From The Sublime To The Revolting

It’s noon and the temperature is already near 100 at the northeastern corner of California’s Central Valley.

I carry a lawn chair the couple hundred meters from the car to the meditation place on the creek, wade in and place it in the shallow stream. The cool, gentle current ripples around my calves, and I soon forget about the heat.

Gazing downstream, the sight of the light and color reflecting off the surface, and the sound of cascading water over rocks behind me, are soothing beyond words, because word-making has ceased.

Time passes until I’m unaware of its passage. With the spontaneous quieting of the mind in passive awareness, attention gathers unseen and grows into an intense flame, ending psychological time.

Listening without judging or evaluating, everything is imbued with meaning. Everything is included in passive awareness – – the sounds of the softly rushing water, the seen and unseen birds, the dog barking, and a couple arguing, as well as one’s own reactions.

Large swallowtail butterflies, which feed on the nectar of white, spiky balls overhanging the creek, begin to form pairs and engage in elaborate dances above the water. Their movements are at once exquisitely beautiful and inexplicably random.

Sunlight shimmers in long swaths of achingly brilliant green on the water. Previously unseen residues of experience in memory dissolve in awareness, and there is a feeling of impersonal, all-inclusive love.

After an hour sitting in the stream, I move to the bank. A question arises: What is the relationship between individual awakening and the world?

Personal enlightenment is an oxymoron. Darkness is personal; awakening is not.

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Enlightenment is the temporary or irreversible ending of the ‘me’ at the center of existence, the ‘I’ that chooses and thereby loses life.

Invited to participate in an online dialogue out of Australia, someone declared, “I think there is one revolution only, and that is one person at a time.” He continued, “I am reminded of a beautiful quote by Chogyam Trungpa: “It is easier to put on a pair of shoes than to cover the whole Earth with carpet.”

That sounds lovely but it’s interpreted to comfort the separate individual in his or her individualistic seeking.

It’s true that the revolution in consciousness begins with the individual, so it makes sense to speak about a revolution within one as a microcosm of the whole of humanity.

However it makes no sense to pursue a personal goal of enlightenment that has no relationship to society, much less to the future of humanity.

Just as activism without an inner life leads to burnout, a contemplative life without social awareness is escapism.

My question about the relationship between individual awakening and a revolution in consciousness that manifests in the world wasn’t taken up. Even the most supposedly self-knowing people in the world – – the global network of Krishnamurti centers – – focuses on the self to the point of solipsism.

Though the escape-to-enlightenment crowd doesn’t want to be disturbed, awakening and doing one’s own spadework is a given, and “one person at a time” guarantees that humanity will run out of time and space.

Meanwhile, in the world as it actually is, “In the biggest war between European countries since World War II, the death and destruction have no end in sight.”

Putin, like his buddy Trump with Iran, is never going to admit defeat. It would mean slithering back to Moscow or Washington.

As for war-ravaged Ukrainians, a frontline volunteer ominously intoned: “I was talking to many people about nuclear attacks, and people say, ‘We don’t care. Let them bomb us. Let them kill us but we don’t want to be Russians.’”

Such a mentality is applauded by politicians and commentators in the west, while navel gazers don’t believe it has anything to do with them and their individualistic “journeys of enlightenment.”

As someone who meditates every day and has been prone to so-called mystical experiences since my teens, I’m still asking what meditative states have to do with the world as it is. I’ll only stop asking if I’m certain humankind is doomed. As bad as things are, we aren’t.

The United Nations is meeting in New York this week on the cusp of selecting a new general secretary. In the world of wars and climate crisis however, no new leader can save the UN.

The “international rules-based order” is not just crumbling. It lies in ruins that our feet. And the polycrisis is, at bottom, the convergence of inseparable crises flowing from the consciousness of man.

The UN can no more guide humanity through this unparalleled global crisis then the tech bros can control the AI Frankenstein they’ve unleashed, or Donald Trump can lead the world toward a true world order.

Psychological revolution isn’t a matter of some future time. It has everything to do with the violence people in the Middle East, Ukraine, or Sudan are suffering at the hands of oppressive powers.

And it has everything to do with us, for we are them, and they are us.

Psychological revolution means the end of domination and violence as givens in human relationship and political organization.

It begins with each one of us, not by simply sitting in the middle of shallow streams, but by leaving the stream of man’s dead consciousness every day, and re-engaging with the world.

© Scoop Media