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Started: 01st August, 2020.
Completed: 03rd August, 2020.
This essay is devised as a teaching tool. It is trying to make a point, in this case about developing a specific kind of mental skill. Because it is a teaching tool, it is concerned mainly about leaving behind a specific impression on the student's mind, i.e., it is more rhetorical as opposed to logical in nature. It thus follows a narrative structure that suddenly jumps off without a warning, and repeats the same point in many ways. The reader would profit from keeping this in mind.
It is not an over-simplification to confidently assert that errors of our times are errors of meaning, or an inability to make meaning of things. Let us start from the most common-place and then move on from there.
Take the phrase " mere zikr ka zubaan pe swaad rakhana" from the song Channa Mereya in the film Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, a Karan Johar movie. It is a nice hum-along song, but it is doubtful whether those who listen, or for that matter, those who have written it realise the import of the words. The word zikr, in Urdu, or Arabic, literally means remembrance. So what does the term remembrance mean beyond its obvious meaning?
It so happens that this term, in its various versions, is one of the most important terms in religious scriptures. In the Qur'an, for instance, it is conjoined directly with the act of remembering Allah. In the Pali Cannon, the ability to remember (or what is loosely translated as mindfulness), was cited by the Buddha as the single-most important quality of the mind to develop for those taking their first serious step towards the practice of meditation.
Hence, when the term zikr is used in the particular song above it is requesting the beloved to remember the one she loves in a specific manner. But this meaning is available only to those who possess the above awareness of the context of zikr. They alone would interpret that the singer and composer is indeed telling his beloved to remember him with an intensity that would be usually reserved for the Divine One.
This simple layering of meaning changes therefore the resonance of the song. However, on listening it is evident that the play-back singer failed to fully capture this: for the singer's voice passes over this word, or sings it like any other word, except for making a deliberate attempt to get the pronounciation just right.
This is one example of meaning-making. Let us now move a little farther. Meaning-making, at times, though perhaps not always, is a result of reflection. What does the term reflection mean? Reflect literally is made of two terms: re and flect. 'Re' means of course repetition, recurrence, to carry out an action once again, etc.. The word flect means to 'bend'. Now does the term reflection mean to bend again? Or, does it mean that by bending something, something is repeated?
Again, the trick is to ask ourselves: where is this word used, in what context did it originate from, or where does it find its most common use? Evidently, with reference to the physics of light. A light is reflected, or refracted, from a surface. When it is reflected it first strikes a surface, and is thrown back by the surface as it came to it, but in a direction different from the one it entered, and even perhaps at a different angle.
Everyone clearly understands such an optical phenomenon, but what has this got to do with the act of thinking (which reflection is)? For the final time, let us visualise the phenomenon. When light is reflected, it is first of all bent at an angle and because of this bending it illuminates a different part of its environment. If there was no surface to reflect it, the light would have continued its journey all the way through, and the possibility of illuminating an 'other' would never have arisen.
What have we done here? We have step-by-step walked through a certain phenomenon in our mind and as we walked through it we can almost feel it happening inside of us. Hopefully, this detailing should now make clear what reflection is and how it is helpful. To make things explicit, we can do term-by-term substitution: Light stands for what we see, hear and experience. The reflecting surface is our mind; the act of bending is the act of our minds thinking, at times purposefully and willfully, what our senses gathered or accumulated; and if the bending is carried out skillfully then the words, thoughts or ideas we heard suddenly illumine, enlighten, educate, make us self-aware or conscious about something which we otherwise would have missed out on: much like the light travelling straight-through, instead of changing its course.
So much for reflection. But we can use this meaning of reflection to conclude that in its essence, the act of reflection is a pre-requisite for a change, a movement of significance, a shift, or in its most exalted form, transformation. Sadly, the way humans change things is generally through revolution, revolt, reaction and rebellion. And when none of these are possible, they do what humans do best: nothing much, or more of the same.
A third and final example will suffice before we change track. Meaning-making might seem intellectually daunting. But in fact it is not so. Consider the following tale from the Islamic tradition: it tells of a story that transpired after the Qur'anic revelations had spread across the Arabic lands. There was a scholarly person who had come from Europe, having stayed with the Greeks and in the process having learnt a lot about their philosophy. As a result of having intercoursed with great minds he had many profound questions, one of which concerned God.
One day he met a Bedouin walking in the desert along with his camel. Knowing the Bedouin was likely a believer, he asked him: why do you believe in God? The Bedouin pointed him to the camel's poo and said that's why. What did the Bedouin's response imply? His action of pointing to the poo simply meant: if you see the poo of a camel it means there was a camel that passed by this place. Likewise, if you see the Creation, are part of a Creation, it means that there is a Creator who Created.
The Bedouin had in the most elemental of ways established the law of cause-effect without any philosophizing. Because there is Nature and she operates in the way she does, and not in an eccentric or ham-handed way, it means there is a law which governs her, and the Creator of that law is in whom the Bedouin submitted to. He had made meaning of the most profound and open secret of his directly experienced reality and, that too, in the most direct and starkest of manner. He took what he observed and took it to its logical concluding meaning.
Meaning-making therefore is not about enclosing oneself in a room and brooding for hours on end. It is about engaging with one's reality in a certain manner: perhaps with a music lyric, a random word, or the idea of the Divine. The important thing is to ask ourself: what allowed the Bedouin to so easily reach that certainty which the philosopher, for all his erudition, lacked? In other words, how is it possible to make fruitful meaning?
Let us unpack what was transpiring in all of the examples above. We took some idea or some term, and wrapped that term in an additional context. This context could arise through the etymology of the word, its other and alternative uses, connection with our own reality, and many other spur-of-the-moment strategems. These strategems then allowed us to look at the same term, phrase, expression, action or phenomenon from a different stance. But not just from any stance, it was a stance, or more correctly, a frame of reference, which helped us experience that term in ways we were more familiar with.
Thus, zikr is not just asking your beloved to remember you. It is asking her to remember you in a certain way which you have experienced before, perhaps when it came to your own prayer and worship. Similarly, as a child, we may have experienced the light reflecting off the surface of a lake, or seen it in a movie clip and were enchanted by it. Somewhere that imagery stayed at the back of our mind, implanting a deep aesthetic impression. It is that particular impression which perhaps promptly came to the fore when we reflected on the word 'reflecting'. Likewise, the Beduoin, for whom his camel was his dearest friend, could distill some of the essence of his religion through the acts of his friend, acts he would see daily and could understand most clearly.
In every case, without fail, the abstract was brought to the level of concepts or terms that were primal and primitive to one's own mind: i.e., only one level removed from our own immediately felt experiences. Something is abstract not because it is difficult to comprehend but simply because we have no direct experience of it.
Meaning-making is thereby, first and foremost, an act of taking something that is distant, aloof, abstract, removed, apart; and to bring it near in a way that it becomes familiar, dear, close, quite simple and elementary, almost as intimate, boring and self-evident as our daily routine. When that happens, it is possible to see something in a completely different light, leading, at times, to arising of pivotal insights. All the complications are stripped away and what remains is simply a clear and distinct image or something which is heart-felt.
It is possible to embark on making a technical meaning of the above paragraph. This is not necessary but done solely to clarify any confusion one might have. We all tend to use the term thinking as if it is a very generic activity of the mind. But it is not so. Under the term thinking are implied many modes of thinking. There is reasoning as distinct from evaluation and evaluation as distinct from speculation and speculation as distinct from letting the mind roam freely without limits. All of these could certainly be deemed as thinking processes.
Under the garb of reasoning itself lie many other modes, such as deductive, inductive, inferential, self-referential, circular, cyclical. Under evaluation would be involved activities such as comparison, valuation, calibration, adjudication, counting, weighing, balancing amongst others. Likewise under speculation could involve moves such as taking a leap of faith: jumping from one datum to a universal principle one believes is embedded in it. Gambling of course classifies as the most destructive form of speculation. And then of course there are cases that we mistakenly label thinking : writing election speechs for a politician could qualify as an act of non-thinking, given the fancy label of effective communication.
What kind of mode of thinking then is meaning-making? To answer this, it is useful to imagine what our minds our upto when they are busy making-meaning. A careful review of our examples convey the fact that what the minds are 'up to' is essentially finding equivalence: searching for one thing that is the exact equivalent or match of another. It is a kind of one-to-one mapping exercise; or, a job of translation or transliteration. It is akin to someone translating a book from a foreign language to a vernacular one. The foreign language book is the phenomenon one is trying to comprehend and the vernacular language is the collection of the primitives: images, words, phrases, syntax, grammar: that are more familiar and intimate to us.
This should clearly alert us that meaning-making is not to be taken lightly. Finding equivalence is a difficult accomplishment (imagine trying to find just the right group of words in one language that perfectly map onto its corresponding foreign one), and the consequences of making an error are profound. In the arena of politics, the efficacy of translation (an important part of diplomacy) can determine the choice between war and peace. The first cause of false interpretation is false translation. The second is stupidity. Hence, we must spend some time around this point before journeying further.
There is a famous example of the Buddha having made a wrong meaning of the word happiness: in his search for happiness, he came to believe that the body is the root of all his unhappiness. He even went so far as to equate his body with the analogy of a wood: after all the moistness is driven off from the wood, what remains is simply dry powder. Similarly, once all the evils are driven out of the body what will remain is the ultimate state of bliss. Because he made this equivalence in his mind, he under-went rigourous and painful exercises to gradually make his own body suffer to the extent that almost nothing remained of it. At the end of a very painful period of experimentation, he realised that his entire thesis was based on a wrong supposition drawn from a false analogy. It is this realisation which forced him to change course and which subsequently led him to conclude that it is the focus on the mind and perfection of the mind in which lies path to ultimate bliss. His guidance to follow the middle-path (neither extreme austerity nor unthoughtful enjoyment of pleasures) was partly a product of this personal experience of his.
If the Buddha could err so can we, and that too at scale. Another somewhat highly unusual example will serve to drive home the point. It is possible to argue, tentatively, that nationalism is the by-product, or the direct product, of equating respect towards one's country and fellow-citizens with attachment to something that is of a transcendental or noble character. The latter kind of attachment is called piety, worship and devotion. But when the act and meaning of devotion is projected onto the artificial (man-made) mental construct of a nation, race, ethnicity, and what-have-you, it can ultimately result in the artificial supplanting the most sacred of one's realities.
It is an example of a false, and pernicious equivalence, which unfortunately, is very easy to fall prey to. When executed to the extreme, it can result in societal polarisation and eventually wars of a peculiar kind: not economic or political but driven purely by ideological extremeties. Ambedkar presciently warned against allowing for devotional-kind-thinking in the arena of politics as it will inevitably seed the possibility of a constitutionally-governed polity taking on shades of dictatorship.
So, back to our question of: how is it possible to make meaning fruitfully, given that we now interpret meaning-making as our minds trying to understand something by finding the appropriate equivalence? How is it possible to adopt and shift our frame-of-reference intuitively, in a quick-footed way as we are living through life? How is it possible to make meaning as a habit? For we do all agree: to change, we must make meaning. Put another way, to reform, we must, loosely speaking, reflect.
It could be said that to make meaning one has to be well-read, possess a mastery of spoken languages and have a wide variety of experiences. Yes, all of them are without doubt valuable in themselves, but none of them are strictly necessary for the purpose at hand. A man can live his whole life in the same hut and he may turn out wiser than the most travelled man in the world. Shiv and Parvarti: Children, travel around the world. Karthikeya: travels around the world. Ganesha: circles his parents. Evidently, Ganesha made some serious meaning of the words of his parents, as well as the term 'parents' itself.
Neither do scholarly distinctions, or academic qualifications aid much. Sample this: this author went to a baker's shop after the lock-down was lifted. He casually asked the baker, how is it going. The baker promptly responded: I am doing fine. Generally speaking, those who have hunar (skill) will do fine. Today it is the labourer who is in demand and it is the white-collar worker who is worried.
In one sentence, the baker had made perfect meaning of the essence of education: hunar. Possessing knowledge is fruitless unless one learns the art of translating it into a practice of benefit to others. It is the hunar that gave the grocer, the baker, the labourer who is willing to lift boxes in a warehouse, the farmer, the driver, and now the maid, a peace of mind. It was the financially profligate manager in an air-conditioned office drawing more than a lakh a month who was suffering from bouts of self-inflicted anxiety.
What is it then that distinguished Ganesha and the baker as opposed to the manager? It is what they took away from what they experienced: in the case of Ganesha his deeper understanding of holding respect for one's parents above everything else (which he evidently felt every day), and for the baker realising the value of knowing how to carry something out, in this case baking, skillfully over a long period of time.
Neither of these realisations came from being told that parents are invaluable or that baking is valuable; it came purely from experiencing those phenomena, seeing their value materialize over time, and then internalizing that value as part of their own respective personalities. In short, both of them did not fritter away the lessons that life had to offer them. They were, in the modern parlance, life long students.
This brings us to an important distinction: meaning-making is a life skill and not simply an intellectual past-time: a distinction worth remembering as we move further.
The matter of life-skill brings us to another useful analogy, which is the travesty of modern education chiselling a pigeon-hole out of our minds. It creates categories and sub-categories into which knowledge is boxed. Now, when the time really comes to live life, to deal with the tragedies and challenges of life, imagine how difficult will it be to search each pigenon-hole to find the answer one is looking for. Is it in the pigeon-hole called mathematics? How about social sciences? No, what about psychology? Not there too, then how about, religion? Nopes.
Soon it eludes everyone that a pigeon-hole can only accomodate pigeons: but in the real life one could come across eagles, peacocks, snakes, crocodiles, cockroaches and squirrels. Even granting for everything in the world to be a pigeon, the size of each hole is too circumscribed to contain them all, and it would drain everyone's energy to go through each hole and count them all and find precisely the one that would answer the burning question of life at hand.
Contrast this with another kind of a learning process: much as the sponge absorbs water, so does our mind absorb experiences. Like a sponge, the mind expands when experiences increase, and contracts as they fade away. All the while, however, the mind is fluid, flexible, assimilating, welcoming, inviting and delighting in the experiences of life. As the experiences gather, sometimes they connect with each other on their own (the Beduoin who tending to the camel heard the Qur'an), other times the mind engages in a purposeful act of inter-connection / pattern-searching (light and act of reflection), and at other times, while enjoying itself, it makes the connection out of sheer coincidence.
Meaning-making is therefore a by-product of an active, alert, discerning and curious mind, but only of those minds that have the humility of a sponge to first absorb. While the sponge has its own little pigeon-pores, a careful look under the microscope will reveal that all those pores connect with it each other, they are built as layers upon layers and the sponge is both a whole and a sum of its parts at the same time. To then make better meaning, it is perhaps useful to start with making meaning of the analogy of mind as a sponge. If this analogy is made meaning of, the rest will follow in a cascade, like the notes of a carefully arranged musical composition (another analogy to make meaning of).
To aid the student's effort, here are a few tentative hints. What eventually happens to the sponge after it has absorbed all that it can absorb? It is put to use to clean something, and then when it has served its cleaning purpose, it is made ready to absorb more. How? By really squeezing it hard. Like we did in the case of reflection, think of the act of squeezing and equate it with some act of the mind. Squeezing a sponge leaves a sponge pure, pristine, refreshed and reinvigorated. What is the colloquial term for squeezing? In Hindi, it is called nichodana. Don't we often say, what is the nichod, or in English, essence of things? Meaning-making through reflection is like squeezing everything of what is stuffed inside our minds, so that our mind is lightened (and enlightened), unburdened with worries removed, and it remains ready as ever to absorb, and importantly, to give back, more.
Thus, learning has to involve both absorption as well as extraction and the more the cycle repeats, it gradually coalesces into a spiral. The mind, with every cycle of meaning-making, improves its strength to make meaning of larger, more complex and more existential of questions of life. Humility in learning does not mean being accepting of everything and anything, it means taking things in carefully and knowing what is useful and what is not.
All of this is fine, but finally everyone is interested in knowing how to go about the business of doing it. There are two directive principles (pause: directive principle is a guidance, and not a command or instruction)s here to aid the sturdy student: first, since meaning-making is a skill, it has to be learnt as a skill. Secondly, as most of meaning-making is about connecting with the most primitive of constructs in our mind and as the most primitive of our mental constructs are essentially aesthetic qualities, qualities which can be felt (rhythm, continuity, coherence, integrity, symmetry, cadence, worship, respect, trust, faith, perseverance, sharpness, and so forth), being in company of things that can nourish these qualities can go a long way.
For the first directive principle: a skill is learnt from someone. Hence, seek company of people who are already good at this, by engaging in conversations with them, reading what they have written etc.. For the second directive principle, read literature, listen to music, appreciate nature, and occassionally fall in love. These prescriptions will seem unusual to the student because our modern schooling system is remarkable for the precise absence of emphasis on acquiring self-mastery of skills and cultivating a love for the aesthetic disciplines. But the good news is that it does not need schooling to learn something whose proclivity and attraction lie within everyone (stop and make meaning of this). It however does need the right environment and practice to re-activate what has been dead and beaten down for too long.
In summary, this essay on meaning-making itself is an example of meaning-making: that is, it has explained the meaning of its subject-matter through the use of the same subject-matter (self-referentiality). It has used examples, anecdotes, stories, and events from daily lives and avoided supplying definitions, using complicated phrases, has ignored sophisticated theories and has refused to blindly adopt some idea because someone's authority is behind it. Why?
To demonstrate how a skill is really learnt. Look at the phrase meaning-making: it is a noun-verb combination. It means that it is the verb that results in the noun, or it is the 'making' part which governs what meaning emerges. Making is an ordinary verb much like cooking, bathing, washing, caring and what not.
But there is an important distinction: one could make a nuclear submarine or an electoral strategy to fool the masses; or one could make a better human being. Thus, meaning-making will yield results if and only if it is directed towards, or rather conjoined with, a wholesome purpose. Meaning-making done to enhance repertoire of one's knowledge will serve only to increase one's vanity, and thereby negate all the mental effort that was put into it.
In passing, make meaning by making meaning.
P.S.: The student may develop a false impression that reasoning, rationality or for that matter, acquiring intellectual mastery of analytical disciplines is futile. Far from the truth. Indeed devoting oneself to the study of any intellectual pursuit is not without life-long benefits. It results in a rigorous chiselling of the mind. The error arises when one starts believing that because one knows in depth about something one is well-equipped to engage with life as it is. If all one has to do is remain within the bounds of a research laboratory then much of what is stated above is in fact outright useless. However, if one is a person who is genuinely interested in himself or herself and making better of what one sees in the mirror, then meaning-making is a valuable, and in fact, perhaps the only necessary tool required in life.
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