There is no text; there is only context.  Of course there is text, but we spend a lot of time confusing the trees with the forest.  Postmodern critics like to say that texts have no meaning.  We shall examine the other side of that coin – meaning has no text.

Reality tolerates many kinds of analysis.  Let us consider the linguistic analysis of reality as paradigmatic.  With language and reality we have the sign and the signified.  We also have communication and its role in human relations.  I have suggested that reality is ultimately a relational society, holographically composed of virtual, personal entities, like you and me.  Reality is a recursively bootstrapped social structure, or whatever that turns out to mean.

As holographic microcosms, all of us are in direct contact with all of reality.  Why then do we need the indirection of language and other sensory data?  Those signs, which purport to inform us of reality, are mainly just a smoke screen.  But the smoke goes along with the mirrors that are our space-time manifold.  If you are going to have the mirrors you have to have the smoke.

The social structure that is the cosmos has to project itself in order to be holographic, and the space time manifold is an optimal medium of projection.  Given that necessity, direct perception is transformed into the indirection of sense data.  Meaning is filtered into text.  Our intuitive sense must be empowered so that the filters can be removed.  That is our apocalypse.

The text of reality exists only in some virtual, fill-the-gap sense.  We become mesmerized by the text and lose sight of reality.  By giving up the text we can reclaim the meaning that is reality.  No one said this would be easy.