What is Meaning?
A Mote of Dust Suspended in a Sunbeam
This essay is a meditation on Meaning—its rarity, its contingency, and its profound necessity. Weaving together Carl Sagan’s cosmic humility, Dylan Thomas’ defiant refusal to surrender to oblivion, and an urgent critique of our algorithmic sedation, this essay stands as both an elegy and a call to arms. Meaning, unlike Reason, cannot be outsourced to machines; it must be wrested from existence through engagement, through choice, and through the sacred defiance of passive consumption. If we are to rage at all, let it be against the dulling of our own fire, the creeping automation of wonder, and the tragedy of treating life so literally that we forget how to truly live.
Before we begin please note that you can listen to this post like a podcast episode by downloading the iOS app. It may help to think of this like a book—break it up into chapters and if you find yourself struggling to make lasting sense of it in your own understanding, normalise re-reading and re-listening. Don’t make the mistake of just consuming this like ever more content—really sit with what is being said and allow the meaning of it to find you.
That said, this essay can be read on its own, but it makes the most sense as part of a larger body of work exploring Reality and A Universal Theory of Everything. Each piece connects to the next, building a bigger picture—not just a way to simplify everything, but more as an ongoing exploration of how emergence, causality, and actualisation actually work.
a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam
In the second half of A Universal Theory of Everything, Reason is described as the river that leads back to the source and fills the entire ocean of Meaning.
In the first half of A Universal Theory of Everything, Meaning then is how we understand rivers at all. The emergent dynamic sum of it that is greater somehow than all its parts. From source to rivulet, to stream, to torrent, to rapids, crashing waterfall, churning cauldron and the languid meandering that carves through rock and trembles before it disappears into the ocean.
Reason can be explained and synthesised by Artificial Intelligence, but Meaning implies something different—something that is felt, lived, and borne—something that cannot be grasped, let alone approximated by artificial intelligence. It is not just about understanding what is, but how it matters in a way that moves, unsettles, or transforms the one who encounters it.
In the vast, indifferent expanse of the universe, Meaning is therefore exceedingly rare—perhaps the rarest thing there is. Planet Earth is a tiny island of meaning in a vast, uncompromising cosmos. This rarity speaks nothing of its preciousness; scarcity alone does not confer value. Meaning is not merely rare—it is irreplaceable.
Its significance, its salience, and its exceedingly priceless value are not in its elusiveness, but in the astronomically rare and precise conditions that make it possible at all.
Across the vast expanse of time, from the first flicker of the Big Bang to the emergence of human consciousness on this fragile world, an unbroken and unfathomably complex sequence of events had to align just so for Meaning to even be a question that could be plumbed in the first place.
The right cosmic forces, the right planetary conditions, the right evolutionary paths—all of it had to converge over billions of years to create a single vantage point from which the universe could look back upon itself and wonder.
Meaning is not just the rarest thing, it is the most contingent. And that contingency makes it infinitely precious. o say that meaning is contingent is to assert that it arises conditionally, dependent on context, perspective, language, culture, and the interpretive frameworks of a conscious agent and then all the causes that preceded that. This says that Meaning emerges in relation to specific conditions that don’t happen and won’t just happen again, ever.
Contingency points to how meaning is not intrinsic to objects or events, but something emergent through relational participation. Everything then, is seemingly connected.
On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 space probe, as it travelled towards the outer reaches of the Solar System, took a photo of its point of origin—Earth—from an unprecedented distance of over 6 billion kilometres. This image, known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” was part of a series of photos capturing the planets of the Solar System at the request of astronomer Carl Sagan. Bless that man!
The photograph highlights Earth’s smallness in the vastness of space, emphasising not only the fragility and rarity but the unity of life on our planet. Carl Sagan famously remarked on this photo of a single pale blue pixel on a postcard of the otherwise black expanse of empty space.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
If the Earth is an island of Meaning in a vast, indifferent universe, then our responsibility is not just to preserve life, but to uphold the conditions that make Meaning possible. The search for knowledge, the pursuit of Reason, the articulation of Truth; none of these exist in isolation. They are anchored in something deeper: the necessity of coherence, the yearning for understanding, the call to orient ourselves within the unfolding of existence.
The Eternal Why
Before we can structure knowledge, we must acknowledge the necessity of coherence.
Before we can articulate Truth, we must recognise the fundamental yearning that makes Truth matter at all. Meaning is not an afterthought to Reason; it is the living marrow, viscera and flesh of experience without which Reason would be cold and hollow.
In a precise but colder sense, Reason is fundamental. But from where we stand to appreciate reason, we cannot do so without Meaning. To enshrine Reason without Meaning is to devise a language with no speaker, to chart a map with no traveller. To enshrine Reason without Meaning is to create a system of pure logic that does not have the essential why—to underwrite a mechanism that turns but does not move. It is the sterility of perfect calculation absent the animating force that makes calculation worth resolving.
Understanding
We are human beings.
Understanding, from where we stand, is and can only ever be a human project.
Understanding is the appreciation of life and existence as an equation, that is both progressively solvable and yet beyond ultimate resolution. It is the apprehension that all mystery and all reality succumb ultimately to the same sublime geometry; the recursive, self-similar structures that govern emergence, order, and becoming at every scale.
Understanding is the deep recognition that all differentiation, all complexity, all apparent division, is still bound by a singular architecture; an equation that can be studied, engaged with, and refined, but never fully solved, because it is both the map and the territory, the process and the emerging truth itself.
Understanding within our human context, even augmented by technology, is bound to the conditions of our perception, the reach of our cognition, and the depth of our participation in existence. Our current limits are not our permanent limitations, but they are not irrelevant either.
Just as we see only 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum, we only parse a fraction of reality’s total signal. The mind can model the infinite, but it cannot hold it in a single frame. Human beings do not merely perceive or think about reality; in fact we cannot properly do that unless we engage with it, and only through engagement does understanding take enduring and meaningful shape.
Every step toward deeper understanding must emerge from within the conditions of our current frame. Understanding is not static, nor is it infinite—it is contingent, iterative, and bound to our evolving capacity to perceive, think, and engage with what is.
Artificial Intelligence can parse Understanding with precision faster than human intelligence but it is human Understanding and Meaning that anchors all that cognitive power in a “so what” question. Reason alone can map the mechanics of the world, but it is Meaning that gives us reason to care.
Without Meaning, what could we understand beyond mere computation—a neuter processing of consciousness untethered from the urgency and richness of being?
If Meaning is not the fulcrum on which our Understanding turns, what can be?
The Paradox of Meaning
To approach meaning is to navigate paradox: It cannot be reduced to logic, yet it is not irrational.
The quest for Meaning is the heart of that which gives rise to philosophy, the longing that animates myth, and the force that orients us within the great unfolding of the emergence; less an answer than an ongoing dialogue, an interplay between what has been and what is still possible. It is the constant negotiation between Fate (the accumulated weight of what has already unfolded), and Destiny (the emergent potential of what may yet be shaped.)
We do not create meaning ex nihilo, nor do we merely uncover a pre-existing code; we participate in its emergence. Meaning is fractal and recursive, shaped by will, perspective, and participation. It is not fixed, yet it is not random. It follows a deep rhythm, like a sublime symphony that adapts but remains recognisable in its all its movements. It is what allows life to be lived, rather than merely endured.
Chasing Meaning can be what obscures it. Paradoxically, to pursue the substance and quantity of meaning. Meaning for meaning’s sake is a misapprehension of the essence of meaning. The more we demand meaning to present itself as substance, as certainty, as something definable and owned, the more it eludes us.
Beauty and Reluctance
Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
Kahlil Gibran
Beauty is that which tempts Choice and Surrender from the Reluctance. It is that which induces the soul to transcendence.
Without reluctance, what we call choice is autonomic; a mere reflex rather than an act of will. Without reluctance, what we imagine to be surrender is meaningless; an unbecoming rather than a becoming. Reluctance is marriage between true Choice and true Surrender.
The profundity of this statement only lands when you reflect deeply on it and inspect the turth of your own choices and encounters with true surrender. Then you can see that every true Choice is a Surrender of Reluctance, and every True Surrender is a Choice of Reluctance.
Choice without surrender is mere assertion, a reaction rather than an action. Surrender without choice is collapse, a forfeiture rather than a determination of selfhood. But where Beauty is present, in an archetypal sense, Choice and Surrender become one motion; the act of willingly stepping beyond the known into what beckons in the service of realising intention and becoming.
Meaning is how we process Reluctance.
Reluctance is not simply hesitation, it is the retention surface of the drop of selfhood, the I AM that we call a self. Our true self is as much an essence as the distillation of it, our innate source of reluctance is what we are, the potent unspent currency of choice and surrender that we invest to participate in meaning and existence.
Our innate sense of reluctance is what we are.
And this defining thing about us then is not an error, or simple energetic resistance to be overcome, but in essence the very presence of selfness, pressing against the contours and angular edges of all that which is not self.
The fault lines by which our integrity and authenticity are revealed as they tumble along the riverbed of existence is the shape of our Reluctance, more unique than a fingerprint. Reluctance is the poetry of lines and contours, the grain we might say, of our heartwood that is revealed by the carver’s hand.
Meaning is how beauty is alchemically transmuted from Reluctance in the furnace of life and the crucible of experience.
Without meaning, reluctance is hoarded, frozen, a held breath that never exhales. With meaning, reluctance becomes the tension that makes choice real, the weight that makes surrender sacred. It is what allows the self to unfold without unraveling, to give itself to the world without losing what it is.
To exist is to be in constant negotiation with this reluctance—to feel the pull of life and the hesitation to step forward, to wrestle with the gravity of identity and the surrender of it into something greater. Meaning is the fulcrum, the alchemy that transforms reluctance into movement, into participation, into presence and actualisation.
Meaning and Reality
Meaning is the invisible architecture of human reality, the connective tissue between Experience and Understanding, between what was, what is and then what is possible and from that what ought to be. Meaning is not merely an inherent property of the universe—it is latent, woven into the fabric of existence but requiring consciousness to bring it forth. Without consciousness to engage with it, meaning remains unexpressed, a silent potential, like music that exists in the structure of strings but is only realized when they are struck. Without meaning, existence is mere sequence; with meaning, it is symphony.
Real Meaning is felt rather than simply known. The language of meaning is not spoken in Reason alone. It is as much somatic as it is intellectual, as visceral as it is conceptual. It does not arrive merely in sentences but in sensation—the quickening of the pulse when something strikes as true, the stillness that settles when something finally makes sense in the way a body understands before the mind catches up. Meaning is the knot in the throat, the weight in the belly, the heat behind the ribs. It is the unspoken recognition between two people and the web of connection they share. It is present in the way memory resurfaces in scent or song. It is a quiet gravity that pulls us toward what matters, and the entangled deep, cellular knowing that something is worth seeking, worth enduring and worth answering.
To speak of meaning is to speak of relationship—between self and other, past and future, between cause and effect, fate and destiny, choice and surrender, chaos and order. It is the pattern that makes sense of the whole, the unseen principle that binds disparate events into coherence. Meaning is not given but discovered, not imposed but revealed through engagement. It is neither fixed nor arbitrary but emergent, fractal, and recursive—a function of will, perspective, and participation.
Meaning is not a thing, but a function, an emergent property of consciousness encountering itself. It is the hidden syntax of reality, the unseen logic that binds disparate moments into coherence. It is not imposed, and it is not finite. Meaning does not exist as a ledger of transactions, nor does it operate within a closed economy of scarcity and ownership. Meaning is potentially infinite in depth and generative in nature.
To ask what meaning is is to ask what it does. Meaning orients. It moves. It shapes the way experience unfolds, influencing what is noticed, what is ignored, what is held sacred, and what is discarded.
Meaning determines what becomes part of us and what drifts away, untethered, into oblivion. To seek meaning is not to chase a final answer, but to step more fully into the unfolding.
Oblivion Chaos and Regret
Meaning does not exist in isolation; it stands in dynamic tension with its opposites, each revealing something essential about its nature. If meaning is the binding principle that brings coherence to experience, then its negations are not singular, but manifold—each a different kind of absence, a different kind of loss.
Oblivion is the erasure of meaning. It is the void where meaning is not just lost but obliterated—forgotten, forever lost. It is the silence after the last voice has faded, the story that never gets told, the memory that has no witness. It is not merely death, but the absence of imprint, as though nothing ever was.
Chaos is the entropy of meaning. It is not the absence of information but the overwhelming of it—an excess so vast and unordered that nothing coheres. If meaning is a thread that weaves through time, holding things together, then chaos is the unravelling, the swarming static of endless knots and stitches, the deluge of its structure overwhelmed by its own unregulated flow, the energy death of coherence itself. In chaos, nothing is connected, and nothing holds.
Regret is the meaning we can still feel. It is the lived awareness of a different possibility that was lost, the ache of meaning glimpsed too late or squandered when it mattered most. Unlike oblivion, which erases, or chaos, which scatters, regret preserves meaning but turns it against us—it is the unbearable presence of meaning where we wish there were none. It is the heaviness of choices we cannot undo, the weight of what we might have been.
If oblivion is terminal loss, chaos is overwhelm, and regret is the burden of knowing too well. Meaning is the only sanctuary, the only bulwark against these shadows. It is the lighthouse, the harbour, and the moorings. Meaning is not the absence of loss, confusion, or sorrow, but the way we refuse to be unmade by them.
To explore meaning is to stand at the threshold of something vast, to feel the gravity of the infinite pressing against the limits of the known. Meaning is what draws us forward, what deepens our presence, and what makes us more than passive witnesses to existence. It is the fire at the centre of all yearning—for connection, for understanding, for creation.
Legacy and Inheritance
Meaning has Legacy. Meaning has Inheritance.
To live without meaning is to be adrift in experience, unmoored from coherence. To live in the pursuit of meaning is to enter into relationship with reality itself, not as an observer but as a participant. Meaning is not just something we seek; it is something we make, something we hold, something we become.
Meaning is not a solitary pursuit; it is an inheritance and a responsibility. If we wake up—if we take ownership of our actualization—it is not just for ourselves. The full weight of meaning only emerges when we connect with the future human and the long arc of what we are a part of.
We do not stand alone in time. We are both descendants and ancestors, part of a living relay that stretches back beyond memory and forward beyond imagination. The choices we make do not only shape our own lives but reverberate through the fabric of existence. To neglect this—to abdicate our responsibility as stewards of our legacy, our environment, and the countless species that share this world with us—is not just a failure of conscience; it is a rupture in the great pattern itself.
Meaning is cumulative—exponentially so. When we falter, when we betray our role, we do not just diminish our own meaning—we diminish the vast and untapped potential of those who come after us. Worse, we diminish the meaning of those who came before—the generations, both human and non-human, that clawed their way through struggle and chance to give us this moment. We risk unravelling the whole thing, collapsing the latent potential of all existence into oblivion and chaos where there should have been a symphony. We are courting cosmic-level Regret and playing chicken with Chaos and Entropy.
This is the weight of consciousness. This is the charge of being human. If Meaning matters at all, it matters completely. It matters beyond us. It matters through us.
Nothing else accumulates like Meaning. No other currency, no other force, no other essence is subject to such profound compounding. Meaning does not merely add—it multiplies, cascading through time, layering upon itself, deepening with every generation, every choice, every act of conscious engagement.
To squander it is not just to lose our own stake in the unfolding—it is to weaken the entire structure, to erode the inheritance of those who came before and foreclose the potential of those who come after. Meaning, once fractured, does not simply reform. It is either honoured and expanded, or it is diminished and lost.
This is why we cannot afford to drift. Why we cannot treat our existence as trivial, or so painfully literal. If Meaning matters, it matters entirely. It is the only thing that does.
Every step I take along the road of devotion is met with the goodwill and blessings of the ancestors and the gratitude and appreciation of the descendants. In walking this path, I come to realise I am the ancestor to the future human—the bridge between what was and what will be.
This is where the Golden Rule and “As Above, So Below” converge—not merely as philosophical axioms, but as the Great Fusion Reactor of Meaning itself. Looking back with reverence is how I walk forward with responsibility. The way I honour those who came before me sets the pattern for how I will be honoured—or forgotten—by those yet to come.
Meaning is not static; it moves through time, carried forward by the choices we make and the way we invest ourselves in something larger. Just as I inherit the weight and wisdom of those who walked before, I become a living thread in the weave of the future, passing forward what I have refined, tempered, and come to understand.
To recognise this is to stand in the fully activated circuit of Meaning. I am the recipient, and I am the source. I am the child of my ancestors, and I am the ancestor to those who will carry forward what I leave behind. What I do now—how I live, what I love, what I choose—matters, because it does not end with me.
Meaning does not rest in the past or wait in the future. It flows through the arc—from before to beyond—powered by devotion, sustained by participation, and made eternal through non-idealistic gratitude, presence, discernment and intentionality.
Agility—Consulting Epimetheus
If fate is the cumulative emergent reality, then an Agile retrospective is a formula for distilling meaning from experience—a structured way to engage with what has unfolded, what was gained, what was lost, and how we might refine our participation. It is a practice of Epimethean witness, looking back not with regret alone, but with discernment, appreciation, and integration.
In whatever arc or packet of context we are casting our retrospective into, we ask:
What were my triumphs and gains? What moments stood out as evidence of alignment, skill, grace, or growth?
What were my deep regrets, my griefs, my great follies? Where did I misstep? Where did I suffer needlessly? What do I mourn?
If I had the cycle again, what would I keep doing, what would I stop doing, what would I start doing? How do I take what has been and refine my movement forward?
This sounds banal only because it is practised in relatively banal commercial contexts—in software development, project management, and corporate teams. But it is, in truth, a profound formula for practising an examined life, not vaguely, but with precision, finite context, and real meaning. It is a way of engaging with fate, not as something fixed, but as an emergent ledger of all that has been done, chosen, and lived.
To love one’s fate (amor fati) is not to passively accept all that happens, but to stand in a real relationship with it, to extract Wisdom and Understanding from experience, and to step forward, not blindly, but in a conversation with what has already been revealed.
A true retrospective is not a lament, nor a justification—it is an act of discernment and intentionality, a way of saying: I was here, I took part, I learned, and I will carry forward what is worthy.
This empowers Promethean forethought and foresight—not as passive speculation but as an active engagement with fate. When we look back with discernment, appreciation, and integration, we do not merely extract lessons from the past; we sharpen our vision of the future.
Here the reader is encouraged to adopt an archetypal framing to connect with the sense that is intended. The premise is that the concepts being discussed are ineffable to our reductionist sensibilities and in the tradition of Carl Jung, best parsed in the language of the Psyche, which is allegory and archetype.
A true retrospective does not trap us in hindsight—it prepares us for foresight. It arms Prometheus, allowing us to see patterns in the unfolding, to anticipate the movement of consequence, to make clear-eyed choices rather than blind leaps.
To love one’s fate is not resignation—it is alignment with reality as it reveals itself. When we engage fate this way, we step into a deeper authorship of our own becoming, not by dictating the future, but by understanding the conditions that shape it.
In this, Epimethean wisdom feeds Promethean fire. The past is not a weight—it is a forge. The lessons distilled from experience fuel foresight, allowing us to walk forward not as prisoners of what has been, but as architects of what could be.
Promethean Consultancy is the practice of looking forward—not through speculation, but through intentional foresight. It is about recognizing patterns in the unfolding of consequence, anticipating challenges and opportunities, and making clear-eyed choices. This is the work of strategic forethought, aligning with emergent reality and stepping forward with intelligence, agility, and wisdom.
Epimethean Consultancy is the practice of looking back—not with regret or justification, but with discernment. It is about engaging with the past as a source of wisdom, distilling meaning from what has unfolded, and refining participation. This is the work of the retrospective witness, examining what was gained, what was lost, and how movement forward might be improved. The past is not a burden but a ledger, revealing patterns, lessons, and insights that sharpen our engagement with reality.
How far and how clearly we look back, determines the reach of our foresight.
True consultancy—whether in personal practice, leadership, or strategic guidance—requires both. Epimethean wisdom without Promethean foresight leads to stagnation, where one is always looking back but never moving forward. Promethean foresight without Epimethean distillation leads to heedlessness, where one charges ahead without understanding the lessons of the past.
To engage fully with fate is to integrate both perspectives. The past is not a weight, but a forge. The fire of Prometheus is fueled by the charcoal of Epimetheus. When we refine our understanding of what has been, we sharpen our ability to shape what could be.
The Magician Archetype - The Great Circuit
The cumulative context of experience is one pole of a great circuit, a battery, a magnet—the weight of all that has been lived, all that has been known, all that has been suffered and overcome. It is the charged field of the past, the ledger of fate, the raw material of wisdom.
The cumulative potential we are enabling—through our channelling, mediumship, and the conscious ionization of that past into something that can move forward—is the other pole. This is the generative force, the Promethean current that does not merely inherit meaning, but distils it into something that can be enacted, embodied, and passed forward. It is the harnessing of what has been into what will be.
Together, these poles—the deep well of experience and the charged possibility of future meaning—form the great battery of legacy, human potential, and the ongoing evolution of consciousness.
Meaning is not static; it is a circuit, a flow. It requires both the grounding of what has already come to pass and the voltage of what is yet to be realized. It is not enough to merely witness history, nor is it enough to merely imagine the future—one must be the conductor between them, the medium through which the latent energy of the past is made kinetic, actionable, and alive.
This is how legacy is written—not in monuments, but in momentum. Not in what is left behind, but in what is carried forward, charged with new possibility.
Focusing solely on future outcomes, blind or intransigent about your past, neuters and enervates the power and potency of the Magician archetype.
The Magician is not merely a visionary but a master of integration, one who channels what has been into what will be, transforming raw experience into wisdom, and potential into manifestation. To neglect the past—to cast it aside as irrelevant or to resist its reckoning—is to sever the very current that fuels true foresight.
The Magician’s power does not come from untethered aspiration but from attunement to the full continuum of experience—the past as the deep well of meaning, the present as the alchemical crucible, the future as the emergent horizon.
To refuse the past is to deplete the voltage of transformation, to rob the Magician of the full potency of their craft. True magic, in this sense, is nothing more than the precise application of Reason in the service of Will—the deliberate alignment of intention with reality’s governing principles to optimize the realization of desired outcomes. Reason remains the structuring force behind true agency.
This form of intentional participation in the emergence of reality requires both retrospective wisdom and Promethean forethought, the ability to draw from the past without being bound by it and to shape the future without being lost in it.
As above, so below—the great principle of correspondence, where the movements of the vast and the intimate, the celestial and the terrestrial, the timeless and the immediate, mirror one another. This is not a metaphor—it is a structural reality, the very architecture of emergence.
Just as the heavens move in grand orbits, cycles, and alignments, so too does the individual life—bound to the same rhythms of expansion and contraction, death and rebirth, loss and renewal. The fractal intelligence of the cosmos repeats itself at every scale—the structure of a galaxy, the branching of a tree, the unfolding of a thought, the opening and closing of a heart.
As above, so below—the current of meaning moves in both directions. What is true for the human psyche is true for civilizations, is true for the unfolding of the universe itself. The past is not discarded; it fuels the charge of the future. The Magician does not create ex nihilo—they draw from the deep well of what has already been known, already been spoken, already been lived.
To sever oneself from the past in blind pursuit of the future is to break this circuit, to diminish the potency of the archetypal Magician, to cut off the very source of transmutation. But to engage both poles—to be rooted in what has been while reaching for what is to come—is to step into true power.
The more the positive pole—the past—is activated, the more the negative pole—the future—is charged, creating a powerful feedback loop that amplifies the potency of intentionality and the force of will. This is the circuit of true magical agency, the alchemical engine of emergence.
The past is not dead weight, nor is it merely something to be overcome. It is a charged field of meaning, a reservoir of encoded wisdom, a deep current of continuity. When engaged with intention—not as nostalgia, not as fixation, but as fuel—it ionizes the field of possibility. The past is the anode, the future the cathode, and in between, the present becomes a conduit for the electric force of will.
This feedback loop is not deterministic but catalytic—it increases the voltage of presence, sharpens the coherence of vision, and fortifies the gravitational force of intention. It is what allows the Magician to steer fate, not by domination, but by attunement—by aligning with the structural logic of emergence rather than acting blindly upon it.
When this circuit is activated, will is no longer mere desire, mere projection, or mere personal striving. It becomes a force of nature, charged with the accumulated meaning of the past and directed into the open field of the possible. The result is not just movement, but momentum—not just action, but the shaping of reality itself.
The Empress Archetype - Renewal and Abundance
This invokes The Empress Archetype—Renewal and Abundance—the force that governs the cyclical, the generative, the ever-giving return of life and meaning. She is the great vessel of transformation, not through force, but through attunement to the rhythms of emergence. She does not seize, she receives; she does not impose, she allows.
Her power is contained in Yield—a word that holds two faces, both essential:
To yield is to surrender—to release resistance, to step into flow, to recognise that control is an illusion, but participation is power. The Empress does not conquer reality; she moves within it, cultivates it, nourishes it, and makes space for it to unfold. She trusts the cycles, knowing that all things ripen in their time.
To yield is to harvest—to gather what has been cultivated, to receive the return of all that has been sown. What is put into the world returns, what is nurtured flourishes, and what is honoured endures. This is not accumulation for its own sake, but the deep knowing that all things cycle, that abundance flows from participation in the great rhythm of emergence.
Return itself also means two things:
To Return means to go back—to revisit, to restore, to re-enter the cycle from a new vantage point. It is the movement of recurrence, the spiral rather than the circle, where what was once left behind is encountered again, but never in quite the same way. It is the wisdom of knowing that nothing is ever truly lost, only transformed and returned in a new shape.
Return, in the sense of return on investment, is the yield or outcome gained from what was put in—whether effort, time, energy, or resources. It is the measure of what comes back as a result of what was given.
These two interpretations invoke the prodigal figures in Jesus' parables: the prodigal son, who left and returned transformed, closing the cycle of the fool’s journey, and the servant who invested rather than buried their inheritance, yielding gain.
Observing renewal and yield as per The Empress archetype is essential to the Magician archetype—he channels and directs the current that is she generates via grace and renewal. Where he directs that flow, she ensures it bears fruit. The Magician activates, but The Empress gestates—she receives what is yielded, amplifies what is offered, and returns it in full measure.
This is the secret of true generativity—that power does not reside in hoarding, nor in ceaseless striving, but in knowing when to yield, when to let go, when to gather, when to give back. The one who masters this cycle does not merely wield magic; they become the source of it.
THE KEEPER OF MEANING Your life is a tapestry, so many threads, woven a tremendous going on, a relentless unfolding, of thatching and unravelling, a picking loose and a tying off, a coming together of chapters; of beginnings that are noticed only now, but which when traced back to stitches made sometimes so far back, we discover, began, actually very long ago. And a vividness and a contrast coloured at once in fine detail and sweeping fullness depending on how close we dare to stand or how far back we venture to take it all in. And of endings, whose thread was running out already somehow, whilst a new theme was just blooming onto the scene, announcing its future disappearance in plain sight in a way that can only be seen once it has taken up a different kind of room in your heart in the shape of your remorse. And then there are ways in which a pattern emerges. which betrays at once the repeated leaning of our choices and an invisible hand that seemed to always know exactly what it was doing even in those moments where we had been invited to steer the design. Strangely, especially in those times and unsurprisingly, exactly when you thought yours was the only hand at the loom. And then of course as we arrive at the unfolding event horizon of what is emerging in often alarming confusion only now, that bright exciting edge where today is splicing into tomorrow, that moment of infinite potential we call Now being as it is, not yet hemmed in by the selvege of fate, and we arrive at the same time at a place of enough courage wound around the spindle of our hearts to allow the whole incredible picture, replete with its many flaws and knotted regrets that refuse to allow the eye to forget. If we can love that enough and choose the whole of it, with all its tragedy of promises that unravelled as the shuttles of requited and unrequited love struck their rhythms to the weave of your own heart that seeming failing of the world and of deeply significant others to give us the kind of love we thought we wanted rather so often instead the kind we needed. If we can remake the frame of our minds to regard all of it with the honour of acceptance, a beauty is revealed which takes us by surprise, whose other name is Meaning and we discover with profound humility we are both weaver and weft, and more that each of our wonderfully complex tapestries are both impossibly and inextricably Intertwined. And then, when we forget again, and drawn back in, as we undoubtedly will be, to the narrow and engrossing task of living, the secret beauty of every snag, every rude break in our rhythm, and every frustration, is in its invitation to re-embrace the wider view to be reminded, again, it is always now. — Perspective is the Keeper of Meaning. An excerpt from Keeper of the Flame, Rocco Jarman, 2022 "My whole apprenticeship I thought was devoted to Reason, my pilgrimage I believed beckoning me beyond the horizon was towards the golden dome of Understanding. What a Fool’s Journey to discover at last it was all precipitated by, a yearning for and catalysing of Meaning."
Meaning is unveiled—discovered via encounter or it is not discovered at all.
Meaning exists in a latent potential sense—woven into the structure of reality, but only made real in encounter. It is not an external thing waiting to be found, nor a mere projection of the mind. It is a field of potential, present but unactivated, like the music held within a string before it is plucked, like fire waiting in the flint.
Potential is either potential meaning or potential noise—potential entropy or potential oblivion. It is not neutral; it is emergent. Meaning does not arise automatically—it must be midwifed into being through encounter, recognition, and participation. Where there is no encounter, where there is no engagement, potential does not become meaning—it collapses into noise, dissipates into entropy, or vanishes into oblivion.
This context reframes our relationship with the latent potential we refer to as dark energy and dark matter.
What we call “dark” is not necessarily absence, but hidden structure, an unactivated field of possibility. The cosmos, like meaning, exists both in what is visible and in what is latent, waiting for encounter to bring it into form. Dark energy and dark matter may not be voids, but fields of unexpressed reality—potential coherence that has not yet met the conditions to become meaning.
If meaning is what binds experience into coherence, then what we call darkness—whether in physics or in the psyche—is the threshold between coherence and dissolution. It is potential that may either integrate into the known or remain untethered, unformed, and unrealised.
This does not mean that all potential must be meaning, only that meaning is the force that prevents potential from becoming nothingness. In this way, our very search for meaning—our encounter with it—is not just a human endeavour but a fundamental principle of emergence itself.
This is the meaning I take from Dylan Thomas when he extolled us so stridently to “Rage against the dying of the light.”
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. —Dylan Thomas
If we are to rage, let it be against something worthy of our fire—not against the passage of time, which has never been ours to command, but against the creeping automation of thought, the quiet suffocation of spirit beneath the weight of convenience, conformity, and the outsourcing of wonder.
Let it be against the slow death of curiosity, the anaesthetizing lull of passive consumption, the dulling of our own capacity to wrest meaning from existence rather than having it spoon-fed to us by the indifferent algorithms of virtual culture, commerce, and dogma.
We are, as Carl Sagan observed, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, but what a rare and curious thing it is to be conscious of that fact—to feel the unbearable brevity of life and still insist on living rather than simply passing through.
How we temper that rage into noble defiance, let it not be petulant, nor nihilistic, but exquisite—a rebellion in defence of meaning, of soul, of the sheer miracle of awareness. Let it be a fire that refuses to be reduced to data points and trending metrics, a defiant hymn to depth, to presence, to the unquantifiable joy and ache of truly being here.
Defiance is the noblest and most precious of all human conceit—it is the seed of God in us.
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