NCM & the Roots of Consciousness
by Hinko Livernoix

Think, please, about our formative years, those tens, hundreds of thousands of years in Africa as we woke up.

Violent years? No doubt, often violent, but not constantly. Intermittently violent as we struggled to establish and hold a place in the order of things.

Fearful years? That too intermittently, as we learned the value of caution.

Celebratory years? Of course, because there were moments of success.

The point: over a long span of time the whole range of behavior, which we know as ourselves, arose, and with it also the whole range of emotional and intellectual responses to the world and our behavior in it.

We struggle now to adjust those well-learned behaviors to a changed world. Behaviors which arose in response to the given world of nature are not necessarily the best in response to the mixed world of nature and culture that we now inhabit.

The light, half-wakeful sleep (think cats) that kept us alive in the Serengeti and the Olduvai Gorge has changed to the deeper, longer sleep of emergent civilization.

Sex roles that served us well on the climb our of the gorge now in a cultural context turn out to be dangerously restrictive and destructive.

And so on.

For all that, if you think about the quality of life then, in the earliest years of emergent self-consciousness, between the long bouts of hunting and gathering, reproducing and rearing, there must have been, with us as with other animals, long, long periods of alert wakefulness, the kind of attentive loitering that one sees still even in our pets. Sitting or lying and watching the world.

Surely the many hours spent thus over tens of thousands of years had a formative influence on the nature of our consciousness, how we think, and what we do with how we think. A passive, visual immersion in the world. An optical rapport with the world, and an absorption of the subtlest kinds of information from the world.

At rest, with a wide visual field before us, land and sky, earth and trees, desert and mountain. Eyes shifting from here to there to there, watching.

Is it then not possible, perhaps even probable that we, like the animals, drew nourishment from that quiet activity? Nourishment that we’ve now largely shut ourselves off from, living and working indoors. And when outdoors we are almost always moving purposefully from here to there, rarely stopping and just attending.

Only one culture celebrated such looking. In their classical landscape paintings the Chinese repeatedly sought to capture such moments of attentive observation of the world: the observer seemingly suspended in space with vastness before him, vastness of such a scale that humans are reduced to barely visible ants.

Call it NCM: Nature-centered Meditation.