The Infinite Stack of Abstractions

I did not blog yesterday because I spent the whole afternoon catching up with my expatriate colleagues at Tamarind Square, Cyberjaya. As always, whenever I'm there I could not resist browsing at the BookXcess store which led me to purchase 6 books. One of them is a thick biography of Mozart, which I should put on my reading list for, probably next year.

I'm feeling a bit more relaxed this weekend as I have a slightly better clarity of certain directions which I will embark upon next year. As always, I will try not to allow ego, greed or fear to dictate the decisions that I'm going to make. I'd like to think that the universe makes decisions for me and by removing selfish considerations, the best option will always manifest itself.

I'm writing these lines at Tim Hortons today. I don't have a particular topic to focus on; I just want to enjoy the quiet vibe of the place, let random thoughts surface into consciousness, and simply noticing them. To be able to do so dispassionately is a skill which vipassana meditators try to cultivate.

When you are just the observer of your thoughts, you are basically establishing a higher level of abstraction. Thoughts become the atomic element in this model. They have a specific lifecycle: they arise, have their brief moment in your mind and then die away, spawning the next thought in the process.  

When you say that you are observing your thoughts, there's an implicit 'observer' in the model. What and where is this observer? For the meantime, let's take it as you--whatever you want to label it: mind, soul, consciousness, self or awareness.  Now ask yourself, what defines 'you'? Is there a personality behind this entity called 'you'?

Where does the personality come from? You then realise that, what defines this personality is its reaction to all the thoughts that arise. You claim that you are merely observing them. But are you really? 

The level of reactivity you have to your thoughts define how successful your abstraction model is. If the observer participates in his thoughts by reacting to them, then the line between self and thoughts are not well defined enough yet.  Sooner or later, you'll get caught up in them. You dive into your stream of thoughts, causing complex currents and ripples, losing your detached observer stance in the process. When that happens, you will feel pain or pleasure. Reaction to these influences the next generation of thoughts. And that is how karma works.

Why should we practice observing and being detached from our thoughts? To establish one level of abstraction, so that we can move on to the next. Pain and pleasure are simply ontological elements of the mind and body. When you can see the chain of thoughts that lead to them, you have already cultivate a level of skilful awareness that allows you to observe macro-trends, if you will. They become your new ontological building blocks.

You begin to see typical patterns in these chains of thoughts, and you are able to predict their lifecycles, just from a glimpse of its rising trend. This pattern recognition ability is what we would call wisdom. The intelligence of recognition and the non-reaction to the thought chain, dictates its optimum resolution.

By non-reactivity, we are detaching our lower-Self--the one that is closely attached to the body, so that we operate from a higher level. This high-level observer, is just another level of abstraction. After a while, you begin to recognise that, it too has its more subtle reactivity--the higher Self also possesses ego! It's just a more complex one, which demands an even higher level of awareness to untangle.

And that in a nutshell is the spiritual journey. We develop wisdom from better recognition of our thought patterns and behaviour. The mind and body is a self-monitoring system that is also self-refining. We can wallow in the drama of human action and reaction our entire lives, without any self-reflectivity. That's fine, but you will always suffer the extremes of pain and pleasure, learning in the most inefficient way.

Wisdom is simply the development of ever higher levels of abstraction; the observing self becomes an object of observation by an even higher self. Is there an end to this seemingly never-ending stack of abstractions? Well, let's find out.