meaning of ((my name))

this is very roughly researched, i'm sure i am probably incorrect about some things here, take with many grains of salt. happy to be corrected!

i tell people the meaning of my name is 'in remembrance of god' or 'infused with the spirit of god' because that's what i was told and is what mostly tracks with cursory google searches. i ask them if they know what 'naam smaran karna' means, from which you get simran (a name they're likely familiar with), from which one can arrive at simar. probably contentious but it gets the point across.

spiritual contemplation or some such.

😇

i've never been a fan of this meaning. the religious connotations are mostly what put me off. while i've seen 'contemplation on the finer aspect of self' and 'on the oneness of being', it still somehow never clicked. i remember hunting down alternate meanings of my name, hoping to find something else that made sense.

all i found was

not the most exciting. i figured this was the best i was gonna get and moved on. after all, what's in a name?

i'm subletting a 2bhk in ashwem, goa for a few months with a friend. it's a very cozy quiet place between the sea and a jungle. i am attempting to document it here. in an attempt to figure out how to log things (in a way that makes sense to me) which is a separate post in and of itself.

the fun part of a sublet is getting a small glimpse into the lives of the people who live there. there are many many rumi books around the house.

i picked up one (translations by coleman barks) the other day and immediately landed on this piece.


ZIKR

A naked man jumps in the river, hornets swarming
above him, The water is the zikr, remembering,
There is no reality but God. There is only God.

The hornets are his sexual remembering, this woman,
that woman. Or if a woman, this man, that.
The head comes up. They sting.

Breathe water. Become river head to foot.
Hornets leave you alone then. Even if you’re far
from the river, they pay no attention.

No one looks for stars when the sun’s out.
A person blended into God does not disappear. He, or she,
is just completely soaked in God’s qualities.
Do you need a quote from the Qur’an?



hmmmm. this sounds like what simar basically is, does it not? zikr. dhikr. remembrance through repetition, incantation. a very matter of fact term for a defined activity that is meant to lead you to a higher spiritual state. it's still worship but..

something felt like it clicked a little more, even though this was all information i already had. i wanted to find out if zikr and simar had any etymological connections.

((cue few google searches later))

they do not. but what was interesting is that the words arise from separate root words that both mean 'to remember, recollect'. s(mr) for simar. ((there is a whole paper about s(mr)?))

in 'proto indo european' language (means this is 'to the best of our knowledge' reconstructed and not based on actual texts):

*(s)mer-

  1. to fall into thinking, remember, care for

from which comes the sanskrit 'smar/smara' and from which we also might have gotten

"mischievous, baneful, causing anxiety"

the sources on the linguistic claims here aren't very strong, but poetically:

“In English, the term memoir comes directly from the French for memory, memoire” David Shields offers in Reality Hunger. “And yet, more deeply rooted in the word memoir… is the ancient Greek, mermeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian memara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mermer, ‘to vividly wonder’, ‘to be anxious’, ‘to exhaustingly ponder’.

‘to vividly wonder’, ‘to be anxious’, ‘to exhaustingly ponder’.

now we're talking.

anyway, i'm not able to keep track of all the directions these root words are going but at some point we get smriti and smaran from s(mer).

re: smriti:

From Proto-Indo-Iranian *smárati, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)mer-mer- "Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/(s)mer-") (“to remember”). Cognate with Persian شمردن (šomordan, “to calculate”), Central Kurdish _ژماردن (jmardin, “to count”), Pashto شمېرل_ (śmerël, “to count”), Ancient Greek _μέρμερος (mérmeros, “mischievous, baneful”), Latin memor_ (“mindful”).

and looking up sanskrit smara... brought me here.

interesting. see: smaradasa.

smara also refers to kamadeva, the hindu god of love, which... makes sense i guess. loving is remembering. caring for, holding in ones heart, accounting for, falling into - are all manifestations of remembering, i believe.

anyway, back to smaran.

i suppose at some point smaran got absorbed into punjabi/hindi (i am not an etymologist so again, many grains of salt) and we got ਸਿਮਰਨ (simran) which seems to be the the practice of being mindful, aware, contemplating god/oneness etc. at large and ਸਿਮਰ which seems to be the verb itself - the doing of it, the active state of it. i think. remember, remember, remember, remember.

wikipedia:

According to the Guru Granth Sahib, through simran, one is purified and attains salvation (mukti). This is because si-mar means 'to die over', thus indicating the death of ego, allowing the realization of ultimate truth (sach "Sat (Sanskrit)")) to appear.

On page 202 of the Guru Granth Sahib:

Simar simar sukh paa-i-aa

Translation:

Meditating, meditating in remembrance, I have found peace

there is no source for 'si-mar' meaning to die over and seems more like a folk interpretation given that 'mar' means to die. but sure, why not. 'mar' does trace back to 'mer', a root from PIE which means to disappear, to die.

i like the repetition in simar-simar here which tangentially reminds me of how mermeros and mermer (above) got formed too - the nature of repeating a word that means 'remember' - which in itself is the original act of recalling something or something coming to mind, a memory, and then doing that again and again - which shades itself into all kinds of meanings. turning around a thought in your head again and again. anxiety. worry. overthinking. or taking a conscious action to call something to mind, keep it in mind. a tender act of care. loving recollection. infatuation, obsession? creative flow, losing yourself in an activity. thinking of - again, and again, and again. or simply, counting, accounting for. keeping track of. hisaab.

i suppose all of these are kind of meditations in their own right, conscious/unconscious attempts to hold on, remember, be transported somewhere else, dissolve into something else. we write diaries, collect boarding passes and train tickets, hold onto things we have no use for, memorize faces and landscapes while we can, fall hopelessly in love, backup our data twice, thrice. log everything. sometimes we do it for others, for things they've forgotten. sometimes we forget. and then remember. and forget, even though we dont want to. and remember, though sometimes we might not want to.

the act of remembering, i think, is a definition that resonates with me much more. the next time someone asks me what my name means i am going to link them to this post.