Mythic Light — Stories of Construal and Luminous Worlds: Series Preface

This interlude series of children’s stories continues the thematic explorations of the Lantern series and the Seeing Meaning framework, translating relational ontology into mythic narrative and perceptual imagination. Where the previous series examined meaning as a reflexive alignment — the act of differentiation and co-constitution within the luminous field of construal — this collection embodies these principles through story, landscape, and symbolic character.

Here, the lantern is not merely an object but a metaphor for construal itself: the means by which potential patterns are brought into attention, enacted through perception, interaction, and relational alignment. Liora, the river, the mountain, and the valley enact different strata of the ontology: instance, system, semiotic field, and emergent relational pattern. Together, their journeys dramatise how meaning emerges, flows, and disperses, not as a static property of objects, but as an ongoing dialogue between observer, world, and symbolic mediation.

The series builds sequentially:

1. The Lantern and the River of Shadows — the awakening of perception and relational potential.

2. Beyond the River: The Dream of the Two Lights — differentiation, reflection, and the interplay of perspective.

3. The Mountain That Listened — the enduring system of the world responding to and aligning with perception.

4. The Night the Valley Dreamed Itself — collective emergence: system, instance, and semiotic field in co-constitution.

5. The Lantern’s Return — dispersal, reflexivity, and the pervasive luminosity of relational meaning.

Together, these tales form a mythic bridge: connecting the analytical insights of Seeing Meaning with the imaginative and symbolic register of storytelling. They allow the ontology to be felt, not merely reasoned — showing that meaning, like light, is not only something to be observed, but something to be enacted, shared, and lived.