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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
Martin LeFevre - Meditations - Latest News [Page 20]
‘Sentient’ AI, and What Differentiates Us As Human Beings
Monday, 27 June 2022, 10:10 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
Have you heard the one about the Google engineer who was fired because he declared that the AI program he’d been working with, called LaMDA, has a soul? It’s darkly fitting that as more and more humans lose their souls, AI engineers are seriously ... More >>
Imagining ‘Umwelts’ Is Unnecessary
Wednesday, 22 June 2022, 10:24 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
Rows of magnificent cumulus are piled up to the east. It’s an unusually cool afternoon before a protracted heat wave is due in California. I seize the opportunity and drive to Upper Park, parking near the last gate at the end of the gravel road. It’s less ... More >>
Indict The Bastard
Friday, 17 June 2022, 10:26 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
Having predicted the election of George Bush (twice), Barack Obama, and most notably, Donald Trump, you would think I ‘d have voice in the United States. You’d be wrong. But since what passes for democracy in America hangs in the balance, I must ... More >>
Is Universality A Western Idea?
Thursday, 16 June 2022, 10:32 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
Most people acknowledge that human beings are essentially the same wherever they live on earth. Yet there’s also a strong belief that ethnic and cultural differences are primary, and that universality is a Western construct. It cannot be both – ... More >>
Refusing To Procreate
Friday, 10 June 2022, 10:11 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
Many young people, in America, China and around the world, are choosing not to have children. In the West, their reason is a generalized sense of hopelessness about the future of humanity, often expressed in shorthand -- “climate anxiety.” “Climate ... More >>
Intelligent Life, Meditation And Transmutation
Wednesday, 8 June 2022, 9:44 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
It was the philosophical obsession that largely defined the first 15 years of my adulthood. After having a life-changing ‘mystical experience’ at 18 of the separative nature of thought as opposed to the seamless wholeness of nature, I began asking: More >>
Expansion Or Negation Of Self?
Thursday, 2 June 2022, 11:50 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
By invitation in the last few days, I attended a zoom reading and discussion of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Considered his masterpiece, the poem fuses the ‘divine I’ with the egocentric I in an originally and quintessentially American ... More >>
I Have Never Felt So Ashamed Of America
Thursday, 26 May 2022, 10:17 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
It’s very difficult to write about the kind of evil that erupted again in America yesterday. Nineteen elementary-age children and two teachers were slaughtered by another 18-year-old acting out of bottomless hatred for people and life. America ... More >>
Response To An Optimist’s Worldview
Tuesday, 24 May 2022, 10:59 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
Lynn is a life coach for business executives. This email exchange took place this weekend after a stimulating phone conversation on Friday. It reflects the worldviews of two people living on different planets. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide ... More >>
Weep for America, Work for Humanity : Martin LeFevre
Friday, 27 February 2015, 9:10 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
Sometimes you read something by a mouthpiece for the status quo that’s so outrageously false, yet so widely and subconsciously accepted, that you want to scream. Here’s such a boner (in the first sense of the word, though Viagra could have inspired it): ... More >>
Martin LeFevre: Melville’s Billy Budd
Sunday, 22 August 2010, 7:43 pm | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
One of the best studies of good and evil by an American writer is Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd.” If you haven’t read the novella, there’s an excellent 1962 film with the same title, which stars, and was directed and produced by, Peter Ustinov. ... More >>
Martin LeFevre: Thought Is a Single Stream
Friday, 13 August 2010, 11:35 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
It’s near dusk, and the parkland seems to be full of Cooper’s hawks. At one point on the path, a large, brown, stipple-winged hawk takes off from the path ahead of me with some small animal in its mouth. More >>
The Unmet Sorrow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Monday, 9 August 2010, 10:50 am | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
Here we are again, 65 years and tens of thousands of nuclear weapons later, commemorating the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps it’s because my first political memory, at ten, is of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that the issue ... More >>
Martin LeFevre: What Is Human Freedom?
Tuesday, 3 August 2010, 8:21 pm | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
A few friends and I have been asking: Are there choices in life, but is the chooser an illusion? If so, what is the basis of right action? These questions go to the heart of the problem of freedom and determinism. More >>
Afghanistan: The Tunnel at the End of the Light
Friday, 30 July 2010, 1:43 pm | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
WikiLeaks, the semi-respectable sibling of Wikipedia, has demonstrated that journalism is not a dead on arrival joke on the Web. The gauntlet for the war in Afghanistan has been thrown down. In what every news organization, reputable and disreputable, ... More >>
Palin’s ‘Grizzly Moms’ Hard to Bear
Friday, 23 July 2010, 6:14 pm | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
Sarah Palin recently granted her 50th endorsement of Republican office seekers. All but one are women. She is positioning herself as the biggest and baddest of the “Grizzly Moms,” fighting to defend the indefensible, sustain the unsustainable, and keep ... More >>
Creative Destruction and Man’s Destructiveness
Friday, 23 July 2010, 5:02 pm | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
The American media, even the progressive media, are promoting the idea that most of the life on Earth has been wiped out many times before—by asteroids, comets, or super-volcanoes. Why? Because the best pretext for continuing with human destructiveness ... More >>
Spy Games: Old Cold War and Hot New War
Friday, 16 July 2010, 5:57 pm | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
Two spy stories, in as many weeks, attest to how the old game of espionage has entered a territory somewhere between absurd and bizarre, and become dangerously irrelevant. Last week’s exchange of Russian and American spies was, we were told, a mere speed ... More >>
The Urgency of Psychological Revolution
Tuesday, 13 July 2010, 12:37 pm | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
The foundational philosophical investigation to which I devoted my youth flowed from this question: Why are humans generating increasing disorder and chaos, when we evolved along with all other life, and life moves in dynamic order and wholeness? More >>
Martin LeFevre: The Enlightenment Was a Misnomer
Monday, 12 July 2010, 3:07 pm | Martin LeFevre - Meditations
If the events of recent years have demonstrated anything, it is that the Enlightenment ideals of reason and human rationality cannot hold sway over the chaos of belief and irrationality. But that always was a Hobson’s choice. There is another factor ... More >>
