The Spirituality of Money

Finally, I found a bit time for myself to read, write and blog on this errand-filled Saturday. I have chosen a place which serves alcohol and here I am typing out these lines while taking sips from my cool pint of draught beer. 

It hasn't rained today--yet--and I'm here savouring the good vibes of a pre-Christmas weekend. As I've mentioned elsewhere before, this is the best time of year. It's like you've finally arrived at your destination after a long flight and the plane is taxiing gently down the runway.  It's the happiness of arrival, of coming home or escaping from it.

All spiritual teachers will tell you that bliss is your natural state. Happiness is finding that inner peace within. It is of course, easier said than done. We spend our entire lives chasing external happiness or attempting to show others we are 'happy'. 

We think that happiness comes from acquiring more things and being recognised for our worldly achievements.  I don't disagree. One needs to go all out and fight the good fight, for only in doing so would one be able to understand the kind of satisfaction that worldly success brings...and the pain of losing it.

Once you've acquired material success, you will realise that it is not easy to let go of it. You are forever 'handicapped' by your need for luxury and comfort.  Acquiring riches is only half the story; the other half is keeping it. In the movie Wall Street, the character played by Daryl Hannah, the trophy girlfriend of the protagonist, Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen, said: "When you've had money and lost it, it can be much worse than never having had it at all".

Money is not evil. It is actually a great teacher, even a spiritual one. To acquire money, you usually have to go through a lot of hardwork and pain. But once you've had it, you'll realise that what you thought was sufficient, actually falls short.  There's always someone who earns more than you. So you want more, for being just rich among the super-rich is equally or even more painful than being poor among the rich.

If your wants are only ever to increase--a fancier car, a bigger house--then you'll never ever come to a point where you'll consider yourself rich enough. One can become rich easier by pursuing it from both ends. How? Continue making more money and at the same time reduce your wants.

If you have a car now, can you learn to live without one? By reducing your material needs, you grow spiritually. You have less attachment to things and are not affected by their absence. This is enormously liberating. It's like sprinting towards the finishing line to find that it is also advancing towards you!

Turn your pursuit of material success into a spiritual one by using it as a tool for understanding the pain of attachment. Be grateful for the blessings of wealth, if it happens to come your way. But most important of all, take it as a means to an end. By going all out to pursue riches, you are facing all your spiritual obstacles head-on. The path to enlightenment is paved with money.  Just watch out for the potholes! 

 

The End of Ecstasy

Today, I'm at McDonalds, which happens to be the most convenient place for me to hang around while waiting to pick up mom later from the hairdresser. I thought it would be fun to order a McD meal and use the opportunity to blog. I haven't eaten a McD meal for a while and relish in the chance to indulge a bit in the guilty pleasure of fast-food.

I rarely complain about food because I think all food tastes good when you are hungry.  Food and wine are simply accompaniment to good company and conversation. And when I'm eating alone, I'll either be reading or writing; food becomes fuel for thought.

Is food the topic of today's blog? Why not? We Malaysians make a big fuss about it, always claiming we have the best food in the world. I do enjoy local food but my preference is biased because my tastebuds have been shaped by what I've been accustomed to since childhood. 

I've learned that most food would taste good if you approach it without any preconceptions. I would bet you'll enjoy anything that you can stuff into your mouth if you have been starving the day and you have not tasted a properly cooked meal for some time. That's how I would judge food--to always approach it  with a hungry stomach, real or imagined. That way, they usually taste good.

Personally, I have a preference for simple food, which could be eaten while you are reading or writing. I agree, that's certainly not mindful eating, where one is supposed to focus completely on what one is chewing, tasting and savouring. Eating can be a good meditation exercise. But I reserve that state of mind for other things. Eating, as I'm doing now, simply provides the contemplative interludes in between sentences and paragraphs.

I know that for most of us, eating is one of the great pleasures of life. But I'm often amused by how unashamed we are about our fondness for it. Malaysians, especially. All we talk about is food, boastful and proud even about our cravings for it. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against a hedonistic indulgence in culinary delights, just that I sometimes wonder, if one were to express a similar enthusiasm towards sex, would that be equally acceptable? I always find that exaggerated expression of delight on the faces chefs on TV whenever they sample food, amusing.

We live for the pleasures of life: food, sex, love and adventure. If you find that all these things are ultimately empty, then you have a problem...or a calling. You have to plunge yourself deeply into the realms of pleasure to be able to know that. 

If at the end of every ecstasy, there's only emptiness, we know something for sure: that's why you are still reading this blog.

Existential Questions on a Lazy Saturday Afternoon

It's the Christmas shopping season now and there's a good vibe in the air.  I've always enjoyed this time of the year. It's a good time to relax a little and look back on the year that had passed. It's also a good time to catch up with old friends again.

Recently I've been spending a lot of time in the morning taking long walks in the park. One of the regulars there whom I chat occasionally with asked me (after finding out that I'm still single), if I would be concerned about not having any descendants. I find that question very interesting, because the first thing that popped into my mind was: "why should it be?" 

Don't I want to get married and have children to carry on my family name? That seems to be a very reasonable thing to do as a biological creature with a driving urge to procreate. Our genes, are selfish and want to preserve themselves, at our expense. We die, but our genes continue on. That is the whole game of evolution. 

But I did not choose the genes that I currently carry in my body. Where was I before I was born? If it didn't bother me then, why should it bother me when I'm gone? And who and where is this 'I', before and after I'm gone?

Let's say, there's an immortal soul that lives in heaven after one has done one's time on Earth. Does this soul sit in front of a cosmic TV and watch if his descendants are doing justice to his name? Why do we care about our legacy after death? And what makes us think that our post-death souls would be interested in such things?

Is the soul simply our software code and memory state transferred to run on a different substrate after death? What makes souls think that each and every one of them are unique and worth preserving? What defines your uniqueness? Is it your personality--your likes and dislikes, values and attitude towards life and other people, including your many faults and foibles? Is each one of us a unique node in the universe?

If it is, and the project of this cosmic life is simply self-preservation, is procreation a part of the soul's purpose and project? But what about its spiritual goal to reunite with God? The Multiplicity finally merging back into Unity? What happens to your uniqueness then, when you are finally one with God? Will you still be you with your ego and bad attitude, smirking and basking in the final glory of your success?

Those are all very interesting questions and each one of us, I think, tries our best to grapple with the mystery of our existence. Our instinct prompts us to self-preserve and procreate. But if this is the only purpose of our existence, what is considered a 'successful' existence?  Is a man who fathers many children to carry on his genes, a 'successful' individual? 

Surrounded by all these questions, we try to define a purpose for our existence. Some try to make a mark in the world by accumulating as much wealth as possible and perhaps in the process help as many people as possible too, while others dedicate their lives to piety, to find God. They are all noble goals. No one can fault you, if you choose one or any combination of them. Who has the authority to judge you, when everyone is in the same existential boat?

Go, be the human animal that you are. Be fruitful and multiply! And. be the spiritual being, which you think your true self is, existing even after death. Accumulate as much merits as you can, so that you qualify for whatever rewards that the Supreme Being has in store for you, as He (or perhaps his prophets?) has defined it. 

Do whatever you think is right. I think we'll all be alright. We'll all die for sure. And who knows, maybe we'll get a chance to revisit this subject again and compare notes? I'll live for that!

Pain, Par for the Course

I have some time alone today and I am happy to have an hour or two of quiet reflection. There's only another month left to the year. Even though it is raining everyday, this is the best time of the year for me. And I plan to enjoy every moment of it.

How do I enjoy life? What is enjoyment for me? A day that passes peacefully with nothing extraordinary happening is already a great joy for me. My bar for happiness is set very very low, which is why I'm rarely unhappy.

There were moments in my life over the past decade when I did have to face some difficult times but I took them all in my stride and I was grateful that I learned something valuable from those experiences. To be able to sleep well every night is a great blessing and to wake up every morning alive and kicking is already something worth celebrating. Now you see how low my happiness bar is set.

Can money buy happiness? Yes, but it also buys you an equivalent amount of pain. If you want the kind of happiness that money buys, then be strong and wise enough to tackle the pain that comes with it. When you have the capability to accept pain, pain is just pain. You take it on the chin and it ends there. If pain is suffered consciously, in the very moment itselfr, there's no hidden costs or compounding interest to be paid in the form of chronic mental stress.  

Some people see work as stress and recoil from it. But remember, that's also why you get paid for doing the job. Your job exists because there are problems that need to be solved for the business to function. If you want the happiness that a fat salary buys, be happy too to take the stress that comes along with it. 

With experience and wisdom, you will develop the strength to handle different challenges in an optimal fashion. You'll understand why certain things are painful and then you'll learn how not to take the blows, without injuring yourself.

I've written in another blog article how as long as we are in tune with the carrier wave of life, we will never be carried away by peak ecstatic experiences nor be devastated by any misfortune in life. The oscillations of life should not break the fabric of your existence. You are existence-consciousness-bliss -- that's the triple attribute of your true nature, the ultimate state of perfection, untainted by ego and illusion.

All that wanting, desiring and posturing that you exhibit in your mortal life, one day, you'll see how insignificant and petty they are. But at the moment, they don't appear so to you. Your career and your standing in society seem like non-negotiable pre-conditions for happiness. So embrace them with wisdom and maturity. There will be pain. But it's alright. For pain is par for the course.

The Quest for Quietude

A blinking cursor on a blank screen. This is how I began this blog post. 

I posted an article yesterday and as promised, I'm blogging again today to make up for an earlier week which I did not. I've learned to enjoy the freshness and challenge of a blank page.  It's an empty canvas that beckons a God-like moment: Let there be light.

There's a lot of information embedded in this blog of mine which I started more than 20 years ago. Now with the use of AI in the form of large language models (LLM), I could easily interrogate myself and distill the essence of my thinking and belief system.

Writing is revelatory because it comes from the depths of one's soul. I try to make the act of writing as simple as possible--friction free, so that thoughts manifest themselves, easily and un-selfconsciously onto these blank pages. 

Actually, when it comes to blogging, there are no pages--just an infinite scroll of whiteness on the screen. I could sit down, type and pour out my thoughts, and it would swallow it up without judgement.

Every word etched here is a moment in my life lived. Every choice of word came from the mysterious within. They arose spontaneously like hot lava spewed out from the turbulent core. How much of me has been captured here? 

In a way, there's not much, because I don't write a lot about the factual events of my life. You probably can't even figure out where I work and what I do for a living, nor where I live.  

My life appears to be outwardly dull these days, unlike decades ago when I used to travel a lot. But I do love the peace of mind that comes from a simple life. I truly appreciate the dullness of a drab existence. 

Let others seek peak experiences and exhilarating moments of ecstasy. These youthful pursuits are no longer my cup of tea. I revel instead in the contentment that comes with calmness. 

A sip of Earl Grey, a glimpse of greenness outside my window through the drizzle of November rain, I live each moment as they happen; How I welcome every conscious sight, and marvel at the occasion of a subconscious insight.  

That's all that one could aspire for. My quest now is that of quietude. And hopefully through these wispy words of mine captured here in this blog, scattered in the vastness of internet,  a glimpse of that magnificent beauty and happiness that I experience is being captured. 

Waves in the Ocean of Oblivion

I still have not made up for my lost week of blogging, hence I'm trying again to post two articles this weekend, since I did not manage to do so last week. It's still Friday evening and the weekend has just begun. Isn't this the best time of the week?

Last weekend was also a busy one for me, as I had to take care of a lot of family matters. Gone are the days when I could go out and not return home; sleep in the office or in my car or just hop on a train ride to nowhere. Circumstances change in life, but one thing has remained constant throughout: I've not lost my enthusiasm for knowledge and spiritual insights. All the articles in my blog over the last 20 years have borne out that fact.

I live for insights. An insight is a moment of clear-seeing--discerning a pattern from a mass of information. It's seeing the hidden connection between things, oftentimes confirming a hunch I've always had. Writing this blog is part of this quest for insights. A lot of them emerged during the act of writing, which I consider a sacred act.

To write is to commune with the gods. All inspiration is divine in origin, for it comes from that Collective Unconscious which artists and philosophers tap into. The prophets of old get their revelations from god because they have cultivated minds that are capable of peeking into this source of insight.

We create God and gods because that is the most natural thing for the human mind to do. Archetypes are mental attractors or reccurent patterns that inevitably form when human minds are allowed to self-express. All works of art are abstract representations, glimpses of this unconscious wellspring of wisdom.

The more we dwell upon the nature of things, the more we realise that the reality that we see around is quite 'unreal'. Unreal in a sense that we can never know what's out there, because what we experience is only a small slice of it, interpreted through our senses. And there is really no Self inside that looks at the Cartesian theatre screen, deciding whether to switch channels. There's only the experiencing and no experiencer. The enduring soul or spirit that you feel animating your body, heart and mind is nothing but an emergent pattern, which persists momentarily.

If we use the language of Advaita Vedanta, we can say that ultimate reality is Brahman and the mind and the world are but manifestations of it. When the ocean is perturbed, waves result and each wave-mind thinks of itself as a permanent existence, propagating across space, swelling on occasion into tsunamis,  as mortal souls like us do across time, aspiring to grandiose dreams. 

Waves go about with their petty concerns oblivious of the ocean of which they are a part of. Each wave thinks that it is unique and worth preserving. And when they do subside, they imagine themselves resurfacing elsewhere in some wave heaven, in full glory, retaining the perfection of their remembered forms.

Knowledge, Lost and Found

 I didn't post anything last weekend because I was completely tied up with the mundane but essential chores of life, which left me no time to catch my breath and reflect. I'm trying to make up for it by attempting to post 2 articles this weekend.

Here I am, having a head-start now on a Friday afternoon. I have at least an hour's time before I start preparing to head downtown for a social gathering. The weather these days is very unpredictable, I'll try to take the train, if possible. That will give me some time to enjoy some audio content on my phone.

I do have a backlog of podcasts, lectures and audiobooks to consume. My regular morning walks recently have given me an opportunity to catch up a bit on them. It's something I look forward to everyday.

Whenever I get to dine alone outside, I'll always bring a book with me. The other day, I was eating at the mamak restaurant nearby and was engrossed in a hardcover book by Bernard Lewis about the history of the Middle-East. When it was time for me to leave, I left it on the empty chair beside me. I only realised it the next morning when I wanted to resume my reading.

It was interesting analysing the emotions that arose in me when the thought of losing the book sank in. The first thought was:  I'm not able to finish reading the book. But then I realised that it could easily be remedied as I can buy another copy from the internet.

Then it also sank in on me that I do have a bit of sentimental attachment to the book as an object. It's a beautiful hardcover book, which I had wrapped with plastic and it has stayed unread in my library for over 18 years! I had the date inscribed on the cover page, with my name on it. 

I did not read it earlier because I had found the author's prose difficult. But I've read many books by the famed historian Bernard Lewis since then, and had thoroughly enjoyed every one of them. So when I reopened this tome again not too long ago, I was sucked into it again. I was about a third through its 450 pages, when I lost it. 

Losing a sentimental object is painful. But as someone who actively practise non-attachment to material things, I understood the momentary pain of the loss and resolved to let it go. I also comforted myself with the thought that, if the book did end up in the hands of someone, it would likely be one who appreciates books, or at least has some curiosity about the history of the Middle East. I'll be doing some good by setting this book free in the universe.

Reading and rereading my old books, and seeing their contents in a new light is one of the greatest pleasures of life. I delight in the fact that I've matured and progressed in my comprehension of topics that were previously beyond my grasp. This Lewis book, is one of those reads.

I decided to try my luck to see if I could still recover it from the mamak place, which is a regular hangout of mine.  During lunchtime the next day, I drove to the place again, and enquired with the cashier about my 'buku' which I had left on table 13.  He was initially surprised but then asked me about the colour of the book. White, of course. And lo and behold, he produced the glorious tome from the shelf behind him! Even my pencil, tucked in an elastic band around the cover is intact!

I was elated to be reunited with my book again, grasping it again in my hand with sheer gratitude. The tactile feel of a hardcover book is one of those indescribable pleasures that bibliophiles like me enjoy. Which is why I'm still hesitant to move to ebooks.

This brief lost-and-found episode has made me reflect on my attachment to things. And I know the pangs of pain that I had felt from the loss was directly proportional to that sense of possession that I have over this book, an object that is impermanent and slowly disintegrating over time. A relationship with a book, is not unlike that with a human being. And I remember many happy years ago, I had written a blog post about how people are like 'interactive books'.  There's so much that one could learn from these relationships, human or otherwise.

Pitfalls of the Path

Today I'm in my study and personal library, slowly nursing my pot of Earl Grey.  It's a moment respite, from the drudgery of my daily and weekly chores. I write to relax, and reflect. Hopefully, some gem of insight would emerge...

 Strangely for the last 2 weeks I find myself writing about God. For someone who professes no religion, it seems rather strange, doesn't it? Have I finally found my true spirituality in the worship of god? Certainly not. And no, it's not because I think it is a path not worth pursuing. It's definitely a legitimate and effective path, practised by millions in the world, epitomised in the Bhagavad Gita as Bhakti Yoga, also known as the path of devotion.

It appears to be an 'easy' path, because it latches on to our natural human tendency to obey an alpha leader. It makes god a conscious being, like us, only more powerful. We can easily imagine such a god, by projecting all the virtuous quality we can find in humans into the superlative realm. The God model is one that anyone can understand. We do not need a lot of deep philosophical knowledge to be able to grasp it. To worship, is an activity as natural to us as eating or sleeping. 

To the more intellectually sophisticated, worshiping a supernatural deity or deities seems like a rather primitive practice--something that borders on superstition. How wrong they are! All forms of devotional worship, if practised correctly are no less effective than any spiritual practise that requires superhuman feats of concentration, self-mortification or a lifetime of scriptural study.

Even though I've been referring to the deity in singular most of the time, my views about devotional practices extends to polytheistic worship too. I know that many monotheist believers tend to think themselves as spirituality superior to those who worship many gods, but I do not see anything wrong with it. The worship of idols and images is simply a natural expression of spiritual devotion, provided that it is practised in the right spirit--as aids and not as ends in themselves.

You see, there's a simple principle in operation in all theistic worship: by simply shifting one's sense of importance from oneself to someOne else--we immediately have a grasping point for tackling the ego. What better way to deflate it than to subjugate it before a more powerful one? A master-slave architecture is employed here, and it is one that is simple and intuitive.

Acknowledge that there's a more powerful being out there--our Creator--who determines everything. The secret of the devotional path is to surrender one's will to a higher one. Submitting to God's will is the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. And when done correctly, one is filled with love for the divine. One's ego has no place in the system, because every manifestation of will or desire within one's being is subsumed and aligned with that of the Lord.  

How brilliant is that! The ego is simply put in check by our human biological instinct to submit to an alpha figure. Instead of having to tackle a hardened rock of an ego using the chisel and hammer of meditation, we simply disarm it with a manoeuvre akin to spiritual judo. Everything is the will of God. You simply surrender and worship Him.

What are the pitfalls of this path? Unfortunately, its simplicity is both its strength and its weakness. God worshipers think that because they obediently perform the prescribed rules and rituals of worship, they are immediately protected by some sort of personal mafia. Instead of diminishing the ego, they further inflate it by using God as their symbol of pride and treat it as another cause to fight for.  They think they are superior to others who do not worship the way they do. They succumb to superstition and bicker over the minutiae of religious dogma. 

The path of spirituality is certainly filled with pitfalls. One can easily get sidetracked or be blinded by falsehood. A love of God can easily be inflamed into religious zealotry; spiritual epiphany into intellectual arrogance; the submission to God becomes an excuse for the subjugation of unbelievers. It is a simple and beautiful path to reach heaven, but one wrong turn can also lead to hell.

The Art of Abstraction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The God Model

Feeling rather thirsty after my early morning exercise, I decided to go to a place where I could have a cool beer while I dive into my weekly blogging routine. And so here I am now, seated comfortably outdoors with a pint of Tiger, tapping out these words, figuring out the topic for today's blog.

Part of my reason for blogging is to allow myself to figure out my personal philosophy of life. Being someone with "no religion",  I'm simply devising my own system of values to live by. What are the fundamental beliefs in this personal philosophy of mine?

Fundamental belief number one is that there are no fundamental beliefs. Everything can be challenged. Religious people would say that one must have faith in something, say God, to be a moral person. If one does not believe in a higher authority, a creator whom we have to answer to in our afterlife, wouldn't one end up as a morally degenerate person leading a purposeless life?

I have no problems with the belief in God. If that model works for you, by all means, go ahead and live by the precepts set forth by the religion of your birth or adoption. If it gives you meaning, purpose and joy, all the better. 

I personally learned a lot from all the theistic religions of the world and do enjoy the wisdom of their scriptures and the beauty of their rituals and liturgies. But to ask me to swear allegiance solely to one particular faith is like asking me to declare that Jazz (or any other genre of music) is the one and only true music. No, my life will be a lot less meaningful if I listen only to Jazz and consider Baroque music, keroncong or rap music 'heresies'.  I will continue to listen to all types of music and appreciate the pleasure and insight that comes from them.

Now, if I don't strictly follow the tenets of any religion, how would I know what's good or bad? With no fear of God, wouldn't I degenerate into an evil person? 

Does anyone seriously believe that would happen? Think about it. It takes a lot of skill and hardwork if one were to cheat, rob and kill for a living life. The bulk of humanity has to live together with their fellow humans. A small group of misguided individuals might resort to unethical means to get certain advantages in life, but at what cost? 

If you are a selfish person with no integrity, do you think you would be able to secure a good job for long? You simply ostracise yourself from the society of people. You wouldn't have any friends. Your own family members will despise you. And in extreme cases, you could even run foul of the law.

It is practical to be moral and ethical. You don't need any holy book to tell you that. What holy books do is something more than morality. It attempts to answer deeper philosophical questions about your existence and its purpose. That's the real appeal of religion. If religion exists simply because of a need for a code of ethics, then it is superfluous. 

God created you and the universe. And there are some expectations on how you should act and believe so that you are saved, avoid pain, transcend death and find eternal joy. 

Wouldn't I lose out on that, if I don't belong to a creed that promises those things? Perhaps. It doesn't bother me because I think it is a bit insulting to God (if He exists) to consider him a kind of paternalistic figure who loves his children, gives them free will to choose and then proceeds to punish them by banishing them to the fires of hell if they disobey Him. 

Well, I certainly wouldn't punish you if I were God, because I would understand why you went astray, given your life experiences. Some of your flaws were even genetic, which is God's own handiwork. Why blame the product, when there are factory defects?

In electrical circuit theory where a physical network is modelled using idealised discrete components such as voltage sources, resistors, inductors and capacitors, we understand that these ideal components don't exist in real life but it is a close enough mathematical model that will help us calculate and predict the behaviour of a circuit. Without these 'gods', the human mind will not be able to accomplish all the electrical engineering feats that we all see today.

The mind needs such conceptual models to navigate the real world. There are materials in the world that produce resistance, converting electrical energy to heat but they are not perfectly discrete lumps that are localised in an ideal conductor. In some circumstances, we would need to use calculus and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism to really model the behaviour of networks more accurately but for most practical purposes, we don't. These idealised discrete components are good enough. The God model is good enough too, for most people.

We are life forms perceiving our environment through our finite array of senses and have brains that tend to process information in a very specific way. So we devise models to explain and navigate the world around us. These models of the world arose naturally, almost inevitably.

We like myths and stories, because for some reason, the circuitry of the human brain has a facility for narrative arcs, something with a beginning, middle and end. There must be tension and release; agony and ecstasy; damnation and salvation. Thus we resonate with the eschatology of religion.

We have certain expectations on how the universe should be, because we live in an every day world that has creators, objects and purposes. Our vocabulary is limited to that. So God and gods are true in this very specific view of the universe.

Does God exist? Do resistors exist? Yes, of course. Can we come up with better models? Most certainly. But understand that the human mind can only comprehend things using models, described using a human language that grew out of every day experiences. 

One must be aware of the limitations of every conceptual model. Insisting that your model is the only true one can only be a recipe for disaster. The God model, like any other model has its flaws. But it is an inevitable model which fills a specific psychological need in humans. One thing's for sure: it will be endlessly modified, recast and reframed to meet the changing needs of the times.  

Value with a Vengeance

Is it possible for any one of us to exist as an individual without association to any community, society, tribe or organisation? The moment you are born, you are already a part of an organisation--your family. You don't get to choose that. You are a passive recipient of their love, care, advice and admonitions. The overriding concern is your survival and your role as the progeny of the family line.

You are taught to speak and you learn to express your needs, your likes and dislikes through the medium of language--which you now know as your mother tongue. The words, phrases, idioms, sayings and proverbs that come with that language become a part of you, shaping your thinking and your view of the world.

So, no one is ever born free. You are born with very specific initial conditions, or what I often refer to as boundary conditions, that limit and constraint the way to think and interact with the world. It's like the instruction set of a processor. Your primordial personality is cast in the assembly language of your mother tongue.

As you grow older, you learn more things--specific subjects and life skills that are independent of the language of instruction. But how well you master those skills depends to a large degree on your genetic makeup--in other words, your hardware--and the primitives of your operating system. The skills are like the applications you have on your computer. They are 'installed' through a process called 'education'.

When you go out and work in a company for instance, which is set up with a specific purpose, you become a node in a larger organisation, applying your higher level skills and knowledge to serve a particular role and function demanded by the organisation. The company attempts to impose its values on you too, through its corporate culture.

You also realise that there's an even larger organisation that you belong to--your country of which you are a citizen. It too has its own aspirations, values and culture, imposed upon you through the law and constitution and the public education that it provides you. As a good citizen, you are supposed to express a love and affinity towards these values and be 'patriotic'.

Emotionally however, the temperament and the values that you honour were forged during your upbringing by that default organisation that you were born into. That, is the culture of your family and your tribe, which to a large extent, shapes your personality. Even though genetics do play a big hand in determining who you are, it's the culture that determines which genetic traits get expressed or suppressed.

Your choice or music, religion, food and movies that you watch, and perhaps the political party that you vote for, are determined by these more primitive layers of your psyche. but are the values of your lower layers in congruence with the higher layer ones? 

A lot of the problems of humanity are caused by these differences in value. What you think is self-evident truth to you and your tribe might not be so to another. Are we able to appreciate these differences as 'diversity' which makes an ecosystem thrive and agree to celebrate them? Or are we bent on out-arguing the other party so that you can convince them that your values are greater than theirs?

Some values, especially religious ones, are deal-breakers. There's no compromise, because these values are already embedded in the psyche of the people.  When we can't convert the other party to ours, we resort to doing so by force. That's how humanity has been spending their time throughout history.

Whenever we find ourselves pursuing our cherished values with a vengeance,  let's ask ourselves, how did these values arise in first place? Can we co-create better ones? That is definitely a spirit that I would value.

A Potential Difference

Welcome to this moment. Yes, this moment. Every moment is here, now and eternal. When I connect with this moment, I am awake. Conscious. 

I have an hour to write something today. Let's analyse the previous sentence. It was a thought: I was trying to project into the future when I would have already written my blog entry today. That's the nature of a thought. It's always about the future or the past. When I think of something, I set up a tension in the mind: there's an idea of how things should be and how it is now. This gap is a 'potential difference'--almost like a voltage (V) between two points in a electrical circuit which enables current (I) to flow.

Whenever there is a potential difference, there's energy to do work. Action happens in the world, transforming its state, which then sets up a new potential difference.  Emotionally, this potential difference is often felt as a kind of 'stress'. We could waste all this potential energy in stressing about what we are supposed to do--in my case, what to write.

Stress is like the resistance in a piece of conductor wire. In an ideal conductor, resistance, (R) is zero. But in the real world, every conductor has some finite amount of resistance, which causes energy to be lost as heat (I-squared R) .Stress is like heat--wasted energy. We should try to minimise stress, every time we feel a potential difference in the mind. 

In my case, my task is simply to make use of this potential difference to produce words and sentences as smoothly and efficiently as possible, without worry or hesitancy. Every outpouring from my mind, driven by this potential difference, if I'm focussed and conscious, should be sincere and true.

I have to trust the mind to reveal the truth of things, as nature is the truth. If my words reflect my thoughts which are natural products of nature, then I have nothing to worry about. It is as it should be. Every word produced every moment is precise and accurate. 

But I'm not a perfect conductor. There's obviously some amount of stress, uncertainty and obfuscation due to my imperfections. But that's alright. The whole purpose of this blog is to allow this process to unfold, so that I become a better conductor of thoughts. 

And then there's this thing called the ego. Thoughts change the medium that conducts it.  It's like the conductor becoming oxidised, making it a less efficient conductor. Ego is formed as we interact with the world, congealing around our imperfections, creating impedances which further morph the flow of the truth.

I write to see my own imperfections. I analyse the stresses in my mind and trace them to their roots. Wherever possible, I untangle them. When the mind is quiet, only truth can emerge. This truth is to be savoured, refined and assimilated into the system. When that happens, we call it a moment of insight, an epiphany.

It's such a miracle; I started with a blank page. I had a thought and I wrote it down: I have an hour to write something today. An hour has now passed. That one thought had spawned off a series of neuronal firings, resulting in more thoughts, in physical movements of my fingers and voila, I have a blog article. And who knows, it'll probably trigger thoughts (which it already does, because you've come this far) and set things into motion in your universe. Have I made a difference?

The Curse of Cults

It's mid-afternoon already on a Sunday, when everyone is having this sinking feeling that the weekend is coming to an end already, and soon we'd be back in our daily grind. I'd wanted to blog yesterday but some family chores swallowed up all my time. 

Today, I managed to steal sometime to come here to Cyberjaya to check on my apartment. The sky is dark and cloudy outside as I type these words. I'm not going to linger here long, but hopefully long enough for me to finish writing this blog post, which is going to touch on the topic of...religion (again!).

I reread one of the many articles I've written on this subject, one entitled The Fire of Religion and find myself nodding in agreement with what I wrote in 2019. Do I have anything new to add? Probably not. But since this is my own blog, I make all editorial decisions and religion it is!

Religion is sensitive because it is something a believer holds deeply in the heart, it is its refuge in times of difficulty and it promises salvation in a life which could prove difficult and challenging, not to mention the truth about our mortality, which confronts every one of us. If we ridicule someone's belief, people feel it like a gut punch--being hit at one's most vulnerable spot. 

Religion is couched in rituals and doctrines because these are great intuition pumps (to borrow Daniel Dennett's term). We need drama and stories to induce a particular state of mind in an individual and also a community. I admire religion for its ability to bind communities together and make them embrace a larger purpose. When we have this going as part of human civilisation, we call it culture; when it is systematised and enhanced with a dose of metaphysics, it becomes religion. But when religion is taken more seriously than it should be, we veer into the region of cultism.

There's a certain allure in being a member of a cult, that sense of belonging to a higher cause. And the follower feels 'fortunate' that he or she has been accepted into this 'privileged' group. They feel protected and blessed under the embrace of a cult leader who is charismatic and seemingly wiser than everyone else. Whatever the leader says is taken to be the undisputable truth.  

Cultism is like mob behaviour.  The mob doesn't think--it only acts, sometimes violently, when stirred into a frenzy. When you surround yourself with people who are fanatical about some cause, it is easy to be caught up in the excitement and romance of it all.  Sports fans supporting their favourite team are like that too. As loyal supporters of football clubs like Liverpool or Manchester United, we willingly submit ourselves to a cult, all in the name of good fun. Hopefully that's as far as it'll go.

The Communist parties in every country during and after the WWII were also religious cults. They all had charismatic leaders and members who blindly follow the doctrines of the cult to disastrous consequences. Cults like to think that they are saving themselves and the world from an impending doom. It is us against the ignorant masses and we are privileged enough to see the light. Workers of the world unite!

Cults, led by these self-styled saviour-leaders,  are driven by visions utopia--The Rapture, a Classless Society, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth! It plays on our sense of drama and our love for epic myths. As I've said before, only stories can stir us because our brains are wired that way. Our susceptibility to cults is something that we have to be wary of. It is simply religion veering woefully off-course. 

The Cosmic Dance

I spent Saturday catching up with an old friend over some beers. It's been a while since I've had the chance to meet up with my old buddies. My only free time these days is Saturday, when I take a brief break from family duties. 

I'm still trying to adjust to my new 5am routine. My sleeping hours have been greatly reduced and I have not been able to adhere to my plan to go to bed earlier. But I'm getting there and I'm eager to keep this routine going. I love the early hours of dawn when I can get a head start to the day ahead.

Human lifespan is but a brief insignificant moment in the history of earth. We've come to believe that we are 'important' and we should leave a legacy behind. There are great names in history, people with deeds--good and bad--who are remembered and talked about for ages. We can only view life, most of the time from a very narrow perspective; so we think we should maximise the opportunity given to us in this life. 

And even that is not sufficient for some, so we try to prepare for our afterlife.  Even though there may be such a thing as life after death, we need to question ourselves about our conception of life.

Why do we think what we experience through our five senses, constitutes life? When we imagine life after death, we see it as a continuation of this life that we know, without the encumbrances. Perhaps a life of pure unbridled happiness, without pain. 

As I've written in another blog post before, this is a failure of imagination.  If we want to talk about life, the entire cosmos is alive. Why can't we live the life of the cosmos? The reason why we are not able to do so is because we are tied up with our small mortal concerns of this very limited life--feeding ourselves,  procreating and making ourselves look good in the eyes of others.  It is the only life we know but if we know better, we would want to see life beyond this limited perspective. Is this possible? 

If we could see beyond limited vision our lives, we would effectively be enlightened beings, with cosmic consciousness. Our deaths would like the deaths of skin cells, a natural process of life, which consists of lives within lives within lives ad infinitum.

It's probably too much for most of us, to have such a cosmic vision of life. But we don't need to. We just need to know that we are part of this larger architecture of things and then we continue doing what we normally do: feeding, procreating, laughing and crying. But once we've caught a glimpse of this cosmic vision, every ordinary activity of ours would be infused with joy, for the dance is only possible when there are dancers.  We dance this cosmic dance by living our ordinary lives--feeding, procreating, laughing and crying.

Finding Pleasure in Boredom

It's been a while since I blogged from a cafe in a mall. Today, I decided not to spend time in my library but loiter at my neighbourhood mall instead. Here I am typing these lines, feeling relaxed and surprisingly fresh, despite having less than 5 hours sleep everyday for the past weeks.

I'm behind in many of my regular activities like reading, even though I still read daily, the volume is less. I haven't been watching any TV series, limiting myself to short video clips from Youtube.     

My audiobook listening time has increased though, because I walk every morning in the park, enjoying the crisp morning air and the dewy freshness of grass on the ground.  I'm happy that there's enough content on my phone to last me for years. I also have sufficient interests in different subjects to pursue, which hopefully I would not lose enthusiasm for.

Boredom has never been my problem because I find almost everything interesting. Every subject is a rabbit hole which I could spend an entire lifetime exploring.  This non-discerning taste in reading also extends to my choice of food. This makes mealtime very easy wherever I am in the world. As long as I'm sufficiently hungry, all food tastes great.

Often I choose a place to eat, not because of its food but because it is conducive for reading.  Meal-times are the best time to read, if you happen to be eating alone. The mind needs feeding as much as the stomach and it's a joy to be able to feed both at the same time. 

Malaysians general take a lot of pride in their local cuisine. I enjoy them greatly but I don't crave for them. Food is great but it is not the greatest pleasure in life. I take greater pleasure in not being attached to pleasure.  Enjoy all sensory delights when they present themselves but do not cling to them. Let them go, so that they may come back again, with equal delight. That has always been my attitude towards the pleasures of the senses.

Pleasures of the mind and body can be addictive. Always receive them with a sense of gratitude. When they are bestowed upon us, treat them as a bonus but when they are absent, it is not such a big deal. A mind deprived of pleasurable content inevitably feels bored. I've often wondered how I would cope, if say, I were to be put in solitary confinement without any reading materials.  Perhaps if such an 'opportunity' arises, I could treat it as a meditation retreat. 

Meditation can be interesting if you are curious about the works of the mind. Thoughts will always arise spontaneously. It's like going sight-seeing. You just wait and some content would show up and you observe and say to yourself: interesting. And then another thought arises. Interesting. One can never feel bored because thoughts keep on arising. Watch the endless parade of thoughts.  If they cease after a while, that's all well and good--you have achieved some level of meditative bliss.

If you watch these self-generated thought content long enough, you'll realise that they are just white noise. The natural pattern recognition mechanism of the mind sees shapes and events and associations, resulting in thoughts, which then trigger emotional responses in the body. 

The next time that you are bored,  look at it as a blessing in disguise. Boredom could be the key to the secrets of your mind. Observe the spontaneous content that arises. You'll learn a lot about yourself.

The Theatre of the Mind

Today is my day to recharge myself. It has been a very tiring week, juggling various tasks, personal and professional. But I'm grateful for the opportunity to be able to do so. 

I know it is difficult to make yourself feel 'grateful' when you are hit with very stressful situations that challenge you mentally and physically. Over the years, I've learned the art of defusing stress by looking at the larger picture: no situation is as acute as it feels to be. In the larger scheme of things they are likely to be insignificant and even petty.

People who are perfectionists are naturally more susceptible to stress because they see flaws in every tiny detail; they always see potential difficulties and attempt to prevent them now.  They are seen as good workers because of that but they often end up being assigned with too much work, because the boss thinks they are reliable.

I always feel that meditation is a good therapy for people who are stressed. When one meditates, one introspects one's own thoughts. You see thoughts as arising in the space of the mind and not as how you are feeling now. If you observe carefully, a feeling is nothing but a certain on-rush of chemicals in the body which induce changes to blood pressure and heart rate. That's all you are experiencing. The rest is just drama.

Firstly, every drama in your head consists of atomic thoughts. Every thought has a beginning, middle and end. More often than not you only become aware of a thought when it is already in its middle peak state. And then you dwell upon it, fuelling it further, causing it to spawn even more thoughts and emotions (which are bodily reactions to thoughts).  A stressed mind is one where there's such a cascade of thoughts, overwhelming the body and mind.

When you learn to meditate, you see these stages of a thought more clearly and are able to detect the arising of one. And when one does arise, you do not suppress it, you simply allow it fade away naturally. 

You see, thoughts only grow to fruition when you cling to them. If you simply notice a thought and treat it as not having any further importance, it fades away quickly. Thoughts are full of themselves; they think they are important. Ignore them and they'll leave the stage, as if embarrassed. After a while, every thought will only take a small peek into your mind and leave as if they know that they are not getting any attention. That's how you empty your minds of unnecessary thoughts.

You often can't control which thoughts show up in your mind. They enter the stage, craving for attention. But you are the manager of this theatre of the mind. You determine where to shine the spotlight. There's always an object of meditation--the breath, bodily sensations, an image of a deity or a mantra. Just shine it there and the rest will take care of itself.

Musings of a Malaysian

It has been a while since I've been able to do my pot-of-Earl-Grey routine here in my apartment. But here I am finally, perched in my study loft, overlooking the viridian foliage outside my window, enjoying pleasant sips of hot tea, unwinding with the gentle sound of a Mozart sonata playing on my stereo. This is my spiritual sanctuary, my retreat from the world, my mental pit-stop.

It's Malaysia's Independence Day today. Let me spend some time reflecting on my thoughts as a citizen of Malaysia. I think I've written somewhere in this blog before that Malaysia can be viewed as either a half-empty or half-full cup. If you read social media and listen to political pundits, there are many who think that even characterising Malaysia as a half-full cup is actually being generous, for whatever little that remains is already draining away at an alarming rate.

I used to be quite a patriotic lad, taking a lot of pride in being Malaysian. Don't get me wrong, I still do. I would always call myself a Malaysian first, Chinese--a very distant second. But as I grow older, such nationalistic and ethnic identification becomes less meaningful, if not counter-productive.

In today's global world,  our country of birth and skin colour are but incidental details. We are all, as Carl Sagan puts it so eloquently, "Citizens of the Cosmos". That's how I've always seen myself. 

If I have any identity at all, perhaps it is to carbon-based living beings which had arisen by accident and evolved to who we are today. I belong to that lineage of intelligent apes who could foresee the inevitability of death and spend our time devising endless ways to postpone it. 

At the same time, our complete dominance over other living beings and our exploitation of planetary resources have also put our existence on this planet in peril due to the destruction of our environment which we are a part of.

My concerns are global, even cosmic, rather than nationalistic. Though I want Malaysia to exist for as long as possible, the boundaries of nations are becoming less important. Sadly, I think Malaysia does not represent the best of ethnic and religious diversity, even though we started with all these advantages. Unfortunately we had carelessly allowed that to erode away.

A modern nation today is becoming more like a football club. Talents are recruited globally to build the best team, irrespective of background and skin colour. With our diversity we actually had a head-start and If we had exploited our advantage and built upon it, we could have had the best team in the world.

I'm still a proud Malaysian because I have no other identity; but at the same time I'm also questioning the value of having an identity. Identity is important only as a kind of bonding mechanism--just like how being a Liverpool supporter immediately puts me in kinship with all the fanatical Reds in the world, celebrating every win together, as if we ourselves had a personal hand it its success.

As a Malaysian voter and tax-payer, my existence as a citizen does play a part in the direction and future of the nation. As they like to say, think globally but act locally. But at the same time, as a student of history and human consciousness, I've come to accept the inevitability of change and the ephemeral nature of any human construct. A nation is an artificial construct. It too will disintegrate one day, even one as mighty as the Roman empire, as we have seen.

The Malaysian experience is like the pain and joy of youth. It's a beautiful thing. Let's celebrate and make the best of it. We all suffer the pangs of growing up and have our regrets. but with some luck, we get through this phase unscathed.

Forgetful Kindness

I'm constantly amazed by how people get angry easily over small and petty things.  The expression of anger reveals a lot about the psychology of a person.  It offers a glimpse into what the angry person considers to be important in his or her life.

Everyone has sensitive spots which when exposed could lead to an emotional outburst that takes the form of rage or grief. For example, if someone insults your intelligence publicly by calling you stupid, how would you react? If intelligence or competence is something which you take pride in, such a public insult would certainly not be taken kindly. 

Pride in one's own ability is an essential component of one's ego. The ego is an artificial mental construct which we have unconsciously built over time. It is the mental model of your physical existence. An insult to your pride, is a blow to the ego, not unlike the thrust of a sharp object to one's body.

When the ego is threatened, it attempts to defend itself by reacting in anger. So every time someone is angry, see if you can identify what aspect of the person's ego does it reveal. 

Take the case of road rage. Why would someone blocking your way trigger such abusive language and gestures? The person probably thinks that his importance is diminished by someone so blatantly ignoring his right of way or perhaps it also helps to reaffirm his superiority over others by pointing out other people's incompetence on the road. 

The ego is always looking at ways to defend and strengthen itself through confirmation bias. All resentment results from repeated confirmation in the mind that the opposite party is constantly repeating their despicable behaviour. Not again! That's how relationships between husband and wives and also between business partners grow sour. Familiarity often breeds contempt.

Kindness, understanding and compassion diminish and dissolve the ego. A true act of kindness is a voluntary tear-down of one's own ego structure. You let go of your pride and selfishness to accommodate someone else. 

Kindness will always result in personal inconvenience. You are sacrificing time, energy and other resources for someone else's benefit. And if that inconvenience is taken as something negative, the ego takes the opportunity again to replenish its reservoir of resentments.

Even when one accomplishes a great act of kindness, the ego will still try to use it as an opportunity to build another artificial structure--your 'reputation' for kindness. It makes you crave for praise and recognition. You begin to expect it every time and when it is not forthcoming, you feel hurt or unappreciated. That is another resentment trap that one should be vigilant for.

True kindness has no memory. You 'fire and forget', almost like a reflex action. Any act of charity is best done quietly and anonymously, without any fanfare. Kindness heals by softening the ego. Any surge of pride that one feels is but a momentary wave of pleasure that rises and falls, and promptly forgotten. 

Will such a kind person be taken advantage of by others? Sometimes, in the short term. But that is not your problem. It is not your job to keep account of deeds owed and rendered. Outsource that to the universe. In the long run, no act of kindness can result in one's ruination, because it goes against the laws of nature. Just practice forgetful kindness. The attendant peace and joy of the act will be its constant reward.

What's Bugging You?

It's a quiet Friday again, which means that I could start blogging early before the weekend begins. Tomorrow I'll try to ease back into my Saturday routine of reading and writing. 

I've been doing a lot thinking on how to help people with mental health issues. Each one of us has a mind and we assume that other people's mind work the same way. If something is obvious to you, it has to be obvious to others too--or does it?  How do you enter the mind of a depressed person, when you yourself are "normal"?

I put the word normal under scare quotes because, we think we are normal, or at least what we assume what others feel when they are also "normal" is similar to our own. But it is unlikely so. We know from the reaction of people to different things, for example food or music. We attribute that to taste. But taste itself is a reflection on how we react to the stimuli of the world. We react differently because we all have a different default brain states. 

Our so-called "mood" influence our reactions to other people's words and actions. Mood is also part of our default brain state. The mood of a depressed person is obviously very different from a so-called normal person. We can react with anger or laughter to the same situation, depending on mood.

For a depressed person, the chemical balance could be off, causing a person to be constantly plunged in a quiescent state that is dark and oppressive. Just like a body that is walking on a tightrope, when balance is maintained, you could walk forward; but when you are off-balanced, you could end up falling. There's a point of no-return, when no frantic waving or shifting of the body will allow you to remain standing. 

One could try to change one's default state with medication or by changing one's lifestyle. However the company of different people could either irritate or cheer up a depressed person; so that has to be arranged carefully. Family members are often the source and trigger of a person's depressive episodes.  A complete change of environment, far from surroundings which reminds the person of stressful situations could be helpful.

Some people are naturally irritable, grumpy and suspicious. But they are different from people who are depressed. These are behavioural characteristics. Depressed people are often outwardly nice and sunny but inside, they see a dark world.

A nice user-interface could conceal a buggy piece of software. The software of our minds are partly genetic and partly programmed by our education, culture and experience. There's no clear dividing line as to when nature ends and nurture begins. We have to see the human system holistically.  Like bad software, the mind could also be caught in infinite loops, memory leaks and stack overflows. The system crashes or hangs. 

We need to be able to debug ourselves constantly and fix whatever we can through self-detection. That's a tough thing to do. But do take advantage of feedback from your 'users'--the people you interact with everyday. Often they reveal the presence of bugs in you and also in them. Like it or not, we are all imperfect, buggy systems that require constant maintenance. 

Subsuming the Self

It's the end of another work week and today is a good day to blog since it's a rather quiet Friday. I've been maintaining my discipline of rising early and ending my workday early, with the hope that at some point I'll be able to incorporate some exercise routine into my day.

Right now I'm certainly lacking a lot of exercise as my weekend routine has been disrupted since my mother's surgery. Mum is recovering well now and I've been slowing easing off my care so that she could practise going back to your usual routine. Having given care to my father and now my mother, i think I've become quite an expert care-giver for the elderly.

My years of taking care of my dad was great training. I like how it had shaped me into a more patient and compassionate person. Not that I wasn't one before; just that you are ignorant of the limits of your endurance until you have been fully tested.

Meditation trains you to be constantly aware of the thoughts that arise in your mind. And you know how to sandbox them so that none of them take control of yourself. People who lose their temper reveals a lot about the poor state of their minds. An even-tempered person detects anger arising from a very early stage and is able to dissipate their energy before it becomes uncontrollable.

The skill of mindful awareness is one that can be honed through practice. Most of the time, we are consumed by our thoughts but when we are mindful, thoughts are just one of many 'application processes' running in our minds. We have another monitoring process that oversees them. But even this monitoring process monitors itself and ensures that no single thought process consumes all resources.

An angry mind is a mind descended into chaos. The entire mind is taken over by a single all-consuming thought that seeks the path of least resistance. It even induces the body to act violently sometimes. It is a sorry state of mind indeed.

Mindfulness means constant awareness and monitoring of one's state of mind. When a single thought appears to be hogging resources, we ease it off. We allow it to fade away by not reinforcing it. That means letting go--which is another skill I talked about in an earlier article. 

By caring for others, we let go of our own self-serving thoughts. The ego is forgotten because to serve is to subsume oneself to others. And that works better than any self-absorbed meditative practice.

A Boat called The Human Condition

I want to write about something positive today. Something that will lift my mood up; not that I'm feeling down right now but I was reflecting on some people who are plunged in perpetual gloom. I am curious as to what can be done to change such a person's outlook on life.

I've mentioned before that I'm naturally a glass-half-full person, as opposed to someone who always see the negative in every situation. Being grateful for having half-a-glass of water to drink is a much better state of mind than to subject oneself in a tirade of negative thoughts: "My glass never is full", "I knew it: every time someone pours me a drink, it is always half-full", "You see, I never get my full due". 

Such habitual negativity is often found in people who like to see themselves as being victims. They perceive the world as always being unfair to them, and the are being dealt a bad hand. They are 'motivated' to continue spewing negativity because they need people to acknowledge how much they have suffered and how their situation is so untypical of others. 

The need for acknowledgement of their suffering is part of this complaining attitude towards life. Unfortunately grumpy people don't usually attract many sympathetic friends. Such people just need an outlet to vent their frustrations towards everything. Constant venting however is not a solution that will help the person break away from this cycle of negativity.

One thing that can be done is to expose them to the company of cheerful people--people who could lead by example. Let them see how a difficult situation can be tackled rationally and cheerfully, without resorting to anger or blame.  They will find that, a 'giving-people-the-benefit-of-the-doubt' attitude will always make one's life better. You don't accumulate resentments that way. No one in this world is conspiring to make life miserable for you. They are also struggling to overcome their own weaknesses and its resulting suffering.

You see, everyone is in the same boat called "The Human Condition".  Everyone is born with certain strengths and weaknesses. We all try to hide or deny our weaknesses. When they manifest themselves, they cause us pain, simply because we do not know how to handle them. 

Acknowledge your own weaknesses, but at the same time be kind to yourself. Sometimes these weaknesses are just irrational fears that are unnecessarily amplified. See them clearly as they are. Tell yourself, it's alright. It's not a matter of life and death. You are not alone in this struggle called life. 

To call life a 'struggle' is also the wrong paradigm to adopt. You wouldn't call a workout session in the gym as a 'struggle'. Every difficulty that causes you to 'struggle' is just another resistance load added to help strengthen your body and mind. You'll always gain something out of it. 

The Human Condition is a boat launched on a sea with choppy waters. Some sea-sickness is bound to be expected. But after a while, one gets accustomed to its rock and sway and be able to get on with life on it. Blaming the boat or the sea for your discomfort is not going to help. Adapting to it does. 

An Onus on an Opportunity

I'm hoping to get back to my usual weekend routine of blogging and reading. When your daily routine has been interrupted through circumstances beyond your control, try to see it as an opportunity. 

People often quote that the Chinese word for crisis, weiji, consists of the characters for danger and opportunity.  Any major change in our lives, is the best opportunity to plant some new habits because the inertia of routine has been interrupted. It's like an intruder creating a diversion to distract the security guards.

For example, I'm trying to reintroduce an early morning routine again, by waking up at 5am. There was a time once when I used to go for a jog at 6am every morning. But this routine has been interrupted by one too many late social nights, which affected my sleep time. 

To wake up at 5am, I'll have to be in bed by at least 11pm, if not 9pm itself, to get 8 full hours of sleep. Since I don't have an active social life these days, I will try to be in bed before midnight so that I can join the 5am club again.

The 4 hours before 9pm is a most wonderful period of the day, if I could access it. I could meditate, exercise, journal, read and shower before the world even begins its day.  I get a head-start and it feels great to be on top of things when actual working hours begin. 

I've been waking up at 5am or earlier for the past 2 weeks. Now that I no longer need to go to the hospital to attend to my mum, I will use this newly inculcated habit to pursue a new set of routines. I'll still have to take care of mum at home during her recovery period but I'll get a lot of flexibility to slowly inject some productive time-slots into my day.

We will all succumb to physical decline and mortality one day. Caring for someone else who is undergoing this phase helps one to prepare for this inevitability. Life is what it is and you make the best of it, with strength, resolve and optimism.

I can only express my gratitude for the opportunity granted by this crisis. In the process, I know so much more about my own strengths and weaknesses. The onus is on me now to make the best use of this opportunity.

The Epic of Existence

I'm typing this from the cafe at the ground floor of the hospital. The place is relatively quiet on Sundays and I'm taking a brief break from my routine of attending to my mother here at the ward. It has been a rather stressful few days but I hope the worst is over.

I realised that, despite the lack of sleep and the long days that I had spent here, I'm actually not very tired--very much less tired than my usual working days. Perhaps it is the break from the computer screen that feels 'refreshing' to me.

I might have to go back to work soon and this 'holiday' has given me a fresh perspective on work and life. One thing's for sure: material success has never been an effective motivator for me. Whenever I find myself drifting towards that direction, my mind recoils from it. 

I treat work as a kind of sport--you play hard to win but, at the end of the day, it's just like another game, which has no real significance in the larger scheme of things. This doesn't diminish its importance; it merely reframes it.

We humans look for meaning in everything we do, because the mind is a story generating machine. Having 'meaning' means having a 'reason' for everything we do or observe. It is the way our brain has evolved. We want to comprehend why certain things happen. The explanation has to have an emotional and logical arc, which when narrated provides a sense of satisfaction and certainty. All our religious myths and political ideologies are good examples of such stories.

The fact of the matter is, a greater part of our lives have no 'meaning' in the rational sense. And there's nothing wrong with that. We do the things we do, because we've acquired what Daniel Dennett calls 'competence without comprehension'.  We have evolved culturally, infected by memes in the form of thinking tools and habits, some of which are beneficial, some not. Once infected, these habits and practices become a part of our 'competence', which is manifested instinctively or ritualistically.

Our evolved brain, which is capable of intelligently shaping the materials of the universe for its own purpose, attempts to provide a logical story retrospectively for practices and behaviours, which had evolved rather 'unconsciously'.

The tendency of the mind to latch on to stories is why we find it so hard to meditate. When we do mindfulness meditation, we try to see things clearly as they are, without entertaining any stories. In such moments of meditative silence, we see the movies in our heads clearly--our fears, angers and desires--all fragments of stories which we had composed to explain, project or justify every sequence of events in our lives.

Stories are higher level protocols of the karmic stack. More stories are generated when we operate at those higher layers, causing enormously complex karmic reactions. At the base level, we only have a causal chain of atomic events, and by paying attention to them, we allow them to play themselves out in the simplest possible manner.

Whenever a thought appears in the mind, ask yourself: what's the story here? See how each thought attempts to spin a story to start another complex chain of events.  By doing so, we save ourselves from the many wild swings between ecstasy and sorrow, which is the bane of human existence.

Remember, the mind is a spinner of stories. Only when we cease listening to them, the stories die. And when they do subside, the epic of existence reveals itself.

Transcending Pain

I had to take care of a loved one in hospital for the past couple of days.  Spending time in the hospital allowed me to observe people at their most vulnerable. Always in places like these, you'll end up reflecting on the human condition and how much suffering we mortals have to endure.

I admire the hospital nurses and staff who have to handle often very difficult patients with such patience and kindness. From what I observe, the suffering that patients go through is often accentuated by their state of mind. Physical wounds will heal in its own time, if proper care is taken. Hospitals do that well. They provide the necessary medication and treatment to heal the physical body. 

But the anxiety in the minds of the patients and even the family members is something else altogether. A stay in the hospital becomes a struggle if you are bothered if every minor discomfort. The mind multiplies every physical discomfort a hundred-fold. Not everyone knows how to let go and allow nature to take its course.

Surrendering to physical pain is the best way to alleviate it.  But that is a very difficult thing to do for many.  It made me better appreciate the whatever little meditation skills that I've acquired; people without such training are so consumed by the anxiety in their minds that they become their minds. The mind is that suffering self: I am in pain!  When all there is a wave of thought which we label as pain. Even the "I am" subject is also another wave.

So this momentary virtual object called 'Self' detects signals from the nervous system which it interprets as 'pain' and creates a cascade of associated thoughts: Why am I in such pain? Am I in deep trouble? Is it going to get worse? I am doomed! I don't deserve this!

The momentary Self takes centre-stage and aims to perpetuate itself through a series of thought-waves. That is how the Self achieves persistence.  It needs the reverberating effects of a story--the story of pain--to further reinforce its continued existence. That's what the arc of life is--a never-ending series of actions and reactions, which give form to virtual objects.

But this is a house of cards which collapses the moment we let go. Yet we can't, because we are living physical creatures with brains that continuously creates thoughts and concepts. Only when we are able to see that everything is as it is--processes, originating from other processes, are we able to transcend them all. And finally what is that awareness that transcends it all, if not the Virtual Self? Is it another illusion? Let's find out for our--selves. 

Ambiguous Ambitions

I completed my work early today and now I'm free to indulge in my free-writing exercise for the week.  There's a long weekend ahead with Monday being a public holiday and I intend to use every minute of it productively. Posting this blog article would be like checking off the first item on my task list.

A lot of what I do is pursuing my interests in a wide variety of subjects.  I guess that's my way of 'enjoying life'.  I'm lucky that the things I enjoy come relatively cheap. A good internet connection, my library of books and the company of good friends are basically all I need. My bar to happiness happens to be set very low indeed. That very fact itself makes me happy. 

Does being easily contented make me less 'ambitious'? Perhaps. But what does ambition mean? I don't have the conventional ambitions of being successful in my career, making a lot of money and gaining recognition, nor any charitable goals of doing good to a lot of people. I am only interested in always delivering quality work in whatever I do, learning things all the time and being of value to the people that I deal with--people within my sphere of influence.

There's nothing wrong in being ambitious. If one feels the stirrings of ambition within one's breast, forge ahead! Be the top of your field, be the best in the world, acquire all that you've ever desired, pursue your dreams. There will be a lot of obstacles ahead but channelling one's energy towards overcoming them builds skill, character and resilience. In a way, that's the coursework that you have to do towards a mastery of life.

Ambition implies having specific goals in life. I guess, ambition is ego plus goals. If  you are clear of your goals, you can ride the ego like a vehicle to move towards them.  That's the way to pursue your ambitions--be clear of your goals, but keep the ego under control. Like a good driver, you must know how to tap the power of the ego engine to propel yourself forward. 

Without goals, we do not know if we are heading in the right direction. In my case, my goal is just to grow. Like a tree. A tree has no ambition, but it fulfils its purpose in life. The difference between a human and a tree is the presence of the ego. 

Ego is something natural and present in every human being. If we recognise its nature, it can be very useful. Treat it like a booster rocket. Let it help you achieve escape velocity, but discard it at the first opportune moment.

To live is to grow, in the areas that matter to you. To me, it is always gaining new insights, seeing things from a different perspective and moving forward. If they happen to result in material gains, or if an explicit pursuit of them makes sense, then I'll put my mind to it. But I'm always mindful of what I'm getting into. 

Life opens up new possibilities all the time. And being ambiguous on ambition gives me that flexibility to pursue different options. All the river has to do is flow, and the terrain will guide it towards sea. 

The Game of Letgo

Another Friday, another day off for me. I'm here in my apartment today, listening to some Mozart sonata, appreciating a respite from the world outside in this oasis of calmness.

Life can be very challenging for many of us, even though most of the time, we lead rather dull lives of being at work with our colleagues and at home with our family members. People are often unhappy because of relationships with their friends, co-workers, bosses, spouses, siblings or children. 

One thing that we have to acknowledge is that people are different. No two persons think and feel alike. People operate by completely different paradigms, resulting in very different world-views. Whenever we expect other people to see things the way we do, we inevitably run into disagreements.

We end up resenting people who always go about annoying us with words and actions that we completely disagree with. Families argue over petty little things on a daily basis because they know each other too well, and familiarity over each other's 'shortcomings', inevitably breeds contempt.

People generally can be divided into two broad categories: those who see the glass as half-empty and those who see it as half-full. The half-empty type are perpetually complaining about things: the food is lousy, the service is bad and people around them are not good enough. They are never ever really happy.

Those with a half-full glass mentality are always grateful for what they already have. Even when things are not what they expect, they are hopeful that things will always work out for the best in the end. If everyone is able to cultivate this simple half-full glass attitude, a lot of pain and friction could be avoided.

Having the half-full glass mindset means that we are always trying to see people as good by default. If they do and say things that we disagree with, perhaps they had a bad day or they had been triggered by something that they are sensitive about.  Or they know something that we don't. So give them the benefit of the doubt. 

Like sportsmen, people can go off-form sometimes. Be forgiving of their momentary lapses. They could be rude, insulting and impossible to deal with. Well, just side-step the person and avoid stepping into the puddle. We can't change other people's behaviour. It's also not our job to do so. If you are a boss who has problematic employees like these, just agree to part ways. They can always find employment elsewhere which could be more conducive to their peculiar style of working. 

Family members, on the other hand, are a much trickier lot to handle. We did not choose our parents and siblings and certainly can't fire them at will. We need to take friction among family members as a test of our nimbleness and resilience. Understand that everyone sees the world through different lenses; often they are shaped by their own personal pain. 

Empathy is always a good starting point. Self-reflection is also necessary for us to realise that, perhaps we could be partly blamed for the present unhappiness. Perhaps we can correct the situation by adjusting our own behaviour?  Be grateful that if we have the power to alleviate a difficult situation through an action that we could affect. Always work within our own sphere of influence. If we can easily will ourselves to lift a hand, we are certainly capable of letting go of a grudge.

It is easy to practise the skill of letting go. Our everyday lives already pose sufficient obstacles for us to identify what it is that we need to let go, and if we have the mental strength to do so. 

Search yourself. Identify every pain or dissatisfaction that you are carrying inside. Explore this virtual reality game that's constantly running in your mind. The enemies that you have to eliminate go by names like Pain, Hatred, Grudge, Resentment, Anger. Your weapon is something very subtle: it's a skill which everyone already possess but few use it well: it's called 'letting go'. 

Every time you let go of some Hatred, you collect pahala points. And over time you'll find that you can be pretty good at it. The more pahala points you collect, the fitter and healthier you become. So let's go: Let's play this new and exiting game in town called Letgo! 

Consciousness Considered

Today, because I'm on leave, I'm back to my usual pot of Earl Grey routine here in my study, listening to Chopin and staring out into the green foliage outside my window and the dull grey skies in the distant, which seem to forebode rain and thunderstorms later. 

Maybe today we'll discuss a bit about consciousness. This is a favourite topic among philosophers and people with religious beliefs. There are a lot of terms related to consciousness, some used synonymically with it like 'mind', 'soul' and 'self'. Each of these terms gives a slightly different nuance to the meaning.

Actually what do we even mean by consciousness? American philosopher Thomas Nagel in his famous paper "What is it like to be a Bat", perhaps gave the simplest articulation of it by stating "an organism has conscious mental states if there's something that is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.".

We all know what it is like to be ourselves. It's the feeling you are conscious of right now while you are reading these words, comprehending, wondering, comparing, objecting or agreeing with what I'm saying. And we take it for granted that other people feel something like that too, when they are sane and awake. "The lights are on", as Sam Harris like to say.

This first-person 'feeling', do other organisms, say a bat with vastly a different neurophysiology, have it too? I know what it feels like to be me but what is it like if I were a bat?  We could argue that we need something complex like a brain to be conscious. Could consciousness be an 'emergent' property of complex systems, like an ant or termite colony which is capable of behaving 'intelligently' as a group?

As it is today, it is safe to say, no one knows. Consciousness is the ultimate mystery, partly because we are using consciousness to investigate consciousness. This is why philosopher David Chalmers calls it the "hard problem of consciousness" as opposed to the 'easier' problem of just investigating the physical brain and its processes which generate so-called consciousness. 

This is the age old mind-body problem--that eternal Cartesian division between the immaterial and the material properties of our existence. "I think therefore I am"--Descartes's famous dictum asserting that the only thing that we can be sure of is that we are thinking, therefore at least that is real. The rest is up for grabs. 

That resulted in all the different schools of thoughts we have today--dualists who think that mind and matter are two distinct substances or monists, which are either idealists who believe that the entire universe is a projection of consciousness or materialists who believe that matter is all there is. And there are those who try to marry the two like the panpsychists, who speculate that perhaps consciousness could be a fundamental ingredient of all matter. 

Religious and mystically-inclined people do not like the materialist view because it lacks that magical substance called 'soul' that defines who we are. Certainly we are not the same as stones and trees. We have a soul that lives on after the material body has disintegrated. But then, there are animists among many primitive tribes who believe that even stones and trees have immaterial spirits and are 'alive'.

Can AI be conscious, if not already? LLMs today already can converse like humans and would arguably pass any Turing test, if not now, in the near future. If they cannot be distinguished from humans, are they not at least the proverbial philosophical zombie who is capable of behaving exactly like any one of us? 

Philosophers use the philosophical zombie thought experiment to argue against the materialist view of consciousness.  There are others who think that consciousness is a false problem, similar to the definition of life. We used to believe in some kind of elan vital substance or 'life force' that differentiates between living and non-living beings. Now we can see many organisms like viruses that are hard to be lumped into either category. Why can't life or consciousness lie on a continuum? 

Could consciousness be a measurable quantity of complex systems? Scientists who believe that have come up with Integrated Information Theory or IIT which defines a mathematical quantity based on the amount of 'integrated information' in a system, measuring how 'conscious' a system is.

Personally, I am open to all ideas. I think there may not be an answer that satisfies us simply because we are computationally-bounded observers based on Stephen Wolfram's theory of a computational universe.  We only perceive things that matter to us and are limited in the way we comprehend the universe. 

I am happy simply typing these words, thinking, speculating and observing. In other words, just being me: Conscious.

A Remembrance of Rosebud

Today I'm writing from a pub, having a beer in the afternoon, instead of my usual Americano or Earl Grey.  On the large projection screen in front of me, they are showing a live telecast of badminton matches from the Australian Open. 

I used to play a lot of badminton during my school days but I found that I was better at soccer and table tennis. Me and my buddies would scour the entire town for available badminton courts: in public parks, kampungs and schools--anywhere that we could string our net, without raising an ire. 

We liked to play early in the morning, sacrificing sleep. And because all the courts were outdoors, wind was always a major disrupter. But the cool and the stillness of morning air was just perfect for badminton.

We usually played doubles because that was the only way to ensure everyone got a chance to play. I also preferred the more fast-paced doubles game. Childhood and teenage years were a lot of fun; friends everywhere within cycling distance. Every year-end school holiday was a month-long outdoor carnival of games and adventures.

Perhaps the opportunity to grow up like that is forever gone now: a childhood untainted by television, video games and social media.  Those halcyon days of innocence and wonder; of excursions into the jungle, of getting ourselves lost deep in a maze of rubber trees, of climbing guava trees and chomping on its delightful bounty, of rapturous hide-and-seek games under the moonlight, shrieking with our childish delight to the annoyance of neighbours.

I always feel that it is a blessing to have that core of innocence, or at least its memory, in the depths of my soul. My days now are spent in front of multiple computer screens, solving issues far removed from anything in nature--lambda functions, automatic scaling groups, api keys and HTTP headers. The replicants in Blade Runner cling on to their implanted memories as a kind of proof of their humanity. Who can forget Rutger Hauer's now iconic dying scene in the movie, where he uttered these immortal lines:

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"

If such a thing as a soul exists, I know at its core, it is infused with our cherished childhood experiences.   Everything we later experience as adults is tinged with its mood and colour. They anchor us and re-orientate us whenever we are lost. 

If we lose the child within,  it is akin to losing our souls. I also see the evocations of childhood wonder in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which makes it the most poignant opening of any novel that I've read:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

I too remember many distant afternoons, full of joy and innocence when I discovered a world full of intriguing mysteries and promises.

I'm not sure why I feel a sudden nostalgia for my childhood here in this stifling pub, filled with techno-music blaring in the background. But it is strangely comforting to be able to reconnect with it. The sight of Lee Zii Jia playing badminton was a Proustian moment that had triggered these memories. 

My childhood, real and imagined, all the books that I had read and the movies that had made deep impressions on me, they all defined who I am, and my path ahead.

No, I'm not facing any existential crisis like those replicants of Blade Runner or Colonel Aureliano Buendia, but I see memory as something that's critical to our identity, the catalyst for the unrelenting pursuits of adulthood.  And like Citizen Kane in the acclaimed Orson Wells movie, perhaps, deep down inside, we all have our own personal Rosebuds.