On this page I will put forth meanings thinkers have ascribed to the concept of meaning. I will keep adding. You can as well contribute.

1. From the ‘Attachment across Life Cycle’ – Colin Murray Parkes

A meaning is an organization of experience which enables us to identify those events which matter to us, relate them to previous experiences, and determine how we should respond to them. It involves classifying events, ordering purposes, and recognizing feelings associated with events and purposes. Like all living organizations, it evolves constantly and reiteratively, as events provoke emotions which influence purposes which in turn influence the events which follow and how we feel about them.We would not be able to survive for any length of time without these meanings. Unless experience can be perceived as patterns which recognizably repeat, we cannot learn or predict anything. The process of growing up is, then, as much as anything, the maturing of organizations of meaning.But meanings are organized as social institutions as well as personal understandings – as science, religion, ideology, law, art, and most fundamentally in the structure of a language. And these institutionalized meanings, too, have a life of their own, evolving as they are reiterated. As much as our personal understandings, which incorporate them, they create the predictability of human interaction.On Grief – When is the ability to make sense most likely to break down? That is, under what circumstances does our difficulty in understanding what is happening, in retrieving a sense of purpose, or in coping with contradictions overwhelm us with anxiety, despair, or grief? Research on bereavement, depression, and the effects of unemployment suggest that childhood experience of attachment, the nature of events themselves, and the social context in which they occur all affect our resilience.Any loss which fundamentally disrupts the central purposes of our lives will normally provoke severe and long-lasting grief. To reintegrate those purposes, so that they can once again inform life, the bereaved have at once to retrieve and consolidate the meaning of what they have lost, detach that meaning from the irretrievable past, and reformulate the meaning so that it becomes relevant to the present. It is a painful, ambivalent process, but within a year or two, most people recover a sense of worthwhile activity.