This humorous and bizarre little tale can be a jumping off point for a number of discussions and explorations. The concept of language is based upon symbols, and a name is a symbol or collection of symbols meant to describe and show a facet of something, be it a person, an object, an action, or something else. Symbols are inherently imperfect, as they comprise less than the whole. By being imperfect, they can emphasize one aspect and minimize others.
Relating that back to Clarke's story, each "name" of God represents an aspect, and the sum total of the names, according to the story, ultimately describes all aspects of God and completes the work of humankind.
Setting that story aside temporarily, there is another story that is needed for further examination. You likely have read or heard it before. In various versions of the ancient teaching story of the elephant, a group of blind men touch an elephant. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, then they then each describe what the elephant is.
One version goes roughly that the blind man who felt a leg claimed the elephant is a big tree; the one who felt the tail said the elephant is a rope; the one who felt the trunk said the elephant is a big snake; the one who felt the ear said the elephant is a giant leaf or fan; the one who felt the side of the belly said the elephant is a wall; and the one who felt the tusk says the elephant is a giant spear. The men argue heatedly for some time, and then a sighted sage explains to them that each one is correct, but that none of them sees the whole.
The symbols here are the elephant as God, the blind men as the various conflicting religions, and the sage as the enlightened man. The story served a number of purposes, not the least of which was minimizing conflict between different religious beliefs.
In both the stories, the possibility of errors was ignored. A word written as the name of God could have been a nonsense word or a word meaning something much less than God. One of the blind men could have wandered off and been feeling a real wall.
Error possibilities aside, we can examine the core concept; that if you gather sufficient descriptions of something, you can know the whole. That too is demonstrably false. The enlightened man never saw inside the elephant, nor did he experience its consciousness. The written names of God were only a limited subset of any real God.
It is axiomatic that a part of a whole can never have sufficient information to comprehend the entire whole. The very act of comprehension adds another layer of complexity. Simply stated, we can never understand all of the universe, either as individuals or as a group.
Is it possible then that in the very attempt to understand God that humankind actually is understanding less fully and turning small aspects of a greater whole into fetish objects? Is the phrase "I am that I am" perhaps as complete a description as can be had?
A study of various religions certainly provides ample examples of conflicting beliefs. Is real enlightenment the sweating Zen monk who thinks of nothing but tending a garden and experiencing the fullness of hunger and labor? Or is enlightenment the study of all and realization that it is nothing? Or is enlightenment the goal that is always just out of reach, the fate of Tantalus in Tartarus? Will the last human mulling this conundrum please put out the light?
