Relativity Reframed: General Relativity and the Gravity of Meaning

If Special Relativity rewrote the grammar of motion, then General Relativity added the poetics of gravitation. But what if we read curvature not as a distortion of a container called space-time—but as the instantiated unfolding of process in relation to mass as semantic attractor? In the relational cosmos, gravity is not pull. It is patterned actualisation.

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Gravity, Not as Force, but as Relational Constraint

In classical physics, gravity is a force that pulls objects together. In Einstein’s General Relativity, it is reimagined: not a force, but a curvature of space-time around mass and energy. But this still assumes that space-time is a kind of ontological arena—something that can be shaped and curved by entities that exist within it.

In our relational ontology, we turn this inside-out.

There is no arena.

There is only unfolding.

There is only construal.

Mass does not curve space-time.

Mass constrains how space and time are actualised.

What we call “curvature” is a systemic shift in the way meaning is instantiated, depending on proximity to semantic attractors—masses—within the unfolding symbolic process of the cosmos.

Gravity as Relational Patterning

Let’s take the principle at the heart of General Relativity:

Matter tells space-time how to curve.

Space-time tells matter how to move.

But here’s our relational reframing:

Mass instantiates a pattern of unfolding.

This pattern constrains how other processes instantiate their own unfoldings.

There is no container, no field, no “thing” being curved.

There is only patterned construal—symbolic differentiation of potential into instance.

Just as a riverbed constrains the path of water, the gravitational field is not a thing—it is a semantic topography, structured by relational meanings.

The earth does not fall toward the sun because the sun exerts a force.

It falls because this is the pattern of co-instantiation enacted by their mutual construal of becoming.

From Centre of Mass to Centre of Meaning

In General Relativity, the “centre of mass” shapes the gravitational field. But what is a centre of mass, in relational terms?

It is a centre of symbolic constraint—

a focal point around which meanings differentiate.

Not an object in space, but a systemic attractor in the flow of experience.

You and I are not pulled to the earth because we are objects in curved spacetime.

We are participants in a meaning system where earth is the attractor

that most strongly constrains our instantiation of motion.

What Newton called force, and Einstein called curvature,

we now read as semantic resonance—

the echo of process in process, pattern in pattern.

The Metric Field as Pattern Grammar

The Einstein Field Equations describe how mass and energy determine the curvature of spacetime:

These are not fields acting on a stage.

They are semiotic constraints in a universe unfolding through relation.

The metric does not measure distance.

It constrains how distances can be instantiated.

It is the logic of spacetime differentiation, actualised anew in every local field of unfolding.

A Sacred Geometry of Becoming

Where does this leave us?

General Relativity becomes not a map of space and time—but a ritualised grammar of relation.

Gravity becomes not a pull—but a semantic coherence among unfolding patterns.

And mass becomes not substance—but meaning-centre,

around which potential coheres into experience.