Language is our sole access to meaning. We experience life with our attention and sensation, but all of that is literally meaningless. Without our words, we would live and experience without any context and also without any meaning to our experience.
So, just as we came from nothing to enter into an already existing world, we also entered life by entering into an already existing language, with its complete sets of meaning and context that seems to have always been in place before our arrival. In effect, we are thrown into this world as it actually exists. We enter into an ongoing process of social meaning that defines us according to culture and its context in this moment of time.
In the laws of physics, an object at rest, remains at rest, unless a force acts upon it; and an object in motion, remains in motion, unless a force acting against it and degrades its motion. This description is also the description of thrown-ness. Life builds in its momentum of occurrences and events. It eventually declines against the seemingly sameness of the present moment that seems never to change. This present moment is eternal and it does not decline, when life begins its decline toward death. Within that individual life, a human being lives as if the meaning that he or she makes of their life is reality, without seeing that it is largely being constructed from contexts that exist around them, and by means of language.
"AS-IF-NESS" is the aspect of our thrown nature that we experience. While we exist, we operate as if our beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, opinions are true, and we fail to see, that they have all been programmed into us by life. They are part of our thrown, automatic way of being. We are "thrown" in the time and place our arising, and in the context set by those that came before us, and from our past. We experience it AS-IF it is all the Past, Present, and Future in a linear time. Yet it is all now. In effect, that past is prologue. In this way of being thrown, there seems to be no possibility outside the pathway of our our thrown-ness.
Each generations is different because of this, but we fail to see that this difference is superficial. My generation was raised with television. My parents generation was raised with radio. Today’s young people are raised with the internet and cell phones All of these are delivery systems for language, and all of them contribute to the thrown nature of life. They are cultural. Language is always creating and sustaining reality for each generation. It uses the technology of the times we are living. Behind this state of thrown-ness is the same way of being, and the same subjective sense of living in a world as an individual. Yet it is without the experience of being in touch with our real nature; without a sense of being present to the moments of life that are transcendental.
We routinely fail to recognize that thrown-ness is indifferent to its role in the creation, maintenance, and destruction of our world. We play a part in the unfolding of those processes. This is an automatic and mechanical process of nature that uses our life. If we somehow began to interact with meaning in a way that allows for our true being, which is timeless, to become fully realized in us, the thrown-ness would operate AS-IF we interacted consciously right now with our inherited meaning from the past. Other contexts than the passive and automatic ones that operate are then possible. Can we begin to replicate a new context of our creation? One that has meaning that enables human beings to arise to a potential we do not yet recognize as even being possible?
It is the fact that we are programmed and operated by means of the drift of consciousness in which we are thrown that makes a change of our state of being possible and it is our ignorance of it that makes it seem impossible. That is because consciousness exists outside our thrown nature. However if we wake up to it, we become self-generated, human beings. Here there exists another possibility. That we are a quantum phenomenon, where the presence of an observer consciously observing determines the reality that occurs through that observing.
Can we begin to see how we really are? Can we look at the language we use to describe what occurs, and the meaning and context that are thrown with it? Can we create a language that generates a new world with a new set of meanings that throws us toward a new possibility? Maybe, such a new world is possible if we do.
Photo by Levi Midnight on Unsplash
© Copyright 2006 Robert Fertman, All Rights Reserved
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