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Two levels of meaning - Magical Realist - May 6, 2016
There is first the explicit meaning of the narrative itself---the story as it occurs complete with plot and drama and character development. Literature, movies, and real life acquire this meaning all the time. Recounting your day for someone is a tale of things that happened and how you reacted to them. But there is a higher level of meaning that occurs above this linear narrative. It is the implicit metaphorical meaning of the narrative--a context of relationships to ideas, to values, and universal truths that gives the narrative meaning beyond it's mere blind happenstance. What archetypal themes or motifs occur in the narrative? What are the main ideas that are symbolized by the events? Literature and movies have this signatory power. Cannot we approach real life in the same way? Abstract polarities underlie our everyday experience. The fundamental dualities of the human situation. Freedom vs security. Reason vs hope. Good vs evil. Desire vs independence. Compassion vs justice. These themes pulsate rhythmically thruout the shimmering web of our mundane world, defining the interplay of its threads and nodes as a complex symphony that transcends us and connects us to reality itself. Jung said it best: "What happens to us is typical of us." There is an order behind the seemingly chance accidents of our lives. It is the destining order of becoming whole and self-aware souls.
RE: Two levels of meaning - C C - May 8, 2016
Fixing, inventing, and building something requires knowledge and skill of the empirical details (narrowing down to the specifics in a system). But actually understanding what's going on requires summarizing and classifying the particular components, relationships, and actions under broad concepts, interpretations, and regulating principles (getting beyond the individual "pixels" and grokking the overall patterns and habits they realize at a higher level). No human has the capacity and speed to mentally hold and manipulate all the particular items and details that constitute all the regions of existence and specialized activity, anyway: Understanding the world depends upon generalized shortcuts. A person couldn't even drive a car if s/he couldn't rightly claim to apprehend and demonstrate what a car's abilities and limits are without having to be the minute degree of authority that an automotive engineer or even an automechanic is about the machine (and even the latter have to intermittently refresh their cognition with the farmed-out external memory of paper books or digital manuals).