In our time, we find ourselves at a crossroads—a moment when the old stories no longer suffice, yet new stories remain elusive. Science has transformed our understanding of the world, but often at the cost of sidelining the very meanings that make that world livable. Meanwhile, ancient myths seem distant, their forms and functions misunderstood or dismissed.
This series invites us to explore a different path: toward a new mythos of meaning.
Drawing on insights from relational ontology, systemic functional linguistics, and semiotics, we will trace how meaning itself can be understood not merely as communication or representation, but as the evolution of possibility. Meaning is not a layer added onto a given world—it is the semiotic architecture through which worlds become possible and real.
Over six posts, we will examine:
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How meaning unfolds as the systemic differentiation of potential.
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Why possibility is structured, patterned, and constrained—not infinite chaos.
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How myth functions as a semiotic system that shapes what is thinkable, sayable, and enactable.
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The limits imposed by the “myth of the given” and the challenge of moving beyond it.
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What it means to consider meaning-making as sacred—a fundamental act of world-formation.
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How to live within a mythos of meaning that embraces responsibility, emergence, and relationality.
This is not a return to ancient cosmologies, nor a simple critique of modernity. It is a reframing: a call to rethink meaning as an ontological force, a dynamic system, and a living process.
Through this series, we hope to open a space for conversation—among scholars, practitioners, and seekers—about how we might inhabit this mythos, and how it might guide new ways of knowing, being, and creating.
We invite you to join us on this journey toward a new understanding of meaning—one that honours both rigour and imagination, precision and poetry, system and story.
1 Meaning as the Evolution of Possibility
What if meaning is not a layer added to the world, but the very condition through which a world becomes possible?
This question—orients the direction of this series. It invites us to step outside familiar binaries: between fact and interpretation, matter and mind, biology and culture. It asks us to stop treating meaning as something that occurs after the world is given, and instead to see meaning as what allows any “given” to emerge at all.
We often imagine evolution as the transformation of things over time: forms changing, species adapting, systems complexifying. But from a relational perspective, the deeper movement is not the evolution of things—it is the evolution of possibility.
That is: what can happen, what can be enacted, what can be construed, is not fixed. It is always structured, but never closed. Meaning does not just respond to reality; it reconfigures the field of what is real, what is sayable, what is thinkable, what is livable. And this reconfiguration is not incidental—it is ontological.
Meaning, in this view, is the semiotic differentiation of potential. It does not represent the world—it patterns its emergence. This is why language matters. Not because it names what already exists, but because it enacts systemic pathways through which experience can be brought into being.
From this angle, evolution is not just about organisms or cultures. It is about the deepening articulation of affordances: new ways of cutting, relating, valuing, realising. And every such articulation is a construal—a meaning-event that shifts the terrain of the possible.
We are not just living in a universe of matter and energy. We are living in a universe of meaning-potentials. And these potentials are not static. They evolve—not as outcomes of external processes, but as internal reorganisations of the semiotic field.
This is not metaphor. It is a change in how we think about system, construal, and emergence.
It is also the beginning of a new mythos: not a return to ancient cosmologies, but a way of inhabiting meaning as the very substance of reality’s becoming.
In the next post, we will explore what it means to treat possibility itself as systemic—not infinite or formless, but structured, ordered, and shaped by the conditions of meaning.
2 Possibility as System, Not Substrate
If meaning is the evolution of possibility, then we must ask: what is possibility?
In many traditions—scientific, philosophical, even spiritual—possibility is treated as a kind of substrate: a blank openness, a space of infinite potential out of which things emerge. This gives rise to metaphors of chaos, void, formlessness. But these metaphors mislead. They treat possibility as undifferentiated, raw, awaiting form.
Relational ontology offers another view: possibility is not formless—it is structured. It is not a passive background, but an active system. And like all systems, it has its own organisation, its own internal topology, its own affordances and constraints.
This means that what is possible is not arbitrary. It is not infinite. It is systemically patterned—shaped by interdependencies, tendencies, modalities, and strata. Not everything is possible at every point. Possibility is always constrained by system—but never reducible to mechanism.
To speak of “system” here is not to invoke determinism. In SFL, as in relational thinking more broadly, a system is not a machine—it is a theory of the instance: a structured potential, a field of virtual relations, within which actualisation may occur in many different ways.
When we say that a clause is a choice within the system of mood, or that a social act is a move within a field of values, we are already working with systemic possibility. Every instantiation is a cut—a selection from a potential that is meaningfully structured. That structure is what we call system.
So too with the world itself.
We can no longer treat possibility as a metaphysical default. It is neither chaos nor chance. It is a relationally ordered field, in which constraints are not limits but conditions for meaningful emergence. Possibility is what becomes available when systems differentiate themselves.
This shifts the role of meaning. Meaning does not merely refer to what is real. It organises what can be real. It structures the field of possibility—not just semantically, but ontologically.
And this is where the mythic dimension returns.
For what we call myth may in fact be one of the oldest and most profound human attempts to model possibility not as abstract freedom, but as patterned system. Myth does not tell us what is true or false. It tells us what is available to be meant—and how different patterns of meaning bring different worlds into being.
In the next post, we will explore this more fully: not myth as story, but myth as semiotic architecture—a construal of possibility that shapes what reality is allowed to be.
3 Mythos as Construal of Possibility
What is myth, if not story? And what is story, if not the unfolding of meaning through time?
To think mythologically is not to believe in gods or spirits or origin tales. It is to engage with the world through a systemic construal of possibility—to inhabit a patterned way of meaning the real.
Myth, in this light, is not a belief system. It is a semiotic system: a way of cutting the world, making distinctions, assigning value, projecting causality, locating self and other across dimensions of time, space, and relation. It is not reducible to narrative form, but narrative is one of its natural modes of instantiation.
What makes myth mythic is not its content, but its function: it patterns possibility.
A mythos is not a set of statements about the world. It is a relational grammar for how the world is to be meant. It construes what kinds of entities can exist, what kinds of events can unfold, what counts as meaningful action, what scales of time and space are available for human participation.
In this sense, every worldview—scientific, religious, ideological, philosophical—is also a mythos: not because it is fictional or irrational, but because it offers a systemic organisation of meaning-potential. It tells us not just what is, but what could be, what should be, what must never be. It is a construal of the possible.
Modernity, in attempting to rid itself of myth, did not eliminate it. It simply disavowed the construal. It re-enacted mythic patterns—of progress, rupture, purification, mastery—while denying their semiotic nature. This is the legacy of the literalist cut: myth was recoded as falsehood, and thus stripped of its power as a construal system.
But myth was never about truth or falsehood. It was about structuring fields of emergence—creating orientations to time, space, value, and causality that made certain lived realities possible.
To reconceive myth as semiotic architecture is to recover its role as a meaning-system—one that does not merely explain the world, but shapes how the world becomes available to experience. Myth construes the boundaries of self, society, cosmos, and the sacred—not by asserting facts, but by patterning construal.
And in doing so, it conditions what it is possible to be.
This is why myth cannot be replaced by science. They do not operate at the same level. Myth is not a competitor to explanation—it is a prior construal of what counts as explainable, what counts as agentive, what counts as real. Every scientific paradigm rests on such patterned assumptions. So too does every politics, every religion, every theory of mind.
The question, then, is not whether to live within a mythos—but which ones we are already living within, and what they make possible or impossible.
In the next post, we will examine one of the most pervasive and restrictive mythic grammars of the modern world: the myth of the given—and the need to cut against it.
4 Cutting Against the Myth of the Given
There is a myth at the heart of modern thought. It does not wear the name of myth—indeed, it wears the name of truth. But it functions as all mythoi do: by shaping what is taken to be real, obvious, and beyond question.
This is the myth of the given.
The myth of the given insists that the world is already there: fully formed, pre-structured, knowable in principle and observable in fact. It teaches that reality is something we discover, not something we enact. Meaning, on this view, is a secondary layer—an interpretive veil cast over what is already objectively the case.
This myth is not just philosophical; it is deeply cultural. It underlies the logic of measurement, the authority of data, the fetish of objectivity. It feeds the fantasy that truth is what remains when all construal is stripped away.
But this fantasy is itself a construal—and a particularly powerful one. For by disavowing the role of meaning in the making of reality, it renders invisible the semiotic systems that structure the real. It pretends to speak from nowhere, while reinforcing a very particular somewhere: a world of bounded objects, discrete subjects, and linear causality.
To cut against this myth is not to abandon truth, but to reorient truth within the dynamics of construal.
Relational ontology makes this move explicit: what we take to be real is not passively received, but enacted through patterned meaning-relations. There is no unconstrued reality to fall back on—only different cuts, different systems of potential, different instantiations of experience.
This does not mean that anything goes. Quite the opposite. Once we recognise that all actuality arises from within systems of potential, we can begin to ask: What are the structures of possibility that condition this event? What are the systems through which this meaning becomes actual?
This is the move from description to systemic construal.
It is also a mythic move—not in the sense of fiction, but in the sense of founding logic. For every ontology rests on cuts: distinctions between what is and what is not, what counts and what does not. The myth of the given hides its cuts. A new mythos must bring them to light.
And here lies our task: not to reject myth, but to reconstrue it systemically—to build new architectures of possibility that do not pretend to speak from nowhere, but that speak from within meaning itself.
Such a project is neither nostalgic nor utopian. It is ontological. It invites us to inhabit meaning not as a veil over reality, but as the medium through which reality becomes—an open system, evolving, patterned, lived.
In the next post, we’ll ask: what kind of mythos might emerge if we took systemic construal itself as sacred? What if the deepest ritual were the act of making meaning?
5 When Meaning-Making Becomes Sacred
What happens when we take the act of meaning itself as sacred?
Not sacred in the sense of sanctified by religion, or protected by ritual taboos—but sacred in the deeper, systemic sense: as that which orients possibility, that which grounds worlds.
Traditional mythologies have often located the sacred in a realm beyond the human: the divine, the eternal, the transcendent. But a relational ontology has no “outside” in which to place the sacred. There is no ultimate reality beyond the cut—no cosmic substrate untouched by meaning.
Instead, the sacred must be understood within the system: not as a thing, but as a function—a way of organising meaning that reorganises possibility.
In this view, the sacred is not that which stands apart from meaning-making, but that which draws attention to it. It is the moment when meaning is no longer transparent, no longer taken for granted. The sacred is the flare of construal becoming visible.
This transforms ritual.
A ritual is not merely a repetition of inherited forms. It is an act of systemic re-alignment: a way of selectively actualising a field of potential, of marking a construal as consequential. When we light a candle, speak a name, cross a threshold—we are not simply expressing feeling. We are performing a cut. We are making meaning as if it mattered.
What if all meaning-making were like this?
What if every construal—linguistic, social, conceptual—were understood not just as functional, but as formative? What if to mean were to participate in the shaping of reality itself?
This would require a new grammar of sacredness. Not a grammar of purity, hierarchy, or transcendence—but a grammar of responsible construal: one that recognises the ethical force of each meaning-choice, not as moral pronouncement, but as ontological participation.
In this mythos, the sacred is not a fixed domain. It is a dynamic infolding of system and instance—a site where potential is opened, felt, cut, and reconfigured.
To treat meaning-making as sacred is to take seriously the insight that we do not live in a world, but in a construal of world. It is to honour the systems that make meaning possible—not as abstractions, but as lived architectures of becoming.
And perhaps this is what myth was always reaching for—not a supernatural order behind the real, but a heightened attention to the patterned nature of reality itself. Myth made meaning visible. It sacralised the cut.
In the final part of this series, we will ask: how might a new mythos for meaning itself take shape—not as a story we tell, but as a system we live?
6 Living a Mythos of Meaning
We have journeyed through the evolution of possibility, systemic construal, myth as semiotic architecture, the challenge of the myth of the given, and the sacredness of meaning-making. Now we arrive at the heart of the question: what does it mean to live a mythos of meaning itself?
To live a mythos is not to adopt a fixed story or ideology. It is to inhabit a relational architecture—a dynamic system of patterned potentials that shape what can be thought, felt, and enacted.
Such a mythos acknowledges that reality is not pre-given, but enacted through meaning. It recognises that every act of construal is a creative cut, an instance of systemic potential actualising itself in particular ways. Meaning is not a passive reflection; it is ontogenetic.
Living this mythos means embracing the responsibility and the possibility inherent in our ongoing acts of construal. It means becoming aware of the systemic patterns we participate in, and the affordances they open or foreclose. It is an invitation to co-create worlds with intention and insight.
This new mythos is not confined to language, nor to human cognition alone. It encompasses the interplay of systems at all scales: biological, social, cultural, symbolic. Meaning-making is the connective tissue of reality’s becoming.
In practice, living this mythos might look like:
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Cultivating attentive awareness of how meanings are made and remade in everyday life.
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Engaging with the systemic potentials of language, ritual, art, and science as ways of enacting new possibilities.
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Recognising the interdependence of meaning and materiality, where symbolic action shapes embodied experience and vice versa.
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Embracing the open-endedness of potential, resisting closure and dogma in favour of ongoing emergence.
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Honouring the sacredness of construal as an ethical and ontological act.
In this way, the mythos of meaning is a living system—not a relic of the past, but a generative matrix for future worlds.
It is a call to rethink what it means to know, to believe, to imagine, and to be. To reimagine meaning not as a property of language alone, but as the evolving fabric of reality itself.
And in doing so, to open the way for a new kind of human engagement: one that is at once rigorous, poetic, and profoundly relational.
An Offering to the Conversation: Meaning Beyond the Mechanism
This series—Toward a New Mythos of Meaning—emerged from a simple but radical question: what if meaning is not a human overlay on an otherwise neutral world, but the very medium of its becoming?
In this, the series aligns itself with a wider and growing conversation: one that refuses the closure of mechanistic metaphysics, and that seeks to recover the possibility of reality as alive, patterned, emergent, and meaningful.
Among those voices, Rupert Sheldrake’s work stands out—not because of any shared theoretical framework, but because of a shared impulse: to ask what lies beyond the assumptions we’ve inherited, and to take seriously the idea that form, order, and novelty are not imposed from outside, but arise from within a field of evolving possibility.
Like Sheldrake’s critique of the “scientific creed,” this series challenges the notion that reality is best understood as passive, mechanical, and given. But rather than propose an alternative set of empirical hypotheses, it offers a semiotic reframing: a way of understanding meaning itself as systemic, ontological, and evolutionary.
We do not need to return to older cosmologies, nor invent a new metaphysics out of thin air. What we need is a renewed appreciation of meaning as a primary mode of being—not a by-product of brains, but the patterned articulation of potential at every level of system.
This is not a metaphor. It is not mysticism in disguise. It is an invitation to rethink what it means to know, to be, to evolve—and to do so with care, rigour, and humility.
To those, like Sheldrake, who have kept the doors open—sometimes at great personal cost—this series offers itself not as critique or correction, but as resonance: another wave in the field, another cut through the possible, another step in the evolution of meaning itself.
