Introduction
Whenever we come across a word that is unfamiliar or obscure to our understanding , the first questions we tend to ask are: What is its meaning? How is it significant? How does it relate to the rest of the world I live in?. These questions, which are often taken for granted, are in fact elementary to the development of our selves and the knowledge of the world in which we experience those selves. They are imperative to the mechanism of the phenomenon by which we relate our selves to the world and to each other, namely that of language. In this paper I shall consider two particular instances where the word has become systematised and organised in ways that lie far beyond the scope of ordinary language. Sometimes so far that it becomes capable of abandoning that around which the whole of language revolves, the human selves, for the sake of the very source of the world and of the words through which we explain it.
Ordinary use of words in the form of language is characterised by ultimately pragmatic properties that are directed at expressing or signifying 'meaning' and the problem of defining the relationship between language and meaning might be understood as lying at the base of contemporary philosophical discourse. In trying to understand the ‘meaning’ of Mantra and Dhikr we are catapulted into the realm of meta-physics, in which the two most important questions might be understood to be : What things do exist? And how are these things composed? Contemporary philsophy has approached existence in an often quasi scientific manner in that it has recognises that if a thing ‘exists’ it has to exist not only ‘in’ something but also ‘of’ something. Science thus declares that the existence of the ‘whole’ requires the existence of smaller ...