Someone said to me recently, “When will we not feel urgency?” There is something plaintive, and slightly self-pitying in that question.
There will always be a sense of urgency, since urgency is in the nature of life itself. Not wanting to feel urgency is like not wanting to be disturbed; both are essential to right living, and neither is unpleasant unless one doesn’t want to feel.
After the breakthrough in human consciousness occurs (and one has to have the faith that it will occur, or humanity is finished), there obviously won’t be the urgency for such a breakthrough. But healthy individuals will always feel a sense of urgency, since our days on this earth are finite, and our opportunities to grow into human beings and perhaps beyond are limited.
Why is thought so powerful that it prevents us from experiencing the timeless actuality that lies beyond thought? The numinous is not supernatural, not separate from energy and matter; it is inextricably woven into energy and matter.
It’s good to have much work to do, but it’s essential to do and be nothing for a while every day. Negation in meditation, by whatever name, is the single most important action of a human being.
The mind falls silent by attending to its movement without judgment or direction. In doing and being nothing, there is the re-experiencing of emptiness. One is unburdened, temporarily at least, of the suffocating accretions of the past and the crushing weight of the present world.
Initiating the movement of negation in meditation clears and resets the brain, enabling one to return to one’s work and relationships with renewed feeling and new insight.
Therefore the urgency of meditation is the first imperative, that of seeing anew each day and growing as a human being. At the most basic level, if one doesn’t tend to the senses by simply attending to nature, the senses become dull, the mind thickens and the heart shrinks.
The word sensitive has the same root as the word sensory, which implies hearing sounds as they arise and seeing nature and people without images. Normally we think of the senses as less important than thoughts and thinking, but they are actually far more important.
Religious traditions in the West and East have taught that the senses deceive, and are the source of desire and self-indulgence. But sensory awareness is the foundation of listening and seeing beyond thought.
The urgency of meditation involves the tremendous necessity to end the observer and time every day. The observer is psychological separation, the root of all division and fragmentation, darkness and evil.
Time is the illusion of becoming, of ‘later,’ of gradualism and incrementalism. The world is time, and one has to be able to use time well to function in the world. But goals, doing and building are one thing, and becoming another.
Becoming denies being. Therefore take the time (a paradox I know) to do nothing, be nothing, to simply observe without the observer. All inward, non-accumulative learning flows from that.
Our individual consciousness is inseparable from human consciousness as a whole. Therefore when we end division within ourselves, we are contributing to the wholeness and healing of humanity—and not contributing to its destruction.
There is a drive in every person to be free. In the past, the drive to be free was outwardly oriented, and often took the form of violent political revolutions. Old concepts of sovereignty, which had their roots in a passionate desire for freedom, now enslave people in separateness and conformity to patriotic poppycock.
It’s often said that all politics are local. But in a global village, the local is global, and the global is local.
Autocratic disruption is not change. Decent human beings can no longer psychologically live in America, or any other country. We have no choice now but to reside in the world as a whole, as chaotic and confusing as it is.
The clear and present danger humans are posing to the planet, and to our children’s future, is a tremendous source of urgency. There’s an imperative to ignite a revolution in consciousness, which to my mind is the only thing that can change the disastrous course of humankind. Such a revolution can only happen when enough individuals awaken and ignite insight within.
For the first time in human history, we have the possibility and opportunity of creating and harmoniously combining all three dimensions of human life in an integrated whole–the spiritual, philosophical and political.
Apparently, not only have the New World and 2000 years of Christianity reached a dead end with Donald Trump (nearly 85% of evangelicals voted for a self-confessed criminal sexual predator to be President of the United States), but 20,000 years of civilization and 200,000 years of human evolution have also reached an end.
Conclusions mean the end. They are fixed, and so inherently false. Don’t form conclusions, and hold the one’s you have lightly. Ask the right questions, and insight and transmutation will come.
Martin LeFevre
