Extracts from Rotary Club, Sambalpûr (Main)
February 28, 2003
Guest Speaker: Vyôm Akhil, R.F.A. (1985-86, R.I.D. 3260-5260)
Topic: International Understanding
Friends, ….I have to.. (now).. with you (my thoughts on) the.. nature of Understanding…..:
Given that over a millennia-spanning period, our species has consistently demonstrated that it will unerringly choose to be silly, stupid, selfish, dangerous, vindictive, arrogant, jealous - the list is as long as you wish to stretch it - one may ask why do we need to understand anything at all? The insects and animals - not to mention all that is inanimate - do very well in the surviving-&-thriving game without, apparently, understanding a thing. In fact a saint had gone so far as to say ‘happy and content are those who are not bothered by the conditions and problems of the world’.
During a previous visit to your Club, I had spoken of the stage-related origins of the word “Understanding”. Someone had to stand under the stage and hand up the props, such as a bouquet, to a Romeo who would use it then as a love-vehicle and give it to the actress playing Juliet. The word originally meant, “to be supportive”. That is not the same as “being wise and full of insights.”
Understanding is a first but not the final step towards an accommodative, mutually beneficial sustainable co-existence. Without this goal at the end, an ocean full of understanding cannot, with any reliable degree of certainty, prevent aggression and attack, cruelty, violence, destruction and tragedy.
Resolving existing conflicts is laudable and that is what negotiators skilled in the use of facts and their effective communication try to do. But this heroic act is akin to performing a life-saving surgery on an old and malignant tumor that has brought the body to the verge of death. To this extent conflict-resolution is the next thankless step in the vocabulary of crisis management. Frequently, the high-pressured process of resolving conflicts, reasonable dialogue has to be set aside because there are deadlines to meet and innocent lives might be lost. Often negotiators have to go into what I call the deal-making mode.
Friends, it is obvious that understanding is multidimensional. From an individual wrestling with the essential nature of Being and Becoming, to a group that may be as small as a nuclear, or, even a single-parent family of two, or a tribe, a community, a village, a region, a nation, all the way up to the global level of international understanding, there are events and on-going processes that first need an understanding and then a comfortable accommodation. Beyond the international, we need understandings and accommodation with nature and our physical space - with those creatures, whether plant, insect or animal. And this needs to occur both at the local as well as global level. But as we explore outwards from this planet, there are understandings that challenge our notions of time and space, of the meaning of life and intelligence. Called by the National Geographic Society in 1976 to look at the future, the late R. Buckminster Fuller observed that after having traveled 39 times around the world and actually feeling it to be a tiny planet of a tiny star, he was convinced no one out there in the Universe was dying to know who would be the next president of the United States.
We can also appreciate the fact that partial understandings in one domain affect the processes in the other. That, at every level, there has to be a good fit to build upon. In some respects the nature of understanding is like those in fractals. For instance, there is the oft-quoted Sanskrit aphorism, “Yathä-piñdé tathä-brahmäñdé”. One can looslely translate this to say, ‘as the point, so the Universe.’
Today, understanding is when you say, “I see!” or “I got it!” or even more colloquially “Bingo!” or, Jackpot!” Clearly, this is more than being supportive. It means to be able to figure out something, to know its nuts and bolts, its P’s and Q’s. …Therefore, we revert to the intent of the original Sanskrit word, “Antarsthäna”. For what is really occurring when you understand something today is a mental process.
But how does the human - perhaps all mammalian - mind process information, most of which comes to it through the sense of sound? Even the horizon, be it noted, is limited to line of sight vision. It is for this reason that our sound-sensory apparatus switches on during gestation, long before we are born to this earth. One can say that our ears have a head start!1
What exactly happens when we receive sounds from the outside? Brain scans now confirm that our visual cortex is stimulated and our minds use the sound to create an internal image of the event.
It is this image that predominates the one we receive from our eyes. We even say of a prejudiced person as one, whose vision is colored, thereby implying that the internal image he has, overpowers the evidence of his own physical eyes.
At this point, to limit my exposition, I shall revert to Sanskrit words, “Chitta” or the active part of the mind, “Chétanä” or the state of consciousness, and “Chitra” or an image, usually internally formed in the active part of our mind; for the one visible on the retina Sanskrit has the “Drishya”.
I have a confirmation of sorts. Don’t people who understand something say, “I see” without really meaning that they are sighted and not blind?
I am, therefore, suggesting to you something that may not have been submitted to anyone anywhere:
Understanding means creating accommodative images.
I use the word “accommodative” with reason. Quarrels occur when our images are not in agreement. We have the famous and well-known story of the six blind men who were using their sense of touch to figure out what an elephant was. And each had an image that did not agree with those of the others.
Friends, I now have to use two phrases to explain my next point. We have this ‘Image-based understanding” and we, the educated and the influenced, find we also try, unsuccessfully, to often substitute it with what I would call ‘A word-based understanding’.
Here, when I say ‘word-based’, I mean those words that do not create an image for one reason or another, like the abuse, or overuse of available of visual technologies. Most words - especially long speeches are so boring, listeners fall asleep. …..
Opposed to a word-based understanding, I bring an example of an image-based understanding in the shape of a small visual - a chart - that I like to call “Humankind’s Price of Fear and what can be done if we reduced it just by 25%….” (this is posted elsewhere on this site).
