Too much existential drama!  I recall a line from the philosopher, James Madden, that our minds are more like antennae than projectors.  Yes, sometimes I project meaning outward onto brute matter, but usually I swim inside existing circles of meaning.  Take my dogs, for example (please).  People and dogs together form a whole, a family, and within the whole, causation is more about meaning than mechanics.  Around the time for their afternoon walk, my dogs rouse from sloth and start watching me, then nudging me, while I conspicuously ignore them.  They’re in my mind, I’m in theirs, we’re conditioning each other and moving as a whole.  We moderns think of causal relationships as linear and mechanical, like when the scientist, Pavlov, rings the bell and the dog salivates.  But really, Pavlov's dog is in a reciprocal relationship with Pavlov wherein both get conditioned-- in fact, in that sterile laboratory, the dog focuses all his attention and will on Pavlov, to have a meaningful relationship with Pavlov, because the dog has no other family.  

 

When the whole guides the parts, it uses meaning as a principle of connection and of causation.  Before you scoff at my spiritualism, please understand that modern science is heading this way at the quantum, cosmological and biological levels.  At the quantum level, material causation can’t account for quantum entanglement or the collapse of the wave function.  At the cosmological level, material causation can’t account for Lee Smolin’s fine-tuning calculations-- wherein the statistical probability of life in the universe is effectively 0%... yet we exist!  At the biological level, material causation can’t explain the mystery of life.  Because material causation alone can’t account for scientific fact, therefore, “there is another” (Yoda).  The other form of causation is meaning-based, running from the whole to the parts, from the ultimate whole, God, to lesser wholes to parts.   

 

Meaning has a powerful causal effect.  Meaning runs like electricity and it connects things in the material world.  I remember walking the California hills with my prior two dogs.  The dogs would form a perimeter 100 yards wide, one on the left, the other on the right and me in the middle, giving us together a large field of perception.  Then we communicated, mostly in body language and sometimes in sound, and we moved as one whole, as if an electric current of meaning was running between us and keeping us in line.  From afar, deer would survey this whole unit, and immediately run.  The deer knew our meaning and the material consequences of getting too close.

 

Or imagine looking into another person’s eyes and face, and giving up your own eyes and face to that person’s gaze.  Imagine just staring into another person’s eyes, as the minutes roll by, getting past initial discomfort, past embarrassment, past shame, all the way to… what?  I submerge in connection and emerge a changed person, or maybe it’s too much for me and I look away.  Martin Buber tells a story of his youth.  Young Buber was cleaning out the stables and came face-to-face with a horse.  They gazed at one another and there was meaning between them, Thou to Thou.  Young Buber felt it, was overwhelmed and became afraid.  He looked away and the moment was gone, to his life-long regret. 

 

Everything connects.  I connect in the world and I make it as it makes me.  In Will to Believe, William James says it’s like the question,

“Do you like me or not?.... Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation.  The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases what makes your liking come.  But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt... ten to one your liking never comes.”

 

Everything connects in the whole.  Solzhenitsyn said that one man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny.  In my life, I’ve seen that the continuing commitment of me and my wife to our marriage has a positive causal effect that ripples out and materially touches our kitchen, our garden, our children and beyond.  A strong marriage is a lever that moves things in the world. 

 

I’m responsible for how I connect.  I’m responsible for the stance I take to the world.  If I take a stance of detached objectivity, then I call forth from the universe both the power of science and its meaninglessness, and I’m responsible for that.  If I stand in meaning, then I call forth the power of connection, and I’m responsible for that too.  For my part, I’d rather throw myself into the world and throw my heart into other people.  I want to be like Elvis, who went into the audience and walked a wide circle, kissing all the girls.