Despite the governor of California’s orders to only go out alone for groceries and exercise, the bumpy gravel road into the canyon beyond town is lined with cars and small groups walking together.
Though alone, I’m driving one of the cars into the canyon before three days of predicted rain. So I feel no separation or annoyance at the crowd of which I am part. Indeed lately, whenever I hear someone refer to “people,” I’ve started pointing out the implicit separation. There are no people but us.
Walking up the rocky trail just 200 meters from the last parking area, there’s no one in sight except a mother and her teenage son coming up the path 25 meters behind me. I comment on the wildflowers and stride up to my meditation place.
The lupines are even more plentiful than last week, and within a few minutes I nearly forget the pandemic amidst the beauty of vertical volcanic slabs and majestic view up-canyon.
It takes an hour to come to the peace beyond all understanding however. Actually, it isn’t the peace beyond all understanding, but the peace that surpasses all knowledge and experience. Friends and loved ones can give comfort, but only solitude, especially in nature, can give true peace.
Less than half a dozen people pass by on the rocky path behind me in an hour. For the first time I can see a figure high above, more than a mile away, a tiny, solitary human being standing at the edge of the cliff.
Suddenly everything is there, all that is, and all that ever was. And all that ever will be? No, that is in the process of being created during this, the most pregnant moment for humanity a 100, 1000, perhaps a million years.
As bad as this pandemic is, it’s also a tremendous opportunity to re-examine and reset our relationship with nature with respect to the climate crisis and the Sixth Extinction, before the rapacious global economy starts up again. Most people are waiting for it to be over, but waiting is death.
Four things are clear. First, a psychological revolution is essential to awaken human consciousness and change the disastrous course of humankind.
Second, a revolution in consciousness is not a collective movement, but a creative explosion igniting in a sufficient number of undivided human beings.
Third, the revolution in consciousness has not begun, and no one knows how many self-knowing, genuinely awakening individuals it will require to ignite.
Fourth, the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, with this “stand down” of the ravenous global economy, is the last chance in our age for the living generations to light the psychological revolution. If it does not occur now, the world will become a much more authoritarian, homogenous and barren place after its over.
So is there a strong metaphysical aspect to the coronavirus pandemic? Can humankind change course before it’s too late for our age, if not humanity itself? What is psychological revolution, and can we ignite it within ourselves, and through small groups all over the world thinking together as one mind?
A creative explosion of insight is essential, and will begin when enough people prepare the human heart and hearth. One group of people will strike the match at the right moment.
A true global civilization doesn’t flow from imagination, but from the insight of the few igniting insight in the many.
What can you do? Be self-knowing and do the spadework within, which means seeing yourself as you are from moment to moment. Share in the intent to ignite the psychological revolution, and question together, online and when safe again, face-to-face.
Martin LeFevre
Lefevremartin77 at gmail.com
