Truth, Knowledge, and the Sacred in a Relational Cosmos

Let’s follow the thread into what this rethinking of “the real” does to our understanding of truth, knowledge, and the sacred—three concepts that, in traditional frames, were built on the assumption that reality is objective, fixed, and knowable from outside. But if the Fall and the Collapse are diagrams of how reality becomes real through construal, then these ideas must be reconfigured from within.

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🔍 1. Truth Is Not Correspondence, but Construal

In the classical model, truth is when a proposition corresponds to an independent reality.

But in a relational cosmos, where the real itself is instantiated meaning, correspondence no longer makes sense in that way. You can’t compare a construal to an “unconstrued reality”—because there is no unconstrued reality to compare it to.

So what is truth now?

Truth is coherence within the constraints of a given construal.

• It is not whether your story matches the real.

• It is whether your construal makes meaning possible within a system of relations.

• In myth: a truth is a pattern that helps a meaner navigate experience meaningfully.

• In physics: a truth is a model that allows phenomena to be measured and predictions to be made.

Truth, then, is not objectivity, but integrity—the structural soundness of a meaning system in relation to its context.

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📚 2. Knowledge Is Participatory

In a relational cosmos, knowing is not about extraction. It’s not the passive acquisition of facts. It is always:

A participatory act that shapes what can be known.

This is true both in myth and in science:

• The mythic knower does not learn facts about the gods—they encounter the divine through story, rite, and symbol. The knowledge is transformative.

• The quantum physicist does not observe a hidden particle—they instantiate a result through a situated measurement.

In both, the knower is not separate from the known.

To know is to engage, to risk, to change.

To know is to instantiate a world.

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🕊 3. The Sacred Is the Potential That Resists Final Construal

What, then, is the sacred?

In myth, the sacred is that which cannot be possessed, cannot be fully known. It is the tree in the garden, the cloud on the mountain, the name you must not say.

In physics, this maps to the uncollapsed wavefunction—the full field of potential before it is instantiated.

So perhaps:

The sacred is the horizon of potential—the remainder that no construal can exhaust.

• It is the source from which meaning arises.

• It is the limit that keeps meaning from becoming tyranny.

• It is the reminder that the world is always more than we’ve yet meant.

This aligns with our framing:

The sacred is not supernatural.

It is meta-semiotic—it marks the boundary between meaning and unmeaning, instance and potential.

To honour the sacred is to remember:

Every construal excludes. Every instantiation forecloses. And yet, the potential remains.

This gives us a deeply ethical cosmos.

Not because there is a cosmic rulebook.

But because every act of meaning-making is an act of care—a response to the sacredness of what has not yet been meant.

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🧶 4. Where This Leads

When we reimagine the real as relational construal, then:

• Truth becomes coherent construal within context.

• Knowledge becomes participatory enactment.

• The Sacred becomes the inexhaustible potential that construal can never fully capture.

And in this light:

• Myth is not false, it is foundational.

• Science is not a mirror, it is a method of enactment.

• Reality is not external, it is unfolding.

• And the self is not a container, but a participant in the becoming of the world.