Meta

The move of stepping up a level — and the name for the ultimately ineffable top of any category, where it rejoins ØNE.

To say Meta X is to point at the highest universal overarching and uniting X of Xs, which by definition contains within itself and orders every other possible X. So: the Meta Story is the story of stories; the Meta Goal is the goal of goals; the Meta Project is the project of projects; the Meta Game is the game of games. The prefix is used this way consistently across the whole field, which is why it earns a page of its own rather than living as a habit.

Two things must be held together about every Meta term. The referent is ineffable — the Meta level of anything lies beyond the boundary of knowing, and further beyond our Current Best Articulation of it. And the conception is a rendering: "the highest overarching and uniting X that contains and orders all other Xs" is our best conception, the finest fingerpost we can raise. The fingerpost is refined forever; what it points toward does not move. Concretise it and you have built an idol where a window was meant to be.

It is load-bearing because it is how the field avoids infinite regress. Every hierarchy here terminates somewhere, and the termination is always the same: at the Meta level, all categories reunify. The Meta Story, the Meta Goal, the Meta Intention, and the Meta Game are, ultimately, ØNE — the same summit approached up different faces of one mountain. That is what makes it possible to say, without sleight of hand, that the object of the Meta Project could not be anything other than the Meta Goal.

In play, going meta is an ordinary move: when a disagreement will not resolve at its own level, step up one and ask what both positions are instances of.

Also called: Meta Idea · Meta Law · Meta Value · Meta Story · Meta Goal · Meta Quest Stands on: ØNE · The Ineffable · Holarchy Opens onto: The Goal · Levels of Abstraction · The Meta Project · The Meta Crisis · Meta Opportunity · Current Best Articulation · Do Not Concretize the Absolute In play: At the table, as the move when an argument is stuck; at the Room and beyond, as the reason many bodies' aims can be shown to be one aim. Sources: Meta (wiki root, canon-grade) · Essences, Renderings, And Ineffable Referents (Card, status: settled) · The LIØNSBERG Lexicon, Boundaries · The Goal (root). lionsberg.wiki: Meta. Open: none found; the root page is the single mature articulation and the rest of the corpus uses the prefix consistently with it.