That which is unexpressed by the word, that by which the word is expressed, know That to be the Brahman and not this which men follow after here.
— Kena Upanishad (Aurobindo)
Wipe your glosses with what you know.
— Finnegans Wake, 304
What we know is neither purely fictive nor factual, but actual, the knowing moving always in circuits, in feedback loops. The problem for a culture trying to deal with mythic reality is that consensus on how to talk about it is much more difficult to achieve than consensus on the language of objects of sense experience. Hence the need for initiation, ritual, prayer, or ‘schools of thought’ in order to create and sustain that consensus. By integrating patterns of practice with patterns of language, and monitoring the connection closely, a community can create a common mythic language within itself. The trouble is that outsiders have limited access to this common language, which is necessarily a symbol system.
If you are developing a relationship with a person or community, you are working toward a sharing of intention. One of the best methods of testing for consensus is to compare symbols, i.e. to take turns proposing mythic accounts or descriptions of the non-sensuous world and watching for confirming signs from the other. Consciously, then, you identify symbols with intentions, since sharing the one is naturally taken as a sign of sharing the other. Hence the idea that to understand an author’s text is to know the author’s intentions or ‘intended meaning.’ But when the text is written – especially if it was written long ago – you have to take your confirming signs from the context rather than the mutual exchange of responses shared in a conversation. The actual context of your reading is then your intent and your personal history of using language to represent that intent symbolically.
So the only real question you can ask of a scripture is: What do I mean by this? For the ideal reader is the ultimate interpretant of the original Author.
… the Bible deliberately blocks off the sense of the referential from itself: it is not a book pointing to a historical presence outside it, but a book that identifies itself with that presence. At the end the reader, also, is invited to identify himself with the book.… the reader completes the visionary operation of the Bible by throwing out the subjective fallacy along with the objective one. The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared.
— Frye (1982, 137-8)
For the reader of scripture, the book becomes a whole world. And for the seeker of the logos (or in Sanskrit, dharma) which is common to all beings, the world becomes a Scripture: ‘the trees, the birds, the violet bamboo, and the yellow chrysanthemums are all preaching the Dharma that Shakyamuni [Buddha] taught 2,500 years ago’ (Thich Nhat Hanh 1995, 147). ‘The double metaphor of the world as a text and a text as a world has a venerable history’ (Eco 1984, 23).