"Here’s what I know, based on my experience.", KC started...

   Here’s what I know, based on my experience. 

   We live in a world of mediated experience.  Everything, including our own bodies, is a filter on Reality.  Even our ideas are part of the filter. 

   Reality is unmediated experience.  When you experience Reality it feels as if you see everything, all at once.  The kind of divisions, categories, sequences that we’re used to here don’t seem to occur in Reality.  Yet everything is very distinct, unique, and essential in Reality. 

   Anyone who experiences Reality comes away with the ... 

primary feeling that we are loved.  And I mean Loved.  Another part of that primary feeling is an experience of mind-boggling beauty.  It’s as if your heart leapt up in your throat and you’re possessed. 

   It takes a great deal of love for a person in Reality to approach us here.  There’s a diminishing for them.  On the other hand, it can be overwhelming for one of us to see someone in Reality.  It blows your fuses, you might say.  If you’re really immersed in mediated reality you’re going to have a tough time dealing with unmediated Reality. 

   Some of the scientists say that life-after-death experiences are nothing more than bio-chemical artifacts.  Of course, these are the same people who say that falling in love is just chemistry.  It’s like saying that a beautiful painting is nothing but ground-up minerals - and those in turn are nothing more than molecules. 

   Mediated experience points to unmediated experience, the same way a portrait points to the person who poses for the painting. 

   Needless to say, some portraits are more successful at capturing the person than others. 

   In fact the great joy in life is playing with the colors – painting different portraits, capturing the many faces, moods, subtleties of Reality. 

   Or, to use a different metaphor, many different pieces of music can celebrate a theme - we, our lives, are those varied compositions. 

   To get caught up in mediated reality, to mistake it for Reality, is like mistaking the menu for the meal.  It doesn’t pay to take this life too seriously - we’re not meant to.  St. Augustine ... 

  said it best, “Love God and do what you will.” 

   Some of us are born gifted with some sense of unmediated Reality.  From early childhood we have experiences that tell us there is more to the world than meets the eye.  If we try to tell our families about what we “see” they get grim, embarrassed, silent.  We learn it’s better to be quiet.  But we never forget.  Many of us become writers, artists, musicians, dancers...

   The easiest way to find unmediated Reality is through the child within you.  Somewhere in the ...

 Gospels it says something like, Unless you are like a little child you can’t enter the kingdom of Heaven. 

   In our time this means dropping the ironic pose.  My generation was particularly cursed with the Irony Filter.  We couldn’t just take life at face value, we had to detach and cooly observe everything from an intellectual distance. 

   I suppose this is what happens when you teach people that mediated reality is all there is, that there is no magic. 

   There is a writer, Morris ...

  Berman, who wrote about these things extremely well, in The Reenchantment of the World.  And a philosopher no less than Alfred North Whitehead also dealt with these ideas. 

   So by unmediated Reality do I mean “God” ?  I’ll leave that to wiser minds than mine.  But I do think God is a person, not just some high-minded idea.  Nor do I think God puts all sorts of conditions on loving us.  I do think our own attachment to mediated reality can get in the way of experiencing unmediated Reality.  No matter how ...

  “spiritual” you are, you find your body is very attached to mediated reality, indeed.  “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. 

   Our bodies create our individuality.  I think the soul is the product of the intersection between our bodies and our spirits.  The body informs the spirit and vice versa.  The spirit gets consciousness through the body, and the body gets timelessness through the spirit.  Reality embraces the individual.  Each of us is loved. 

   What about religion?  Religion tends to be suspicious of anyone ...

who claims experience of unmediated Reality.  Of course, the all-time worse offender was Christ, who said he was unmediated Reality. 

Certainly Jesus was possessed by unmediated Reality.  He tried to tell people they were loved, that there was much more to the world than meets the eye, and not to take mediated reality too seriously. 

   Anyone in this life who experiences unmediated Reality changes the world.  I don’t know how this works, or why, I just know it’s true.  I mean this quite literally. 

   Unmediated Reality does not force itself upon us.  But the people who experience it open the door and bring it into this world, and this world is forever changed.