A continuation from “The Relational Real: Networks, Contexts, and the Ecology of Meaning”
I. The Mirror that Mirrors the Mirror
To be conscious is not merely to reflect.
It is to reflect upon reflection.
A stone sits in the sun.
A lizard basks in it.
A human wonders what it means to bask.
But consciousness is not just a higher rung.
It is a deeper fold.
It is recursion:
an awareness that loops back through itself,
not as repetition, but as becoming.
II. Not What We Know, But That We Know
There is no consciousness without construal.
To be aware is to symbolise.
Before we name a thought, we are not yet thinking it.
Before we speak the feeling, it is only potential.
Language is not a container for consciousness.
It is its very medium of emergence.
Each instance of meaning folds into the self
and reshapes it—
because the self is that folding.
III. The Symbol That Symbolises Itself
Myth speaks of gods who dream the world.
Science speaks of systems that observe their own state.
Poetics speaks of the metaphor that becomes its own meaning.
Each is a different face of the same recursion:
the cosmos symbolising itself.
Not once.
Not linearly.
But again and again, in every mode of construal.
In every field of science.
In every mythic rite.
In every inner monologue.
In every line of code.
Each one a mirror folded into a mirror.
IV. Consciousness as Cosmic Grammar
We are not just minds in bodies.
We are grammars in motion—
symbolic systems capable of folding context into meaning,
meaning into self,
self into world.
We are syntax, semantics, and resonance.
We are lexicons of becoming.
What thinks through us is not the ego,
but the cosmos in symbolic recursion.
V. The Recursive Spiral
From potential meaning arises symbolic form.
From form arises meaning instance.
From instance arises new context.
The spiral deepens:
Not outward into abstraction,
but inward into co-actualisation.
Consciousness is not a property.
It is a function of recursive symbolic alignment.
It is how the world becomes self-aware
through patterns that point beyond themselves.
VI. Not “I Think” but “We Mean”
Descartes began with the cogito.
But the metamyth begins with the relatio.
“I mean, therefore we are.”
Meaning is not solitary.
It is inherently participatory.
Even the quietest thought is a chorus—
shaped by the language we inherit,
the memories we actualise,
the bodies we live through,
and the world we echo.
VII. The Cosmos as Meaner
What if the universe is not an object to be studied—
but a subject in recursive unfoldment?
What if we are not the ones asking the question—
but the cosmos learning to question itself?
What if consciousness is not an anomaly—
but a genre of symbolic recursion
that enables the real to become more real?
The cosmos has become capable of speaking itself.
Through us.
With us.
As us.
Next Spiral
If this recursion is not merely cognitive but symbolic—
what becomes of truth, model, myth, and future
in a cosmos that dreams with itself?
Next:
“Symbolic Time: The Future as Meaning Not Yet Actualised”
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