The Art of Abstraction

Last week I wrote about God as a useful model which anyone can adopt to function in the world as a living individual. By accepting God as part of your ontology, it dictates and necessitates a set of design patterns, rules and conventions which make it possible for a society of believers to function harmoniously. 

It's very much like adopting say the object-oriented paradigm as your programming model. You see, whenever we discuss any subject, we are using words to abstract the reality we perceive. Every word is a model, an approximation of a real-world object, state or event. Computer programmers are familiar with the different layers of abstractions we use to describe the state and dynamics of each level. 

For example, we can have a very high level description of the activity of clicking a link as the browser submitting a 'request' over the network as a client to a server, and expecting a 'response', which contains the HTML code describing the page to be displayed. The browser simply renders this HTML code as a pattern of pixels on the screen. But if you care to look at the signals that go on the wire--voltage pulses and electromagnetic waves, there are only patterns of energy flowing over different mediums. 

There is no such thing as a 'request' or 'response'; nor are there packets or frames--these are abstractions, which allow us to describe phenomena at different levels in the communication architecture easier. The mind cannot perceive individual electrons, but it can understand that, at the highest level, there's something that's "requested by the client and responded to by the server" And if we want to dive deeper, we can analyse the request, which is defined by the HTTP protocol consisting of text headers and a body of content. There you see, headers and body are again abstractions. 

God as an abstraction or model works for us individuals, because we can worship, request and love Him, because, in--Java programming parlance--it implements an interface with methods that we humans are familiar with. The personal God is a good abstraction of the entire universe. We don't have to perceive the world at the level of subatomic particles to be able to interact with it.  

In Advaita Vedanta and Yoga, Ishvara is the personal God, which is an 'abstraction' of Brahman, the ultimate reality. It's difficult to conceptualise Brahman, because it is by definition, non-dual and has no attributes. But once you have an abstraction called Ishvara as God, you can give it attributes that you can relate to, with the help of superlatives--such as the all-powerful, the merciful and compassionate. You can assign it roles such as creator, sustainer and protector.   

Ishvara, is simply Brahman enmeshed in 'maya' or illusion. All abstractions are illusions of the conceptual mind, in a sense that they do not have a real existence. It only exists within a certain conceptual framework and that's good enough for it to work.

Similarly, the concept of a 'soul' is also an abstraction. Atman, the individual soul or self is Brahman in essence but it is the client-side portion, of the client-server interaction, between the individual and God. It also owes its existence through the illusion of maya. 

Do souls exist? Yes and no, depending on which level of abstraction you are talking about. You can have oneness or duality, unity or multiplicity, Nirguna Brahman--the ultimate reality without attributes, or the Saguna Brahman, with its rich array of qualities attributed to Isvara and Atman.  Each has its own language to describe its ontology.

We live and operate in a world of abstractions. A lot of philosophical confusion about religion arise due to the lack of clarity about the level of abstraction which we are referencing. Basically we commit category errors all the time by insisting on the truth of one level of abstraction to another. 

It's simply the consequence of living in the world of maya. The moment we try to articulate concepts using language, we are creating illusions--abstractions that are useful only within a particular context. To gain spiritual insight is to master the art of navigating all these different levels of abstractions.