What Does It Mean To Have An Inner Life?

Friday, 25 July 2025, 12:04 pm
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

A huge bald eagle, the first one I’ve ever seen, soared across the little lake and alighted at the highest point on a tree at the entrance to an inlet about 300 meters away. I wouldn’t have been able to make a definite identification and observe it without the small binoculars I grabbed on my way out the door.

There were a few kayakers on the gently rippling water, plus a handful of fishermen and at least two meditators on the shore. The majestic raptor sat stock still, peering down on the lake for 45 minutes. After a few minutes of passive watchfulness, you could feel its presence as it intensely watched everything below.

Though there was a breeze, and an occasionally audible wind through the pines, the silence of the sacred spot was palpable. Despite the gentle wind, you could hear conversations 200 meters away as if people were in the same room.

Unnoticed, passive watchfulness for its own sake gathered unguided attention, which quieted thought and opened the brain to Mind. There was spontaneous, impersonal love, the mark of the meditative state and the essence of cosmic consciousness.

Just as passive listening to the outer and inner movement in the surrounding silence ignited a meditation, I had a premonition of the fisherman 15 meters away turning on some music. Sure enough, country music began to mar the stupendous quietness of the place.

Because it’s a reservoir for the nearby mountain community of Paradise (which burned down in one day six years ago, but left the pines encircling the lake unscathed), no dogs or gas-powered motors are allowed.. Everyone in the area knows it’s a special place and treats it, and others, with uncommon respect.

So when I politely asked the fisherman to turn his music off, he complied without complaint. I commented on the bald eagle, which wasn’t visible from his spot. Apparently a local man, he said there was a number of them that nest around the reservoir, and seemed genuinely glad when I said it was the first one I’ve ever seen. I thanked him again for turning off his music and went back to my meditation.

What does it mean to have an inner life, and why is it essential?

By definition a human being has an inner life, and is no longer contributing to war, which has its roots in the division and identification within all of us.

That isn’t a refusal to see the realities of power, and the necessity, for example, of calling out with a cri de coeur Israel’s campaign of starvation and genocide in Gaza. It’s simply the realisation that by “choosing sides” one is contributing to war and genocide.

An inner life begins with being aware of oneself and one’s surroundings in the present --what’s commonly called mindfulness. However the universal directive of mindfulness these days hasn’t translated, as far as I can tell, into an inner life for all but a few.

Besides mindfulness, having an inner life also requires one take the time and carve out the space every day to sit quietly outdoors, in nature if one is fortunate enough to live in a place where one can still see and feel the Earth, but even simply on a patio at sunrise or sunset in a city.

The quality of observation is everything. Most people only know observation from a center outward, which isn’t actually observation at all. Right observation means observation without out the separation of the observer, without the judgments and evaluations of the self, and without the comparison society instills.

That means the common habits of mind of inward authority and outward identification have to be negated to have an inner life.

With regard to authority, no one can teach us about ourselves except ourselves. Any degree of followership denies self-knowing, which is the essence of an inner life.

One perennially begins with what and where one is, that is, what one is actually feeling, thinking and doing without rationalisation, judgment or comparison.

Nothing is permanent, not even the stars or the universe itself. Yet we desire and seek permanency. Why? Is it in the nature of thought, and its illusory fabrication, the self, to seek security through permanency?

Clearly the demand for security has led to the global condition of increasing insecurity, for individuals and nations.

So to have an inner life one must be one’s own teacher and pupil, questioning and observing patterns and conditioning as they are uniquely in play within us.

Without an inner life, at best we inevitably bob on the sea of collective darkness that human consciousness has become. At worst, we become inured to the atrocities of this world, and thereby become part of them.

I believe without belief that it is our birthright not only for all people to be treated with respect and kindness, but for every person to have the freedom to sit beside a stream or small lake and feel the benediction of life.

I may not see even a glimmer of such a world in my lifetime, but it is the world the living must pour the foundation for within, if this hellish world isn’t to prevail until the end.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail