A Happy Breath

This has to be my last post for 2019. I have blogged without fail every week for more than a year now. I love the discipline that I impose on myself and the weekly schedule is just right for me.

I usually blog on every New Year's Eve, but I'll blog a day earlier this year. I don't want to reflect too much on the year that passed. One thing that I can take pleasure in is the fact that I've fully utilized my time to acquire new skills and to continue exploring different areas of interest. That has always been my sole purpose in life. As long as I'm learning, I am living life to the fullest.

As you grow other, many things do not matter so much anymore. Things that seemed important to you in your younger days now seem like childish pursuits. Perhaps years from now, I will also see what I'm doing now as infantile. That is not such a bad thing for to be able to do so means that I am still growing.

Let me pose myself a 'stupid' question: Of what use is all the knowledge that has been acquired?

What is the use of knowledge that has no relevance to one's career? This presupposes the fact that what's important in life is 'success' in the form of worldly achievements--a high paying job or lucrative business, even fame in one's chosen field. That is 'success'. And having attained that, one dies with a smile on one's lips.

Isn't that the goal of life? No, some may say. The end-goal is 'happiness'. All worldly success brings some measure of happiness--that can't be doubted. How else can one attain happiness?

Let me, just for the fun of it, propose the simplest definition of happiness: To be happy is to be able to breathe well.

Doesn't that set a very low bar for happiness? If it is to be taken seriously, doesn't that mean most people are happy? Very clearly, that's not the case. What kind of definition is this? Surely I can't be serious. Can I?

Let's examine the breath. If one is breathing, one is alive. To breathe is to live. It is the simplest and often overlooked human activity and yet it is the most important. If you can't breathe, you can't be happy. That much is clear.

Now pay attention to the breath. Mindfulness of the breath is one of the simplest forms of meditation. The breath is always there and it is the most obvious sign of life. It is also the best indicator of our state of health. The flow and movement of the breath is latent with information about our internal states. If you know how to 'read' your breath, you will know so much more about yourself.

Doctors are trained to use the stethoscope to listen to your heartbeat and breathing for indications of sickness. You too can observe the breath to know not only your physical state but your mental one too. You don't need an external instrument to do so: you are the instrument. You--your body and your mind can observe the breath and sense its every subtle signal.

Breathe in. Observe every tiny quality of that in-breath. Breathe out and watch the characteristics of its flow. What do you feel? Do you sense anxiety? Boredom? Impatience? With just one breath, you have a sample of your entire universe within. Take another breath--do you feel doubt? Do you not feel a lot of things in this simple activity of observing your breath?

Imagine a loved one in your mind. Observe your breathing. Is there a certain warmth that emanates from within? When you are in a loving mood, doesn't your breath reflect it? Everything distills to the breath. The breath contains the essence of living.

As you breathe, you gain realizations. The world 'inspiration' comes the Latin world inspirare -- to "blow into, breathe upon". The spirit of life is the breath. The literal meaning of the word 'nirvana' is 'blown out' or 'extinguished' -- as in a flame being blown out. The metaphor of the spirit-breath is everywhere. Every inhalation and exhalation is a microcosm of a lifetime. We are reborn again with every in-breath, and dies with every out-breath.

The building block of a life is a single breath. The quality of that breath determines the quality of your life. You are nothing but a summation of your breaths. Hence, to to be happy, you need to breathe well. Breathe with the fullness and totality of your entire being. Your whole life culminates in your present moment of breath. The breath is the karmic fulcrum that takes in the weight of the past and launches the future. By perceiving your breath mindfully, you are able to make the necessary adjustments that aligns your actions to be in harmony with the flow of the universe.

Now, is it too far-fetched then to say that to be happy, one has to breathe well? Breathing well means being able to read every signal that's embedded in that breath and allowing the body-instrument to make the necessary adjustments to optimize it.

So breathe and be grateful that you are able to do so. Be a master of your breath by being mindful of it. For it is in the breath that the secret of happiness lies. You don't have to look far and wide for the key to happiness. It is already there within you. Every breath is a moment of insight. So, from this moment onwards, take a breath.

Take a happy breath.

On Lovingkindness

Lovingkindness is an interesting word, rarely used except in Buddhist literature, as a translation of the the Pali word, 'metta'. I"ve often wondered: Why not just love, or kindness? Why the compound word, loving-kindness?

Etymologically, 'lovingkindness', was used in the King James Bible as the English translation of the Hebrew word 'Chesed'. There, it is often used to denote God's grace and charitable kindness towards its chosen people and vice-versa.

Love alone, especially the romantic kind, is targeted and directional. Lovingkindness is open--like the outward radiation of the sun's warmth, bringing benevolence to whomever it touches.

Kindness alone, is often 'selfish', done to elicit a kind of reciprocal reward. Lovingkindness on the other hand is soft and yielding, so undemanding on its recipient. It opens up the heart like an unfurling flower. In the Buddhist practice of metta-bhavana or the cultivation of lovingkindness, the practitioner learns to direct good wishes to firstly himself and then to people close to him, and then moving the circle outwards towards strangers and even enemies, culminating in its final stage towards all sentient beings in the universe.

This outward radiation process is very good for the mind, which has a tendency to be ego-driven and self-centered. Doing the practice of metta bhavana is like bending backwards to stretch your back, after a long day of being hunched over the desk. It brings balance to the soul. It dissolves congealed hatred and fear. It shines a light into the dark corners of the mind.

It is like smiling warmly from within, and then welling up onto the lips, giving the face a healthy flush. What a wonderful practice this is. Often, the beginner meditator alternates between breath and lovingkindness meditation. These practices kneads and shapes the mind into something that's soft and luminous, allowing one to see things in its true essence.

When one is infused with lovingkindess, all actions are harmonious with the world. Obstacles melt away because you are fluid and flexible in your actions, always forging a creative way forward. With lovingkindness, one is at one with the world.

The Energy of Life

This December has been a rather hectic month for me so far because it is the month for year-end social gatherings. Everyone is in a good mood when Christmas approaches. The weather is rainy and cool, which is conducive for heart-warming drinking sessions with old friends.

This month is also a transition month for me as I'll be trying to embark on something different next year. It can be challenging as I am tackling so many things alone, relying on whatever little skillsets and contacts I have. But life goes on. I am always focusing on the task at hand and I have faith that any path that I take will bring fresh and life-changing insights.

Just the other day, M. was asking me why she is always jealous of other people's success. She felt a bit disappointed with herself. I told her that it is natural for feelings of envy or jealousy to arise. Emotions are like waves in the ocean. They will rise and fall, driven by the wind and gravity. The important thing is not to allow any of them to turn into a tsunami. That is why surrender and acceptance is vital. Emotions rise and by not dwelling on them, they simply fade away.

I advised M to harness the energy of that wave and turn it into something positive instead. Whenever jealousy arises, it means there's energy and movement that can be harnessed--like how a sailing ship takes advantage of the winds and tides to sail to its destination. Do not waste this energy. Jealousy is just an indication that we are diverting our inner energy into something that's not productive. Perhaps, other people's success can motivate you to work even harder? That's a positive use of that energy.

Hatred and jealousy are wasted energy. Detect them early and divert them into position action on your part. Take comfort in the fact that you have emotions, which is merely a reflection of your energetic potential. You have all the passionate forces of life stirring within you. Be glad that it is so. You are simply alive.

The Might of Myths

I've been thinking of writing about the topic of myth for a while. What are myths and why are they so significant to humans?

In the old days, myths involving stories of warriors, gods and heavenly creatures are intertwined with the everyday lives of people. They explain the success and failure of crops, the rise and fall of nations, the life and death of humans, who have very little control over the mysterious forces of nature, which governed their destinies.

Part of the appeal of religion are the myths about their founders and their conception of eschatology--the destiny of believers and unbelievers when the end of times come. Myths have the power to imbue human lives with a kind of cosmic meaning.

In modern day usage, the word myth has acquired some negative connotations: it implies some amount of falsehood. When someone says, 'it's a myth'--that means it's factually untrue. But we've not outgrown our need for myths even though we have gained some mastery over nature with our knowledge of science and technology. Myths have now incarnated into conspiracy theories and urban legends. And they are amplified virally over cyberspace, blurring the lines between reality and falsehood.

But why do myths have such an enduring appeal to us? I think it's related to what I discussed last week: the mind latches on to anything that is 'interesting'. The mind cannot store isolated facts well--they need to be woven together into stories. Then only do they stick.

Myths are like software architectures or frameworks. Programmers are familiar with that. For example, web programmers know about the Model-View-Controller architecture or MVC. By adhering to the principles of MVC, your code is more organized, easier to scale and maintain. It is a kind of self-discipline, which helps to organize complexity. So are myths.

Religion rely on myths to guide and inspire the conduct of its believers. Not many Christians would be able to grasp the Neo-platonistic concepts in St Augustine's writings but almost everyone can identify with story of the Passion and the many parables of Jesus' teachings. Myths have an emotional appeal. It is the most effective form of mass education.

Any interesting anecdote that is recounted many times have the potential to become a myth. After a while, people do not care where it originated. All myths belong to the public domain. They lodge in the collective unconscious forever. Myths are the clothes-line that allow 'facts' to hang together.

All master mnemonists apply the same trick: to remember a long string of items or numbers, they turn them into visual objects and invent a narrative to weave the sequence of things together. People remember things well not because they have good memory brain-cells but simply because they have a good imagination for inventing stories.

That is power of myths. Once absorbed by the mind, they are like a drug that's injected into the bloodstream. They determine the course of our future actions. So take stock of your myths. Remember, myths are always mightier than facts.

The Meaning of Monotony

This is another typical vegetarian Monday for me. I've been doing this routine for many years. Routines give life a certain propulsive power. I've discussed about this in a previous blog article. Today I'm going to talk about another aspect of routine life--that it is monotonous and unmemorable.

The way our memory works is that it remembers novelties. We are hardwired that way. We remember things and events that stand out from the rest. If your everyday life involves you pursuing the same routines everyday, you'll find the familiar experience of time passing very fast. No, time always plods on at the same pace. Just that when there are no significant events to remember, all we see is an expanse of blandness. We mark time by events. If you punctuate your life with many small memorable events throughout the day, you'll find that your day can become very long.

You typical day in the office feels short, because all you remember is you going and leaving the office. But if you had spent the day attending a conference overseas where you got to sit through many talks and meet many new people throughout the world, you'll find that the day felt pretty full. A three-day conference certainly feels longer than 3 routine days in the office. The difference in our perception of time is just the novelty of our experience.

The key is novelty. The mind is programmed for it. The mind also gets familiar with things very fast. If you attend conferences every week, you'll will find it difficult to tell one from another. Time would fly again. Your year will pass in a blur of conferences.

Every letter that I type here has a timestamp--it occurred at a specific moment in in my lifetime. My blog has become the best chronicler of my mental life. Some article are more memorable than others. But again, because I've written so many of them, I can only remember the significant ones. The important thing though is to write and not to dwell on them like static monuments.

As long as you are acting positively in the world, you are leading a meaningful life--even if your life seems like a monotonous one. The pistons in an engine only move up and down but it propels the vehicle forward. As long as we act and live every moment of our lives with intent and purpose, we are living life to the fullest. The young mother who feels tied down with the endless chore of changing diapers and feeding her baby everyday is soon amazed to find how fast her child grows. In the 'blink of an eye', he is a young boy, and then a rebellious teenager and finally fully grown man, ready to start his own family.

The monotony of every life, if pursued with purpose, always bear results. Nothing is duller than watching a tree grow but grow it does and soon it will reward you with a bounty of fruits. It is the monotonous rhythm of the beat that binds a musical piece together. Without its regularity, everything falls apart. So do not lament the humdrum existence of your everyday life: listen to the rhythm of its monotony and how it alone binds everything into a meaningful whole.

A Soliloquy on Sleep

I didn't write yesterday because I was rushing off some work which I had promised a client. Only just now did I finally sent the thing off. My head is throbbing from the lack of sleep these last couple of days. So I'm going to take it easy for the rest of the day and hopefully go to bed earlier tonight.

It is a great feeling to have spent the day working hard. Rest is sweeter when well-earned. Rest is important for the mind because a lot of things require sub-conscious processing. I don't normally rush into decisions whenever I'm doing something because I know the mind takes time to come up with the right answer. You just allow it to marinate with all the necessary facts and information. At some point, the solution will pop up.

Sleep is important both to the mind and the body. All self-healing happens during sleep. The body has a natural intelligence and when given the opportunity it will readjust itself to correct imbalances. But you must give it the opportunity to do so. The intelligence of the body is hardest at work during sleep-time. It knows that we are in an inactive state, and it can start doing maintenance work--very much like how our highways and computer systems get fixed late at night when there are no users.

I always find it strange that we consider sleeping and waking up the following day a given. Why are we so confident that we'll wake up at all? Doesn't death sneak up on us like sleep? And when we sleep, are we not yielding ourselves to the higher powers that could giveth and taketh?

So wake up every morning with a sense of gratitude that you are alive--to rise smelling the fresh morning air and be given a chance to see your loved ones another day. Kahlil Gibran expresses it most beautifully in the Prophet:

To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving; To rest at noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy; To return home at eventide with gratitude; And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise on your lips.

Yet how casually do we waste our days when we know that its store is finite. We have no choice but to yield to sleep every night for life imposes its mandatory cycle of death and resurrection that we may pursue our waking hours with a renewed vigour everyday. How sadly can this go wrong for some, who despite being blessed with fame and beauty still find life unwelcoming.

We must also pursue life with the humility that we are all vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life. And that no one is immune from the forces of despair and depression which could also creep up unseen on us, as quietly as sleep.

Perhaps the best weapon against the forces of depression is an attitude of daily gratitude. Whatever little we have, is a blessing still. We slept and woke up alive. And that is all that matters.

A Learned Life

The greatest joy in life is the joy of learning. If I have any purpose in life at all, it is to learn. To learn is to live (it's probably the title of a blog post, I wrote more than a decade ago).

I measure the success of my day by how much I've learned. And in moments like this, just before bedtime, I reflect back on the day: what did I learn? Only when we learn do we stem the forces of decay that gnaw unceasingly at our souls. If we learn something everyday, it means that we've grown, even though we are a step closer to our graves.

What constitutes learning? Learning is the endless process of classification, assimilation and transformation of thoughts. Every action and reaction in our everyday life stirs our minds and reorganizes the constituents within. Like Tetris blocks falling into its rightful slot on the rising pile of rectangular blocks below.

Every success and setback experienced in life is a self-teaching moment. The material world sculpts us with the chisel of joy and pain--each blow reveals another layer of realization from the inner depths of our souls. We speak of souls, and minds and the world as if they are tangible forms, subject to our manipulations. These are mere illusions, yet still we need them as we need avatars to play virtual games, without which we have no material metaphors to hold on to.

I write, and every word that I materialize on this page is my response to the challenge which the universe poses to me. It kneads me into a certain shape, and I type these words to reassert my form. And in that dialectic between me and the universe, learning occurs. Insight arises.

And that's how we progress everyday. To challenge and be challenged. To participate in that eternal struggle that regenerates life at every moment. And true learning happens when we encounter the world this way. All learning has to be earned. And that is greatest lesson of life.

Walk as Worship

Here I am again on a Monday evening, staring at a blank page, trying to figure out what to write. But no matter, as always, I'll just take my fingers for a walk.

To walk leisurely is one of the greatest pleasures in life. My parking spot at the office basement is a distance away from the lift but I always enjoy the leisurely walk towards it. When going to a meeting anywhere, I often have a habit of parking a distance away from the actual destination. This is because the short walk from the car gives me time to think and help put myself into the right frame of mind before a meeting.

I think walking is also one of the healthiest exercises for cubicle creatures like us. It relaxes the body and helps circulation; it makes us body-aware and frees us from living too much in our heads. Buddhists are familiar with the practice of walking meditation, which is often done to break the monotony of its sitting counterpart. To walk slowly, observing the movement of the heels and the the pressure of feet on the ground helps to slow down our hurried pace of life.

I remember my time in Singapore when I was commuting by bus everyday to work. Singapore is very pedestrian friendly and I enjoyed alighting at the bus-stop outside Liang Court, along River Valley road. From there, I had the pleasure of walking across a bridge over the Singapore River towards my office at Central Mall. That was a very happy time in my life. I had my Walkman with me, and was listening to audiobooks everyday.

To walk is to engage in the simplest physical activity that one can do. To me, it is an act of worship, of participating in the flow of the universe. Only when you are in the throes of rhythmic locomotion are you at one with everything.

Isn't walking also the cheapest form of exercise that anyone of us can pursue? You don't need fancy exercise outfits or expensive gym memberships. And the best thing is that you can incorporate it into your daily life. Do like what I do: just park further away from the office. Or just take the train, which would surely involve a lot of walking.

Being able to walk is actually a great blessing which many of the old and disabled are not able to enjoy. So be grateful that you've been blessed with this gift. The simple and graceful act of walking is a miracle of motion which our most advanced robotics are still struggling to reproduce. But enough of talk. Let's just walk it.

The Scourge of the Second Law

Today, I'm writing these lines from my apartment in Cyberjaya. I am usually here once a week, for a change of environment. It is the only personal space I have and all the books that I've accumulated throughout by reading life are here. Being here makes me happy because I'm surrounded by books and all the things I love.

We spend our entire lives collecting things. Lately I've come to realize that space is a very limited resource. Every item that you acquire requires some amount of space and time. You need to place it somewhere and you need to keep it free from dust and heat to preserve it. Even if you have the space to store all these memorabilia, you still need time to appreciate them. More often than not they lie forgotten in some out-of-reach shelf or stashed in some dusty box under the bed.

My policy nowadays is not to acquire things unless absolutely necessary. Reducing clutter has become a very important goal to me. Even if you can afford to buy a large apartment to keep all your material possessions, the place itself requires maintenance. Everything decays and the only thing that keeps them going is maintenance. If you own a house, you'll know how often things break and what a hassle it is to find someone to fix them.

I remember living in a hotel in Indonesia for 2 years as probably the happiest period of my life. I did not have to worry about maintaining anything. Everything I possessed came in two suitcases. But when I left, I had to ship back two large boxes of books. Accumulating books is one bad habit that I have not managed to discard.

Life requires maintenance. We spend our entire lives fighting the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which dictates that entropy has to increase. The entire universe is moving towards ever increasing disorder. Some theologians used to use this as the 'prove' that the theory of evolution is false: how can complex and organized life forms like human beings evolve from the chaos of the universe? But scientists who really understand the laws of physics know that, local pockets of organization can emerge 'briefly' from the chaos of the Big Bang. Galaxies and planetary systems look like they have been engineered by some creator God, but science can easily show that they are all natural consequences of the energy matter obeying natural physical laws.

Human intuition is limited by the very smallness of our sensory experiences in relation to the immensity of the universe. A single human lifetime is an insignificant flicker of existence. We simply have no capacity to imagine what 13.5 billion years is like. We can't even explore all the sights within our own country, let alone comprehend the vastness of the solar system, which is just a cluster of rocks around an insignificant star on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy---one of many billions of such systems in the universe.

And yet here we are, trying to make the most out of the brief existence that we have, preoccupied with petty little quarrels and concerns. 7.7 billion people squabbling and jostling for space on a tiny blue marble hurtling through empty space, succumbing, inevitably to the Second Law. Realizing this is at once humbling an exalting.

Rite of Coding, Code of Writing

Today is a public holiday and I'm currently sipping coffee at Starbucks, at the Curve in Mutiara Damansara. Feeling a bit sleep as I've been up since 4am. I enjoy my early morning work session. I see it as a kind of practice session. Coding is a skill which gets rusty when you do not practice it often enough. It is also why I keep this blog--it is my weekly writing exercise.

Coding and writing are skills that need to be honed. Coding is 'easier' than writing because you always know exactly where you are heading. The end-goal is clear: you are always trying to deliver some feature or functionality. How well you do it, depends on your skill and creativity.

You can also say that certain forms of writing, say writing a report, requires you to know exactly where you are heading too. You have to convey certain points and messages. But writing, unlike coding is harder because your choice of words is vast and there are a thousand and one ways an idea can be expressed. Sometimes you grope in the dark in search of the perfect word or phrase to express what you have in mind. Often what comes out is not exactly what you had wished to convey. But that is part of the challenge of writing. It is finding a way for thoughts and impressions to material into the physical world as printed or written words.

Coding, on the other hand is constrained by the programming language. Despite that, there is still a lot of room for creativity. The goal of the programmer is to achieve its goal with an economy of means. An elegant piece of program has no superfluous statements. Every line has a purpose. And a good programmer aims to make his code clean and maintainable. One thing I've found out the hard way is that a messy and unorganized piece of code will always come back to haunt you. Architecture is very important and code has to be constantly refactored to make them general and reusable.

Therein lies the key difference between coding and writing: when it comes to coding, the more reuse you can achieve, the better a programmer you are. You do not want to reinvent the wheel every time. If you can make use of components you have built before, that means you have done your job well. Whereas as an original writer, you strictly abhor repetition. Even if you have to write about the same thing again, you will not be looked upon highly if you just cut-and-paste sentences that your readers have read before. Never under-estimate your reader and always try to express something new, even if it revolves around the same subject.

I treat coding and writing are two important ritual that keep my mind constantly sharp. They are to my brain what my jogging sessions are to my body. They are my inviolable codes of conduct. Everyday when I start my morning work session, I feel grateful and blessed that I am able to still perform these activities well. And long may it continue!

A Life for Show

My blog article last week was a pretty heavy one. I don't think I'll even want to attempt something like that this week. Let this week's topic be light and easy, simply because I have been working since 5am and am feeling quite exhausted.

So today, I'll just take my fingers for a stroll on my computer keyboard, just allowing words to pour out, no matter what the subject might be. In other words, I'll just be rambling. Since this is my blog, I can do whatever I like and I don't have a readership to please. That's the perverse pleasure and advantage of keeping a blog that no one reads.

The generation who grew up on social media today has a lot of challenges to tackle. I'm referring to the recent news of a K-Pop star who committed suicide. During my time, bullying could only happen during school-hours and your reputation is only limited to a very small world. Nowadays, cyberbullying is 24 hours and is global in scale.

When Facebook and Twitter first started, I was among the early users. It was a lot of fun in the early days. But unfortunately social media have taken over our lives. They have made everyone's life a kind of reality show. Think how strange my last statement is. Life, a reality show? Yes, we've turned our real lives into a kind of show, with a global audience in mind, until we are not able to see what is real and what is not.

Isn't it not surprising that there's such a thing called 'fake news'? Because we treat our lives as show (and shows are by definition, not real), we cannot discern what is real and unreal anymore.

I think I've mentioned elsewhere before that social media is an amplifier of human virtues and weaknesses. Like technology, it can be a force for both good and bad. Be it fame or infamy--anything can be multiplied a thousand fold in cyberspace. Issues flare up and die down in rapid cycles and we live in a incessant wave of these distractions.

It is natural for human beings to crave for attention. We want to share things with friends and with the people we care about. We used to do that when we meet face-to-face in meatspace. That is the real meaning of socializing. Nowadays, we seem to think that every brain-fart of ours is headline material. So we tweet, we upload, we post, we share with a deft swipe of the finger.

Cyberspace could be infinite. But human lifespan is finite. Is your life a 24-hour social media show where you constantly have to coax and cajole people for their attention? Maybe that's a good life. Maybe not. You decide. It's your show.

Absolute Abstraction

Brutes abstract not - John Locke

Today I'm lucky enough to be seated comfortably at my favourite spot at the Coffee Bean Cafe. This means that I can really relax and settle down on my thoughts of the day. Or rather, what I've been thinking about lately.

I have been working on my personal projects most of the time, doing a lot of coding. When you code, your main preoccupation is getting the application functionality done in the cleanest and simplest possible way. That's something that's easier said than done.

All developers know that they are always working within time constraints. Your users wanted it yesterday. So you try to push out something reasonable quickly, often having to resort to workarounds and quick fixes. Users are happy as long as the application works. They only see the facade of the software--its user interface. As long as it meets all the requirements and does not break easily, they walk away happy. You live to code another day.

But six months down the road, they come back to you with more requirements for the application. And when you open the hood, you realized that you do not understand your own code anymore. What seemed so logically clear and obvious previously now looks like spaghetti code to you. All your workarounds and quick fixes have come back to haunt you. You have to invest a lot of time to try to understand what you or another co-worker have done. Without understanding it again thoroughly, any change could break the entire application in unexpected ways. You have to suffer the karmic consequences of your coding sins.

There's a whole slew of best practices for the programmer to avoid these pitfalls. Clean code requires modularity and separation of concerns. Every part does a small well-defined job with clear inputs and outputs. At the lowest level you have objects with encapsulated data and methods, which collectively performs the function of a specific layer or a tier of logic. The entire 'application' could also be a microservice--the building block of another larger service or application.

Each level is abstracted from the other. You can be working at the microservice layer and sees each component as having clear and clean APIs. That's all you need to know. Details and dependencies that you do not need to know are hidden away from you. Abstraction is the key to peace of mind. As a programmer, you might be responsible for all the layers of logic but at any moment in time, you are only working at a particular level of abstraction. And that is the most important thing.

Life too consists of many levels of abstractions. To a CEO, all the divisions and departments in his companies are objects and layers of abstraction. He only needs to know what resources are needed by each and what deliverables are expected of them. The departmental heads are working at another lower level of abstractions. He has workers with well-defined job functions. They need to do their part to ensure that the goals of the department are met, which then feed into the overall delivery mechanism of the company, orchestrated by the CEO.

Any individual is also made up of many levels of abstractions. You can consider your physical body as the lowest level. You have no control over how your individual cells and organs operate but you can ensure that you eat the right food, do the proper exercises and keep it safe from external harm and make sure it is well-rested. That will ensure that the machinery of your body continues functioning--you can walk, you can talk and you can think and reason.

Our ability to think opens up another dimension of abstraction. This is where we often encounter 'spaghetti code'. If we know how to abstract different domains of our intellectual and emotional lives, we'll never get them mixed up together. A lot of pain and conflict in life arise because we are too muddled-headed. We let personal issues affect work and vice versa. We are unclear about what resources are required for each and every aspect of our lives. We allocate too much time and money to unnecessary things, simply because we have no clear boundaries between the different domains, each with its individual demands.

The practice of mindfulness helps us to abstract things. We see a thought as an object that has a lifecycle. Nothing more, nothing less. No single thought hogs the entire process. They come, and they go. There's inversion of control--your awareness controls them, and not the other way round.

A bunch of thoughts make up a personality: your Self. The self is another layer of abstraction. It has an ego, which is an apparent interface requiring certain dependencies as its input. But the self is nothing more than the amalgamation of your many thoughts, which are the result of the neuro-physical activities of your brain and body chemistry. Who is it that plays at this level of abstraction? The soul, perhaps?

The soul sees the self and the human body as having a lifecycle. There's inversion of control again. The physical self is but the souls momentary instantiation. Many religion plays at this level of abstraction. They claim that the soul lives on after the physical body dies--to be judged in an afterlife or to be reborn again in another cycle of instantiation. But is the soul too another level of abstraction?

Perhaps there are infinite levels of abstractions? And we in the smallness of our self-oriented consciousness can only speculate as far as the soul. Are we not part of a higher existence which plays at many levels of abstractions? Our language is only suited for describing our very level of abstraction--so we can only speak of human-like God or gods. Are these not mere models, mental stepping-stones for exploring higher levels of abstractions? To speak of the soul, is already an achievement of abstraction of sorts. How else are we supposed to ascend to even loftier levels?

Well, let's meditate on it. Let's abstract it. It's the least we could do.

The Wisdom of the Ocean and the Sky

As I type these lines, I'm perched uncomfortably on a high stool, with my usual mug of Americano at the Coffee Bean cafe. Sometimes the cafe is a bit crowded and you don't get the spot that you like--especially one with a power point. But I'm used to working from uncomfortable places everywhere. Once you get into the flow, you are oblivious of the surrounding.

There's a depth of mind which we only glimpse during periods of deep concentration or meditation. If you manage to tap into it, you get access to a wellspring of ideas. Which is why I often ramble on for a few lines whenever I start a blog post, just to get into the groove--an invocation to the inner world.

The most rewarding thing about meditation is that, you always get some new insights on the nature of your mind. These insights help you in many ways. For example, the other day, while I was struggling for a while with wandering thoughts during my meditation, I hit upon the idea that these thoughts are like the wind and rain that continuously lash at a flag-pole. But the flag-pole holds steadfast to the ground no matter how furiously the flag gets blown and beaten by the wind. By imagining myself as the flagpole, I immediately gain strength in my concentration. All spurious thoughts had no hold on me.

This reminds me of the famous Zen story about two monks arguing about a flag. The first monk said: "The flag is waving". The second one says, "No, it is the wind that is moving". And then the patriarch who happened to be passing by, commented: "It is your mind that is moving".

It is the mind that chooses to 'move' with thoughts. Thoughts come and go and if we follow them, the mind gets distracted. Allow them to drift into our consciousness like clouds in the sky (another useful mental model to adopt when meditating). You are the sky in the background--vast, immovable, ever-present, all-seeing, all-knowing.

But what is the sky? It is also not 'something'. It doesn't have a permanent colour or substance. It is the witness of all the activities that happen within and without. And even within and without is just an illusion. There's only incessant change of which we are a part of.

The ocean is another good metaphor for our existence. The waves--if you freeze it in time, looks like some perfect sculpture, designed by some unseen hand. But no wave has a single permanent existent and even to speak of a 'wave' is an artificial division of the expanse of water which we call the ocean. Each of our individual existence is like a momentary wave. We rise and subside just as swiftly, if we view our lifetime from a cosmic perspective. And here we are clinging so desperately to a wavelet in the ocean, sparkling momentarily in the sunlight, mistaking it for an immutable diamond.

If you remain on the surface, you'll always be thrown about like flotsam. But if you dive deeper into the depths of the ocean, you merge into the whole and the wisdom of the entire ocean is yours to tap. And like a diver of the deep, a hitherto unimaginable world of beauty is finally revealed before your eyes.

Grace and Gratitude

Weekends are for 'sharpening the saw'--the seventh habit of Dr Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. We should never be too busy sawing and completely forget about sharpening it. Renewal and rejuvenation is essential to maintain a healthy working life.

I'm happy to have been able to jog both today and yesterday. And today, I also spent some time cleaning out some old stuff and as a result, I have 3 more bags of 'offerings' to the God of Karma--stuff that I have not touched for ages (some for more than 10 years). These are old karma that needs to permanently resolved with gratitude. One feels greatly unburdened after such an exercise.

We spend so much of our lives chasing new experiences. The human soul needs to be constantly challenged, entertained and awed. When we are young, this spirit surges ahead like a mighty tsunami, overwhelming and obliterating everything along its path. As it moves, it expends its energy and finally the tsunami has completely worked out its 'karma'.

When we seek new experiences--we are actually looking for outlets for karma to find its resolution. It is karma that gives us life. It is a force that creates and destroys. It is, as Dylan Thomas puts it: "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower...is my destroyer". Karma always mean consequences. When we use the energy of karma to chase new experiences, sometimes we generate even more karma, creating an endless cycle of action and reaction.

The meditative man is like a good heat sink. He is constantly dissipating heat/karma. That is what meditation does in your mind--it isolates thoughts, and then let them decay naturally. Everything in the universe decays and dies. Meditation is simply good karmic management--an absolutely necessary mental house-keeping activity. Meditation helps to maintain the equilibrium of the system and allow karma to be dissipated efficiently.

Every action begins with karmic energy from a single thought. This thought gets its energy from another previous thought. The thought either snowballs into a bigger one by gathering energy from other related thoughts or it simple loses momentum and fades away. In the silence of our meditation, you'll know which thought does what. We do a 'ps -ef' on our mental processes as we strive to become better system administrators of the mind.

Sometimes, we just need to reboot the system. And that's what I try to do with my mind on weekends. Cleared of karmic residues, it is ready to tackle the start of another week--one which my heart welcomes with grace and gratitude.

The Dance of Daemons

I'm typing these lines at Espressolab Cafe, Empire Subang. Had some salad for dinner and here I am trying to figure what to write for today's blog post. I'm feeling quite exhausted from all the work I did over the past few days. It is great to have a reason to work.

I wrote about Aristotle's Eudaimonia last week. 'Daimon' means spirit in Greek--the original root of our word, demon, or the slightly more archaic version 'daemon'. Eudaimonia can be loosely translate as 'good (eu) spirit (daimon)'. That's another key to understanding the meaning of Eudaimonia: there's a spirit within us that seeks to be aligned with a purpose. For some reason, the more modern version of the word,'demon' has come to mean something evil. But daemons are a different story.

When you boot up a computer system that is running Unix (like the laptop that I'm using now), you will find lot of processes running in the background--also called 'daemons' in Unix parlance. I love writing daemons--they are processes that work quietly in the background providing useful services, essential to the health of the entire system.

Maybe daemons reflect my natural inclination--I too enjoy working quietly in the background. I'm happy as long as I'm doing useful work and serving my purpose. Daemons never blow their own trumpet. You'll never know they exist. But when they fail, something will go wrong.

Some people are meant to be loud--like graphical user interfaces (GUIs). They display themselves to the world. They too serve their purpose in their own way. The world needs both background daemon processes and GUIs to function well. Come to think of it, 'GUI' is Hokkien for 'ghost'. It looks like these creatures from the netherworld make the world go round.

Processes which have died but for some reason have not been cleaned up by the operating system, are called 'zombie processes'. These category of creatures are absolutely useless. They are processes who used to do useful work but have somehow crashed or died an unnatural death. Their resources have not been properly reclaimed by the operating system. If you have worked in any large company before, you'll know that they are employees who are like zombies. They occupy space, draw salaries but do not contribute anything useful at all. Some have degenerated into such a state because they have lost their motivation to work.

That is why it is important to always have a purpose in life--telos in Greek. Telos is central to Aristotle's philosophy. Everything in the universe has an inherent purpose. A purpose is simple a goal and direction. Whether there's a universal divine purpose to our lives or not is immaterial. Even a nihilistic existentialist will tell you to define your own subjective purpose and pursue it. Without a purpose, nothing happens in the universe.

So be actively like those daemons--dancing quietly in the background serving their individual duties. The alternative is becoming a zombie.

The Music of Eudaimonia

Today is another public holiday: as a matter of fact, it is Malaysia Day--a day that should be celebrated with a lot more enthusiasm than how it is currently done. These days, I think Sabah and Sarawak whose citizens take great pride in their diversity of culture and religion should be the model for the rest of the country. Maybe we should follow Indonesia's lead in moving the capital of the country to the island of Borneo!

I've been working from home the whole day. Come to think of it, I did not even step out of the house today! But what a productive day it has been. I woke up early at 5.30am. After a brief meditation session, I managed to work on my app project until 8am before I went down for breakfast. After that it was more work until dinner time, with a short break for tea. It has been a productive day and that makes me happy.

Sometimes people ask me why do I never seem to stop working. Today while enjoying my afternoon cup of Earl Grey, the thought occurred to me: Why was this question never posed to professional pianists or athletes?

The answer is clear: performance artists and sportsmen need to be constantly training and practicing to keep their performance in tip-top condition. And that is exactly how I view my work: I need to be constantly practicing to be mentally fit.

I see my work as training. An athlete's or a musician's job is never 'done'. To keep himself mentally and physically in peak condition is his job. To me, if any piece of work gets delivered, it is like the completion of a performance for the musician or a race for the athlete. There will always be some hits and misses. He or she has to go back to the studio or training ground and try to work on those weaknesses. One is never ever satisfied with one's performance.

I take great effort to ensure that I do not wear myself down from overwork. A balanced lifestyle is important. I do socialize, even though not as often as I used to. I give priority to my backlog of hobbies, of which reading is at the very top of my list. I enjoy my weekly exercise sessions at the park, where I also get to listen to my audiobooks. I subscribe to Spotify, from where I also get to sample a wide selection of music--especially those from obscure Baroque or medieval composers.

We live in a great age when there are a lot more content and information than we could ever consume in a lifetime. Hence we need to be selective and to know how to use our time wisely. You don't need a lot of money to enjoy life because all the good things in life (at least the ones that matter to me) are cheap.

Aristotle defines the purpose of life as achieving 'Eudaimonia'--which is often loosely translated as 'happiness'. But it means more than that. To me Eudaimonia is a state of well-being, in alignment with one's inner spirit. Work, if motivated by the right spirit, is an opportunity to achieve Eudaimonia. And no one expresses it more beautifully than Kahlil Gibran:

"When you work, you are a flute whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music".

And to me, that music is Eudaimonia.

The Demons of Distraction

I'm meeting a friend at 6.30pm to discuss about some of our on-going projects. I have about 45 minutes to write this blog post before the meeting. It's a public holiday today--one of the 3 long weekends we have this month. So it doesn't feel like my usual Monday at all.

I worked from home today, starting very early in the morning around 5 am. I love these early morning work sessions: the mind is so fresh when you wake up in the morning and during these golden hours, there are no distractions from anyone at all.

The good thing about clocking in some work in the wee hours of the morning is that you are guaranteed of a productive day, even before your day actually begins. It gives you a great sense of accomplishment for the rest of the day. Whatever you manage to do after that becomes almost like a bonus.

The most difficult challenge about starting the day early is of course having to go to bed early. I've been hitting sack before 12 lately but to really ensure that you wake up early and fresh, you'll have to go to bed almost like 10pm! That's kind of challenge in our lives today because a lot of our social life--dinners, outings with friends or family--extend until late at night. One such social event could disrupt your routine for days. Nothing is worse than feeling lethargic the whole day due to lack of sleep.

I've learned how to harness the tides of energy and concentration that I experience throughout the day as they ebb and flow. Do your best work when it is rising and allocate some time to relax when your energy is beginning to wane. Early morning after rising is when your powers of concentration is the highest. These are golden hours that should not be wasted doing web-surfing or other time-wasting activities.

Finding the right rhythm and balance is the key to productivity. A work session should not last more than 3 hours. Take a break in between to recharge yourself. I find that Baroque music works best for me. Coffee breaks and meals are also great activities to relax the mind. These breaks are also the best time to catch up on the messages that pile up on your phone while you were concentrating hard on your work.

That's the ideal scenario. In reality it seldom works out that way. We get interrupted and distracted many times during the course of our work session. Sometimes we subconsciously welcome then because--admit it--work can be pretty tedious and difficult. So you jump on the first Whatsapp message that drops into your phone.

The way I overcome distractions from the phone is not by turning it off but by lowering the notification sound and configuring the apps in such a way that nothing pops up on the screen. It's best to treat Whatsapp messages like email. Most of the time, they are not that important anyway.

So one needs to be extremely wary of distractions to be productive. Another trick that I use often is to reserve some 'easy work' for the next work session, so that you can get started easily. Without that convenient stepping stone to work, sometimes you won't get started at all because you'll probably have to search through lots of files to figure out what to do. And in the process, something will happen that distracts you away from work.

Remember, the demons of distraction are extremely devious. Be very very careful of their machinations. Godspeed.

The Education We Lost

There has been a lot of discussion about our education system lately. But come to think of it, education has always been one of the key national issues for as long as I can remember.

The older generation often lament about the declining standards of our education system. I am not old enough to be considered part of the English-educated generation. I had my entire education in a public Sekolah Kebangsaan. Was the standard better then compared to now? Let's examine this further.

My dad went to the old colonial English-medium school. I inherited many of his textbooks. I remember feeling envious that my dad got to study poems by Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron as part of his secondary education. I did read a lot of sajaks too during my school days and even wrote a few myself. But I was the exception. I don't remember any of my classmates having the same kind of interest in poetry and literature as I did.

I am a hundred percent a product of the national school. Was the standard of education better then? Thinking back, I think there were a lot more bad teachers than good ones. But as students we did not know any better and being the foolish schoolkids we were, we actually liked teachers who walked into the classroom and declared: "buat kerja sendiri hari ni". It meant we could spend the period, chit-chatting or playing games with our classmates. It made our day. We didn't appreciate the good teachers who were usually strict disciplinarians. But they were few and far between. Most of the teachers never prepared any of their lessons. Some just dictated notes to us; the entire period would be spent copying notes.

Unlike kids today, I didn't go to any tuition during my primary schooldays. My parents guided me whenever they could. They inculcated in me the discipline to study everyday. The good thing was that there were not much distractions then--limited TV (black and white), no internet, no smartphones, no computer games. They only 'distractions' were outdoor activities--playing football, marbles and other outdoor games with neighbourhood friends.

I think that made our childhood education more meaningful. We were never distracted; we had healthy outdoor activities and going to school was a lot of fun because our friends were there. We wanted to hang out with friends--eating together at the school canteen, getting all sweaty during PE lessons and hanging out in school after class for extra-curricular activities. Sometimes we would venture out into the rubber-estate behind the school and had great fun frolicking in in the stream, catching fish and playing ducks and drakes.

Perhaps that was the best part of our education. No, I don't think the teachers were not any better or worse than the ones today. The syllabus--I don't know and we didn't care. We learned enough science, mathematics, English, BM, art and even a bit of Mandarin for us to pick up any other advanced subjects later in life. I can still write and read in elementary Jawi, which we all learned in school.

I feel we were a more cohesive society then not because race-relations were a lot better then. No, for as far as I can remember, politically, there has always been suspicion between the races. But socially, in the national schools, there was a good mix of different races studying and playing together everyday. That was the best part of it. It was nothing unusual and it was fun. We spoke Malay all the time, even among the non-Malays.

When I see schoolkids today being picked up by parents from their elite schools to be shuttled immediately to their tuition centres, I pity them for not having the kind of 'education' that we used to have. No, our teachers were not better, our syllabus were not superior, our standard of English wasn't that good either.

But we interacted a lot. That was the key difference. We played after school together, Back home, we watched the same TV programs (Combat, Six-Million Dollar Man, Empat Sekawan, Drama Minggu Ini, Bintang RTM) and talked about them in school the next day. Most of all, we shared a common space. That to me was where the real education took place. And sadly, that is something we have really lost.

The Piston of Time

I like to keep my weekly blogging schedule because I like discipline. Discipline helps to shape the soul of a person. However when applying discipline, one needs to find the right balance: too strict a regiment suffocates a person and induces fear and distaste; too lax a routine invites laziness.

Balance is the key to everything. But that is the hardest thing to achieve. A sense of balance comes from having wisdom, but wisdom itself is a product of learning and experience. One of the key challenges of life is that, we are uncomfortable with uncertainty. We want clear, fixed answers to everything. We want rules: what is right and what is wrong. But a lot of things in life do not have such clear binary distinctions.

At every point in life, there's a best fit solution and never a perfect one. Finding the best fit solution--the balancing point that optimizes everything, is what we have to deal with all the time.

I like to use the analogy of a surfer when it comes to navigating through the ocean of life. A surfer has to find his balance every moment, reacting to the movement of the waves beneath him. By remaining in balance, he surges ahead. A surfer can never determine in advance, how he should position his body at any moment: balance comes with practice and experience. With enough practice, the skill becomes hardwired and instinctive.

For example, parents have to make difficult decisions everyday: How much freedom should they allow for their children? How much time should they spend playing computer games? How late are they allowed to stay out? There's no definite answer for all these. It is a problem balance again. And with experience, you get a feel of the right answer for the situation at hand.

I used to blog everyday. It was the discipline I imposed on myself then. But that was more than 15 years ago. The circumstances of my life was very different then: I had a very simple life in Indonesia, living alone with little care or worry. The discipline then was good for me. Without the strict regiment I imposed on myself, I wouldn't be able to do a lot of things that I am doing now.

With the current circumstances of my life, a weekly blogging schedule suits me perfectly: not too frequent and not too slack. I still feel a bit of 'pressure' when blogging day (Monday) comes because I have to figure out what to write and I have to will myself to type words onto a blank screen.

But I've had enough experience to know that, having a fixed schedule makes things easy and automatic. The ticking clock is the piston movement that powers the engine of your day. When the time comes, you just do it, because you are pushed by that perpetual machine that is Time. But you see how powerful that piston is. It has pushed me to this last paragraph of my blog post for this week. So when it comes to work, find the right balance by adjusting the regularity of your activities. The piston of time will do the rest for you.

Limitless Lists

There are a few subjects I have in mind which could be today's blog topic. As a matter of fact, I keep a whole list of them on Trello. I'll refer to the list if there's no pressing topic that I have in mind to write about. And it just occurred to me that 'keeping lists' itself could be today's topic!

I am constantly making lists. When I start my day in the office, I'd usually write down a list of tasks I wish to accomplish for the day on my scratchpad. It helps to organize my thoughts and the act of writing sets things into motion.

Trello is a great tool to keep lists. Since I started using this free tool in 2016, I've been using it to track, among others: books I've read, audiobooks that I've listened to, big items I've purchased, things I've discarded and insights I've gained from meditation. For books I've read, I start a new list every year. So I know exactly how many books I've read for each year. And using Trello, it's easy to jot down my thoughts for each item. I also summarize my takeaways from each book there. There's also a Trello app that allows me to do it from my phone easily.

I also have lists of todos, ideas and possible projects that I wish to pursue. I also keep technical notes on various subjects, so much so that I've come to rely on it as my extended memory. I used to write notes on text files but organizing those files systematically and searching for information becomes a bit of headache. With Trello, I managed to overcome all those problems.

Listing items is a great way to start thinking. Every time I'm planning something, I'll start a list with the first item: "1. ..."--and that gets the ball rolling. I have a paper scratchpad notebook that is full of lists. When I'm having discussions with my colleagues on the whiteboard, I start with a list of discussion items too. Each item branches off into further lists. Which makes the Trello app great as you could do that easily and also sort and re-sort items out in the order you want, besides being able to insert images, paste labels and even put timelines on tasks.

Listing helps one to think systematically in a step-by-step manner--algorithmizing thinking. Lists are like programs for the mind--you enter your instructions and you could also put your output into another list. That's what I do compulsively. No list, no work gets done. As simple as that.

As we grow older, the number of items and events that we have to keep track of, increases dramatically. As a result, nothing stands out anymore--and that makes people complain that their memory is failing. But in actual fact, it is the novelty of input that is lacking. To remember something, we have to see its uniqueness in relationship to the rest of your experience. But when you meet so many people and tackle so many mundane tasks in your daily routine, nothing stands out anymore. So it is difficult to recall people's names or remember what you eat for lunch yesterday. That's where lists come in.

I know exactly the sort of things that I will definitely forget. So if they are important, they immediately go into one of my lists. The challenge next is to actually remember that you've captured them in a list! But luckily, Trello is searchable. You just train yourself to go to this single place where you keep your lists and that would be a good starting point.

I also keep a list of movies I've watched every year. So far my list for this year has been pretty empty--I'm not particularly fond of the superhero movies that are hogging the screens these days. But there's a good movie in town this week from one of my favourite directors. So I plan to put that movie on my list today. I will probably blog about it in the coming weeks. So I'm done for today's blog post. That's another item checked on my list!

Audio-fication

It's a public holiday today, so I'm writing this from home. It has been a long weekend which I spent jogging and decluttering--two activities which I seem to have acquired a taste for.

I love to jog because like driving, it gives me a good opportunity to spend some quality time listening to my audiobook. I usually have two audiobook titles which I am listening to: one when I'm driving and the other when I'm jogging and exercising in the park. Nowadays there so much audio content out there that the problem is a shortage of listening time. I think people who don't listen to audiobooks are wasting away 50% of their time--time which could be spent learning so much.

The internet makes it so easy to learn anything. Learning is a pleasure in itself. I do not care if whatever I learn is useful for my work or whether it improves me as a person. Learning is like tasting good food. The mind craves for knowledge because it is its source of sustenance. Neurons simply want to forge connections and it needs new information to do that. When an insight occurs, you know, something in the brain has changed permanently. And that is a good feeling.

I have many pairs of bluetooth headsets. I keep one in the car--for my audiobook listening while driving; I have one in the office--for hooking up with the iMac, which I use, usually for listening to Youtube, while I'm doing more routine tasks. I have a light, sweat-proof pair which I put on while I am jogging. Generally, I do not like in-ear phones, as I do not like to be cut off from surrounding sounds. The bone-conduction ones are the best.

Given the amount of time that I spend listening to various audio content, I think my ears have replaced my eyes as my main input channel for knowledge and information. I also have bedtime audio-stories--usually, a chapter from an old audiobook I've listened to before. I usually fall asleep at the 10-minute mark--which is exactly the reason why I only use familiar audiobooks. I listen back to the parts I like and also get to refresh my knowledge on the subject.

A lot of people told me that they have problems listening to audiobooks because their minds tend to get distracted and then they lose track of what they are listening too. It ends up as background noise. That rarely happens to me, because I've developed a habit of relaxing into a listening mode when I'm driving, jogging or doing some monotonous task. The habit can be cultivated. I have years of practice as I've been listening to audiobooks for more than 20 years--beginning with the days of cassette tapes and Walkman.

Most audio content are already available free from the internet. And there's no easier--even lazier--way to do so than to listen to them. Imagine the entire wisdom of mankind, available for your edification. To live is to learn. Not doing so would be great sacrilege. so hark!

Woo Woo Nothingness

I had intended to blog last night but the Community Shield--EPL's curtain raiser of the season--was on and my favourite team was playing. Even though Liverpool lost on penalties in the end, I thought their performance in the second half was pretty good. So weekends won't be quiet anymore for the season has begun!

I have a serious topic in mind today, which I am hesitating to put into words. I don't want to treat it too casually and it is along the lines of psychology and religion, which I am fond of writing about. I had a long work session in the office today, working quietly on my project, so I'm pretty exhausted now. I thought it would be fun to just write another post about...nothing!

OK, how does one start to write about nothing? I am immediately reminded of Lawrence Krauss's book which I read 2 years ago: A Universe From Nothing. When it comes to cosmology, the question is often asked: How did the universe began? Everyone knows the answer: The Big Bang. OK, but what caused the Big Bang? Some will say, it is an irrelevant question because, both space and time emerged from the Big Bang and it doesn't make sense to ask what caused it because, time did not exist and hence what happened 'before' the Big Bang is a nonsensical question.

That of course doesn't give much satisfaction to the average person. Krauss's book goes a bit further by saying that the universe of space and time emerges spontaneously from 'nothing' because in the sub-atomic realm it is natural for particles to pop into existence and then disappear. Everything is probabilistic. Universes can come into existence because 'nothingness' itself is unstable. Like fireflies in the night, an infinite number of universes are winking in and out of existence all the time.

It is a grand vision of the cosmos. Something which New Age gurus like Deepak Chopra like to latch onto to illustrate the impermanence and illusory nature of our reality. We can literally 'recreate' our own existence every moment because quantum mechanics suggest that is the nature of particles. It gives hope to the individual that he or she can change his world by tapping into a deeper 'intelligence' which presumably is where the universe springs from.

New Age gurus often over-stretch quantum mechanical concepts to suit their philosophy. Intuitively, they are appealing. That often is enough for one to use as a guiding philosophy for living. It's woo woo but the alternative is institutionalized religion, which arguably has done as much harm as good.

In my blog here, I am basically expounding my own woo woo most of the time, for my own amusement. That's one of the purpose of this blog--for me to see how well my own spiritual philosophy stands on its own when exposed starkly in writing. At least I'm not inflicting it on others and the act of writing actually helps me to gain further insights. OK, that's enough woo woo for the day. I've accomplished my goal of writing about nothing!

The Ultimate Servant

We are all blessed with a servant who works for us without wages. Once given the necessary training, he will work unobtrusively in the background, doing what needs to be done without having to be ordered to do so. He is timely and tireless. And over time, he gets even better at what he does.

Sounds too good to be true? What's the catch? Ah, this servant is very independent minded! If you do not specify his job scope as thoroughly as you could and then show him how it is to be done, he would go about doing things his way. And you never want him to do that because once he has caught on, it is very difficult to make him change.

Make sure you do not leave out anything important and go through with him, step by step, how you would like it done. He might not pick it up very fast. But repetition is the key. During the training phase, make sure he does everything to the tee, based on how you would want it, again and again and again.

He could be stubborn initially. Sometimes, he is reluctant to do things your way, preferring the easy way out or what he is already used to. But if you can overcome this difficult phase, you'll have the most efficient and loyal servant you will ever find. Once you convert him to your ways, he is your greatest friend and protector. He will an asset you can rely on for the rest of your life.

For when he is properly instructed, he literally runs your life--more efficiently than you ever could. Life becomes worry and hassle free because he automatically handles things on your behalf. Once set on course, he does not deviate, which reemphasizes the importance of investing time in training him well.

What futuristic machine or robot is this? Am I talking about an AI-based personal assistance? No, it's someone who has been assigned to you since you were born. He could be your blessing or your curse, depending on how you use him. If you do not realize his existence in you life, then it's because he has been working quietly without you realizing it. And please take note: He may not be doing what's best for you! He may even think he is the master!

So seize him. Impose your authority over him. Tell him clearly what needs to be done and how it is to be done. Handhold him. Walk him through everything, ad nauseam. Show him who's boss! Ah, and before I forget, let me introduce you to him: his name is Habit.

The Labyrinth of the Heart

Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal

- from the Labyrinth, by Edwin Muir

I thought I'd try to write something different today. Since this is my blog and I am writing mainly for my own pleasure, I shall do what I like. I've been writing too many topics that focus on the mind. Let me for try to tap the heart for a change and sees what comes up.

There was a time when I used to write poetry. Being a fan of the romantic poets, what I wrote often came out in the style of Byron, Shelley or Wordsworth. During my university days, I had many of my poems published in the local tabloids. I shudder to reread them again for they are full of amateurishly lyrical lines, written in imitation of the masters. So much of them were on nostalgia for childhood and the solitude of city life.

Passions reign supreme when you are in the flush of youth. I had often thought that life was like fireworks: the sole purpose of life is to dazzle, to soar high and to express the innermost soul, no matter what the consequences. I believed in Romanticism perhaps to the extreme.

Sights and sounds consumed me. Music and movies were a big part of my life. To live was to be intoxicated by the senses. In Thoreau's words, "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life". I wanted to rediscover that Noble Savage within that modern life had forced us to conceal. I was bedazzled by the lyricism Wong Kar Wai's movies. The effect of watching Days of Being Wild for the first time, at the Majestic Theatre in PJ Old Town, I remember, was quite life-changing.

I read Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, and felt the heaviness of my soul--the burden of responsibilities, the imprisonment of a soul that yearned to be free. I read Bertrand Russell deep into the night seeking to find a glimmer of insight from the philosophers of old, and in my darkest hours, I found mild solace in Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga.

Every night, I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again. The heart trumps the head all the time for the restless heart is ever-urging one to move, to strive, to sacrifice. Oh, the heart with all its intrigues and treacheries!

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. And I had complete faith in the wisdom of my heart then. But then the heart is an organ of fire. When it is inflamed, it is often beyond our control. And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place.

A Workout of Self-Perfection

It's very early in the morning and I happen to be up early, as I've been doing over the past 1 week. You see, I'm trying to regain my former practice of being early to bed and early to rise. I find the hours in the morning after a good night's sleep very conducive to work. The mind is at its sharpest and the quality of work produced is often the best.

Many people, yours truly included, has a habit of working late at night. That is understandable because that often is the only stretch of time when we are not disturbed by the phone or other human interactions. Quality work requires a concentrated mind and that is usually brought about by silence.

Work is very challenging in today's era of social media and the incessant bombardment of content from the internet. The very space where you are supposed to concentrate and work is also the gateway to a thousand and one distractions. At a click of a link, I can launch myself off to another trip of distractions, surfing from one gratification to another. To concentrate on what you are supposed to do requires a lot of discipline.

Many of the young claim that they can work or study better if they are listening to music or having the TV on in the background. "It's not so boring". "I can still study effectively". That's what they'll claim. But have they every wondered why they can't just work and study without all these distractions? If they could, wouldn't the session be a lot more effective and intense? Wouldn't the utilization of time be a lot more efficient?

It is true that, with the skillful application of a conducive work environment, one can get into the mood for work easier. Sometimes music helps simply because it drowns out other types of distractions. The music helps your mind to focus, and at the very least keeping you at your desk and putting your mind in a pleasant state. To me, that is only useful as a starting point. Just like sweeteners to hide the bitterness of medicine.

Having enticed the mind to start working, one then needs to get into the groove of work. That is often difficult because work is often dull--reports to write, bugs to troubleshoot and other repetitive chores to execute. A lot of our distractions are willing inducements to put off work. It's much more interesting to surf news sites or watch trailers of the latest movies.

This is when a good metaphor for work helps. I try not to think of work as something you have to do to make money. Work to me is an exercise in self-perfection. I don't work, I workout. Just like going to the gym to build up your fitness. Running on the treadmill can be a boring chore too if you are not motivated by the fact that you are getting slimmer and fitter and hence physically healthier and perhaps looking more attractive.

Work is often dull when you look at what you need to accomplish as a long and laborious project. Break up work into tiny chunks of tasks. All you have to do for the next hour is this tiny piece of exercise. It's an exercise that has a finite payoff--say a chapter of a report done or a diagram for a presentation drawn. Look at the task in isolation and not to be too bothered about the larger effort of fitting it into the rest of your work. When it is done, you are already closer to your end goal. Work gets finished simply because you are constantly moving in a forward direction through these tiny steps. That is the most important thing: moving forward and not sideways or backwards.

Breakup your work into a list of tiny tasks. Have the list somewhere you can easily reference. There's always one task that's easier or more fitting to the present mood you are in. Use that to start the engine. Once the engine is started, it simply has a tendency to continue moving.

The mind is like a distracted child. You need to give it the right inducement for it to follow your orders. When you know how to tame your monkey mind, you have an ally who could help you perform miracles. And that's what I try to do everyday. And the fact that I'm typing the last few sentences of my weekly blog post is testament to the effectiveness of my method. Any now, I'm enjoying the payoff of my task: clicking the 'Publish' button. And I'm off on another productive week!

Modes of the Mind

I'm blogging a bit earlier than usual for the week. As I am sitting here at a cafe with my laptop running only on battery power, initially with the intention to do some work, I've decided to just use the limited time available to do my weekly post instead.

I'm going to be very speculative today. I've been thinking a lot on how the human mind has evolved over the ages. Today, we often hear that today's generation are prone Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), perhaps due to their busy digital lifestyle. They hop from one digital stimulus to another: from a tweet to an Instagram story next, to resuming a paused Youtube video before launching off a link received via Whatsapp, opening up an e-commerce site and before they know it, they have already purchased a gadget on offer and immediately shared their experience with friends on Facebook.

Well, we are all guilty of doing this, not just the millenials. What I'm curious is this: how has this kind of lifestyle affected the human mind? Have we lost our ability to concentrate? Has the digital lifestyle made us fickle and restless dopamine junkies, ever-seeking the next gratification at the speed of a swipe?

I'm also interested in playing the devil's advocate: is this in any way bad? Perhaps the world of the future requires people with the nimbleness of mind to switch context from one thing to another quickly and performing multiple tasks almost in parallel? Hasn't our ability to catch things that happen quickly improved a great deal because we are so used to watching sub-second music video sequences and grasping fleeting events that play on our tiny screens?

Doesn't today's computer games train the mind to be adapted to the challenges of the future where wars will be fought using remotely controlled drones and machines? Isn't this a 'skill' that our generation has mastered--a kind of evolutionary adaptation that give us a definite one-up on our lumbering ancestors?

If we read some of our classics like say Moby Dick, War and Peace or Les Miserables, we notice that they are all long works where the authors take their time to slowly build their characters and scenes. Certainly no publisher would accept new works in such forms anymore for today's reading audience. Was the reading public different then? Did people have that much concentration power and stamina to labour through such mighty tomes then for the sheer pleasure of it? Were their minds then different from ours? Isn't the so-called ADD-afflicted young simply functioning within the demands of their milieu, as we have compared to the exquisitely-paced thoughts of say, the Victorians?

This opens up an intriguing thought: How has our minds changed since the beginning of our species? The invention of writing has certainly changed the mind significant ways. What were our minds like before writing or even language was invented? Did we function purely on instincts? Were we better honed, just like many animals do, to our natural environment--detecting what is edible using a heightened sense of smell and simply knowing our physical location in space and time through a holistic experience of light, temperature and perhaps even earth's magnetic field? Did humans have the ability to communicate telepathically once? And more importantly, have we lost our natural instincts in exchange for the ability to reason and analyze, brought forth by the advent of the written word?

These are all interesting speculations. We need to be open to the ability of the mind to operate in many different modes. Psychedelic trips and the experiences of mystics show us that the normal mind is just the tip of the cognitive iceberg. By learning to operate and function through different mental modes, perhaps we can better tap the true potential of the human mind.

The Karma Disintegrator

I'm writing this on a Sunday instead of my usual Monday evening after work. It's a typical lazy Sunday at home where I tried to catch up on some podcasts, do a bit of light work and pursue my on-going task of de-cluttering my living spaces.

De-cluttering has been a major pursuit of mine these past months. Over the years, I've accumulated a lot of stuff--clothes, bags, cables, computer and other electronic accessories. Many of them have already outlived their usefulness. I have a simple rule of thumb these days: if I haven't touched them for more than a year, then there are a candidate for the garbage bin. Or if I find something that have totally forgotten about its existence, then I can certainly banish it out of my life forever.

I have a tendency to hold on to things for their sentimental value. I have old hotel receipts of memorable trips, movie ticket stubs, airline boarding passes and other pieces of memorabilia that mark significant chapters in my life. But with my newly acquired resolve to de-clutter, they have been made as sacred offerings to my 'karma disintegrator'--that's what I call my heavy duty paper-shredder.

Decluttering has become something spiritual to me. Every piece of old junk that I offer to the altar of the garbage bin carries residual karma that can be eliminated for good. I humour myself by thinking that this as a super-quick way of working out karma. I feel a deep sense of spiritual release after a heavy session of house-cleaning.

It is a great feeling to see your room cleared of dust and other unnecessary stuff. I like the feeling so much that I have even set myself a quota of ditching at least two garbage bags of unwanted stuff every week. I have been faithfully adhering to this ritual for the past couple of months and I'm amazed that I still have a huge pipeline of stuff waiting for disposal. At this rate, I'll probably end up with only bare necessities, which would be a wonderful achievement. Who knows, maybe I'll even become a minimalist!

Decluttering is just one part of the equation towards leading a more minimal life. We should also try to minimize acquisition and consumption. I am ultra-conscious of what I buy nowadays--weighing their usefulness against their potential to clutter my living spaces very carefully. Everything I buy has to contribute towards learning, improving productivity or simplifying life. Things that satisfy a certain craving of the senses or pander to the ego do not deserve any consideration at all in my life.

If you do not have any spiritual practices like daily prayer or meditation, consider regular decluttering instead. I think it ranks on par with the rest in terms of spiritual benefits. Instead of buying incense, prayer beads or other paraphernalia of worship, consider getting yourself a karma disintegrator. I guarantee that the gods will be very pleased with your offering of personal garbage.

The Fire of Religion

If I look back on all my blog postings, religion is one of the topics that I've written about most often. Just check them out here. For some reason, here I am again, parked at my favourite cafe, ready to write another blog post on the same subject.

One might ask why? Well, I guess the easy answer is that it is the only thing that troubles me so much. My views about religion have been well-articulated here before. I certainly do not belong to the new movement of militant atheism, though I agree with many of their views. I am sympathetic, even admire people who renounce the world to pursue a spiritual life. If you have read my list of favourite books in my previous posting, at least one of them is written by a very tradtional Hindu renunciate.

I've also written a post stating my belief that the religion you adopt is a matter of chance--the culture from which you happen to be born in. And if you are blessed with the good fortune of being able to freely adopt a religion of your choice, it could still be a matter of taste.

I've offered a pseudo-psychological theory of the value of religion as an 'architecture' by which one could find meaning and purpose in one's life. I've also come to accept the fact that, even if religion were to be eliminated from the world (say, the vast majority of the human race have been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust and all the religious books and artifacts in the world have been destroyed) mankind would still invent new religions through its remaining survivors. Just as they would surely come up with art and music.

Religion, like art, is an expression of human civilization. And like music, it might not even serve any useful purpose, but it will arise quite inevitably as an evolutionary byproduct. As long as the human species survives, a mode of existence will take place and that is expressed in its culture, art and religion.

The point I'm making is that, like it or not, we have to learn to live with religion. Societies can be run in a secular way, but we still have to allow people to express themselves, in their one way, through their religion-like how we allow and even encourage artistic expressions.

But the problem with religion are its practitioners. Like people who are fanatical about a certain type of music or soccer team, they think theirs is the best. That is the root of all the problems. The certainty of religious practitioners about their doctrinal version of the truth is the greatest problem that mankind faces. It is an infantilism that continues to plague us, even though we have come so far in terms of technological, political and social achievements.

The is the biggest issue and to me it outweighs things like climate change and economic uncertainty. It is the only thing that makes me feel angry and disappointed. There are perhaps more theists than atheists in this world but, I think the world would be a much better place if the latter dominates. The so-called religious people, don't know much about their own religion. And there-in lies the biggest problem.

Most God-fearing people are nice and decent human beings. But I would argue that their decency did not come from their knowledge of religion--it is human nature to try to be be nice to each other because that's the only way that one can exist in a society. Any other mode of behaviour will ostracize one from it. The Golden Rule is the norm simply because society disintegrates without it.

So, simple God-fearing, even slightly superstitious masses, who don't really give too much thought about the doctrines of their religion are quite harmless. The problem begins when religion is being mixed with idealism--that's like when a child starts playing with the proverbial fire.

If we bother to master the use of fire, we can actually go far. The problem is that most people don't. They thing that the small spark lit by a match is already a glimpse of the ultimate, that they want everyone to start playing with matches.

Some use this fire to cook and feed people, others use it for arson. Religion is a fire can engulf us if we let do not know how to handle it. If we can, I'd prefer that we do not play with it. Learn to cook with it instead.

Treasures on a Desert Island

Today is one of those days when I'm not sure what to write about. But here I am at one of my favourite spots after a simple poke bowl dinner, sipping an Americano, contemplating in front of an opened laptop.

One of the simple pleasures of life is sitting at a cafe, reading a good book. My current read is a rather surprising choice: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. This adventure yarn is of course a great classic, one that is often read, willing or unwillingly, by schoolkids. I've read simplified and abridged versions of the book before but I've never read the original.

There are many of such books which are popular among schoolkids of my time but they are often available in simplified English suitable for our age. Among these are works by Dickens like A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield and also short stories by Edgar Alan Poe. Who can forget the Telltale Heart, the Pit and the Pendulum, The Gold Bug and other immortal tales by that master of the strange and morbid.

Stories like Treasure Island thrilled me as a child. And now I'm reading the original as a sort of a light interlude in between heavier tomes of philosophy, psychology and spirituality. I try to vary my reading diet greatly. I would attempt to squeeze in some fiction every now and then. It is good to have a varied diet. I have many books that I had bought ages ago but have somehow remained unread still. They are like seeds that are awaiting their right time to germinate. Every now and then, one of these books would catch my fancy again, and it would become my main read--plucked from obscurity, like an instant celebrity.

My recent read The Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson is one of such books. I bought it in 1998 at the now closed Borders, Singapore where I had spent many happy evenings after work scouring its well-stocked shelves. The book is about the unique personalities who populate Silicon Valley during the good rush days of the dotcom boom. Reading it brought back many pleasant memories of those heady times when the internet threatened to revolutionize every industry out there. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

A question often asked of celebrities is what books they would bring if they were marooned on a remote island. I like to amuse myself by thinking about this too. If I were to be allowed only 10 books to read for the rest of my life on a desert island, which ones would they be?

My selection would be very eclectic. Firstly, Merging with Siva, by Gurudeva would certainly be on my list. I would say it is one of the books that had influenced me a great deal during my years in Singapore. Every time I dip into its pages again, I unravel another layer of its wisdom. It is books like this that can nourish me for an entire lifetime.

History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell would certainly be among my selection too. Only the other day, I was fondly flipping through the yellowing pages of the paperback copy of this book that I still keep on my shelf. I still find great pleasure in Russell's very opinionated sweep of the greatest ideas from all the major philosophers of the Western tradition.

For poetry, I would certainly bring along Palgrave's Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics. I've written about the significance of this book before on a previous post. Like an old friend, it has remained a faithful and indispensable companion to me through my entire teenage and adult life.

Thus far I've only named three of the ten possible books that I would bring to a desert island. I won't be able to decide on the rest of them at this point in time--there are simply too many to choose from. But those three that I've mentioned, I am certain of them because of their emotional and intellectual influence they have had and continue to have on me. And on that hypothetical desert island, if I have these books to keep me company, who needs buried treasures?

Mining Meaning from Mindlessness

It's a working day again after a week-long break for Hari Raya. I have been reasonably productive though during the holidays, working on my favourite projects. I like to put every second to good use. Even idleness has to be 'meaningful' idleness.

Now, how do we gauge what is meaningful and what is not? Why should 'meaning' be an important aspect of life? Why do we have a need to seek meaning?

Meaning is a vector--it has both magnitude and direction. Doing something meaningful in life means that you have a direction or goal to aim for. And then you expend time and energy towards it. How much time, how much energy you invest---that's the 'magnitude' part of the meaning vector.

As long as our lives are guided by over-arching principles and purpose, even moments of idleness will automatically have meaning. How? Let's say you are watching TV, channel surfing randomly until you hit something that catches your fancy. And then you sit there on the couch for an hour, watching whatever that caught your attention. Is this activity meaningful or a total waste of time?

One could argue that watching TV can be meaningful in many ways. Maybe you just need to relax and take your mind off work for a while. That could be a good reason. It's a 'sharpening the saw' activity that is essential for us to be fit and ready when we are required to do so.

But sometimes we tend to over-exaggerate the need to relax. A short nap or a walk in the park could be a better way to refresh oneself. Most of the time, watching TV is just a way of putting off work. It's simply easier to press a button on the remote control and let your mind shift aimlessly in tandem with the channels. It's basically a form of daydreaming.

We can, if we choose to, watch TV in a more meaningful manner. Many TV series are quite educational. I'm not talking about serious documentaries that are obviously directly educational, but even fictional ones. Fictional films, drama or serials, especially the high-quality ones, can help us learn a lot about history or other domain subject matter like law, or government, or criminal investigation. We just need to be smart to know where real-life ends and fiction begins. All fiction are based on real-life situations, only exaggerated for dramatic effect. If we are smart in knowing these boundaries, we can extract the essence from the dross.

Hence watching TV is like a process of mining. There's a lot of junk that's being fed into our minds, but every now and then, a gem of a lesson emerges and you lap it up with relish. We are like those underwater filter-feeding creatures. They live by allowing water to flow continuously through their 'mouths' and have food nutrients extracted from it.

Watching TV is certainly not energy sapping, only time-consuming. So it is an activity that's performed at the cost of your time. But always remember this: time is a finite resource. Even though we can filter educational nutrients from this activity, it is better to be smarter in the process. We can enter into this low energy mode but still have a better flow of content fed into our minds. That way, we get the most value for the time spent.

Actively choose what you feed your mind with. That way, you can better control the quality of meaningful nutrients that are being consumed. And do have a conscious intent to extract. Extraction requires some effort. Energy is involved, but it is minimal, if you've already acquired the habit. To extract, you will need to be questioning, comparing, assimilating and noting facts throughout the entire experience. Only when these activities are present in your mind, and not simply passive reactivity, can knowledge or even wisdom be extracted.

So, treat the mindless experience of watching TV as a process of mining. You'll be surprised to find out how much meaning you can extract from it.