Late Boomer

What does mean mean?

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What is Meaning?

Meaning is mentally projected onto beingness.

In existence, feels are constantly being birthed and dying. These feels can be created upon seeing some beingness, and then 'connected' through feeling the feel and sensing the sensation at the same time.

Meaning isn't something inherent or different from reality. Meaning is a negative-space. All that there is, is a feel and sensation being kept together.

 

Here's what I wrote down in my journal a few months ago regarding this. Honestly, I didn't complete the contemplation. And I am procastinating to continue.

Edited by Swarnim

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1 hour ago, Swarnim said:

What is Meaning?

Meaning is mentally projected onto beingness.

In existence, feels are constantly being birthed and dying. These feels can be created upon seeing some beingness, and then 'connected' through feeling the feel and sensing the sensation at the same time.

Meaning isn't something inherent or different from reality. Meaning is a negative-space. All that there is, is a feel and sensation being kept together.

Interesting. So you think it's not there, but it's our projection?

What about this idea? I think we have a feeling when we name things that we never get it exactly right. You can never describe something completely because you're using words. Meaning is that thing that feels missing from the words. Like the words don't quite cover it. What is it that the words are failing to capture? Whatever it is, that's meaning. 

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8 hours ago, Late Boomer said:

Interesting thought. I figured out a long time ago that everyone has a persona or more than one personae, meaning mask or masks. That's pretty intuitive. You have a "self" or "selves" that you present to others in public, online, at work, etc. You don't talk about your fetish porn at work or cuss like you do at home when you're with your religious relatives (Christian bro is coming to town...).

But sounds like  you're getting at the idea that "self" is itself a persona that your self wears for itself. Your self doesn't like to think there's anything under the mask because it thinks the mask is itself. So is whatever you "mean" under the mask of self? Or under the illusion of self? 

But are we assuming that we start the same before we develop a persona? If you're a sociopath for instance, were you born a sociopath? Does that mean you're only a "self" or an ego and have no meaning underneath? 

Going deeper. My head is trippin'.

Yeah its completely radical. 

It really boils down to the identification aspect. The self is a very seemingly felt experience. The normal assumption is that "I am a real separate person".

And yet somehow this identification seems to fall away and not because something stops but because it's recognized as having never been real in the first place....like an assumed identity or misidentification so to speak.

And this apparent realization can happen whether the body is a sociopath, psychopath, or any average joe.

It's often referred to as a non happening that's experienced by no one.


“Everything is honoured, but nothing matters.” — Eckhart Tolle.

"I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside." -- Rumi

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Mean means, other than. It's like a lasso that are used to single out and catch any concept that holds a different value over other concepts. Meaning just happen to be the most useful and transparent tool to convey otherness, since the word meaning is devoid of meaning on it's own. The word meaning doesn't obscure the intrinsic value of what is actually concidered to be conveyed as meaningful with the word mean/meaning. It is also a word that can't be easily charged/loaded no matter what it's been used for.

And since meaning is used to be filled with other than itself, inorder to have merit as a useful word/tool, that is what makes it recognized as a word. A word that could not exist on it's own. So mean/meaning is quite a unique word.

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On 9/3/2021 at 0:39 PM, ZzzleepingBear said:

Mean means, other than. It's like a lasso that are used to single out and catch any concept that holds a different value over other concepts. Meaning just happen to be the most useful and transparent tool to convey otherness, since the word meaning is devoid of meaning on it's own. The word meaning doesn't obscure the intrinsic value of what is actually concidered to be conveyed as meaningful with the word mean/meaning. It is also a word that can't be easily charged/loaded no matter what it's been used for.

And since meaning is used to be filled with other than itself, inorder to have merit as a useful word/tool, that is what makes it recognized as a word. A word that could not exist on it's own. So mean/meaning is quite a unique word.

This is good stuff. At first I was like, eh, doesn't get it. Then I realized, you DO get it. Which is kind of helping me get it. 

Here's my latest thinking: 

Mean doesn't mean anything, but mean IS something. It's a signpost pointing to something that does mean something. It could be a mile ahead or 100 miles ahead, but whatever it is, the signpost helps you get there. Mean is a metaphor. All words are metaphors. The more meta you get, the closer to the truth you get. Mean is a really powerful metaphor.

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It's all just mouth noises and farts in the wind. Want to know meaning? Dance naked in the rain.

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5 hours ago, Late Boomer said:

This is good stuff. At first I was like, eh, doesn't get it. Then I realized, you DO get it. Which is kind of helping me get it. 

Here's my latest thinking: 

Mean doesn't mean anything, but mean IS something. It's a signpost pointing to something that does mean something. It could be a mile ahead or 100 miles ahead, but whatever it is, the signpost helps you get there. Mean is a metaphor. All words are metaphors. The more meta you get, the closer to the truth you get. Mean is a really powerful metaphor.

Thanks! Alright, you definitely seem to get the gist of it from what I can tell. I just want to add something to this or point out that

5 hours ago, Late Boomer said:

Mean doesn't mean anything, but mean IS something.

Mean doesn't mean anything, ..Until it does. It both is and it isn't, depending how you look at it.

So it becomes quite a language paradox when you try to derive meaning out of what mean means.

I think the signpost example you came up with are really good, but more so for all words except mean/meaning.

But if I where to use your analogy here, I would like to put mean, as a sign post. Pointing back towards the signpost that you already read a few miles back. Only so that you could know that the signposts that showed you your direction, was in fact not the actual direction, but merely signposts.

So a sign post is recognized by pointing you toward something, but it can't point at itself. And there is where mean comes in, and points back at all the signposts that had to exist before mean can mean something at all.

The signpost example can be a bit confusing, since you already know what a signpost is, so keep that in mind.

I wouldn't want to call mean a metaphor necessarily, but in the context of the meta language we speak of, I think I do get what you mean by that. It's just that when you use mean, you mean exactly that in which you describe. You do point as directly as you can, inorder to show what you truly mean. So no metaphors needed If you know what I mean.. But by all means, go meta for the win!^^

Edited by ZzzleepingBear

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On 9/5/2021 at 3:35 PM, ZzzleepingBear said:

But if I where to use your analogy here, I would like to put mean, as a sign post. Pointing back towards the signpost that you already read a few miles back. Only so that you could know that the signposts that showed you your direction, was in fact not the actual direction, but merely signposts.

Can you elaborate on this a bit more? My signpost analogy works like this. It doesn't give you the meaning, it points to the meaning. If you ask someone "what does x mean?" you're going to get a synonym, a combination of other words or a word in another language. If you get several of those or exactly the right one and you understand it, you get very close. But you still have to experience it to really find out what x "means." 

For example, a Norwegian friend told me they have a word hygge, that doesn't have an English equivalent. It means "a mood of coziness and comfortable conviviality with feelings of wellness and contentment." They have a similar word, "kos" that means "something quiet and good going on between a select group of people." He said the English word cozy isn't the same. It gets close, but not quite. I suspect you have to be Norwegian or Scandinavian and experience the feeling to really know what it means. 

Germans have a word, "weltzshmertz" that means something like "world pain." Pathos is close, but not quite it. 

What do you mean about pointing back at a sign post? 

On 9/5/2021 at 3:35 PM, ZzzleepingBear said:

You do point as directly as you can, inorder to show what you truly mean. So no metaphors needed If you know what I mean.. But by all means, go meta for the win!^^

"As directly as you can" is what I was getting at. It can't actually BE the thing. It helps you figure out how to experience or really understand the thing. I'm being meta in other words. :)

BTW, for most of my life I've had a vague feeling about what I thought of as sign posts: when events happen that tell me the path is changing and I am supposed to take another fork. I always kind of wrote it off as superstition, but it feels real. When certain key people quit a job I've held for a long time, for example. Or a traumatic event happens - like recently having to quit what I thought was a safe job due to extremist politics. Or I discover something that impacts me very strongly - like the several mushroom trips I had and some of the teachers and philosophers that resonated with me afterward, Leo and Alan Watts for example. 

Could mean and meaning be related to the concept of Tao?

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3 hours ago, Late Boomer said:

What do you mean about pointing back at a sign post? 

Ah I get you know, my analogy is quite confusing, so I don't blame you for not getting it right away. What I meant to say was just that the word 'mean' can't mean anything prior to what it is trying to frame or point at. That is what makes the word mean a paradox if you try to isolate it or find a absoulte definition for what mean means.

3 hours ago, Late Boomer said:

"As directly as you can" is what I was getting at. It can't actually BE the thing. It helps you figure out how to experience or really understand the thing. I'm being meta in other words. :)

Yes that's totally it!:)

3 hours ago, Late Boomer said:

BTW, for most of my life I've had a vague feeling about what I thought of as sign posts: when events happen that tell me the path is changing and I am supposed to take another fork. I always kind of wrote it off as superstition, but it feels real. When certain key people quit a job I've held for a long time, for example. Or a traumatic event happens - like recently having to quit what I thought was a safe job due to extremist politics. Or I discover something that impacts me very strongly - like the several mushroom trips I had and some of the teachers and philosophers that resonated with me afterward, Leo and Alan Watts for example. 

Could mean and meaning be related to the concept of Tao?

Yes I would agree that mean/meaning certainly are related to Tao if you get into the meta awarness of meaning as you do right now. As the book of Tao describe itself in the beginning of the Tao te ching "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao" and I think mean/meaning shares that essence if you will. Change and meaning are so closely related, so when things do change, then the new situation may nudge you to rethink your position of what you once thought to be absolute in what you consider meaningful, so that you eventually can spring into action from a new sense of meaning.

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