Experience and Construct

Make sure you put in the bit about Horse Head Nebula.
~My Wife

One ‘problem’ with the nature of labels, symbols, and other perspective positioning spectra, orienting mental frameworks and paradigms is that such interior constructs always must occur after the experience, are secondary to the experience and can never take the place of the experience. Yet if on one hand any experience has an objective temporal primacy in its aspect of engendering meaning, on the other hand interior constructs have a functional subjective primacy in forming a coherent understanding of meaningful experiences.
~ OH, ‘Tween Darkness and Differential

As recently as above, I have wondered about the nature of meaning and whether meaning itself is a retrospective emergent property of experience, and I divided meaning into two categoric poles of a spectrum (see also here and here) according to the following properties: meaning from immediate experience such as passion, the numinous, intuition and in general intense, spontaneous, irrational, emotional events; and meaning from interior constructs with such properties as reason, logic, relational analysis and in general direct mental, differential pursuit of meaning (cf. differential and compact).

First, since I expect whether meaning is objectively retrospective or exterior of self to remain unknowable, my curiosity about these things somewhat underscores my differentiation predilection and how this can lead to my interior darkness. I obviously could use shift in my balance of modes of meaning towards the experiential, and I have been attempting this here and there.

Yet I also continue to believe the nature of our common subjective experiences is significant and knowable to some extent. Thus, curiously whether meaning is or isn’t, objectively speaking, an emergent property is less important than the fact that during immediate experience, meaning can feel as if it were objectively external and part of the holistic cosmos, and that during interior construct examination, meaning can feel as if it were a property of the objectively external universe that is merely discovered. 

Moreover, maintaining perspective about the perception of an experience and the unknowable objective reality of an experience (e.g. philosophy versus philodoxy or even ideology) also seems on the whole of lesser importance than how well an individual manages to assimilate the new ‘puzzle piece’ of meaningful experience with other meaning derived from their various interior constructs – i.e. the nature of objective reality and our ‘minor deviations’ from the nature of objective reality are of less importance than coherency of individual subjective meaning. 

If you had never seen the Horse Head Nebula and did not know what it was, you’re still bound to have a meaningful experience of it were someone to hand you an unmarked picture of it. You would know it for a representation of stars and could still have the immediate experience of associated wonder and grandeur even if you didn’t have the differentially marked scale of light years, star names, chromagraphic star scale, know exactly how far the colors had to be shifted into visible light, or even if you philodoxically or ideologically thought you already knew these things and say what stars and nebulae were made of and happened to be far from correct. Meaning seems to depend more on the level of ‘interactive coherency’ in an experience of self with anything that is not self, unknown or ambiguous, than upon being right, wrong or having a particular mode of experience.

Indeed regardless of an individual’s exact particular blend of meaning from differential interior constructs and meaning from compact immediate experience, it seems more important for an individual to strike a balance of modal meaning conducive to maintaining a positive perspective, one oriented on growth, happiness and well being rather than, say, upon fear. One can, for example, be fearful of not collecting ‘enough’ meaning widgets and live driven from activity to activity, never really enjoying any experience or meaningful happiness. Or one might treat meaning as a futile zero sum game in the face of death and merely strive to avoid as much pain as possible or even prematurely effect the end of their ‘game’. 

More positive perspectives consist of things such as living openly to experience, treating the experiences we do have as real and valid, learning that change is like difference in that it is neither good or bad, just something we’re going to experience.

I know it’s a fairly ‘zen’ thing to say, but I’m often struck how it always seems the only tenable attitude toward life is to enjoy what there is to enjoy of the past (though not rehash, relive and dwell in the past), enjoy what there is to enjoy about the present, and, should you be among those fortunate to have more coming, enjoy what there is of the future to enjoy – when it gets here.
~ OH, Health: Enjoying What Is