In studying the meaning of meaning, the will to meaning, and the meaning in how purport and import align -- these are the two meanings of every word in a sentence* -- it becomes clear: Understanding meaning is enlightening; understanding the meaning of meaning is empowering.
The more we seek meaning, the deeper we go into power, which is probably why Nietzsche was confused on this essential point and thought the will-to-power was the deepest motivating will. Let me be clear that I respect Nietzsche's position. I do understand his genius was remarkable, so I am not slighting him by saying that he was confused on this essential point. This is because I know that his entire cultural context -- everyone in Western Civilization -- was embedded in the matrix of binary logic so deeply that the "meaning of meaning" was hidden not only to him, but to everyone in his era.
Although the advent of non-Euclidean geometry was preparing the way, we can see -- by how hard Wittgenstein struggled to arrive at the precipice, "the end" of binary logic -- that it was a few decades after Nietzsche when that nut began to crack. What he missed, as I mentioned in my preceding essay on the ternary nature of the will to meaning, is that will to power is only a side effect, or corollary of the deeper will to meaning. I hope this helps explain how I mean no slight against Nietzsche when I say he was confused; everyone was, at that point in history.
If genius arises from a crucible, Nietzsche's was hot, but it took the much hotter crucible of the Holocaust for Viktor Frankl to survive, and within it, to discern this deeper will, which I am now convinced is the deepest of all wills, the will to meaning. I believe this because it structurally taps into the ternary layer -- literally, the meaningful layer -- cracking the eggshell of binary meaninglessness with the very essence of what separates life from death: the will to meaning is the essence of life, within mortality.
In other words, the spark of life is the will to meaning. If I'm right, the will to meaning is like gravity in how it is everywhere. Compared to the other much stronger forces of the electromagnetic spectrum (which I believe includes the nuclear forces because if you go far enough back toward the Big Bang, all forces were one), gravity appears weak. But its very weakness is counterpoised by its reach: everywhere. Thus stars are born, galaxies come and go, black holes come into being, planets circle stars, weather patterns behave as they do, and so much more, all due to the comparatively "weak" force of gravity.
So when I say that the will to meaning is everywhere like gravity, I also mean it is weak like gravity, yet it is an inexorable "force" within all matter.
Let's look at how it operates ontologically: As matter responds to this weak force, out of trillions and trillions of possible "random" combinations of matter, a vessel for the spark of life gets formed. It is so weak, it requires trillions of iterations before things line up perfectly, and the vessel is "just right," in the Goldilocks zone for life.
After countless trillions more of these vessels form, life one day begins. In that moment (now thinking of how reinforcement learning operates), a step toward meaning happens, and is reinforced. The faint will-to-meaning has been rewarded, and from that point forward, it has a degree of freedom which it did not have, while embedded in matter, which seems to be meaningless in and of itself.
(A curious side-note to this thought experiment: life arises in exact opposition to gravity, a yearning upward, toward the sun, which carries the germ of life that is in all life on earth. Gravity is selfish, self-absorbed, attractive to itself, whereas life, the will to meaning, is giving, other-absorbed, attracted to light. This duality makes me wonder about the relationship between gravity and entropy, vs ascension and negentropy...)
After the initial advent of the will to meaning -- out of the prison of meaninglessness -- into that first vessel of life, billions of years of evolution occur before the vessel is both stable on the large scale (as Schrödinger pointed out in "What is Life?"), and sensitive enough on the micro scale, for the advent of language.
Language is said (by Noam Chomsky) to have started about 100,000 years ago. It appears language is the ultimate perfection of... a vessel... for the will to meaning; it is as profound a leap into the unknown as the advent of life itself was, billions of years before.
No wonder Jesus Christ is the Word. This equation, Jesus=Word, is talking about meaning. Language is so intricately woven with the nature of God, that the Book of John unabashedly embeds the Word right into the Beginning, before Genesis even begins, and equates the Word with God.
Of the many meanings of this at-one-ment of language and Godhead, the one which is relevant here: language is a vessel carrying the finest nuances of the will to meaning. Jesus had the unique aspect that his words and his actions were aligned. Thus he sets the standard of alignment between purport and import, which is what he was getting at when he said "I am the way, the truth and the life." He is the door, because of his perfect alignment between the inner and the outer meanings.
There is much to say here, but I think this is enough for now.
*purport and import, i.e. that which is intended and that which is heard