Spirit is that which reveals things in their meaningfulness, meaningful here in both the sense of the meaning of a term and as in 'that was a meaningful experience'. That is, meaning that carries a certain weight and force. It is only in being meaningful that things and experiences 'come into being' and carry their intensity. This meaningfulness is the constitutive element of existence such that the more spirit becomes self-conscious of itself as spirit the more that things that are considered or assumed to be certain of themselves outside of meaning become subsumed into the ever unfolding 'play of meaning'. What we find in Hegel is that in the movement of spirit what is taken to be immediate, and thus having the possibility of grounding absolute knowledge (as apart from absolute knowing) continually becomes conscious of itself as being mediated by what it takes to be secondary to it. Thus empirical knowledge, taken to be the ground for knowledge finds the certainty of sense-perception contaminated with concepts and categories that make sense-perceptions recognizable. What marks itself as central, self-evident and grounding gets uprooted by the movement of spirit and no longer takes itself to be the central 'thing' which grounds and determines the meaning of things. This movement is a growing awareness of the contradictions that are involved as soon as one makes a claim to have discovered a foundation, in the very claim that has been made.

In uprooting these foundations however, the movement of spirit is not a negative or destructive force, but is rather the force that sets limits upon the claims to universalizability and 'ultimate'. As spirit becomes self-conscious of these things, as they get held out before spirit as ultimately constituted by their spirit they are still held to be meaningful, in that they carry weight and significance but are understood to carry weight as significance. Thus it is not the 'actuality' of religious stories and myths that determine whether or not they are meaningful. The question of 'actuality' is a question posed before spirit has become self-conscious of itself. What matters is that spirituality of these stories and myths, that through them we come to be constituted and spiritually arranged in the world. Their being meaningful is indifferent to their 'actuality' and one assumes that through spirit holding itself before itself as spirit would come to take 'actuality' itself, as the value that determines the value of such stories as meaningful, as meaningful in of itself. That is the self-conscious spirit when it no longer takes 'actuality' or positivist truth value as the central value does not take these things to be fictitious or erroneous, but meaningful in of themselves. Historical accuracy, while not the 'be-all, end-all' of the religious experience is not simply left by the way-side but becomes a subject of questioning itself. The self-conscious spirit as it pertains to religious historicism asks, what does it mean that the legitimacy of religious experiences corresponded to the truth or falsity of claims of historical accuracy?

Spirit's self-consciousness of itself as spirit (which requires ultimately that it be other than itself) reveals meaning as the immanency of phenomenon. In this uprooting of the foundations, I think spirit's movement towards self-consciousness reveals 'existence' as rhizomatic. Spirit is not the meaning of things, but things as necessarily and essentially meaningful, and meaningful due to their relation and interdependence of other meanings. This rather than meaningful because it refers to something that holds its meaning self-evidently and externally to language and plays of meaning.