Radical Means Going To The Root

Thursday, 11 September 2025, 10:57 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Perhaps because you have tried many different methods of meditation, you’re turned off to meditation. But it really just means that methods are antithetical to deeply quieting the mind.

Here are some suggestions. They are not meant to be instructions, much less a template, but may serve as a starting point to experimenting with undivided observation, which is the cornerstone of meditation.

Symbolic thought is a unique evolutionary adaptation, found only in humans on this planet. By its very nature, “higher thought” separates, in order to “remove and make ready for use.”

However apparently from its very inception in “fully modern humans” 100,000 or more years ago, conscious thought did not just function to separate things in nature for survival, permitting knowledge about plants and animals for hunting and gathering, but the humans psychologically separated themselves from nature and others.

The word for psychological separation is division, and it occurs within before without, inwardly before externally. Psychological separation was the proverbial “original sin,” and it led inevitably to conflict and war socially, and to increasing fragmentation of the earth ecologically.

Pre-agricultural people, living close to nature, were continuously reminded that that separation is an illusion, and found ways, through their myths and traditions, to mitigate man’s alienation.

Now all restraints are off, and global capitalism and AI are mining our minds and souls. That means the present planetary crisis of Homo sapiens as a whole is a crisis of human consciousness, the nadir of the fragmentary tendencies of thought, which the Earth is screaming at us to attend to.

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Meditation in the individual, by whatever name, is a remedy to psychological separation and fragmentation. The essence of psychological separation is the ancient habit of thought separating itself from itself as the observer, which continually stands apart from what one observes.

The observer is what’s called in philosophy an infinite regress. Defying direct observation, it recedes in habitual separation, like holding a mirror up to a mirror. How does one break the mirror, so the observer ends and observing without separation and interpretation begins?

Again, there is no method. Just be present in a relatively quiet spot of nature while questioning and observing the workings of the mind. Don’t go with anyone, or take your dog. Simply sit on a bench or beside a stream (if you’re fortunate enough to live near one) and let all your senses open.

That’s the first thing – allowing one’s senses to be as open and integrated as possible. That happens when one doesn’t choose to focus on anything in one’s environment, but simply watches and listens to every sight, sound and smell as they occur.

Meditation is precluded by concentration of any kind, whether one’s breath, a mantra, or reciting a prayer. Meditation begins with inclusive, choiceless awareness. Nature is a mirror for choiceless awareness if one allows her to be, which permits the senses to grow acute.

One’s thoughts naturally slow, and the spaces between thoughts increase. At this point the tendency is to become ‘stuck’ on a thought or in an emotion. I’ve found that jotting down such thoughts and emotions, with the intent to look at them later if necessary, helps to free the mind to simply observe so that the spaces and silences between thoughts can grow.

One soon notices that there always seems to be an observer that stands apart from what is being observed. The observer is the root of the self and the ego, which have generated the division, hatred and conflict in society.

So the observer is the ancient and deeply rooted habit of psychological separation, which is as old as man. It’s the false wellspring of the illusorily separate ‘I,’ the ‘me,’ the separate self. And contrary to Eastern nonsense, there is no such thing as a “Higher Self.”

The quieting of thought occurs when the observer falls away and there is just observing. Non-directed attention grows unseen in the brain, and at an unforeseeable moment, which always comes as a surprise, the mind-as-thought falls silent, and the Mind-as-Awareness is. Then the “peace that passes all understanding” comes over one.

Meditation is a lifelong journey of non-accumulative learning. Along the pathless way, time ends during one’s meditations, and intimations or more of the absolute, which is death/creation/love, come.

As long as we live however, there are questions. Even the most illumined human beings never stop questioning.

And I still begin my sittings, after allowing the senses to grow present and acute, with the question: Is the observer operating?

For as long as we are caught in its ancient habit of psychological separation, there can be no meditation and there can be no wholeness. With the effortless ending of the observer however, the door to limitless insight and inviolability opens.

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