Is Your Life Mediated or Unmediated?
Insulated and Isolated or Fearlessly with a wide open heart?
Are You a Second Hand Person?
There is no true learning or knowing anything
outside of the context of direct experience and relationships.
"We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not [one of] hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light." (Hildegard of Bingen 1098-1179)
Living as close to the jagged edge of reality as possible cuts and wounds, burns and scars. It’ll break your heart wide open.
And yet when I live safely up and away from those jagged rocks, where it is safe and secure, comfortable and cushiony, I slip into a state of being comfortably numb; missing the real stuff of life. Missing life’s essence. Missing that which is real.
Mediated meaning and purpose: Life, truth, reality come from an external source, spoon fed. You settle for being a second hand person. This is a form of philosophical suicide.
Unmediated meaning and purpose: Life, truth, reality come from an internal source, we are original, experiencing life directly; living without appeal, without excuse, without blame.
My progression was from fundamentalism (total mediation, spoon fed dogma) to Quaker (quite unmediated, direct experience in silence, inner voice, inner teacher, no creed) and yet there is still a Christian framework embedded within these theologies, which are human constructs.
Living without appeal is by definition living without co-dependence on meaning and purpose from another, without appealing to the gods and their religions. Not even appealing to life having some self defined, revealed purpose. No framework. No agenda. No dogma. No theology. No creed.
We are story-telling beasts and we use this ability to give meaning and purpose. We create or adopt stories in our heads, myths, that give us a grounding upon which to build our lives. In the story we choose our truth, our reality. We often call this story adoption our foundation upon which we build our house on rock or solid ground rather than sand or shifting, unstable ground. Meaning can only come from the stories we are told and then, in turn, tell ourselves.
Like a moth to the flame, we must choose how close to reality our stories come. We can create meaning from a story that is not true at all but is a story that has been handed down through generations without any verification and any concrete connection to reality.
Or we can create meaning from a story that is as close to reality as we can get without getting mortally burned. This is the nature of the human condition, the nature of the myth, and the nature of language and thought.
All religions and belief systems are human constructs that are based in thought and language. We imagine. We think. We create images and stories in our heads. We use language to tell these stories. But words are not reality. Words cannot be reality, ever. All they can do is point to reality, i.e. MEDIATE REALITY. That is the natural limitation of language. This is the world we have been given. We can imagine what we think is reality. We can describe what we believe about reality. But these are all stories and images that remain trapped in our minds. No one can take reality or truth and stick it in their head. When we mediate reality, we end up with stories and images. So the question is:
