The Quest for Qualia

It takes a lot of skill and courage to see things from another person's point of view. All of us are naturally prejudiced. What feels so right inside you is naturally difficult to dislodge.

Why did Putin choose to attack the Ukraine? Historians for generations to come will continue to dissect this. We will never know with certainty how he sees the world. Because we are all inclined to judge others based on our own standards.

We are all products of our genes, upbringing and life experiences. The trauma you suffered as a child and shaped who you are today, is difficult for another person to comprehend. The books that I find so inspiring could be utterly boring to you.

We look at trees and see green leaves. We both agree that green is a cool and relaxing colour. But how can be sure that the green I experience with my senses is the same as the one that you are having? It is possible that what I see as 'green' is actually the experience of 'red' for you. There is actually no way to find out. I've been conditioned since birth to see the colour 'red' as cooling rather than something hot and fiery. The experience of the colour 'red' is exactly like how you feel when you see green. 

Philosophers call this qualia. Qualia is what your senses and mind perceive. It is the 'greenness' of leaves. We could agree on the frequency of green light mathematically, but you and I can never objectively compare these experiences.

Experience is always qualia-tative. It is what it is. Wavelength, amplitude, frequency--these are quantitative data which can never convey what we actually experience as a human being.

What I find fascinating is that despite the variety of human experiences, we actually could agree on a lot of things. If I tell you that I'm in love, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Why? How could it be possible that we--two genetically different assemblages of biological cells that had been been subjected to different sensory experiences, nutrition and education conjure up within our internal worlds, something which we can agree as 'love'?  Is the qualia of love universal?

Or perhaps life and its associated experiences are not so complicated after all. Our common experiences could be an inevitable outcome of physical processes obeying physical laws. Just like how perturbations on the ocean would always take shapes which you would recognize as 'waves', and vapour condensing and clumping together into recognizable fluffy-looking objects in the sky, which we call 'clouds'. These are all natural formations, observable under similar conditions in any planet in the universe.

The qualia of love could be a natural state that arises when there's a natural affinity of needs between two biological systems. Life is nothing but the arisal of qualia. And all of human civilization, our art, culture and scientific achievements are part of this neverending quest for qualia.

The Value of Work

Looking forward to a good rest this weekend after a tiring work week. As I slowly relax on a Friday evening, my mind begins to ponder about the nature of work and the type of work that brings the most satisfaction.

There are both boring and challenging aspects to what I'm doing now. There are repetitive tasks that I have to do again and again--these are  the 'boring' type of work. And yet I do not mind doing them because they can be done almost subconsciously. I merely treat them as opportunities to practice mindfulness--to be aware of what you are doing, no matter how boring, and to see them as actions that are most appropriate for the moment.

What is boredom anyway? Boredom always begin with an expectation. When the expectation of the mind is not fulfilled, there's disappointment and frustration. Or when nothing happens at all--like when you are watching an action movie and 30 minutes into the show, there's still only dialogue and no car-chase or nor killing-- you are both bored and disappointed.

Work can be like that. When you are doing the same data-entry task for the umpteenth time, you begin to question if this is the most worthwhile way to spend your productive working time. Is this going to get you anywhere? You begin to long for fresh challenges, where you could utilize your skills.

However for some, this repetition of the familiar is a much-welcome comfort zone. You are master of all you survey, at least in the small area of your expertise. You are never stressed and you handle every task with efficiency and aplomb. Wouldn't this be an ideal job?

It all depends on where you are in your life. If you are young and ambitious, you want to be upwardly mobile. You want to make a name for yourself and climb the ladder of success. You yearn for the glory of power, position and money. That's not a bad thing at all. One should go all out to pursue one's material ambitions.

But when one reaches a stage in life where one has a family to feed, then security of career and income become upper-most. No more risky career moves that could put one's rice-bowl in jeopardy. The daily chore of bringing up kids and managing household expenses is already a challenge enough. You see a lot of these people in the corporate world--people entrenched in their secure jobs, grateful for the regular paycheck that ensures the wellbeing of their families.

My attitude towards work is slightly unconventional. Being single, I do not have the pressure of having to provide for a family, even do I do have dependents and household expenses to pay. But the glory of corporate success never held any attraction for me, which explains my independent streak and my tendency towards straying from the 'right' way of doing things, to the detriment of my career. I never saw work as a 'career'.  

Work is action performed towards a goal. It could be any goal. And the work that is done towards that end will always present some challenges that expose your weaknesses. That is what I am grateful for. The pain one has to go through in overcoming obstacles always says something about oneself. And by being mindful of these, one can gain a lot of insights.

Work, as I've said before is a kind of penance, a pilgrimage if you will. Whatever accolades one gets in the process of performing it is just bonus. Work is a revelation when performed with the right mindset. And that to me is the real value of work.

The Gut of God

“Look, here is a tree in the garden and every summer it produces apples, and we call it an apple tree because the tree "apples." That's what it does. Alright, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that at least on the planet earth, the thing peoples! In just the same way that an apple tree apples!”   - Alan Watts

I begin with a quote today because I have been thinking all week about the process of life in the universe. I can't help it, but these are the thoughts that occupy my mind in between my mundane daily activities and my only way of making sense of them is to process them out here in my blog.

We often think of life as something special and precious that sets living things apart from the inanimate matter. It's like something magical that is bestowed on a specific class of of systems, even though both living and inanimate things are built using the same materials--the 118 chemical elements in the periodic table. This gives rise to words like 'soul' or 'spirit', which is an attempt to put a label to that extra 'something' that differentiates living from non-living things.

Genesis 2:7, Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

As what the famous verse says, we are moulded from clumps of dirt and the X ingredient is injected into us to make us alive. But when it comes to 'organisms' like viruses, are they considered alive? Biologists argue about it because a virus is nothing more than a  protein sheath around strands of DNA or RNA but it reproduces itself like any other lifeform, albeit by taking advantage of its host. Viruses can be crystalized and remain inert forever like chemicals and spring back to 'life' again when conditions are right.

We are also getting close to having robots and AI systems that passes the Turing Test flawlessly and its behaviour would be indistinguishable from an average intelligent human being. Will they be considered as living beings and be accorded the same rights in the eyes of the law as us?

We even see ourselves as above other indisputably living things like animal and plants. But how many of us would have wished that our loved ones display the kind of unconditional love that a dog has towards its owner? 

Even plants are not unlike us. According to scientists and those who work in managing forests, trees are also social beings and they struggle against yet cooperate with each other for survival. They communicate with chemicals over an 'internet' of roots and fungi with each other. 

 If we look closely at our own living human body which we are so proud of, we find that in terms of cells, more than half of us consists of the community of bacteria living in our guts. It is this symbiotic relationship with our microbiome that makes us healthy and living. We simply cannot survive without them. We have 2 sets of genome: the human one and those carried by our gut microbes. Based on the number of genetic instructions that determine the functioning of our living body, we are more microbe than human.

What does that say about the process of life in nature? Isn't nature itself like a big gigantic living thing? Through the concept of Gaia, we already know that the Earth is like an organism. 

Nature is life. It is what existence is. There is no clear separation between living and non-living things: it is a continuum. The Earth is 'peopling'' because it is part of a natural process that happens when the conditions are right.

The photons, atoms, molecules, stars and planets and galaxies are undergoing an evolutionary process because existence itself is a process. Process means change, according to the laws that it is subjected to. Every step of change is natural and inevitable, based on its condition and environment. 

If we want to be romantic about it, we can call this living universe,God. God is us and we are God. But I think a more picturesque description would be: we are like microbes in the gut of God.

The Pupahood of Pettiness

Having finished my work early, I could afford to start blogging on a Friday evening. It's a great feeling being able to look forward to a weekend ahead for rest and recuperation.  

The television is filled with news on war in the Ukraine. We humans can never seem to outgrow our instinct to control others for our own self-preservation. We view life narrowly--from our own selfish point of view. Don't we all do that? When it comes to the crunch, you and your own family members matter more than your neighbour's. 

The instinct for self-preservation is what drives life on Earth. The perpetuation of our own kind is what matters. Genes need to perpetuate themselves at all costs. That is the game of life. My genes matter more than yours, on this small tiny clump of matter circling an average star on an unremarkable spot in the Milk Way galaxy, which consists of several hundred billion stars, which is also part of a cluster of galaxies called the Local Group, which is part of the larger the larger Virgo Supercluster, which is just one of around 10 million superclusters in the obvervable universe.

And still we fight over small swathes of land, as if they are the ultimate purpose of our existence. But what is the purpose of our existence? Don't we wonder about this with our puny brains, made of carbon-based molecules. And what laughably grand thoughts emerge from these brains, filled with so much pride and pomposity. 

We also spend a great deal of time speculating about life after death. Yes, there must be some kind of paradise which exists beyond the seemingly tough struggles of existence on this earth where all our desires and needs will be fulfilled. And our dreams are defined by what we know to be desirable in our short lifetime--all the things we wish we had but did not. That's our dream of paradise--defined by very mortal sights, sounds, smells and touch that give us pleasure.

We think we humans are the pinnacle of life. Don't we pity those insects and animals who do not fathom the aesthetic beauty of our music and art, the culinary delights of our world cuisines, the excitement of our video games and outdoor sports and the stimulating conversations with our loved ones and friends. 

But is what we experience with our mortal consciousness the epitome of experience? In our more philosophical moments, we do sometimes wonder, what's it like to be a bat? To 'see' the world with sonar? To dance from flower to flower, as a butterfly, guided by the ultra-violet display of flower petals?

Certainly the caterpillar, stuck on a surface of a leave could not have fathomed the life that awaited him as a butterfly, with wings to flutter across gardens filled with a dazzling array of multi-coloured flowers, sucking the sweetest of nectars from within the hearts of these blooms?

How curious would have been the life of a catepillar, from the viewpoint of a butterfly. And wouldn't the caterpillar think that its slow transformation into a mummy-like pupa akin to old-age and death? We could all laugh at our pettiness one day, when we all become butterflies. How we were childish little caterpillars, thinking that the leaf that we clung to so desperately for food and foothold were all the world there is.  How silly we were to dread our decline into pupahood! 

But we know better now, as resplendent butterflies, smiling at the pettiness of the caterpillar. Or do we?

The Happiness of Pursuit

I need to rest as I've been staring at the computer screen all day for the past week. I went for a haircut at the mall and had a leisurely stroll through the aisles of a bookstore and as always, ending up with a couple of new purchases.

The crowd is coming back to all the shopping places and that's a boon for the retail businesses. We are supposedly entering the endemic phase of the Covid-19 pandemic where we learn to live with it, with so-called 'standard operating precedures' or SOP, which Malaysians have adopted as part of their everyday vocabulary.

Will we go back to our old habits of spending, littering and generally, consuming in excess? We certainly will because it is in our nature. It is also our nature to forget, which may not necessarily be a bad thing, as I've argued many times in previous blog articles. But pain is a great etcher of memory and hopefully we've learned many such painful memories during the pandemic.

While we complain about the many inconveniences which the pandemic had brought us, Ukranians are now living under the fear of being bombed to smithereens by their Russian neighbours. When our everyday ordinary lives are being disrupted, we'll start to appreciate more of what we've always had. All the ordinary things that we take for granted--a walk in the park, browsing the latest bestsellers at the bookstore, slurping through your wonton noodles at your favourite hawker stall or simply going to the ATM to withdraw cash--become longingly beautiful.

Life is great and we make it unbearable by wanting too much. We yearn to be elsewhere, to find the life partner of our dreams, to have that perfect job that provides the position and perks and the recognition of others. We should start appreciating the fact that we even have that opportunity and possibility of chasing after these yearnings of the heart. Being able to do the things that you set out to do is what that matters. Happiness--the everyday mortal variety--is found in the act of pursuit.

The Nuances of Analog Wisdom

I took the day off from work yesterday and besides catching up on some overdue chores, I also spent some time mulling over the subject of my blog article this week. I know I have written a lot in the past about the trap of dogma and certainty (e.g. here and here) and it is the naturally tendency of our minds to fall into the trap of confirmation bias.

Today, I'm going to elaborate further on the other side of the coin: if we operate in a mode of uncertainty, wouldn't we be unable to function decisively in the world?

I've mentioned before that 'perhaps' is my favourite operating state. A lot of things in life are not binary: it's never true or false, good or bad, white or black. The answer lies somewhere in between--not in the digital, but the analog domain.

Which is why analogies work well as a tool to grasp an understanding of any situation. You compare one situation with another which you have an intuitive grasp of; having an intuitive understanding means that you 'feel' it in your body, you have physical and emotional sense of it.

If I tell you that ruling a country is like walking a tightrope, you get a sense of the difficulty in finding you balance at all times--to be vigilant and not sway too much to one side. You are are always sensing and adjusting to changes in your position.

For any area of expertise, you'll need sufficient experience before you get a feel of things. You cannot rely on flowcharts with yes/no tests to determine what you are supposed to do in every situation. Real-time situations have nuances and extraordinary exceptions, which can never be captured completely in any instruction manual.

I've always believed that a good football striker is one who has a good positional sense. He takes in everything in a heartbeat--the direction of the ball, the position of the defenders and goalkeeper, the run of his team-mates and then deciding what movement--to accelerate, to jump, to slow-down, to readjust his body, so that he can be in the most optimal position to receive the through-ball, the cross or the pass from a team-mate. All this is done instinctively. And when he processes all these very quickly, he outwits the opposition and arrives at the right position and at the right time, to head or strike the ball with the correct technique and force, to score a goal.

The football striker has a nuanced feel for the situation.  It can only come through a mental and physical wisdom honed through practice and experience. The mind and body learns things that way.  He doesn't mentally decide how to move at every instant, he simply 'flows' with the game, in a holistic immersion.

The analogy extends to almost all of life's roles and situation. How much freedom should you give to your child? It depends. How much affirmative action should a government enforce to help the minorities and the disadvantaged? Again, it depends on the situation. There's no simple answer for it.

The most important stance is to never have any dogma and always have a keen awareness of one's own mental biases. Listen to the facts, observe the situation and make a decision. Observe, evaluate and take another action after that. It's a continuous feedback control system. Have a feel for the nuances, the many gradations in shade and hue of the situation.

An analog signal captures everything, albeit within the sensitive range of the sensor. A digital one, chops and judges with absolute certainty--it's either a 1 or 0 at the instance of sampling. Ones and zeros are good for transmission and storage once the signal has been captured--we can do that without loss. But what we lose are the nuances at the point of sampling. Once lost, they can never be recovered.

Which is why, there are audiophiles today who prefer vinyl records and vacuum tube amplifiers for the audio-system, claiming that the sound is 'warmer' compared the precision and perfection of digital CDs or MP3 players. The analog signal captures all the nuances of sound at the moment of creation. True, noise is often introduce at every stage of processing, but something of its original quality and character is also preserved. And that makes all the difference--at least to the diehard aficionados.

Living in a the real-world requires a mode of perception that is similar to analog signal processing. You take in everything as best as your senses could, and never judge prematurely. That way, all the nuances of life are captured and taken into consideration. That to me is the essence of wisdom.

The Examination of Life

"The unexamined life is not worth living"  - Socrates

Reflecting on how sedate my life is nowadays, I thought of writing about a time when life was more turbulent and uncertain--the passionate days of my youth, especially my undergraduate days.

Poetry poured out of my soul then. I was always scribbling down verses which found some readership in a local tabloid. Those were days before Instagram and Facebook and had I been born later I probably would be attempting to find my niche among the Insta-poet crowd.

Recalling some of my juvenilia, I realized that I had been heavily influenced by the romantic poets like Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron and also modern ones like Dylan Thomas and Edwin Muir. 

I was an engineering student at a local university but I spent my days in the university library in the Humanities section, lapping up the literary treasures denied of me, growing up in a small town.

There were eagerness, passion, anger and loneliness mixed up in a potent brew which fueled my incessant scribblings. I was comfortable straddling the worlds of the arts and the sciences--being compartmentalized into any one area would have suffocated me. It wasn't my nature. Science and mathematics gave me the grandeur of vision; the arts, a sense of beauty that yearns for expression.

In the cold halls of the library, I read Kant, Aurobindo, Asimov (whom I found had a book of dirty limericks), the letters of Dylan Thomas and also books about movies. I remember enjoying one which analyzed all the movies of Stanley Kubrick. The wealth of knowledge did distract me from my engineering studies but I always made sure that I studied intensely before the final exams to get good grades.

Exams, which thankfully we only had to sit once a year were harrowingly difficult, not because the questions were tough but more because we did not know what were we supposed to know. I was not a good note-taker and unlike students today who have the luxury of being given lecture notes and Powerpoint slides, we had to make sense of the aimless ramblings of the lecturers--many of whom taught at their whim and fancy.

I could understand why some students were driven to the edge of desperation during exam season--there were always rumours of some poor soul in another faculty attempting suicide. The library would be filled to the brim the month before exam. One had to go early in the morning to book one's seat. Everyone had their favourite spot to study--mine was close to the philosophy section on the ground floor.

I did not feel any sense of accomplishment even after I had graduated with a good Upper First Class degree. University education was a bit of a letdown; the only consolation was the library where I saw how wide the world of knowledge was. It despaired me to know how much more I had to know to understand the world.

Thinking back, my life could have taken so many different turns but I chose the mundane one, gaining employment with one of the large multinationals where quite by accident I entered the world IT, because I was tasked with the job of managing a network of UNIX workstations. 

But I never had a sense of a career--a job was something one did to sustain oneself so that one could decipher the mysteries of the universe. Throughout my entire life, I had never made a move that I had thought would advance my professional career. The real meaning of life was always elsewhere. And this has been the recurrent theme in my life--from the turbulence of my youth to a temperate middle-age. 

One could say that I am unpragmatic and and unworldly. Perhaps so. But one thing I've realized is that one can never suppress one's true nature. I am comfortable living the life I choose. I could not have chosen any other path.

Facing examinations in university was tough, but to me life itself is one big on-going examination. The questions of this examination are posed by nature, and there are no correct answers. One just has to commit to one's chosen answer and follow its consequences. That to me, is the proverbial 'examined life' of Socrates.

The Firmware of Violence

The biggest news this week is the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.  Philosophers and psychologists have long claimed that war is Man's natural state. And today I'm going to reflect on this truism. Can we as a human species ever outgrow war as a way to settle conflicts?

First of all we have to acknowledge that we are all born different. Both genes and our environment shape the way we think and feel about the world. The moment a child is born, we can see that each one already has a different personality--some cry louder than others, some are more active and others show annoyance over certain types of discomforts.

If we put two individuals with different personalities in close proximity, frictions are bound to occur. Each one of us have different wants and expectations.  We want to control the environment around us so that it maximizes our comfort and pleasure. We want to feel at ease--to not feel threatened and to live the life we choose.

At the same time, we also realize that no individual can live in isolation. We seek the companionship of others to fulfill both our physical and psychological needs. We need things and services that come from others and that is what makes an economy.  Naturally, genetically similar individuals flock together. When similar people congregate, they create a way of living, which we call 'culture'.

Culture emerges naturally out of human interactions. Genetically and culturally similar people is what makes a tribe. A tribe, or culturally similar tribes occupying a geographical area becomes a country. Laws are written down to formalize the previously unspoken contract between these individuals. 

Law and culture bind a nation together, allowing everyone to know what is acceptable, and what is not. No one will have all their wants and preferences met but the fact that they choose to remain within a society means that the benefits far outweigh its inconveniences.

Is it any surprise that the differences between countries are no different from differences between individuals? Political leaders who determine the course of a nation are both a reflection and a magnification of the peoples beliefs. A strong leader accentuates and reemphasize certain cultural beliefs of a nation. 

A leader can come to the conclusion that his or her nation is under threat. And to protect the people's interest they should go to war. And so a country goes to war with another. 

Is war ever justified? Certainly not. But can humans outgrow their violent impulse to subjugate another? Not when we have uncontrollable fears, wants and urges. Is there a way out of this quadmire? Not with our present level of thinking. We need a massive paradigm shift to lift ourselves up to the next level of civilization.

But that is not impossible. We have fundamental shifts in human society before--like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women. War is a tougher nut to crack. How do we outlaw war and enforce it? With what? With more violence?

How do we as a human species outgrow our animal instinct for territoriality and violence? These instincts are deeply embedded in our hardware and firmware. We cannot reengineer ourselves genetically yet. It is also difficult to change our culture--which I liken to firmware and operating system. But we can certainly enforce it on the application layer. 

That's where law and ethics come into play. Religion was supposed to be a powerful software that could alter the behaviour of humans but it is a double-edged sword, which, more often than not, is used to justify violence and accentuates differences between people.

Mental transformations can only happen gradually by examining our firmware code line by line. That's where mindfulness come into play. When a violent instinct arises, you detect it early, acknowledge it and insert a check: if violent, let go. Slowly, it'll become a habit that's part of the firmware.

Let God be X

I was reading the newspapers early this morning and a couple of things about religion riled me up. But I'm not going to succumb to the temptation of ranting about it again. I've said enough. Today, I'm going to write about learning.

This is a topic that has intrigued me every since I was a kid. I've always observed that each one of us is born with a certain aptitude for specific areas and not others. I noticed that in my class then, there were those who were hopeless when it came to subjects like mathematics, but excel in languages.

What makes a person pick up maths easily but flounders when it comes to stringing a simple sentence in English? In my case, I certainly wasn't a math whiz and I even disliked the subject during my primary years,  but then I learned to like the subject when I entered Form Four. 

I've always loved subjects like history and geography but was also scientifically inclined. Which made me neither this nor that. If there had put me in the Arts stream, I would have been bored by the way in which there teach the subjects. Humanities require good, inspirational teachers, which are few and far between.

Like all reasonably good students, I was of course put in the Science stream. And that was a revelation, akin to a religious awakening. The subjects of Physics and Chemistry suddenly opened to me what real science was all about--that the universe itself could be understood and expressed in beautiful mathematics. Mathematics became to me, the language of God. 

I fell in love with mathematics. But I realized at that time, I did not perform as well in the subject as some of the other students who came from Chinese schools. I was curious. What was their secret that made them excel in the subject?

As I spent more time with them, I noticed that their minds were more logical. There's no vagueness in everything they say or do. It was the 'dullness' of their logical minds that made them think clearly when it came to solving math problems. 

This clear logical style of thinking is something that my young mind was not accustomed to. I had the mind of an artist--prone to passionate bursts of emotion and poetry. A romantic, if you will. And when it came to solving mathematic problems, I was careless and always making silly mistakes. And I noticed that I did not bother to understand the underlying concepts with the thoroughness and clarity of a logician.

 To achieve that precision and clarity of thinking, I realized that I had to slow down my mind. As an artist, I value my flights of fancy--the flurry and passion of thoughts as they whiz through the mind. But this is like painting in broad impressionistic strokes of impasto. You can fill the canvas up very quickly but leave out a lot of details.

When it comes to mathematics, you have to be a Pointillist. One dot at a time. One logical conclusion after another. State a fact, and then ask yourself, what's the next logical step. Put that down on paper, clearly. Clarity and precision are key.  Always, one statement of truth at a time. Break a large problem into smaller parts. Tackle them independently, and then put the pieces together. By following this principle, you will always arrive at the inevitable conclusion: the right answer.

I began to perform a lot better in maths after that. I was thoroughly in love with the subject because it opened up a world of beauty to me. Every problem, can be broken down into simple parts, by the application of specific mathematical techniques--a deft substitution, a transformation or a geometrical approach. And when I saw how mathematics were used to expressed the laws of Nature, I was ecstatic because I finally could catch a glimpse of God's genius.

It is funny how I use the word "God" so often when I discuss mathematics but in everyday life, I try to make my language secular. You will never find me saying "God bless you". But when it comes to mathematics, I am unashamedly 'religious'.

I am veering dangerously back into the subject of religion, which I am trying to avoid because I have written too much about it. But I just want to register this point: it was applied mathematics that made me understand why people find the concept of a personal God, even an impersonal one, appealing.

For instance, in the subject of Statics Mechanics, there's the concept of centre-of-gravity. You are always given a weird looking object with various weights or forces impinging on it and instructed to calculate where is the centre of gravity for this system of forces. You will define a point X somewhere in the middle of object and then you write an equation that balances the moments caused by the forces clockwise and counter-clockwise. When the point X is found, you can forget about all the other details. Everything reduces to a single force acting on point X. Point X is where you would put your finger, to hold the entire object in balance. A complicated problem is reduced to an extremely simple one, by finding X.

God is like X.  We always need mental stepping stones to figure out the problems in life. As humans, we deal with people. We know how to love or be loved by someone. Our minds work with people-related metaphors. If God is a fictitious lord, invented by superstitious people, it is perhaps a necessary one. We know how to obey or respect a person of authority. And that streamlines all our subsequent actions. A centre-of-gravity 'exists' because all forces act in a resultant manner on that particular point. 

We can debate the ontological truth of God, but we will never transcend the limitations of human understanding, which sees the world in terms of people, 3-dimensional space and time which moves from past to future. We are, in other words, 'naive'.  But even a naive understanding of the universe is useful, as long as we understand it as a model, and not the ultimate reality, if ever there was one.

To tackle mathematics, I had to modify my model of thinking. When I understood mathematics, I saw metaphors that helped me to under other concepts like God. Without labels like "God" or "center-of-gravity", we would find it difficult to express anything that is useful. Is there such a thing as a "center-of-gravity"? It's not important. It is a property of the system that has a certain utilitarian value.

Always define the unknown as X. Put it in an equation. Sometimes there are more than one variable: X, Y, Z or X1, X2, X3....  There's no harm in polytheism as long as it serves some useful purpose. But remember, they are there because we need them to think and act. As long as we are clear with the metaphors that serve us, we'll never run into delusions about their reality. Beyond that, there's nothing more to be said. 

A Quantum of Thought

Yesterday was a crazy day, filled with a flurry of activities. I had to work on some urgent issues on my laptop while coordinating some workers who were repairing my roof leakage and also some movers who came to pick up stuff that my friends left at my apartment when they went back to India.

I worked until almost 1am this morning. Today I had a good breakfast of rice noodles and now I am back in my apartment, hoping to finally relax while writing my weekly blog article.

Blogging can be relaxing when you are just allowing thoughts to deposit themselves on the page. Thoughts come, thoughts go and as they go, they leave a trail of words. When you observe how thoughts arise and fall, you'll understand the basic rhythm of the universe. Observe them like how you would, standing on the beach as waves lap at your feet. 

The waves of thoughts are the residual echoes of previous actions. When you allow them to subside, their energy is expended. Karma is worked out. But when you react to them, you create reverse ripples, which reverberate throughout the universe.

Sometimes what other people do or say stirs up strong reactions in your mind. And if you do not resolve them by allowing them to rise and subside, you'll always be in a state of mental turmoil. A mind at peace is a clear mind, and a clear mind is capable of penetrating any subject that it chooses.

A mind clouded with all sorts of anger and dissatisfaction is like having eyes with cataracts--your vision will be clouded and you won't be able to see through things clearly. By allowing these strong emotions to subside, you'll improve your mindsight.

Blogging is part of my weekly relaxation ritual. As I write, I am able to work things out, letting go of stress and anxiety. And at the end of every blog article, I feel energized, refreshed and enlightened.

Nosce te ipsum--know thyself, as the ancient sages like to say. What better way to do than to write in a journal or blog. We are so preoccupied with the external world that we do not even know the motives of our own words or actions.

Each thought is the summation of your life up to that point in time. There's nothing more about you than that thought that you have now. It contains your entire past and future. So give every quantum of thought its due now.

The Handicap of Luxury

I am writing again after working over the Chinese New Year holidays beginning with New Year's Eve on Monday. I'm finally on leave today and tomorrow. I caught up on my sleep and settled all my outstanding credit card bills. I'm ready to tackle a fresh new month. 

The year doesn't really begin in this part of the world until the Chinese Lunar New Year is done. Usually falling on the end of January or February time-frame, the end of Christmas is the beginning of the CNY shopping season. When all the deafening sound of firecrackers and the pounding drums of the Lion dance have died down, only then can one really get down to business.

However my start to the year has been a good one in terms of reading. Without realizing it, I finished reading 3 books. Now I have the good problem of picking my next read. Maybe this year, I will give special preference to books by local writers, usually biographies or commentaries on local politics. They have always proven to be exciting reads due to their relevance to me. Which is why, I have covered 3 sizable books within a month.

When it comes to books and pens, I live in absolute abundance. These are the only 2 'luxuries' that I unashamedly allow myself to indulge in. I have a collection of fountain pens, which include Mont Blanc, Pelikan, Lamy, Kaweco, Pilot, Parker and Conklin and a selection of multi-coloured inks to go with. 

Recently on a trip back to my hometown, I spotted a beautiful Parker Duofold in the showcase of the local jewellery shop. It has probably sat there for more than 2 decades, the shop proprietor having resigned to keeping it as a prop, as they sell mostly watches and gold to the local clientele. But it was love at first sight for me: I could not resist holding the beautiful marble green Parker Duofold in my hand and dreamt of writing in my journal with it. After some half-hearted haggling, I decided to swipe my card to make that impulse purchase, to the delight of the shop owner.

Expensive fountain pens are a luxury. The ten ringgit one can perform as well as the high-end ones. The Parker Duofold starts with 4 figures, and that's because it has an 18K gold nib, which does not necessarily improve writing experience a thousand-fold. 

For someone who does not like expensive things, collecting fountain pens is a hobby which I 'approve' of, just to ground myself as a normal human being. And this is where it will stop, because I've always considered luxury a handicap.

Once you are used to staying in 5-star hotels, it's difficult to downgrade yourself to cheaper ones. The same goes to other luxuries. Once you've tasted it, it's difficult to let go, and you are forever beholden to that need. That is why I call it a handicap. It's the reason why I do not sleep with the air-condition on. I grew up without one and I could sleep perfectly well. I can sleep anywhere, even if it is hot and stuffy. That is a 'skill' that I want to preserve.

I have nothing against spending on the good things in life if one could afford it. But do not make it another necessary condition for happiness. Remember, no matter how much you have, there's always more to acquire. Were you less happy when you had less? Certainly not. Why create more necessary conditions for happiness? Wealth is relative. There's always someone richer than you. No matter how rich you are, you are still mediocre in the eyes of someone above you.

During Chinese New Year, we wish each other good fortune, wealth and prosperity for the coming year. Define prosperity your own way. It's not necessarily material wealth that we should consider. Being able to work efficiently and thus allowing one to enjoy more leisure is a good form of acquired prosperity.

So I wish everyone a wealth of wisdom in the year of the Tiger. Pick and choose your luxuries and may those that you indulge in do not end up handicapping you in life.

Positive Penance

With the relaxation of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, I can see the crowd again whenever I go out to do my grocery shopping. Furthermore, it'll be Chinese New Year next week and for the first time in 2 years, people are allowed to go back to their hometowns. I can see shops doing good business now. It is a relieve for many businesses to be able to enjoy the brisk sales of the festive season.

Most people have already gone on leave. I actually look forward to seeing KL streets being emptied again as always during the festive holidays. This year however I will be especially busy because I will be working over the first 3 days of the holidays. 

The pandemic has changed my lifestyle a lot. I hardly go out anymore, except on weekends. Is this change for the better? I am not sure, but I find it interesting that I can adapt to this new routine. I even see it as a kind of penance, that is ultimately good for the soul.

Usually penance is a sort of self-punishment inflicted on oneself in order to repent for some sin committed. It is a way of consciously dealing with the karma of one's actions. You pay your debts now, in the form that you choose so that they do not surface unexpectedly in the future.

Penance and confession come hand-in-hand--something the Catholics know very well.  I think it is a good practice, if not mired in superstitious beliefs. When you confess to some wrongdoing, you are allowing the karma to work itself out in its most efficient way in the external world, instead of allowing the guilt to create all sorts of psychological damage inside.

Penance is karma yoga in action. As long as it is not physically sadistic, it allows a person to suffer pain consciously and enables the effects of one's past actions end  there and then. First you have to identify the action that needs resolution and then you have to clearly see what was the erroneous motivation that led to the action. You confess to it, so that its consequences can be unraveled openly. And then you proactively take its pain by taking penance.

Professional athletes subject themselves to strenuous regiments of training and exercise that are tailored to address weaknesses and build up strengths. Penance is the same too. Penance is a form of spiritual training. To associate it with sin and punishment is to bring an unhealthy element of religious superstition into it. 

We can see every challenge in life as a form of penance. It is challenging to you simply because of certain inherent weaknesses in yourself. And by willingly taking it head-on, you will learn and thus addressing the source of its pain. 

Penance taken to the extreme is asceticism, which is certainly not the Middle Way that the Buddha promoted. Sportsmen know that the wrong type of training can caused injuries. Similarly with asceticism. Let's see penance as something positive and therapeutic. Take the penance approach to every challenge that comes up in your life. And by doing so, every challenge becomes an opportunity to perfect yourself.

The Carrier Wave of Life

Finally, time for some quiet reflection. This is one of the joys of blogging. In a way it is like writing in a journal because it is personal, but expressed in a public way. I've been thinking about this week's topic last night and the thought that occurred to me is the subject of happiness. But a quick check revealed that, I've written about this subject many times before.

Perhaps today we could examine what are the things that make happiness elusive. Is it seemingly elusive because we always define happiness as something that we do not possess now but aim to get in the future? What is your present state of mind? Are you happy? If not, why? Why in the world are you not happy?

When asked this question, the mind would come up with a litany of complaints: I hate my job, I don't have enough time with my loved ones, I have mounting debts, someone backstabbed me in the office, my spouse or partner is not faithful to me. And the list goes on, ad infinitum.

If you think about it, it appears that we define happiness as some ideal state where all the troubles and inconveniences of life are absent. Is this what real happiness is? Perhaps this is why heaven is such an allure to some religious minded people: there all my needs will be met and everything will be ideal and perfect. This mortal world of matter is an imperfect one, created by a lesser God perhaps, like what the Gnostics believe.

Life by definition is inconvenient. If we always envision happiness as some idealized state of perfect bliss, then we may never be happy. Happiness and gratitude goes hand-in-hand. Be grateful that you are blessed with some challenges which you have to strife hard to overcome.  To embrace challenges is to live.

I have an apartment filled with books. That makes me happy. But the apartment roof has a leakage problem, and rain-water seeped into my shelves and ruined some of my books. Does that make me unhappy? It sure perturbed me for a while, but then life is full of such inconveniences. Some people lost all their possessions to the flood recently. My problem, if it is even one, is trivial and petty. And I also know that any attachment causes pain. In this case, I certainly have a lot of attachment to my books--their destruction certainly is a cause of grief. But understanding these things make you see things in their proper perspective.

So life goes on. You have to deal with the maintenance of material possessions because it is their nature to break down. Impermanence and the Second Law of Thermodynamics rule supreme. Being able to see these truths, and seeing them in action in the world, surprisingly brings me a sense of joy.

Because we always define happiness as some sort of peak state, they become elusive. Behind the ups and downs of life there's a constant underneath--I call that the carrier wave of life. It is there to carry the signal of happiness and sadness, the fluctuations in the wave that carry 'information'. If you focus too much on the signal, you miss that state of bliss, the sat-chit-ananda of the mystics, which is that underlying carrier wave.

And what is this carrier wave that underlies life's turbulent experiences? It is that knowing, the wisdom and the truth that reveals itself when we are not distracted by the ecstasy and agony of living. Being able to tap into it gives one the foundation for--not happiness--but, equanimous joy. 

The peaks and troughs of life will come and go but the carrier wave--it is always there. And if you know how to tap into it, you are in touch with your innermost soul. Call it what you may: soul, essence, core, spirit; just remember, it's there always, and at anytime you can  tune into that carrier wave of life.

 

Of Pigs and Politicians

I have been thinking about my blog topic this week for the past few days and actually did have something in mind. But this morning another topic occurred to me and I thought I wanted to get it off my chest by blogging about it.

As the non-existent readers of this blog would know, I never blog about politics. This is not because I'm not interested in the subject but more because I feel that adding more rants--of which most socio-political commentaries are--serve no purpose. There are tons of them around and I have nothing new to say. Nor am I an insider with a first-hand knowledge of things in the corridors of power. But what I am interested in is the psychology politics, politicians, their supporters and the masses, who are the ultimate victims or beneficiaries of the political game.

Comments about politicians are often cynical: they are doing what they are doing for power or other greedy selfish interests. It is often said also in Malaysia that it is politicians that divide us with their rhetoric on race and religion. Actual everyday Malaysians live in harmony with each other and will help each other irrespective of skin-colour or creed.

I think that view is absolutely naive. Politicians are not much different in terms of their 'greed' or 'selfishness' from ordinary people. They are a reflection of who we are--just an exaggerated version. It is very much like how social media amplifies the good and the bad in our society. They are the manifestation of our deepest hopes and fears. They are neither devils or angels, only caricatures of ourselves pushed to the fore by voters who need a vehicle for their expression.

The ordinary citizen is not more virtuous nor moral than politicians. True, to become a politician, one requires certain qualities. I can never see myself as one. But if there's a political figure who believes and expresses the views and principles that I also hold, obviously I would support him or her fervently. Politicians exist because they have support---they exist because we need them to channel our beliefs and principles on how our government should function.

The greed for power does have something to do with a lot of political intrigues in any country. But even ordinary people are seduced by power, just that there is no opportunity for it to surface yet. You want power because you want to be able to command others to do things that you believe in and enjoy the privileges that you think you are entitled to, or get away with.

If you look at how 'ordinary' citizens behave when they are customers in a restaurant: chastising waiters when they get an order wrong, making demands which they are entitled to as a paying customer, you'll see the root of that instinct manifested in our politicians. Politicians are just the embodiment of the ordinary flaws and foibles of society, writ large.

The seemingly selfless NGO leader, who works tirelessly in a charitable organization and criticizes the corrupt political leadership of the country, when put in the position or power, will also face the same criticisms. This is not to excuse the corruption and ineptitude of the government, which in many cases is true but let's not view the world in black and white. 

Everyone has flaws and when you are a public figure, every action of yours, whether good or bad is judged in a very superficial way. The opinion the masses have on a politician is never nuanced. It is the nature of the human mind to make instant judgements and put someone in specific box, often with scant information.

An ordinary citizen who uses his company resources which are within his authority for some harmless, even reasonable personal purpose, gets a way with it because it is trivial. But a politician in power with the authority to award million dollar contracts at his whim, is considered corrupt if he takes such liberties.

Again, this is not to excuse the bad behaviour of our politicians. They are just no better and no worse. The real political leader is someone who understands such human weaknesses and chooses to rise above them. But they are few and far between. 

I don't love or hate politicians. But I do not believe that we'll be better off without them. When you think that we have gotten rid of them, like the chickens and the horses in Orwell's Animal Farm, we will find that the pigs who have taken leadership, are no better.

The Void Beyond Wisdom

This is my first post for the year 2022. It has been a very busy start to the year and it did not occur to me to blog until today when I have a bit of breathing space. My morning and afternoon were spent running errands and the weather which was sunny and hot earlier has now turned gloomy, threatening rain and thunder.

Being out and about today refreshes me. One thing that I have to watch out for during this pandemic is the lack of exercise. I will have to see how I can incorporate more physical activities into my everyday life. 

As one advances in age, one has to be very careful with one's physical and mental health. The body starts its downward slide after a certain age. And so does the mind, if we are not careful.

The thought occurred to me earlier today on how we tend to over-estimate the intelligence of the average adult. We assume that adults possess the necessary reasoning capability and judgement to act wisely. But our actions are only measured by the intelligence of other similar adults--all who have come to the peak, at least biologically, of their mental capabilities. We can continue to learn and gain more knowledge, however as an adult we have to admit our physical body is already on its downward slide. 

An adult would always understand that a child would never understand certain things which they see so clearly. But they know that as the child grows up, he will change his point of view because he would have gained more experience in life and learned its valuable lessons. Our intelligence is not unlike the artificial ones--AI--which is becoming ubiquitous everywhere. It becomes better, the more data or experience is fed into it. It builds its model from the flow of information that it processes everyday.

 But after a certain biological age, the hardware to further improve our intelligence model is no longer growing in tandem. Our intelligence does not register the kind of leaps that we see from a baby to a child, a teenager and finally an adult. 

We can smile and understand the innocence of a child's thinking. But what makes us think that we are not equally naive when viewed from a higher alien intelligence? Why are we so certain that aliens would want to even communicate with us, given our still infantile intelligence?

If we are to project the intellectual growth that we had experienced on the way to adulthood onwards, what levels of super-intelligence would we have achieved, if only our biology is able to keep up with it?

This is why I am not sympathetic to people, especially religious ones, who think they already have all the answers. Everything that seem important to us now, the material life, the family we want to build, our career ambitions, the birth and death of loved ones would seem rather 'childish' when viewed from a higher intellectual vantage point. From there, all our concerns would seem rather petty because we are only seeing a small part of the picture, the same way a child cannot comprehended the everyday cares and concern of an adult.

What is important to us now--like the need to have a happy afterlife--may seem like the silly concern of a child who fears that Santa will not reward him with gifts if he does not behave. A child does not know any better. Neither do adults.

Humility in the face of the unknown is the best attitude. There's nothing wrong in admitting that we don't know and we are working on it. Our brains do not grow at at the rate that we experienced in our adolescence.  But at least we can factor in the limits of our intelligence when discussing matters beyond our ordinary sense-level experience. 

It is my hunch that this life that we cling on to so jealously and desperately is part of a much larger process of evolution, of which "we"--if that word has any meaning of all in this scheme of things-can partake, if we do not prematurely stunt our growth with certainty.

Absolute certainty is our greatest enemy of wisdom.  When we admit that we don't know, at the very least, we are looking out into the void of unknown. Who knows, something profound might emerge slowly out of the darkness?

The Cloak of Boredom

It's the last day of 2021 and a good time for us to reflect back on the year that passed. To the nation and the world in general, it has been nothing short of horrible since the pandemic began. The events of 2021 are those that none of us want to repeat again as we experienced more political upheavals, more deaths due to Covid-19 and culminating with the the worst floods in recent memory.

When I was a kid growing up, every year felt different from the previous one.  I was developing fast both intellectually and emotionally. But after you've reached a certain age, every year begins to feel the same. Your thinking does not seem to have deviated much from those of previous years. It feels as if you've stagnated in your development, if not deteriorated.

That's when you understand how the weariness of life creeps in on you. You do not have the energy to seek for adventures anymore. You become risk averse. You get bored seeing the same things repeating again and again--people's behaviour, the movies on TV and the headlines th in the morning papers. Can you blame some old people for being so cranky? Life can be repetitive.

This year's new year celebrations will be muted as most countries are imposing strict controls due to the surging Omicron infections. Which is well and good for me as I've never really understood why certain days, like New Year's Eve, or one's birthday are singled out as 'special' days that need to be celebrated. Isn't every new day a miracle that deserves equal celebration?

Every night when you go to bed, remember that there's no guarantee that you'll wake up tomorrow. You willingly surrender into the arms of sleep and 'die'. What makes you so sure that you'll still exist tomorrow?

Which is why when you wake up in the morning, that's the greatest moment of all that deserves as much thanks and gratitude as all the other special days. Rejoice for you are alive and able to breathe the morning air and that your heart is still pumping blood into every part of your body and you can command your body and limbs to get up and participate in the daily saga of life.

We need to keep our minds fresh to avoid descending into this state of tiredness. Freshness is achieved by seeing the same things in a new light. It is up to us to live life with a creative eye, to see joy and wonder in even the commonest of things.

Penetrate each moment of existence like sunlight on a multi-faceted jewel. Notice all the subtle variations of light and shade, the dazzling reflections that scatter hues across the room. Each moment is a precious gem that is able to spring its surprises. We just need to look closely.

So let's greet the coming year with this resolve, even if we have to see the same dull headlines and trite cliches being repeated everyday. Look at each moment of experience closer and penetrate the secret of its sameness. For Nature conceals its deepest beauty in a cloak of boredom.  

The Inevitable Tides of Time

This week's blog post has to be about the devastating floods that have wrecked havoc across the nation. I think it started on Friday night, when it began to rain all night and continued raining the whole of Saturday. I didn't pay much attention to it as it was like any typical rainy day in December.

But this particular day was different: a whole month's of rainfall fell within 1 day and water completely inundated many low-lying areas in Selangor, Pahang and even Negri Sembilan.  Klang and Shah Alam were the worst suffering places in Selangor while all the major towns in Pahang had it bad too.

It was like a biblical deluge, threatening to wipe out entire towns and cities. People were trapped on the top floor and roof of their houses, without food, water and electricity. Cars were completely submerged and washed down like flotsam down roads which had now become muddy rivers.

As always there were a lot of blame to go around. People were understandably angry as rescue efforts were slow. The sick, the elderly and the handicapped were  were stranded helplessly in their homes as flood waters rose. People on the ground had to help each other out. The destruction to homes, properties and businesses were incalculable.

This is a double-whammy after the livelihood of so many people had been severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic which is still showing no sign of abating. How do we deal with such challenges in life?

Is life simply suffering, as the 'pessimistic' Buddhists like to put it? Or have we just been lulled by the comforts of our middleclass existence only to find the real world unbearably harsh when we are literally thrown into the deep end of the water?

The truth is that, life has always been precarious. The universe is a harsh place for fragile carbon-based organisms like us which require very optimal conditions to flourish. We are but a small flicker of existence in space and time.

We are small and insignificant when viewed from a cosmic perspective--tiny clumps of molecular debris flushed out into the immense void. This localized aggregation of matter which we call a living being has but only a transient existence. Are our mortal sufferings then considered insignificant in the larger scheme of things?

The very fact that we realize that we are suffering, is by itself an awakening. This chance conglomeration of matter is suddenly conscious of its existence and considers itself to be separate from the universe. This separation and the need to constantly preserve its existence is the very definition of suffering.  

Suffering is the price of consciousness. To love the life we live is to awaken to the bliss and harshness of the universe, in equal measure.  We alternate daily between heaven and hell, finding the former when our needs are met and suffering the latter when what we love are taken away from us.

When we suffer, we are exercising our right to be conscious. We want to control that piece of space-time real estate which we call ours--our bodily existence, our material possessions and our connections to other living beings.

We suffer when we see what is ours destroyed by the ruthless forces of the universe. Relief only comes when we are willing to let go, and allow the torrents of mud and water to reclaim them. In the end, nothing is ours: they were only leased to us at the pleasure of the universe.

We must live with the assumption that nothing is ours. What we consider ours is simply loaned to use temporarily. We should never claim ownership to them. That way, we'll let go of them more easily. Yet, there's no less enjoyment in their possession when we appreciate the fact that we are blessed with the opportunity to enjoy them, even for a brief moment. 

When we assume that everything we have belongs to the universe, we tend to be more generous--giving and sharing whatever that we are being blessed with, which by and large is a matter of chance and luck. And when someone suffers the pain of losing something they own, we share what we have with them. 

It is the giving and sharing--not owning--of what we have, which is what true existence is about. The less we own, the less liable we are to suffering. When the floods come to claim our possession, we know that the debt-collector of pain has come to demand what is due. 

Ultimately, everything will be lost. If not swept away by the waters of the flood, inevitably they will be reclaimed by the tides of time.

World-Weary Words of Hope

I dined out last night alone at the Chinese coffee shop and was surprised that the place was quite empty. The volume of night activities has more than halved and it was pleasant to be able to find parking when in pre-pandemic days, it would have been difficult to even drive through the area.

This is the one good thing that the pandemic brought about. Chinese coffee shops are now much more comfortable places because they are forced to space out their tables and limit the number of patrons. Usually these places are jam-packed with customers and it was never easy to get a place to sit, especially for lone diners like yours truly. The pandemic has ironically made dining out a better experience for people like me, who usually eat alone and linger after my meal to read and drink.

I enjoy drinking beer at the Chinese coffee shop because they are the cheapest places to do so. During my days in Singapore, I used to have beer and stout at the food court near my place and spent time there reading quietly.  Prior to the pandemic, I used to eat alone at a cafe and spent time working on my project after that. 

For better or worse,  the pandemic has certainly brought changes to our lifestyles. We got used to ordering food and eating from home. Many companies found that they could be equally productive having their employees work from home. Some people, by choice or by necessity, decided to switch careers, having rediscovered hobbies or skills which they could make a living on. Wildlife and the environment also had a respite from the intrusion of humans and the pollution caused by their activities.

The pandemic is a good opportunity to re-engineer our lives for the better. The world used to be a quieter and more livable place but we've sacrificed a lot of that in our chase for material prosperity.

The roadsides at my neighbourhood are filled with cars parked indiscriminately. Every house has at least 2 cars. It's difficult even to go anyway on foot as pedestrians have no safe space to walk. All our spare time is consumed by online content. Everyone's attention is glued to some kind of screen.

Is this a better world? Yes and no. On the one hand, we have more accessible knowledge online than we ever had before. But we also had the entire filth of the world available at the click of the mouse. All kids live within a screen-tap away from the worst neighbourhoods in the world.  That's the kind of world we live in now and we have to manage it wisely.

Our roads used to be safe places for cyclists and pedestrians. But now, they are choked with cars and fumes. But we take comfort in the fact that we could also drive in this gridlocked traffic in air-conditioned comfort, plugged into our favourite content, streamed into our car dashboards or headphones.

But as always, I'll count the blessings that we have: we live in a peaceful era and are blessed with an abundance of food. We have the freedom to pursue our goals and are given the opportunity to realize the meaningful life, as we define it. 

There will be moments of world weariness like this but at least I get to blog about it. Having done so, I am grateful and hopeful that the world will self-correct itself and pave the way to a better future for everyone.  

The Reason of Faith

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth - Pope Leo XIII, 1879.

I touched upon the topic of faith in last week's  article. Let try to elaborate further on that. What is faith? Is reason superior to faith?

Faith is usually used in the context of religion. All religious followers adhere to certain doctrinal beliefs which give them faith about the purpose of their existence. There's an unshakable confidence among the believers that they are guided by some divine power.

The faithful are driven by some inner drive and strength because they have a strong sense of certainty that certain outcomes will materialize. Whenever doubt creeps in, they just remind themselves of their core beliefs to forge a new resolve. Faith is constantly renewed through regular communal rituals and activities. 

Faith is powerful. It can imbue believers with a deep sense of purpose and mission, including sacrificing their lives for some kind of recognition or reward in afterlife. Faith, once cultivated is like a magnetic field that aligns all the particles in one's body an soul towards a particular direction. 

Can faith be blind? Most certainly. This is where reason comes in. Faith is only one part of the equation--very much like how a car requires power from fuel and a driver to steer it towards its destination. Without the fuel of faith, a person with all the knowledge of direction would not be able to get to its goal. The power and  'faith' of the engine works in tandem with the 'reason' of its driver.

Faith is holistic. It is a feeling that arises from deep within and posesses one's entire body and soul. One can have all the faith in the world but if the faculty of reason is weak, there you will find a religious extremist.

Religion has a bad name because of blind followers who does not question 'truths' that are written in supposedly holy books. The wisdom in any scripture can only be distilled by men who have reason honed by years of thinking and reflection. 

Cultivate faith, sharpen your reason. Question faith. Doubt reason. It's the interplay of these two qualities that brings forth wisdom.

A Pilgrim's Project

I'm blogging earlier than usual this week as I'm on leave and have time on my hands. The good thing about not being on project related work is that you don't overwork yourself, which is a nice change for me.

When you are doing a project, the dateline is constantly looming in your head and you are naturally cautious of unexpected problems surfacing at the last moment. So you try to cover as much ground as possible so that you get a heads up of the terrain ahead.  Which means that you spend nights and weekends working and when things get done, you fuss over tiny details obsessively to make them as perfect as possible. That makes project work very stressful at times.

During a project, you are always forced to confront your weaknesses. Which is why a project is like a pilgrimage: it is both a physical journey and a catharsis. During a project there will be times when the obstacles ahead might seem insurmountable but you have to trudge on because there's no other alternative. And then you realize that, it is by the sheer power of persistence that certain problems resolve themselves. Forging ahead, doing the next logical thing may seem sensible in hindsight but when you are a traveller stranded in a strange place, you feel so lost and helpless.  But a pilgrim progresses by having faith and accepting that all obstacles along the path are part and parcel of the spiritual quest itself.

Religion emphasizes faith, which is the power of belief; and when belief is applied not as a kind of smug certainty but as an inner conviction that all obstacles can be overcome if one does not panic and simply stick to the basics of problem-solving.  And what are those basics? It's just asking yourself these questions: Where are you now? Where do you want to go? What is the next small step you could do to move towards your destination?

At any point in time, there's only one small step to make, and not the 10,000 miles that separates you from your destination. Having made that small step, you would check again, if your new vantage point reveals fresh information. If they do, make use of it. Sometimes, as the cliche goes, you need to take a step backwards to move two steps forward. 

A project plan is nothing but a route marked on a piece of map. It sets the general trajectory and provides an estimated time of arrival. But when it comes to the actual journey, the terrain itself would always offer some surprises.  It is the unexpected challenge of the terrain that makes a pilgrimage. And one is not unwise to approach a project as a pilgrim would, with faith and fortitude.

Gardeners of the Mind

It's been a while since I blogged from a cafe but here I am today, hogging a table at the Komugi cafe at a mall nearby. Feeling a lot better today after struggling a bit with the effects of the booster vaccine shot I had on Tuesday.  

My first dose of Sinovac knocked my body off-balance a little bit. And then my second dose felt like nothing as my body had acclimatized to it, I think. But the booster shot I had was Pfizer, something my body had never experienced before. It's no surprise that I felt its side-effects, which was thankfully mild--some headaches and tiredness--but uncomfortable, nonetheless.

Meditation always helps to stabilize the body and mind. Stripped of any spiritual or religious connotations, meditation is simply a good exercise for the mind.  Sometimes I conduct rather morbid thought experiments like: what would happen if I am jailed and put into solitary confinement? Will I be able to cope? This is when I think my meditation habit will come in handy. I'll just look at it as a meditation retreat! No more time pressures. No more trying to squeeze in 10 or 15 minutes during lunchtime. 

When time stretches ahead infinitely, it does something to the mind. It is like transplanting a tree sapling from a pot to the ground, it will start growing to its full potential. Which is why I always feel that I do my best work on weekends and when I am not rushing too much.

Thoughts grow creatively in an optimal fashion when given the time and space to do so. Ideas take time to germinate in the subconscious mind. It's important to plant the seeds first and put in the right soil and fertilizers. Allow them to grow on their own with the right amount of water and sunshine.

Mindfulness is simply the cultivation the mind soil so that it is healthy for the germination of good ideas and solutions. Cultivating a soil means eliminating all contaminants and weeds that hamper the growth of your plants.

Thoughts that are creative grow naturally, driven by its creative impulse. We just need to put them in the right soil. Thoughts intermingle, combine and synthesize into bigger ones on their own.

Pride, ego, fear and irrational obsessions are like weeds that inhibit the organic growth of the mind. They drain away the soil of its nutrients. When these thoughts and feelings arise, acknowledge them for what they are. The way to eliminate them is to allow them to disintegrate under the glare of awareness.

When we tend the garden of the mind carefully and lovingly, beautiful flowers bloom. Life become rich in possibilities. Remember, we are just gardeners. We can only plant seeds, cultivate the soil and water the saplings into maturity. The rest is up to the creative forces of the universe.

The Strange Sweetness of Sedentary Life

Today is Thursday but I'm free because I'm on leave. And there's no better time to start blogging for the week. I'm learning to take the occasional break to recharge myself. And during this slow transition back from a pandemic lock-down to a normal life, I'm also taking the opportunity just to get out of my house.

My life is slightly different nowadays, due to the nature of my job. Workdays are intense with long hours but weekends and leave are completely work-free. Which is different from how I used to work, which is non-stop, but with less intensity.

I used to work in spurts of 2-3 hours. Set up myself at a cafe in between meetings, do some work and then take a walk around, which I think is pretty healthy.  Do I miss the kind of life I used to lead? A little. But you move on. There are pros and cons in being home-bound. One is that you actually spend a lot less in parking, petrol, coffee and other unnecessary expenses. It's true that your electricity bill will be higher if you have the air-conditioning running all day at home, but it is still less than what I'd pay monthly for petrol.

In a way I've moved on from being a nomadic hunter to a sedentary farmer. And it's remarkable how one can get used to different life-styles. I used to feel restless whenever I was not travelling for more than a week. Going to airports, checking into strange hotels and eating alone at restaurants was exciting to me. I loved hotels so much that I stayed in one for two years.

Now I would find it difficult to work as a nomad because I have a good workstation set up at home with two laptops and and two external monitors. And I just replaced my decade old chair with a good quality ergonomic one, complete with headrest and lumbar support. I'm afraid I won't be able to work from a cafe anymore, unless work involves just writing or blogging.

This sedentary life is a cheaper life to lead but it's also less healthy. For one, I walk a lot less--most days I just go downstairs and up again, multiple times a day. Occasionally I would go out to the nearest petrol station to buy my daily copy of the Star. That's one thing that I still enjoy wherever I'm at--reading the morning papers while having breakfast. 

I find enormous happiness in doing these small things: reading in the bathroom, listening to CNN every morning and writing in my journal with my favourite fountain pens. Blogging makes me happy, and this weekly ritual is like sharpening the saw, as Stephen Covey of the 7 Habits fame would put it. 

Now that the weekly sharpening is done, I'm moving on to my next task--my longhand journal. I'm not sure how long this period will last but enjoy it I will--this strange sweetness of sedentary life. 

Mirror of My Mind

I was thinking about what to blog about this week for the past 2 days, and I thought about the subject of anger, because I do see angry people around me all the time. But then, I thought I must have written about this before and true enough, I found this post that I wrote in 2005. Upon rereading it, I thought that it expresses everything that I wanted to say on the subject and like all blog posts of mine, they appear to be better than what I had thought when I first wrote it.

What shall I write about today? I could just ramble on and write about nothing in particular. In many ways, it is the theme of this particular blog--like Seinfeld, which is a show about nothing, just people talking.

So this blog is just about me writing and thinking--writhink.  I could go on rambling and everytime I touch on a topic, I'll just link it to a previous blog post that I had written. Sounds like a great idea. 

In a way, that's how the mind works. Our thoughts wander most of the time and then we just recall back snippets of conversations we had recently, memories of past events, things we hope for and fear and all sorts of random things. This blog is just a mirror of my mind.

Everything potentially links to every other thing. There's like the equivalent of a 6 degrees of separation between ideas in your head. When you read this blog, you'll get ideas in your head too because what I write spawns off ripples of thoughts in your mind. These thoughts reverberate and stirs up other thoughts. Some thoughts grow and become words and action--for action is just the gross level of thinking, something I've written about before, obviously.

The inter-connectedness of thoughts and ideas is what defines you and me. It is the signature of the mind--the intelligence model honed by a lifetime of experience. We view the world through this tinted glass of ideas--ideas which have been shaped by pain and pleasure.

I am too lazy to comment about the latest political events or even technology, which I make my living from. I actually made a conscious decision not to be like so many other blogs that simply rant about current political issues. I have a natural tendency to want to see both sides of the argument and that doesn't make me a very interesting commentator of political events. The most  popular bloggers, vloggers nowadays are those that are partisan and divisive. You need to have an attitude to incite both admirers and haters alike. 

Let's admit it, we all love to have a figure to hate. One could argue that politicians, celebrities and other public figures that we dislike serve a deep-seated psychological need in us by providing the necessary punching bags for us to release our anger.

Love, hatred and anger are subjects I've touched on a lot in all my past blog posts. If there's a recurrent theme, it is that I tend to see everything emotional as "energy". And when I talk about energy, I will always link it to karma, which literally means action.

This blog reflects all the thoughts that swirl in my head constantly and by writing, I am able to distill them to their essence to understanding their deeper meaning and implications. And there you have it: another blog article, that talks about all the other articles that I've written in the past. I will continue to deposit my thoughts here and over time, everything expressed here will be a true reflection of my mind.

Live and Let Love

Thinking back, there have been times in my life when things were so difficult that I did not know how I would get out of the situation. There did not seem to be any way out. 

It was in those difficult times that you get to know yourself. You ask yourself, what is the worst that could happen? Why did it feel so intractable? Was it shame, loss of a loved one, physical danger or financial ruin that made it so difficult?  

You see, everything that I mentioned before is painful simply because of attachment. There's attachment to pride, to someone you love, or to your own physical and financial well-being.  If you let go of them, all pain dissolves away. 

The worst that could happen is that you die. Our attachment to our own existence in this mortal frame is what we are ultimately concerned about. Let's say that you lose everything that you own, your money in the bank and the job that you have now. Everyone you know and love is gone from your life. Would you still have the strength to go on living?

If you say yes, or that you'll have to, for you have no choice, then the rest is simply a willingness to endure pain consciously--the pain of picking up the pieces and starting over again. It takes strength, courage and resilience--qualities that are difficult to summon in times of despair.

Even when you have not encountered such a dire situation before, it's a good thought experiment that one could perform, for it reduces life to its simplest objective: to survive. What does it take for one simply to survive?

There you will come face to face with your karma. You are born because you still have an attachment to life. It's the simplest of attachments: you want to be alive. To survive involves overcoming a lot of everyday obstacles--seeking food, shelter and companionship. It involves a lot of painful work. That is what working out your karma means. 

And if you have the wisdom to take this pain consciously, you do not generate fresh karma. Work and relationships could be difficult things to tackle. If you love someone and think that your possessive love is something very noble, you are simply generating fresh karma with a lot of potential pain.

Love for love's sake. There's pain and pleasure in the act of love. Take them both. There's no future goal when you love someone. It is not to have kids and a beautiful home. That's a by product of love which you could express gratitude for, if they do materialize. The act of love itself is selfless and goalless.

To live is to love. Love is an energy that emanates from your being. Just spread it around like the selfless sunlight that nourishes the flora, like the cool breeze that brings relief during a hot afternoon, like the gentle ocean waves that lap on the shore. 

Think again of that difficult situation that you have. What attachment is it that's holding you back and making things so difficult? Let go and fall back into your natural state of love. Then you'll know that love and life are inseparable.

The Sword of Fame

Time for me to relax and allow my mind to breathe for a while because it's Friday and I'm finally alone here in my apartment with no work to worry about. Yes, I'm on leave today and I spent the afternoon just now catching up with Myra.

I'm happy that she's making some headway in the entertainment industry, appearing frequently on television, hosting various programs, occasionally starring in music videos and dramas. I advise her to be not too agitated over some of the difficult people she encounters every now and then but to focus on gaining more experience for herself. All experiences, whether they are pleasant or unpleasant are valuable and help to build character.

She is also earning some decent income as a social influencer. I'm always advising her to be mindful of what she does in public as being a public figure opens one up to all sorts of unwarranted scrutiny. The fact that someone can earn money from a fan-base of so-called followers is because, there's a certain 'insanity' innate in people that is being exploited here for commercial gains.

For the masses to pour so much adulation on certain personalities based on his or her looks or even talent is a kind of insanity. Think about it: why should we scream and yell, behave like a lunatic when we sight our favourite idols? Why should we pay so much money to possess certain memorabilia associated with these individuals? 

There's some kind of psychological hangup here that finds its expression in the form of celebrity worship. It's true that there's nothing wrong in admiring the beauty, talent or performance of certain entertainment or sports personalities because they give us pleasure and perhaps even knowledge. But why do we go crazy over them as if they are some kind of super-human that exist on a super-terrestrial plane? Why are their private lives of interest and concern to us? 

Decent human beings do not pry into the private affairs of their neighbours and friends. Why is there a paparazzi industry that exists just to cater to this strange sickness of a large portion of our society?

Celebrities make a lot of money because we are insane enough to pay a premium for a sight of their good looks or talent. Even if they are so talented in a particular field, why should we pay so much to gawk at them? 

So when celebrities complain that they do not have private lives and it is not all bed and roses after all for being famous, they don't really get my sympathy. They are where they are now because of the very perversion which they are complaining about.

Idolization of famous personalities has never made anyone a better person. One could of course claim that the success of one's idol motivates one to excel. But if it is mere inspiration we are seeking, how do we explain our hyper-reaction to their every appearance in the public arena? If a fellow co-worker is a super-performer in some field, do we ask for her autograph? 

If we simply wish to learn from the best, we will watch, take notes and emulate, not drool at their sight. Psychologist have theorized about the underlying cause of this human behaviour. Some say it could simply be compensation for some deficit in the fanatical fans themselves. Is there something that's lacking in their lives that they seek to over-react to everything about their idols?

Perhaps it's simply normal human behaviour that's innate within us, akin to mob behaviour.  Is there any harm to it? Maybe there's none at all. Celebrity culture and idol worship is simply part of the fun of everyday human interaction. We enjoy gossiping about the people we know, so what's wrong with prying into the lives of the rich and famous? 

This is what I try to tell Myra every time I see her. There is nothing wrong in seeking fame and fortune. In fact, I even encouraged her to do so. If popular success attracts you, go for it. Everyone has a calling and that is the path that will be most rewarding spiritually, even though there could be a lot of pain that goes with it. Your soul seeks the best path for its healing.

When one is famous, one should not complain about being treated unfairly by the masses. Their insanity can be both a boon and a bane. You just need to prepared for it and to deal with its adverse effects. Remember, the sword of fame cuts both ways.

Collosseum of the Dead

As we ease our Covid-19 restrictions, I fear that the number of infections will go up dramatically. What more with a state election coming up in Malacca. But what can we do about it? We have no choice but to resume normal life and learn to live with the virus.

It's now customary of hearing people dying of complications caused by Covid-19. The inevitability of death is something that we have to learn to accept. None of us: you, me and all the people that you see around you now will still be around in another 100 years. All the beauty and pride, the smiles, the laughter and the banter will be gone without a trace. 

It is painful to lose a loved one. When we love someone, we have an emotional bond attached to the person as if it is a physical cord itself that ties our souls together. When one dies, these cords will be severed, with a pain that's akin to a limb being amputated.

All pain however fades away with time if wounds are allowed to heal. The first pre-requisite for healing is simply letting go. That is often the hardest thing to do. We feel a pang of guilt, as if we are betraying the dead by 'forgetting' about their existence.

The death of two of my friends due to Covid-19 was a great shock to me. But now I'll have to continue living, cherishing the good times we had--the joy and banter we exchanged are now but a beautiful memory, constantly present to nourish the future. 

We can only go forward and the endpoint of this journey is death. To those who are religious, there could be an afterlife where one is judged for one's deeds in this life; to others there could a transition to another birth. Whatever it is, what matters most is now. This very moment.

This moment that stands on the memory of the departed, ushering the living to their inevitable end. We live and that's all we know. I write these words, and that's all I could do. So I do it with as much heart and earnestness that I could muster, for it is what defines me. 

There are more people who have lived and died than there are those who are alive today. So we live surrounded by ghosts, like gladiators performing in the collosseum of the dead.

All we can do is fight the good fight. Fight with the wisdom accumulated by those who have come before us. It is the best way to honour them. And in time, we too shall depart, hopefully leaving behind some deeds or knowledge that could guide those who shall come after us.

The Fluctuating Field of Feelings

Another week, another Friday off. I'm looking forward to the long weekend because I'll be working continuously the whole of next week when everyone else goes on leave.

I didn't have breakfast today, opting to go for lunch instead, which I had here in my apartment in Cyberjaya a moment ago. Now I'm just enjoying my coffee while I type these lines and figure out the subject of this week's blog article.

This morning a single phrase keeps repeating in my mind: "existence is energy". I remember that I wrote about this recently, and upon searching my blog, indeed I had an article called Existence is just Energy.  Perhaps I want to elaborate more on what I mean by this.

I'm going to go a step further by saying, existence is a feeling. Now, we know what it is like to feel something. You feel cold. You feel dejected. You feel touched by someone. There's a feeling, that is the sum total of all your bodily electro-chemical process inside which you recognize.  The feeling varies from moment to moment in time. There's a quality and identity to that feeling.

Yes, but what is the point that I'm trying to make?  You know you are alive when you are feeling something. And feeling means receiving and reacting to the world. I almost wanted to write "reacting to the external world" but that would be wrong. The so-called reaction is exactly what we mean by that feeling. It is a fluctuation in the field, of which our individual existence is defined.

So life is a continuous feeling. If I may paraphrase Descartes: I feel, therefore I am. At any point in time, the state of your existence is that feeling that you feel and you should treat it as nothing more than a reading of the energy dial. When you meditate, this is what you are constantly aware of, moment by moment. You are tracing the graph of existence as it is being drawn.

When you see that feeling as it is, it is all there is. You are not a physical being feeling heat or cold, anger or elation, but just being a point in the energetic continuum. You have no idea which way it will go next but all you have to do is observe and maintain your balance as you are being swept along by the waves of this energy.

Again, all this sounds like mystical new age mumbo-jumbo. This is what I have a propensity of doing: spouting paragraph after paragraph of such nonsense. I take that as a compliment. They are all non sense--not to be experienced with the usual senses. It is what underlies your senses. You know it when you feel it.

When you say that you know or you understand, again it's a feeling. And if you see it clearly, one feeling differs from another in terms of quality but they are all neutral. We cannot say one wave causes another, or is superior to another. They are part of that oceanic field of cause and effect.

All of art is nothing but feelings captured in various physical medium. And if you feel something after reading these lines, then I've made my point. The moment it is felt, it becomes a part of your existence. And there's nothing more that needs to be said.

The Comfort of Certainty

I'm feeling very comfortable here today in my apartment in Cyberjaya. I've decided to spent the rest of the day doing some much needed housekeeping  after I'm done with this week's blog article.  As always, I'll have to decide what to write about as I go along.

I know of another thing that gives us a lot of comfort: certainty. We humans are fearful of the unknown. What happens after death? That's the greatest unknown, which makes us feel extremely uncomfortable. Is there life after death? We want to know desperately. We want some kind of certainty that death is not the end of everything.

All that is very understandable. We are humans and we have a common experience and expectation of what life is and should be. Life is good. Death is bad, because it is the end of everything we like here. We want whatever little happiness and love that we have in this brief existence to continue. We fervently wish that if a life after death exists, it has to be a better one, without the suffering that makes this life so difficult at times.

Uncertainty makes us edgy. Having some kind of flaky answer to the ultimate questions is better than admitting ignorance. You know what I'm getting--my favourite bugaboo: religion. I do not dislike religion, only their institutions and man-made doctrines, which on serve to numb and exploit our worst fears, never elevating us to greater understanding and transcendence, which its hidden truth is capable of revealing.

We need some figure of authority to tell us that if we recite this prayer or perform certain rituals, some good or blessing will come to us. The local gangster up there will ensure our safety after we have obediently paid the protection fee. Our susceptibility to religious dogma suggest some deeper psychological hang-up or fear that needs to be worked out. But instead of healing, we opted for numbing--something which religious doctrines and dogma provide with their false sense of certainty.

Those preachers and priests want you to believe that once you have accepted their faith, you belong to an exclusive club of favoured souls, whose safety is guaranteed in the hereafter. They talk so much about the hereafter as if they have been there and back, like tourists recounting their budget tour experience in some exotic far-flung country.

There's certainly comfort in such certainty and exclusivity. If that makes your life more bearable, by all means, go ahead. But do not be deluded into believing that you have the answers to everything. Allow others to find their versions of the truth, which may or may not be better than yours. 

I've blogged before about the virtue of keeping an open mind. It's alright to say, I don't know. Of course we don't know. That's why we are living: to slowly discover more and more. We'll not know until we come to our deaths.  It'll be interesting to find out if your membership, which was chiefly determined by the circumstance of your birth, qualifies you admission to the Club and its perpetual pleasure parties.

There's certainly comfort in certainty, but not at the price of ignorance.  The path of the pilgrim is fraught with uncertainties. It is the challenge of uncertainty that illuminates the mind and offer glimpses of the real afterlife. 

You can ask: how do I know this?  I certainly don't. But I do know uncertainty and its many discomforts. And strangely, there's a certain comfort in that.