Perhaps the mind is a three-way plug: through the personal unconscious into the body, through the collective unconscious to all minds past and present (even pre-human), and through the spiritual unconscious (sometimes called the superconscious if it receives attention in meditation) to God and the universe.

To change metaphors: we can dive into the depths of the pool and find the three electrical outlets that connect us to the global power net.

The mind comes out of and returns to its three roots throughout life. After the death of the body, one of the roots becomes useless, but the mind still exercises its effects through the other two, on the human and natural totality and on the spiritual realm. It does this without consciousness, except when found by others, when it borrows their consciousness to communicate its accumulated knowledge to them. And perhaps God’s consciousness is permanent and total; we remain as thoughts in His mind. But it is nothing like our personal consciousness while we live on Earth, which we can never recover without the active presence of the body into which we were plugged.

According to Hobson, the mind is defined as the sum of all the information stored in the brain, whether conscious or not. But it is information WITH MEANING. To the “mere information” as simply anti-entropy is added purpose, under-standing, values, and decision-making and choice. The mea-ning comes from the three sources: the body and its will to live, experience pleasure and avoid pain; the human and natural collective and its will to survive and expand, and the spiritual realm and its will to be embodied or incarna-ted (from transcendent to immanent).

There are humble meanings (e.g. this neuron circuit MEANS “raise your arm”) and higher meanings (e.g. this sum of gestures MEANS “I love you”). But it is certainly always more than “mere information”, i.e. the presence of entro-pically improbable states.

Meanings from the human collective can be classified as follows:

1. from the present immediate human collective (family, school, friends); i.e. upbringing, education, socialization;

2. from the past or distant human collective, through orally transmitted memories or books, taking the form of language, mathematics, art or music;

3. from ancestral memories directly, which we cannot usually do, but some ancient peoples apparently could, e.g. Australian Aborigines;

Meaning from spiritual sources can come either from contemplating nature in the widest sense, or from meditation, or as a direct revelation, in very exceptional cases.

What does it MEAN to endow information with meaning? Configurations become signs or symbols, not only improbable statistical ensembles. The reason for picking the improbable ensembles to signify something beyond themselves is because they are rare, tend not to occur by chance. Chance or random occurrences of the more probable ones would obscure meaning if we tried to use them for signalling; i.e. we would never know if they were INTENDED or just happened.

Only to a mind does it matter that information should have meaning. In other words, meaning is information that matters to a mind.