Cherry-picking?
There are so many apps and websites these days which help you filter through gigantic books and get to the desired points in no time. As a child, I remember reading the entire chapter to write every single answer at the end of it, and as we grew up the texts grew larger and more difficult to comprehend. Of course there were cheat-sheets available for everything, but we all know they can’t take you anywhere good.
The help of technology in today’s world comes in handy every single time when we set up to delve into something big or deep. There are apps right from the summaries of important literary works to various editions of enormous mythological texts. There are some mythological apps which pretend to help by giving you one random verse everyday to read.
Sometime back I downloaded a Quran app, which undoubtedly helped me in the initial stages of developing interest and acted as an introducer to the nuances, but if I rely solely on the app to help me in gaining an insight into the religion, it won’t turn out to be fruitful.
We cannot deny the fact that all the religious texts are intricately woven, and to decipher their true meanings we need to read them with constant determination. The religious texts, no wonder, are some of the most misunderstood works of all times. The moment we pick out random pearls from a necklace, it loses its beauty as well as value. The same principle can be applied to our selection and dealing of people.
When we meet new people, while evaluating them, we overlook one of the most important things concerned, the context. How a person has reached this particular state of mind and what all experiences have shaped his personality — are some questions, which, if answered analytically, can blossom into wonderful relations or peaceful escapes.
Imagine watching a random episode of Shri Krishna and trying to understand why he killed his own uncle, or the tricks he played on his own people. If things were that simple, we all would have attained Moksha by now, or would have at least learnt to live peacefully. The importance of dealing with things by keeping in consideration their contexts is highly underrated. If a person has become irritant or irksome and people are afraid to walk past them, there may be good enough reasons for him to have reached that phase. A constant burden of overwhelming responsibilities, hard work resulting in zero credits, loss of a loved one or probably a series of failed attempts at life, career or relationship — the reasons could be endless.
When we break all these links associated with a verse or a person, we detach it from its respective context and what we get might be a single flower and look pretty by itself, but separated from a tree cannot serve any larger purpose. It cannot grow or blossom any further or be fragrant forever.
The separation might result into one single verse, a single paragraph, which contains a complete meaning, but is still part of a larger whole. Unless we have the required patience and perseverance to explore the whole, we cannot understand what He has in store for us. May it be his texts or his people, without a complete understanding of the whole context; we cannot do any justice with anything. Cherry-picking may come in handy once you are done reading the whole text at least once and color-coded it or you have practiced to understand people in a few meetings. Until then, I personally would like to avoid the practice.
