Mystical Meaning

Part 1 provided a technical analysis of meaning. Here we dive into the lived experience of meaning.

VI. The Ground Beneath Meaning

In the early fourteenth century, a Dominican friar named Meister Eckhart was saying something remarkably similar (see part 1) from the pulpit in Cologne — not to philosophers, but to nuns, merchants, and laypeople trying to figure out how to live.

Eckhart’s central teaching was about what happens when all distinctions collapse. He called it the Grunt — the Ground — and he described it as the place where the soul and God are one, prior to any relationship, any distinction, any meaning. “The eye through which I see God,” he preached, “is the same eye through which God sees me.” Not two eyes in correspondence — one eye, one seeing. The boundary dissolved.

It’s worth being clear about something: Eckhart isn’t explaining semantics. He has no theory of meaning, no framework of systems and boundaries. He’s describing, from the inside, the lived experience of the boundary falling away — what it feels like when the distinction between self and world, knower and known, softens and dissolves. That his description maps so precisely onto the structure we’ve been building from information theory (part 1) is what makes him remarkable. He arrived at the same place, but not through analysis. He arrived through surrender.

He would have agreed entirely that meaning is relational, that it lives at interfaces, that it arises from the play of distinction between systems. But then he would have said: keep going. Don’t stop at the recognition that meaning dissolves when boundaries collapse. Ask what’s there when it does.

His answer was not “nothing.” It was something he struggled to name — the “desert of the Godhead,” the “silent stillness,” a reality so prior to distinction that even calling it “God” was already too much. “I pray God to rid me of God,” he wrote, because “God” as a concept has meaning only in relation to the soul, to creation, to the world. It’s a boundary phenomenon, just like everything else. To reach what lies beneath, you have to let go of even that.

But Eckhart’s Ground isn’t static emptiness. This is where he diverges from a merely analytical conclusion. The Ground is generative — he described it as a kind of “boiling” (bullitio), an overflowing that can’t contain itself. The undifferentiated spontaneously differentiates. The boundaryless erupts into boundaries. Meaning doesn’t just dissolve into the Ground — it perpetually arises from it. Creation, in Eckhart’s vision, isn’t a one-time event but a continuous overflowing of the One into the Many, the simple into the complex, the silent into the spoken.

But why does any of this matter? Eckhart wasn’t building a theory. He was describing something that happens to a person — and what that experience makes possible.

If meaning is relational, not inherent — if it lives at boundaries, not inside things — then nothing in the world has a fixed claim on you. The job you’re terrified of losing, the status you’re scrambling to maintain, the failure you believe defines you. These things have meaning, real meaning, but the meaning isn’t baked into them like a physical property. It arises from your relationship to them. Which means it can change. Which means you can change.

This is what Eckhart called Abgeschiedenheit — detachment. Not withdrawal from the world, not numbness, not indifference. He was clear about this. It means engaging fully in life while knowing that the meaning you’re swimming in is something you are participating in creating, not something imposed on you from outside. You can still love, work, grieve, build — but without the desperation that comes from believing meaning is a property of objects you might lose.

Consider how much suffering comes from treating meaning as fixed and inherent. “This failure means I’m worthless.” “This loss means my life is over.” “This person’s opinion means I’m not enough.” Each of these mistakes a relationship for a fact. It confuses the boundary phenomenon with the thing itself. Eckhart would say: the meaning is real, the pain is real, but the meaning is a relationship, not a verdict. You can release it without denying the pain. You return to the Ground — the place prior to that particular meaning — and from there, new meaning can arise. The Ground overflows. It always does.

What the encounter with the Ground offers, then, isn’t an intellectual insight. It’s something closer to a felt shift — the experience of being the space in which meaning happens rather than being trapped inside any particular meaning. Like stepping back from a painting and realizing you’d been pressing your nose against the canvas. The painting doesn’t disappear. But your relationship to it transforms.

VII. Full Circle

We started with a clay tablet and asked how much meaning it holds.

Information theory showed us it holds astonishing structural richness — enough to derive a working model of the language, its concepts, and their interrelationships. Language models proved this empirically, demonstrating that the statistical structure of text alone can generate systems that converse, reason, and create.

But that richness was ungrounded — a web of relationships floating free. Grounding, we discovered, comes from alignment with something outside the text: a filesystem, a sensor, a world. And this alignment is just what meaning is. Not a mystical property of symbols, not a philosophical puzzle about reference, but a relationship between systems — each giving the other something it couldn’t provide alone.

Zoom out far enough, and even this meaning dissolves. Merge the systems, erase the boundary, and what was meaningful becomes merely structural. Meaning, it turns out, requires an outside. It’s a property of edges, not interiors.

The meaning was never in the clay. It was never in the reader, either. It was in the meeting between them — brief, contingent, and inexhaustibly generative.

Postscript: Try Reality

In April 2025, Richard Dawkins published an essay called “No Satisfying Alternative to Religion? Try Reality.” His argument is bracing and, within our framework, entirely correct. Scientific understanding is the alignment of internal models with the external world. The joy of comprehension is the joy of tighter and tighter correspondence between what you think and what is. “Try Reality” is, in the language of this essay, “try grounding.” And it works. The meaning Dawkins finds in the structure of the cosmos is real — it’s the same phenomenon we’ve been describing throughout.

But watch what happens in his own language.

“There is joy in understanding,” he writes, “true joy, rising to little short of ecstasy.” He describes existence as “a piece of shattering good fortune.” He calls us “blessed with the opportunity to know so much.” He speaks of “the buccaneering adventure of the restless mind” and “the pilgrim’s way.” He concludes with “the poetry of reality.”

Ecstasy. Blessed. Pilgrim. Poetry. These are not the words of someone reporting data. These are the words of someone who has been met by something. The universe, in Dawkins’ telling, doesn’t just sit there waiting to be measured. It shatters. It blesses. It offers adventure. It has poetry. His prose is saturated with the experience of being encountered by something that reaches back.

And none of this follows from the science he’s celebrating.

You cannot derive “existence is a gift” from physics. You cannot derive “understanding is ecstasy” from the scientific method. You cannot derive “you owe it to reality to revel in your existence” from any observation about spiral galaxies or Devonian fish. These are values — ungrounded foundations, exactly what the appendix describes. Dawkins is standing on them while arguing that reality alone is sufficient. But the conviction that reality deserves wonder, that the appropriate response to the cosmos is awe rather than indifference — that conviction is not itself a product of the scientific framework. It’s the ground beneath it. And he can’t derive it from within.

This isn’t a contradiction. It’s the very phenomenon the essay describes. Dawkins has encountered something in his engagement with reality that is simultaneously the foundation of his intellectual life and something that reaches back toward him with what he can only call ecstasy. He stands on it. It meets him. Foundation and meaning, collapsed into a single experience — precisely the structure we identified in the appendix, the thing that axioms and values alone cannot do.

He just declines to ask where it comes from.

The materialist has a ready answer: evolution. DNA shaped brains that reward pattern-recognition. Organisms that model their environment accurately survive. The ecstasy of understanding is just selection pressure wearing a mask. Wonder is fitness, not revelation.

But follow it one step. Why does the universe have a structure that rewards modeling?

The strongest materialist response is to refuse the regress entirely. Don’t chase the “why.” There is no “why.” The universe has no purpose. It isn’t for anything. It just is. Asking “why” is a category error — projecting human intentionality onto a system that has none. Stop asking. Shrug. Move on.

This is the most honest materialist move. And here is where things get strange: “it just is, without why” is exactly what Eckhart says.

He taught that life lives sunder warumbe — “without why.” If anyone asked life for a thousand years, “Why are you living?” life would only say, “I live so that I may live.” The Ground has no purpose, no reason, no teleology. It doesn’t overflow in order to create. It just overflows. It doesn’t reach back because of something. It just reaches. The mystic and the hard materialist arrive at precisely the same place: the brute fact that resists further explanation. The thing that simply is.

The difference isn’t in what they’re pointing at. It’s in their relationship to it. The materialist says “it just is” and means stop asking. Eckhart says “it just is” and means this is the most important thing I’ve ever said. Same words. Radically different postures. One treats the brute fact as a wall — the place where inquiry ends and you shrug. The other treats it as a door — the place where a different kind of knowing begins.

And the essay’s own framework explains why the posture matters. If meaning is alignment between systems, then your relationship to the foundation changes what meaning is available to you. The shrug is a turning away — a closing of the feedback loop. The surrender is an opening. Not because the mystic has better information, but because they’re in a more receptive alignment with the thing they can’t explain. Same reality. Different coupling. Different meaning.

But there is a sharper objection than either the evolutionary regress or the materialist shrug, and it cuts at the essay itself: language is misleading us.

Words like “reaches back” and “overflows” and “meets you” are agentive verbs. They smuggle intention into a description of impersonal processes. The universe doesn’t “reach.” Reality doesn’t “meet.” These are metaphors, and we’re being seduced by our own prose into seeing agency and relationship where there is only structure and indifference. Eckhart was a poet, and poets make things feel true that aren’t. The whole argument — from “the Ground overflows” to Dawkins’ language “betraying” him — might be nothing more than a demonstration of how easily humans are fooled by evocative metaphor.

This is the strongest objection because it challenges the essay’s own instrument. We are making an argument in language about the nature of meaning, and if language is systematically distorting the picture, the whole thing unravels.

But follow it to its conclusion. What would a non-metaphorical description of the mind-world relationship look like? “The universe has structure that is amenable to cognitive modeling by evolved organisms.” Is that literal? “Amenable” implies receptivity. “Structure” implies intelligibility — a quality relative to a mind that could find it intelligible. Even “the universe has no purpose” relies on “purpose,” a concept that only exists in relation to agents who have purposes. There is no neutral description of the relationship between mind and world that doesn’t characterize the relationship in some way. The choice was never between metaphor and literal truth. It was always between metaphors.

And this is the essay’s own point, turned on itself. Meaning lives at the boundary between systems. Language is one of those systems. There is no view from outside language, no description of reality that isn’t already shaped by the system doing the describing. So the question isn’t “are we being misled by metaphor?” — we’re always inside metaphor. The question is: which metaphor keeps the feedback loop most open? Which way of speaking leaves you most aligned with the thing you’re trying to describe?

“It just is, and there’s nothing more to say” is a metaphor that closes the loop. “It just is, and it overflows” is a metaphor that holds it open. Neither is provably correct. But one invites continued alignment — continued encounter with the brute fact — and the other doesn’t. Within the essay’s own framework, the open metaphor is the one more likely to generate meaning. Not because it’s more true in some absolute sense, but because meaning requires a relationship, and you can’t be in a relationship with something you’ve turned away from.

Dawkins is free to shrug. The essay’s argument doesn’t require anyone to stand in any particular relationship to the brute fact at the bottom. But when Dawkins says “try reality” and then describes that encounter in the language of blessing, pilgrimage, and poetry, he is not shrugging. He is testifying — inadvertently, perhaps even against his own intentions — to the existence of something in reality that reaches back. Something that can’t be captured by the models it gives rise to. Something that overflows.

Eckhart would recognize it immediately. He’d just smile and say: yes. That. Keep going.

Dawkins makes one other argument. He addresses the “epidemic of loneliness” and insists that the remedy is human fellowship — “the warmth of real, live, flesh-and-blood companions and loved-ones” — not talking to an imaginary friend. Prayer, in his account, is a closed loop: you speak into a vacuum, and the only reply is “conjured within your own imagination.” You’re talking to yourself. “Which is really rather sad.”

Within our framework, this critique has real force. If there’s nothing on the other side — no external system to push back, no feedback, no grounding — then prayer is exactly what Dawkins says it is: an ungrounded loop generating its own output with nothing to calibrate against. No alignment, no meaning. Just a language model running without tools.

But here is where things get interesting: Eckhart would agree with almost every word of this.

“I pray God to rid me of God.” Eckhart spent his career dismantling precisely the model of prayer Dawkins is attacking — the conversational relationship with a personified agent who lives somewhere above the clouds and responds to requests. The “imaginary friend” version of God is exactly what Eckhart says you must release. It’s an image. A concept. A projection of the self dressed in divine clothing. Dawkins is attacking the outer shell of religion from the outside. Eckhart attacked the same shell from the inside, and hit it harder.

What Eckhart means by prayer is almost the opposite of conversation. It’s silence. The systematic stripping away of images, concepts, words, expectations — everything you might “talk to.” The apophatic tradition, centering prayer, contemplation. The practice is closer to what a scientist does in a lab than to chatting with a friend: you put yourself in a posture of receptivity and wait for something outside your model to push back. The “reply” isn’t words conjured in your imagination. It’s the shift that happens when you stop generating and start receiving. You don’t hear a voice. You find that something has changed in you that you didn’t change yourself.

And the loneliness point — Dawkins is right that the remedy is human fellowship. Our framework agrees. Relationship with another person is alignment between systems, meaning at the boundary between self and other. But the essay also showed that the deepest experiences of human fellowship have a quality that exceeds the interpersonal. Love that arrives unbidden. The moment of being truly met by another person in a way that you can’t reduce to “companionship.” The contemplative tradition says prayer is the practice of opening that same channel — the channel through which reality reaches back — without requiring another human to be the occasion for it.

There is also a quiet irony in Dawkins’ suggestion that “even an AI robot is better” than prayer, because “at least ChatGPT exists, really talks back at you.” Our entire essay begins from the observation that an LLM operates on ungrounded relational structure — a vast web of statistical patterns with no contact with reality. Its words are generated from co-occurrence, not from encounter with the world. By our framework, an LLM without tools is a closed loop, exactly the thing Dawkins accuses prayer of being. It’s only when the model gets a feedback channel — a filesystem, an API, a world that pushes back — that grounding begins. The contemplative sitting in silence, attempting to open a feedback loop with whatever is actually there, is arguably engaged in a more grounded practice than chatting with an ungrounded language model. At least the contemplative is oriented toward something outside their own system. Or if not that, oriented towards something beyond language. The chatbot is oriented toward nothing at all.