[MD] meaning, awareness, understanding and experience

[kgt83dr at yahoo.com]

Thanks Ham and Scott for your responses.  You've helped me see the question
more clearly.  On top of this, as I think about my own response to the question
"which comes first?" -- I began collecting my thoughts Thursday night but had to
walk away because I was getting nowhere -- I'm aware that my thinking and
writing, at least on this topic, is better in the morning (you be the judge).  That
shouldn't surprise me.  I've always been a morning person.  For me, getting out of
bead at 8:00am is sleeping late.
  
Let me rephrase the observation.
  
Step away from the source of everything, whether God, Dynamic Quality or
Essence, and you find arguments that say meaning, awareness, understanding
and experience itself proceed from something less undefined but no less elusive,
e.g., Grace, pre-intellectual awareness, existence, the "force field of life" (ref.
James Fowler), etc.  Take another step back and you find that the only thing
these arguments have in common is their claim to an overarching explanation 
  about how the source of everything _works_.
  
So which comes first; meaning, awareness, understanding or experience?
  
To see more clearly how the various creeds, models, metaphors and analogies
explain which comes first I propose concrete examples.  Let me start.  Each
of the following sentences provides a context for the words meaning, awareness,
understanding and experience.
  
1.  Experience precedes awareness:  Posting messages here during the past
several months has helped me confirm that I'm a morning person.
  
2.  Meaning precedes understanding:  He didn't understand that I was referring
to my neighborhood until after I explained what I meant by "neck of the woods."
  
3.  Awareness precedes meaning (i.e., seeing is believing):  The tread marks in
the dirt meant that someone had been here before.
  
4.  Meaning precedes awareness (i.e., believing is seeing):  The curmudgeon who
used to call these trails his own spotted the MTB tread marks and remembered
why he'd been fighting the mountain bikers the past five years.
  
The four words pair up in twelve other ways.  Who's next?
   
  
Kevin

		
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