: “Maybe we can’t know ourselves through the process we call introspection. But we can gain pretty good self-awareness by extrospection, by closely observing [others] behavior.”

Derisively dismissing self-awareness, this prominent voice in America actually has the temerity to write: “I feel bad for all those people — from René Descartes to modern commencement speakers — who said the key to life is to ‘know thyself,’ ‘look within’ and ‘do the inner work.’ This advice seems like narcissistic nonsense in light of recent research.”

He feels bad for Descartes! He feels sorry for people who say, “Look within!” It’s a blatant admission of self-ignorance. Indeed, like virtually all Americans on the right now, he tries to make a virtue of self-ignorance, backing his case for unawareness of oneself by “recent research.”

He is effectively saying, ‘I do not look within; I am not doing my own spadework; I have no inner life.’ Truly, such a person is the one to be pitied.

But is there anything to the claim that self-awareness “seems like narcissistic nonsense in light of recent research?”

Aside from the fact that “temet nosce” – know thyself — is older than Latin, and was once the cornerstone of Western civilization (however rarely practiced), what in “recent research” makes “narcissistic nonsense” out of self-awareness?

With succinct wrongheadness, our esteemed pundit explains it this way: “We have a conscious self, the voice in our head, but this conscious self has little access to the parts of the brain that are the actual sources of judgment, problem-solving and emotion.”

The basic mistakes here are trying to make the “conscious self” knowledgeable about the subconscious mind, and equating subconscious content with the neuroscientifically correct phrase, “little access to the parts of the brain.”

The “conscious self” is a euphemism for the supposedly separate self/ego, which is the problem in the first place rather than having some privileged position in the brain. And self-knowing isn’t a matter of knowledge at all, but of direct perception and insight.

Subconscious conditioning, motivations, desires and maladies reveal themselves with right observation, which means observing without the infinite regress of the separate self/ego. (Of course most of us still have a great deal of dark matter from the personal, family and primeval past to work through. Hence the imperative of “doing your own spadework.”)

The opinion writer backs up his boilerplate psychology by quoting a few experts, such as Will Storr, author of “The Science of Storytelling”:  “We don’t know why we do what we do, or feel what we feel. We confabulate when theorizing as to why we’re depressed, we confabulate when justifying our moral convictions and we confabulate when explaining why a piece of music moves us.”

To confabulate means to “make up some story” that explains ourselves to ourselves, such as what the commentator does in this piece. Confounding the reader further by doubling down on his well researched confusion, he concludes with a contradiction: “In telling ever more accurate stories about ourselves, we send different beliefs, values and expectations down into the complex nether reaches of our minds.” (Italics mine.)

This is risible stuff, and it’s hard not to make fun of it. But this ‘thought leader,’ and most of the psychologists and scholars he cites, are attacking something essential to the human being, and the most important element in making it through this crisis of consciousness – self-knowing.

The implicit assumption is that we “have little access to the parts of the brain that are the actual sources” of our motivations, problems, neuroses, etc. is simply wrong. Indeed, one of the quoted experts, Nicholas Epley, author of “Mindwise,” goes so far as to say, “We don’t have privileged access to our minds.”

That’s not only deeply mistaken; it’s radically pernicious. In fact, “privileged access to our own minds” is the only thing we truly have. For a psychologist to insist otherwise is to hand over the human mind to the AI manipulators at Facebook, Google and Apple.

Trying to erase the question ‘why?’ from therapy, Epley egregiously proclaims, “No psychologist asks people to explain the causes of their own thoughts or behavior anymore unless they’re interested in understanding storytelling.”

In truth, if a client really wants to understand themselves, and the therapist is self-knowing and competent, they enter into an exploration that can yield great insight, understanding and freedom.

For a psychologist or psychiatrist to deny the capacity of the human being to observe the movement of thoughts and emotions without the filter of the observer/self is not just malpractice; it sustains and promotes mental and emotional illness.

Observing thoughts, emotions and conditioning as they are, and as they arise within us, without judgment or interference, is the key. Doing so is neither introspection, in the sense of the observer looking within, nor ‘extrospection,’ in the sense of an observer looking without.

We can maintain an attitude of ‘I don’t know myself or anyone else,’ and learn the art of undivided (i.e. observer-less) observation. The fruits of diligently do so on a daily basis is a quiet, peaceful and joyous mind and heart, if only for a few precious, timeless minutes.

Even if it doesn’t seem like one is getting anywhere, and the task seems Sisyphean, most people these days would sorely welcome even a few minutes a day of regenerating silence and reinvigorating insight.

Martin LeFevre

The post The Imperative of Self-Knowing first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

The Signs and Teachings of Hawks

A large, brown, stipple-winged hawk takes off from the path ahead of me with some small animal in its mouth. It’s near dusk, and the parkland is full of Cooper’s hawks.

Another hawk, perched on a branch overhanging the park road, drops from the limb and screeches continuously as it glides in a straight, level flight path just above the road ahead. A few minutes later, two people walking in front of me stop and turn to watch a raptor alight high in a sycamore tree.

Later, for the last 20 minutes during a meditation by the stream, a gray squirrel chatters away in a tree behind me. Consciousness is like that squirrel prattling on. It isn’t concentration, but inclusive, undirected attention that quiets the mind.

A hundred meters up the path I pass two college-age couples talking non-stop as they imbibe at a picnic site adjacent to the footbridge. In the time it takes me to go by, one of the young women changes subjects about shopping three times, without appearing to take a breath.

Meditation – the spontaneous quieting of thought — cannot truly begin until the mind/brain lets go of everything. No trick or technique can cause it to do so. Only undivided observation loosens the bonds and ends the grooves of thought.

Why is it so difficult to let go? What is it about the human mind that keeps us attached to beliefs, people and problems? It appears as though the brain, using thought, is wired to attach itself to things.

Attachment is in the nature of thought. Obviously attachment is also a function of the self, which is a fabrication and creation of thought. And as long as there is the emotionally held idea of a separate self—me, my and I—there will be attachment with all its problems.

Clearly, there is no separate entity that stands apart from anything. Why then is there a seemingly separate self that experiences things as happening to it, rather than simply happening? Why isn’t experience perceived as an unbroken flow of inner and outer movement, but seen instead in terms a fixed center?

Is an illusorily separate self that interprets, judges, evaluates and then acts an unchangeable part of being human?

No, the operating system, program and contents of the self fall away during meditation. And when there is no sense of self, there is no basis for attachment. Therefore attachment, and all the suffering it engenders, is a function of the ‘me,’ the emotionally embedded ego at the center of human experience.

The expression, ‘my thoughts,’ is not merely redundant; it is existentially and neurologically erroneous. And yet the ‘me’ seems to have tremendous validity.

Though the separate self doesn’t actually exist, the brain, dominated by thought, fabricates a separate self, and holds onto it for dear life. This ancient habit of the human mind then extends to ‘my country,’ ‘my religion’ and ‘my group,’ though such arbitrary divisions generate incalculable death and destruction.

In the absence of insight into the nature of thought, which evolved for utilitarian separation of ‘things’ from the environment, the mechanism of a separate self is constructed to bring some semblance of order and stability to the chaos of thought.

The brain records experience, and a program called ‘me’ subconsciously selects and screens, according to one’s conditioning, what it subconsciously deems important. Awareness can be quicker than thought however, and bring subconscious habits and unconscious content into the light.

Apparently as humans evolved conscious thought, the survival instinct became linked to concepts of identity, and identity then became imbued with the importance of survival.

So instead of realizing that I am thought, there is the subconscious and emotionally held idea that ‘I am not thought, but a separate entity, ‘me’.’

From this psychological basis, the idea of permanence, and the fear of death, are inevitable. So separate selfhood, survival, attachment, permanence and fear of death got mixed up together, and formed the psychological basis of our dubious humanness.

Thought-dominated consciousness has become utterly dysfunctional however, both individually and collectively.

Authentic meditation, which has nothing to do with methods, techniques and traditions, awakens another order – a true order — of consciousness.

To ignite meditation, one has to begin by ending division in observation. In actuality, there is no observer or watcher. By passively observing the observer and watching the watcher, awareness quickens and gathers force. In the unwilled and undirected attention that ensues, attention, in itself and by itself, halts the habit of psychological separation, if only for a few precious, peaceful minutes a day.

Thought is a single stream, which habitually separates us from nature and humanity. When the sense of separateness ends, thought simply falls silent, and there is “the peace that passes all understanding.”

That’s the meaning of meditation. And by whatever name one gives it, it is the single most important, and urgently necessary action for the individual, and for society.

Martin LeFevre

The post The Signs and Teachings of Hawks first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

Mysterious Peru, Ecuador and Columbia

I used to enjoy going to my family reunions or family get-togethers.  I have some very interesting family members, but instead of talking about each family member, I will tell you about two uncles, both are deceased.  The first uncle I will talk about is my uncle Manuel “Manny” Ayala.  Manny was a former CHP (California Highway Patrol), his sister Josie Hodson is a retired CHP Radio Dispatcher.  Manny’s nephew Robert Crain is a retired CHP and now is a private investigator and CEO for his own company called Arcy Professional Investigations, Inc. Josie’s ex-husband Larry Hodson is a retired Oakland police officer.  Uncle Manny Ayala retired early from CHP, when he got run over by a drunk driver.  When he finally recovered, one leg was shorter than the other.  After his recovery, he worked at the Fairfield Truck Weigh Station and I would drive through the weigh station and greet my uncle.  One of the stories that my uncle would tell is how he pulled over Charles Manson, who was driving towards Los Angeles in a beat up van.  He pulled over Charlie Manson for reckless driving and gave him a ticket.  Uncle Manny was a Vietnam vet and I will never forget his unforgettable stories of his days with CHP.  Before Manny passed away, he was a farmer in Utah.

My other colorful uncle was Jose “Joe” Causing. Jose is a Vietnam vet, 82nd Airborne, Merchant Marine and jazz drummer.  He was also a Gung Fu Master/Instructor in the 12th degree, who learned Gung Fu from Bruce Lee’s Martial Arts Schools.  Note: Jose attended Bruce Lee’s funeral in Seattle, Washington.  Jose drove an old gray Cadillac with the license plate # Gung Fu.  As a Merchant Marine, Jose traveled the world.  He was an international traveler.  As a young boy, I was fascinated with the paranormal and I would always have my uncle seek out paranormal stories from the countries and territories that he visited.  When he visited Peru, Ecuador and Columbia as a Merchant Marine, here are some of the paranormal stories he related to me:

Peru:

When Jose visited Peru, he was floored at all of the stories he heard about this country.  Jose talked with Jesus Munoz.  Jesus says that he was surfing in 1977 and came upon a huge turtle that bumped his board and knocked him into the waves.  Jesus says the turtle had to be about 150 feet, with a width of 20 feet. Jesus could not believe on what he saw and told his family members and friends.  One of his friends told him, that he saw the Sachamama.  This is a cryptid that is seen in the ocean regions of Peru.  A Sachamama is a giant turtle and has two pairs of snail-like feelers at the base and the tip of the snout.  Jesus told Jose that he stopped surfing for 2 years, after he had the incident with Sachamama.

Luciana Suarez, a native of Peru says that when she lived with her parents, her home was very haunted. Cabinets would open on their own.  There was times when her mother and Luciana were pushed by an unseen force.  Her mother experienced the entity grabbing the back of her hair and pushing her head into a wall.  Luciana said that they were too poor to move away.  Then one day Luciana’s father noticed that part of the floor boards seemed to be rotted out and the wood was raised above the other flooring panels.  When Luciana’s father removed the rotted floor panels, he came upon a burlap bag.  Inside the bag were human bones. There was a skull, ribs and one leg bone. Other bones were missing.  Luciana took the bones to a nearby cemetery and buried the bones.  He said a prayer over the bones and threw holy water upon the makeshift grave.  After this was done, the haunting of their home stopped.  Luciana believes that the bones belonged to the family that once lived in their home and was probably a relative.  There are many, many ghost stories in Peru.  Peru is very rich in culture and history, so it would seem natural for a country like Peru to have so many ghost stories.

Also, archaeologists have a field day in the story of giants that once inhabited this land.  The giants were so tall, that a 6 foot man would only reach the knee cap of a giant.  The giants were known to raid villages and devour the farm animals and they were also known to eat humans.  Besides the giants, you had alien elongated skulls.  In 1928, author and researcher Brian Foerster talked about the bizarre elongated alien skulls.  Were the inhabitants at the time trying to mimic extraterrestrials that lived in Peru, by stretching their skulls to look like them?  Or do the elongated skulls carry the  DNA of humans and an alien species, a hybrid race?  Were the giants the fallen ones…the Nephilim as mentioned in the Bible?  Peru has many mysteries and I can’t wait when the day comes that some of these questions can be answered. 

Ecuador

Just like Peru, there is evidence that giants once roamed the land of Ecuador.  Jose says there are stories of UFOs seen in the Andes and cryptids called “Stick Men” seen crossing paths in the Ecuador Amazon.  From the way Jose described the cryptids, it almost sounds like the Fresno Nightcrawlers that you hear about today.  Also, there have been reports of hikers who have encountered Amazon Opossums and as they watch the opossums walk along the tree branches, some will fade away, as if they are ghosts.

Columbia

Felipe Iglesias told Jose that he was taking care of his sick aunt in her home and when his aunt went to sleep, he went into the broom closet to retrieve the broom and start sweeping around the house.  When he was finished, he placed the broom back into the closet.  As Felipe was walking away, the broom closet opened and the broom smacked him right in the back of the head.  Felipe believes it was his cousin Juan Pablo who died in the house.  His cousin died of untreated bronchitis.  Felipe believes his cousin did not mean any harm for hitting him in the head with the broom.  Felipe believes his cousin was trying to let him know, that he is still around.  Columbia is just like Peru and has many, many ghost stories, this is just one ghost story out of thousands of ghost stories in Columbia.  Just recently through his Facebook profile, the mayor of Armenia, Jose Manuel Ríos Morales, said that at approximately 11:29 p.m. on Monday, August 2, a security guard suffered a “paranormal attack” in a Colombia.  There is a video of the attack and it shows the security guard as he hits the wall.  It actually looks like he was violently pushed by an unseen force. 

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

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Suffering Is Psychological Memory

At the only sandy ‘beach’ along the creek in Lower Park, a group of parents and children frolic in the water. It’s a lazy late- summer afternoon and the temperature is nearly 110 F/44C.

At One-Mile, where the creek was dammed decades ago to create a public swimming pool about 200 meters long and 50 meters wide, there are more people in the water and on the grass than I’ve ever seen.

Though the sun beats down relentlessly, it’s tolerable in the shade beside the stream. Butterflies flit over the creek, and birds land on the rocks at mid—stream.

The senses open. Though I’m in the middle of town, for minutes at a time there’s no noise of man, just the sound of the rippling creek and the twittering birds. The smell of the earth and water is sweet, and luminous emerald light reflects off the stream.

After awhile, I’m surprised to find that one’s burdens have lifted, sorrow dissolved, and despair dissipated.

Effort of any kind is antithetical to meditation. Mantras are hypnosis; watching the breath is concentration not attention; methods are of thought; and ‘guided meditation is an oxymoron.

One doesn’t meditate according to some idea or previous experience. One simply watches and listens for its own sake. Delighting in passive watchfulness, attention gathers effortlessly, unseen. The illusory observer dissolves, and a meditative state, which is new each time, spontaneously ignites.  

The mind and emotions – indeed the brain itself – fills with junk from experience and the culture if one doesn’t regularly allow the space and stillness of emptying. Beyond that basic inner housekeeping however, there is the direct experiencing beauty, silence and the sacred.

Why does meditation require at least a bit of nature, if only in one’s backyard?  Because our relationship with nature is the ground from which all relationship flows.

The mind-as-thought mediates experience with symbols and memories. And words, images and memories—the residue of experience—pile up in the mind and heart, clouding perception and corrupting feeling. Observing nature without the observer cleanses the mind and unburdens the heart.

Meditation is inner hygiene.

As we get older, the accretion of experience—the hurts, sorrows, conflicts and psychological memories—grow and slowly suffocate the mind and heart. These accretions, as much or more than poor diet, also affect the body, making it insensitive and dull.

Therefore to my mind, understanding and applying the art of meditation is more important than any other ‘wellness’ practice.

Since any form of effort prevents the meditative state from happening, what can one do?

One can take and make the time to do the most radical thing in this rotten society—nothing. Simply make the space to let things be, let go and observe. Don’t watch your breath and all that other nonsense; just listen and watch, outwardly and inwardly.

Nature is the best mirror. If one sits and is passively aware in a relatively quiet place where one isn’t likely to be disturbed, the senses become attuned to one’s surroundings. Then, by allowing the same inclusive, undirected awareness to turn within, one is able to watch thoughts and emotions as they arise—without judgment or interference — which is the essence of the watcher.

This is the highest action of which a human being is capable, and it is discipline in the true sense of word. Though the word ‘discipline’ usually means to force oneself to do something for the sake of something else — to use a more or less brutal means to reach a desired end – the root meaning of the word is simply to learn.  

Meditation begins by ending the illusion of the observer by allowing observation to grow quicker than thought. One sees thought/emotion as a single stream; ‘I’ and ‘me’ are an inextricable part of the stream.

In attending to the single stream of thought without division or effort, the pollution of the past within comes up and flows by and out of one.

It’s easy to perceive the toxins the mind and emotions accumulate and secrete. We see it manifest in the world every day on the news, and feel it, if we are at all aware, in this dead and darkness-saturated culture.

Allowing space in the mind is the most important thing. Without it, there’s only the continuity of thought and accretion of memory.  Functional memory is essential, but psychological memory is suffering.

Life, as we usually know it, is a chain of thought as memory, impeding seeing and feeling and anchoring us to the past. That prevalent way of living prevents freedom, and sinks us into the muck of the personal.

The deepest intent of the human being is freedom. Freedom means leaving the increasingly polluted stream of content-consciousness, if only for a little while every day. Freedom comes the effortless, diligent art of meditation.

Martin LeFevre

lefevremartin77 at gmail.com

The post Suffering Is Psychological Memory first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

The Long View

The American media, including the progressive media and Steven Pinkerish academics, are promoting the idea that most life on Earth has been wiped out many times before—by asteroids, comets or super-volcanoes. The best denial of human destructiveness is maintaining that nature is also destructive.

A study by scientists at America’s Smithsonian Institute and the University of Kansas, mapped out all of the Earth’s extinction events from the past 500 million years. They are 99% sure that there has been an extinction event on average every 27 million years–much more often and regularly than previously thought.

An extinction event is defined as a sharp decrease in the diversity and abundance of macroscopic life, that is, life that can be seen without a microscope. As MIT’s Technology Review reported, “Something of enormous destructive power happens every 26 or 27 million years,” wiping out a significant portion of animals and plants on Earth.

The study was largely treated as a joke on American talk shows, with people saying things like, “eleven million years ago a ten mile wide asteroid crashed into New Mexico, wiping out half the species at the time, so that still leaves 16 million years you can continue to watch our show.”

We are in the midst of a man-made extinction event. At the present rate of annihilation at the hands of the Earth’s only sentient species, half of all animals and plants on Earth will be wiped out by mid-century. This largely ignored fact, in favor of anthropocentric “climate crisis,” and hubristic “Anthropocene Age,” cuts to the heart of the relationship between humans and nature. If one lets it.

How do you view humankind’s place in nature, and the universe? The vast majority of people in the West see nature as hostile and the cosmos as essentially chaotic and indifferent to human life. We have also been conditioned to view humans as specks on a speck in space, no more significant in the scheme of things than ants are to us.

Is science responsible for this wrongheaded notion? Science, as important and powerful a tool as it is in human life, is essentially a reductionistic enterprise, based on ‘objectivity’ (read separation) and reason. To the scientific mind, the universe operates according to predetermined laws, laid down in the moments after the Big Bang, determined by chance.

So the more destructive humans become, the more science is used to tell us not to worry — the universe is destructive too. Even more cunningly, scientists echo New Agers in saying, “We’re not actually separate.” (No, but as humans we habitually separate, and are therefore existentially alienated.)

To gain insight into what used to be called ‘the riddle of man,’ cease fragmenting the earth and ourselves, and preserve what’s left of the Earth’s wild creatures and places, we have to make a clear distinction between natural creative destruction, and pointless human destructiveness, which has no precedent in nature.

Poverty, war and man-made extinction of the animals with which we evolved and share the earth are closely interrelated. And when we kill animals thoughtlessly, selfishly and wantonly, for food or sport, we are contributing to the destruction of future generations. We are saying to our children, ‘We don’t care about you, and the world you inherit; we only care about our own survival, comfort and pleasure.’

The same self-centeredness and brutishness that kills animals needlessly upholds the divide between the rich and poor all over the world. ‘Animals were put on Earth to be exploited by humans,’ and ‘the poor will always be with us,’ are two sides of the same old brainless coin.

We are a sentient species, meaning that we have awareness of ourselves and what we’re doing. However our unintelligence as a sentient species is proven by the general indifference to wiping out half the animals on Earth, and destroying the viability of the oceans and atmosphere at an accelerating rate, and then denying or minimizing it, as Steven Pinker and his ilk do, or rationalizing it by saying that the universe is destructive too.

Africa, the birthplace of ancient and modern humans, contains the last great herds of animals on Earth. Early Homo sapiens dwindled to only a few thousand people, perhaps due to a natural extinction event like a supervolcano. There was a breakthrough, a Cognitive Revolution, which gave humans the powers to accrue knowledge and manipulate nature. All nearly 8 billion people now alive descended from those ten or so thousand people.

Another breakthrough, a fully conscious Insight Revolution, which is essentially spiritual in nature, must occur for humans to cease being a destructive creature and grow to our full potential as human beings.

Changing the basic, disastrous course of man will require a revolution in human consciousness unlike anything the world has ever seen. It sure doesn’t look like it will occur in our age, and if not, I pity the children born today.

Though we’re too close to the intensifying crisis of human consciousness that’s been 100,000 years in the making, we still have to ask: Is this darkest hour before the dawn of a new human being?

Martin LeFevre

lefevremartin77  at gmail.com

The post The Long View first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.