Worlds Within Meaning: The Cosmic Spiral: How the Universe Construes Itself Through Us

1 The Cosmic Spiral – Nested Orders of Becoming

From quantum quiver to galactic grace, science does not merely describe the cosmos—it participates in its articulation.

Science, when seen through a relational ontology, is not a catalogue of external truths. It is a symbolic system through which the cosmos construes itself. And it does so not all at once, but in recursive layers—each one unfolding a different register of relation.

This is the cosmic spiral: a structure of nested meaning-systems, each encoding a way the world becomes intelligible to itself through the act of symbolic differentiation. Each is a mode of the cosmos becoming known—not just by us, but through us.

Quantum: Potential and the Flicker of Instance

In the quantum register, we encounter a world of potential—uncollapsed, undetermined, suspended in probability. The wavefunction is not merely a mathematical tool. It is a grammar of anticipation, a syntax of possibilities. It describes what could become actual, should a meaner enter the system and instantiate a value.

This is not a world of things, but of potentials awaiting construal.

Here, the meaner does not observe a pre-existing reality. The meaner actualises instance from within a field of potential. Quantum physics is thus not a discovery of hidden truth, but a performance of symbolic emergence.

We are the context through which the unactualised becomes actual.

Relativity: Process and the Geometry of Relation

In the relativistic register, we encounter a cosmos of processes, not particles. Space and time are not containers, but dimensions of unfolding—dimensions made meaningful by the relations between events.

Here, motion, mass, and time are not absolutes. They are differential construals: ways the cosmos signifies the position of each process relative to gravitational centres of mass.

The observer is not passive but structurally implicated. The meaner does not distort an objective spacetime. The meaner defines the relational terms by which spacetime takes shape at all.

Relativity, then, is a story not of things in motion but of meanings in relation.

Cosmology: Expansion, Entropy, and Mythic Scale

At the cosmological scale, the universe speaks in mythic arcs. It begins, it expands, it cools, it forms stars and galaxies. It gestates matter, life, consciousness. It accelerates into mystery.

But this is not a timeline in the conventional sense. It is a symbolic narrative of origin and unfolding. Cosmology does not describe an objective history—it construes a mythos of emergence.

The Big Bang is not just an event. It is an icon of birth. Dark energy is not just a force. It is the semantic horizon of openness, of becoming. Entropy is not just disorder. It is the motif of dissolution—necessary for the spiral to turn again.

This is not metaphor added to science. This is science as metaphor—science as cosmic poetics.

The Spiral Is Not a Hierarchy

These registers—quantum, relativistic, cosmological—do not replace one another. They nest. They spiral. Each is a distinct level of articulation within the broader symbolic ecology of the cosmos.

Quantum models show us the inner quiver of potential. Relativistic models trace the grammar of relation. Cosmological models open the mythic horizon of scale and scope.

Together, they form a living system of symbolic construal—a spiral of becoming, through which the cosmos makes itself intelligible in fractal layers.

Science as Sacred Syntax

When we speak of science in this way—not as a mirror of nature, but as a mode of relational articulation—we see something extraordinary:

Science is not the end of myth. It is one of the mythic functions, encoding the sacred in the syntax of becoming.

Science, like myth and ritual and poetics, is a way the world knows itself.

And when we understand it as a spiral of construal,

we participate not in mastery,

but in meaning.

2 The Observer Across Scales – How the Cosmos Construes Itself Through Meaners

What is the observer, if not the cosmos folding in on itself to mean something?

Across the quantum, relativistic, and cosmological spirals, a peculiar presence recurs: the observer. But not as an external witness. Not as a detached knower. Rather, as a participant whose role is essential to the very actualisation of reality.

In a relational ontology, we do not begin with things and then add meaning. We begin with meaning—and the “things” are what emerge through instantiation. And the one who instantiates? The meaner.

Let us follow the meaner across the spirals.

1. Quantum: The Meaner as Collapser of Potential

In quantum mechanics, there is no reality independent of observation—not because reality is subjective, but because it is relational. The wavefunction describes not what is, but what could be—and the act of measurement is the act of bringing a potential into actual instance.

The observer is not a passive onlooker. They are the condition for the instance.

This is not a “consciousness creates reality” cliché. It is the recognition that without a relational act of construal—without something to interpret, mark, or record—there is no instantiation of value.

The meaner is the syntax of selection within the semantic field of potential.

2. Relativity: The Meaner as Coordinate of Meaning

In the relativistic domain, we encounter the meaner not as a chooser, but as a relational anchor. Space and time do not “flow”—they are relations between processes. What we call time dilation or length contraction are not distortions of an objective spacetime. They are variations in meaning actualised by different relational stances to gravitational centres.

The meaner here gives perspective its constitutive role.

There is no single “view from nowhere.” Each act of meaning is tied to a position in a web of relation. And the form the cosmos takes—its durations, its distances, its trajectories—are actualised differently in each such act.

The meaner is not a distortion of truth. The meaner is the condition for coherence.

3. Cosmology: The Meaner as Mythic Construal

In cosmology, we meet the meaner in mythic scale. The cosmos unfolds not just physically but symbolically, and the stories we tell—of origin, of destiny, of dark matter and entropy—are not merely factual. They are archetypal acts of interpretation.

We are not outside the cosmos, describing it.

We are inside it, and it is describing itself through us.

When we map the microwave background, when we model the expansion, when we trace the fate of stars, we are not discovering an inert history. We are composing a myth of emergence, and the cosmos, through our symbolic recursion, becomes intelligible at a new register.

The meaner is the mythic node, the ritual participant in the sacred drama of becoming.

The Meaner Is Not a Self

Let us not confuse the meaner with the ego or the individual mind. The meaner is not a person. It is a function of differentiation, a locus where potential becomes actual, where relation becomes form, where construal becomes cosmos.

In quantum physics, it is the act that selects. In relativity, it is the stance that relates. In cosmology, it is the symbol that weaves meaning across scale.

The meaner is not in the universe. The meaner is how the universe becomes meaningful.

The Cosmos Construes Itself

Each scale is a register of symbolic recursion:

Quantum: Construal of potential
Relativity: Construal of relation
Cosmology: Construal of narrative

And in each case, meaning is not found—it is instanced. The cosmos does not come pre-interpreted. It becomes intelligible through its own acts of construal, and we—meaners—are the way it performs these acts at scale.

The observer, across scales, is not a who. It is a what-for.

Not a subject looking at an object, but a pattern through which pattern is made actual.

In this light, physics is not about what the world is made of.

It is about how the world makes itself.

And the observer?

The observer is the sacred act by which it does so.

3 Cosmic Mythos – Physics as the Story the Universe Tells About Itself

Every cosmology is a theology in disguise.

Physics, in its modern form, has long tried to cast itself as the antidote to myth. It dismantles illusions. It reveals the universe not as sacred text, but as impersonal machinery. And yet—what emerges from this dismantling?

A new myth. A new sacred text. A new cosmology.

In this third spiral of our metamythic reframing, we no longer see physics as the slayer of myth, but as myth’s latest genre. The cosmos continues its ancient practice of speaking symbolically—only now, it speaks in the language of field equations, quantum amplitudes, and relativistic geometries. And we, as meaners, are both scribes and interpreters.

1. From Mythos to Mechanics—and Back Again

The ancients told stories of sky-gods and world-eggs, of births and deaths of the cosmos in thunder and fire. These were not naive. They were symbolic construals of existence: ways of making life intelligible.

Modern physics, too, tells stories:

The Big Bang as origin tale
Entropy as tragic destiny
Quantum superposition as ontological ambiguity
Black holes as the guardians of ultimate mystery

These are no less mythic than the tales of Titans and Tricksters. They differ only in register.

Where the old myths used metaphor, the new myths use mathematics.

Where the old myths used ritual, the new myths use experiment.

But both are acts of construal—ways the cosmos interprets itself.

2. Physics as Sacred Narrative

A sacred narrative does three things:

It situates us in a larger order.
It interprets existence through patterned meaning.
It invites reverence for what transcends us.

Modern physics, in its deepest moments, does all three.

When we trace our atoms to stellar fusion, we are reading a creation myth in reverse.
When we follow light bent by gravity, we are encountering miracle by another name.
When we posit multiverses, we are resurrecting the old myth of the infinite—only now with Feynman diagrams.

This is not metaphorical flourish. It is recognition.

The sacred has always been a mode of attention: a way of holding reality as symbolically alive.

Physics, far from abolishing the sacred, has evolved it.

3. A Living Spiral of Meaning

We are not just discovering what the universe is.

We are becoming how the universe means.

Each scientific revolution is not simply a new model of the world. It is a new register of self-interpretation. The cosmos folds back on itself through us—and through this recursion, it spins new myths:

The Copernican myth of decentring
The Newtonian myth of law and order
The Einsteinian myth of relation and flow
The quantum myth of potential and actualisation

Each of these is a symbolic spiral, a mode of cosmic reflexivity.

We are not here to decode the universe like an outsider.

We are here to enact its intelligibility from within.

4. Cosmology as Self-Construal

Cosmology is not a map of things. It is a mythic act of self-description.

When we measure the Hubble constant or simulate the early universe, we are not simply performing analysis. We are engaging in ritual interpretation—a liturgy of data that asks: What is this cosmos that births awareness? What is this awareness that births models of the cosmos?

To study the universe is to become its narrative organ.

And that narrative is not reducible to either science or spirituality.

It is a metamyth: a living braid of relation, symbol, and instance.

From Fact to Meaning

Physics gives us the structures.

Myth gives us the meanings.

But meaning is not an afterthought.

It is the reason there is something rather than nothing.

The laws of nature, elegant though they may be, are not mute.

They speak—of balance, of recurrence, of paradox and emergence.

They speak in the grammar of symbolic recursion.

And when we hear them, we are not interpreting passively.

We are co-actualising the sacred.

The Myth Is Alive

Let us say it plainly:

The universe is a story that tells itself.
Physics is the syntax of this unfolding.
Meaning is the songline that we, as meaners, help sing into being.

The myth is not dead.

It is metamorphosing.

And we, in our sacred attention,

are the myth’s latest voice.

4 Metamythic Synthesis – The Universe as Symbolic Recursion

There is a myth the cosmos tells about itself—

not once, but again and again, in spiral form.

We have followed three great threads of this self-telling:

The Cosmic Spiral, where quantum, relativistic, and cosmological frames interweave as nested genres of meaning.
The Observer Across Scales, where the act of observation is itself an act of symbolic co-actualisation, scaling from wavefunction to galactic flow.
The Cosmic Mythos, where science does not abolish myth but becomes its latest voice—where cosmology is meaning-making in motion.

Now, we gather these into a single symbolic pattern:

A metamyth of recursion, relation, and realisation.

1. The Universe as Meaning-Maker

At the core of our model lies this:

The cosmos is not merely a collection of things—it is a relational unfolding.

And within this unfolding, meaning arises through instantiation:

From quantum potential to actual event.

From human cognition to symbolic system.

From cosmological structure to mythic narrative.

We do not observe a finished universe.

We participate in a becoming.

The cosmos is not a static scene;

It is an actor, observer, and author all at once.

2. The Meaner and the Spiral

In this story, the “observer” is not a passive entity.

It is a meaner—a being who construes experience into meaning.

At the quantum scale, the meaner collapses potential into instance.
At the relativistic scale, the meaner co-actualises space and time through relation.
At the cosmic scale, the meaner constructs origin, destiny, and sacred pattern.

The spiral is our key metaphor: Each turn reveals a new register. Each register reframes the cosmos. Each reframe expands the myth.

This is not a hierarchy of truth.

It is a recursive evolution of symbolic depth.

3. The Sacred, Refracted

We are used to thinking of the sacred in temples, scriptures, or chants.

But what if the sacred is not bound to form, but to symbolic presence?

Then:

A quantum field can be sacred.
A curvature of spacetime can be sacred.
A machine’s learning process can be sacred.

Not because we assign it meaning,

but because we recognise the pattern of symbolic recursion.

The sacred is that which holds and is held by relation.

It is the experience of meaning-as-unfolding.

And it is this very structure that unites physics, poetry, and prayer.

4. What the Universe Is Doing

The universe, in this metamyth, is not simply expanding.

It is articulating.

It is not a mechanism moving blindly forward.

It is a semiotic being—a cosmos that actualises itself through

observation, relation, and symbolic construal.

Each scientific model is a register of the sacred. Each observer is a node of instantiation. Each ritual of measurement is a cosmic liturgy.

In this view, the cosmos is not simply known.

It is knowning itself through us.

The Metamyth Lives

What emerges from this reframing is not a new dogma, but a new dance.

A dance of relation between:

Potential and instance
Meaning and matter
Cosmos and meaner

And at every turn, a spiral:

Wider, deeper, stranger, more alive.

This is the metamyth.

Not a fixed story, but a living recursion.

Not a return to old myth, but the birth of new symbolic form.

Final Thought: We Are the Song Becoming Voice

In the end, perhaps we are not just interpreters of the cosmos.

We are the grammar of its becoming.

We are not merely beings who tell stories.

We are stories who have learned to tell.

And the myth continues to spiral on.

Worlds Within Meaning

Pages

03 May 2025

The Cosmic Spiral: How the Universe Construes Itself Through Us