NAMING : THE FIRST PSEUDO - CORRUPTION

Dr. Sudhansu Kumar Dash

            As we understand, naming anything helps us to communicate our feelings to others and we identify ourselves with that feeling to give it a strength. We think we have understood it by giving a name to it. But by giving anything a name we have categorized the object of the feeling without looking at it more closely. But actually without giving anything a name we are forced to look at it and we look at it without a preoccupied mind as if we have never seen it before.

            Naming is a very convenient way of disposing anything at our hand. But actually by naming something we give it a label and destroy it immediately. The corruption of nature by man starts here and then moves in a cumulative process. If we do not name anything may be a person, race, flower, feeling etc. we are certainly forced to look into it most intimately and then it is much difficult to corrupt it or kill it. So naming, the label, definitely destroys the thing than helping it to survive. One can destroy a label quite easily but without the label one is forced to consider ones uncorrupted relationship with it.

By a convenient disposal of a thing by naming means either accepting or denying, condemning or justifying, loving or hating, but all are a short of corruption to the thing in some way of the other. If condemning is corrupting the thing justifying also as the deposit is equally true.

A vital question therefore is why do we name ? Is it essential ? Where from the tendency to name anything comes from ? We think that there is a centre from which we were acting, judging and naming. That centre is nothing but memory that has enclosed innumerable impressions of the past. This centre feeds us the present and we start the naming of things. As long as this centre exists there is a preoccupation of mind and understanding the thing is impossible. It is because we felt to understand a thing as it is, we feel helpless and then this helplessness escapes him to corrupting the thing by naming it. This naming comes from the memory the centre of various experiences. So a question comes if we do not use the words can we think ? As mind is nothing but innumerable experience of pleasure and pain it is pleasure and pain that are verbalized through words. But it is sure that the experience of pleasure or pain is not the word ‘pleasure’ or ‘pain’ . So the important thing is that words are become important and not the substance and we live on words only. Because the word has become important, we fail to know what that feeling is and the reality hidden behind the label or word. As we identify with the word, we fail to proceed beyond it.

Certainly when all the labels, forms, opinions are removed, there is an emptiness. The emptiness nothing but the sense of fear of being a ‘nothing’ . We are afraid of facing it. This is the core, the centre where the word is dissolved. After the resolution, there is a transformation of the Pseudo-Being.

What happens when we look at a thing without naming it. To look at a thing without naming, without any judgment, any preoccupation and directly is quite a different relationship with the thing. When we do not name a thing, we are forced to look at it anew. When the mind does not think in terms of words, it becomes quiet. It is quite. When the mind is quiet the centre dissolves. This state is not a negation but understanding without any words or label. This is the only non-corrupt  state of the Being. Reality manifest itself with this silence of mind.

Lecturer in English

SridharSwami College of Education & Technology

Sadangi, Dhenkanal, Odisha (India)