I am THIS

While coding seems so distant from spirituality both have something in common: ignorance. When Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj was asked:” What is your state at the present moment?” he answered: “A state of non-experiencing. In it, all experience is included”. A disciple wrote down his teachings in what is known as the book: “I am THAT”. The title is a phrase dueling in Advaita Vedanta and it means: you are the Absolute, the Whole (Tat Tvam Asi).

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. This photograph might be copyrighted and NOT under a free license. However, it qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.

In English, This and that are demonstratives. We use this or that to point to people and things. In C# the keyword “this” can be put at some use in Extension methods but is used mostly to refer to the current instance of a class, it points to the actual object.

public class Car
 {
   private string _model;
   private string _type;
   public Car(string model, string type)
   {
    this._model = model;
    this._type = type;
   }
 }

Not falling away from this tree is also Java, where within an instance method or a constructor, this is a reference to the current object. So in OOP we have remembrance of Wittgenstein’s early work and logical positivism where there are not accepted the limits of a meaningful language and everything speaks about a logical form of the world.

Strangely in other languages, like Javascript, things get more confusing. Alone, this refers to the Global object:

var value = this;

In an object method, this refers to the object whom the method belongs:

var car = {
  type: "Tesla",
  model : "Model X",
  fullName : function() {
    return this.type.concat(' ', this.model);
  }
};

In a function, this refers to the Global object while in a strict mode this is undefined:

function Function() {
   return this;
}

And the list is not finished here, but for the sake of the argument should be enough. In Wittgenstein’s last work, Philosophische Untersuchungen the barrier between perfection and imperfection are broken and left where the notion of an ideal language becomes an illusion. Javascript, in this sense, belongs to this later work. It points to a major break down of a logical world where everything shifts on the context and the philosophical quest depends on a one based conversational question-and-answer.

So Wittgenstein had is own epiphany and his last work is beautiful. But Maharaj is uncompared, as he tosses away any outward experience: instead of searching for what you don’t have, find out what it is… that you have never lost.