Dorothy Rowe - Beyond Fear

Our meaning structure starts to take shape while we are still in the womb, where babies hear sounds and experience pleasure and pain. A newborn baby looks around at the world with intense interest, and so his meaning structure grows and changes. Our meaning structure grows out of the functioning of our brain, and so, like all living things, its first purpose is to stay alive.

‘Staying alive’ for a meaning structure means staying as one coherent whole. The aim of all the functions of the meaning structure is to keep the structure whole and not let it fall apart. If the meaning structure starts to fall apart the sense of being a person will start to dissipate. We experience this whenever we discover that we are mistaken in our judgement. Mislaying our house keys makes us anxious; discovering that the world is not what we thought it was can threaten to annihilate us as a person. Whenever we discover that we have made a serious error of judgement - say, that the person we loved has abandoned or betrayed us, or that being a good person does not protect us from disaster - we feel ourselves to be shattering, crumbling, even disappearing, and with this comes the greatest terror, the fear that we shall be annihilated as a person.

Our sense of being a person is our meaning structure, and this meaning structure grows out of the functioning of the brain. While we are far from understanding just how brain and mind are linked, our increasing knowledge of how the brain functions shows that there can be no scientific doubt that the brain and mind are one.

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