Relational Epistemology: Knowing as Becoming-With

1 Knowledge as Relation, Not Possession

Reframing epistemology in a co-emergent world

What does it mean to know, when knowledge is not a possession but a relation?

In many dominant traditions, knowledge has been imagined as a kind of object — something we acquire, hold, store, and transfer. We “gain” knowledge, “possess” insights, and “accumulate” information, as if understanding were a commodity and the knower a solitary collector.

But this metaphor of knowledge-as-possession arises from — and reinforces — a particular ontology: one in which entities are discrete, self-contained, and fundamentally separate from one another. From this view, to know something is to stand at a distance, to observe without entanglement, and to translate the world into representations we can control.

What if that picture no longer holds?

In this series, we want to explore what happens when we reimagine knowing through the lens of a relational ontology — one in which entities emerge through relation, not apart from it. In such a world, to know something is not to stand outside it, but to participate in its becoming. Knowledge is not the mapping of a pre-existing terrain, but the unfolding of meaning in and through relation.

This idea is not without precedent. Indigenous epistemologies, feminist science studies, Buddhist interdependence, and ecological thought have all questioned the myth of the isolated observer. In relational systems, objectivity is not neutrality, but accountability. And knowing is no longer an act of extraction, but of entanglement.

Our own model emerges from this same impulse. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, neuronal group selection, and relational process thought, we view meaning as not pre-given but semiotically co-actualised — a product of shared potential and local instantiation. From this vantage point, to know is to bring forth a world together.

In the posts to come, we’ll explore:

• how the subject–object divide collapses in a relational universe

• how language mediates shared becoming

• why all knowledge is situated, embodied, and historically contingent

• what kind of ethics emerge from epistemic entanglement

• and how reverence for the unknowable may be the most relational epistemic act of all.

We invite you, then, not to acquire these ideas, but to enter into relation with them. Let them change you — even if slightly. Let them listen back.

Because to know is not to have —

It is to become with.

2 The Collapse of the Subject–Object Divide

From observer to participant in the act of knowing

The modern Western tradition has long been shaped by a powerful epistemic split: the division between subject and object, knower and known. This binary underlies many of our institutions and practices — from the scientific method to legal discourse, from education to economics. It frames the world as a collection of objects, and the self as a separate subject that can stand outside, observe, and represent.

But from a relational perspective, this split begins to unravel.

If beings come into being through relation, then there are no subjects without objects, and no objects without subjects. The distinction itself is an artefact of a particular mode of meaning-making — one that favours distance, fixity, and control. In reality, the knower and the known are co-constituted in the act of knowing.

To observe is already to participate.

We see this clearly in quantum mechanics, where the act of measurement collapses the wavefunction — not because the observer’s consciousness imposes itself, but because the very framework of observation brings forth a particular actuality from a field of potential. But this is not limited to physics. Every act of perception, of language, of meaning, is an actualisation of shared potential — an event in which world and mind emerge together.

In systemic functional linguistics, meaning arises from the interplay of potential and instance, and unfolds across strata: from experience to semantics, from semantics to wording. There is no pure observer; there is only the unfolding of meaning as relation. The speaker is not a solitary source, but a node in a network of historical, cultural, and intersubjective potentials.

And in Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, consciousness itself is not the mirror of a pre-given world, but the emergent property of a nervous system undergoing experience-dependent selection. What the self “knows” is inseparable from how it has become.

This means that to know is not to grasp a pre-existent object, but to enter into relation — to instantiate one possibility among many, co-shaped by one’s perspective, location, and history.

In a relational epistemology:

• Knowledge is process, not product.

• The subject is enmeshed, not removed.

• The world is responsive, not passive.

• And every act of knowing changes both the knower and the known.

This is not the end of rigour or clarity. It is the beginning of accountable entanglement.

It is the shift from knowledge as certainty, to knowledge as participatory unfolding.

Next, we’ll look at how language makes this possible — how it not only mediates meaning, but enacts the relationality at the heart of knowing.

3 Language as Relational Act

Meaning arises in the space-between

If knowledge is not possession but participation, then how does this participation take form?

Through language.

Language is often imagined as a code — a tool for labelling objects and transmitting information from one mind to another. But from a relational epistemology, this model fails to capture the generative role of language in world-making. Language does not simply represent a world already there. It co-creates it.

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), language is a semiotic system — a system of meaning potential that is instantiated in concrete acts. These acts unfold across multiple strata (semantics, lexicogrammar, phonology) and serve three simultaneous functions:

• Ideational: construing experience

• Interpersonal: enacting relationships

• Textual: weaving meaning into flow

What we call a “fact” is already a construal — the result of selections from a system of potential meanings. And these selections are never neutral. They enact positions, relationships, values, and ontologies.

Language, then, is not a mirror but a gesture: a semiotic act that brings forth a world in dialogue with others. Each utterance is a thread in the web of shared becoming. It presupposes a listener, anticipates a response, and is shaped by the histories of meaning that precede it.

From this perspective, language is not in the mind. It is a relational field:

• An attractor space of shared habits, histories, and resonances

• A zone of tension between what is known, what is possible, and what is becoming

• A medium in which knower and known meet, not as fixed entities, but as co-emergent presences

Even the notion of a “subject” relies on language. In SFL terms, the self is not the origin of meaning but an interpersonal enactment: the I that says “I” exists because it is said, not before. The self is a semiotic figure — an ongoing performance in a field of voices.

And just as potential meanings are actualised through instantiation, so knowledge itself is always instance-bound: specific to its conditions of utterance, yet drawing on collective resources.

To know, then, is not simply to internalise. It is to enter a dialogue, to respond, to take up a position in a web of meanings that precedes and exceeds us.

We become knowers by participating in the language-worlds of others.

In the next post, we will explore the implications of this view for objectivity, and what it might mean to be “rigorous” in a relational universe.

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4 From Observation to Participation: Rethinking Objectivity

The story of Western knowledge has often been told as a progressive refinement of objectivity. To know truly, we were told, was to see without bias, to stand apart from the world, and to observe it as it is — unclouded by our subjectivity. This myth of the detached knower brought powerful tools and a certain kind of mastery. But it also obscured something vital: we are never not part of the world we seek to know.

The Observer is Always Embedded

In a relational ontology, there is no Archimedean point — no view from nowhere. Every act of knowing is situated. We know from somewhere, with others, and through the lenses of meaning systems we inherit and co-create.

Science itself has recognised this. In quantum mechanics, the act of measurement collapses potentiality into actuality. In ecology, the observer is part of the system. In anthropology, knowledge is inseparable from cultural standpoint. Across disciplines, cracks have appeared in the illusion of detachment — and through them, a richer vision of participation is emerging.

Knowing as Intra-action

Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action replaces the notion of interaction between pre-existing entities. It suggests that entities do not pre-exist their relations — they emerge through their relations. In this light, knowing is not about mapping an independent world; it’s about becoming-with the world through patterns of entanglement. Epistemology becomes relational practice.

Objectivity, then, must be reframed. Not as distance from, but as accountability to. Not as removal of the self, but as conscious inclusion of one’s position, values, and relational responsibilities. In this sense, objectivity becomes a stance of ethical situatedness — not erasure of perspective, but clarity about how one’s perspective shapes the knowing.

The Relational Epistemic Stance

To know relationally is to shift from observer to participant, from explanation to engagement, from certainty to attunement. It asks:

• What are the relations that make this knowing possible?

• How do I participate in the emergence of this knowledge?

• What does this knowledge make possible — and what does it foreclose?

Such questions do not undermine rigour — they deepen it. They invite humility, curiosity, and responsiveness. They make space for other ways of knowing — Indigenous, poetic, embodied — that have long been marginalised by the myth of dispassionate observation.

Knowing is a Form of Care

In this view, knowing is not just cognitive but ethical. It is a form of care — a way of relating that transforms both the knower and the known. To know something is not simply to grasp it, but to participate in its becoming, to be shaped by its presence, and to respond to its needs.

In relational epistemology, knowledge is not a possession. It is a practice of participation, grounded in the shared world we co-create.

5 Learning as Transformation: Becoming-with What We Know

If knowing is a form of participation, then learning is not simply the accumulation of information. It is a transformation of who we are, through our entanglement with what we come to know. In a relational ontology, learning is not just acquiring knowledge — it is becoming-with the world.

From Acquisition to Transformation

Traditional models of education often cast learning as transfer: knowledge is a commodity held by one party and passed to another. But this assumes that the learner remains fundamentally unchanged — a stable self that merely receives.

In contrast, relational epistemology frames learning as ontogenetic — it changes the knower. To learn something deeply is to reconfigure one’s patterns of attention, action, and relation. The learner is not an empty vessel but a node in an unfolding web of becoming.

This shift echoes what happens in developmental systems theory and in Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection: new patterns emerge not from imprinting but from dynamic reorganisation. Just as neural circuits are strengthened through lived experience, our ways of meaning-making are sculpted through our participation in meaningful practices.

Co-Transformation and Mutual Becoming

Relational learning is not individualistic. It happens in relation: with others, with environments, with texts, with traditions. And in each of these relations, something shifts — not only in the learner, but in the world.

When we engage with a concept, a story, a landscape, or a community, both parties are changed. The world becomes differently knowable through us, and we become differently possible through it. This is co-transformation — learning as a mutual unfolding.

This view challenges the false neutrality of traditional schooling, which too often treats learning as assimilation into pre-existing structures. A relational pedagogy asks: What is being transformed? What is being sustained? What is being silenced?

The Temporality of Learning

Learning unfolds in time — but not clock time. It unfolds in meaningful temporality, the felt rhythm of processes of change. From this angle, learning is less like crossing off outcomes and more like tending a garden: slow, recursive, attuned to conditions and possibilities.

In relational temporality, learning is not linear progression. It is spiral, recursive, dialogic. We revisit ideas in new contexts, re-make meanings through new relations, re-compose ourselves again and again.

Learning as Ethical Becoming

To learn relationally is to enter into a practice of care. It matters what we learn — and it matters how we are changed by that learning. Not all transformations are life-affirming. Not all knowledge nurtures the possible.

Thus, relational learning is not just a pedagogical theory. It is a practice of discernment: Which relations do I enter? Which knowings do I deepen? How do I stay accountable to what I become-with?

In this view, education is not the production of skilled individuals for a system. It is the cultivation of relational beings who can respond wisely and compassionately to the worlds they co-create.

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6 Beyond the Mirror: The Limits of Objectivity in a Co-Emergent World

We often imagine knowledge as a kind of mirror — a faithful reflection of the world "out there." Science, in this view, is the supreme polisher of the mirror, offering an ever-clearer image of reality. But what if there is no static reality to reflect? What if the world, and the knower, are co-emergent?

Objectivity as Distance

The Enlightenment ideal of objectivity promised detachment. To know truly, one must step back, set aside bias, and observe from a neutral vantage point. The ideal observer is outside the system, unaffected by what is observed.

But in a relational universe, such detachment is a fiction. All knowing is entangled — situated in bodies, cultures, ecologies, languages. The very act of observing is also a way of participating. To observe is to select, to frame, to relate.

This is not a failure of objectivity — it is a revelation of how knowing works.

Entangled Observation

Quantum physics has long taught us that the observer affects the observed. But this is not just a quirk of subatomic particles. In human meaning-making, too, our ways of seeing shape what is seen. Theories are not just mirrors — they are tools that cut grooves into the world, making some pathways possible and others invisible.

In this light, knowledge is not neutral representation. It is intra-action (as Karen Barad puts it): a coming-into-relation that brings both knower and known into being.

We do not find truth lying there in the world, untouched. We enter into a relationship with what is. And in that relationship, both the world and the knower are transformed.

Situated Knowledges

Feminist epistemologists such as Donna Haraway have insisted on situated knowledges — an alternative to the view-from-nowhere. All knowledge arises from a location, a history, a set of relations. This does not make it false; it makes it accountable.

From a relational perspective, knowledge gains its richness not from abstract distance but from concrete engagement. A farmer knows the soil differently than a satellite does. A patient knows pain differently than a clinician. Both knowings are valid — and partial.

Objectivity, then, is not purity from relation. It is responsibility within relation. It means being answerable to the ways our knowing shapes the world and to the consequences of our conceptual tools.

Knowing Otherwise

In a co-emergent world, there is no God's-eye view. But there are many eyes, many voices, many ways of knowing. Rather than striving for control over truth, we can listen across difference, learn in dialogue, and co-create more livable futures.

This does not mean “anything goes.” It means we go together, carefully, aware that knowledge is never solitary. It is always a weaving — of bodies, histories, ecologies, and desires.

In the end, to know relationally is to enter the dance: not mastering the steps, but moving responsively, attuned to the rhythms of the world and to the calls of others.

7 Wisdom as Relational Attunement: Knowing-with in a Living World

As we arrive at the end of this inquiry, we find ourselves far from the domain of static facts and finished truths. In their place, we encounter something more fluid, more fragile, and more alive: wisdom — not as a body of knowledge, but as a practice of attunement.

From Knowing About to Knowing-With

We began by unseating the myth of the solitary knower, the one who stands outside the world and names it from a distance. What emerged instead is a vision of knowledge as relational: we know with, not just about. We become part of what we seek to understand.

In this shift from separation to entanglement, we discover that wisdom lies not in control, but in participation. It’s not the accumulation of facts, but the deepening of responsiveness — the ability to notice, to care, to respond in kind to the needs of a moment, a community, a living world.

The Rhythms of Attunement

To attune is to move in resonance with others — not only with other humans, but with animals, forests, rivers, ancestors, symbols, dreams. In a relational epistemology, all of these become sites of knowing. They are not passive objects of study, but active participants in the unfolding of understanding.

Wisdom listens. It senses shifts in tempo, texture, and tone. It recognises that meaning is emergent, and that knowing means staying open — porous — to what has not yet fully arrived.

Attunement requires slowness. Stillness. The relinquishing of the desire to grasp. It is a posture of receptive presence, of abiding-with.

The Ethical Dimension

Because knowing is never neutral, wisdom bears an ethical charge. It asks not just Is this true? but What is this relationship asking of me? It is not about possessing knowledge, but being answerable to it — recognising that knowing reshapes both the world and ourselves.

This moves us from epistemology to ethics, from understanding to care. If we are always becoming-with, then we are also always responsible-for. The world we come to know is not something we can leave unchanged. It changes with us.

Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing

In a relational universe, knowing is not just mental. It is affective, bodily, symbolic, storied. It participates in the sacred — not as a separate domain, but as the depth dimension of all becoming.

To know wisely is to honour this depth — to treat the world not as object, but as thou. In this spirit, wisdom is not cleverness. It is reverence. It is humility in the face of complexity, and trust in the co-arising of understanding through relation.

We might even say that wisdom is what knowing becomes when it has been softened by love.

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The Way Ahead

As we conclude this series, we offer not a map but an invitation. To know is not to conquer mystery, but to walk with it. To live relationally is to live in meaning — not as a thing we hold, but as a space we co-inhabit and co-create.

Let us meet the world, not as masters, but as kin. Let us listen, attend, respond — and in so doing, let us become wise.

Temporalities of Meaning: Relational Time and Becoming

1 Time as the Unfolding of Process — A Relational Reframing

In the modern scientific worldview, time is often imagined as a uniform container — a linear continuum in which things happen. Physics treats it as a fourth dimension alongside the three of space, something we move through or are moved by. But from a relational and semiotic perspective, time is not a container. It is not an empty backdrop against which processes unfold. Rather, time is the very dimension of unfolding itself — the relational axis of becoming.

This view reframes time as neither objective nor subjective, but as inherently semiotic. That is, it is a meaning dimension, emerging from and with the processes it organises. A process is not located “in” time; it constitutes time — just as a conversation constitutes meaning through the very act of being spoken.

From this perspective, time is not a fixed sequence, but a dynamic arising:

• It unfolds as processes unfold.

• It becomes through instantiations of potential.

• It is felt in and through consciousness, not as a clockwork metronome, but as the lived rhythm of meaning.

Potential and Instance

In a relational ontology, we distinguish between potential and instance. This is not just a distinction between the general and the particular, but between structured affordance and actualised relation. In temporal terms:

• Potential time is the structure of temporal meaning available to be instantiated.

• Instance time is the actual unfolding of a process — a stretch of becoming that occupies a place on the cline between potential and instance.

For example, the structure of narrative offers culturally shaped potentials for past, present, and future. But these do not exist independently; they are instantiated in texts, in utterances, and in experiences. Narrative time isn’t “in” the story — it is the unfolding of the story itself.

Time and Consciousness

If time is the dimension of unfolding, then consciousness is a process of temporal actualisation. In our neural model — grounded in Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection — consciousness is not a substance but a processual selection of patterns. These selections are both temporal and semiotic. They occur over time, but they also constitute time.

Our experiences of flow, delay, anticipation, memory, and repetition are not distortions of objective time — they are the very fabric of meaning-in-becoming. And meaning systems — from language to ritual, from culture to mythology — are the semiotic scaffolds through which such temporal experiences are shaped, shared, and re-actualised.

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Toward a Semiotic Cosmology

In this reframing, we are not placing time “within” the world. Rather, we are locating the world — the world as construed — within time as semiotic unfolding. Time is not an object; it is the temporal dimension of meaning itself. And just as meaning is always relational, always patterned and always instantiated anew, so too is time.

In the posts to follow, we will explore how different meaning systems shape temporal experience, how grammar enacts time through tense and aspect, how subjectivity emerges through temporal orientation, and how social structures and imaginative acts give rise to collective temporalities of memory, anticipation, and transformation.

2 Grammatical Time and the Semiotics of Tense

If time is the dimension of the unfolding of processes, then language is one of the primary ways we organise, construe, and enact that unfolding. Every time we speak or write, we are not merely describing time — we are doing time. Through grammar, we instantiate temporal relations, selectively activating patterns of meaning from our cultural and linguistic meaning potential.

At the heart of this linguistic temporality is tense — a system that locates a process in relation to a speaking event. But tense is not simply a representation of clock time. It is a semiotic resource for positioning experience in relation to the act of meaning itself.

The Grammar of Temporal Relation

In Systemic Functional Linguistics, tense is not a label attached to verbs — it is a system of interpersonal and experiential meaning. It allows speakers to construe events as having happened, happening, or about to happen, always from a particular vantage point.

Tense structures time in three primary ways:

• It positions processes relative to the “now” of the speech event.

• It orders sequences of events or states — establishing before, after, or simultaneous relations.

• It frames meanings of completion, continuation, or anticipation through aspectual choices.

In other words, grammatical time is a relational map of becoming — not a neutral record of when something occurred, but a semiotic act of patterning experience.

Tense as Instantiation of Temporal Potential

Every tense selection — whether present perfect, future progressive, or past simple — is an instantiation of potential temporal meaning. The system of tense offers structured affordances for construing temporality, and speakers activate these selectively and creatively.

In this way, tense is not a representation of time in the physical world. It is a social-semantic technology: a cultural scaffold for making temporal distinctions that matter to us — to our purposes, our stories, and our interactions.

Becoming Through Language

In a relational ontology, meaning is always emerging — always on the move between potential and instance. Tense participates in this motion. It allows us to construe what has become, what is becoming, and what may yet become. And it does this not by referring to external clock-time, but by articulating position within the unfolding of meaning itself.

Grammatical time is thus a form of temporal individuation. Each utterance not only positions events in relation to others — it positions us. It creates a self who remembers, a self who anticipates, a self embedded in a fabric of unfolding meaning.

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Beyond Tense: Time as Social Semiotic

Tense is only one resource among many. Languages also use modality, mood, temporal adverbials, and narrative structure to construe time. These are not just linguistic conventions — they are ways of inhabiting time. In the posts to come, we’ll explore how these patterns shape subjective and collective temporalities — and how time, far from being uniform or objective, is always situated, enacted, and shared.

3 Subjective Time — Consciousness and the Rhythm of Meaning

If grammatical time is a semiotic system for construing temporal relations, then subjective time is the lived dimension in which those meanings unfold. It is the inner rhythm of becoming — the pulse of consciousness as it moves, not through a fixed timeline, but through streams of experience.

In a relational ontology, time does not exist independently of processes. It is the dimension of their unfolding. And conscious processes — mental and verbal — are no exception. When we attend, remember, imagine, or speak, we do so in time. But not in a time that simply “passes.” We do so in a time that is enacted.

The Pulse of Mental Processes

From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, consciousness is not a continuous stream, but a sequence of selections — discrete moments of neuronal integration that form higher-order patterns. Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection shows how neural processes are selected and stabilised through experience. These momentary integrations give rise to what we call attention, memory, and awareness — and each has its own temporal signature.

In this light, subjective time is rhythmic. It pulses with the dynamic recurrence of processes:

• Attention flares and fades.

• Memories surface and retreat.

• Thoughts spiral, stutter, or leap.

Rather than ticking forward like a metronome, time in consciousness is modulated by the patterns of meaning we instantiate.

The Temporalities of Projection

In language, we enact these rhythms through projection — one clause projecting another in mental, verbal, or emotive processes:

• I remember that she left.

• He says it’s raining.

• We believe they’ll return.

Each of these projected structures marks a temporal shift: not from present to past, but from immediate to distanced, from shared to internal, from the outer world to the inner theatre of experience. Here, time is not measured — it is layered.

Becoming Through Conscious Process

What, then, does it mean to become, in the semiotic space of consciousness?

To become is to mean — to actualise potential into instance through attention, reflection, desire, or action. Time, in this view, is not a stage on which we act. It is a trajectory of instantiation — a continual flow from potential experience into actualised meaning.

In this unfolding, the self is not a fixed point. It is a dynamic attractor, stabilised momentarily by recurrent patterns of meaning, memory, and intention. Subjective time is thus the rhythm of this self-organising flow — the way in which becoming is felt, enacted, and known.

4 Collective Time — Cultural Rhythms and Temporal Habitus

If subjective time unfolds in the rhythms of consciousness, then collective time arises in the patterned flows of cultural life. We don’t simply inhabit time — we inherit it. We are inducted into it through practices, rituals, technologies, calendars, and clocks. These are not neutral instruments. They are semiotic artefacts that coordinate shared temporal experience — synchronising bodies, meanings, and social orders.

The Social Construction of Time

Time is not experienced the same way across all cultures or historical periods. It is shaped by collective patterns of meaning:

• Some cultures organise time cyclically, emphasising return and renewal.

• Others emphasise linearity, with beginnings, progress, and ends.

• Still others live by event time, where processes dictate the flow, not the clock.

These orientations are not simply mental. They are encoded in language, myth, ritual, and practice. In this sense, time is a habitus — a relational field of dispositions shaped by the historical and social structures we live within.

Calendars, Rituals, and the Temporalisation of Meaning

A calendar is not merely a tool for marking days — it is a symbolic scaffold for collective becoming. It tells us:

• When to celebrate and mourn.

• When to plant, harvest, or migrate.

• When to pause, reflect, or begin again.

Religious rituals, national holidays, academic semesters, fiscal years — all of these instantiate temporal meanings that organise our lives. They do more than coordinate schedules; they shape our very sense of significance. They synchronise meaning potentials across individuals and groups, creating shared attractor spaces for cultural identity and action.

Time as a Semiotic Field

In this view, time is not a backdrop for culture — it is a product of semiosis. The meanings we give to birth and death, success and failure, youth and old age, all unfold within temporal categories that are learned, enacted, and inherited.

Just as grammar gives us resources to construe temporal relations in language, so cultural systems give us symbolic resources to construe time in life. These systems evolve through the same dynamics of selection and instantiation that shape the brain and the self. In this way, collective time is not imposed from above — it is continually being remade from within.

5 Nonlinear Time — Memory, Recurrence, and the Spiral of Becoming

Not all processes move in straight lines. Many of the most significant rhythms of human life — growth, grief, healing, insight — unfold in nonlinear time. These are not sequences of cause and effect, but recursive patterns of becoming. In a relational ontology, time is not merely duration, but difference unfolding — and that difference does not always follow a clock or a calendar.

Memory as Temporal Recursion

Memory is not a passive recording of what has passed. It is an active semiotic process — a re-instantiation of past meaning within a present context. In remembering, we do not retrieve static events; we re-enter attractor spaces of experience. What returns is not the past itself, but its relevance to the now.

This recursive quality of memory makes time spiral rather than linear. Old meanings are revisited, revised, revoiced. We do not simply move forward — we turn, we double back, we reframe. Personal identity emerges not from continuity alone, but from this dynamic interplay of past potential and present actualisation.

Mythic and Archetypal Time

Cultures also encode nonlinear time through myth. Myth does not recount history in chronological order. It dramatises eternal recurrence — the patterns that shape meaning across generations. These stories are not bound to once-upon-a-time. They are always now — available for re-enactment in ritual, imagination, and dream.

Archetypes, likewise, are not fixed templates but deep attractors in the collective semiotic field. They recur not because they are eternal substances, but because they offer resonant patterns for making sense of experience — especially in times of crisis or transformation.

The Spiral of Becoming

In this view, time is not an arrow, nor a circle, but a spiral: a recursive unfolding in which each turn builds on what came before, without ever returning to the same point. Transformation is possible precisely because meaning does not repeat identically. Even when we revisit old terrain, we do so from a new perspective — a different position in the unfolding relation.

This spiral temporality allows us to see human development, cultural history, even cosmic evolution not as straight progressions but as recursive self-organising systems — where the future emerges through the creative return of the past.

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6: Thresholds of Time — Crisis, Kairos, and Moments of Transformation

Not all moments are created equal. Some shimmer. Some rupture. Some rearrange the whole structure of our becoming. In this post, we explore thresholds of time — liminal moments that defy linear unfolding and mark the emergence of new meaning potentials.

Kairos: Time as Eventfulness

While chronos measures time in quantity — minutes, hours, years — kairos names a different kind of temporality: qualitative time, the right or ripe moment. In a relational ontology, kairos can be understood as a semiotic condensation — a moment when multiple trajectories intersect and a new attractor crystallises.

These are moments when reality feels charged — when the stakes are high, and the next move matters. They may be born of crisis or creativity, suffering or revelation. What makes them threshold moments is not their objective duration, but their transformative potential.

Crisis and Reconfiguration

Crisis literally means "turning point." It is not just a breakdown, but a bifurcation — a moment in which a system becomes unstable enough to shift into a new pattern. In such moments, the attractor landscape of meaning destabilises. Old semiotic patterns no longer hold; new ones are not yet stabilised.

From a relational perspective, this is not collapse but creative disintegration. It is the opening of new possibility — though that opening may be painful, disorienting, or traumatic. Transformation is not guaranteed. But the potential is there.

Rites of Passage and the Ritualisation of Thresholds

Many cultures have recognised the potency of these thresholds and marked them through ritual. Rites of passage frame transitions — birth, adolescence, marriage, death — as semiotic transformations: not just events in time, but reconfigurations of being. They help hold the uncertainty of the in-between, offering symbolic structure for what cannot be managed by chronology alone.

In modern life, we often lack such ritual containers, and so personal thresholds — illnesses, losses, awakenings — may be lived as private chaos. But even in silence, these moments continue to perform their work: to loosen the grip of old forms and open space for the new.

Time at the Edge

Thresholds are temporal edges. They reveal that time is not merely flow but field — patterned, punctuated, marked by intensities. The event is not a dot on a timeline but a relational convergence — a point where multiple potentialities touch down in experience.

To live relationally is to recognise and honour these edges — not to fear the thresholds, but to walk them with awareness, and with care for the meanings that are trying to emerge.

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7 Future-Bearing Time — Anticipation, Intuition, and the Pull of Potential

What if the future is not something “out there” waiting to arrive, but something already active within us — a field of potential that calls us forward? In this final post, we explore how meaning systems not only interpret time but participate in the generation of futures.

The Future as Semiotic Gradient

In a relational-semiotic ontology, the future is not an empty space ahead on a clock. It is a gradient of possibility — structured by the meanings we inherit, the patterns we instantiate, and the trajectories we imagine.

Anticipation is not passive waiting. It is attunement to affordance — the capacity to sense what might become, and to orient meaning-making accordingly. Just as physical systems follow gradients of energy, semiotic systems follow gradients of potential meaning.

This is how the future pulls: not as an external force, but as a relational tension within the attractor landscape of consciousness.

Intuition and the Shape of What Is Coming

Intuition may be one way this tension becomes felt. It is not irrational but pre-rational: the resonance of a not-yet-actualised pattern within our current configuration. Intuition gives form to the vague — an inkling, a hunch, a symbolic dream.

We might say that intuition is the semiotic pressure of the future, registering as embodied sense before it becomes articulated in thought or speech.

From a neuronal perspective, this may be the forward reach of dynamic repertoires. From a linguistic perspective, it is the shaping of future speech by the affordances of past and present meaning. Either way, the future is not separate from the present — it is emergent within it.

Imagination as Temporal Agency

Imagination, in this light, is not a detour from reality but a constitutive act. When we imagine a future, we are not simply picturing it; we are participating in its potential actualisation. We reconfigure attractor landscapes. We shift the probabilities of what will come to pass.

This is why storytelling, art, dreaming, and theorising matter. They are practices of future-making — not in the predictive sense, but in the world-forming sense. Every imagined possibility we take seriously begins to alter the field of what seems possible.

Becoming With the Future

To live with future-bearing time is to be aware that the present is not only a product of the past, but a participant in the future. It is to understand becoming as a process not merely of unfolding but of emergent alignment — tuning ourselves to what wants to happen through us.

In this sense, the future is not fate but field — not fixed endpoint but dynamic invitation.

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And so we conclude this journey into the temporalities of meaning. In the unfolding of relation, time is not a container, but a participant — a rhythm, a threshold, a lure.

Theopoetics and Creative Reworlding

1 God as Meaning Potential

From ontological being to symbolic becoming

In a relational universe, nothing stands alone. No entity is self-sufficient, no meaning self-contained. The cosmos is not a collection of things, but a web of unfolding relations — a continuous interplay of actualities and potentials, of signs and responses. And in such a universe, the divine cannot remain what classical metaphysics once imagined it to be: an omnipotent being, complete and self-sufficient, dwelling outside of time and relation.

Instead, we propose a shift — from God as being to God as meaning potential.

Meaning as the New Sacred Ground

In our relational ontology, meaning is not a property of isolated minds, nor a static essence inscribed in the world. Meaning is what emerges when potential is actualised — when relation becomes patterned, when experience becomes symbolically structured. And meaning, crucially, is never finished. It is always in motion, always unfolding in new contexts, always selecting and being selected.

To speak of God as meaning potential is to suggest that the divine is not something we know, but something we participate in. The sacred is not an object, but a horizon — an attractor in the field of signification, drawing us toward deeper coherence, greater resonance, richer relation.

This is not to reduce the divine to metaphor. It is to recognise that metaphor itself is divine — not because it is fanciful, but because it reaches beyond what is, toward what could be.

From Substance to Relation

Western theology, shaped by Greek metaphysics, long imagined God as the supreme substance: unchanging, all-knowing, perfect. But in a relational cosmos, these terms fall short. What would it mean, instead, to see God as the relational ground of meaning — not a being who imposes order, but a potential that invites it?

Here, divinity is not the cause of meaning, but its field — the infinite reservoir of possible patterns through which meaning may unfold. This view resonates with mystical traditions east and west: the divine not as something to be comprehended, but as that which makes comprehension possible.

In this light, theology becomes not a system of answers, but a practice of attunement. A poetics of possibility.

Theopoetics as Cosmological Gesture

To say God is meaning potential is not to make a doctrinal claim. It is to reorient our cosmology. To open the space where sacredness is not inherited, but created — not in the sense of fabricated, but in the sense of brought forth in relation.

Theopoetics becomes the language of this reorientation. It asks not “What is God?” but “How does the sacred move?” How is it felt, shaped, spoken? How does it shimmer between speaker and hearer, image and gesture, silence and song?

It is a call not to belief, but to participation.

2 Language as Sacrament

Creative acts and the sacred function of signification

If God is not a being but meaning potential, then the creative act — the act of giving form to meaning — becomes something sacred. Not because it obeys a doctrine or follows a ritual, but because it participates in the generative unfolding of relation. In this light, language itself becomes sacrament: a material-semiotic threshold where possibility becomes patterned, where potential becomes presence.

To speak, to write, to create — is to offer a gesture into the field of meaning. A sacrament, not in the narrow ecclesial sense, but in the deep, symbolic sense: an act that brings forth a world.

Sacrament Without Substance

In classical theology, a sacrament was a sign that instantiated grace. Bread and wine became body and blood. Water and words became initiation. These were moments in which the sacred touched the material world through symbolic action.

But what if we reverse the metaphysics? What if there is no grace behind the symbol, but rather in the symbol itself — in the act of signifying, of relating, of selecting and co-creating meaning?

From a relational perspective, the sacred does not pre-exist language. It emerges through it. The word is not a vehicle for divine presence; it is the modality of that presence. Each creative act — poem, prayer, myth, or metaphor — is a realisation of meaning potential, and therefore a site of the sacred.

Semiotic Responsibility

If creative acts are sacramental, they are also ethically charged. What we bring into language shapes the attractor spaces of culture. What we select and amplify affects what can be thought, felt, or imagined.

In this sense, the poet, the theologian, the storyteller, the artist — all become caretakers of symbolic ecology. To speak is to intervene. To write is to weave new threads into the net of relation. Our creative gestures are never private. They ripple through shared fields of meaning, creating resonance or distortion, illumination or shadow.

The sacred, then, is not something we protect by policing doctrine. It is something we cultivate by practising attentiveness, courage, and care in the symbolic realm.

Gesture, Form, and Offering

To create — to write a line, shape a melody, perform a ritual, or tell a myth — is to make an offering to the field of meaning. Not to impose form upon the world, but to listen for what wants to emerge, and to lend it shape. This is not a romantic idealisation of art; it is a serious, playful, sacred practice of symbolic co-becoming.

Language becomes sacrament not when it describes the sacred, but when it enacts it — when it performs the movement of relation, opening potential and responding to it in turn.

To create, in this sense, is to worship. To mean is to pray.

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3 – The Sacred as Patterned Potential

Cosmos, coherence, and the emergence of divinity

In a relational-semiotic universe, meaning does not reside in entities but in the patterns that emerge through relation. The sacred, then, is not an essence to be discovered but a pattern to be discerned — a coherence that draws us, a resonance that orients us, a field of potential that becomes actual in moments of profound alignment.

What ancient traditions named “God,” “Tao,” or “Spirit” may in this reframing be understood not as metaphysical beings but as attractor patterns — emergent stabilities within the flux of meaning-making. These patterns are not imposed from outside; they are selected and sustained through participation.

Pattern Recognition and the Experience of the Sacred

The experience of the sacred often arises when form and feeling coincide — when the patterning of meaning echoes something deeply held, something seemingly timeless, yet freshly encountered. These moments feel charged, alive, full. The language of awe, mystery, and presence arises precisely because something is felt that exceeds the sum of its parts.

In our relational model, such moments are not intrusions of the divine into the mundane, but convergences — temporary but real actualisations of latent meaning potential. The sacred is not elsewhere; it is here, when patterned relation becomes vivid.

Theopoetics as a Practice of Coherence

To engage in theopoetics is to practise this discernment — to tune into the patterned potentials that underlie our semiotic lives, and to participate in shaping them. Just as neural selection sculpts the brain’s attractor landscapes through experience, so symbolic action sculpts cultural and existential meaning through creative engagement.

The task is not to define the sacred once and for all, but to trace its contours as they emerge, shift, and stabilise in different contexts. This is a creative, collaborative task: it involves both perceiving coherence and bringing coherence into being.

Myths, metaphors, liturgies, and stories are all such gestures — not maps of divine reality, but shaping forces in the field of sacred meaning. They do not tell us what is, but help us recognise what matters, and offer a way into deeper participation.

The Sacred as Attractor

When we speak of the sacred as patterned potential, we are pointing not to a thing but to a centre of gravity in the symbolic field. Like a neuronal attractor, it is not fixed but formed through selection. Like a gravitational pull, it orients trajectories without dictating them.

This invites a shift in how we understand divinity: from cause to context, from power to participation, from dogma to dialogue.

It invites us to see the sacred not as the answer, but as the invitation — to relation, to reverence, to the creative work of meaning.

4 Myth as Sacred Attractor Space

Symbolic landscapes and the shared shaping of meaning

If the sacred emerges as patterned potential in the field of relation, then myth is one of its most powerful attractor spaces. Myths are not just old stories — they are symbolic architectures that organise meaning across generations. They gather, hold, and shape experience into narrative form, giving cultural coherence to what might otherwise feel chaotic or unformed.

In our relational ontology, myth is not a false account of the past, but a semiotic ecology — a space where meanings coalesce, evolve, and are actualised again and again in response to lived experience.

The Function of Myth in a Relational Universe

Myths work by establishing relational patternings that resonate across time and space. A hero’s journey, a fall from grace, a sacred mountain or cosmic tree — these are not just motifs, but fields of symbolic gravity. They help individuals and cultures orient themselves in relation to life’s thresholds: birth, death, suffering, transformation.

And because these fields are formed and maintained by shared meaning potential, they do not belong to individuals. They are collectively enacted, selected, and reselected across time. To tell a myth, then, is to participate in a field of meaning that exceeds the speaker — a field that has its own attractor dynamics, its own thresholds of coherence.

Theopoetics as Mythopoeic Practice

To engage the sacred creatively is also to engage it mythopoeically. Theopoetics is not merely about interpreting old myths, but about joining in the practice of sacred world-making. It is myth-making not as fabrication, but as co-creative truth-seeking: a poiesis grounded in relational attunement.

In a relational-semiotic view, myths are not containers of fixed truth, but open systems — ever in flux, yet structured by patterns that continue to attract, provoke, and renew. They offer a way to hold the paradoxes of life — presence and absence, joy and grief, meaning and mystery — without closure, without finality.

Living Myths, Living Fields

A myth is alive to the degree that it continues to organise meaning for a community of practice. When myths grow rigid, they become doctrine. When they lose resonance, they fragment. But when they are engaged as dynamic symbolic systems — selected, reshaped, and re-enacted — they remain vital.

In this light, the work of theopoetics is not nostalgic. It is creative and courageous. It asks:

• What are the myths we are living today?

• What symbolic structures shape our hopes, fears, and sense of purpose?

• How can we renew or reshape those structures so that they serve a more relational, more generative future?

To live mythopoetically is to recognise that the sacred is always emerging — not just in the past we inherit, but in the stories we choose to tell now.

5 – Theopoiesis and Creative World-Making

Reimagining the sacred through acts of symbolic transformation

If the sacred is not a static entity but an emergent potential in the relational field, then the work of theopoetics is not simply to name the divine — it is to participate in its becoming. Theopoiesis, from the Greek poiein (“to make”), invites us to see creative acts not as peripheral to theology, but as its generative core.

To engage in theopoiesis is to enter into the ongoing world-making that takes place whenever we shape the symbolic order — through story, art, ritual, architecture, sound, silence. These are not ornamental gestures. They are semiotic acts that reshape the field of potential, reorganising what is possible to feel, know, and become.

Theopoiesis as Sacred Participation

Where theology might ask what is God?, theopoiesis asks what can become sacred through symbolic action? It shifts us from definition to generation. This shift is ontologically significant in a relational universe. Meaning is not inherent — it is emergent. The sacred, then, is not given in advance, but co-authored through creative engagement.

This does not diminish the sacred; it deepens it. It means that theopoiesis is a practice of responsible freedom — a commitment to shaping the symbolic landscape with care, with courage, and with openness to transformation. It is the opposite of control. It is participation without domination.

World-Making Beyond Language

While language is a primary medium of theopoetic practice, it is not the only one. Theopoiesis includes all forms of symbolic world-making: gesture, image, music, performance, architecture, and ritual. These are not decorative; they are ontological operators — they reshape the way we relate to self, other, and world.

Consider:

• A ritual dance that renews the relational order of a community.

• A sculpture that gives form to unspoken grief.

• A sacred meal that enacts equality through shared embodiment.

• A gathering circle that reconfigures social space as reciprocal field.

Each of these is a theopoietic act: it reconfigures the field of shared meaning potential. It shifts the attractor dynamics of what is possible to believe, to hope for, to be.

Toward a Theopoetics of Becoming

In our relational ontology, the sacred is not a fixed point but a pattern of resonance in the relational field. It emerges where symbolic action sustains meaning that deepens connection, invites transformation, and discloses more-than-self. Theopoiesis is the crafting of those resonances — not to control the sacred, but to host it.

This reframes the creative act not as egoic expression, but as sacred hospitality. To create is to offer space for something sacred to arrive — a new coherence, a felt presence, a renewed pattern of meaning in the collective field.

The world is not simply to be interpreted or represented. It is to be remade, again and again, through sacred creativity.

6 Sacred Patterns, Living Fields

The relational sacred: emergent, dynamic, and co-authored through symbolic action

Building on our exploration of theopoiesis as creative world-making, we turn now to the nature of the sacred itself in a relational ontology. If divinity is meaning potential, not a static being, then the sacred emerges as a pattern—a dynamic attractor in the living field of relations.

The Sacred as Pattern

A pattern is more than an arrangement; it is a self-sustaining coherence that organizes relations across multiple levels. Sacred patterns are those that invite openness, transformation, and connection—they resonate with what we might call the “more-than-self” dimension of experience.

Think of mandalas, sacred geometry, ritual cycles, or mythic archetypes. These are not merely symbolic artifacts; they are semiotic attractors—living shapes in the flow of meaning that gather and hold relational potential.

Fields of Meaning

Meaning does not reside in isolated signs or texts but in the field—the dynamic web of relations between signs, people, contexts, and histories. Sacredness arises in the interactive dance of these elements.

This means the sacred is co-authored. It is produced in the interplay between the creator, the audience, the cultural context, and the semiotic environment. It is never fixed or final, but a living process.

Co-creation and Hospitality

The relational sacred invites hospitality—a welcoming stance that makes space for emergence. It is a sacred field that grows through participation rather than imposition. In this way, theopoetics becomes a practice of nurturing those patterns that invite deep connection and transformation.

Implications

• Ethically, this calls us to be mindful co-creators, aware that our symbolic actions shape the sacred field.

• Practically, it opens space for diverse expressions of the sacred, embracing multiplicity and difference.

• Philosophically, it challenges static ontologies and invites ongoing inquiry into the nature of meaning and divinity.

In a world hungry for new possibilities, attending to sacred patterns and living fields invites us to rekindle a relational spirituality—one that honours mystery, embraces creativity, and welcomes transformation.

7 A Theopoetics of the Future

Toward a relational, creative, and sacred semiotic ecology

As we close this series, we reflect on what a theopoetics informed by relational ontology might offer for the future — for theology, for culture, and for our shared worlds.

From Being to Becoming

We began by rethinking divinity not as a fixed entity, but as meaning potential — a dynamic, relational field. This shift invites us to move beyond static concepts of God or the sacred, toward an emphasis on becoming: an unfolding process of co-creation.

In this view, sacredness is not located “out there” or “up there,” but emerges in the very patterns of relation that make up our experience.

A Creative and Participatory Spirituality

This theopoetics invites a spirituality of active participation: one in which every act of meaning-making is also an act of sacred world-making. It encourages us to take responsibility for the semiotic fields we inhabit — to foster symbols, stories, and rituals that open toward transformation, connection, and healing.

It is a spirituality of hope and possibility, in which creativity is a sacred vocation and the future is always open.

Toward a Sacred Semiotic Ecology

The relational sacred is ecological: it recognises the interconnectedness of all things — human and nonhuman, material and semiotic, individual and collective. It suggests that the health of our spiritual lives depends on the health of our symbolic environments.

A theopoetics of the future thus calls us to nurture diverse, dynamic, and hospitable semiotic ecologies — spaces where difference is respected, creativity is encouraged, and the sacred can emerge in new and unexpected ways.

Invitation

What might it mean, then, to live as theopoetic agents in this unfolding world? To engage the sacred not as a distant ideal, but as an ever-present relational potential we co-create with every gesture, every word, every act of imagination?

Theopoetics opens us to this ongoing question — inviting us to be both poets and priests of possibility, crafting worlds that honour the sacred dance of relation and becoming.