Defining the meaning of meaning is the most difficult task in semantics, even more challenging than understanding the meaning of life. For the intention of life is quite straightforward.

As humans are born to die—as both individuals and as a species—the purpose of life is to realize experientially that our True Nature is never separate from the Immortal Ground of Being. If we can also know this fundamental truth of existence cognitively, such an understanding can help greatly with completing the Cosmogonic Cycle with full awareness.

Knowing the true meaning of life can help us answer the question “What is meaning?” with fresh insights, unavailable to linguists specializing in semantics within the constraints of the prevailing culture, where it is taboo to live peacefully in union with the Divine.

Algirdas Julien Greimas, a Lithuanian linguist, semiotician, and mythologist, highlighted the central issue in the first essay in his book Du Sens in 1970, translated into English in 1990 with the title ‘Meaning of Meaning’, which begins,

It is extremely difficult to speak about meaning and to say something meaningful about it. The only way to do this adequately would be to construct a language that signified nothing. In this way an objective distance could be established that would allow holding meaningless discourses on meaningful ones.

By recognizing that information is data with meaning in the IT industry, the primal concepts of Integral Relational Logic, beginning with Datum, provide the meaningless contextual foundation on which to build a coherent conceptual model of the Totality of Existence within the Cosmic Psyche.

Such a psychological approach to understanding the meaning of meaning, which John Locke presented as his ‘idea theory’ of meaning in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1689, is essential when we come to build a transcultural, transdisciplinary megasynthesis of all knowledge, where concepts we all share can be expressed in many different languages. This, of course, is the reverse of the situation that so troubled Alice, in that words can have many different conceptual meanings.

Furthermore, to develop the art of inner science, we need to map the Cosmic Psyche in a meaningful manner, recognizing that our cognitive maps are contained within the territory being mapped, as explained in the introductory pages of this Glossary.

This also means that to construct a complete map of the Totality of Existence, nothing should be rejected. Everything has meaning or significance within some context, an all-inclusive principle that extends to society, as a whole.

As a cognitive species, the meaning of meaning thus goes to the heart of what it means to be human, in contrast to the other animals and machines, like computers. For this is something we sense within, as Gnostics, especially when we come to understanding the meaning of Totality, as Wholeness.