By Martin LeFevre
All methods and techniques of meditation preclude meditation. The devices of thought cannot be used to trick thought into stillness.
The mind falls silent by taking the time and giving the space to allowing attention devoid of judgment or choice to gather, watching without the watcher thoughts and emotions as they arise.
True meditation has intent without a motive, and drive without a goal. Letting go of past experience, meditation can occur even in the most familiar places like one’s backyard.
After two days of rain, the sun shines brightly in the afternoon during a short day in the northern hemisphere. All of a sudden, a flurry of birds appears, among them meadowlarks chasing each other on the wing, and jays squawking up a storm in the fruit tree. The jays seemed to be as unhappy as the meadowlarks are happy.
Rising and looking to the east, I’m struck still by white cumulus formations ascending thousands of feet into a blue sky. They’re literally capped by a dome unlike any formation I’ve ever seen, a perfectly circular natural Pantheon. Around the middle of the dome are two gray striations, giving the formation an unearthly appearance.
A full moon, whiter than the clouds, emerges from behind them, framed by a semicircular scoop in the middle of the cumulus. The entire scene is overwhelmingly beautiful, a phenomenon never to be replicated again, conveying a feeling of sacredness and reverence beyond description.
Is there an intrinsic intent in the universe to evolve, through random means, brains with the capacity for consciousness of Mind?
Can we ask this question without wading into the tar pit of teleology, an explanation for evolution in terms of its purported purpose, end, or goal? We can if there is no attempt to think in terms of humans, or the human brain, as the end or goal of evolution.
Without getting too Platonic, expressions and forms of evolution are completely secondary to direction and process. There is no goal as end, or purpose as form.
Many philosophers and scientists set up a false choice between a totally random universe and the belief that “our universe was created by an all-powerful and purposeful being,” along the lines of a recent essay in a national magazine with the dogmatic title, “Life Is an Accident of Space and Time.”
To my mind life, including potentially intelligent life like Homo sapiens, is neither an “accident of time and space,” nor the result of a Creator setting the whole shebang in motion and occasionally intervening with god-like human beings.
On the other side of the debased coin, the doctrinaire author asserts without question: “Our existence, and our universe itself, is simply an accident, one throw of the cosmic dice.” I wouldn’t have thought that physicists could have belief systems as inflexible as any religionist.
Believers in the doctrine that the universe, life, and consciousness are completely accidental events have a difficult time getting around the anthropic principle, which refers to the physical laws that make the universe “fine-tuned for the emergence of life.” These include the nuclear force holding the centers of atoms together, the amount of as yet unobserved “dark energy” that allows the universe to expand at the rate it has, and other “fundamental parameters.”
Maintaining the false choice between total randomness and a Creator, many scientists and some philosophers have fallen for the intellectually dishonest and scientifically absurd fad of the multiverse. Given the theology of randomness, the idea is that our universe is but one of innumerable universes, each with different “fundamental parameters.”
The need to uphold the accidental universe extends to the Earth itself of course, which “has such favorable conditions for life—liquid water, moderate temperatures (at the moment), and plentiful oxygen for higher-level metabolism.”
Imagining an unlimited number of universes where different physics apply, and the “fine-tuning” for life doesn’t exist, is intended to maintain a belief system based on life’s randomness, accidentalness, and meaninglessness. That isn’t science, but religion.
The proof is in the absence of provability. “Even if multiverse idea of a multitude of other universes is real, there may well be no way to prove or disprove their existence,” an eminent physicist admits. The multiverse is therefore a good definition of a belief and has nothing to do with science, which advances through observation, evidence, and repeatable experimentation.
So, we return to my question, which flows from direct meditative experiencing as well as existing science, and neither presupposes a Creator nor takes false refuge in total randomness.
Is there an intrinsic intent in the universe to evolve, through random means, brains with the capacity for direct awareness of Mind?
