Engender – to bring into existence
A meaningless world brings fear into existence. A meaningless world brings fear into existence. A meaningless world brings fear into existence.
Sorry. Just have to wrap my brain around that. A meaningless world brings fear into existence. It’s a good point. A meaningful world doesn’t bring fear into existence. What we understand, we don’t fear. We fear what it is we don’t understand, and so we create meaning in order to assuage our fear.
Today’s idea is really another form of the preceding one, except that it is more specific as to the emotion aroused. Actually, a meaningless world is impossible. Nothing without meaning exists. However, it does not follow that you will not think you perceive something that has no meaning. On the contrary, you will be particularly likely to think you do perceive it.
A meaningless world is impossible? Is Course referring to the denotative meaning of meaningless here? Or the connotative meaning? Something else?
Here we go with this cryptic language… It does not follow… that you will not think… you perceive something… that has no meaning.
Let me give this a stab… Nothing without meaning exists. However, just because all that exists has meaning, does not mean that you will not think you perceive something that has no meaning.
Ah! OK. One more try. Everything that exists has meaning. That being so, it won’t keep you from perceiving things that do not have meaning. Despite the fact that everything that exists has meaning, we continue to perceive that which does not exist and is therefore meaningless.
Recognition of meaninglessness arouses intense anxiety in all the separated ones. It represents a situation in which God and the ego “challenge” each other as to whose meaning is to be written in the empty space that meaninglessness provides. The ego rushes in frantically to establish its own ideas there, fearful that the void may otherwise be used to demonstrate its own impotence and unreality. And on this alone it is correct.
It is essential, therefore, that you learn to recognize the meaningless, and accept it without fear. If you are fearful, it is certain that you will endow the world with attributes that it does not possess, and crowd it with images that do not exist. To the ego illusions are safety devices, as they must also be to you who equate yourself with the ego.
You don’t have to use the term “God” here. There is Reality and unreality. The term “God” can be interchanged with “Reality”. The ego creates what is unreal and therefore meaningless. Reality has meaning, but it is not a meaning we can comprehend through the ego.
So – does that mean ACIM is pointing to connotative meaning? Or something else? Ultimately, it is connotative meaning that means the most to us. After all, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. But connotative meaning remains a part of the ego, doesn’t it? It’s difficult to imagine that denotative meaning would engender fear. Surely it is the connotative meaning that engenders fear. But what the ego does when it experiences fear is to create denotative meaning, not connotative meaning, right? We divide and conquer by naming, categorizing, and cataloging. In that way we attempt to gain understanding. Denotative meaning is ultimately symbolic, but we still think of it as real. Connotative meaning is more directly experienced because it is felt more than it is actually understood. (The word river denotes a moving body of water and may connote such things as the relentlessness of time and the changing nature of life.)
I don’t know. I’m not a psychologist and this is the first I’ve even considered denotative or connotative meaning in terms of ACIM. Perhaps it has nothing to do with it at all, but I’m going to keep it in mind, anyway.
I am looking at a meaningless world.
A meaningless world engenders fear because I think I am in competition with God/Reality.