Chapter 5

Creators of Meaning

At an aquarium, I stood watching a shark move through the water. Smooth. Tireless. Always moving, always searching. The guide beside the tank said, “Here we have the ultimate eating machine.”

And I remember thinking, in my own smaller and stranger way: Humans are the ultimate meaning machine. Well – not “machine.” Human beings are constant creators of meaning.

We begin doing this almost from birth. A child asks whether Santa Claus is “real,” and already the mind is wrestling with layers of symbol, participation, truth, imagination, trust, and identity. The moment a child learns that Santa is “not real” is often treated like a small catastrophe, a tiny collapse of trust. But if the story survives that discovery – and often it does – it survives because something underneath the facts remains alive. The symbol becomes personal. The child who once received the gifts now becomes Santa for someone else.

After the truth of Santa, we stepped into another world entirely. Superman impossibly flew across the skies while somehow carrying very human questions about strength, loneliness, goodness, and restraint. We learned how this story stuff worked.

We followed Dorothy down the Yellow Brick Road into a landscape where every figure could point toward another layer of meaning. Intelligence doubting itself. Feeling convinced it had gone cold. Courage trembling in its own shadow. A wizard who appeared all-powerful until we dared to pull back the curtain.

And none of those meanings canceled the others.

That is the strange elasticity of mythic structure. A story can carry many truths at once without tearing itself apart. In fact, the more enduring the story, the more meanings it seems able to contain. The symbols do not narrow as time passes. They widen.

At this point, it becomes tempting to turn toward Scripture and begin “explaining” it. But the moment we attempt that directly, we discover the scale of the thing we are touching.

We call it “The Bible,” as though it were a single object resting comfortably on a nightstand. In reality, what we call Scripture is less like a book and more like a continent of memory. Saga, poetry, law, lament, genealogy, apocalypse, parable, prophecy, argument, ritual, dream, political history, and mystical vision have all been gathered together across centuries and layered one upon another until the structure becomes almost impossible to see whole.

Even Torah alone is immense beyond ordinary comprehension. Stories branch into symbols. Symbols branch into interpretations. Interpretations branch into traditions. In some forms of Judaism, the meanings within the text are not expected to settle into one final conclusion. They continue unfolding. One commentary rests atop another like geological strata, each generation hearing something new in the same ancient words.

And then the Hebrew Scriptures widen outward still further. Kings rise and collapse. Prophets thunder against injustice. Wisdom literature sits quietly beside catastrophe. Poems of longing appear beside laws about mildew and livestock. The whole structure refuses simplification.

Then comes the New Testament – not replacing the older symbolic universe, but rearranging its gravity around a new center. The old stories remain alive while simultaneously becoming something else.

The scale of it all is just too difficult to describe.

If the Yellow Brick Road is a small solar system of meaning, Torah is the Milky Way. The Hebrew Scriptures widen into galaxy clusters. The New Testament spins through the same heavens while rearranging the stars.

That is humongously enormous.

And then we must encounter Hindu traditions. And then Buddhism. And then mythic worlds from cultures we scarcely understand yet. Each one is layered with centuries of meaning, memory, fear, longing, ritual, and hope.

Anything I might say about the possible meanings within such structures would be like trying to describe a flooded river by examining a single drifting leaf.

So I am not going to tell you what any of these stories “really mean.”

That is often where discussions of religion become exhausting. One person insists the stories are literal history. Another insists they are primitive superstition. Another reduces them to psychology. Another turns them into political weapons. Soon, everyone is knee-deep in interpretive mud, proving mostly that mud exists.

But perhaps we have already learned something more important.

Perhaps the deeper question is not whether mythological structures are true or false in some narrow factual sense. Perhaps the question is what human beings are doing with them in the first place.

Because we do not merely read stories. We inhabit them.

Human beings seem almost unable to exist without symbolic structures. We arrange our lives around narratives of meaning, belonging, destiny, identity, fear, hope, sacrifice, justice, and transcendence. Even the most secular among us continue to construct mythic worlds filled with heroes, villains, rituals, moral visions, sacred objects, and promises of salvation. We simply rename the parts.

And after all the stories, all the scriptures, all the gods and heavens and demons and revelations and rituals, something remarkably simple remains.

A human being.

A conscious presence saying, “I Am.”

And wrapped around that simple awareness – protecting it, narrating it, defending it, fearing for it, and trying desperately to explain it – is what I have come to call The Me.

The Me gathers memories and beliefs and wounds and loyalties. It constructs identities. It learns tribal languages. It clings to certainty. It fears dissolution. It searches endlessly for meaning because beneath all the noise sits the quiet and undeniable fact of subjective existence itself:

I Am.

Roll the vast machinery of myth off the stage for a moment, and this small presence remains, standing in the light.

I Am.

And, The Me, forever trying to understand what that means.