Meaning Is Correctable: Why the Process Matters More Than the Feeling

This insight draws a sharp distinction between the subjective sense of meaning and the normative process that governs its correction. The sense of meaning is subjective in a precise, philosophically loaded way: it admits of error. A person can experience profound meaning in a context later revealed as fraudulent, which means the phenomenology of meaning and meaning itself cannot be identical. If meaning were reducible to its felt quality, there would be no standard by which to recognize that the feeling was mistaken. The existence of meaning-error implies a non-subjective normative dimension — something that adjudicates between genuine and illusory meaning.

The argument then locates the real locus of value not in any achieved state of meaningfulness but in the process by which meaning is dissolved and reconstituted when prior framings fail. This is a process-relational account: meaning is not a stable possession but an ongoing dynamic of integration, breakdown, and reintegration. Empirical support comes from research on mystical and transformative experiences, where the "insight factor" — the degree of genuine realization — predicts lasting changes in meaning, while phenomenological intensity alone does not.

The sacred, on this account, is reconceived as the inexhaustible process of intelligibility itself: the capacity to update one's grip on reality at the edge where established order meets anomaly. This reframes sacredness not as a content, an object, or a terminal state, but as the optimal functioning of the self-correcting, self-transcending process that operates precisely at the border between order and chaos — which is why encounters with it carry the phenomenological signature of the numinous.