Symbols are vehicles of understanding, are messengers of meaning, unfold its creativity and beauty. Language and culture incorporate symbols whole and living, or falsified, hollow and dead. A symbol has life insofar as it participates with, gives focus to, the life which stands prior, which breathes into and is ever making whole the creation and commons shared between. While not itself a person such nature stands as a reflection which rightly focused serves to witness relations and intentions, highlight beauty and meaning, truthful and whole. Here the created is enfolded within, as it is capable of mirroring and so unfolding, a reality and ‘commons’ prior, preestablished, and uncreated. If a symbol brings a commons into focus, serves as lens for relation, is capable of witnessing and affirming the lived reality of relationship, it is truthful insofar as it bridges the first and the last, images the higher within the lower, affirms a sharing correspondence. The created so comes to recognition and enters completion as itself a breathing symbol and temple, wherein value births value, face lights face, the created commons and its culture nurture and support relations whole and relationship truthful.
The rightful commons is neither a graveyard nor a trash heap, but a place of meeting, a common ground of sharing and creating, of being and becoming together. A commons is a reflection of intention and its meaning, a movement toward transparency or opacity, a lens of real value or blinding poverty. The ‘commons of becoming’ is personal and shared, creative and clearing, subsists within and without. Such commons finds affirming foundation through reflecting a prior transparency, a higher reality of truth and value, the ‘commons of being’, seed and field of enlivening participation, the one life shared between. Without leaving becoming to grasp at being, the false ‘commons’ centered upon false and non corresponding intention does need to be set aside. Being and becoming are interior to one another, as truthful language and action are informed by integral relationship, engage a shared field of symbol, wherein change becomes lens of the changeless.
‘Harmonization’ may represent a sterile conformity, or a free and fruitful entering of a commons and whole of enlivening relation, providing means for a wider and clearer scope of shared meaning and understanding. Here harmonization is with an informing fullness, is engaged through a measured and living intention, gives birth to what is inviolable, to that which has foundation and standing. True harmonization brings not confusion but clarity, is an opening wherein identity is found and not lost, wherein boundaries are lucid and not blind. ‘Identity’ finds birth and renewal within not a confused conformity, but through a freeing identification with an engaging field of meaning and value, an identification respectful of boundary while revealing of an opening truth and an enduring whole. Harmonization is mediated by this identification and its revealing commons, whose ‘nature’ is not reactive but responsive, not abstract but transparent, not impersonal but truthfully personalizing.
“Coherence’ is not mere adhesion, is not narrow attachment, but begins and builds through truthful and shared identification. Such identification is not clouded by projection, but is quickened and clarified through a shared perception of true and resonant value, a shared body and commons of meaning. Such ‘commons’ and value is not an abstraction but an immediacy, not an objectifying tool but a transparency capable of mediating and bringing together into a coherence of informing symbol and active meaning. If false identification is product of an illusory projection and distorted dependency, is cause and fruit of stunted development and depersonalization, so identification which clarifies and affirms the life giving and truthful provides ground for relations which personalize and stand vibrantly personal. Persons cohere each with another through a shared response, an opening and becoming with and together, through being members of a common home and body of transparent value.
Coherence becomes co-inherence as identification is quickened through an engaging co-intension. If co-intension speaks of a common ground of mediating value and meaning, so co-inherence refers to a knowing recognition each with and within each, of being and sharing, without confusion or separation. Only that which is whole carries these two properties, and only wholes engage in a process of clarification, moving in ever wider and deeper, ever more measured relation with other wholes, and if persons, into relationship and relationships sound and whole. As with the wholes they embody co-intension and co-inherence cannot be manufactured by intentions and forces less than whole, attempts at replication never attain the measure of consciousness and life. To the extent one identifies with and serves such falsely measured systems experience turns pained and bitter as it becomes less coherent and less than whole. Apart from coherence meaning scatters and identity fractures, perception becomes imprisoned within a reactive cage, with loss of wholeness yielding a loss of responsive creativity and actual freedom.
‘Clarification’ is one with the process of making and becoming whole, a process which becomes its own reward, is one with the recognition of value intrinsic, of an order and nature prior, of a life making present. Clarification yields true and truthful identification, an identification which does not aggrandize but sincerely humbles, which permits sharing communication and access to meaning enriching and informing. Accurate perception requires a space which is clear, of focus and intention in measured correspondence with a sky and earth of resounding value, in embrace of understanding, with eye meeting eye. If misidentification is of an undermining distortion, a shadowed fruit of projection, truthful identification informs and unfolds, permits development affirming and sound. In such manner do wholes become always and increasingly whole, realize a breathing inviolate, a word which expressively rings.
It is meaning which illumines, and whose light sustains. However not all ‘meaning’ is of full standing, being generally taken as the delimitation of a word or object’s significance and constructed use. Yet language and use are ever oriented, consciously or not, within and around a field of value, instrumental or primary, objectifying or intensifying. Instrumental meaning and value are products of specific need and use, are generally passed on through objective instruction. Primary and intensive value is transparently recognized, or not, it impacts and calls into account wholly and personally. Such recognition arises directly, while is also often quickened through the witness of the selfless example of another. Intensive meaning opens the way of co-intension, provides access to a reality substantive and whole, illumines value as its own end, and so comes to feed and sustain. ‘Sight’ here opens beyond the limited object, which together with the body entire is lifted as whole, within the deepening meaning perceived and heeded.
