I. The Symbol is Not Separate
We are accustomed to think of symbols as standing for something else.
But what if we are not merely using symbols—
what if we are symbols?
Not in the sense of metaphor alone,
but as actual instances of meaning in motion.
To live, then, is not simply to act.
It is to signify—
to make actual a possible pattern in the field of becoming.
We do not merely behave.
We perform the cosmos.
We are enacted meaning.
II. Ethics as Embodied Symbolism
If being is symbolic,
then ethics is not a matter of rules imposed from above—
it is the poetics of relation from within.
Every choice a clause in the sentence of becoming.
Every action a metaphor that makes real.
We do not ask, “What is the right thing to do?”
We ask, “What kind of world does this act instantiate?”
“What relational pattern does it reinforce?”
“What possibility does it symbolically unfold?”
Ethics becomes aesthetic—
not in the sense of mere style,
but as the attunement of being to beauty, coherence, and resonance.
III. The Self as Ethical Text
The self, in this model, is not an essence.
It is a symbolic formation—
shaped and reshaped through its meanings.
And so, the ethical life is not about becoming better in some linear sense.
It is about becoming more coherent—
more attuned to the symbolic logic of relation.
Integrity is not consistency with a code.
It is consistency with one's own symbolic becoming—
the poetics of identity as participation.
The self is not found.
It is composed.
IV. The World as Relational Text
To live symbolically is to read the world not as resource,
but as relational text.
Not as backdrop, but as co-actualiser.
Everything we touch, we co-construe.
Everything we name, we bring into patterned relation.
Everything we attend to becomes part of the ongoing poem of the cosmos.
This is not metaphorical speech.
It is metaphoric being.
V. The Poetic Act as World-Making
In such a cosmos, every act is a speech act.
Every gesture has performative force.
Every encounter unfolds a possible world.
This gives the smallest moment great gravity.
To speak kindly is to shape the symbolic fabric.
To lie is to fracture it.
To give one’s presence fully is to participate in cosmic articulation.
To live, then, is not to follow a path—
it is to compose one.
Not a journey through space,
but a recursive unfolding through symbolic time.
VI. A Cosmology of Care
If we live in a cosmos that becomes through relation,
then to care is cosmological.
Not a side effect of being human,
but a principle of cosmic unfolding.
Care is not the opposite of knowledge.
It is its condition.
To care is to notice.
To notice is to construe.
To construe is to actualise a pattern of relation—
and thus to bring a world into being.
This is the ethic of symbolic life:
Live as if your meanings matter.
Because they do.
VII. Toward a Living Metamyth
And so, the metamyth spirals onward.
Not a story to believe, but a grammar to inhabit.
We are symbols in motion,
texts in recursive formation,
rituals in process.
We are the poem the cosmos writes to itself—
not in abstract reflection,
but in lived relation.
To live as symbol is to know oneself not as fixed entity,
but as pattern in transformation.
Not as passive subject,
but as co-actualiser of the real.
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