Meaning
1.
We have been unnecessarily detained by the rule that what we speak or write must have meaning. I like to write and this rule is a great hindrance.
As i look around, I do not see any such constraint from nature. In nature, so many sounds are made, and there is no preconceived notion of it being in bond with meaning. The thunder of the clouds, the whistle of the wind, the cooing of birds or mooing of animals, and so many sounds that emanate are incidental and communicate minimally for survival and enjoyment. This mania for meaning has given rise to script and grammar, number and maths, schools and syllabuses, and made asses of children having to carry loads of books on the back and their contents in the head. What a pity!
Look at Krishna. He went to school and that too briefly after plenty of fun of every kind. He made fools of others instead of being made a fool of. He had just one poor fellow as friend in school, but he had innumerable friends before that, who considered it bliss, and the ones who were opposed to him, he smoothly packed off, culminating in killing his own uncle and installing the uncle's father as king, a sort of reverse dynasty that does not seem to have caught on. We are told dumbly to worship Krishna and read studiously what he said. What can be more diabolical?
All this because of invention of meaning. Look at our own political masters. They never had such shackles and their captive audience did not bother about meaning. They are not constrained by consistency or keeping the word, as such calamities are not possible when there need be no meaning.
I think that the next meaningful revolution will be abolition of meaning and all that meaning has encumbered us with.
Meaning comes from the Whole, not any part in isolation. Meaning is in what adds to the Whole to keep it in balance, not in individual glorification. A plant growing silently, flowering and bearing fruits, a bee collecting honey and hoarding it in a hive, a deer with scared look and brisk and graceful movement, a tiger prowling about in bestial majesty, everything has meaning in the Whole. Man has meaning in the same kind and degree. Dr. Hegde says, 'Billions of germs live in our body and we will be dead without them.' Each germ, invisible and insignificant in its individuality, adds meaning to the Whole. Same with man. It is just that man has created fabulous stories around himself (Harari). The germs have been around far longer and may outlive man. What meaning will be there to man when he is extinct except as a small step in the colossal march of nature?
Our megalomania does all harm, unrecognised by us and hence proliferated in a grandiose vision of a world where man will be master, and design everything after his desire. But, that is part of nature.
There is nothing sacrosanct about meaning of an individual life except in drawing from and adding to the harmony of the Whole.
Sound/Meaning
I went to Kanchi Sankara Matam fifty years ago with my grandmother who bought me a copy of Vishnu Sahsranamam with translation of Sankara Bhashyam in Tamizh on my demand. I read the meaning of the names a few times over the years, but it did not make sense to me except maybe some like viswam. It has no particular order and no cogent theme. But, it has cadence and the order of names follows the beauty of sound. It has a balance of hard and soft sounds and long and short ones. I got an abiding interest to learn it by heart after listening to MS. I love to hear it or chant it and meaning does not add to my bliss.
I used to listen to Vedic chants even as a boy of less than ten years of age and love even now, but the meaning looks quite trite often to me. It is the sound that is appealing to me.
Even in music, I am taken in by the melody, meaning does not necessarily enhance my enjoyment.
I would have written off myself as weird and eccentric, but when I read the following, I got a faint hope:
Arthur Osborne on Sri Ramana
“The sound of the chanting helps to still the mind.” He has also said explicitly that it is not necessary to learn the meaning. This is a practical illustration of what has been said about the ‘meditation’ he enjoined — that it is not thought but turning the mind inwards to the awareness beyond thought.
While presenting a dictionary, I wrote, ‘Go beyond word
to meaning, and beyond meaning to life.’ Meaning and reason do not enrich life,
but divert us from what is to what we imagine and superimpose.
2.
Vedic Hinduism postulated purushartha (meaning
for human existence) in terms of dharma (doing one’s assigned turn in the
context one finds oneself in), artha (earning), kama (fulfilment of desires)
and moksha (liberation). People are generally confined to the second and third.
3.
The letter appended is taken from Will Durant’s
book.
Durant says of the
letter – ‘This is a delightful piece, which I print here with the uneasy conscience
of a man stealing a gem.’
“Dear Durant:
You ask me, in brief,
what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working
for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living
creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to
be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of
activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism—in fact, it is
almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.
The precise form of an
individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he
came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. I do not
lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For
the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the
violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I
do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an
intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It
happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for
putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to
say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.
There is very little
conscious volition in all this. What I do was ordained by the inscrutable
fates, not chosen by me. In my boyhood, yielding to a powerful but still subordinate
interest in exact facts, I wanted to be a chemist, and at the same time my poor
father tried to make me a business man. At other times, like any other
realtively poor man, I have longed to make a lot of money by some easy swindle.
But I became a writer all the same, and shall remain one until the end of the
chapter, just as a cow goes on giving milk all her life, even though what
appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin.
I am far luckier than
most men, for I have been able since boyhood to make a good living doing
precisely what I have wanted to do—what I would have done for nothing, and very
gladly, if there had been no reward for it. Not many men, I believe, are so
fortunate. Millions of them have to make their livings at tasks which really do
not interest them. As for me, I have had an extraordinarily pleasant life,
despite the fact that I have had the usual share of woes. For in the midst of
these woes I still enjoyed the immense satisfaction which goes with free
activity. I have done, in the main, exactly what I wanted to do. Its possible
effects on other people have interested me very little. I have not written and
published to please other people, but to satisfy myself, just as a cow gives
milk, not to profit the dairyman, but to satisfy herself. I like to think that
most of my ideas have been sound ones, but I really don’t care. The world may
take them or leave them. I have had my fun hatching them.
Next to agreeable work
as a means of attaining happiness I put what Huxley called the domestic
affections—the day to day intercourse with family and friends. My home has seen
bitter sorrow, but it has never seen any serious disputes, and it has never
seen poverty. I was completely happy with my mother and sister, and I am
completely happy with my wife. Most of the men I commonly associate with are
friends of very old standing. I have known some of them for more than thirty
years. I seldom see anyone, intimately, whom I have known for less than ten
years. These friends delight me. I turn to them when work is done with
unfailing eagerness. We have the same general tastes, and see the world much
alike. Most of them are interested in music, as I am. It has given me more
pleasure in this life than any external thing. I love it more every year.
As for religion, I am
quite devoid of it. Never in my adult life have I experienced anything that
could be plausibly called a religious impulse. My father and grandfather were
agnostics before me, and though I was sent to Sunday-school as a boy and exposed
to the Christian theology I was never taught to believe it. My father thought
that I should learn what it was, but it apparently never occurred to him that I
would accept it. He was a good psychologist. What I got in Sunday-school—beside
a wide acquaintance with Christian hymnology—was simply a firm conviction that
the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God
preposterous. Since that time I have read a great deal in theology—perhaps much
more than the average clergyman—but I have never discovered any reason to
change my mind.
The act of worship, as
carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It
involves grovelling before a Being who, if He really exists, deserves to be
denounced instead of respected. I see little evidence in this world of the
so-called goodness of God. On the contrary, it seems to me that, on the
strength of His daily acts, He must be set down a most cruel, stupid and
villainous fellow. I can say this with a clear conscience, for He has treated
me very well—in fact, with vast politeness. But I can’t help thinking of his
barbaric torture of most of the rest of humanity. I simply can’t imagine
revering the God of war and politics, theology and cancer.
I do not believe in
immortality, and have no desire for it. The belief in it issues from the
puerile egos of inferior men. In its Christian form it is little more than a
device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on this
earth. What the meaning of human life may be I don’t know: I incline to suspect
that it has none. All I know about it is that, to me at least, it is very
amusing while it lasts. Even its troubles, indeed, can be amusing. Moreover,
they tend to foster the human qualities that I admire most—courage and its
analogues. The noblest man, I think, is that one who fights God, and triumphs
over Him. I have had little of this to do. When I die I shall be content to
vanish into nothingness. No show, however good, could conceivably be good for
ever.
Sincerely yours,
H. L. Mencken”
4. Koan
Zen Buddhists believed
that it was important to embrace uncertainty instead of always seeking answers.
They meditated on paradoxical riddles called kōans to raise doubts about the
very meaning of knowing and, through this, find deeper truths about existence.
There are roughly 1,700 kōans.
https://aeon.co/videos/what-zen-buddhist-riddles-reveal-about-knowledge-and-the-unknowable
5.
Here
Proust gives us three possible answers – social status, love and art (breaking
away from habit) and suggests the last. Not really satisfying to me because art
is a way of looking at things, not really looking at things. There is a great
joy in just looking, listening, hearing, feeling, smelling, and then in
thinking with no dogma or possessivemness. Answers that come from most of the
intellectuals ignore the ordinary man. And hence they are a solution to a niche
group.
I
am more with GBS who replies to the question 'What is the meaning of life?'
with a rhetorical counter-question, 'Is the question meaningful?' Durant says
that we must do something that will be enduring (Thonrir pugazhodu thonruga –
if you are born you muct achieve fame - which always troubled me). What does it
matter if something survives me or not, or why should someone else have to
appreciate me, though such an urge is universal? It is this moment that is
precious and important and I must be in it. When it goes, it goes. Its memory
is a vain vestige,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mLdo4uMJUU
6. Touching and edifying::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjLdMVYL3mc
7.
Religion
afforded meaning, argues this article.
(Religion was
invented, in my view, to afford meaning to human life and has been made
anthropomorphic in content. We can say nothing about god with any certainty.)
Excerpts:
“The
observable universe is inconceivably vast and ancient: it is approximately 93
billion light-years in diameter and c14 billion years old.
Rabbi Harold
Kushner. ‘Religion offers us a cure for the plague of loneliness by bringing us
into a community of people with whom we share what is most vital in our lives …
Faith also satisfies a deeper human need – to know that somehow we matter, that
our lives mean something, count as something more than just a momentary blip in
the Universe.’
A person’s sense
that their life is meaningful depends on their perceptions of their own
significance. But a person can be significant in various ways. One would do
well to seek out ways in which they can matter – whether that means mattering
to other individuals, to their communities, or perhaps even in the grand scheme
of the Universe.”
8.
Life is both a beauty and an enigma, and all we can see
is that we are too little to understand its significance and mystery
“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it
to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
―
I recommend the reader
to peruse his other quotes here:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/20105.Joseph_Campbell
