The Kernel of My Character

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God's Greater Glory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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