Chapter 2

Abstraction and experience

Let’s start at the beginning of human evolution, and let’s

understand why the human race invented symbols, language and
concepts. Let’s understand this with a small imagination exercise,
imagine we are living in the times when human beings dwelled in
caves, they had not developed language and semantics, they did
not have rationality enough to symbolize things. You and I, both
friends without the tag of friendship, are walking down the forest,
you suddenly grow very thirsty and you are in need of water, how
will you convey this message to me that you are thirsty?

You might try to make gestures, you may try to show me through
your body that you need water, or you may take me to a river
directly and drink the water. It was going on quite well until one
fine day, our needs became much more complicated, one fine day
we started having thoughts and thoughts started forming images
in our head. The first approach of human beings to communicate
complex ideas came through wall painting. Cavemen in an effort
to communicate the complex imagery in their head tried to put it
all down on the wall. They found that scratching the wall with a
rock created creases and that through those creases they could
make lines, through those lines they could form shapes and when
they looked at the external world, all they saw was shapes and
colors.

This may have gone on for a while until there came a time when
the thoughts became much more complicated and the needs
became much more immediate, every time there was a wild
animal attack, one cannot draw an entire mammoth. Some smart
human beings of that age figured out that their mouths can
produce variety of sounds and those sounds have always been
used to signify pain or exhilaration, but if they associate specific
sounds to specific objects, they find that by merely pointing out to
that object and making that specific sound, they can communicate
better.

This may very well have been the beginning of rationality. The
road from here for them was discovering new sounds they could
make with their mouth and tongue and remembering the
sequence of sounds that they would be able to make, and
associating as many objects as they could with the sequence of
sounds their mouth could make. Over a period of thousands of
years, this process evolved more and more until human beings
found themselves in yet another necessity, they found the need
for a little more organization, a little more categorization. The
species of beings which could fly were eventually called birds or
whatever else in the native language used at that time, and within
the category of birds were different other types of categories
evolved, let’s say for example, birds who would eat other birds
and birds who would eat worms, and so on further classification
happened.

The need for categorization in early human beings also came

from a perspective of survival, let’s say a human being is the
forest and he eats a certain type of poisonous fruit, the human
being would immediately classify that fruit as something which
can potentially kill you. The first classification as a matter of fact
might have stemmed in terms of death and life. Some fruits and
vegetation sustained them and some killed them.

With the need for classification also came the need for recording
what has been classified, and also the need to memorize the
classification in order to survive in the real world out there. The
uncertainty that death may occur if humans consume the wrong
category of food became a very strong motive to develop
memory, to remember. Cognition when developed did not linear
fashion, rather it branched out like branches on trees or like how
fungus would spread or like how roots would spread into the
ground. And so, when memory developed, it did not just develop
to remember classification, it also developed for human beings to
remember their way home. It evolved in a way that would learn to
associate landmarks with direction and thus find our way home.

Homing pigeons would have inbuilt direction mechanism that

would guide them even thousands of miles away from their nests
and every year so many migratory birds would come to the same
spot, it is as if a higher intelligence amongst these beings which
chose to develop in this way, and for us it chose to manifest in
form of memory, cognition and rationality.

Memory has always served us as a guide map, it has always

helped us to avoid walking on paths which may lead us to failure
to fulfill our needs or it has tried to help us avoid imminent threat
and even in some cases imminent death. Memory as a tool has
aided immensely in the evolution of human consciousness.
Without memory man would be condemned for eternity to commit
the same mistakes and take the same routes over and over again
until death. Memory as a tool has also helped us not just to
remember ideas and concepts but has also helped us build upon
those ideas and put implementation upon it. Let’s take the simple
task of cooking our meal. It is through our memory that we
remember the classification of different spices and different sorts
of foods that we eat, it is through memory that we remember the
exact sequence upon which we can add our vegetables and
spices to make a tremendously flavorful dish.

The ingenious coders of the present time remember the entire

sequences of code and implement it to make programs that are
unique in their application, their memory helps them avoid making
the same errors and help them further the programming. It is only
through memory and classification human beings today are able
to deal with their own complex physiological and psychological
problems. If I am not able to understand what is going on within
me, I shall perpetually be afraid of the uncertainty that is present
within. The danger will always be potential in nature and as long
as I cannot identify the danger, how am I supposed to deal with it?
Memory for a very long time has been a very dutiful servant for
humankind. Without memory, human evolution would not have
taken the same path as it has taken now. There would be no
words, no language, no symbols without memory. Memory seems
to be at the seat of all abstractions and concepts that human
rationality can fathom. The art of looking into the unknown, of
looking into the uncertain and trying to interpret it is only possible
through this higher intelligence that manifests in human beings
through memory.

Evolution of human consciousness in the domain of rationality,

categorization and memory brought about great movement and
great shift in the dimensions in which human beings would deal
with the world. But there is another aspect to this entire idea of
categorization and memory. As and when human beings started
on the journey of naming things, somewhere down the line forgot
the distinction between the actual reality and the reality portrayed
by the words and abstractions that we would use to assign
meaning to things. In other words, the word ‘water’ merely points
at the drinkable reality and that the word in itself will not quench
our thirst.

The problems that rationality and categorization caused in

modern human civilization is that of confusing the reality as it is
with our perception of it. Now in a way we could not help it,
because with the development of human rationality there
developed a concept of separate ‘I’ or a separate ego. Ego was
essentially developed as a protective mechanism, there was first
an awareness that I am this body, separate from the other body
that I see, take for example the case of a new born baby, initially
the new born baby feels as if the mother is an extension of itself
and there is no reason why it should not feel that way, the baby
was at one point the extension of mother connected through
umbilical cord, even though after being born, it is still that child’s
reality that mother is not something separate from it. The first
moment of awareness that a child gets of this feeling of
separateness is when he cannot find the presence of his mother
around him. This is a moment of great anxiety for the child, and
so it cries and cries until mother comes and comforts it.

The development of a child's personality depends heavily on

these initial periods of child’s development. Have you ever seen a
tree trunk which is cut off? If you look at the center of the trunk
you will find rings emerging from the center. And other rings sort
of engulfed one after another causing layers of growth in the tree
trunk. First came the central layer, then upon that central layer
came another layer as the tree grew bigger, then came another
and another until the whole tree was formed with hard bark. If you
understand the development of a child’s personality it is
somewhat in a similar manner, at the center of the child's mind
emerges the first ring of ego, the idea separateness from this
world. Now it is very important that we understand that this feeling
of separateness initially is highly important for the child. Upon this
layer of separateness there came many more layers of
conditioning, many more layers of ideas and beliefs and doctrines
which were imposed upon it by the parents, the teachers, peer
groups and society. To live in this world is to understand its rules
and norms. And so, in a way a child is being trained to face the
actual world, though the perception of the actual world is very
subjective for all of us. The child eventually takes up an identity, a
persona that helps it to walk in this world.

The problem is that the child is never taught this idea that the
value of his persona is the same as value of money, that is to say
money is a good tool that abolished barter and made our
transaction much easier but it still is a symbol for real wealth
rather than being it. If you have money, you can buy food with it
but money itself is not food. Pablo Escobar once burnt millions of
dollars’ worth of cash just to keep his daughter warm, when he
was on the run and in hiding from the government. If he had not
understood the real value of money in that situation, that is of
paper that can burn rather than a useless currency, his daughter
would not have survived the night. Deep down of course we are
aware of this fact and we are also aware of the fact that we spend
all our lives chasing numbers and papers rather than living the
pleasure that those numbers and papers would buy us. Coming
back to the development of a child, we understand that the nature
of persona and the identity that one develops is just a tool of
transaction with this society and not his actual being.

If your body is hurt, you feel the presence of pain in your body
something separate from other and you will take necessary
actions to get rid of that hurt, in a way the feeling of separateness
arises from the need to protect oneself from the hurt that is
caused in the world, the thing is though, not all hurt is
physiological, some hurt is also psychological and emotional. We
all have an image of ourselves in our head. A perception of who
we are in this world, our identity. And we constantly cling to this
image of identity that we created for ourselves, the moment there
is a crack or damage in this image we have formed of ourselves
and the image we have formed of the world around us, it causes
us emotional pain. To defend against this emotional pain, our ego
rises in a defensive manner to either revert the hurt or convince
us of the idea of the rightness of the image that we hold for
ourselves.

The problem does not lie in having an image or having ego, the
problem lies in clinging on to that image. Identity and ego as
functional tools can help human beings, just like how lines of
latitudes and longitudes help us navigate. But we do not confuse
these abstract lines of latitude and longitude as being actually
there covering the globe. The reality as we perceive it is different
from the reality that actually is. The map may help you understand
how to get to a place but to confuse it with the actual journey and
the problems that we shall face on the actual journey is absurd,
but we keep on doing it, we keep on getting back into the same
cycle, over and over again.

The idea of categorization and classification is very good for

scientific purposes, but in reality, there exist no such
classification. Imagine you are an astronaut who has recently
landed on a new planet. This planet has its own vegetation and its
own kind of life on it, would you have names of these plants and
animals first or would you rather first have a look at them. First,
we look, then we classify and based on those classifications
people further identify the world around us. I do understand the
necessity of putting these classifications upon the world, to view
the world in a human construct. But human beings have furthered
so much in these classifications, that human beings have lost
their ability to look without identifying things.

We have been conditioned to view the reality through the looking

glass of classifications designed to help us navigate the world but
it has turned upon us because human classification and
abstraction just gives us a pinhole from which we can look at this
world. Alan Watts once said “the ordinary everyday
consciousness that you have, leaves out more than it takes in.” In
other words, human consciousness eliminates more than it
accumulates, there is a function of the brain to eliminate data that
it does not deem important for the ego that is present within us.
But in a way, it is to say that the data that you accumulate is the
data that you seek. If I tell you to look for all the brown objects in a
room, your brain has the ability to eliminate everything else but
brown objects.

It is just one of the marvels of the higher intelligence present

within human consciousness, but often we forget the limitations
that we have within this human consciousness. We are only able
to perceive a certain spectrum of light and only able to listen to
certain frequencies of sound. But light and sound also exist
beyond our limited perception of this world. The reality that we
often perceive is limited by our senses, if you cannot see infrared
rays does not mean it does not exist. Though as humans we have
found tools and machines which helps us a little to navigate into
the unknown, which helps us to see the invisible but the vastness
of this universe would not allow us to know all of it through the
machines and tools. There will always be more unknown than
what is known.

Here is where we face the limitations of classification and

categorization. If we are very steadfast in our own beliefs of how
the world is, we are trying to cling to the everchanging. No matter
how much we try to hold on to our hardened doctrines and view of
the world, the truth is that we will always not know what lies
beyond our experience of this reality.

There is also the interesting problem of memory that we face, the

memory that we use as a guide map to our consciousness may
turn against us at any moment. Memory does something very
interesting to our consciousness, we use memory to compare the
present moment with the past, in doing so we forget that there is
no past moment and that the act of comparison is being done in
the present moment itself, memory is nothing but a trace of
something that has already existed but the trace is being done in
the present moment, so the experiencer has an illusion that he is
able to view past and present simultaneously, but in reality it is all
happening in this moment and this moment is all that there is. If
you say the car is at a certain point in this moment, while you say
the words “car is at this point” the moment is still going on and the
car has passed the point you want to describe. In other words this
moment is all there ever will be and this moment is constantly
happening, it is still constantly slipping out. In comparing and in
not understanding the non-existence of past and present, we
fragment ourselves away from the reality that is. When you are
able to compare with the use of memory a trace of your past with
the present moment which is constantly dying and being reborn,
you create an illusion that a separate ‘I’ is watching this
comparison of past and future, when in reality you are not
separate from this reality but a part of it.

Because we as human beings are self-conscious, we have an

illusion of a separateness from the experiences that we feel. The
more the feeling of separateness, the more the tendency of our
mind to think that it can escape pain, the more it tries to escape it
the more it grows afraid of having unpleasant experiences, and
now it is caught up in a vicious loop.

If I were to explain you this feeling in simple words, I would say

that this feeling of separateness is like being an island in the
middle of the ocean, for miles to go on all you see is water and
you feel it is something different from you but deep within you are
connected with the same landmass of the same planet to which
the ocean is connected, to which the other islands are connected.
To be in the present moment is not to be conscious of oneself, it is
rather quite the opposite. You are only aware of your ears when
they are not functioning properly and you hear a ringing sound,
you are only aware of your eyes when something is disrupting
your visual perception, in the same way you are only conscious of
yourself when there is a problem. That problem is usually
fragmentation.

To ask what one can do in such a case shows that one has not
really understood the problem in depth. There is not a need for
doing in such cases but rather a need for being, if we understand
the problem, we shall be accepting of each moment as it comes
without trying to escape it. What then happens is the
fragmentation starts to heal and you are not many but you are
one. The insecurity that caused fear earlier would now be a
source of inspiration. There are not many who can set themselves
in the uncertainty of this world and bring back valuable
interpretations of it, there are not many who would not only stare
into the abyss for long enough but also bring back the essence of
it for the rest of us to enjoy. It is these individuals who have
understood the secret of accepting this moment as this moment,
of understanding reality without the limitations of classification and
once understood bring the reality into human form. Such are the
individuals who become a beacon of hope for humanity, and point
in the right direction. It is our duty not to get attached to the finger
that is pointing at the reality rather than enjoy the reality by
ourselves. It is then that we are able to enjoy this human
experience thoroughly.