The whole state of the body depends on meaning. The whole state of society depends on meaning.
If you say certain people are of a lower class or a higher class, you are disposed accordingly. And once that is set up, people find it extremely hard to get out of those fixed dispositions.
All meaning is within a context. And that context, in turn, is a meaning, a broader meaning, and so on. So there’s no limit to meaning. It’s always sort of floating in an indefinite context that eventually you can’t define.
Our perception of the meaning of the world affects the world. It affects what we do with the world, certainly.
To be too ready to assign ultimate meaning to something is very dangerous.
Let’s look at meaning as a process. I’m suggesting we have usually taken meaning for granted, and saying it’s just something—or else it’s very abstract and ethereal and mental. I’m saying it’s a process which is as much physical as mental, as much chemical, neurophysiological, and so on. It really has no limit.
The word “fragment” really means—its root is “to smash,” you see. So if you imagine taking a watch, you could find its parts; but if you smashed it, you would get fragments, not parts. You divide it in irrelevant ways, right, and break it up. See, if the world means a lot of separate places and people and so on, even though they are really connected, we will start smashing it up and apparently getting a confirmation of the correctness of our meaning—not noticing we have produced that division.
Assumptions may be self-fulfilling. That we get the proof that the assumption is correct as a result of the disposition to act that comes from the assumption. So therefore, then, we say that’s inevitable, you see? Therefore we get trapped in it, right—say the divisions between nations are of that nature. There’s no real division in the country or not much in the people, yet you have this tremendous barrier at the frontier and all the differences. So we now say: look at how different all these nations are. That’s proof that our assumptions are correct. But, you see, we ourselves have produced it out of the assumptions.
The word “soma,” the way it’s used now, takes just simply the matter of the body, which gives the matter of the body a very great difference from every other form. But, in fact, we know there’s no great difference. It’s constantly exchanging. You see, what was food, what was air, what was water becomes the body and vice versa. So therefore, it’s also exchanging all the time.
It’s not to make a division between us and the world, but we’re all taking part in a similar process.
You could make an analogy to the psychological problems of the individual and the problems of society as due to misinformation.
Society and the individual lack something analogous to the immune system of the body. Perhaps they have it, but it has gone wrong.
You cannot reduce the whole of life to function, because then it would have no value. All function is ultimately in the light of some value beyond function.
