Words: Action and Perception

An impression on the saying that knowing without doing is not knowing but merely dreaming and similarly, that doing without knowing is only as good as what is done without knowing what exists before doing and what will be after doing... And there are some words which add more substance to this consciousness

A word is but its meaning. There are words we have to do an action to perceive their meaning, though how we do an action and how perceive the meaning are quite another thing. It is also an entirely different issue with a complex psychoneurological process, plus other lingual and sematic perspectives on how we are/become aware of the meaning.

But what we will suggest for a scrutiny is that there are words and expressions which we need an action, some activity associated with the collection of letters, to interpret their finer nuances and to find them in totality. Otherwise, redundancy and verbosity would have taken care of, or at worst, clarity would be the victim at the cost of unnecessariness — in using the words that we might have meant to mean it in the most meaningful way in the first place, but not — and hence futility.

Taking ‘self-acceptance’ as a word, as we perceive it as the affirmation or acceptance of self in spite of weaknesses or deficiencies; and taking another random word like ‘addiction’ as dependence in its simplest level, we can show the deliberate relation between action and perception.

Moral science shows on what qualities the character can be developed from, and in that we memorise and perceive the meaning. Yet how does it figure along with ‘addiction’? If a wo/man is addicted to some chemical substance and is in a denial mode, then the very meaning of acceptance vanishes into thin air, in spite of having a perception of the term ‘self-acceptance’.

But this is so obvious, inasmuch as the lack of integrity in an addict — now the point is how and where have the meanings, s/he had acquired from learning or wherever, disappeared? Or is it a preconception that s/he knows the meaning? Or is it that the meanings are relative, depending on time and situation? Or is that language in letters is so static when comparing to activities in spirit happening unceasingly, without a pause in the big great cosmo?

There is another word, ‘tune’, strictly in the sense of tuning a musical instrument. For example, a guitar can be tuned to Standard, Drop D, Open C, Open G, Open D, Open G, Half Step Down, Full Step Down, Open E or Admiral and so on. But this is all Greek if a person has no idea of tuning a guitar, even if s/he knows by definition that to tune is to arrange the strings in succession of notes that form a typical musical sequence or even if s/he knows, at least, the guitar should be tuned altogether.

Necker Cube*

But there is a confusion here. As in the mathematical complexities that go into the understanding of the universe, the use of language itself creates a gap of awareness, or rather the unawareness creates a language of lacking; and corollary to this view, the deeper we go into the state of affairs, the more it is necessary to use quite a lot of letters and numbers to make the things apparently visible. That is another story.

The words exist because we have their meanings that shed light on our being. With so much room to dig deeper, for now, what matters is staying clean or learning how to play a guitar make the terms ‘staying’, ‘learning’ and ‘playing’ more insightful and it would not have been possible without doing them.

Seemingly abstract nouns have to be rendered to a level of some concreteness to help us visualise, for example, beauty does not exist on its own term but relative to an object of perception — that is again some kind of doing. What’s in a name which we call a word, by another action would mean the same.

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* Necker Cube is an optical illusion, an ambiguous line drawing. The effect is interesting because each part of the picture is ambiguous by itself, yet the human visual system picks an interpretation of each part that makes the whole consistent.
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