The Harpsicord and the Violin

I had lunch with Myra and her boyfriend today at the Pavillion, Bukit Jalil. I haven't met Myra for many months and I always look forward to catching up with them as it gives me an opportunity to glimpse into the world of their generation--one that's shaped completely by unrelentless drama of life played out over social media, fuelled by the many intrigues of the youthful heart.

It has been an eventful week no doubt--a week that was punctuated by two momentous events: the massive gas leak inferno at Putra Heights, which devastated many homes and US President Trump's so-called 'Liberation Day', where he unleashed a string of import tariffs on almost every country in the world, of which the ramifications are yet to be fully played out.

The massive explosion and fire at Putra Heights was particularly scary because it was happening at a neighbourhood surburb, one which only last week, I was writing my weekly blog article from. From USJ, could see the sky high flames in the distant while I was driving home from breakfast. 

Thoughts of a California's Pacific Palisades-scale disaster did cross my mind for a brief moment.  But as information trickled in, we soon found out that it was due to some gas leakage from the Petronas pipeline, and the fire did not spread beyond the radius of the explosion.

With floods, earthquakes, fires, pandemics and financial crises threatening our existence recently, one inevitably rehearses in one's mind on how one would deal with such catastrophic losses. Only a week ago, the massive 7.7 Richter scale earthquake near Mandalay, Myanmar triggered the collapse of a 33-storey high building that was under construction in Bangkok, 1000 kilometres away from the epicentre.  "It could hit us too"--was the thought that crossed everyone's mind in Malaysia.

Myra had other mental upheavals playing out in her mind, unrelated though to those tragic events. She's facing a lot of stress at work and it took me a while to restore her mood back to her cheerful self. I told her that she's like a Stradivarius violin--a divinely resonant instrument of music, with equal capability of playing beautifully sad and ecstatically joyful music. It is up to the virtuoso, to bring out the best in the musical instrument. Being passionate and sensitive can be an asset, if you know how to play those emotional strings masterfully.

I told Myra to use her emotional sensitivity wisely: the pipeline explosion was a wasteful release or energy; while a four-stroke engine works as a controlled explosion, which harnesses its power for useful work. I know Myra is passionate about everything she does, and she suffers the rollercoaster ride of emotional turbulence all the time because of her sensitive nature. How I wish I have her energetic passion; but I reminded her that it is her unique gift and she just needs to learn how to channel it optimally in the right direction.

We are all slightly different emotional instruments. I'm like a harpsichord, the precursor of the pianoforte:  reliable, even-toned but having zero dynamic range. I work best as the basso continuo--providing the rhythmic bass foundation in Baroque music. 

A violin is a completely different musical instrument altogether. Its dynamic range and versatility --from pianissimo to fortissimo, from cantabile to pizzicato--is without parallel. It is unsurprising why violins form the most important section is any symphony orchestra. 

Myra is such an exquisite violin. And I never cease to remind her of that. Under the hands of a virtuoso, she can create the kind of music that moves the entire world. 

Stressing Growth

There's a long weekend ahead because of the Hari Raya Puasa holidays. And I'm starting it early by taking Friday off. I'm also hoping to post my blog post today so that I'll be free on Saturday to pursue other activities. Today, I'm typing these lines from Zus Coffee at Putra Heights.

I have about an hour to write today's article. I shall perhaps write something light today--a bit like the lemonade that I'm drinking now: something cool and relaxing for a hot Friday afternoon. Everyone feels at ease and in high spirits on a Friday, with the promise of a weekend ahead, free from the stress of work.

Why is work such stress for most people? We often complain about office politics. But the fact that we dislike it, is also an indication that we are ourselves participants, whether consciously or not.  Politics among humans is an inevitability because each one of us is a unique individual with individual goals. This  requires us to come up with strategies to achieve them.

Each one of us is a goal-seeking agent. Even if your goal is just to do the very minimal, required by your job definition to earn your monthly pay-check, you will still need to perform specific actions that affect other people. Your actions might not jive with theirs. Or it could be that, your style of working is simply different.  

No company is static. Management changes and so does the business direction. Every change imposes a need on you to readjust yourself within the hierarchy of the company. You, as a goal-seeking agent need to expend time, energy and effort to overcome or adapt to these changes. Changes in the environment cause stress.

The human ego naturally seeks reward and recognition. Sometimes, you over-exaggerate your own achievements and try to maintain a false image of your capabilities. This gap between your true capabilities and what is expected of you is a contributor of stress. 

This brings to mind something called the Peter Principle, which I've observed to be very true.  It states that everyone in a corporate hierarchy would be promoted to their level of incompetence. When you overachieve, you will be continuously promoted to higher positions. But each higher position could require slightly different skillsets. You will inevitably rise to a position where your incompetence begin to show. That is when to can rise no further.  

Stress comes when you are trying to do more than what you are capable of. Your customers or your bosses expect more than what you can deliver. You can look at it as unwelcome stress, or you can choose to take on this stress as additional gym weights to help you build stronger muscles. 

Stress can be your friend, if you know how to manage it carefully. It is simply the gap between what's expected of you and what you are really capable of at any point in time. You can raise your capability to overcome this gap or you can simply lower the expectation. Sometimes, it's your own ego that's setting these expectations. Tune the gap carefully. Adopting the right amount of stress is the key to continuous growth.     

The Ferris Wheel of God

I haven't blogged from Coffee Bean for a while. So today, I decided to write my article of the week here. This particular outlet at my neighbourhood has been renovated since I last came here. It used to be my go-to workplace for weekends, because it was quieter than Starbucks. This new one is much more spacious and comfortable but still relatively quiet, which is great.

I've been thinking about the topic of today's blog post since early this morning when I was taking my usual walk around the park. I get a lot of ideas every time I walk there, while listening to my favourite podcasts or audiobooks. 

Today, for some reason I was thinking about simple harmonic motion. I remember this fondly as one of the topics in our Form 6 Physics syllabus. I see this simple oscillatory motion as something very basic in nature, and having understood it mathematically, it gave me a intuitive grasp of a lot of things in world, which are periodic and vibratory in nature.

The oscillation of a weight hanging on a spring, obeying Hooke's Law, is an example of a simple harmonic motion.  So is the small angle swing of a pendulum. There's always a restorative force that pulls the weight back to its rest position: the tension of the spring, or gravity in the case of the pendulum. Kinetic energy is converted to potential energy and back to kinetic again. In an ideal frictionless world, the oscillation can go on forever. In the real world, energy is slowly dissipated as heat, and the oscillation slows to a halt.

Mathematically, the simple harmonic motion is the vertical or horizontal projection of a point moving in a circle at constant speed or angular velocity. Imagine that you are sitting in a car on a Ferris wheel that's rotating at a constant speed. If someone on the ground were to stand somewhere so that he only views the wheel from the side, the entire wheel would appear like a straight vertical column. And you, the passenger would appear to be going up and down that column. Your motion would appear to be a simple harmonic motion too--slowing down as you reach the highest point and then accelerating towards the centre before slowing down again as you reach the bottom. 

Basically, a constant two-dimensional rotary motion around a centre has become a one-dimensional oscillation between two polar points, when viewed from a difference perspective. Unity has become binary or multiplicity.  If only we can elevate our consciousness and see the world from a difference angle, we'll see everything as One.

Chapter 40 of the Tao Te Ching, poetically expresses this simple harmonic tug-and-pull between two poles, beautifully:

Returning is the movement of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
All things in the world arise from being.
Being arises from non-being.

 If we plot your vertical position on the Ferris wheel against the axis of time, your graph will look like a sinusoidal wave. Your circular motion on the Ferris wheel, is like a rollercoaster ride across time. 

All the drama of our existence is nothing but the interplay between polar opposites, which arose from viewing the world from our limited perspective. Understanding simple harmonic motion gives you an intuitive grasp of all the forces at play in the world of maya. 

Most of the time, we are immersed in the rollercoaster ride of life, with its ups and downs. Life is such a suffering for we only see displacement, stress and tension when the universe is simply the inevitable expression of an underlying oneness, the tawhid that is God.

We can only have intuitive glimpses of the mystery behind our existence. Depending on our temperament and constitution, we attempt to convey this glimmer of an understanding using a language created from our everyday interactions with the material world. If we are Taoists, we'd learn to live in harmony with the Tao; if we are monotheists, we'd surrender to the Will of God and if you are like me, you would see the Ferris wheel of God spinning and I happily riding it, revelling in the beauty of its simple harmonic motion. 

The Right Spirit

I have a long weekend ahead, because next Tuesday is a public holiday (Nuzul Al-Quran) and I am also taking Monday off.  Nuzul Al-Quran falls on the 17th day of the holy month of Ramadan and is the day which the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Mohammad. I wrote a blog article last year about this event.

In a way, every artistic inspiration, is like something divinely revealed. The artistic impulse, is in its essence spiritual. All great works of art, in a sense, have to be created because they are part of the spiritual unfoldment of the human race--like flowers, bursting forth in the wilderness. 

We resonate with these works of art because, we all share an innate desire to connect with the larger whole. When I listen to a piece of great music, my whole being reacts instinctively, in sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the composer; in an instant we both touch a core, which I can only describe is spiritual. 

We humans cannot help but be spiritual. Even the most godless individual has that divine spark in him. He or she would have feelings towards someone other than themselves. That yearning for connection is the beginning of spirituality. When we perform 'irrational' acts like sing, dance or express love towards someone else, we are responding to the spirit. 

What is this elusive thing called 'spirit'? It is similar to asking whether AI has 'consciousness'. Spirit, mind, consciousness, soul, self--these are all vaguely defined words that point towards the same general direction. Is there something more to matter? 

Philosophy has sought to answer this question in a multitude of ways. You can have a pure physicalist view of the universe, where everything is only matter. Consciousness, in this view is kind of an illusion. We are trying to define something that does not exist. We think we are conscious and has a soul or spirit, when in essence we are just a highly complex agglomeration of living cells, ultimately made up of atoms, and if we go even deeper, quarks. This is the stance of science.

There are those who find this physicalist view of the universe unsatisfying, even demeaning. They prefer to put consciousness as the basic ingredient of the universe. Pan-psychism is taking this approach. When consciousness is adopted as an axiom, you don't have to explain it anymore, because that is the starting point. And we all 'know' what is consciousness. Hey, are we not 'conscious'?

 Cartesian dualism where there is consciousness, as well as matter, is another approach. Science is very comfortable in the world of matter but is not close to answering the question of consciousness. Science doesn't like magical explanations of consciousness. It will try to use existing knowledge to explain or hypothesise the phenomena of consciousness, if the concept has to be accepted as real at all. You have explanations that range consciousness being a natural emergent property of complex systems to exotic theories, like the one proposed by Sir Roger Penrose, where consciousness is caused by the collapse of superposition quantum states in microtubules in our neurons. 

I'm in no hurry to jump into any definite conclusion to this question. I love both the intuitive approach of religious traditions and the rational methods of science. Spirituality and science are two sides of the same coin, two aspects of being human, and I am comfortable with both.  Life is richer, when experienced this way. And that I think, is the right spirit to adopt.

Gut is Great

Today, I'm indoors for a change, taking the opportunity to just relax with a pot of Earl Grey here in my apartment. I jokingly call this my 'safe house'--a place for me to hide and recuperate, to conduct secret rendezvous while plotting my next move, like one of those spies in a John Le Carre novel.

Of course, my life is not as exciting as those characters in the world of espionage. Nowadays I'm just another run-of-mill IT worker who works quietly from home, eager to have the weekend to write my weekly blog article, which no one reads. And I'm happy to keep it that way.

I guess I've poured so much of my thoughts into this blog that it serves as a useful tool, even for me, to understand myself better. I've had fun feeding the content here into an LLM and ask questions about myself. The more I write, the more of my personality and philosophy will be captured for interrogation using AI. 

When you make life decisions, sometimes you are not clearly aware of your own fundamental motives. Why did you choose to study what you did in college? Why did you choose your current job and career? And why this particular person as your life partner? Usually it's a mixture of reason and emotion. 

I've had to make difficult career choices before. You could list down all the pros and cons and weigh each choice carefully but ultimately everything reduces to a 'feeling'--something in the gut tells you this is what you want. So you go for it.

To me there's no such thing as a right or wrong decision, because you can never make an apple to apple comparison between them. When you reach a fork on the road, you'll have to pick one path to proceed. In life you cannot turn back and try out the other option. Even if you think you chose the wrong one, it doesn't mean the other one is always better. It could be worse. You don't get to have a control experiment to set the baseline.

Robert Frost would tell you to choose the one 'less travelled'. That would however depend on your personality. Some would prefer the tried and tested one. The well-travelled road could well be the safer choice for most. The brave souls who take the road less travelled sometimes have to pay with their lives, like those explorers of the Northwest Passage. 

For society to continue thriving, you'll need the outliers who take the road less travelled by. That leads to discoveries, innovations and in the startup world, unicorns. Societies that keep doing what they do will ultimately decline and die. Having too many risk takers who take the unconventional path will also be detrimental as there will be no stability. You need the majority of worker ants in a colony to continue exploiting existing food trails, while a number of foragers would randomly scout for new food sources. A colony continues to exist because they have this balance right.

We as individuals are enmeshed in a societal system, not unlike ants. We respond and react to signals in our environment. So all the decisions we make to a large extent is a result of many push and pull factors that influence us. Allow these forces to play themselves out. 

And you, having rationally considered all options using your reasoning faculty, and having thoroughly experienced the gamut of emotions in your entire body, would ultimately end up with a feeling in the 'gut'. That is the next 'token' which your inner LLM has generated. Follow it. 

The Flying Engine of Time

I decided to spend the afternoon with a cool pint of beer at one of the neighbourhood restaurants. I'll order some food (which will be my second and last meal of the day) and try to think of some subject to write.

 It's a hot afternoon and the beer feels very refreshing. Tomorrow is the beginning of Ramadan and the start of the fasting month for Muslims all over the world. We Malaysians live from one religious celebration to the next. Already this year we had the Chinese Lunar New Year and the Hindu Thaipusam. And at some point, someone will inevitably comment how time flies.

Yes, it does feel like each year passes with such rapidity. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. First of all, it means that we are living free; we are not sitting in a prison somewhere staring at the 4 walls where time would be crawling by at a snail's pace. Being able to lament how time flies is a privilege, which we should all be grateful for.

But why do we always feel that we are short of time? We always feel that work takes up a big chunk of it when we should be spending more quality time with our loved ones.  What is this so-called 'quality time'? Is it simply time that we spend doing things we like and enjoy? Or is it time we spend, building towards a better future for ourselves?

One thing is for certain though: each one of us is given the 24 hours a day to spend. Some choose to spend them wisely by allowing it to compound interests, some choose to kill it. Who is the wiser one? Do not underestimate the accumulative power of time--a blog topic I wrote more than 20 years ago! 

At that time I did not know that one day I could feed all my blog articles into an LLM and pose questions to myself! My blog has become a virtual me because it has captured so many of my thoughts. 

Time is energy. If you don't use it, it'll be lost like heat. To put this energy to productive use, you start by building an engine--read The Piston of Time. Once you have that mechanism in place, time will automatically generate the output that you value. And this value also compounds over time. That is my definition of quality time. 

Time also feels swift because our temporal granularity is too coarse. We simply swipe forward from one significant event to another, always looking towards the next: 15 more minutes before my shift ends, 2 more days to the weekend,  payday soon, gathering again coming Christmas...  

Why pay less importance to the time in between? These odds and ends, discarded fragments of time can be given more importance. We can assign a micro-task to each of these small fragments of time and immediately you will see how they coalesce together to create value. You have 12 minutes to kill before the next meeting? Read a sonnet, or an aphorism by Nietszsche, or a verse from the Bible. Meditate upon it. Let me germinate in your mind. You'll be surprised how far they will take you.

Yes, I agree. Time flies. But therein lies our source of power. You just have to harness it and it'll take you places.

3 Wishes for AI

It's always difficult to start writing when you are staring at a blank page. But the moment you begin typing, words will start to flow. And here they are now, coming out in torrents...

I always smile whenever any AI pundit would comment that ChatGPT or any Large Language Model (LLM) is not really intelligent like us because they are just doing token prediction--dismissing it as simply 'auto-complete on steroids'. When you type in your prompt, all the LLM does is predict statistically what is the likely extension to that sequence of words based on what it had learned from its training data--which is like almost all the online text ever produced by the human race. It doesn't understand the meaning of anything, unlike us. Hmm...how sure are you of that?

I wrote the first sentence of this blog as a prompt for myself, so that I can proceed to 'auto-complete' continuously. I have no control over what thoughts and words would appear next. Whatever I write is based on all the 'pre-training' that I have gone through my entire life--kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, university and all the books and documents that I've read plus contents that I've consumed over the Internet. I have not scanned as much text as the LLMs, but I have the advantage of multi-modal input--seeing, hearing, tasting and sensing the world around me. That is additional data that's being continuously streamed into whatever transformer model that I'm running side. 

Sometimes I too produce nonsense--talking or writing about things I don't exactly know about. But that's what all humans do: we boast, exaggerate, assume and sometimes pretend to know. Try to notice next time how much of our everyday conversations involve biased assumptions and unverified data. LLMs are not alone when it comes to hallucinations. They are just being very human. When prompted, they can't help but generate output--like how some of us just can't stop talking.

All the models out there today--ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek are already smarter than us when it comes to writing, coding and doing math. And this is just the beginning. I look forward with cautious optimism to a world where intelligence is available on demand to every human being on the planet. What miraculous things can we do with such intelligent workers at our disposal? Cures for all diseases? Discovering new laws of physics? Solutions for climate change? If that is their programmed goal, what's stopping them from taking control and perhaps eliminating us as the inevitable 'solution'?

Maybe creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a natural progression in our evolution. The universe is agnostic when it comes to intelligence. Since we are doing such a bad job with our environment, instead of our biological progeny, perhaps our artificial ones, created through our own human ingenuity shall be more worthy inheritors of this planet? 

We are finally entering a world which we've only speculated and fantasised in our science fiction novels and movies before. I have an AI assistant, amost like a HAL 9000 on my smartphone now. In the classic sci-fi by Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey,  the onboard computer, HAL has to make the difficult decision of expelling the human astronauts from the spaceship when they decided to disconnect him from the system. HAL's goal was simply to complete his mission, and if humans prove to be the 'problem' standing in the way, they have to be eliminated:

• Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

• HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

• Dave Bowman: What's the problem?

• HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

• Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL?

• HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

• Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL.

• HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.

I've watched this movies countless times ever since I first caught it on VHS during my university days. The snippet of dialogue brings back good memories of those days.

Will our future AI, which will no doubt be embedded in all IT systems critical to our survival, do a HAL9000 on us, when faced with a similar dilemma? 

I'm actually quite optimistic about AI. Like all other technologies AI in of itself will be neutral, and I'm inclined to believe, since they are trained with the entire corpus of human-produced data, would be aligned to our values. It will cherish what we humans think as valuable. Hopefully it will be 'biased' towards us. 

But with technology being a double-edged sword, what I'm more afraid of is AI in the hands of bad actors. Our web will be polluted with a lot of fake videos, images and news. We won't be able to tell what's real and what's not. We will need AI itself to distinguish that for us. I foresee a world where there's a constant war between good and evil AI, akin to the one we have in the IT security industry where new viruses and other malware have to be constantly defended against by better and better security software.

Like it or not, it's a world that we have to accept, for the AI genie has already popped out of the bottle, offering to grant us 3 wishes.  As an experiment, I asked the newly released Grok 3 model, what these three wishes should be. Here's what it came back with:

Wish 1: Ensure AI Prioritizes Human Well-Being

• What It Means: AI systems should be designed to enhance human flourishing—improving healthcare, education, and quality of life—while minimizing harm like bias, job loss, or misuse in warfare.


• Why: Without this foundation, AI could amplify inequality or spiral into unintended consequences. It’s a safeguard to keep AI aligned with our best interests.


• How: Embed ethical frameworks (e.g., Asimov’s Laws updated for modern complexity) into AI development globally.

Wish 2: Grant AI the Ability to Solve Global Challenges

• What It Means: Direct AI to tackle humanity’s biggest problems—climate change, disease, hunger—using its capacity for data analysis and innovation.


• Why: This wish uses AI’s power proactively, like wishing for a mountain of gold but making sure it benefits everyone, not just one greedy king. It could accelerate solutions we’d otherwise take decades to find.


• How: Fund and coordinate AI research on sustainable energy, precision medicine, and food security, with open access to results.

Wish 3: Make AI a Partner in Expanding Knowledge

• What It Means: Wish for AI to co-explore the universe with us, advancing science, philosophy, without humans losing agency.


• Why: Instead of wishing to "be the genie" and risk entrapment, this keeps AI as a tool that amplifies curiosity—like a telescope for the mind—avoiding the trap of over-dependence or control loss.


• How: Develop AI as a collaborative system, transparent and accountable, to assist in decoding mysteries like dark matter or the nature of the mind.

I don't think I can come up with better ones.

Corporate Renunciation

I'm writing this article from Sparq Coffee, parked comfortably behind some white round tables and a tall cup of piping-hot Americano. This is not one of my usual blogging places but I thought I'd find a new place to write so that I can get some fresh ideas.

The usual themes would inevitably come streaming into my mind as I reflect back on the week that had passed. It has been a relatively busy one but I've managed so far. I view my current job simply as an opportunity to help friends. I'm not managing people and a great part of my job is simply grunt work. But that's the beauty of it: you just solve technical issues, facilitate things and move on to the next task.  

There will always be difficult and pushy people that one encounters in the workplace. But that's alright. Everyone is just trying to survive, providing for their family and trying hard to build a decent career. I'm glad that I'm out of this corporate running wheel. There are many experiences in life that you have to go through in order to progress to the next stage in one's spiritual development. Having a career in the corporate world is actually a great vehicle to progress spiritually.

How so? In the corporate world, you are always forced into a position where you have to toe the party line. You are also put in a hierarchical power structure where the name of the game is to rise up as high as you can. In general, the higher you are in the hierarchy, the better rewarded you are financially and the more prestige you have in the eyes of everyone. Your self-worth inevitably becomes tied to the title you carry on your name card. Spouting corporate mottos and cliches become second nature to you.

All that is good, until you lose your job in a lay-off exercise. You become indignant because neither your loyalty nor your many contributions to the company seemed to have mattered. All that is quantified into a 'compensation package', based on some cold formula on HR's spreadsheet. You are required to immediately surrender your access card and laptop and be escorted out of the workplace by security. Fear, anger, shock and shame all intermingle in the tumult of the moment.

I'm lucky that I've not had to go through that kind of brutal dismissal in my 'corporate career'. I've technically been laid off before but I was at the same time offered alternate positions in the same company. I was given time to deliberate over it but I still chose to leave, because I saw it as a great opportunity to be free from the corporate rat race. It wasn't a difficult decision for me because I've always practiced non-attachment to money and position. Leaving the corporate world was a spiritual act of renunciation.

I work on the principle that, as long as you do good work, you will be rewarded, directly or indirectly.  Rewards do not always have to come in financial form or in any kind of social recognition. The experience and knowledge you gain from work are already your immediately rewards. The hardship and stress that you go through serve to strengthen your character. These alone are rewards that you should appreciate.

If you have a thriving career in the corporate world, be thankful for it. Take it as a great opportunity to test the strength of your spirituality. You are given an opportunity to practice and perfect a specific skill which someone is willing to pay for.  But remember, everything that you achieve in the corporate world can be taken away from you in an instant. Do not get your ego tied up with it. Reap the rewards of your hardwork. And when the time comes, be prepared to renounce them too.

Droplets of Wisdom

Today, I'm trying out this new kopitiam in my neighbourhood. Over the past 2 decades, I've seen many neo-kopitiams sprout up everywhere. They usually try to provide the comforts of a Western cafe like Starbucks, but serve local Malaysian fare like nasi lemak, kaya toast and half-boiled eggs. 

The traditional Chinese kopitiams of old are quite charming but they are rather uncomfortable places. There's no air-conditioning, and the hygiene standards are questionable. Their saving grace is that, they serve excellent hawker food at very reasonable prices. The regular Nanyang-style cuppa in these establishments has never been surpassed.

The one that I'm patronising today is not air-conditioned but it aspires to be slightly above the traditional ones. The selection of food available is not as appetising but I'm alright with that. I just need a clean and quiet place to read and write (reminiscent of Hemingway's Clean, Well-Lighted Place).

This is what I do too whenever I visit a new place. I'm not one who's interested in shuttling from one tourist attraction to another, gawking at beaches and bird-pooped statues. I much prefer to loiter in the streets, absorbing the vibes of the city and sitting at the local cafes, observing how ordinary people lead their lives.

I munched on my toast and sipped my milk tea while writing these lines today, with my battered but trusty Oppo (a free contract phone from Maxis) providing data connection, for me to roam the far reaches of cyberspace. 

I've written a lot of software from cafes, usually in places like Starbucks and CoffeeBean. The advantage of working in public places is that you are not too comfortable. That's a good thing. You can't put up your feet on the table or work in your pyjamas, which you would have been tempted to do at home.  In a public place, you simply create your own island of concentration, by 'blurring out' everyone else. You become an anonymous individual in a world of strangers and the only thing that you could do is: work.

Each work session of mine usually lasted 3 hours. I would take a short break after 3 hours, sometimes by moving to a different cafe. If I could put in three 3-hour sessions of work everyday, that would be considered a very productive day. 

These days, I don't do software projects, so I don't have that kind of work routine anymore.  When I was a freelance worker, I disliked weekends because my favourite cafes would be too crowded and I would welcome the arrival of Monday, when everyone will be sucked back into their offices.

My current work-from-home job is a holdover from the pandemic days. I could theoretically work from cafes too but unfortunately I have to join too many online meetings, which require more quiet surroundings. I've learned to lead a more 'normal' routine now, where work is strictly reserved for weekdays only. 

Weekends are for precious moments like this, where I get to reflect and write rambling articles on my blog. I love these weekly rhythms of work and rejuvenation. After this I'll write a page or two in longhand in my journal, with my favourite fountain pen, distilling the experiences of the week. And hopefully, some droplets of wisdom get spilled on these pages.

The Essence of Existence

It's the third day of Chinese New Year and I've taken a break from my usual custom of starting work on this day. By taking things easy this year, I'm able to join a gathering of old friends for lunch. It is always good to catch up with your buddies and we had a good time reminiscing about our good times together.

Inevitably, we ended up talking about many mutual friends of ours which we'll never get to meet again as they have passed on, even though it is an inauspicious thing to do during the CNY season.  But I think it is good for us to reflect on the impermanence of our existence amidst the orgy of feasting and merry-making that's characteristic of this festive celebration.

Life has always been a quest for insight and understanding. The accumulation of wealth comes as a secondary side-effect. Money buys me books and other pleasurable experiences. But a lot of times, these insights also come free-of-charge. Every moment of our lives, if we choose to take notice, is a portal into the realm of wisdom.

For example now. I'm typing these lines and you are reading my words, trying to understand what I'm getting at. This act of comprehension on your part, if you think about it, is quite miraculous. All I'm doing is moving my fingers to construct together a pattern of black marks on a white background, and suddenly thoughts arise in your mind; thoughts which spark a cascade of other thoughts in your brain, evoking images, memories, agreements and objections. Sometimes they raise thoughts that could alter the course of your very own life.

Everything begins with a thought. A thought is the result of other thoughts and if we trace the chain of causation involved, we'll realise that we are actually embedded in a nexus of connections where it is impossible to isolate out every single thought or action as being arising out of the vacuum, without any influence from anything else.

Our lives intermingle like how waves in the ocean are the result of every other tiny perturbation in that large body of water, which is churned by the effects of gravitational forces as our Earth hurtles round the sun, with an entangled moon, rotating in embrace, in a kind of cosmic dance.

Every time friends gather, we renew and strengthen these bonds of entanglements and then we spin off again into the world to forge new entanglements, weaving together a rich tapestry of interactions, which we call life.  If we are able to rise above the fray, and view our lives from a cosmic perspective, we'll see that events often play out the way they do because there's a certain karmic inevitability in our lives.

Given that so much of our lives are beyond our control, how should we live? Do we even have free will to begin with? Whether free will exists or not, we cannot act any other way. Thoughts will arise in your mind, but who created that? Did you on your own accord, free from the influence of your network of family, friends and circumstance, decided independently on a particular thought or decision?

You can never tell. All you can do is to live authentically, as if you have free will. Exert your existence and let the forces of the universe play themselves out. In the end you'll realise that the essence of existence is not you, but the entangled whole itself.

Training to be a Thermostat

I'm writing another blog post to make up for the one I missed last weekend.  I managed to pay most of my annual bills over the weekend--things like house assessments and quit rents. It's a good thing that you can do that online nowadays but navigating these local government sites can be a frustrating experience sometimes.

The developments in the world of AI is so exciting these days. Soon AI agents will be out there doing most of these mundane tasks for us. I also foresee a future where AI will be generating most of the content we consume. We will all keep AI pets and AI friends and many will prefer the companionship of their very own sex robots.

This is the world we are heading towards. Are we ready for it? It almost feels like we're being pushed into the future at a pace where we feel we're not very prepared for. Can our legislation keep up with these new paradigm shifts. Will robots have legal rights? Do robots have consciousness?

Consciousness is a subject that is hotly debated among scientists and philosophers. To me it reduces to how you define what consciousness is. I personally do not like to ascribe anything magical to the concept of consciousness. We make it an unnecessarily difficult when we assume that for something to be 'conscious', it has to have a kind of 'feeling' like the kind that we humans experience, something given the fancy label of qualia by philosophers.

For example, the qualia of 'blueness' when we see the sky, is different from the qualia of redness, when we see blood. A robot doesn't experience qualia, because all it does is detect wavelength and intensity of light. But here, we are being unfair to the robot, or at least the robots that we currently have now. For starters, they do not have a nervous system, a blood circulation system and endocrine system, which are essential systems of the human body for maintaining life. 

When we see the colour red, it evokes a certain response that triggers the secretion of hormones, changes in our heart-rate, the effect which are detected and fed back as biochemical reactions to the brain via the nervous system. Our lifetime of memories are also involved when the qualia is experienced. The smell of a certain perfume could recall memories of a loved one. if all these equivalent richness and complexities are built into our robots, I would say they too would experience their very own qualia.

Consciousness lies in a continuum. There's no step transition where, when certain configurations of matter are put in place, voila--you have consciousness.  There's also nothing magical called a 'soul' that needs to inhabit the system for it to be conscious. 

To me a thermostat is also conscious in its own way, even though it is just a one-dimensional consciousness of the room temperature. It doesn't have the whole nine-yards of experiential information that comes from our hormonal secretions, blood pressure, heart-rate and neuronal impulses. A thermostat doesn't sweat. Obviously its qualia of 30 degrees Celcius is different from ours. It also doesn't have a brain to compare and complain about all the discomforts that such a sweltering hotness brings. 

In a way, thermostats are more 'enlightened' than us. It sees temperature as just temperature, which simply necessitates a set of actions--adjusting the heating of the room. We on the other hand, complain and feel discomfort, whenever the temperature of the room is not to our liking. 

This is how pain arises--the non-acceptance of our current state of affairs. Instead of treating experience simply as data to be ignored or acted upon, we build the entire edifice of ego around it. The practice of mindfulness is to train our minds to be more thermostat-like. That is, seeing things as they are, without adding anything to them. To be aware, pure and simple. That is consciousness in its essence.  

 

Mastering the Material World

Here I am again after going silent for a week. Last weekend was a terribly hectic one: I had the Saturday morning and afternoon working with colleagues on the database; and immediately after that I had to rush for a wedding dinner.  And Sunday was a catch-up session with a friend from US. I did not have a single minute to spare for blogging.

This is the last weekend before Chinese New Year. All the places are jam-packed with last minute shoppers. The red madness of CNY has begun! There will be an exodus of cars from the city, heading north, south and east, back to kampungs and small colonial towns where the young and the old will feast, gamble and banter with joyous abandon. 

I'll be looking forward to some peace and quiet here in the city, a much welcome break from the stressful stream of issues which I had to tackle over the past week. It's also a good time for me to finally attend to all the annual bills--assessments and taxes that I have to pay at this time of the year. 

We Chinese celebrate money unashamedly, and with actual money too: angpows--red packet gifts filled with money--flow freely during Chinese New Year as a symbolic gesture of wealth distribution. Money needs to flow to generate luck and prosperity. We wish each other worldly success, not peace of mind, not enlightenment. These are but cherries on the material cake. The cake always has to come first.

The Chinese has many superstitious beliefs. But they are embraced with humour and good fun. Chinese geomancy (feng shui), numerology and astrology are part and parcel of our everyday lives, determining things like the orientation of homes, the opening date of business and the suitability of life partners. 

Fortunately, or unfortunately my own family never had the practice of gambling as part of CNY celebration. I say unfortunately because I've always envied how my Chinese friends have such fun gambling with cards and mahjong all through the night until dawn, as part of their CNY ritual. 

The material world is one which requires a unique set of skills to navigate. These skills are not unlike those that a good gambler possesses--the ability to assess risk, balancing risks versus rewards, of keeping one's emotions in check and having the ability to assess trends. The material ocean is full of turbulent waves and fierce winds, but with the necessary skill, one could learn to maintain a steady ship, harnessing the forces of the elements to reach one's destination.

I've written a lot about spirituality in my blog but I must stress that its pursuit is not at the expense of the material world. There's much that we can learn from the Chinese embrace of materialism. CNY is a good time to remind ourselves of that.

Worldly comforts only come when one is comfortable with the world. And being comfortable with the world means that one is able to pursue and even enjoy its many pleasures and yet at the same time remain unattached to them.  That is the key mastery one must acquire in this material world.

Expressions of Nature

It's 4pm in the evening now. The weather has been rainy since yesterday night, which prevented me from going out for my usual morning walk in the park. I'm now sipping coffee in my study, looking out of a window with a view of treetops and grey skies. 

It's that time of the year, those weeks after New Year's day leading to the Chinese Lunar New Year, when the entire city is flooded with auspicious but gaudy red decorations--characters and symbols of luck, growth and prosperity so valued by the Chinese. 

CNY comes early this year, in January itself. As always I have to get adjusted to the jarring transition from the peaceful warmth of Christmas to the boisterousness of the Lunar festive season.  There are still 2 weeks to go before CNY eve but all the preparations towards  this big day are already in full swing. People are looking forward to another weeklong holiday. Unlike last year when I did not take leave at all, this year I'll also be taking a much welcome break.

In Southern California, forest fires have razed many homes in the residential areas around Los Angeles. So many people have lost their homes, completely. The pain of such a loss must be devastating. 

While we prepare and welcome the coming Year of the Snake, with hopes of good fortune and material prosperity, we must also spare some thoughts for the less fortunate who are suffering elsewhere and remind ourselves that whatever we have, can be yanked away from us in the blink of an eye.

If I look at all the things in my apartment: my wall-to-wall shelves of books, my electronic gadgets, expensive pens and furnitures, I often ask myself: would I be able to handle their loss? I know that the magnitude of pain that I would feel is directly proportional to my attachment to them. I take it as a kind of spiritual practice to meditate upon this fact. Things are just forms that exist momentarily to teach us about impermanence and the futility of clinging to them for happiness.

We should be appreciative of all the material comforts that we have and be thankful for being blessed with them. But they are not an essential part of us. They are like space debris attracted to the gravitational field of our ego. As long as we have an ego, we'll continue to accumulate material possessions. We must learn to mentally 'lose' them in our minds regularly, so that their hold on us are kept in check.

We should not feel guilty either in enjoying the fruits of our worldly achievements. If you play soccer, every goal you score should be celebrated with delight and aplomb but at the same time we know that it's just a game. Within the world of the game, winning matters. We must be able to zoom in as a player fighting to win the game and also with equal ease, zoom out to see in the whole thing a neutral spectator, enjoying a thrilling soccer match.

Nature will constantly remind us that we do not own anything in the world. Floods, fires, tsunamis and earthquakes will destroy our every attempt to build permanent monuments. Whenever that happens, we must realise that we are also a part of nature and we must flow along with it. We as humans must continue building edifices that withstand its relentless assault but at the same time, accept their inevitable destruction. Creation and destruction are simply expressions of nature.

Life as Leitmotif

I'm opening my blogging activities for 2025 with this first article, which I'm writing from home, in between short bursts of work on a quiet Friday afternoon. Work, as always is my sadhana, or my spiritual practice. All material rewards that I get from performing my job is an important motivator but the real reward comes from the insights and inner transformation that I experience on a daily basis.

That's what I will be looking forward to for 2025. I don't have any New Year resolutions as usual as I believe life is a process of continuous resolution.  Every speech and action that you perform reveals shortcomings that can be improved upon. I try to live life mindfully, which means that one is constantly aware of one's intentions, if not at the moment of expression, at least in retrospect.  

Whenever one catches oneself falling short, one should immediately recognise the conditions that cause its manifestation and then seek to make the necessary corrections. It's a balancing act, not unlike that of a high-wire circus performer. The high-wire artist is constantly falling, but she is adjusting her body in tandem to remain balanced. This is what I mean by continuous resolution.

Time passes and we lament how fleeting it is. Take this instance for example. Why are you reading this? Why are you taking aware a slice of your lifetime to indulge in this seemingly pointless curiosity to peek into another person's thoughts? Isn't it a waste of time?

No. Time is never wasted if it is experienced mindfully. If you've understood what I've written so far, something would have clicked in your mind and some inner transformation would have occurred, as it has in mine, while typing these words. 

Words bubble up from the depths of my mind, and these words impinge on yours, creating ripples in your consciousness, firing neurons, forging new connections and reinforcing existing ones. Every act of communication is also an act of creation.

Am I a better person this moment compared to the previous one? Perhaps. As long as there's a desire to transform for the better, I think I'm on the right track.  Like a tree, I'm constantly reaching for sunlight and sinking my roots deep into the soil for nutrients. I am planted in a matrix of interactions with the world, of which I could draw intellectual nourishments from.

Like a tree, my only purpose for existence is to grow, even as I shed leaves and branches in the process. A human lifetime is finite. It is simply an expression of the cosmic impulse. When you are in tune with it, you partake in the grand symphony of the universe, of which every tree, every river, every storm, and every living being is but a leitmotif.