Collective Assimilation of Meaning

Evaluating Steps of Committed Relationships
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Let us start by leaning on the shoulders of giants…

We can’t ever fully transport or inject our meaning into anyone else, but we can express ourselves and invite communal actions as a way of bringing into harmony with others some part of the meaning structure within ourselves. We commonly speak of “shared meaning” as though it could be distributed within a group, like food and wine. My belief is that meanings can be made to be similar in people who work, dance, sing, and pray together, and I call this portion of their meaning structures “assimilated meaning.” … Words are merely cognitive and cannot lead to the sense of trust that comes with deep assimilation of meaning. Joint action is the real glue that holds societies together. It begins with socialization in infancy and extends throughout life as the midwife of meaning in each of us.

How Brains Make Up Their Minds by Walter J. Freeman; pp 14-15

But there is no true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude. I cannot be united in love with a person whose very personality my love tends to obscure,to absorb, and to destroy. Nor can I awaken true love in a person who is invited, by my love, to be drowned in the act of drowning me with love.

If we know God, our identification of ourselves with those we love will be patterned on our union with God, and subordinate to it. Thus our love will begin with the knowledge of its own limitations and rise to the awareness of its greatness. For in ourselves we will always remain separate and remote from one another, but in God we can be one with those we love.

We cannot find them in God without first perfectly finding ourselves in Him. Therefore we will take care not to lose ourselves in looking for them outside Him. For love is not found in the void that exists between our being and the being of the one we love. There is an illusion of unity between us when our thoughts, our words, or our emotions draw us out of ourselves and suspend us together for a moment over the void. But when this moment has ended, we must return into ourselves or fall into the void. There is no true love except in God, Who is the source both of our own being and of the being we love.

No Man is An Island by Thomas Merton; pp 166-167

Romans 12 comes off the heels of Paul unpacking the promises we are brought into through Jesus Christ “grafted into a family” and explains “How do I know God’s Will?” Immediately it gets into the continued explanation and reminder of the Body of Christ on mission with a peculiar word usage of “having the same diaphragm.” They breathed together as warriors waking up from death through death. *

* This paragraph is intentionally dense and an attempt at summarizing our calling as His Body.

Marriages often depart into itself emphasizing what they can do inside of their own marriage “with God.” This is inconsistent with everything we see in Scripture. How can you learn to dance together if you stop dancing? How can you learn to serve if you separate yourself from service? More importantly, doing so without hands on mentor-ship is straight folly! So many marriages emphasize their own over God’s and then through in that they “pray together” and “read the Bible together” Yet what good is Scripture without application?! This is folly. I lived it. We must be a part of His Communal Body 

I am looking for brothers and sisters that are wanting to dream, invent, create, and let justice flow like a river. I do not want to waste time being inspired or connecting through inspirational messages. I am inspired by Christ.