What we say and do often has a great deal of significance beyond that which is immediately intended or meant. Many people, for example, enjoy sending out coded messages in the hope that others who are sufficiently intuitive will recognize the deeper point and respond accordingly. I must say that though I am a fairly intuitive person myself, I often tend to overanalyze things and read more meanings into acts than may be intentional. From my observation of others, this appears to be a common problem; it is easy to miss intended meanings or read meanings that are not there. It is difficult, in the absence of clear and accurate communication, what exactly is being meant, and often meanings that are felt but not expressed can be obvious to someone who is sufficiently in tune to understand them. All of this makes life more complicated.

For whatever reason, I have had the cause to think about this issue a lot recently as far as it dealt with life around me. Whether one is seeing coded messages on the internet, or engaged in friendly conversation that betrays perhaps a deeper concern, there is always the question of whether there is a deeper meaning than appears on the surface. A couple years ago I had the opportunity to have months of practice dealing with coded messages, pondering how messages could have a surface meaning that appeared to read one way but have a different meaning entirely based on the words used and based on the context that the words appeared in. It was almost enough to make me a journeyman in spotting and countering doublespeak and propaganda, and sadly I have found that a great deal of doublespeak exists in larger discourse.

However, rather than spend a post in complaining about the conduct of others when it comes to dealing with deeper motives, because such a post could easily be written, I would like to comment a bit on my own love of layers and meaning. Given the fact that I generally intend on multiple layers of communication, I find it richly rewarding when there are additional unintentional layers that are going on without my knowledge. For example, yesterday I wrote a post about fairy tales [1], and shortly after writing the blog post I received a lot of news about a particularly horrifying story in New Hampshire involving nightmarish details of exploitation of a teenager by her intensely hypocritical and monstrously evil mother. Sadly, among the dark evils of our world (and an evil I know all too well personally) is that our worst abusers and enemies are often those who are closest to us, and this fact in general tends to be greatly corrosive of trust within families and institutions and nations. The results of that lack of trust are present in the lack of cohesion around us.

Part of the reason such deeper significance tends to happen is that all of us live in a world where there is a lot going on that is underfoot. One does not have to be a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy buff to understand that there is a great deal of manipulation and machination afoot in this world. I happen to believe that most of it is done out of insecurity and done incompetently, but it is what it is. Simply because I do not believe in all-powerful conspiracies of the wealthy and powerful does not believe I think everything is done openly and properly, I just happen to believe that most of the people who try to engage in conspiracies do so incompetently because of the difficulty of coordinating actions with other people and the massive efforts it takes to make one’s points plainly understood. The fact that we live in such a world of codes and dishonesty and layers means that we tend to be very sensitive to hidden meanings whether or not such meanings exist.

Often those meanings do exist. I try to be sensitive of the signals that people send me, even if I find them a bit confusing sometimes. Likewise, as a person who tends to communicate in a lot of levels about a lot of different matters at the same time, I can certainly understand when people who know this tendency find meanings that I did not intend to convey, so long as they are willing to bring it to my attention. In this world we all take the messages we receive and read them through our own experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and our own context. When this kind of subjectivity is rampant (and it is, and there is nothing we can do to avoid it at this point if we wish to have dealings with other people), the best thing we can do is do our best to keep our eyes and ears open, and to respect others enough to address our concerns about their communication openly as well, to avoid confusion over hidden meanings and references. Rather than push our feelings deeper underground, we should be sincere enough to bring what is hidden into the light, so that it can be dealt with honestly.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/fractured-fairy-tales/