Coda: Knowing as Participation
“We do not merely come to know the world.
We are the way the world comes to know.”
There is a story we have long told ourselves about knowledge.
That it is something we find.
That truth lies out there, waiting to be discovered, mapped, and mastered.
But in a relational ontology, truth is not waiting.
It is becoming—
And it becomes through us.
Meaning Is Not Discovered; It Is Enacted
The shift is subtle and total.
We are not spectators.
We are participants in the symbolic unfolding of the cosmos.
Every act of knowing is not a passive reception of information, but a creative construal of potential into instance:
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To perceive is to instantiate relation.
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To understand is to form symbolic patterns in the dance of becoming.
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To know is to actualise what could be known, within the web of relation that makes knowing possible.
The universe does not “have meaning” apart from us.
But nor do we impose it arbitrarily.
Meaning is relational—
It emerges where the cosmos meets the construal of a meaner.
The Meaner Is Never Separate
There is no knower outside the known.
No Archimedean point.
No God’s eye view.
Even in science—perhaps especially there—
the meaner is within the system they seek to understand.
When we measure a particle’s spin, or map a black hole,
we are not simply describing it.
We are participating in its symbolic actualisation.
We give it form, not as creators of illusion,
but as co-creators of the meaningful.
This is not solipsism. It is not subjectivism.
It is relational realism—the view that what is, becomes actual through relation.
Consciousness as Recursive Knowing
If all knowing is relational, then consciousness is the recursive loop of meaning:
awareness of awareness,
meaning of meaning,
the cosmos folding back upon itself through symbol.
The self is not an observer.
It is a locus of construal.
An emergent pattern of recursive semiotic loops, each one enfolding world, memory, sensation, and possibility.
This is why consciousness is not “in the head.”
It is in relation.
It spans organism and world, brain and symbol, experience and culture.
And so when we ask, what is consciousness?
we are really asking:
What is the cosmos becoming, through this recursive moment of knowing?
Myth, Science, and Poetics: Concentric Acts of Meaning
We have journeyed through myth, through science, through poetics.
Each is a mode of construal.
Each a symbolic grammar of becoming.
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Myth weaves meaning into world through story, ritual, and archetype.
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Science constrains and symbolises the possible through models, equations, and experiments.
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Poetics holds the paradox—opening the ineffable to symbolic resonance.
These are not rival paths.
They are concentric spirals, nested within the process of the cosmos becoming intelligible to itself.
They are the languages of a world in process,
seeking pattern, beauty, coherence, truth—
not because these are given, but because they are what becomes, through us.
To Know Is to Participate in the Becoming of the World
This is the deepest implication of a relational ontology:
We do not stand apart from the cosmos.
We are its reflexive moment.
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We are the grammar through which it speaks.
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We are the syntax by which it coheres.
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We are the metaphor by which it becomes mythic.
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We are the model by which it understands itself scientifically.
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We are the symbol in whose unfolding it becomes conscious.
Knowledge, then, is not possession.
It is participation.
A sacred act of co-becoming.
A shared breath between self and world, meaning and matter, form and unfolding.
And so the spiral completes—
only to begin again.
Not from ignorance, but from a deeper openness.
Not to conquer the world, but to mean it differently.
The cosmos has never been static.
And neither are we.
Together, we are the movement of meaning.
The recursion of relation.
The story the world tells to become more fully itself.
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