LITMIR.BIZ

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is your evolving, changing structure of meaning which came into existence in the womb and ever since has been growing and changing. It is the sum total of all the conclusions you have drawn and are always drawing from your experience, all your ideas, attitudes, expectations, opinions and belief.

      Whenever I try to describe our structure of meaning I often use a sentence like, ‘You created your structure of meaning.’

      This sentence has the same form as the sentence, ‘You wrote a book.’

      We all know that this second sentence is about two things, you and the book. But the first sentence isn’t about two things. You and your structure of meaning are one and the same thing. To be accurate I should say, ‘Your structure of meaning created your structure of meaning.’

      There is no little person, no soul, spirit, self, person or identity inside you busily constructing your structure of meaning. Your structure of meaning is you, your soul, spirit, self, person, identity.

      If a structure of meaning can survive the death of the body, when you die and go to heaven you/your structure of meaning will be busily making sense of heaven just as you/your structure of meaning is busy making sense of the world.

      If you understand that you are your structure of meaning you will know what is happening to you when you make a serious error of judgement.

      To feel secure you/your structure of meaning has to feel that your structure is an accurate representation of reality. Then you can say to yourself, ‘This is me, this is my life, the world is such and such and my future will be so and so.’

      Perhaps as part o f this secure structure of meaning you are saying to yourself,

       ‘I have my career mapped out and it’s all going to plan’

      or

       ‘My partner and I love one another and we’ll be together for the rest of our lives’

      or

       ‘If I’m good nothing bad can happen to me.’

      Then one day you discover that your judgement is wrong.

      You lose your job, your partner leaves you, you are struck by some terrible disaster.

      If something like this has happened to you, you’ll know what it feels like when you discover that you’ve made a major error of judgement.

      You feel yourself falling apart.

      You feel yourself shattering, crumbling, even disappearing.

      If you know that you are your structure of meaning, you’ll know that what you are feeling is your structure of meaning falling apart, and necessarily so because it has to break apart in order to re-form into a structure which is a more accurate representation of reality. You have to re-plan your future, or build a life without your partner, or modify your religious or philosophical beliefs. This process is unpleasant and scary, but if you understand about your structure of meaning you’ll be able to look after yourself while you go through it.

      However, if you don’t know that you are your structure of meaning you’ll become terribly, terribly frightened.

      If you don’t understand that you are your structure of meaning you might resort to desperate defences to try to hold yourself together and to ward off the fear.

      You might become too scared to go outside because you fear that if you do the terror will kill you, or that everyone who encounters you will reject you because you’ve done something completely unacceptable like vomiting or fainting.

      You might get frantically busy, hoping that by being very active and pretending that everything is all right you can run away from the terror.

      You might start tidying and cleaning everything, checking and rechecking that everything is safe, all in the hope that if you get everything under control you’ll be all right.

      You might become convinced that certain things have special meanings and that you are the object of special attention from certain powers, all in the attempt to make an unpredictable world predictable.

      You might decide that you alone are responsible for the disasters that have befallen you and that you are too wicked a person to be close to others and be part of the world.

      If you don’t understand that you are your structure of meaning when you feel yourself falling apart you think that you are going mad.

      If you then resort to one of those desperate defences, other people who share your lack of understanding will also think that you are mad.

      Psychiatrists will tell you that you have a mental illness. They’ll say you’re agoraphobic or manic or compulsive-obsessive or schizophrenic or depressed. If you become a psychiatric patient, over the years you’ll be given all these diagnoses – and many more fancy ones besides.

      Yet all that happened was that your meaning structure hadn’t in some respects reflected reality accurately enough.

      Whenever we discover that we have made a major error of judgement we question every other judgement we have made. Such doubt loosens the other parts of our structure of meaning and so it all feels like it is falling apart.

      Even when we understand that this is what is happening, the shock of the discovery of our error is followed by pain, anxiety, disappointment, disillusionment and varying amounts of anger and resentment. (At the same time there can be a sense of exhilaration and freedom. The day after I discovered I had misjudged the degree of my husband’s faithfulness I went into a state of shock AND I bought myself a complete new set of make-up. Part of me was saying, ‘Whoopee!’ because the freedom I longed for was now mine.)

      Just as our body following illness or accident will strive to heal itself, so our meaning structure will strive to re-organize itself and align itself with reality in such a way that we can go on living with a sense of security and hope.

      But, just as when ill or injured we have to assist our body to heal itself by taking care of ourselves, so when our meaning structure has to reform itself we have to assist it by recognizing that, ‘By changing I’ll survive,’ or even, ‘By changing I can improve my life.’ We need to be prepared to let go of some cherished ideas and to modify others. Unfortunately our vanity often prevents us from doing this.

      If your meaning structure still contains ideas like

       ‘The only job I can have is one which commands a top salary’

      or

       ‘I can never be happy without my partner’

      or

       ‘The world has to be the way I want it to be’

      your meaning structure is prevented from re-forming itself in such a way that you can feel at peace with yourself and find new ways of creating happiness and security.

      Whether you want to change or not, a large part of your meaning structure is changing all the time. Every experience is a new experience, even if it is like a past experience. I’m sure you’ve met someone at work who’s had one year’s experience twenty times over, but even non-learners change. They just don’t recognize that they’ve changed.

      However, some parts of your meaning structure stay relatively stable over time.

      For instance, the meanings you created when you were a baby so as to be able to tell whether an object was close to you or far away remain fairly stable, though as you get older you might need glasses to let you see the world as being crisp and clear.

      Most of us form a meaning about what gender we are and stick with that throughout our lives, though a few people become increasingly convinced that their family have assigned to them an inappropriate gender and they do what they can to bring society’s assessment of their gender into line with what they now experience.

      Some of us hold for all of our lives a belief in, say, the existence of God or the natural

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