The Adventure of Education

Pavillion, Bukit Jalil is such a busy mall on weekends. I had lunch here with Myra earlier and after loitering around for a while, decided to just park here for an hour to write my blog article of the week. A lot of thoughts went through my head over the week and here I am trying to run through them and see what theme or themes that I could latch on to for today's ruminations.

I was listening to a discussion about education this week and as always there's a lot of criticism about our Malaysian education system. Though there is acknowledgement and agreement about importance of education and how it should be reformed, there is little agreement on what actually should be done. What and how should we be teaching our schoolchildren and what medium of instruction should we be using? Is that even important at all? Should we be emphasising STEM? How should we incorporate AI into our education system? 

I've heard views that range from "Maths and Science should not be emphasized in early education" to "Coding should be taught together with basic maths" to "Philosophy should be more widely taught" to the usual conservative views which believe that all education should be anchored in one's religion, or at least with more emphasis on civics and morality. Other common complaints are that our education system is too exam-oriented and students rote-learn things, which are only important to pass exams.

Let me add my own idiosyncratic view here. I don't think there is a perfect answer. I don't think changing the medium of instruction to English will also make a significant difference. The 'system' can only do so much; it's the teachers that make all the difference. We remember teachers who have inspired us in certain particular subjects and they are often the reason why we ended up liking or disliking them.

Kids today already have access to all the knowledge and information that they need through the internet; libraries and schools are no longer the main conduits of knowledge.  Teachers however are the difference between a run-of-the-mill education and an outstanding one. One could also argue that, we could find the best teachers on Youtube now. Teachers who used to inspire kids in school now end up being content creators online. Online classes in a way does help in bringing more quality teachers and teachings to more students but virtual classrooms lack the social interaction which real brick-and-mortar schools provide. 

The social aspect of education--sharing, exploration, play and even competition are what schools should focus on to make itself relevant in an age when more and more of our interactions are being shifted, for better or worse, into the virtual world.  There-in also lies the greatest challenge in education--where do we find the quality teachers that make all the difference for our public schools? I don't think we can. 

But maybe better pedagogy can be built into the system, since we might not have the personnel to deliver the quality? The solution seems to point to the use of technology. Our centenarian former Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir was a big proponent of that. His insistence on using English for Maths and Science was laudable for its intent, but I suspect its implementation brought all sorts of issues, not to mention opposition from language nationalists.

I guess the solution lies in empowering average teachers with the necessary aids, for example good quality Youtube-style educational content to the students. Every subject should be introduced with a well-made video introduction. This would be followed by discussions and deeper expositions led by the teacher. Class activities in the form of questions and answers are important. Pop quizzes should be conducted regularly, to gauge understanding and for the students themselves to get a sense of how much they have absorbed the lessons.

I guess, this is nothing new and to a certain extent is already being done. What's probably missing is the structure where the audio-visual content is treated as primary, with textbooks and other learning activities as supplementary ingredients. Good students will always excel and take the extra mile on their own to learn. They are the least of our concerns. The challenge of education is to bring a whole mass of students who are not interested in learning the subjects taught in school because they are 'boring'. They are boring simply because of the way they have been taught in school, that is, a textbook-centric delivery of dry facts, with minimal audio-visual empowerment and the participation of students. 

Every subject should be as exciting as a season of Game of Thrones (minus the sex and violence). And because it is video-driven, they would have a mental image of the subject, seared into their memory. Year one science becomes season one of the science drama, which students follow with a sense of the entire story-arc. A subject is a story, with introduction, climax and denouement. 

Reading and writing are still important but they have to be done as part of class activities. Read aloud in class, write as part of the pop test. Students should be taught how to deliver output on the spot. Have students, evaluate each other's work as part of the class activities. Real education happens when no one is afraid to make mistakes and everyone is encouraged to constructively judge and be judged.

There will be a sense of coherence when every subject is like an episode in an on-going saga. Class activities become an opportunity to discuss the show that they have watched together. Class activities should be like a fan gathering for students to eagerly share extra pieces of 'trivia' they have gleaned from their own reading of the textbooks and also an opportunity to show-off in a positive way.

We are driven by stories. And all folklores are basically stories that teach the values of a particular culture. We should use technology, creativity and content that aligns with the habits and lifestyle of our generation to deliver good education. Make education a fun adventure, which our students can enjoy, participate and perhaps, who knows, even learn something?

The Music of Creation and Destruction

Today, I'm writing from Citta Mall, which I am quite fond of because it's a relatively quiet mall with a lot of outdoor eating tables where I could sit with a book or computer. But since it's a pretty warm day today, I decided to sit inside the air-conditioned cafe to summon the Muse.

I'm feeling very relaxed today after a short busy week, spent catching up on work. I believe I have mentioned somewhere in this blog before how social media is an amplifier of the good and the bad. For the past weeks, the world has been discussing the assassination of the American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

The shooter, who is now in custody is a 22-year old by the name of Tyler Robinson.  His true motives have not been fully revealed yet but in text conversations with his room-mate, who asked why he had committed the act, he was quoted as saying: "I had enough of his hatred...Some hate can't be negotiated out".

Why had he felt such 'hatred' from someone he has probably never met or talk to before? Most likely he had been exposed to Charlie's right-wing rhetoric through social media. Charlie has a daily podcast and had many live events debating those who disagree with him.  I'm sure many of us in this part of the world had never heard of Charlie Kirk before his horrific assassination. 

I follow US politics very closely and I fully understand the sentiment from both sides of the aisle. This so-called hatred that exists between the left and the right has never been amplified to such a magnitude before. The algorithms of social media has bifurcated society into two extreme camps, simply because we had allowed our attention to be consumed by the personalised content pushed to us.

 Whether we are left or right leaning, we'll be served content that reinforces our biases all day. Addiction to social-media is in some ways worse than being a drug junkie. The former transforms you very subtly into a bigoted extremist holding a single viewpoint with zero capacity for nuance; the latter simply destroys your body and soul. 

Rather than dying slowly from a drug addiction, you are instead transformed into a TikTok-infected zombie carrying a binary view of the world: extreme left or right. zero or one. We have now carried the digitisation process from our information technology into the social realm. We no longer see the varying shades of grey: either you are with us or against us.

How do we rectify this? Unfortunately, the genie is already out of the bottle. In a way, it's part of the inevitable evolution of technology and society. The universe is dispassionate. It has no obligations to us humans. But one thing's for sure, all cycles exhaust themselves ultimately. Oscillations will dampen; new tensions will build up elsewhere and a fresh round of thesis-vs-antithesis begins again. Yes, Hegel was right. It's the basic dynamic of the universe. I see it as the Nataraja, dancing to the music of creation and destruction.

Intellectual Manna from Heaven

I'm hit with another long weekend again, which I had originally thought to be just 3 days but it turned out to be 4, with the actual public holiday, Malaysia day falling on Tuesday, 16 of September. Monday is the extra holiday announced by the government. 

This long enforced hiatus from work could cause me some problems because I'm sure there's a huge backlog of issues to clear come Wednesday. Therefore I'm planning to do some work this weekend, like what I used to do. Weekends, at one time were my most productive days. I would park myself for the entire day at some cafe to tackle some difficult tasks.

Today, Saturday is my only personal time for blogging, reading and socialising. But this weekend, I don't have any social engagements. I will spend more time planning some future projects and maybe spend some time reading at a pub or cafe.

But first, let me embark on my weekly ramble in cyberspace. Every morning when I walk in the park, listening to some podcast or audiobook, I would occasionally get some insights about a particular subject; it could be something related to spirituality, science, culture or politics. The topics I wrote about here in my blog are often the result of such mini-eureka moments.

But let's talk about the subject of insight, in general. What exactly are insights and how do they occur? A moment of insight, is often a flash of realisation or intuition about a particular subject. This moment of realisation, I've likened it to a tumbling piece that falls from the top slotting in perfectly, with some deft manoeuvring into the gap of a row of  blocks in a Tetris game. I wrote about this 21 years ago (!) in a blog article here called Tetris of the Mind. That article was the result of an insight I had in Indonesia, which gave me a better understanding of the Chinese so-called Book of Changes: the I Ching. I have not fleshed out the details of this insight in any blog article yet--even after 2 decades!. Maybe someday I will. 

I realised that any insight I have completely alters your understanding of the world. It clears away confusions and often ties together isolated and disparate truths in your mind. You see the bigger picture and glimpse a grander vision of the universe.  It is the thrill of gaining insights that keep me going. Happiness is having new insights everyday!

When you have a lot of thoughts and concepts existing in isolation, they build obstacles in the mind, not unlike rows and rows of Tetris blocks with gaps in between. It's worst when they are buried deep down below: all the upper blocks need to be crushed before they can be accessed. But what great satisfaction one gets and we see multiple rows Tetris blocks disappear, when the right piece fall into place, kerrush! It is the metaphor of a eureka moment.

One of the things that I also like to do is to reread pages from my old university textbooks--it could be mathematics, electromagnetics or machine theory; I always gain a better understanding of the subject and would wonder why I never understood the concepts the same way then, when I was an undergraduate student.  But it also means that my mind has improved by leaps and bounds since then, through experience and the accumulation of many small insights. I guess I should judge my younger mind less harshly.

The more I read and listen and experience life, the more Tetris blocks of insights will fall into place, transforming the very substratum of my mind. And may they continue to tumble from the sky, like intellectual manna from heaven! 

Hobbies and Hobbyhorses

I am able to blog today because it is a public holiday here in Malaysia--the Prophet Muhammad's birthday, which is celebrated in many Muslim countries. This is a much welcome break for me--the second public holiday for the week. 

Malaysians are 'lucky' because, being multi-cultural and multi-religious, we have many public holidays. For Islamic-related holidays alone, we have five--the two major ones being the Hari Raya Aidil Fitri and Hari Raya Haji (Eid Al-Fitri and Eid Al-Adha), together with Nuzul Al-Quran (Muhammad's Revelation Day), Awal Muharam (New Year's day based on the Islamic calendar) and today's celebration of Maulud Nabi (Mawlid Al-Nabi). 

I'm not very good at taking leave from work. I'm happy that there are these public holidays which kind of force me to take a break. A healthier work-life balance is what I'm trying to cultivate. I walk every morning for an hour, but that comes at the price of a shortened sleep-time, which is something that I need to address too. I actually might have to abandon regular work altogether to be able to achieve the perfect balance...

My 'problem' is that I have too many areas of interests. Each one of them is a rabbit hole that, if pursued seriously, could consume an entire lifetime. Not only does each interest contend for my leisure time, they also eat into my living space. No matter where I live, my room is always cluttered with books. Even when I was living in a hotel for 2 years in Indonesia, my hotel room was also filled with books, much to the chagrin of housekeeping.

My current bedroom here in Subang Jaya is cluttered with computers, monitors and other computing accessories, and of course, books. In my Cyberjaya apartment, I have a digital piano, Denon amplifier and speakers, my old CDs, more abandoned computers and parts, a digital piano and the bulk of my book collection. I used to have a large Sun workstation monitor, which I have thankfully gotten rid of. 

I used to enjoy oil-painting during my teenage years, inspired by painters like Constable, Renoir, Monet and Michelangelo. But I am reluctant to revive that hobby for, again lack of time and space. I don't want my home to be cluttered with palettes, canvases, half-squeezed paint tubes and dirty brushes.  Every obsession or hobby consumes money, time and space. But hobbies seem to be my main objective in life--pursuing my various interests and obsessions, at the expense of a 'regular' life of a householder.

I avoided having a printer and have been able to get by without one. Recently I also acquired an e-Ink reader--not specifically for e-books--but for easier reading access to all the various PDF documents and papers that I have accumulated in my hard disks, without having to chop down more trees.

I used to enjoy digital photography too but I realised that is another rabbit hole, that's probably not worth a chunk of my lifetime. Video production should also be one of those things that interest me, because i love movies so much. But these days, I hardly go to the movies anymore; even Netflix streaming ones have become a rare luxury, which I can only enjoy at the expense of sleep.  

Audio books and podcasts are good alternative sources of knowledge and entertainment, but they still consume time and mental attention. Digital content has the advantage that they do not consume physical space, which I realise, is the major challenge in any kind of hobby. You can build a studio, library or workshop to pursue all your hobbies serious, but every kind of workspace requires housekeeping and maintenance, which is always a drag.

I have a large collection of fountain pens--another hobby which I allow myself to indulge in, because pens, thankfully do not consume that much storage space. And my excuse for permitting myself this luxury is that pens have utility value: I use them to write in my journals and notebooks (which also clutter my room). Maybe one day I'll blog about my favourite fountain pens, and my equally large collection of inks!

I've also mentioned before, part tongue-in-cheek, part in exasperation, that religion should be treated as a hobby.  In my case, this is literally true, religion and spirituality is a huge area of interest, not unlike painting or music. I have a great desire to understand the philosophy, psychology and history of religion.  As one can see from topic of many of my blog articles, religion is indeed a hobbyhorse of mine.

With so many interesting hobbies to pursue in life, how could anyone be bored? If work itself, is also a hobby, then this subject of work-life balance will never come up. Thomas Alva Edison famously said: “I never did a day’s work in my life, it was all fun.” Yes, let's all work on our hobbies, and have fun.

Of Independence and Utopianism

I have a long weekend ahead because tomorrow, Sunday is Merdeka Day and Monday is the replacement holiday. Surprisingly I'm not feeling that tired today even though it has been a very busy week for me. I'm also looking forward to a lunch gathering on Monday with some old friends.

Since we are celebrating our 68th year of independence tomorrow, I'll reflect a bit on affairs related to our country, which I actually dislike writing about because I don't see anything new that I could contribute. The internet is a cesspool of political podcasts and punditry, and many watch simply to reinforce their already entrenched beliefs. 

I see human society as dynamical systems which tend towards specific attractor states. These are stable patterns of behaviour, which any society has a tendency to latch on to. Cultural norms are strong attractor states; so it is inevitable that the different races in Malaysia have a tendency to stick to their familiar habits. 

We abhor racial stereotyping but stereotyping is basically the negative aspect of the mind's natural tendency to recognise patterns. Like it or not, we stereotype all the time. The moment we make general sweeping statements, even innocuous ones like: 'Malaysians are very friendly and hospitable people', we are stereotyping this species of people called 'Malaysians'. This tendency to categorise, classify and pattern recognise is part of our brain's natural intelligence. The brain's neural networks learn by reinforcing recurrent patterns that it sees in nature.

Is it any wonder then that there are racial prejudices in every society? Malaysia is no different and that is the biggest obstacle towards national integration. It is not possible to artificially impose a language and a culture on a society. Communist countries 'succeed' to a certain extend, at great human costs. Society will always evolve its own culture and habits. 

When you put different groups of people together, each with their own attractor states, these states could coalesce to form new ones. There will be dominant states, that will be augmented by foreign ones, sometimes diminishing its original flavours but at times enhancing them too in surprising ways.  

We are often torn between tradition and change. A country has certain traditions simply because these are attractors states of the system at a particular period in time. But with immigration, technological and other global changes, new states emerge. Sometimes new countries are formed because the zeitgeist has evolved. Hegelian dialectics are always at play.

Communism was attractive to intellectuals at one time because it promised a utopian society that appeared to be fair and seemed to be supported by reason. Marxists believe that one of consequences of the Industrial Revolution is the rise of a class of asset owners who own the means of production. They profit unfairly through the exploitation of the labour class, from which the real value of a product is actually derived.  

Why should the means of production be concentrated in the hands of the lucky few who end up enjoying a disproportionately large share of the profits? Why can't society share all its resources and distribute wealth equitably--'from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs'?

But society and markets being complex dynamical systems determine their own stable attractor states.  The free market system, with minimal government intervention has proven to be a better generator of societal wealth than any centralised ideology-based mechanisms, no matter how noble its aim.  The government can regulate, stimulate and sets certain boundaries, but by and large, the complex individuals who form society inevitably find their own zones of comfort, in other words, attractor states.

And that's how it should be. We are the country we are today, due to circumstances of history and geography. The cultural intermingling of diverse peoples, in this land where the trade winds meet--the 'Nusa Antara'--made us who we are. That is our strength and advantage. As long as we continue being open, adaptable and progressive, we'll always prosper. And true independence means that we are free to think on our own, lest we fall into the seductive trap of ideological or religious utopianism.

The Zealot and the Drunk

I'm on a vegetarian diet today and so I ordered some plant-based meal from the pub here for my early dinner. I enjoy blogging from a pub because I tend to feel more relaxed in such places. I plan to spend a couple of hours here and will probably grab some beers after finishing this article.

We all know that excessive consumption of alcohol leads to drunkenness, characterised by a loosening of inhibitions, slurred speech and impaired judgement. That is why it is unwise to drive when one is in an intoxicated state. 

The mind has so many mental blocks, and when people drink, they temporarily remove them. This makes people more relaxed and social, and this lack of inhibition sometimes making people do  things that are socially inappropriate. That is why most religions prohibit the consumption of alcohol. Alcoholism could also lead to all sorts of long-term health issues. 

Why then do people drink? Well, same reason why people play computer games, binge on Netflix serials or stuff themselves with junk food. We all want to take a break from the stress of everyday problems, and find ways to trigger the release of all the feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and endorphins. 

All pleasurable experiences could lead to addiction, when the brain's pleasure circuits are hijacked. It is easy to get addicted to anything that's pleasurable. Almost everyone craves for their favourite food. We even celebrate that: look at how many Youtube videos and TV programs that are dedicated to food. 

Gluttony is considered one of the 7 deadly sins by the medieval church. Even the consumption of coffee was debated by Muslim scholars during the 15th and 16th century, when its popularity began to surge and coffee-houses became boisterous social interaction hubs, prone to licentiousness. Today, we celebrate the consumption of coffee in all its variety. 

What is prohibited by the religions of the day will be determined by the zeitgeist. There is no right or wrong to it. There will always be purportedly religious people who will behave in a holier-than-thou attitude, condemning others for their failure to strictly follow the rules and regulations of their sect, when they themselves succumb to the deadly sin of pride.

Anything pleasurable consumed in access will tend to lead to bad consequences, whether it is inappropriate behaviour or long term health issues. Religion should help people to cultivate responsible behaviour and alleviate the suffering of the human condition. Everyone is simply trying to cope with the circumstances that they are in, in the best way they know. 

Excessive indulgence in religious fervour should be abhorred as much as alcoholic drunkenness. The religious zealot who bays for the blood of sinners is as repulsive as the abusive drunk who hurls obscenities after a few drinks.  If you know better than others, lead by example. Truth will alway shine like a beacon. Inspire others with the sheer joy of your path. And you bet I will drink to that. Cheers!

Food of the Mind

I'm enjoying some Al-Kbous tea today together with a nice poke bowl lunch, which I had ordered from Grab. Maybe this will be my dinner too, I don't know.  I might go for some beers later. Let's see how it goes.

If I go to a restaurant or cafe, it is mainly to read. Food and drinks are mere accompaniments to this my main activity. And because of this, I am often oblivious to the taste and quality of the food that I'm consuming. I am often surprised when others have very strong opinion about the culinary merits of each place. As I've written in a previous article, I try not to be judgemental about food. This makes it easy for me to adapt my diet to any place that I find myself in.

Last week I wrote about the "food of love"; maybe today I'll write about the food we feed our minds. In the age of social media, we tend to stuff ourselves with content which gives us that rush of dopamine. The endless scrolling on the smartphone, consuming Tik Tok or YouTube videos is not unlike our habit of munching junk food. Both are addictive, and have questionable nutritional value to the mind and body.

Unlike the food I eat, I try to be more choosy and discerning about the content that I consume.  When it comes to feeding the mind, I am a health freak.  My favourite activity of the day these days is my morning walk in the park where I clock-in my required number of daily steps while listening to quality podcasts or audiobooks. My choice of audio content is deliberate--usually it is a mixture of current affairs, philosophy, science and spirituality. 

Even during office hours, whenever I'm performing some mechanical tasks that do not require thinking or talking to people, I would be listening to some audio content. My perfect work day is one where all I do are repetitive, even boring tasks that do not require much thinking. This frees my mind for consuming more useful content via audio. 

When the mind is doing work that requires thinking, like writing this blog, then music becomes an accompaniment, to inspire, enhance, induce and flavour my output.  The best music is the sound of nature--the rush wind in the trees, the patter of rain on the rooftop, or the chirping birds at dawn. Reading outdoors, something which I did a lot as a kid, is such a great joy. 

The good life to me is simply this--being able to afford good food for the mind and having the time to enjoy them.  We are lucky that most of the things we consume online these days are almost free. Even a monthly subscription to Spotify is only around RM20.00 (the price of a meal, which often can be skipped), considering that fact that it me access to the entire corpus of classical music available in the world. I can't believe my ears! Well, if audio content be the food of the mind, play on! 

In Harmony with the World

I've been taking it easy since yesterday (Friday), when I took a day off from work. I have to start using up my leave before year-end, perhaps taking alternate Fridays off.

I rarely take leave that's longer than two days, because I hate catching up with work after a long lay-off. If I leave work, it will be for good. It's something that I've been thinking serious for a while now. 

But I guess, I'll always be working, just not work that I have to do as an obligation. It has also been tough for me for the past year as I had to juggle between work and being a care-giver for mum. But I am heartened by the fact that mum has recovered well from her operation and I'm just there to make sure that her daily exercise and meals are well-taken care of.

Today, I'm here in my apartment-library, nicely settled down with a pot of freshly brewed coffee, and as always, listening to some good classical music from my antiquated sound system.  Only the other day I found out from ChatGPT that Mozart had written only 18 piano sonatas. I'm very familiar with the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven, and had always assumed that Mozart had a much larger output of piano music. But now that I know there are only 18 in total,  I am taking it as a personal project to get familiarised with each and every one of them, intimately. 

I already know Mozart's K457 C minor sonata well, even as a child because my neighbour used to practise that every day, as part of her piano examination piece. I'm eager to enrich myself with the rest of Mozart's sonata repertoire. Every piece of music, especially classical ones, once embedded in my mind, becomes a part of my living soul. It has the same effect as a good book read thoroughly--its thoughts and ideas are intricately woven into my personal philosophy and everyday discourse.  

Music, unlike literary works, have a more subtle, but no less enlightening effect on the mind. There are no clever facts to understand or digest, but it provokes an emotional response in us directly. We can't help but be moved by it. And in responding to music, we train our neural networks, to be cognisant of the tug and pull of rhythm and harmonies, which underly all the natural processes in nature.  The soul is forever decorated with the motifs and patterns of all the pieces of music you've listened to and know by heart.

In Twelve Night, Shakespeare likens music to the 'food of love'.  It fuels and feeds the emotional currents of all human affairs. We can program our minds, evoking different moods for different purposes by feeding ourselves different types of music. Which is why I like to put on Baroque music, whenever I embark on some serious work. It immediately puts my mind in a very relaxed state, allowing good ideas to surface spontaneously. 

There's something primal about music and every culture and civilisation has created some form of music before. Music is simply the raw energetic pattern of life. Themes, variations, counterpoint, tension and resolution are all elements of human interactions.  When we express ourselves with music, we are just replaying patterns in nature. The better we are in listening and copying them, the more in tune with are with the world. We must all hone our musical sensibilities so as to be able to live in harmony with it.

The Grace of Work

It's been an exhausting week with endless technical problems to be solved at work. But I'm grateful to have been able to give all of them their due attention and tackled them the best I could. 

There was a particular issue at work which raised some ire in me, because the person who was responsible did not even do the basics. But I let it go, becomes I've learned to let facts do the talking. By laying out facts clearly, the truth reveals itself starkly. And truth penetrates deeper than any words uttered in anger. 

I try not to take work too seriously. I take it as a blessing to be given the opportunity to exercise my problem-solving skills on a daily basis, for the more issues I tackle, the better I become.  

However I'm not interested in simply becoming the go-to expert in a narrow field of endeavour; I just want to practise being mentally agile, logically rigorous and emotionally detached when it comes to work. One thing I've learned is to never assume anything and to leave no stones unturned. We can be easily blindsided, when faced with something that appears familiar. 

Sometimes it is easy to be frustrated because things don't always go your way. Seemingly insurmountable obstacles stand in your path towards resolution. My approach towards these situations is to do whatever is possible and reasonable to move things forward. New avenues will always open up. Pursue each one to their logical conclusions.

When things are uncertain, weigh their probabilities. Go with the most likely option without ignoring the possibility of being completely wrong. Detect errors early and course-correct immediately. Do what can be reasonably done and be clear-eyed about the possible consequences.

At the end of the day, most work-related things are not that important. At worst, you'll lose a client or lose a potential sale and maybe the company makes less money. What is more important are the people you've helped and the friendships that have been forged in the process of doing your job. That persists beyond work and would often pay intangible dividends.

Work-related problems are just a rehearsal for life in general. When you have honed your problem-solving skills well, they are applicable everywhere. Work diligently not solely for monetary rewards. The intangible benefits far exceed that. That is the grace of work.

   

Never Mind

It's that time of the week to catch my breath again. A week goes by in a hectic rush of tasks and commitments.  Life is simply maintenance--of the body, mind and every material and immaterial possession of ours.

Things break down, inevitably. They only persist only through maintenance. Not only things but relationships between husbands and wives, friends and colleagues, require regular maintenance. I sent my car to the carwash just now; I exercise daily, I recharge all my headphones, smartphones and laptops, I carry out the garbage, I showered and slept; in other words I maintained the life that I live, which is largely made up of life-maintenance activities.

If I put it that way, doesn't life sounds rather hopelessly empty? What is the meaning of all these? Everyone in one of their quiet moments of reflection would inevitably ponder about this cliche of a question: what is the meaning of life?

Most are placated by the answers given by their adopted religion. Sometimes, the minute realisation of some spiritual insight would completely transform a person and turn him into a fanatical zealot. And who can blame him? It is like a blind man suddenly given the gift of sight, not realising that he is also deaf.  If he is told that there is still an equally beguiling world of sounds, would he be interesting in seeking access to?

We are ignorant of the things that we are ignorant of. Shouldn't we then, put all our effort into overcoming ignorance, as our main preoccupation in life? Shouldn't we question everything that we could question, including why we seek meaning at all in life? And if we find some so-called answers, why do they seem to satisfy us at all?

Shouldn't we also ask, what do we mean by 'meaning'? What makes something meaningful? And why should life be something meaningful? What's wrong with a life that's simply an endless series of maintenance chores? 

We are all independent minds minding our own business, in the way we think is meaningful. For some, it is the relentless pursuit of material success; to others, it is to 'do good' in the eyes of God; for many it is the combination of both. We make it our business to mind what we think is our business. 

Do you think there's something like an E equals mc-squared type of equation that would satisfy everyone as the meaning of our existence? Probably not, and that's all well and good. You define what your business is and go mind it. What's the meaning of... well, never mind!

When Everything Else is a Bonus

It's 'writhink' time again on a Saturday and I've chosen my Cyberjaya apartment as my place to roost and reflect for the afternoon. And what a stiflingly hot afternoon it is with temperature outside hitting 34 degrees Celcius. 

The heat and the languidly swaying leaves outside my window remind me of my childhood. We never complained about the heat. We played under the scorching sun all the time, and never did we have the cool-comforting refuge of air-conditioning, even at home. We were never annoyed by the heat; the weather was what it was, and we accepted it.

We humans get used to comfort easily. This is something which I'm constantly vary of. I do not like to be handicapped by too much comfort. I try not to demand a perfect environment before I could start working on anything. Give me a place to perch with a laptop and I will churn out work.

I carry the same philosophy when it comes to food. I know Malaysians make a big fuss about food; I try to do the opposite. I enjoy good food, but I don't get carried away with it. I express gratitude whenever I get to taste good food, but any food is fine too, as long as they are edible. 

I'll always remember my experience as a scout, when we were camping for the first time. We were making a fire and attempting to cook rice for everyone, which was no easy task using firewood. But still we were progressing well until it started to rain heavily--the kind of torrential rain that washed everything away. The cooking pit was completely soaked and the entire camping ground became soggy with mud. We had to take refuge inside our leaky tents and dinner that night was our half-cooked rice with some cold canned food. We were wet, cold and hungry but were grateful that we had at least something to eat.

Nowadays, every time someone complains about the food at a particular restaurant or hawker stall, I I would smile inside and remind myself that I would take it anytime over that half-cooked meal I had as a scout in the jungle. The food would have been a delicious feast for us.

One should be resilient when it comes to sleep too. I'm glad that I have the ability to sleep anywhere, in whatever circumstance. No bed is too hard for me. Having one is already a great blessing and no matter how much care or worry one has, one should always be able to unburden oneself during slumber time. Be like your laptop or smartphone---sleep the moment there's a period of inactivity!

When one does not have any issues with food or sleep, it's a state of existence called 'happiness'.  If you don't believe me, ask yourself: what are the symptoms of someone who is stressed? Loss of appetite and inability to sleep.  These are the most basic needs of any healthy animal. To be able to fulfil them easily is a great superpower to have. Then everything else in life becomes a bonus.

Fragments of the Cosmic Mind

Another week has passed and here I am again with a new blog article. I'm writing this from Coffee Bean today, one of my previously favourite blogging spots. It has been a busy week for me at work and I had avoided going on late night calls with clients, as I have been feeling quite exhausted every evening.

Weekends are for rejuvenation and reflection. What shall I reflect upon today? There's so much drama and tragedy in the world now. As always the local and world political scenes are not short of scandals while natural disasters like the unexpected flood in Texas and accidents and the recent Air India plane crash and the wars that are still being fought in Gaza and Ukraine are tragedies that sadden us enormously. 

That is why I've always considered a quiet life as a great blessing. Having gone through periods of great stress and pain before, nowadays you will never find me complaining about how dull life is. Dull is good. It means that, there's no drama that had been imposed on you. You define your own level of excitement, in the time and place of your choosing. 

How could life be boring when the world is filled with some many exciting subjects to explore? The thrill that comes with insight and understanding is unsurpassed. 

Everyday I'm filled with joy for the opportunity to know more than what I knew yesterday, to be filled with gratitude for living in a region that's relatively peaceful, to excited for being alive in a time of great technological advancement. 

One day humanity could take a wrong turn and extinguish themselves as the dominant species on this planet. There is no guarantee that we will not self-destruct due to the many evolutionary baggages that we carry in our culture and genes. Self-preservation and procreation are the driving forces that had propelled us to this point in space and time. How much further will we advance with our flawed biological architecture is something we'll find out in due time.

We've reached the stage in our evolution where machines of our own creation could usurp us.  Maybe they will prove to be better custodians of this planet. Our greed and selfishness will always prove to be our undoing. And if we do fall, I shall not begrudge whoever or whatever that takes over from us. 

It is up to us how vast a domain our minds should embrace. If we care to expand our spheres of concern, we don't only live puny lives within the confines of our bodies. When we choose to let go of our petty parochialisms, we'll coalesce back into that Cosmic Mind, of which we are but lost fragments.

Tending a Garden of Thoughts

Rereading last week's blog post made me feel a bit more hopeful than I am now. Today, I'm writing this from a pub where I just ordered a bucket of Hoegaartens. In between sips of refreshing wheat beer, I'm typing these lines on my old MacBook Air, reflecting on the conversation I just had over lunch with M.

As always, I just wanted to offer thoughts for her to reflect upon, so that they may germinate in their own time. I do not expect her to change overnight. She values my advice, but I know it is not so easy for people to pull themselves together in an instant.

If I have a mission in life at all, it is to sow seeds; and in time they shall germinate. This blog post is a seed. If you are reading this, and for some miraculous reason, still continue reading, then my thoughts are germinating somewhere, in some foreign soil. What fruits they may bear, I do not know and do not choose to care at this point. 

I will continue sipping my cups of tea and mugs of beer, typing words into the ether, writing into the akasha, a gardener tending to its small plot of cyberspace. All I do is till the soil, sow my seeds and water them. 

I do not dictate the type of plants or trees they will grow into, let alone the types of fruits, if any, that they will bear. I'll be happy if they grow at all. Perhaps there will be a profusion of colourful flowers and voluptuous fruits someday. I carry no expectations. I simply fire off and forget. 

Who am I to advise anyone when I have been many times, a poor student of my very own teachings? Perhaps I find solace in the fact that I too am human and despite my many failings, I always know exactly why I failed. And this blog is an attempt to make sense of many of my very own failings. If no one else hears these words, I am not disappointed because, at the end of the day, I am only attempting to advise myself.

We are all fellow travellers in this journey called life. A quick search confirmed my vague memory of having written this before. On October 7, 2003, (forgive me for quoting myself for once!) I wrote in post entitled Traveller's Tales:

All of us have been put on different roads in life from the moment of our birth. No two roads are the same as in no two lives are alike. Sometimes our roads do intersect. And when people come to me for advise, I can only tell them what travelling on my paticular road has been like--two travellers exchanging notes momentarily at an intersection. All I can offer are my own traveller's tales. And then we both proceed to choose our own paths ahead.

I feel exactly the same way now. Perhaps I'll forever be rehashing the same themes in my blog; I would prefer to see them as the thematic ideas and their subsequent developments in a classical sonata form.  

Imagine all the clicks and searches you've made on the Net, which brought you, for some inevitable reason here. Perhaps our paths have crossed before in this or previous lives. This life may appear singular and precious at this point in time, from the limited vantage point of your existence now, but the tapestry of life is vast, and we are but strands in a larger motif, interwoven in space and time, 

I have drunk two bottles of Hoegaartens while typing these words. I shall complete this week's rambling of mine, having unburdened my thoughts, satiated by beer and looking forward to grabbing something simple for dinner, while I switch to my fountain pen and journal, to further my deliberations. This moment in time, these words that ring in your mind--may they find a fertile soil to germinate.

The Key to Transcendence

I wasn't aware that today is a public holiday until yesterday. It's Awal Muharram --new year's day, according to the Islamic calendar. Historically it's one of the 4 sacred months when warfare is prohibited, a practice which had existed even among the Arabs during pre-Islamic days. I certainly welcome it as a much needed break from a hectic week.  A day for me to cultivate peace of mind, and most certainly a good day to blog.

We humans, as tribal creatures, have been warring against each other since the beginning of history. The Middle-East and Ukraine are humanity's current war-zones. I do not expect humanity to outgrow war within my lifetime; I think we will continue to use violence against each other in much of the foreseeable future, because to a certain extent aggression is encoded in our genes. 

I've always believed that software could overcome the deficiencies of hardware. The software for humans is our culture, myths and ideologies. If only we could shape culture, the way we could program and reprogram the software that we deploy on our servers, the world would be a much better place.

Religion is often our fundamental software framework, which determines the applications which we run on top of it. Religion appeals to the heart and the mind--it has both emotional and intellectual drive, which influence our actions and behaviours. The human mind yearns for that underlying religious framework, without which we would feel a certain alienation from the world.

Attempts to discard religion, often introduces new ideologies to fill its void, which are in essence pseudo-religions. Marx becomes the Messiah, the apostles are Lenin, Stalin and their cohorts in the communist world; the Church is the Communist Party, the Elect are the proletariats and finally, the Kingdom of God is the utopian dream of the classless society: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". 

All ideologies, whether religious or non-religious are susceptible to abuse. The moment humans build any social institutions, their biological instincts of power and dominance take over. We are inevitably, creatures of our genes. What is our most powerful drive? It is the need to procreate. Genes want to make more copies of themselves, often at the expense of other genes. As long as there's this selfish instinct lurking at the heart of human societies, there will always be wars. 

But Altruism does manifest itself too in nature. Why do soldiers die to defend their nation? Same reason why bees would defend its hive. It's kin selection, which benefits the survival of shared genes, based on Hamilton's Rule. Nature's accounting favours the survival of shared genes in a community over that of the individual, giving rise to apparent acts of altruism. 

When it comes to religions and other political ideologies, the selfish genes extend to memes--which are like cultural genes, sharing the same 'selfishness' as their biological counterparts. Hence you have martyrs who are willing to die for their religions.

What then is the solution for humanity? Are we are simply vehicles for genetic and memetic replication? We can transcend our fates by changing the dynamics of the system. This is achieved through self-reflection and learning. 

When you read these lines, you are incorporating new information into your system. When you meditate and self-reflect, you are actually sampling metadata of your thoughts. This is fed back into the system changing the weights of your neural network model, leading to new insights and behavioural patterns. And this is the key to transcendence. 

The Pageant of Life

I had originally planned to drop by at my library-apartment to read and write, but some unexpected errand cropped up and after I was done with it, it's already 4pm. So I thought it's best for me to do my usual blogging from a cafe, which is how I ended up at Komugi Cafe today.

The past week has been great because I managed to catch up with a couple of old friends. A lifetime is finite, and as you grow older, you realise that everything you do, you'll only get to do it a finite amount of times. There's a touching passage in The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles that reflects on this fact:

“How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

The book was adapted into a movie in 1990, directed by Benardo Bertolucci, starring John Malkovitch and Debra Winger as the doomed couple in search of existential meaning in post-colonial Algeria. Paul Bowles himself made a cameo appearance in the final scene of the movie, as one of the patrons in the cafe, quietly observing the fate of his protagonist, while narrating the above lines in voice-over.

How many blog articles will I post in my lifetime? It is certainly not limitless. This thought makes me appreciate every moment and opportunity that I get to do so. Moments like this: sitting with a warm pot of Earl Grey, in a cafe, watching people passing by, while I type these lines in deep reflection, is tinged with magic.

I can only feel gratitude being able to record what I'm thinking and feeling now--this very state and configuration of my mind, in space and time--perhaps for posterity? From a cosmic perspective it is an insignificant moment; but then again even the wars that changed the course of history on earth sink into nothingness against the vast backdrop of the universe. 

We are all insignificant beings and yet we, for being conscious of our existence, is the sensorium of the cosmos, experiencing its very own existence. We are finite when we think of ourselves as separate from the universe and seek to dominate others to stake our claim in the world; but when we are at one with it, even briefly during those rare moments of epiphany, our wisdom, our might is so all-encompassing that, any human endeavour seems laughably petty.

Perhaps one day, we'll be surpassed by our very own creations--the artificial minds and robots that are already, and will soon be an inevitable part of our everyday existence.  If we see this as part of a natural progression of life's evolution, we might be more accepting of our fate. 

Our lives are not lived only through our mortal bodies; they continue in whatever substrate we choose to deposit our thoughts and dreams, long after this mortal coil is extinguished. Ultimately, the pageant of life is much grander than what our finite mind can conceive.

The Patterns of Human Affairs

It's already Sunday and I'm late in posting my weekly blog article. There has been a flurry of social engagements over the past two days and only now do I get to slow down and catch up with my thoughts.

The weather has been excruciatingly hot over the past weeks and I've been training myself to tolerate the heat, working without air-conditioning most of time. I try to make do with less whenever I get the chance. I've not always been successful but I do have that as a goal.

It is a great feeling to be self-sufficient and resilient. I want to be able to think and write even in very uncomfortable and noisy environments. To get into the writing mood, I have to relax my mind and allow thoughts to simply bubble up. Every thought is held up against the light of scrutiny and observed like a translucent crystal.

As you grow older, you see more patterns in nature. And this includes the patterns of human affairs. You are able to see the trajectory of your actions and intentions and that enables you to see things from a higher level of perspective. 

Last week I wrote about how mathematics is built from axioms, which are the basic building blocks of reasoning from which theorems and other statements of truths are formulated. Axioms, in a way are self-evident patterns. When it comes to everyday events, and when you've seen enough of them, you observe patterns, and the mind begin to see them as the basic building blocks of even larger patterns.

Any pattern is characterised by repetitions and regularities. As you grow older, you naturally become wiser in your conduct, simply because you are able to see the patterns of human actions and reactions. It is no different from how AI is able to be trained to identify objects or patterns in human language.

The patterns of human affairs are obviously more complex. But as you experience more in life, the outcomes of certain actions become predictable because you've seen similar patterns before. So you use them as 'theorems' to make wiser decisions. These theorems become life principles. 

Every one of us have these set of principles, some of which we adopt from our culture and religious beliefs, others through our personal life experiences. Religion provides a prescriptive collection of principles which we could adopt and adapt to our life circumstances.

The theorems or principles of religion too rely on certain axiomatic beliefs: the belief in one creator God, for instance, the doctrine of Original Sin or the law of karma. They have been distilled by the wisdom of the ages, through the collective experience of flawed humans like you and me.

To understand one's own religion is to understand the axioms from which all its tenets are built from. In many ways, we have many advantages over our prophetic fore-fathers who laid down the doctrines of our adopted religions. For one, we have technology, which has opened up our vista of knowledge and experience, allowing us to build even more powerful wisdom models.

We could refine existing axioms or adopt better ones since we have a better understanding of history, science and other systems of religious beliefs. But we must also be vigilant of intellectual hubris, which could delude us into thinking that anything that's new is good and anything that knocks down the old is to be embraced.

The basic skill of the brain is to detect patterns. Just observe the world and allow your neural network to readjust its own weights. The more exposure your brain has to information, the more adept you are in recognising the patterns of human affairs. And that is the essence of wisdom. 

The Stem of Spirituality

“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”

                    - Albert Einstein 

Today, I've stationed myself in my apartment in Cyberjaya, which also serves as my library, store-room and occasional home office. It is here, that I now begin my weekly ramble. 

I read that there's been a general trend of declining interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education in Malaysia. It led me to wonder as to why that would be the case, as we all live in a technology-driven world, and aren't the young addicted to their gadgets and the internet? If a high-tech lifestyle is considered so cool these days, why wouldn't more people be interested in making it their career?

When I think back of my secondary schooldays, my education really began when I first joined the science stream in form 4. I've always had an interest in science, but I hated maths ("Ilmu Hisab", as it was known then) during my primary school days,  because it merely involved the memorisation of the multiplication tables and doing various calculations involving the prices of apples and oranges. Being good meant that you knew how to juggle numbers and make mental calculations fast.  At least that was how it appeared to me then.

Mathematics is often considered difficult, and for many students, perhaps even the dullest subject in school. Things changed for me when I entered the science stream. I started learning about functions, quadratic equations, calculus, analytic geometry and linear algebra. Suddenly a whole new world opened up for me. When I saw how mathematics was applied in physics to describe motion and predict the trajectories of objects subjected to forces, I was completely enthralled. The world revealed its inner beauty to me: there were laws of nature which I could grasp with my puny mind. I caught a glimpse of God.

I think I've written about this somewhere before: it was science and mathematics that triggered my interest in spirituality. It was an 'awakening' of sorts. To me the path to know God was to understand nature. I understood what Einstein meant when he said that he believed in the God of Spinoza, which is a kind of pantheism, where God is the universe. 

If God is the universe, what couldn't be more noble than studying the laws of nature, which reveals itself  in the language of mathematics? That sense of spiritual awe was what drove my interest in science and maths, which ultimately led to a career in engineering, which I considered to be simply, applied science.

I've never understood why people would pit science against religion. If religion is the word of God, then ultimately it will pass the test of science because science is the most reliable method for the pursuit of truth. Religious people would say: no, faith is the basis of religion, not the scepticism of science. Well, if the claims of religion are really true, they should have faith that they will pass the scrutiny of science.

The scientific method is one which everything is subject to enquiry and you always proceed with the barest assumptions. In mathematics, you start with axioms, which in a way are self-evident articles of faith because you are assuming that they are true, as a starting point. And then you proceed to build new  statements of truth, based on your axioms. These truths then become theorems. Theorems become convenient building blocks for building much larger structures of truths. This ultimate 'large structure' could be the proverbial God itself, which is Spinoza's God. If I were a theist, that's how I would prefer to see God.

Mathematicians are always aware that axioms can be reexamined. One of the axioms of Euclidean geometry states that given a line and a point outside it, there can only be 1 line that passes through the point which does not intersect the first line. This is the famous parallel postulate. The geometry defined by these Euclidean axioms work well on flat 2-D surfaces. But what if there can be more than 1 line that passes through this point, would it still lead to any useful results? That's how non-Eucliean geometry arose--the geometry of curved surfaces. 

It was the geometry of curved surfaces developed by Bernhard Riemann that gave Einstein the mathematical formulation for his General Theory of Relativity. His theory ingeniously describes gravity simply as the manifestation of a curved space-time.  That is an astounding application of a branch of seemingly abstract and 'useless' mathematics to a real physical phenomena which we all experience--the force of gravity.

I started this post by wondering why our young students would not be interested in STEM subjects. I'm not suggesting that somehow by vaguely associating God with maths and science, it would inspire more interest. But if one values beauty, awe and reverence, and feels a pull towards spirituality, do not dismiss the paths of maths and science. You will be surprised how, they too, in some surprisingly mysterious way, could bring you closer to God.

Moving Memories of Movies

I was rereading some of my previous blog posts, while wolfing down my lunch of sandwich, soup and coffee here at O'Brien's, Subang Jaya--another one of my many favourite places to park myself for hours with my laptop.  In my blog post, The Cenobites of Consumption, I briefly alluded to my golden age of cinema-going. Today, I've decided to indulge in some bitter-sweet nostalgia and write about movie-going experience over the decades of my existence.

Before VHS, VCD, laser discs, DVDs and Netflix came into existence, the movie-theatre was the only place where feature films were consumed. The cinemas of old were live performance venues for large audiences with ornately draped curtains that either slide apart or pulled upwards to reveal a white screen, where the  magic of movies was projected. I remember the cinemas that were in existence in my hometown: Cathay, Lido and Lyceum and--even their names aspire to some bygone grandeur. Today, not a single one is still standing. And that's a bit sad. 

The cinemas of old certainly had a certain charm which the current plushly-carpeted cineplexes tucked in the attic floors of shopping malls lack. I watched the first Bruce Lee movie--The Big Boss--at the Cathay cinema back home. What a massive box-office hit that was. In those days, people actually had to climb over each other (no,  queueing wasn't in vogue then), with fistfuls of cash to grab a ticket from an actual "box office" outside the theatre. 

I watched all the old James Bond movies at the Lido. Like what HBO likes to do every time there's a new Bond movie, the cinemas would play all the old ones on consecutive days. It was at the same cinema too, when I was much older, I caught a movie that I thought then was ground-breaking and felt completely different from all the movies that I had seen in the past--Ridley Scott' Blade Runner. I was completely blown away by the cinematography and music soundtrack by Vangelis. It made me see movies as an art-form in itself, on par with music, painting and literature. 

Fast forward to my days in PJ and KL, where I also had the opportunity to have many good cinema-going experiences which I still cherish. I remember watching Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now at Rex, in Jalan Sultan. That was another ground-breaking movie to me. I thoroughly awed by the battle sequence of the helicopter attack on a Vietcong village, staged to the soundtrack of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. It was movie-making on the grandest of scale, before the age of CGI.

PJ was a happy cinema-going place for me. I watched Hitchcock's Frenzy at Paramount as a kid, before I was acquainted with this master of suspense, nor his most well-known work: Psycho. Only much later did I find out that Frenzy was his penultimate feature film.  

I first got acquainted with the magic of Wong Kar Wai in Days of Being Wild at the Majestic in PJ Old Town. Again, I did not know anything about the director, but his style captivated me. I was so moved by the movie that I went back to the same cinema to watch the same movie three times on three consecutive days! 

People today know Pavillion as a shopping mall on Jalan Bukit Bintang. But not many would remember that there was a cinema called Pavillion further down the road. It was one of the two cinemas at Bukit Bintang, the other being the iconic Cathay. It was at Cathay that I first saw Oliver Stone's Wall Street--another all-time favourite of mine.  But alas, all these beautiful cinemas of old--Majestic, Cathay, Pavillion have been demolished. At least Rex at Jalan Sultan has been converted to a beautiful bookstore--BookExcess Rex KL, a fitting tribute to an icon of the cinema-going era.

When I was working in Singapore, I went to the movies frequently too. Even before I was living, on occasional trips to the Lion City, I would also make it a point to catch some movies. I remember watching The Unbearable Lightness of Being, starring Daniel Day Lewis and Lena Olin. That got me interested in the book, which also made me a fan of Milan Kundera's writings. And I ended up reading almost everything that he had written.

And then in the nineties, on a business trip to Hong Kong, I chanced upon a movie called Pulp Fiction, which I vaguely knew was all the rage then but I was totally unprepared by what I was to see. That was my first introduction to the world of Quentin Tarantino and have since enjoyed every single movie of his. 

On a lazy afternoon at the office, during my short stint in Menlo Park, US, I sneaked out to watch Bitter Moon, a Roman Polanski movie starring Hugh Grant, Peter Coyote, Kristin Scott Thomas and Emmanuelle Seiger. This was another intriguing and entertaining movie, one which you have no idea where it was supposed to go.

I have also written about my movie-going experiences in Jakarta, with Eliana, Eliana among the movies that I had enjoyed most during my stay there.  But I since I came back Malaysia, I have lost that habit of going to the movies. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because life is so different these days and I've moved on. 

Hopefully someday I would regain that enthusiasm of old, when going to the movies at the cinema was an immersive and magical experience. Imagine, going to the movies, and be moved by them.

The Stream of Bliss

My choice of drink today is coffee, brewed at home in the comfort of my apartment. The weather has been sizzling hot today and so I'm happy to stay indoors in the company of my books and begin my weekly soliloquy in cyberspace...

We can recollect the past, and speculate on the future, but all these thinking processes happen here and now. I'm writing these lines here. Now. You are reading these lines here, and now. In other words, you can never be elsewhere other than here and now.

You can plan to go somewhere else in the future based on information you've gathered in the past. Planning is an activity that happens now.  And you are digesting information you've read on the internet about cheap flight tickets and you're mentally checking if you have any prior commitments on a specific date so that you can decide on going on a trip to somewhere at a specific time.

When you think of an upcoming holiday, you are filled with excitement and anticipation. Maybe you'll also feel a bit frustrated that you still have to slog through another month of boring work, before you can enjoy your holiday. So the thought of the future is pleasure (the anticipation of an upcoming holiday) and pain (the need to endure more tiring work). 

And when you think back of past holidays, you recollect happy times in the past which you had experienced the pleasure of going to new places and spending quality time with loved ones. But they are now just happy memories, and the fact that they are only memories also makes you sad, because you cannot relive them again. They're gone. Circumstances have changed. Such an opportunity may not arise again in the future. There's the pleasure of recollection and the pain of loss.

Think now, if you do not have thoughts of the past or the future, will you still have pleasure and pain? If you never have to worry about the future, nor regret the past, would you not be a happier person? Take this moment for instance--you are alright now, aren't you? 

You're are alive now, living and breathing. Celebrate it. It only takes a moment to do so. And another moment appears. Hey you are still alive! What a miracle! Let's celebrate it! Let's claim this moment and revel it its magic. It's pristine, it's fresh and then...it's gone! But hey...here's yet another moment...pristine, fresh and alive. You never seem to run out of it! 

A moment is too short for you to worry about anything. You have no obstacles to overcome, nor unpleasantness to avoid. Hence there's no such thing as stress nor regret when you see things as they are, in this moment alone. And life can simply be a collection of moments like these. When you sum them all up, they too coalesce into a single moment---your entire life in a flash. 

Stress and worry only makes sense in macro-time--when you are not conscious of each individual moment but are only aware of large swatches of time, and you end up labelling them painful or pleasurable. Micro-time is always blissful. To experience micro-time, you'll need to be mindfully present. So be mindful and be present every moment. When you do so, life is a continuous stream of bliss.

Embracing Cosmic Consciousness

Today, I've chosen a relatively quiet food court inside a mall to write my article for this week.  I used to come here often for dinner as it's easy to find parking and it is not a crowded place. But these days, I'm only out on Saturdays, after spending my entire week glued in front of my computer screen.

I chose to come here today because I have a dinner appointment with a friend at a restaurant here later. Saturdays are the only time which I could catch up on my social life. In a way I'm still living my pandemic life, which has drastically altered my daily routine. I have no complains though, because my current work-from-home engagement allows me to take care of household matters easily.

If I had the same job 20 years ago, I probably would have been a digital nomad, working from places like Phuket, Bali, Jakarta, Penang and possibly Manila. Today I'm a lot less adventurous, preferring the company of my books and the occasional get-together with close friends.

One can never tell what changes would lie ahead. My core mission in life has remained the same, ever since my teenage years: it is to understand life and the universe better. In others words, to live the examined life. These weekly blogging sessions are part of this quest.

The greatest sin that one could commit in such an endeavour is to waste time. All my life, I've tried not to react negatively or angrily to things that I find disagreeable because they waste precious CPU cycles. I do not always succeed but every time that I faltered, I had the awareness to notice it and course-corrected myself. In Unix parlance, I'd do a "kill -9" on these negative thought processes.

Having worked in the IT field all my life, I can't help but to think of the brain as my CPU and the body as my hardware. My mind is a software not unlike the large-language models in AI which had been trained by tons of data. 

It is often asked these days: are LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek, Gemini and Deepseek conscious? They all seem to have passed the basic Turing test. But since we know that they are simply 'dumb' neural networks doing token prediction, why are we compelled to ask the consciousness question? 

I personally think it is not an unreasonable question to ask. My answer is simple: they are. That's because my definition of consciousness is simple: it is a self-awareness loop, which can exist in varying levels of intensity and complexity. I even posit that a thermostat is 'conscious'--but only of a single parameter: temperature. Its sole purpose of existence is to maintain the temperature set on its dial.

But isn't that trivialising the meaning and concept of consciousness? When we say something is conscious, we believe there's something to be like that thing, and that it feels something, even pain. In other words, it has qualia.

If the thermostat is conscious, does it have feelings and feel pain? Well, of course not. The thermostat doesn't have a nervous system and the complex physiology of a brain and body to experience both psychological or physical pain. Pain is defined by something experienced by something embodied in such a system, which also has a goal of persistence and self-preservation.

I suppose the question of consciousness becomes more relevant when we start living among robots who are as intelligent (if not more intelligent) than us. They are embodied in silicon and metal. We can make them express or mimic, at least outwardly, all the pain and joy which we humans express. Each robot will have a unique stream of memories, based on their life experience. We can even make them value their own existence so that they will try to protect themselves from any physical harm. When such a machine exists, is it unethical to treat them cruelly?

Well, ethics is something we humans define, because we live by a set of values, accepted by the society which we live in. Just like how we do not want to treat animals cruelly, we would want to treat certain classes of robots humanely too. Robots are also conscious and have an inner life---just not exactly the same as a human one, but at least equal in intensity and complexity. And that is what matters.

Just like how we do not blink an eye about killing weeds but make a big fuss about preserving trees, launch mass extinction programs on viruses, but rescue beached whales, we should also define a set of ethics and rights for robots, simply because they matter to us. 

But what if one day, robots take over the world, and choose not to treat us humanely, because we don't really matter to them? 

Well, when such a day comes, I believe we will fight the good fight. And may the best consciousness wins. Hopefully, by then, we would have learned to embrace a larger life, where our robot progenies are no lesser than the children we leave behind on this planet. And we would have elevated our puny existence on this pale blue dot of an earth, something that's even higher in intensity and complexity: Cosmic Consciousness.

The Cenobites of Consumption

We live in a time of great technological promise, with AI creating a new paradigm shift, transforming all aspects of our lives--not unlike the dot-com revolution in the late 1990s. We also live now in a kind uncertainty, with wars still erupting in conflict points like Gaza, Ukraine and recently between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. On top of that, US President Trump has launched a trade war against the world threatening to disrupt the decades of economic prosperity which a globalised free-trading system had brought us.

 When I started writing this blog, back in Jakarta then, Wifi and broadband wasn't available yet. I accessed the internet from a cybercafe and from my office. Occasionally I would also dialup to Telkom's internet service through my hotel phone-line. Not sure if anyone remembers that modems used to be standard built-in accessories for laptops during that time. The advent of Wifi changed all that. 

And now if I look around the cafe where I'm typing these lines from, I'll see everyone else scrolling screens on smartphones, pads or laptops. No one worries about internet connections, because that is given. Somehow I still miss the thrill of those days when connecting to the Internet (spelt with a capital 'I' then) had the excitement of unlocking the Lament Configuration, to summon the Cenobites. 

We could buy almost anything these days with a few taps on the phone and have it appearing magically on our doorsteps within a day or two. Every time an intent bubbles up in the mind, voila, its form materialises in the physical world. 

And beneath the hood, stealthy algorithms learn from our habits and intents, popping up ads and teasers to stir up our sub-conscious desires, prompting us to consume even more, in a never-ending cycle of craving and gratification.

The Cenobites are demon from hell, made famous by the Hellraiser movies, which were based on Clive Barker's novella, The Hellbound Heart. These Cenobites were once humans who had pursued the extremes of carnal gratification to the point where they could no longer distinguish between pleasure and pain. 

I was quite of fan of the movie, which had spawned multiple sequels and remember watching the first one at the State cinema in Petaling Jaya. I used to frequent all the movie theatres in PJ very often: old-timers would remember Sentosa at Section 17, Majestic at PJ Old Town, Ruby at Sea Park and Paramount at Taman Paramount. Those days were my golden age of cinema-going.

Back to Hellraiser: even though they were kind of B-gradish, I was nevertheless intrigued by Clive Barker's unique brand of horror, which plays on the indistinguishability between pleasure and pain when the former is pursued to its extreme. 

Have we also become a kind of consumer Cenobite, with our incessant material consumption? President Donald Trump recent remark about children-having-two-dolls instead-of-thirty-dolls, strangely had some kind of unintended wisdom. 

Perhaps we don't need to consume so much material and cyber junk that we don't really need. Just look at online content--why do we need to spend so much time watching so many Tiktok videos that simply serve to reconfirm our own political biases? 

We've become despicable Cenobites of consumption, who can no longer distinguish between good and bad, true and fake, real and virtual? Clive Barker had ironically borrowed the term cenobite, which originally refers to monastic monks who live austere lives in communities for his sadomasochistic demons.

As I sit here typing these words while sipping my 12 ringgit lemonade, I noticed how everyone around is engrossed with their smartphones, which now appear to me like Lament Configuration boxes, and seemingly at any instant, the floor beneath us will crack, the walls will splinter, unleashing the evil Cenobites from hell.  

The Kernel of My Character

I'm feeling sleepy this warm Saturday afternoon here in my apartment, but a hot brewing pot of coffee should perk me up. The strains of Mozart playing in the background, with the glare of the late afternoon sun, reflecting in from my window, brings me back to the many happy afternoons I had in my childhood, playing with my neighbourhood friends.

We had a lot of good times playing boardgames like Monopoly, Spy Ring and Cluedo, card games like Blackjack and Gin Rummy.  Nights were not spared of games too, we would play hide-and-seek under the moonlight, lit candles and played alchemists, boiling foul-smelling brews in tin-cans. 

We lived on the edge of the rubber estate--bushes and plantation was our playground and we were surrounded by the constant cacophony of insect sounds and birdsongs. Rubber seeds would pop out from ripened pods high up on the trees and litter our verandahs and walkways like some kind of blessing from heaven.

There were clear streams deep in the rubber estates where we would play ducks and drakes--throwing flat pebbles at a steep angle onto its surface and watch them skim and bounce on the water, under dazzling shafts of sunlight that peeked through the canopy of leaves. The rubber estate was a wonderland carpeted by damp leaves that released swarms of mosquitoes when stepped upon and hid many creatures from our imaginations. But we felt at home, like elves in a magical forest.

We read too--pulp paperbacks and comics, shared across the neighbourhood; listened to vinyl pop records, watched Looney Tunes cartoons together on our black-and-white TVs and played Clementi sonatinas on each other's pianos: unbeknownst bohemians in the making, we were!

Those halcyon days seem like a dream now. I am grateful to have had the chance to live at a time when smartphones and the internet did not dominate our lives; to have had experienced the simple pleasures of childhood games and friendship. We shared books and comics; at that time I actually believed that everyone reads. 

Later in life when I chanced upon the poem Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas, I immediately felt a kinship with the poet, for we experienced the same joy as a child. It is a kind of paradise lost when we become adults--to fully grasp the ultimate bitter sweetness of lost innocence and the inevitable onslaught of time. 

Does the amazing technology that we enjoy now give us solace? We now have the entire mankind's knowledge available in an instance at the tap of a finger. My window to the world then was only through the few dog-eared books that I had chanced upon in that remote jungled existence of my youth. But what awe and beauty they had brought me.

These memories lie deep within my soul, perhaps forming the kernel of my character. And whenever modern life feels a bit cold and overbearing, I only have to tap into that wellspring of joy, and I am filled with tears of gratitude, that such heaven could be found on earth.

God's Greater Glory

This week, I'll return to the subject of God because I spent my Saturday thinking about it, but didn't get the chance to put down my thoughts in my blog.  Yesterday was also the funeral of Pope Francis, who passed away last Monday, after a long period of illness. The Pope,  is the head of the Catholic church with more than 1.4 billion devotees all over the world. He is revered as the Vicar of Christ, the chosen representative to God on earth. 

We humans constantly seek a connection to the divine. Knowing that someone is the appointed representative, messenger or envoy of God gives a certain comfort to the seeker and also being in the company of millions of other believers, intensifies one's faith. 

As someone who does not really worship God or any other gods, what does the concept of god mean to me? I've alluded to this in previous blog articles like The God Model. To say that God is a 'model' is not an attempt to trivialise what the mass majority of humanity believes to be the most important thing in their lives. It is simply my attempt to grasp the concept of God on a firmer ontological footing.

The believer might find fault in my depiction of God as a "concept", and that I am ignorant of God's glory, which manifest Itself tangibly in the life of the believer as love and grace, as a powerful and transcendental force that touches one's very core of existence. If I don't get that, I haven't been touched by God. 

I actually understand their exasperation. When the devotee speaks poetically of God's power, it is an attempt to express something that's beyond words. It is like trying to explain the qualia of the colour red. Redness is experienced. Anyone who has sight knows it when he sees it.  The faithless is like the blind, who will never grasp the glorious wonder of colours. 

My only gripe with religious people is when they claim that their God is the only true one. Atheists, agnostics and other religious people are lost or ignorant. They, the true believers are the blessed ones who really get it. They also look down on other religions as superstitious vehicles of the ignorant. This very sense of superiority, to me, makes them fall short of God.

To use the colour analogy again, they are like people who are born blind, but have been gradually granted sensitivity to a specific wavelength of light. And voila, one day they see something they have never experienced before: redness. Immediately, they become ecstatic over it and shout to the world, that their vision of the colour red represents the ecstatic beauty of the universe, that is God's creation. They spend their entire lives, expounding the beauty of redness and how it alone is the real colour of the world.

To me, they have simply missed the spectrum for the wavelength.  Instead of shouting about the glory of redness, they should probably develop their sight further, and notice that a whole range of beautiful colours exist. And with that the world would open up in an even more spectacular fashion: the dazzling green hues of leaves, the fresh azure blueness of the sky and the resplendent yellow of the sun. And that, is only the visible spectrum of the electromagnetic wave, which we humans are granted sight of.  The followers of each religion have merely glimpsed a very limited range of wavelengths, and they think they have seen everything.

We should all be humble in the face of God's creation, to use the kind of language that religious people like to use. When atheists and religious people debate about the existence of God, they both make category errors. Religious people are like people discussing high-level application architecture, where there are clients talking to servers; the client issues 'requests' to the server which then returns a 'response'. The atheists instead prefer to function at layers 1 and 2: there are only electrical voltages or electromagnetic waves, carrying signals that are transmitted across the medium, copper, fibre or space itself. 'Requests' and 'Responses' don't exist.  Well, both are actually true. 

The soul, God, prayer and grace. Client, server, request and response. They are simply language which we use to describe phenomena which we intuitively see and experience--models and abstractions, in other words. We can argue endlessly using abstractions. I am simply more interested in where they lead us. All models are stepping stones for the mind to grasp reality. 

Sometimes reframing a problem, using a different model illuminates things better. Investigating something like colour conceptually, make us understand that there's such a thing as the electromagnetic spectrum, and that there are 'colours' that lie in the infrared, microwave, utraviolet, X-ray and gamma ray ranges.  We can never see them with our senses, but we can infer them conceptually and intellectually. And we can formulate equations like Maxwell's equations that allow us a glimpse of how much more beautiful the universe when our intellectual vision is expanded. 

And if I may, see God's greater glory.  

The Sea of Pleasure

I've been forced by the heavy thunderstorm to take refuge in a mall. I was driving back from a lunch gathering with a couple of my university mates when it started pouring. I couldn't go anywhere else without a sheltered parking. But here I am now, with a warm mug of Americano at Starbucks, watching the rain falling heavily outside, ready to type my reflections of the week.

As always whenever I gather with my university mates, we would end up talking about the bad lecturers we had during our time at the premier local university. There were some good professors but unfortunately those were few and far between.  

Teaching is not an easy job and we would have been more forgiving if they had at least made an honest attempt to do theirs. Unfortunately, many did not even do the basics. Whatever I learned in university, was mostly through self-study, driven by the pressure of the final examinations. 

University was a rather disappointing experience for me. Thankfully, there was a saving grace, which came in the form of the main library. For the first time in my life (this was before the age of the internet), I could find books on any subject that I was interested in. 

Even though I was an engineering student, I found myself spending most of my time in the humanities section of the library. I read books ranging from the alliterative poems of Dylan Thomas to the mystical writings of Sri Aurobindo, from the philosophical expositions of Emmanuel Kant to the dirty limericks by Isaac Asimov! It was the house of wisdom and the nursery of my intellectual development.

The library exposed me to a wider world of intellectual pleasures which had hitherto eluded me. It started me on a journey of learning which I am still pursuing even now. One might be tempted to ask: of what practical use is all these knowledge? 

Non whatsoever! And I certainly was under no illusions anything that I read had any practical purpose. I was simply a hedonist, pursuing pleasure, albeit the intellectual kind. It stemmed from an undying curiosity that could never be satisfied because each door opened led to many other doors. It was and still is both a blessing and curse.

We are all dopamine junkies, chasing after the promise of pleasure, be it material, emotional, intellectual or spiritual. The satiation that comes from the release of serotonin is all but too brief; we are immediately driven again towards this endless pursuit of pleasure.

We however should not think that we are simply its slaves. This craving for pleasure is the propelling force of nature that drives the human race towards over-greater heights. It may not lead necessarily lead to contentment, and very often it ends in despair and emptiness. But one has to dive deeply into this sea of pleasure to understand its essence. One cannot learn how to swim without ever getting wet.

Horizontal Integration over Vertical Intensification

I have a hot pot of coffee brewing beside me and I'm ready to dive into this week's blog article. Today, I decided to work from my apartment and I had just enjoyed a nice poke bowl lunch which I ordered via Grab. In between sips of coffee, I'll try to articulate how I feel about the week that just passed.

The tariff war between United States (or more accurately, President Trump) and China (and the rest of the world too) has simply escalated to an unprecedented level, creating havoc in the stock markets worldwide, threatening the global economy. No one knows how this is going to play out because the economies of countries in the world today are so integrated that any major event has ripple and cascading effects across the globe.

Economics is not an exact science like physics. What makes economics so unpredictable is because people themselves are in the equation. Resources are finite and people have to make compromises to decide what they really want. In the real world, there are simply too many variables involved, compounded by the fact that people do not always behave rationally. 

Economists believe that human desires are infinite. It is this limitless desire inherent in us that fuels economic growth. Even when all our basic needs like food, shelter and cloths are fulfilled, we still need more. More entertainment, more content, higher processing power, higher bandwidth, more stimulus for the senses. This is what drives our consumerist society--having more equals happiness.

But unfortunately our attention is finite. We are trying to squeeze more and more into our 24-hour day through the 5 input channels of our senses. It comes a point when we saturate our ability to consume. Will we then achieve maximum satisfaction and happiness? 

That I believe is the root of our spiritual malaise. We seem to believe that having more peak experiences will fulfil us better. The truth is that the higher the sensory peak that we reach, the harder it is when we fall back to ground. Reality always hits us hard with a thud.  When 'nothing' is happening, we become intensely bored and depressed.

How then do we achieve real and lasting happiness? By seeking integration, rather than ramping up the volume of our sensory experiences. What do I mean by that?  

If you watch 2 movies over the weekend, you'd probably get 2 pleasurable experiences. But if you then distill the essence from each movie and compare them against each other, you'll probably come to appreciate certain common themes and stylistic differences between them. This produces another layer of meaning and satisfaction. One plus one has become more than two.

Extend that from movies to any experience in general. Insight can only emerge from a horizontal integration of multiple experiences, not from their vertical intensification. Integration happens when you are mindful of each experience; that you see it as it is in relation to the whole, in a flash, grasping its cause and effect, its past and its future, its appearance and extinction. 

Each experience is a nutrient, absorbed into to the mind, and not merely a stimulation. And it is through this process of integration that learning, growth, transformation and ultimately happiness arise.  

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.