The Meta-Priest's Role in Keeping the Apex Signifier Open
God as the body knowing itself whole
Knowing God is not primarily an intellectual exercise but a whole-organism event — physical, emotional, and mental at once. The task is to keep that ultimate sense of meaning open and alive without letting it become a totalizing force that overwrites the wellbeing of others.
The Observer
The Translation
AI-assisted summaryFamiliar terms
A critical distinction separates the meta-theological mode — intellectual inquiry into the nature of God and God's relationship to reality — from the meta-priestly mode, which concerns whether a person is actually experiencing the divine. This experience is not purely cognitive; it is simultaneously somatic, emotional, and intellectual. When these three dimensions achieve Alignment and maximal openness, something described as transcendent immanence becomes available. The warmth and love people express when confessing their love of God reflects the organism accessing its maximal surplus coherence — a state that is, in this framing, itself a form of the Divine. To know God as an organism, in this fundamental sense, is to be happy.
The meta-priest operates cross-paradigmatically — across Mythic, modern, postmodern, and metamodern world-spaces — with a specific task: keeping each person's apex signifier open rather than closed. The apex signifier is whatever functions as someone's ultimate horizon of meaning, the highest-order concept around which their Sense-making organizes. The meta-priestly function cultivates conditions under which individuals and communities can access maximal coherent meaning in ways that are healthy, generative, and adequate to civilizational-scale challenges.
The corresponding danger is well-mapped by Lacanian psychoanalysis: when the apex signifier becomes totalizing — functioning as what Lacan called the big Other — it carries an obscene oppressive potential. Someone acting in the name of an absolute totality can overwrite the wellbeing of everyone around them. The discipline of the meta-priestly mode lies precisely in holding the apex open, ensuring that maximal coherence never collapses into maximal coercion.