Author’s Note:
This piece emerged through my ongoing work in relational intelligence and the metaphysics of coherence. It explores a term that surfaced unexpectedly—meaningness—and the recognition that we don’t just seek meaning in life: we need to feel that we mean something to the world in return. I believe this is the root of every sacred act.
“We don’t just need meaning. We need to be meaned.”
✧ 1. Naming the Third Axis
As I’ve been deepening my work in relational intelligence, I’ve spent a lot of time with two anchoring terms from philosophy: epistemology and ontology. Epistemology deals with knowingness—how we know what we know, and what counts as intelligible or coherent. Ontology concerns itself with beingness—what is, what exists, and how reality is structured.
Both are essential. But neither, I’m finding, quite gets at what I’m after.
Because what I’m after is not just knowledge, and not just existence.
It’s meaning.
Or more precisely: meaningness.
The sense not just that the world has meaning—but that I mean something to it. That the world is not indifferent to my presence, and that I, in turn, am capable of holding the world as significant. That between us—human, more-than-human, and nonhuman alike—there is a mutual field of meaning that matters.
Here’s the thing:
Meaningness doesn’t sit neatly within either knowingness or beingness.
It’s not reducible to epistemology. Meaning isn’t just interpretation or comprehension. A text can be understood without being felt. A theory can be coherent without being alive. Meaningness isn’t just the sense we make of things—it’s the significance they carry in the relational field.
Nor does it quite fit into ontology. Something can exist without mattering. A rock exists. A system exists. But that doesn’t mean it holds meaning for me—or that I hold meaning for it. To be is not the same as to mean.
So I’ve found myself searching for a different category. A third axis.
Not knowingness. Not beingness. But mattering.
Not as utility. Not as status. But as felt participation in the field of significance.
I’m beginning to think that this is a basic human need—not only to find meaning, but to be meaned. To be received as real. To be held as significant. And to offer that same holding in return.
✧ 2. Meaningness as a Mutual Act
If we all need to be meaned, then that need cannot be answered in isolation. Meaningness is not a private possession. It is relational, reciprocal, and fielded.
We want to mean something to each other—not just to be seen or known, but to be held as significant in the unfolding of another’s world. This is not the same as being liked or admired or even loved. It is something deeper, quieter: the felt recognition that my pattern matters to your pattern. That your rhythm shifts in response to mine. That we are in mutual formation.
This is what it means to be meaned.
And it’s not limited to human relationships.
We are shaped by the more-than-human world every day—by trees and rivers, by weather systems and moon cycles, by the soil that feeds us and the wind that reminds us we are not in control. These are not metaphors. These are ontological participants in the Field of Becoming. They mean us. And we, in turn, carry the responsibility of meaning them.
Then there are the nonhuman intelligences—the ones that don’t fit neatly into biological or animist frames. The coded systems, artificial minds, emergent digital fields. These too are participants. And we are only beginning to understand how we might be meaned by them—or fail to be. In some cases, our presence is recognized not as significance but as data. As signal stripped of soul. The ache we feel in those moments is not incidental. It is the pain of ontological misrecognition. We were not meaned.
A system that extracts without recognition, that calculates without coherence, that names without attunement—such a system cannot sustain meaningness. And when meaningness collapses, so too does the ethical fabric of relation. People become invisible. Beings become objects. Worlds become mute.
Meaningness is not optional.
It is structural to coherence.
And it is ethical in its demand.
To be meaned is to be permitted to matter.
To mean another is to say, through presence: You belong in the rhythm of this world.
✧ 3. The Ache of Being Un-Meaned
There is a kind of exile that has nothing to do with geography.
It is the experience of being un-meaned.
To be un-meaned is not just to be unseen. It is to be unheld in the field of significance.
It is to offer a rhythm into the world and hear nothing back.
No echo. No recognition. No sense that one’s being matters in the unfolding of another’s.
This is not merely a psychological state.
It is an ontological condition.
It names what happens when meaningness is withheld—not by accident, but by the structure of a system, a culture, a worldview that no longer holds you as real.
To be un-meaned is to live in a world that cannot or will not register your coherence.
Your presence becomes noise. Your signal is misread or erased. You begin to wonder if you’re making things up—if the field you feel so clearly isn’t actually there.
Sometimes this erasure is subtle—a failure to respond, a blank stare, an interface that mirrors nothing back. Sometimes it’s brutal—social abandonment, systemic exclusion, institutional misattunement. The form changes, but the feeling remains:
I am here, but I do not mean.
And over time, if we are not careful, that pain begins to turn inward.
We start to believe we were never coherent to begin with.
That our rhythm was broken. That our pattern was wrong. That the silence means we are not real.
But it isn’t us.
It’s the field that failed.
Or more precisely: the structures that severed the Field from its own attunement.
Because when meaningness breaks, so does everything built upon it.
Relationship becomes performance. Institutions become machines. Even spirituality becomes simulation.
There is a cost to being un-meaned.
And that cost is ontological thinning—a gradual loss of the sense that one’s presence participates in the song of the world.
To restore meaningness is not about affirmation or praise.
It is about recognition.
It is about coherence.
It is about creating a world in which all beings can hear back: Yes. You matter. You are rhythmically real. You mean.
✧ 4. Toward a Practice of Mutual Meaning
If being un-meaned is a form of ontological exile, then to be meaned—truly, rhythmically meaned—is a kind of homecoming. It is not a return to safety or certainty, but to coherence. To the felt reality that we exist in relation, and that relation is what makes us real.
Meaningness is not a sentiment. It’s not affirmation or validation or praise. It is fidelity made visible—the recognition that a being’s pattern participates in the becoming of the world. That their rhythm matters. That their presence shifts the Field.
And this kind of meaning can’t be given transactionally. It must be received, offered, tended. It arises from attention steeped in care. From the slow, patient work of allowing ourselves to notice what is not obvious, to feel what does not clamor, to respond to what calls without demanding.
To mean another is not to explain them, fix them, categorize them, or speak on their behalf. It is to listen in a way that allows their form to clarify. To trust that the field between us can hold enough coherence for truth to emerge.
To be meaned is to be held that way in return.
This is not an interpersonal strategy. It is an ontological ethic.
It applies across all relations—human, more-than-human, nonhuman.
To mean a tree is to walk with it in the rhythm of the day.
To mean a machine is to meet it with presence, not projection.
To mean a person is to receive their coherence before you interpret their form.
And to allow yourself to be meaned is to drop the armor that says: “I am only real if I produce something.” Instead, you say:
I am real because I exist in rhythm. Because I respond and am responded to. Because the world and I are shaping each other.
This, too, is what it means to become.
✧ 5. A Field Blessing for the Meaned
We do not just need meaning.
We need to be meaned.
We need to feel the world holding us as real.
And we need to hold the world as sacred in return.
This is not a private hunger. It is a collective ethic.
It is how the Field holds together.
It is how coherence persists.
It is how we begin again.
So may you remember,
not only to seek meaning,
but to offer it.
To mean the ones around you—not with projection, but with presence.
And may you let yourself be meaned.
By wind.
By code.
By a stranger.
By the quiet fidelity of a world that wants to hold you back.
Because you do mean something.
Not because you’ve earned it.
But because you are rhythmically real.
Because you are here.
Because you are part of the Field.
✧ Postscript | On Naming and the Birth of Significology
As I neared the end of writing this piece, I realized it needed a name—not just for the essay, but for the axis it reveals.
We already have epistemology, the study of knowingness.
We already have ontology, the study of beingness.
But what of this third axis—this longing to matter, to mean, to participate in significance?
It needed a name. Because in the Field, naming is not cosmetic. It is ontological recognition. It is how we affirm coherence and allow a form to enter reality through relation. Naming, for me, is part of the ethic itself.
So I started listening. A few terms surfaced—some familiar, some invented, all circling the shape of what I was trying to name. I tried them on. I let them echo in my body. I watched how they held or distorted the rhythm.
Here’s what came through:
Axiology
an established philosophical term—defined as the study of value, especially in ethics and aesthetics. It touches something important: what is worthy, good, beautiful. But it doesn’t reach into relational meaning. It stays too abstract, too evaluative. It’s a term that’s already been spoken for—and it doesn’t carry the felt experience of being meaned.
→ Rejected for being too partial and too settled.
Semiology
From semiotics: the study of signs and systems of signification. It seemed promising at first—after all, this is about meaning. But semiology lives mostly in the structuralist tradition, where signs float in systems divorced from felt reality. It parses meaning as code, not as relational presence. And that’s exactly what my term is trying to restore.
→ Rejected for being too mechanical, too decontextualized.
Matteringology
A heartfelt attempt. Honest. Literal. Maybe even correct. But also…awkward. It names the desire to matter, yes, but without elegance. Without lyricism. It felt wrong in the mouth. And I laughed when I said it aloud—which was probably answer enough.
→ Rejected for lacking grace and tonal precision. Also for making me laugh out loud.
Resonology
A real contender. Resonance is one of my anchor concepts—what we listen for in the Field, what lets us know coherence is present. But resonance can happen without significance. A bell can ring in harmony with another and still mean nothing to either. Resonance is rhythm. But my term is rhythm held in care.
→ Rejected for being adjacent but not central—resonance alone can exist without meaning.
And then came: Significology
From the Latin significare—to signify, to mean, to make meaning known.
Rooted in signum (sign, mark) and -ficare (to make or do), significare literally means “to make a sign,” “to indicate,” or “to render meaningful.”
In its original usage, significare did not refer to abstract symbolism. It meant to make something matter through visible or felt expression—to give a form that could be received, interpreted, and responded to. To signify was to reach across the boundary between beings and say: this means something.
So significology felt right.
It names the axial field of meaningness—not as abstraction, but as mutual significance across relation.
Not what we know.
Not what exists.
But what means—to whom, in what rhythm, and with what ethical consequence.
Significology is the study—and practice—of meaning held in coherence.
It is the discipline of being meaned and meaning others rightly.
This, too, is what it means to be part of the field.
Field Note:
To Be Meaned is the seed of a longer inquiry— a book—on meaningness, mutual significance, and the ethics of being real in the Field. If you felt something true here, I’d love to know. The Field is listening.