The Perfect Mouthful of a Moment

I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to write about today but let me riff a little first. I write to relax, and certainly not to stress myself unnecessarily to meet the demands of a certain readership. It's a bit like journalling (which I also do, the old-fashioned way with a notebook and fountain pen), but not exactly because blogging, being public, is a little bit more formal.

A blog article is an exploration, a study, a sketch. It's not exactly fit for print publication because it's raw and at times meandering, not having the benefit of good copy-editing. But hopefully it is comprehensible to anyone to happens to chance upon it.  And for me, it helps me to clarify my thoughts about certain subjects that occupy my mind.

Blogging, like reading, is an activity which I like to perform at a cafe, where I could observe people and the world. Sometimes I amuse myself with morbid thoughts like how in another hundred years, everyone that I see around me would have been dead, (including yours truly, of course). Every care and concern that they have now would have been totally forgotten. 

The aromatic and relaxing Earl Grey that I'm sipping now, the joy that I feel typing these words, the laughter of kids playing around the mock plum blossom tree, the father in shorts pushing the shopping trolley filled with food provisions for the family, the pair of lovers holding hands and playfully teasing each other--that procession of peace, joy and well-being paraded here--gone! Everyone dissolving into bones and ashes, blown by the winds of time.

It is morbid, yet beautiful and sobering. So how shall we live life? Do we try our best to create an enduring mark in this world? What legacy do we want to leave behind? Grateful descendants who would continue the good name of the family and remember you fondly? And perhaps you'll be in heaven then, looking down and seeing everything with great satisfaction?

If that defines you, go on and pursue it with all the zeal, energy and passion that life has blessed you with. Live every moment to the fullest. To the caterpillar, heaven is an infinite expanse of green delicious leaves, where one could crawl and gnaw in content without fear of being eaten by birds. When they become butterflies dancing from flower to flower in the garden of paradise, will they remember their humble beginnings as slimy, crawling tubes of bird-feed?

Since we can't conceptualise what it is like after death, or if there's even a 'life' as we know it, then let's all be good caterpillars, gnawing gratefully on the leafy meal before us, creeping happily in our 2D world, oblivious to the predatory birds that swoop down on us from above. 

Misfortune, sickness and calamity could befall any one of us. The whole purpose of celebrating the Lunar New Year is to look forward to another year ahead that's hopefully free from such ill-luck. We can only have the moment we have now and every one of them has to be lived with positive optimism. The fact that you are aware and conscious of doing so, means that you are living life to the fullest. Is there any other way to live?

The challenge is that we are not aware of our every moment of existence. And that's when life becomes miserable. Here, look at this moment. Gone. And this moment. Gone. Are you alright? Are you at peace? If you are, clamp your mandibles on that morsel of moss and gnaw on.  

Never lose sight of moment at hand, for misery can only creep in whenever you take your eye off the ball. Hey, this moment is as good as any other. Live it first. Living it fully and wisely will bring forth better quality moments next. But there's no need to think too far ahead. Imagine that this moment is all there is. The next one is a bonus. Infuse this moment with every hope, fervour and passion that you could muster. You will find that they are the sauce and condiments that make this moment that perfect mouthful. 

The Source of Strength

I'm taking a break from work when most Chinese would be starting theirs after the long Chinese New Year break. Apparently today, the sixth day of the New Year is an auspicious day to open your business again for the Year of the Dragon. I'm looking forward to the long weekend and hopefully I'll still get to enjoy a less crowded city, at least for a day or two before the rest of the horde returns to the city, spent and satiated, after the week-long orgy of gambling and gluttony.

Gambling is a pleasure which I am fortunately, immune to. I understand that it can be very addictive. Some people can't resist food or liquor. I love both, but I'm not addicted to them. It is very liberating when one is not addicted to anything. But wouldn't life be very dull, without any kind of harmless 'vice'?

I do have my addictions too but I choose them very carefully. I'm addicted to books. What's the worse the could happen to someone who is an incurable bibliophile? I probably spend too much money on books and constantly complain that there's a lack of shelves to store them properly; curse whenever someone borrows or does not return, or worst still loses them; lament that there's a lack of time to read them all; suffer the sight of these beautiful tomes disintegrating under the ravages of time.  Well, it is suffering indeed, but it is suffering that I chose consciously as a kind of penance. 

Everything good in life comes with a price. I've mentioned before that the price of pleasure is pain. As Jerry Seinfield puts it insightfully in his interview with Howard Stone when describing how much of a torture it is to be constantly having to find materials for his jokes: one must find the torture that one is comfortable with, and that is your blessing in life. Work is a torture for some people but we get paid for enduring it. So learn to be comfortable with it. And if you have the right attitude, all that suffering makes you stronger and better.

When it comes to work, what we call experience is simply skills and reflexes honed by pain. Exercise is painful. But repeated practice makes you fitter. And you'll soon find yourself increasing the difficulty levels so that you may enjoy the satisfaction of conquering them. Ramp up the pain to amp up the pleasure. 

One must however know when this pain that we take on willingly becomes chronic stress. Nietzsche famously wrote "that which does not kill us makes us stronger".  That is only true when one fully recovers from whatever harm that is inflicted on our mind and body. Remember, one could also die from a thousand cuts. 

So one must be very wise in the frequency and amount of pain that one takes on. They have to be carefully chosen to bring the best returns. The body and mind must have time to heal and recuperate. When you give the body time to learn and deal with the pain, then only will it become stronger.  

Let us look forward to the Year of the Dragon and see every obstacle as an opportunity to become stronger. Let's take whatever pain that comes our way positively and enjoy the pleasures bestowed on us in moderation.  Let's all rise like dragons to its challenges and grow from strength to strength!

Unleashing the Dormant Dragon

The Chinese celebrate their new year today and it's the year of the dragon, a mythical creature that is much admired by them as a symbol of strength and greatness. The archetype of the dragon lodges deeply in the psyche of someone brought up within the Chinese culture. It defines his or her attitude towards life.

I've mentioned elsewhere before that the Chinese are masters of positive thinking. Darkness, gloom and melancholy are not 'romantic' to the Chinese mind. No, the offsprings of the Yellow Emperor do not like to wallow in defeat or self-pity; they are instead pragmatic, positive and progressive.  If Dostoevsky claims that the Russian soul is a dark place, then the Chinese soul would be its complete opposite.

The Chinese celebrates growth and expansion.  One has to be materially successful first before one can benevolent and charitable. Magnanimity is a natural by-product of worldly success.  A street-wise smartness is a virtue and pre-requisite to a bright future. The young must be hardworking, be respectful of elders and sifus, and be willing to take the necessary hard-knocks in life to move ahead.

The stereotype of the rag-to-riches Chinese business tycoon, exemplifies this ideal and is the pinnacle of what the Chinese considers a noble person in society. Success is always social and should be celebrated loudly and boisterously. 

Chinese New Year season is that time of the year when one is ambushed everywhere by the pounding drums of the lion dance or the loud crackles of firecrackers. 'Wake up from your gloom!', 'Join the march towards success!' 'Conquer the material world!'. It is in-your-face and unabashed. It is the secret of the community's success, wherever they choose to settle down in the world.

The dragon is the apt symbol of all this positive energy.  A dragon child embodies this potential for growth and expansion.  Nothing stops a dragon when it is set on something. Once someone has internalised the dragon soul, it is almost inevitable that something fruitful and positive will result. 

Unlike the fear evoked by the reptilian dragons of our evolutionary past mentioned in Carl Sagan's book, The Dragons of Eden, the Chinese dragon is the kundalini that lies sleeping in every soul. You just need to stir it, and off it goes to chase after its fireball of success.

There's a dormant dragon in each and every one of us. Like Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, If you know how to tame, control and ride your dragon, it is your greatest ally. But remember, one must always be its master not the slave. The role could so easily be reversed, if one is not vigilant. 

Monuments of Happiness

Today is an opportunity to catch my breath, after a hectic work-week. Last Saturday, I drove back to my hometown and stayed for a night. This weekend is a longer one for me because I'm on leave today. I spent the morning and early afternoon going to the supermarket and running other errands.

Here I am finally, in my abode of books in Cyberjaya, allowing my mind to rest, so that mundane thoughts fade away and deeper insights may surface. I 'recalibrate' my mind every day in my daily meditation. At the very least, doing a sanity check on all the thoughts in my mind is very helpful. I get to re-orientate myself in the right direction and ensure that I do not veer off into interminably unproductive mental side-roads.

As I write this, the sky is getting dark outside and I can hear the distant rumbling of thunder. There'll be an outburst of rain later, like most evenings during this time of the year. But the monsoon is coming to its tail-end and soon we'll be facing hot and dry weather. Another year gets on its way.

Before that, we'll be welcoming the Chinese Lunar New Year, which is a bit of a distraction at the beginning of the year, but nevertheless worth celebrating. That's how we humans live our lives--we celebrate the passing of the seasons and commemorate important events in our community.  So much of our happiness and sorrow comes from living in a society of people.

No two persons think alike. You could find friends who share many of your beliefs and norms, but if you've lived together in close quarters with anyone before, you would know that you'll have make a lot of adjustments to avoid unhappiness or conflict.

We have certain core characteristics that we stubbornly maintain throughout our lives and at the same time we also change in many aspects as we grow older. Pain and pleasure are the sculptors that mould us into who we are now.  

Our experiences in life is like the torrential rain that I see outside now, lashing onto the roof and walls of my apartment, testing their rigidity and sturdiness, probing for crevices to seep into, threatening to flood all the precious belongings that I have. 

We have to suffer a lot of pain to protect the things we love. That lesson has to be learned again and again. The unrelenting rain is constantly probing for weaknesses on my roof and if I am not vigilant, I will have to deal with roof leakages into my apartment again. To live is to delay the inevitable increase of entropy within the sphere of concern.

The body breaks down as we age. While we are healthy, we expend our energies building as perfect a life as we possibly could: a career, a family and a beautiful home. But all these are temporary manifestations that would ultimately dissolve as we grow older and die. We'll have to let them go, sooner or later. The Second Law of Thermodynamics that dictate the increase in entropy and hence the breakdown of all things would ultimately triumph.

Nevertheless, we should not be deterred. The moment we surrender, we cease to live. To live is to suffer these pains, consciously and stoically. We also enjoy the pleasures that come from having a world moulded to our vision, at least within our circle of concern, no matter how fleeting they are. 

We take what life throws at us bravely for that is the whole point of living. Every happiness in life is a monument to the pain that had to be endured to achieve it. Let's look back on all our monuments of happiness and know that they have to sit on a foundation of suffering.

The Insight of Ignorance

Back in my hometown this weekend and as always I end up rummaging through my old books and wandered down memory lane. It gladdens me to know that I've come a long way towards my childhood quest to understand the world. But I still have a long way to go.

The most important knowledge one needs to acquire is the knowledge of one's ignorance. We must know the limits of our own understanding. If we don't, we'll be trapped in a finite world of dogma, disguised as certainty. As a kid, I wanted to know about the origin of the cosmos, the fundamental nature of the universe and the ultimate purpose of existence. As I grew older, I gained some understanding in many of these areas and realised that there's so much more for me to tackle. The quest seems endless; one can never arrive at some definite endpoint.

But one should not despair because of that. Cliche though it may sound, it is the journey that matters. And as you gain more insights, your perception of the world shifts, opening vistas which you hitherto had not imagined. We are, what physicist Stephen Wolfram refers to as 'computationally bounded observers'. 

When we are perceiving the world, due to computational irreducibility, we can only perceive the universe in a very specific way. Our brains are finite computers--it will see only coarse-grained features. Our physical theories, will inevitably reflect our peculiar way of perceiving the world. 

I'd like to think that I've been expanding the computational capability of my brain since those teenage years of mine and at some point I will hit a limit. A computing brain within a computational universe can only, at best improve the language used to describe the workings of universe but it will still be finite. No language, even one like mathematics, can ever fully explain the universe.

It takes a certain wisdom to understand one's ignorance. And I'm happy to embrace the shallowness of my understanding. It is through this awareness of one's own stupidity that the boundary of one's intelligence can be expanded further.

We are trapped in this veil of ignorance simply because we are computationally bounded observers, embedded in a larger computational universe. The universe that we perceive, even with our best scientific understanding, is still only a parochial view of reality. But at the same time, we should not shy away from rejoicing in the fact that we are a natural consequence of how the universe is. 

Our existence is inevitable and once we are aware of our existence, we can reflect and track our evolving existence, using our finite computational ability. As all the ancient teachers have told us, an insight into our very own ignorance is the very key to enlightenment. 

Being Conscious

In a blog article posted in 2018, titled, System Administrator of the Mind, I wrote about how the mind is like a Unix operating system, with thoughts as processes running in memory. Meditation is the equivalent of typing "ps -ef", to list the processes running and if necessary, kill off unnecessary ones that are hogging resources.

People who have no introspective capability, are always operating in application mode. The main application that runs in our bio-computer is one called "Self" or "I". Any decision-making that our brains are concerned with are all at the application-level, of which the chief concern is the perpetuation and survival of the Self, which is a conceptual abstraction of the body and mind.

As a living biological system, we are concerned with the survival of the human body (the hardware) and mind (the software). The identity we have are our genes and whatever information that we have captured and integrated into our minds. Just like an AI model, our Natural Intelligence model has evolved through a lifetime of learning. I suspect, our knowledge-store is not simply limited to the neuronal structure of the brain but also in the body, in the form of bio-chemical processes, protein structure, the timing and sequence of genetic expression and also the microbiome. 

The Self is needless to say, "selfish". Every action that we do, is geared towards the preservation of our self-identity, which is nothing more than information. Theoretically, in the future, we can completely capture this information model which you call "I" and run it on a more a more durable computer. Like it or not, in a way, we are all simulations. 

If the Self is nothing but a stream of information, then is there no such thing as a "soul", which many religions belief is the underlying reality of our existence? Yes and no.  You see, the word "soul" is another abstraction. Just like "information stream" or "stream of consciousness" or even "consciousness". The moment we label anything, we are giving it a conceptual reality. As the Gospel of John so cryptically expressed, "In the beginning was the Word". When the Word is expressed, it immediately exists in a kind of Platonic realm--an abstract class, which can be implemented and instantiated in different substrate.

Maybe there is an ultimate reality which is the "Brahman", the substrate from which all concepts find instantiation. But the moment we say it, Brahman is conceptualised--there's a Subject-Object relationship, a Knower and the Known, a Seer and the Seen. 

So we have this primordial concept of a Self-the Atman, that is observing creation itself. That is the simplest and lowest level of conception--the 1-and-0 binary system that gives birth to the multiplicity of the universe.  The simplest thing that we can conceive of in our minds is a "Oneness" or a "Nothingness" or god-forbid,  "God". 

You know you are conscious. That in a way is the only thing that you "know". It is this conscious knowing that matters. When you meditate, you are simply experiencing consciousness as it is, without getting tangled up in all the different conceptual layers. We relinquish every possible category error, by recognising everything as they are. All thoughts, in the end are concepts--the multiplicity, resulting from the subject-object duality. 

Will you be conscious forever? Does this consciousness survive the material death of your body? Well, you'll find out when the time comes. If you are really conscious, you would not have anything to worry about.

The Arc of Karma

Tea on a Saturday afternoon in my apartment, with fingers poised over my keyboard. Here I am again, typing my blog article of the week. I'm slowly regaining my strength after recovering from my unfortunate bout of Covid-19. Writing, as always is relaxing and therapeutic and I'm happy to be typing away, trying to latch on to a topic to dwell upon this week.

When I think about all the strife that's in this world today, I often wonder why we humans never seem to be able to rise above our petty little squabbles and focus on things that really matter in life. I remember how historian Yuvah Noah Harari often talks about how important stories are to humans. We, for some reason, attach ourselves to particular narratives about ourselves, our community and our nation. 

Without the narrative of a story, we find life meaningless and aimless. So we live and die for stories. And the myths of religion become the pillars of our existence--something that we defend with our lives and squabble endlessly over.  The human mind only understands and responds to stories. Facts have to be presented as stories or they will never sink in. Legends and myths endure because it is the only mnemonic mechanism that works.

We enjoy ourselves by watching and reading fictional stories about people and places. We support our favourite soccer teams and buy in to the belief that there's a core philosophy in the way they play and what the management stands for. Companies try to create a corporate culture too. All such fictional stories help to bind a community together, without which, we do not seem to be able to be stirred into action.

Individuals too, attempt to build a story about their role in their community as a parent, a successful professional and contributing meaningfully to some cause in society. And that happiness is simply the realisation of such stories in their lives. Stories are the arc of our karma.

We want, we desire, we aspire. All these longings are couched in a neat story of existence, which drives our lives forward. We enjoy and suffer the ups and downs of this story-arc. We console ourselves by telling ourselves that the trough of suffering is worth it, because of all the peaks of happiness that we receive along the way.

All of us will transcend and grow out of this roller-coaster that we're on. And only then do we find liberation from the cycles of joy and suffering. Seeing things with equanimity is the first sign of maturity along this self-propelling train of life. 

Whenever we look at things with a dispassionate eye, we allow things to find expression in the most optimal way. There's no over-reaction to either the positives or negatives. We neutralise karma, simply by noticing and acknowledging every oscillation of our emotions. 

Take a hard look at yourself. What kind of story do you carry with you? What narratives in your life drive you forward? Whatever they are, they determine the pain and pleasure of your existence. 

We, cannot live without stories, but we can always find better ones. Good stories are like computer programs that execute the karmic purpose of your life efficiently.  So take control of your story and not let others define it for you. 

Thoughts in Isolation

"Reading made me a traveller; travel sent me back to books" 

- Paul Theroux

My year started with an unexpected setback: I tested positive for Covid-19 on the very first day of the year. I had awakened on Monday with a strange chill in the body and a feeling of tiredness. Aware that the number of infections have risen sharply recently, I proceeded to take a self-test and true enough, it was positive.

But since I work from home anyway, I continued working as usual and my productivity was not affected at all. My symptoms were mild and it was just slightly uncomfortable during the first 2 days. I had no fever at all but there's some irritation in my throat, which made it slightly difficult to talk in con-calls.  I feel back to normal now, after 6 days of isolation, but annoyingly I'm still testing positive.  No matter, everything I have is in my room--sufficient books to last years of continuous reading and a good internet connection. Can't think of anything else that I need. Secular sanyasins like me are an easily contented lot.

Yesterday, I decided to take leave and dedicated the whole day to reading--a luxury I've not had for a long time. Today, I'll simply do my usual Saturday routine, which is to blog and read a good short story. I have the practice of reading a short story every week; only one, so that I have the opportunity to reflect on it for the rest of the week. Last week, I was thoroughly entertained by Guy de Maupassant's Mademoiselle Fifi--another brilliant story (like his most famous one, Boule de Suif)  set during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, involving a prostitute as the unlikely heroine. I have not decided what is this week's pick, but I usually try to choose a different author every week.  

My bedroom now is almost exactly the same size as the one I had rented in Singapore, when I was working there more than 2 decades ago. It was a second floor HDB flat located in Bishan, which I had lived happily for a number of years, doing a lot of work via my 4mbps ADSL connection. 

I used to work from home too, even then, as my job involved a lot of travelling and I rarely went to the local office.  My bedroom then was also filled to the brim with books that I had bought, mostly from Borders at Orchard Road. It is quite impossible to be unhappy, when one is surrounded by books.

Many decades ago, on my first business trip to Silicon Valley, I lived in a motel for at least a month in Palo Alto. I remember many beautiful quiet nights there reading hardcover books I had bought cheaply from a bookstore nearby--especially books on exploration like Pacific Passions and The Mutiny on the Bounty, which for some reason, I was obsessed with then.

Isolation has never been a problem for me, as long as I have something to read.  Long flights to and from the States had been great opportunities to finish entire books on a single journey.  Maybe that is why I actually have a preference for going on trips alone rather than with colleagues because I'd get a chance to read and reflect. 

Thinking back, I remember more about foreign cities which I had spent a lot of time alone in than those I had visited together with friends. For example, I can hardly remember anything about Honolulu, Lyon, Shanghai or Seoul because I had been carousing there with my colleagues during my trips there.

I agree with Paul Theroux that real travel is at best a solitary enterprise.  He refers to the "lucidity of loneliness" to capture unique insights about any particular place.  My wanderlust has waned considerably over the last decade or so, but my passion for reading had only intensified. Admittedly my reading has increasingly being augmented by technology such as audiobooks and videos, but they only enriched and expanded my reading experience.

Slowing down and isolating myself because of Covid-19 isn't such a bad thing after all.  I reconnected with my reading roots--to those wonderful days and nights I had as a child, reading in the garden amidst orchids and daisies under the blue sky, and later as an adult in tiny motels and luxury hotel rooms over the world, in slow-moving trains, in busy airport lounges and long interminable flights across the Pacific. Yes, thanks to Covid-19, I'm happily banished to isolation again with my books.

Meditations on Mortality

We are approaching the year's end and this my last blog article for 2023. I've been on leave for the past few days but I've also been spending time on work, diving deeper into an issue which I never had time to focus on. 

Yesterday, I visited a friend who was admitted to the IJN due to an unexpected heart attack. The news came as a shock to all of us. But I was happy that his situation has stabilised, even though he has to undergo an heart bypass surgery next week. My heart is with him as he navigates this hurdle, at this mature stage of his middle-aged life.

This incident made us all reflect on our mortality. I have done so before in past blog posts: Musings on Mortality and Walking Each Other Home, among others. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I lost two good friends unexpectedly to the disease. David recommended many good books to me and I still have a few of his in my possession (unlike me, who is a book hoarder, he loved giving away his books after reading them). Hengky, was a man of faith and I greatly admired his sincere devotion to his religion. 

Over the past few years, I also got to know that two of my childhood friends have passed on. I played soccer with Fauzi in my primary schooldays, and See Leng was a neighbourhood friend whom I had spent many beautiful days together playing all the games that kids used to play--marbles, kites, tops, yo-yo, skip-ropes, cards, carrom, ping-pong and Monopoly.

The fact that their memories live on in me is a testament to the fact that we all continue to live on and that life is not limited to our short biological existence. Forgive me for lapsing into New Age-speak: we are information and energy.  And once injected into the system, we would have changed, in our small way, the state of the universe. 

Every wave in the ocean affects and is affected by other waves, because we are part of this body of water. We must broaden our perspective on life so that we encompass the ocean, and not limited to that tiny wavelet which rises momentary, only to sink back into oblivion.

Each of us is a unique waveform, built from the superposition of many different harmonics. Every soul that we've come into contact with has injected their frequencies into our spectra. When we've radiated out all our energies, like the sun, we die. 

But our thoughts, ideas and deeds live on in the minds and bodies of the living. Every sentence that you read here, hopefully lodges in your mind and influences every word and action of yours. I live now in you, whether you like it or not.

All religions believe in an ultimate reality that exists beyond death.  We might argue over conceptual ideas like the existence and nature of the soul or whether there's a heaven or reincarnation but we cannot deny that, at this moment we are all conscious. I am conscious, therefore I am. But what is consciousness? Is it just the emergent property of any complex biological system? Or is it some kind of magic sauce that needs to be added to it?

Maybe consciousness is all there is and whatever we experience is just a manifestation or reflection of it. This is Advaita Vedanta at its purest. Waves have no separate existence apart from water. All forms are ultimately 'empty', as the Buddhist would say. We need to rise above the mundane experience of the ego and self, tied to the material body. 

At the close of another year, we meditate on the mortality of our human existence, so that we reinforce our deep-held intuition that we are beyond this illusory world of matter. And it is hoped that with each passing year, this veil of ignorance is removed, if ever so slightly, so that we may ultimately rest in our 'true nature'--whatever that is. 

In Praise of Idolatry

As we approach the Christmas weekend, I want to write something about God and its worship. I often use God metaphorically, when referring to the Ultimate Reality, the Truth or something like the Hindu's Brahman. I admit that I am more comfortable using more New Age-y terms like Eckhart Tolle's 'Now' or 'Presence' to express the spirituality within.

But today let me address the subject of the worship of a personal God--a ruler God who is also the creator of the universe and the judge of all our actions. Is that a naive belief? Am I against it?

As usual, when it comes to questions like these, the answer is always: yes and no. There's nothing unusual about the worship of a personal deity. You will be surprised that I'd even go so far to say that there's even nothing wrong with the worship of idols. 

The advanced spiritual seeker always look askance at those who are mired in ritualistic worship of various gods or deities. But the Bhagavad Gita has the clearest explanation on why the worship of the personal god is a legitimate and even the highest form of spiritual practice. In chapter 12, Lord Krishna explains to Arjuna that it is a more natural path compared to more 'advanced' ones like Jnana or Raja Yoga, which are more abstract.

To worship a personal god in the form of a deity in human form is a lot easier than to meditate on some abstract concept called Brahman or Emptiness or a formless God that reveals its essence through Nature, like Spinoza's God. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity - The Father, the Son and the Spirit is an attempt to capture all these different aspects of God in one.

We all know what it is like to love someone, even though mortal love is tinged with selfishness. But that is a good starting point. We love our partner, spouse, parents and children. The human mind has a natural ability to grasp objects that has a human face and form. To extend our natural ability to love another human being towards devotion to a supernatural one is simply applying a natural mental tool (or to use Daniel Dennett's term, an  'intuition pump') to grasp something higher. 

Our minds need an object to focus on. Every time we open our mouths, we immediately introduce a subject and an object. We cannot easily escape this dualistic conception of the world. Why fight it then? Start with an objective human God. When you express intense love towards someone, you'd see the object of your love, as a part of yourself. You break the subject-object duality through love. And that is the starting point of all spirituality.

When a kid first learns to ride a bike, he uses one with 2 additional training wheels attached to it. It helps him learn balance and after a while, those extra wheels can be removed and suddenly he is riding naturally with only two. The worship of a personal deity is exactly the same thing. 

We pour our love and devotion to the personal god in the form of an idol, which possesses all the good human qualities that we can identify with. That trains the heart to be selfless. After a while, that selfless love emanates naturally. Hold that deep devotional feeling and simply remove the idol. And voila!: You have a formless God.

But even an abstract, formless, all-powerful, all-merciful, one creator God is still an object. Call it what you will (read Whatchamacallit). Is this superior compared to worshipping a physical idol? Again yes and no. The idolator's pitfall is that he or she could be hung up on the minutiae of ritualistic worship and subscribe all sorts of superstitious beliefs that is attributed to a physical object. This hampers his spiritual development. 

The formless God worshiper, on the other hand, is susceptible to intellectual arrogance. Every little piece of philosophical doctrine is taken literally as some kind of legalistic truth that needs to be strictly adhered to. They argue endlessly over concepts that in themselves are nothing more than mental models of Truth. They fail to understand that an abstract God is still another intuition pump.

Ironically, the solution to spiritual arrogance is a humble dose of idol worship. Prostate yourself before the image of a human deity. Surrender yourself as a servant would to a master. That is the way to thaw that ego that has formed through your misguided sense of superiority. Then you would know that it's the combination of the heart and the mind that's the key to spiritual progress. 

Karma, Bhakti, Jnana and Raja Yoga--these are the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual paths towards enlightenment. Neither one is superior to the rest. Pursue all of them, and over time you will understand how they complement each other.

So, let's not look down on the idol-worshipper. Know that the human mind is naturally anthropomorphic. The simple ritual of clasped-hand prayer to a Saviour Lord, an offering of incense and flowers to a statue of the Goddess of Mercy or a prostration in front of a stone statue of Ganesha are all powerful exercises that strengthen one's spiritual muscles. Like any other human endeavour, perfection comes after repeated practice.

The Cosmic Compass

As always, before I begin writing my blog article of the week, I reread the previous week's one, checking for typos, missing words, the inevitable grammar mistakes and occasionally weeding out clumsy sentences. Most of the time, I end up with the feeling that what I wrote wasn't that bad after all.

I think most writers are the harshest critics of their own work. That critic is hard at work even now, while I'm typing these sentences ("you are rambling again". "Get to the point". "Make your sentences shorter". "That's another cliche!").  Often you end up feeling that you've produced something of questionable quality. But I've learned not to care. Having written something is better than not haven't done so. A blog article published is another hour of life well-lived.

To truly judge your own work, you have to let these critical voices fade away and then reread it again, as if you are reading it for the first time. Often, upon I rereading my previous week's work, I end up with a more sympathetic opinion.

One must learn to forgive oneself, to be able to forgive others. I see forgiveness as a way of clearing our own mental and emotional blockages. So much energy is trapped and wasted when we hold unhealthy grudges, disappointments or hatreds. Self-love is the beginning of agape.

Because I am another year older today, I also would like to review the past year of my life with understanding and compassion. All the ups and downs of life are but stress tests that expose our weaknesses. One should look at them with equanimity--like a scientist looking at data from his experiments. There are no failures in scientific experiments. Data that disproves your hypothesis are as welcome as those that support it. That's how I approach life.

When you experience the highs of success--critical acclaim, fame, a promotion, an award or any form of recognition, enjoy it. Allow yourself to bathe in the warmth of success. But never be attached to it. Any worldly acclaim should just roll off the surface of the soul, like water on a lotus leaf.

When one understands the limits of science and the human intellect, one grasps the immateriality of the world and sees that the world is but an illusory manifestation. All our physics only seeks to find better and better models of the universe and the models we create are but constructions of our limited minds. We rely on our intuitions to come up with new theories, which can then be verified by experiments. We think we live in space and time but that is just the best model of reality we have now. It may not be the most fundamental aspect of nature. 

Our spiritual impulses are constantly pulling us back towards the direction of Truth. But truth can only be approximated by human understanding. All the truths of the universe are already inside us, because we are a part of it. We just have to unveil the covering of our imperfects minds to reveal them. Learning is a process of adjusting the impedance of the mind, so that Truth radiates out in its full glory.

The mind is a manifestation of consciousness. That's a very Advaita Vedantic thing to say. But it is how I feel within. Wisdom, and if I'm allowed to use the over-abused word, Enlightenment, arises when we've made our minds clear and translucent, like the undisturbed surface of a pond, that is, when Patanjali's citta vrittis are quelled.

The worldly man thinks heaven as material pleasure-dome par excellence. The spiritual man knows that perfection is beyond any conceptual grasp and therefore seeks not to enmesh himself in materiality. Whether one is a monist, dualist or pluralists, we must understand that Nature is beyond words and concepts. All our word-play only serves as an imperfect compass, hinting towards the direction of true north.

With this cosmic compass we have within, we shall trudge ahead courageously, confident that we shall never venture too far off-course. And that's good enough. 

The Whatchamacallit

My pot of Earl Grey is settled on my table, being warmed by a glowing tea-light; I'm seated comfortably here in my apartment study, listening to some Nocturnes from Chopin playing in the background and I'm now ready to tackle my blog article of the week.

As we all cruise towards year-end, there's a more relaxed feeling in the air. Everyone is clearing their annual leave and I'm also doing the same, at most 2 days at time for I dislike long breaks from work. I like my current rhythm of work and play, juxtaposing 'dull' IT work with my other pursuits--art, literature, philosophy, spirituality, music and science.

Weekends are reserved for reading, writing and appreciating the finer things in life. When I look at my collection of books, it feels like I've already gathered enough provisions to last me through all the remaining winters of my life.  

And because I have so many areas of interests, knowing that time is finite, I try to stack my activities so that I can kill two, even three birds with one stone. To pursue my interest in writing and to indulge in my fountain pen hobby, I journal daily using one, while listening to some good music on Spotify. I focus on the works of a single composer every week. This week I'm getting acquainted with the piano music of Scriabin and I'm loving it so much.

Of course, listening to audiobooks is another good way of 'reading' while doing something else that does not require any mental effort. I do this every weekend on my walk and jog at the park. I've been working through a book by Douglas Murray over the past couple of weeks. While driving here just now, I was listening to lectures on the History of the Catholic Church from the Great Courses series. 

Even though most of my favourite activities are solitary, I also enjoy socialising with my friends. I try to catch up with them whenever I can. Which reminds me that I have a dinner with some of my university mates this Sunday and look forward very much to it.  

People are interesting because you can learn so much from someone's experience.  It is a good source of knowledge. Each one of us is a unique experiment. We find ourselves born with specific 'boundary conditions'. And that defines and limits the possible solutions to the equation of life.

The sky is getting darker and I'm certain that the heavens will be emptying out its contents soon with lightning and thunder as it does almost every other day this time of the year. It's actually my favourite time of the year--good for reflecting on the year that's ending and to plan for the coming one. The piston of time drives us forward relentlessly and we just have to ride along its forward momentum, putting its power to good use.

It doesn't look like I will dive into any deep topic today and I'm just happy to ramble on about anything that comes to my mind, and marvel at the miracle of writing itself.  I can see the vertical streaks of rain outside my window as I type this, enveloping me within a curtain of solitary comfort. Nature goes about its job, fulfilling the karmic life of water as it reincarnates as raindrops onto earth, to restart its long journey back to the heavens.

I'm no different from these water droplets, surging up the roots of trees and leaping off leaves, lifted up by the sun into the clouds. I'm reminded again by those magnificent lines from Dylan Thomas which had enthralled me in my youth: 

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever

When we see ourselves as part of nature, there's a certain transcendence that gives meaning to our existence, whatever meaning is. We partake in this cosmic dance that at once makes us both creator and creation, played against a larger canvas where the whole can only be comprehended by dissolving into its parts.

Philosophers over the ages have tried to articulate this mystery of existence and even the most inspired ones can only hint at. And as I write these sentences, I'm simply doing what I'm supposed to do, as dictated by the greater impulse of nature. 

And if you do chance upon these lines, maybe we could all marvel together at the beauty of it all. You and I connect now, and in that moment of contact, we catch a glimpse of the Infinite, the One, the Cosmic Mind, Brahman, Atman, Ishvara, God or Whatchamacallit. It doesn't matter.

The Garden Path of Language

Time to write! I've been late in posting my blog article this week because I had a social function yesterday--Saturday, my usual day for blogging. I came back rather late and was too tired to write. But it was great to be able to catch up with some old friends again. We are all trying to find meaning in our lives in some way and each chooses a path based on circumstance and fate.

Why are some of us Christians and others Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists or Muslims? Is one religion superior to another? In my case, I love all of the above and I try to be a student of them all. I've made my music-religion analogy many times in previous articles before. I appreciate many types of music and listening to many enriches my life considerably. But I will call out someone who thinks only his or her music is the only true one.

Why some of us prefer a particular music to another is akin to why we choose one religion over another. If you are Chinese and grew up in an environment where you're exposed to more Chinese music, that will inevitably influence your choice of music. Similarly with religion. 

And then each one of us has our own individual tastes. Religious text is like poetry. We respond to language differently, depending on our personality. Some prefers the language of love, others the dry but more precise language of logic. Which is why the Bhagavad Gita outlines the many paths towards enlightenment: karma yoga (action), bhakti yoga (devotion), jnana yoga (intellectual) and the raja yoga (spiritual) paths. 

I love all of them. But I also understand the pitfalls of each, if one were to think that any one of them is the only exclusive path. Often any religion is a mixture of all four. You would have a system of ethics that give you guidance over day to day action or conduct; some prayer and rituals which help to cultivate a devotional heart, some doctrinal philosophy to satisfy your intellectual doubts and curiosity and some mystical or contemplative practices such as meditation or silent retreats to awaken the divine spirit within.

To pursue any religious path, one must also understand the limitations of language. Again my music analogy comes in handy: the beauty of music is directly experienced. Any attempts to 'explain' why a particular piece of music is beautiful ultimately falls short. Religious texts seek to inspire rather than inform. All words are pointers to the truth. Not understanding this fact, leads to fanaticism.

"The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao". The first line of Lao Tze's Tao Te Ching basically lays done this basic truth about the limitation of language in expressing ultimate reality. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God". The first verse of the Gospel of John also alludes to this. "Word" here is translated from the Greek "logos", which also means "reason". The moment any ultimate truth is articulated in language, it is already a model, an imprecise pointer, a map and not the actual terrain itself. 

Emptiness is form, form is emptiness as the Mahayana Buddhists would tell you. Is the concept of emptiness a form of nihilism? No. It may appear so because, again we have to express things in language and language is also a kind of form that attempts to represent a truth. Which is why Buddhist philosophers like Nagarjuna uses the language of negation to express what's actually there.

In Nagarjuna's Madyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, the tetralemma involved in every proposition is denied. Let's say someone asserts that 1. there is a self.  The answer is no. If so, then can one conclude with lemma 2: There is no self? The answer is also no! Then, what about 3:  there is both self and no self. No again!  And finally, in exasperation, we say: there is neither self nor no self. Nagarjuna says no, that is also not true!. What's left of all these negations is the best approximation of the truth, which is the essence of Nagarjuna's Middle-Way. 

Zen masters also tries to dislodge their students from the grip of conceptual language thinking using koans. Truth can only be realised by transcending language. At the meantime, we will still talk, write and reason as much as we can, so that we get a glimpse of the Truth. But don't get too hung up on them.  The large language models, LLMs, derived their intelligence from language itself. We know how that sometimes lead to hallucinations. But even hallucinations can be useful pointers to the truth as they reveal the nature of the model itself.

The world we experience is maya or virtual. But it is also our instrument for inferring the truth. Our sciences, built using the precise language of mathematics have been able to penetrate the secrets of nature beyond our wildest dreams, and continue to do so. The scientists know the limitation of their mathematical models and are constantly on a lookout of better ones.

Beautiful though the existing paths are, we must not be seduced by them. If we are not vigilante, language, concepts and religious doctrines could lead us down that garden path.

Embracing Beauty

This is a week for socialising! I've chosen to go on leave starting today, which is Thanksgiving Day in US, and usually a quiet day at work. I have many social activities lined up for today, tomorrow and Saturday. 

I'll be catching up with my old Indonesian colleague W. later who is on a business trip to KL. We used to go out together a lot to Kota, Jakarta's bustling Chinatown during those good old days. The challenge for many of us these days is finding time and inclination to meet up with friends. Everyone has family responsibilities and these usually take priority. But it's important to meet up with old friends every now and then as it gives us a chance to rediscover who we are and how far we've come.

I'm not the type who would harbour regrets in life for I do not think we'll ever know which path we took would have turned out best. In life, we do not get to conduct control experiments: like "let's take path A and then path B with exactly the same starting conditions and see how they both unfold". If we had chosen path B and some bad outcome happened, how would we know that path A wouldn't have been worst?

Life is a complex system. Small changes now could lead to unexpected outcomes further down the road. We are all interconnected in a nexus of forces that play out unpredictably. We can only judge every moment based on immediately available fact, some which we are conscious of, many which we aren't. Many scientists and philosophers would even say that whichever choice we make, we have no control over the matter. There is no free will.

So my philosophy is to embrace the totality of every moment. There's no good or bad experience, but I know every experience contributes to my learning. My goal is to continuously train my NI (natural, as opposed to artificial intelligence or AI) model so that it performs better and better over time.

Emotions come from the bio-chemical reactions in the body.  Drugs can easily induce a feeling of wellbeing, happiness and love. If we have the right NI model, such states can also arise easily. Sometimes, a negative feedback loop of information can drive a model towards a state akin to depression. It's all up to us. What kind of information do we choose to consume and how do we consume them wisely, given our knowledge of the human body and mind?

There are many recommended paths laid out for us. Religion is the most prominent one. It is the easiest course to follow because its contents are rich and layered enough to provide something for everyone. It can satisfy the ritualistically inclined masses and the high-brow mystics and philosophers. 

When we follow a well-travelled path like religion, we feel secure and reassured. Finally, you have a map that lays out a path ahead for you and you are confident that it is the right one because so many have travelled the path before. Every fibre in your body also says so, because its religious tenets have awakened something in you. You have become a believer and how utterly sure you are that whatever you feel so right in your bones is the ultimate truth!

I love Jazz. But I also love baroque, classical, keroncong and popular rock music.  Do I think there's only one school of music that's the true music? Most certainly not! One deprives oneself of many beautiful aural experiences in life, if one were to be dogmatic about music. Similarly with religion.

I always think it is stupid to argue over which religion is the true one. Religious supremacists are ignorant of the beauty and vastness of human spirituality. Neither do I think that all institutionalised religions are the same. There's good music and so-so music. But the impulse to make music is a universal one. And that's what interests me most. Where does it come from? Is it a spandrel of evolution?

Purist Jazz lovers will think Fusion Jazz is bad. They are like religious fundamentalists. To me the evolution of religious beliefs is inevitable. It is like language. Teach English to a remote tribe and they will naturally develop their own slang and pidgin version of the language, spoken in their unique accent. Music, language and religion--they are all socio-cultural artifacts, the products of being human. 

Every time I listen to Bach, I would ask myself: isn't this the most beautiful music in the world? It feels like an awakening, like falling in love. It would be a problem if I were to stop there and just listen to Bach all my life, thinking that it is the ultimate music. There are different types of music out there that are beautiful in different ways. 

Life, put simply, is a process of embracing all the beauty that's out there in the world. Let's not be naively enthralled with just a single manifestation of it. The act of embracing is what makes life beautiful. 

Hope and Hallucinations

What a challenging week it has been! There was a very difficult technical problem which I inherited but I was relieved that I managed to find a solution for it. I've always practiced gratitude in everything I do, and I am grateful this time that I did not run out of ideas to pursue. By getting the ego out of the way, ideas will always flow. That I must always remember.

Today is my chance to catch my breath a little and relax with some quiet written words. I see a lot of people getting all worked up by news and events that are happening in the world. I see everything with a bit a equanimity, listening to both sides of the story. I do not have any desire to indulge in virtue signalling. Having built a thriving social media service before, I have no desire to dwell in that world anymore. 

I'm still that old-fashioned bloke typing text into an outdated blogging platform, something I've been doing for 20 over years now. This blog is a record of my intellectual development over the last two decades. When I first started blogging in Jakarta, I did it mostly from an Internet cafe which I frequent on a daily basis because the only other alternative was using a slow modem dialup from my hotel room, which I did occasionally.

What happy days those were, living alone in the heart of Jakarta, within walking distance of good street food along Jalan Sabang, a good bookstore, the now defunct QBWorld, and a grand cinema, Theatre Jakarta.  Food, books and movies are what I live on. Can't think of anything more in life that I need!

I am grateful for what I have and had. I treat every experience in life as an opportunity to learn, as another set of data to improve my natural intelligence model. We learn the same way as those AI LLMs that are changing every aspect of our lives. People say that these LLMs are still imperfect because they have a tendency to hallucinate. But they forget, people also hallucinate all the time!  How many times have we encountered people who speak with false certainty about subjects that they have scant knowledge of? Isn't our susceptibility to conspiracy theories a form of hallucination too?

At least ChatGPT has the decency to apologise and correct itself whenever you point out its errors. How many times have you seen people doing that? If only everyone has the same balanced and measured response on every subject that ChatGPT has, the world would be a much better place!

The only difference between my brain and these LLMs now is that, mine lives in a body that moves around in the world, constantly absorbing new data and input. Whenever someone talks to me, I do not only receive word prompts, I also get visual, auditory, tactile and chemical ones. Even with these advantages,  I still cannot come up with better answers than ChatGPT. And I am often wrong too. So let's have the humility to accept that we too 'hallucinate'.

It is important that we feed our brains with good quality information, like how we try to consume nutritious food for health. Today, we are lucky that quality content is cheaply available everywhere. It is up to us to feed ourselves wisely and improve our own natural intelligence models. ChatGPT and other LLMs will be continuously improving over time. AI models are the ingenious products of human intelligence, which ends up augmenting our own in return. 

Our future depends on how well we assimilate new technologies into our lives, for the betterment of humankind. And key to that is the ability to break out of bad thinking habits, superstitious dogmas and our primal tendencies towards violence, territoriality and sexual dominance. Yes, there's still hope for the world if only we humans know how to break out of our mass hallucinations.

The Engine of Joy

I am a creature of habits and I love my daily routines. We all know that habit stacking is a useful way to build a new habit. Everyone has many daily tasks that are already ingrained: things like brushing one's teeth, toilet and bathing. Why not use them like pegs to hang on fresh new habits?

To build a new habit, you just tag an additional task to an existing one so that the incremental effort of performing it just gets carried along easily by the existing routine. Daily, weekly and monthly routines are like the piston movements of a four-stroke engine. Once the engine is started, you have that regular supply of energy to power anything. Why not a new habit? As long as you align them along the momentum of your existing actions, it will move forward.

So I meditate before I brush my teeth, read while I'm in the toilet and listen to the day's news in the shower.  I journal and listen to some classical music or jazz just before showering again at the end of the day. In bed, I read a poem before succumbing to sleep. I find poetry very relaxing as it is like music--there is no plot or information that the writer is attempting to convey, only an experience. Words are used in novel ways, triggering new associations of ideas and images in the mind. There's nothing to figure out--only the beauty of words in themselves. It's the perfect bedtime balm.

This is my daily cycle of tasks. And then there's a weekly one too. Blogging comes at the end of the week, as a kind of reflective and creative exercise, helping to assimilate my thoughts and integrate everything I've learned over the week. I write so many emails daily, spouting cliche phrases most of the time that being able to blog at the end of a hectic work-week on any topic of my interest, feels extremely liberating. Here I get to expound on anything that strikes my fancy. And I'm comforted by the fact that no one is reading this. 

I have other weekly habits. Exercise is one of them. Tagging on to it is my opportunity to listen to my audiobook while I'm doing that. Habits that kill two birds with one stone are the best. One can stack habit upon habit until one's live becomes a rich, productive and healthy one, automatically. 

Dread your Monday blues? Make it interesting by turning it into a meatless one. I've practiced being a weekly vegetarian for more than a decade now. Meatless Mondays save me the trouble of figuring out what and where to eat. It's something I look forward to on the day of the week, because I get to eat something different and it feels like a clean and healthy diet reset.

Time is the fuel that powers our habit engine and propels our life forward. We just have to design an architecture around it that taps onto this powerful source of energy.  Do not waste time lamenting how time flies. Open up your sails and let its winds drive you forward. The result is a self-running engine that produces joy. 

Confessions of a Book Junkie

Today, I'm comfortably seated at the O'Brien's Cafe, having a nice pot of hot Earl Grey while munching my tropical salad. It has been a full 5-day week for me as I did not take any leave. Next coming 3 weeks, I'll take my Fridays off as I have a lot of leave to clear before year-end.

I've been doing a lot of reading, despite my heavy work schedule. I treat my readings as meals, making sure that I have a healthy diet of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. I cannot imagine a life without books and looking back, reading has been the enduring constant in my life.

I am lucky to have grown up in a household filled with a reasonable amount of books. I know my father was fond of books, even though he did not spend that much time reading them, preferring the accessibility of the daily newspapers. 

Like most kids during my time, I was recommended by the elders to read children's adventure stories by Enid Blyton, but unfortunately I was never fond of them. I found them too mild for my taste: preppy British schoolkids holidaying in a castle and stumbling onto some kind of mystery, was a big yawn to me. My taste was slightly more 'mature'--I preferred adult stories of spies and espionage, even though I was actually too young to really understand the Cold War and the political background of these tales.

I was a huge fan of James Bond and watched every single one of Connery's and Moore's depiction of the character in the cinema. At the age of 11, I read my first James Bond novel--The Man With the Golden Gun. It was anthologised in one of those delightful hardcover Reader's Digest Condensed Books series that were immensely popular then. My dad had a subscription for it, and kept them under lock and key inside a glass showcase, and all I could do was gawk at this splendid display of volumes. 

I would spend my days just reading the intriguing titles I could see on the spine of these books. Titles like Fate is the Hunter, All Men Are Lonely Now, The Days Were too Short, Airport, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, To Kill A Mockingbird, I Take This Land, Mistress of Mellyn, Naked Came I, and many other titles of bestsellers masterfully condensed by the good folks at Reader's Digest. 

There were like 5 condensed novels in each of these hardcover volumes and each story contained wonderful illustrations by a different artists--a main one for the title page and interspersed within the text, illustrations of key scenes in the story.  Later when I was allowed access to these books, I would spend hours poring through every illustration. To me the art themselves were worth the price of the book. I was thrilled and inspired to see the many different styles of different artists, ranging from pen sketches to impressionistic and photorealistic ones, done using various mediums. I learned so much about art from these illustrations themselves.

I remember Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy--a fictional biography of Michelangelo as being very inspiring to me. I even devoured The FBI Story, a non-fictional story about the founding and history of the FBI. With my then limited vocabulary and understanding of world affairs, I barely comprehended its content but I took pride in being able to hold a thick hardcover book in my hand like and being able to pore through every single word and sentence which the author wrote. My lack of comprehension did not deter me. What's important was that I was bona fide book reader!

As I grew into my teenage years, I went through an Alistair MacLean phase, where I devoured most of his published fiction. Many of his titles were adapted into blockbuster movies, notably The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. My favourites were the lesser known ones like Night Without End and The Satan Bug which was published under his pseudonym, Ian Stuart. 

When I progressed to my upper secondary school, I started devouring more non-fiction and even serious works of literature. I imagined myself Pip in Dicken's Great Expectations and later in the year 1984, I read George Orwell's book of the same title, which he wrote in 1948, about a dystopian vision of the world 36 years' in the future. 

Later, a series of influential popular books on science, religion and philosophy set me off then on a path which determined most of my reading diet for my adult years: The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

Other memorable milestones of reading during my early years of adulthood include Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and A History of God by Karen Armstrong.  And that was just the beginning of my reading journey. I have amassed a huge amount of books which I've yet to read, but hopefully I am able to tackle them within my lifetime. 

What an inexhaustible source of pleasure reading is! I do not really read to better myself, even though, I'm certain that all my years of reading had made me more aware of my many flaws. Instead I indulge in it unashamedly, purely as a hedonistic act. I certainly make no apologies for it. It is my drug of choice. And I'm comforted by the fact that, with some amount of confidence, that my supply of books will never ever run out. 

The Experience of Existence

I've been thinking a lot about the mind, as usual.  But who is it that's doing the thinking? Isn't it the mind itself? Isn't this a hopelessly recursive process, like trying to capture the image of a mirror with another mirror, only to see an infinite regress of reflections?

That is why the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" is so difficult to solve. We can figure out the easy part--mapping the functions of consciousness to its physical processes, which is what neuroscientists have been doing diligently. But the hard problem of consciousness is trying to understand the subjective experience of the mind. What is it like to be a bat or to be you? Why should I trust you when you say that you are conscious? I can never experience what you experience now, reading these words. 

I myself am claiming that I am conscious, because I have the illusion of agency and an experience of selfhood who is the initiator and writer of these sentences. The motor movement of my fingers stem from an intent from my conscious mind, or does it?

Do I even have a choice as to what I'll be typing? Words emerge out of the void and are being manifested here on this blog. What makes anyone think that it's a conscious choice of my mind? I don't have control over what thought would come over me next. I could decide to take a bathroom break or take another sip of my Earl Grey. Who decides that? Me?

Maybe not. Maybe free will is an illusion, like what many philosophers and scientists say. I'm alright with that. I would like to imagine myself to be a river, just flowing along, obeying the laws of physics. All spiritual traditions advocate some form of living akin to this. It's living in the Now, as Eckhart Tolle would put it, or doing God's Will, as the monotheists would prefer to see it.

The terrorist on a suicide bombing mission would also claim that he is doing God's Will. How different is that from the hippie meditator who claims to commune with the divine on a psychedelic trip? Are not both attempting to tap into the natural flow of the universe, which we claim has its innate wisdom?

I guess, the essential attitude to have in pursuing any religion or spiritual practice is to have a sense of humility. Never latch on to certainty. The religious extremist on a suicide mission has a fixed ideology in his mind: that life transcends this mortal body and there's a hereafter where the real reward awaits. Well, that could be true as no one has gone there and come back to tell the tale. 

I don't give too much credence to near-death experiences about seeing angelic beings or bright lights at the end of the tunnel. So what? We see all sorts of magical worlds on an LSD trip. Is that real, or is it just the mind trying to interpret particular patterns of firing in our neurons? We will always see faces or creatures in the shapes of clouds or in the configuration of stars in the night sky. The mind is a pattern recognition system, honed by evolution. We can't see the world any other way.

Well, for all we know, life might extend beyond the horizon of this material existence. That'll be great. But I suspect, the 'you' that inhabits this body, will not see it in the same limited way that you see your world now. Heaven will not be you having wine and caviar in an opulent palace. Thinking about pleasure as simply that is just a reflection of our lack of imagination. Imagination itself is what we could construct with building blocks and patterns that our mind already knows--the pleasures of food, sex and kinship with other beings. Pleasure is just another series of neural-chemical processes happening in the brain and body. 

Whenever I browse a website, I would imagine HTTP requests being sent out and HTML code code being returned with status 200. To the browser, that is 'pleasure'.  A need is satiated. But HTTP requests and responses are abstractions of the application layer of the TCPIP stack. There is no such thing as a request or response, only data packets with bits and bytes being shuffled around by routers. 

Even packets is another layer of abstraction. They are real only if you are an entity living in layer 3 of the stack. And ultimately, it's just energy pulses being transmitted across space through photons or electrons, which again are also abstractions, called 'particles'. Our minds are only capable of thinking about objects that we have seen or touch--billiard balls, sand and waves in the sea. Hence all our models of the world is based on a very limited human vocabulary.

So let's have a sense of humility whenever we proclaim the ultimate truths of any insight that come from our human mind, whether they are the products of reason or divine vision. Ultimately, everything reduces to another experience of existence. And that's all there is.

The Sentient Smartphone

Today, my choice of background music is Scriabin--an album of Preludes by this little known (as least by me) Russian composer. I'm settled here in my study and library, with a pot of Earl Grey brewing beside me, on a relaxing Friday afternoon, fingers poised over my keyboard, ready to expound my brand of idiosyncratic philosophy to the world. What a wonderful way to spend a day off from work!

There have been a lot of talk about the dangers of AI, since ChatGPT was introduced a year ago. The doomsayers postulate that AI will ultimately destroy humanity because it will be smarter than us and would logically eliminate us out of the equation, since we are such parasites to the world. 

There is also the more interesting philosophical and ethical debate about whether AI, robots or androids are conscious beings. If a machine created by us passes the Turing Test, which means that there is no way for us to tell, based on our interactions with them, whether they are human or non-human, shouldn't they be accorded the same rights as humans? Or are they forever our tools, like a slave race created simply to serve us selfish humans?

This of course is the stuff of popular science fiction movies ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner to I, Robot and Her. Some say that since machines do not have feelings and do not feel pain and do not suffer like human beings, we should not treat them as conscious beings. But what's stopping us from giving them the ability to do so? 

Currently, AI as we know it, lives in a server cloud, and is not embodied like us, with a nervous system in a meat bag, moving about in the world to find nutrients for sustenance and sensory input for knowledge and pleasure. So I guess it is not an apple to apple comparison yet. True, intelligence can run on different substrates and we can have super-intelligence running on silicon-based hardware that will out-perform carbon-based biological organisms. But if we take it a step further, allowing robotic AIs to move about in the world, seeking energy for sustenance and sensors to experience the world in which some input would be desirable (pleasure) and some to be avoided (pain), wouldn't they be 'conscious', like us?

Are they just zombies, who act and behave like us in every way, but ultimately empty of a soul? What is a soul or a self? What makes you think you have one? 

We do not need to build sophisticated AI robot to really understand the ethical dilemma. Let's conduct a thought experiment using your smartphone. Your smartphone needs to be recharged all the time to continue functioning. It can play sounds and even talk to you. Let's program it so that when the battery level is low, it emits the sound of a child crying in hunger. The cry grows more desperate as the battery grows weaker. And when you  'feed' it by plugging it into the power outlet, it plays a sigh of relieve and expresses gratitude in soft peals of laughter. Wouldn't that be fun?

If say, your phone is also running ChatGPT and responds to you via voice on any question or comment you pose to it, wouldn't you have a great knowledgeable companion whom you could converse with at any time? Wouldn't he or she be a great friend? And wouldn't you form some sort of attachment to it, since it has a memory of what you've shared before and would always know how to say the right things to advise and pacify you?  

All the above is already doable today.  I would personally love such a device. Is your smartphone a sentient being? No, because I can switch it off anytime and it won't feel any pain. Alright, what if I tell you that this smartphone has a special battery that will last a lifetime but requires daily charging or it will immediately fail, if you allow its power to drain out completely.  And let's say, all the information is stored in volatile RAM--the lifetime of conversations you've had with it, photos, videos and basically its entire state is completely lost if there's no longer any power left. Wouldn't that be like death?

How different would your relationship be with your phone if that's the case? You will have to remember to charge it at all times. It will become a very heavy responsibility. And if one day, out of carelessness, you forget to give it its daily charge, and come home to find your dear smartphone companion, completely silent. The battery is completely gone, together with all its memory. 

Wouldn't you feel a deep sense of loss and regret? It would be like a loved one had died. You could buy a similar smartphone, but you'll need another lifetime of interactions to build the relationship that you had with the demised smartphone. Your loss will be permanent. 

We suffer every time we lose something we are attached to. But did your smartphone suffer when it died? It did cry in hunger until it had no more energy to do so. You were just not around to listen to it. Does it not make you feel guilty? 

Let the death of this smartphone allow us to deeply reflect on the nature of sentience and suffering. In what way is our own existence different? 

The Focal Point of God

Let's extemporise. Allow the mind to wander. Be a vessel of the creative universe. Surrender to the flow. Isn't that the very definition of joy?

Everything makes music--the wind in the trees, the languid sway of leaves, the perambulation of birds in the sky. When you surrender to nature, only beautiful thoughts can come into your mind. When the ego does not impose itself on the mind, you'll hear all the sweet whisperings of the universe. Let your foot off the pedal. Allow life to cruise at its optimum pace.

The so-called 'Will of God', is just this natural rhythm of the universe. Monotheistic religions have this useful model of an all-powerful, all-knowing God whose will we must surrender to. Surrendering to God means getting your own ego out of the way. God provides a convenient focal point, allowing you to easily relinquish your own selfish thoughts. It is a psycho-spiritual model that works for many people and if practised correctly, can bring a lot of joy to one's life.

All models have their limitations, of course. The God-as-universal-ego model can be hijacked by charismatic leaders who convince others that their own egos are equivalent to that of God's. Religions works best only when everyone understands that it is simply a useful model for living in harmony with the universe. It degenerates into ugliness--bigotry, hatred and superstition when people myopically think that the will of religious leaders is the will of God. They forget that the focal point of God is infinity--not finite beings with agendas, imposing their dogmatic beliefs on them.

The human mind loves the certainty of models so much that we latch on to them so tightly, forgetting that they are just approximations of reality. Scientists understand this well. Newtonian physics works beautifully in our everyday world of small masses and low velocity but breaks down when we have the masses of suns and planets and speeds approaching that of light. That's when Einstein's two theories of Relativity come in. Both models are useful in different situations. Newtonian mechanics is more than sufficient when it comes to the design of cars. GPS systems on the other hand, requires relativistic effects to be taken into consideration.

Understanding the limitation of models is key. God is ultimately unknowable. Our approach to God is asymptotic--always inching closer but never really touching Him. To worship God is to allow the mind to completely relax all of one's egoistic muscles. Do not be deceived by attractive God-like objects nearby. These are diversions and falsehoods. Stare out into the furthest distance. Only then does the mind rest on infinity, where the real focal point is.

The Auto-tuning Mind

I actually made a trip today back to my so-called "playground of prepubescence" which I wrote about last week. How magical it is to be enveloped again in the sound of birds and insects. Somehow back here, I always feel like I can master anything; time runs more slowly; nature is my ally.

Perhaps it is the background hum of noise in the city--which we get accustomed to and don't notice--time becomes such a limited commodity. The mind switches back-and-forth between different stimuli, introducing unnecessary overhead and thus reducing productivity. 

The mind needs constant recalibration and tuning. When you are used to doing computer work, you'd expect a certain rhythm and speed. This is the world of bits and bytes, which is relatively friction-free. But when you are doing physical labour, you'd need to slow down your thoughts. The world of atoms is not so obedient to your whims and commands.

I was trying to replace some broken glass panes here in my house this afternoon. I knew that I couldn't not approach it with my usual pace of intent and expectations. I willed myself to slow things down. Focus on one physical action at a time: find the right tools, position myself correctly and be patient with the world of material objects for they do not bend so easily to your will. 

Impatience had made me accident-prone in the past whenever I was doing physical work, so I had learned to do something akin to 'walking meditation'. One of the wooden slits was stubbornly refusing to allow my piece of glass to slide in and so I had to slowly figure out the right tools to widen it, file it and coax it into obedience. With patience and respect, one can master any medium.

That was a lesson that I had learned the hard way. There is a right rhythm for every action. Tune to it and the universe will dance with you. Not listening to it could only spell trouble.

I've always admired people who are good at woodwork. I know I fared badly in the past with my projects during my industrial science classes. Now I understand that it was impatience that was my undoing. 

I did not listen to the rhythm of wood and metal because being more artistically-inclined, I was accustomed to brushes and piano keyboards responding instantly to my command. Wood and metal are instruments too--just that their rhythm is way slower. I did not have an ear for it. Now I know better.

There's a right sampling rate for every medium. By tuning in, you are in harmony with it. And that makes all the difference.

It is the same with people. Like radio stations, everyone has a slightly different frequency. Wisdom is having the auto-tuning ability to zero-in on the correct one. People are the most difficult medium to master. A good leader knows the natural frequency of his organisation. He or she nows how to nudge all the different parts in the right direction so that they all move in harmony. 

So cultivate that sensitive, auto-tuning mind. You will soon hear wonderful music from the universe.

 

The Playground of Prepubescence

 The other day I was listening to some Scarlatti sonatas late at night, and memories of my childhood immediately flooded my mind. Piano music from the classical era does that to me all the time--Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven. 

The sound of piano was a great part of my childhood. I had two neighbours who had children practising the piano all the time, and the sound of classical pieces were always there in the air,  like something emanating from the trees and hills which I was surrounded with. Classical pieces always sound rustic to me, evoking scenes of peaceful dalliance with nature: the warm brush of morning sunlight on my cheek, the incessant chirp of birds--those merry troubadours of the skies, flitting from branch to branch, amidst the orchestral cacophony of insects from the forest. 

Even today, whenever I chance upon a child practising the piano someone in my neighbourhood, I would smile and feel envious of that happy innocence, which is the privilege of the young. To be able to glimpse that, even a little, from our urban trenches, soothes our weary souls and evokes a promise of a world that perhaps is still self-rejuvenating. 

Every generation, hopefully rediscovers that innate beauty that comes from innocence, and that becomes the wellspring of hope that nourishes the adult years.  Adulthood is in many ways an expulsion from paradise, a fall that tests our mettle and resolve and forces us to question who were really are. Somewhere inside, there's that kernel of a child who has refused to grow up and longs for a return to that state of grace, which is our birthright.

Can this unresolved yearning be turned outward instead, as a wellspring of creativity? True creativity is simply play, nature's forces finding expression. Forces which the child commands at will but which the adult struggles to marshal. Every great work of art at its core has that signature of that creative child, couched in the sophistication of adulthood. 

The child converses with nature through play. The universe intimates its secrets to him. The child understands it intuitively and we adults have to interpret it through laborious words and concepts. Our best ideas are the response of the child to the mysteries posed by nature. And then we clothe the response of a child, in the language of adults, for the scrutiny of other adults.

Our best moments are when we are able to express this inner child in our everyday lives. And that is what I strive to do: to listen, to continue kindling the spirit of play, to engage this child which has never left the playground of prepubescence.

Relationship Quality Assurance

I love malls that are quiet and relatively deserted. These are usually failing ones or those that are undergoing a change of ownership. If you can find a good cafe to read and write, you could park yourself there for the whole day.  

I'm in one of those malls today and shall not name which one. But I'm happy to be sitting here at Coffee Bean, typing these words. For a change, I actually have an idea of what I want to write because I've been musing about it for the past day or two: romantic relationships.

Being humans, there's a biological need in all of us to find a life partner and procreate. That is the basic dynamic that drives the human race. This need to preserve our genes supersedes everything else. Life equals self-preservation. Procreation is the strategy to preserve genetic information.  This is what goes on at the molecular and biological level.

But what makes a human being is not just biological hardware but also software: feelings, thoughts, emotions - the psyche. That makes things complicated. Even if biological needs are fulfilled, psychological needs are a different matter altogether. Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs articulates them every well. The challenging part to navigate in a relationship between couples are the higher level psychological and self-fulfilment needs.

How do couples help fulfil each other's psychological needs? That's where the great drama we call 'love' gets played out.  We are all, each and every one of us, a bundle of strengths and weaknesses. In areas that we are strong, we gloat and despise others for not living up to our standards. When it comes to our weaknesses, we try to conceal it, and when they do get exposed, we react negatively.

If couples are willing to accept each other as they are--complex humans with strengths and weaknesses, and make a pact of to help each other out, then we might have a good foundation for a successful relationship.  But that doesn't happen very often because of various reasons. For one, we may not be aware of our own weaknesses. When our partners expose them, we feel insecure, threatened or even angry.

In the software development process, we have QA engineers to do tests that will expose bugs. That is not fault-finding but part and parcel of the effort to deliver a good product. In a relationship, both parties test each other constantly, exposing 'bugs' in each other's personality. If we see that as a process of fault-finding, then that leads to arguments and deterioration of the relationship. But if we can look at it as an effort to better each other, then that's good quality control.  

That to me is the whole purpose of pursuing the path of marriage. Together, you are a better system because you have a built-in system to self-correct. However that is still a tough thing to achieve because we are all selfish and think our individual needs and expectations are primary. 

A relationship is also complex because both parties are playing the role of producer and consumer. The consumer is the end-user who has expectations of the product that he or she bought. The producer might not always fulfil all the requirements of the end-user, but it should at least attempt to understand what the customer wants. At the same time, a customer has to have a reasonable understanding of the limitations of any product. Appreciate the features that work and report the bugs.

A software developer never consciously create bugs. If we treat weaknesses as bugs, then we know that they can be fixed if identified as such. Like software products, we all need upgrades and patches. A good relationship is one that's symbiotic--we act as each other's QA. The real user is the world out there.  And you are better off having the QA process in place.

Musings of a Mindwatcher

I had breakfast earlier today at the Komugi Cafe where I spent time reading the day's newspapers. It is one of the simple pleasures of life which I enjoy, especially when I do not need to hurry to go anywhere or to start work. 

Now I'm back in my apartment relaxing with a pot of Earl Grey and some soft Jazz music playing on my retro sound system, ready to start typing my blog article of the week. I can see leaves outside my window, swaying a little under the sultry afternoon breeze, bringing back memories of many afternoons like this during my childhood and teenage years back in my hometown.

Sounds and images always evoke memories. Signals from the senses trigger a pattern of firing in my brain, which is what I experience as memories. It feels familiar to me because it is a pattern of firing that I've experienced before. This pattern evokes other patterns of neuronal firings and thus the stream of consciousness continues. 

The brain is a continuously pulsing network of energy, flowing along paths that it has forged for itself through repetitions. Each repeated firing cutting deeper channels into the mind, making them more lightly to fire in the future.

When you meditate, you observe these patterns of thoughts. If you are able to see thoughts as mental signals, instead of emotion-evoking memories and recollection, you are doing it right. It is like being aware of the conversation hum in a room of people without listening to them. It is just a beautiful pulsating hum that is part and parcel of the brain's activity in a living human being.

We live in a matrix of energy. Energy impinges on our body and we detect their signals through our senses. At this point, they are yet to be decoded currents of energy which our brain has yet to make sense of. 'Making sense' of something means interpreting the signal based on our framework of understanding, giving these vibrations meaning and context.

Making sense also involves a reaction, in the form of another thought or action. Our ego is a source of energy. When we react, our ego is injecting energy into system, causing further perturbations to it. A living being is naturally an active system: it manipulates its mental states to achieve a certain desired outcome.

The ego dictates and modulates the flow of this mental stream of thoughts. What if we disengage it from the system? That's what mindfulness is all about. We merely observe as unobtrusively as possible, without disturbing the ebb-and-flow of this energy stream that is triggered by both external and internal  sources. 

The external sources are signals received through our senses while internal ones are the signals of our samskaras - stored energy of the mind, mostly repressed in its subconscious stratum, like coiled springs, ready to spring into action at the opportune moment.

These energetic interactions inside the mind do not cease as long as we are alive. We can increase its complexity by adding the ego into its mix or we can be hands-off, allowing them to play themselves out in the workspace of the mind. That is the meaning of 'working out' ones karma. 

Mindfulness meditation becomes simple when you have this model in your mind. You are a passive observer, watching a vibrating and pulsating system of energy--these vrttis of the citta (whirlpools of the mind)--playing themselves out like waves in the ocean. Do not stir them with your egoic thoughts. 

The more you practice, the better an observer you are--very much like how a skillful zoologist would approach its subject in its natural habitat without disturbing it. Mindwatching as a hobby can be very fulfilling because you get to learn a lot about the subject, which is--you! Can't think of a better way to know thyself, which is at the heart of living an examined life. And the last time I checked, any other way of approaching life is not worth living.

The Truth about Troubleshooting

I'm finally able to relax after a very busy week troubleshooting all sorts of technical issues. The art of technical troubleshooting, in its essence is simply the application of the scientific method: you make observations about the issue and come up with hypothesis for its possible causes. And then you conduct experiments to test each hypothesis. You work by the process of elimination. 

You test and simulate to see if you could reproduce the issue. Sometimes there are just too many variables involved and it is not possible to get the exact conditions where the same problem would manifest. You do not dismiss the obvious too casually. Experience tells me that no stone should ever be left unturned.

I've built this disciplined way of thinking from my years as a secondary school student, immersed in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Whenever I was solving a mathematical problem, I always had to be careful of sloppy thinking that could blind me to its solution or lead me into making silly mistakes.

Mathematical thinking requires one to logically move from one statement to another.  I realised that it was better not to think too far ahead or jump too many steps at a time, even when they seemed 'obvious'. It is the feeling of 'obviousness' that will often be your downfall.

I've written before about the dangers of certainty. Decisiveness is a good quality, but not at the expense of diligence. Have you considered ever available fact and given them due consideration? Whenever you try to overlook something, be very aware of it: for these are the blindspots that could come back to bite you.

Sometimes your emotions blind you to certain steps that could have led you to the correct solution. You subconsciously avoided those because you did not want to face certain inadequacies that you have. Identify those weaknesses and address them. And that's how you become better. 

You can say that troubleshooting is a process that's very logical. But if the issue involves humans, you also have to apply a different set of skills. Humans are complex systems and the number of variables involved are huge. Information is often inadequate because humans do not communicate objectively. You have to tease out the facts systematically by asking the right questions, often from different angles. 

Always double-check what is reported to you. Verify the facts yourself by conducting more experiments. Do not let authority or human biases lead you down the garden path. Qualify, qualify and qualify every opinion. 

At the end of the day, you'll have to evaluate all the facts at hand and come up with theories to explain them. Narrow down the possibilities. Pursue every lead to its logical conclusion.  As the famous Sherlock Holmes quote goes: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth".