Meaning
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
10. The book “Meaning of Human
Existence” by E O Wilson, an entomologist, is informative and insightful. I had
posted excerpts from it once. He ends the book on this note:
“If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the
introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an
infinitely more productive and interesting meaning.”
It is like a religious
ending: hope on condition for an unspecified future.
We are concerned with
our present condition and immediate prospects.
“Man’s
Search for Meaning” Victor Frankl
“We can discover the
meaning of life in three main areas: (1)
by doing a deed or creating a work; (2) by encountering someone or experiencing
something; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering”
“The meaning of our
lives can be creativity in the broad sense of the word. This includes creative
works but also merely making something, learning something, or being
productive. Meaning can also be found in the experience of love and the
appreciation of beauty, excellence, culture, and nature.”
The interesting point
Frankl makes is finding meaning in suffering.
This is useful unlike
the stigma attached to suffering as due to sin.
11. Artham अर्थं
This is an interesting word.
शब्दं (sabdam
– phonetics) and अर्थं (semantics) are a pair.
अर्थं also
means physical possession - wealth, something that gets us income. (as in dharma,
artha, kama, moksha)
Now, meaning seems to have got
entangled with physical value. We seem to look for something physical, tangible
when we look for meaning. I do not mean just word meaning. For example, when we
ask ‘what is the meaning of life’, we have an end in view. This perhaps is not
valid. But, it bugs all of us and many books have been written and fortunes
struck. The अर्थं of life has been real अर्थं
for the writers!
If we take the view that life
is its own meaning, that it need not lead us to a goal, a destination or
destiny, no book is possible and no अर्थं. The
fact that we can churn out interesting thoughts cannot be the touchstone of
validity of the ideas.
We must get rid of the
association of अर्थं with a fixed state or
asset and not bother about meaning, but follow what our experience without
rational analysis leads us to. We do not appear to have made a conscious
decision to land in this life. It is unlikely that we are equipped to determine
its future.
12. Nietzche’s take:
Nihilists are often
typified as those that believe that there is no purpose or ‘point’ to life, or
that nothing matters. Alternatively, nihilists might be distinguished from
non-nihilists by their alleged lack of any belief whatsoever.
On Nietzsche’s view,
such beliefs become nihilistic only when the individual holding such beliefs
finds in them a reason for rejecting life and existence as a whole, for
disavowing or disengaging with life itself. It is life-denial, the negation of
life.
Nietzsche himself both
holds this belief and positively evaluates life; he thinks that, even without
an overarching purpose in which all human beings participate, life is well
worth living! .. To judge that life, as it actually is, is not worth living is
a symptom of a dangerous weariness with life, an inability to effectively
engage with one’s world, grow in one’s form of life, and flourish. .. By
adopting the belief in a higher purpose, a person is merely coping. While her
investment in this belief secures her survival, it secures little else.
If an individual can
hold what looks to our eyes like a nihilistic belief – perhaps that there is no
purpose to life – but continue to find life worth living and grow in her form
of life, then this is a sign of psychological flourishing.
13. “Confucius
was alarmed by what he perceived to be the moral and spiritual decline of his
society.
Meaning has three connotations mainly:
intelligibility, purpose and significance.
Susan Wolf: Meaning arises when subjective attraction
meets objective attractiveness.
Meaning is construed to be connected with intellectual
pursuits (mathematical, scientific, musical, artistic) or grand projects. Most
human lives are built aroud relatively mundane experience and activities such
as simple enjoyments, connectivity to their neighbours, and the raising of
children.
Benjamin Schwartz: Ritual is all those ‘objective’
prescription of behavior, whether involving
rite, ceremony, manners, or general deportment, that bind human beings
and spirits together in networks of interacting roles within the family, within
human society, and with numerous realms beyond.
Acc. to Confucius, rituals provide the cultural
grammar for navigating the social world.
Through the powers of tradition and culture, rituals
help give shape to, and express certain basic dispositions such as joy and
sorrow, transforming them into profound human experiences, which stretch our
emotional capacities and help to feel deeply human, often reminding us what
matters most to us. Special occasions, such as graduation, funerals, or
weddings occupy a unique place in the course of our lives.
Confucian tradition lays emphasis on family, filial
duty.
Studies in empirical psychology have vindicated the
enormous impact that parents and caretakers have on children. For most people
family ties stand as the most intimate and enduring of all human
relationships.”
(From The Meaning of Life and the Great Philosophers
Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia)
14. Vyasa and the Meaning of Life
Arindam Chakraborty
Vidura to Dhritarashtra: “Meaningless misery is the destiny
of us all.”
For all the apparent endorsement of the official Vedic
Karma doctrine which ‘explains’ human suffering as a deserved consequence of
past sin, Vyasas’s MB reverberates, at critical junctures, with King Lear-like
“Howl, howl, howl, howl,” lament at the deaths and miseries of sons and lovers
who did no wrong. .. Vyasa insists that one must understand suffering, because
bodily and mental sufferings make up the beginning, middle and end of life.
Such suffering increases as our possessions and our illusory ego-investment in
them increase. Entrenchment of a sense of mine spell death, whereas giving up
possessiveness and recognizing ‘not mine’ makes us transcend death. .. For
Vyasa, the meaninglessness of this ubiquitous suffering means the human folly
of egoism, attachment and the error of blaming destiny, God or other external
sources for self-inflicted injuries.
Death-bound humanity’s undying thirst for life is
awe-inspiring.
“When the speaker, , the listener, and the sentence take
equal shares, without losing any part, into what is intended to be said, only
then, O King, does the meaning come to light.” (MB XII 320.91)
Two-sided moral thinking gives us better (albeit still
fallible) insight into the meaning of life.
A story whereby a human being taught that just as he is
wishing for the riches of another, the quadrupeds are wishing for human hands
which are versatile. Man is lucky to have the hands.
Life need not mean only human life. Vyasa tells us the
story of an insect, which whispers, ‘I am rushing to cross the road before that
scary bullock-cart comes and crushes me because I love to live. Vyasa asks,
‘Would it not be better if you die rather than live in this crawling insect’s
body?’ and the insect answers, ‘Everywhere the same life-force is at work; I
think, therefore, I wish to live.’
Performance of duty vs desire for emancipation may be
treated as Vyasa’s take of ethics as act-deontological, but
rule-consequentialist.
MB XIV 13.l12-18
Liberation is a state beyond hatred and yearning, a state
of “colourlessness” – loss of concern for everything transitory.
Cruelty: Bhishma defines a cruel person as one who is mean,
controlling, harsh, over-anxious, pompous, a user of foul words, a proud
advertiser of his own acts of making gifts, a praiser of his own clan or class
– most importantly – not ready to share and distribute power and wealth
equally. He equates cruelty with overconsumption of edible, drinkable and
lickable delicacies in front of the starving poor.
There is a connection between linguistic conversational
justice, economic distributive justice and truthfulness as practice of
equality.
Life is best lived with moral vigilance against egotism and
cruelty; without lust or hate for life. “Live to give.” Life should mean
sacrifice. The ultimate cognitive sacrifice is renunciation of all dualities
and binary oppositions, including the duality of meaningful (merited) suffering
and meaningless (unmerited, random) suffering. Final freedom means the giving up
of giving up. (MB XII.239)
- “The unknown, the unforetold, the
unproven – that is what life is based on.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent
intolerable uncertainty, not knowing what comes next.” Ursula K. Le Guin
- People say that
what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what
we’re all seeking. I think that we’re all seeking is an experience of
being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane
will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that
we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” Joseph John Campbell in The
Power of Myth.
“I don’t believe life has a purpose. Life is a lot of
protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being.
You can’t say life is useless because it ends in the grave.
.. This moment itself is no vanity, it is a triumph, a delight.
There is life pouring into the world, and it is pouring
from an inexhaustible source.
Mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than
one life.
The great western truth is that each of us is a completely
unique creature and that if ever we are to give any gift to the world, it will
have to come out of our own experience and fulfilment of our own
potentialities. It has to be something that never has been and never could have
been experienced by anyone else.”
John Joseph Campbell in his chat with Moyers
16. “*
17. Freud: “Human beings are fundamentally driven by
pursuit of pleasure, not interested in meaning.”
Victor Henkel:
“Happy people are fundamentally driven by pursuit of meaning.”
18. Nature
does not care
“Meaning is of course
fundamental to knowing – the search for the significant datapoint, the sifting
of the signal from the noise. Yet there are as many ways of finding meaning in
nature as there are people on our planet – as there are people who have ever
lived.”
This article is about
knowledge, and meaning in the quote above is of what is said rather than of
life. Yet, one can find some connect.
19.
Life is for living, not
for searching for meaning or purpose. All of us have a strong desire and will
to live as a given. It is not meaningful to look for meaning other than acting
on the will
20. “The
quest for meaning finds expression or commitment to action, and in one’s
personal relationships.”
“Happiness is in
the awareness of an overall and enduring state of satisfaction in a meaningful
existence founded on truth.” Frederic Lenoir
21. “The good human
life demands meaning and purpose, which cannot be won in any stable sense from
things – like wealth or pleasure – that can only ever be means.”
“But the real
project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good
world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends
paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid
uselessness’.”
“Truly splendid
uselessness nourishes and elevates us spiritually, rather than simply providing
a rush of mental or bodily pleasure.”
“The pursuit of
good and beautiful things for their own sake tends to overflow, to bring more
goodness and beauty into being: one good poem can spark a dozen others, a great
one a thousand. A good marriage, conducted in a spirit of loving generosity and
selflessness instead of status-acquisition, provides a model and inspiration to
one’s friends, family and community.”
“Performing an activity entirely for its own
sake, and performing it excellently, results in an impact far beyond what was –
or could have possibly been – intended.”
22. Monte
Johnson on Aristotle’s views:
“Growth
and stature and nutrition, though important, cannot be the ultimate purpose of
life.
Homo
sapiens is Latin for wise man. Man is a rational animal.
Anthropology
and philosophy can determine what is good for our kind of living things.
Philosophy engages in reason and thought not only in order to serve our
vegetative or animal needs, but just for its own sake, for the sake of living a
human life. Doing philosophy is the ultimate end of human existence.”
23. Plato
(by David SKR Bina);
The
meaning of life is one of those perennially impossible philosophical questions.
The
universe exists for a reason.
Right
livelihood involves servig the broad ideological aims of the whole. Our lives
acquire meaning by becoming thr best persons that we can be. Be virtuous and
the best possible citizen.
Core
virtues: knowledge, justice, courage, temperance, piety.
The
ultimate reward for virtue comes after death.
Virtuous
life is unattainable and inconceivable outside of society.
We should not spend a lifetime trying to find meaning for life. We should live our life meaningfully.
We should not look for meaning for life beyond life.
Each one of us started with a story of success against overwhelming odds. Millions of sperms competed to come to full-fledged life and one succeeded. It has the ingredients for fighting the odds and coming on top. It was a deep desire to live this life that has brought us to what we are. There is no justification to question that desire and decision. The more we look for meaning the more meaningless it will appear. We should, most of all, be careful not to entertain anyone else to find meaning for our life with cock and bull stories.
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