Sunday, December 23, 2007

abstraction and non-duality

Abstraction is the favourite past-time of not only scientists and java programmers but also of philosophers. But then abstraction is built into the human brain. Civilization and probably all human progress can be directly attributed to abstraction.

There is also a dark side to abstraction. Like in the previous post it is also a root for many social problems.
People will use abstraction and extrapolate the constituent's property to the whole.
A muslim terrorist evokes fear and distrust in the common man for the whole community.
A snake-charmer will cause the whole of India to be looked at as an exotic country of oriental magic.
The rest of india will see every south indian as a madrasi and all south indian languages are the same to him, the westerner will call the language the indians speak as indian.
A dumb answer by a Miss USA paegant will give an image of all Americans being stupid.
A rude Israeli tourist causes all Israelis to be adjudged as mean unfriendly people.
Shanghai makes all of China look like the land of gold and oppurtunity.
A chowkidaar at Dzongri will mistake every man not Sikkimese as Bengali:p

okay now for its dual:
If people would see unity in everything there would be peace everywhere.

People clean up their homes, every speck of dust is cleared and every corner wiped crystal, but they throw that garbage right outside their home. Why cant all of the world be their home.
Countries dump their e-waste, nuclear waste and other hazardous wastes in other third world countries.
People say hes Indian I will help him, hes American I dont like him, hes Muslim hes my brother, hes Buddhist hes infidel, he is rich I will envy him, hes poor I will show sympathy, hes evil I hate him, hes boring I will avoid him, hes this and that bla blaa blaa.
Thats a duck, I can eat it, thats a hill let me destroy it and extract aluminium, thats a tree I will cut it and make a sofa. one can go on and on.
There is a spiritual term for this: non-duality.
Duality is ofcourse the existence of 2 extremes/ends, like good and evil. But lets in this context refer to duality as multi-ality(I dont think this is a word but you understand rt)
Abstraction then is the tool with which one slides from one end of duality to the other, non-duality. It depends on how one uses it or applies it, hence it can both alleviate and increase a particular problem.

No matter how much I try to find an absolute, an objective truth I end up with a subjective,middle way path.

variable

The root of many problems arises from the following:
People try to define something that cannot be defined, they try to make connections when the connections themselves are either invalid, non-sensible in the first place, or changing(yes analogies are dangerous), they try to bind a value to a variable thinking it is immutable, they live in the misconception that the value is the same as the variable, they cannot distinguish between the two.
Let me give some simple examples, but before that let me explain some of the terminology I have used:
Events(anything that happens) are values and Nouns(anything that is) are variables.
- Help someone, you will be termed a good man
- Steal, you will be called a thief all your life.
The action becomes the actor and vice-versa.