The vitality of experience

‘How long is this going to take? Am I doing this the quickest way or is there another technique I could use that will speed up the process?’ The basic model that John Main is identifying here is what he calls a ‘mechanistic’ model of life, and everything we do in life is interpreted through this model of mechanical operations. In other words, we learn to deal with life by mastering procedures, techniques, but as a result we miss what he calls the vitality of experience, we actually miss the aliveness, the vitality of life because we are reducing it in our minds or left-brains to a mechanism which we are controlling or performing. So society becomes mechanistic, society becomes a system, a mechanistic system, and individuals become cogs in this machine. And I think that depersonalisation of life and of society is a very real concern for us today.

Enlightenment by Laurence Freeman OSB