The Meaning of Meaning – Part 1

Assessment: When I first saw a possible connection between the numinous relationship experience and the human experience of meaning itself, I quite thought I mightn’t have much more to say about (female led) relationships at all any more. I was (happily) wrong; see especially here, here, here, here and here. In my last segment about the nature of the human experience of meaning I think I either burned myself out or finally managed a functionally accurate (enough) theoretical framework with adequate explanatory power (for a while anyway). However, although in this analysis of the ‘biological meaning matrix’ I’ve hinted at how to do this, I haven’t yet adequately connected the human interior experience of meaning (and passion) to the numinous (female led) relationship experience.

Theory: The experience of numinousity is similar to ‘flow’ and ‘play’ in that it results from action or passion (nearly) completely ‘filling up’ the ‘space’ within a given (no matter how they are ‘derived’ or ‘created’) set of rules, borders or limitations.

Yet the experience of numinousity is unlike ‘flow’ and ‘play’ in that it’s meaning has an aspect of ‘revelation’ or ‘epiphany’, akin to a ‘short circuit’ of consciousness, that (I think possibly) results from a large scale ‘fitted-ness’, like (a large number of) puzzle pieces (all at once), of symbol/experience with one’s interior mental framework.

The numinous intimate (female led) relationship experience is thus particularly interesting because the dynamic (I think) is one’s partner becomes (to a large degree) the set of rules, borders or limitations (through empathy and sublimation) that one (nearly) ‘fills up’. The result I think of as a ‘relationship synapsis’: the perceived intimate ‘lining up’ of two people’s interior spaces and an intimate sense of ‘fitted-ness’ that also has qualities of ‘playful flow’.

This is an emotional ‘rim experience’ on the mental space spectrum but since it happens (is at least perceived as happening) on both one’s emotional interior and interactively on one’s exterior, this lands on arc C or D (depending on how compact or differentiated one’s mental framework is) and arc A.

And, to answer another question I had, I do think meaning is both an emergent property of mental frameworks and used as if functionally accurate for the objectively ‘real’; thus meaning is (or at least can be) simultaneously concurrent to experience and retrospective.

(Meaning of Meaning part 2: Love)