The Framework of Interpretation

My husband and I were talking this past weekend, as we often do. We often engage in deeper, more philosophical discussions about “life.” That is what attracted me to him in the first place! After 31 years we are still able to go there, to meet each other in the depths, even though our paths have seemingly taken us in different directions. Like the poet Robert Frost wrote, we are kind of like two roads that diverged into the woods, each of us taking a less well-traveled path in our own way. And even though we are both on “different paths” we still manage to somehow converge here and there, to cross each other’s pathways. Sometimes my husband has a hard time when I talk more “mystically”, more abstractly, what he calls “ooga-booga” language. And I continue to be enamored with the wisdom that sometimes pours forth from his being.

During our discussion out of his mouth poured: “The moment is the experience, not the framework we put around it to interpret it. So don’t frame the experience or circumstance with interpretation.” Something caught my attention there – the “framework of interpretation” – and I realized how much I do this. How I have erected this framework of interpretation through which I see life, creating a scaffolding of ideas, beliefs, opinions and judgments – a frame of reference that frames everything I see. Like when you go on vacation and spend your entire time behind the lens of a camera, taking pictures of the experience, but never really experiencing it. And so the interpretation of things becomes the frame of reference through which life is seen, instead of the direct experience of living it from moment to moment.

The same is true of “spirituality” it seems. My tendency is to hold on to a particular frame of reference through which to experience “Truth.” “The Mystery” just is. It’s not my image of what it should be, or what it should look like. It’s not in my identities that I project onto it or identifications with particular belief systems. “The Mystery” is authentic in and of Itself, is the reality of what is, not the image I was conditioned to believe. And so it seems my challenge is to see beyond the identity I give it, the image of it, into “The Mystery” Itself – seeing how “The Mystery” reveals Itself without the interpretation, without the framework that I have constructed around it. It was as if in my husband’s words I was being invited to look beyond the scaffolding of interpretation – the stories, the thoughts, the ideas, the images, even the languaging of “It” that keep me in my comfort zone, that keep me from seeing directly.

It seems this requires being open to actually *experience* It – to actually *see* It without the pre-conceived ideas/beliefs *about* It. And for me although the “religious” framework has been gone for many years, there’s still evidently a scaffolding in place, a framework where I try to extract a particular interpretation from the experience of “The Mystery,” instead of just *seeing* it for what it is.

As the conversation continued, my husband then said: “We all stand at the portals of Awareness.” I gasped. These words spoke to me so clearly. He said we are like children looking through a peephole in a fence. A child will look through a peephole and tell you what they see, they don’t worry about being “qualified” to say it, and they don’t interpret what they see. Innocence just sees.

Like my husband so profoundly said – we all stand at the portals of Awareness, of SEEING. Are we curious enough to look, to peak through and see, to go beyond the familiar frameworks? Do we really want to *see* what is beyond the scaffolding, beyond the stories that we tell, the beliefs we believe that keep us in our comfort zones – that keep us from seeing through the Portal – to “The Mystery”…

(for other related readings this week see Liminal Light and this unlit light)