Cosmos of Meaning, Part 1 Worlding as Meaning

Meaning is not a shadow of reality. It is not a pale copy, a set of labels attached to things that already are. Meaning is the work of worlding. To mean is to weave cosmos — to shape how possibility unfolds, how relations align, how beings appear and act within a shared horizon.

This is not metaphor. When myth speaks of a sky-father or a world-tree, it is not “merely representing” a pre-given universe. It is worlding — organising relations, setting axes of orientation, binding a collective into a cosmos. When physics codifies a “law of conservation” or a “spacetime continuum,” it too is worlding — establishing symbolic scaffolding that constrains and enables, that makes reality appear one way and not another.

Worlding is perspectival: no cosmos is the cosmos. Each emerges from cuts in possibility, from construals that align collectives around shared patterns of being. A cosmos is never simply discovered; it is actualised through symbolic architectures that organise experience, action, and expectation.

Meaning, then, is cosmogenic. To mean is not to point, but to weave. To understand meaning is to understand how worlds come to be.