Rengineering One's Life

The act of blogging has to come easily--almost like firing off a casual email to a friend--for one to blog consistently. It shouldn't be a chore, at least for blogs such as mine which are simply personal musings and harbours no further aspirations beyond that.

When I was working in Indonesia, I blogged daily because I had a fairly regimented routine. I would leave work to take a taxi down Sudirman and Thamrin, alighting near the Hard Rock Cafe before dropping by at my favourite cybercafe. Internet connection, let alone broadband was not so easy to find then. It was there at the cybercafe (5000 rupiah for an hour of access), that I made wrote most of my blog entries. It was a beautiful period in my life.

Blogging has not been a routine of mine since I came back to KL, more than a decade ago. I did blog but mostly on special occasions. The greatest obstacle to me blogging here, back in my homeland is the absence of a simple, solitary lifestyle, which I had enjoyed in Jakarta, one which permitted the Muse to work its magic on me.

There's less time to reflect here in this hectic city of KL. Always, there are chores and responsibilities that occupy my after-work hours. And work itself for the past decade has an intense and exhilarating struggle of self-imposed challenge. That period of titanic struggle, I'm happy to say, has eased a little, but still my regular work occupies a greater part of my waking hours.

How did I find the time blog today? Ah, this is actually a small experiment I'm trying to conduct on myself. You see, I am always trying re-engineer my life for greater productivity and effectiveness. For an activity to become part of one's routine, it has to be almost an unconscious habit. I want to find those bits and pieces of time that get lost in between the large chunks of activities that occupy one's waking hours. Most of us are short of time, but at the same time we also waste a lot of it by not planning our daily routine well.

For example, being stuck in traffic is one of the biggest time wasters here in KL. But I've turned it into one of my most productive periods by listening to audiobooks.(I've written a couple of blog posts on this). The other thing I notice nowadays is that we waste too much of our time surfing the Net or texting on our smartphones. These activities are like time vacuum-cleaners--they will just suck up all bits and pieces of time. Why not spend less time on that and read a book or blog instead?

Reading is something that I still do very regularly. It is a habit that has never left me every since I was a child. Without reading, I suppose I would not consider myself to be living. Books are the intellectual fuel of my life. Reading anchors my day--first thing in the morning and last thing at night. And every other bits and pieces of time I can sneak in a book during the day is a welcome bonus.

I've also found a slot for exercise--jogging--in my busy schedule. I run at a nearby park on weekends. This activity has been successfully integrated into my life. The key to integration is simplicity. There should not be too many obstacles for one to perform the activity. Running is an easy form of exercise because you do not need a membership to a gym or fancy equipment to perform it. Wear your running shoes and off you go. Once or twice a week is good enough.

Vegetarian Mondays is another activity that I've successfully integrated into my life. I go meatless at least one day a week--if for some reason it is not convenient on Monday, I'll try to meet my quota on the following day. I do not need to be over-ambitious. Just being a vegetarian a day a week is good enough, for now. I've been practicing this successfully for probably 8 years now.

Meditation is another activity that I've successfully incorporated into my daily routine. This is an interesting topic, worthy of an article of itself.

And how do I propose to do that for blogging? Once a week is good enough for now. I won't be too ambitious. No lofty topics--just simple musings like this post. You need to find that golden hour somewhere within a particular day in a week. Today is the day. Now is the hour!

So I've successfully done it at least for this week. Let's see if this is sustainable. I'm an engineer. To consciously engineer one's own life is the greatest challenge one can embark upon for it potentially can also yield the greatest reward.

System Administrator of the Mind

When the city is emptied of people, the mind is freer to reflect, as it happens every year during major festive holidays. It is Chinese New Year again and it is one of the best times of the year to remain in the city. There's a certain nostalgic languor in its sunlit, car-free streets, redolent of quieter and simpler times.

I've made many reflections during Chinese New Year celebrations in the past about the nature of Chinese people and their culture. It is an admirable culture that is resolutely forward-looking, progressive and materially expansive. I am Chinese, and to some degree I am either genetically or culturally-driven by its social values and ethos. However I see these Chinese impulses in me as another "module" in my mind, in line with modern neuro-psychological models of the mind. At times, this Chinese mental module occupies a dominant position, and on other occasions, depending on the task at hand, its influence gets diminished by other equally strong modular traits which rule my brain in a kind of "separation of powers" governance model.

We experience and interact with the world with our minds. The mind is all we've got. The mind is our window to the world and this window is far from transparent--it shades and colours our perception of reality. Our genetic and cultural programming always influence how we view the world. It is therefore important for us to be aware of the intermediary filters that preprocess the flow of information between us and the world.

We must be cognizant of the fact that all human views have biases, because of our built-in cultural lenses. That by itself is not a sin, but to be completely ignorant of it, is. If we are all prisoners of our cultural biases, how then do we factor them out in our daily interactions with the world?

It is easy for us to point out the mistakes of others but when it comes to examining our own faults and biases, we hit a conundrum: it is like trying to see the spots and blemishes on our spectacles while we are wearing it. And this is where the practice of meditation comes in.

Meditation is that specific training devised for us to train our minds to see its own contents and processes more clearly. The way I explain it to my IT-literate friends is that meditation is like typing the command "ps -ef" on a Unix operating system. It will list down all the processes that are currently running on the time-shared multitasking system. The interesting thing is that, the "ps -ef" command itself, will also show up as another process that is running in the system.

All system administrators are also skilled with using the "kill" command to terminate any processes that are no longer serving any purpose and could be hogging system resources. "Kill" is another process. It takes another process to kill other processes. All processes have their own specific powers.

In meditation, we introduce a process (a thought): observe the breath and try to kill other processes that try to compete with it for system resources. ideally, there should be one process running, but the mind being what it is will continually trigger new processes into the system. You as the meditator, just have to kill them as the arises and allow only that single process which you intended to run. That's all there is to meditation. It takes skill and practice to be a good system administrator of our own minds.

When we have gained a certain amount of "mindfulness" as meditators like to call it, we are better at knowing what are the processes that are currently occupying our minds and decide whether they are appropriate for the moment. This skill alone makes us better and happier people because we are no longer slaves to our thoughts, but instead masters--or in Unix parlance, the "root user".

All biases, prejudices and impulses are mental processes introduced by the many modules in our mind. Sometimes they are useful, sometimes they are detrimental to our personality and mental health. Allowing them to hog system resources can result in bigotry, selfishness and other ugly personality traits. Processes are just tools. Use the right too for the right occasion and use housekeeping tools like 'ps -ef' and 'kill' to keep things in check.

Now you see how the mind works? I started with a reflection on Chinese New Year and the characteristic of Chinese culture and I ended up talking about the 'kill' command on the Unix operating system! Unix is a great operating system, or which its core--the kernel--is simple and robust. It's richness comes from its huge repertoire of commands, which are simple application utilities, written by different people and bundled together in its various distributions over the years. One of the many commands is "wall" - (abbreviation of 'write-all') which can be used by the system administrator to send a broadcast message to all users in the system. Example:

$ wall 'Gong Xi Fa Cai!'

Broadcast message from kenny@Tangerine (pts/0) (Fri Feb 16 12:50:39 2018):

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Seeds Across Space and Time

New Year's Eve is a good time to review the year that has just gone by and to peer ahead a little to see what's in store. I timed my year-end in such a way that I was able to finish reading my last book of 2017--Zaid Ibrahim's Assalamualaikum, which was recently banned by the government. I've had the book in my possession for a while but had no inclination to read it until I was reminded of it by the government's inexplicable move to ban it.

I have a huge array of books lined up for the coming year. The difficulty is always in deciding what to read. For 2017, surprisingly, my most enjoyable read was a collection of stories by Joseph Conrad "The Eastern Stories", which includes his short stories set in the Malay archipelago like Youth: A Narrative, The Lagoon, Karain: A Memory, The End of the Tether, Because of the Dollars and The Secret Sharer. And what great tales these are!

I actually bought this paperback volume back in 2001 at a bookshop in Nouvena, Singapore and have not gotten to reading it, as I found Conrad's prose a bit too ornate and convoluted for my liking. But I suppose our tastes change as we age, what was tedious about Conrad's writing then now seems so satisfyingly rich in atmosphere, memorable characterization and heart-wrenching emotion.

I have many books which I've bought but have not felt the inclination to read them yet, but I know their time will come. Books are like seeds that lie dormant, each one will have its time to sprout and grow in my mind, when the conditions are right. And as you grow older, you have a better sense of timing--what is the right thing to do at each moment in time. Every book will eventually have its day.

There was once a time during my youth when I had lots of time and not enough books to read. Now, I live in an age of information overload--there's simply too much content and way too little time to consume them. So I have to prioritize things wisely. Books are nourishment that one feeds to the mind, they provide maximum boost to the soul when ingested at the right time.

The anthology of stories by Joseph Conrad had to wait exactly 16 years before I was ready to appreciate the beauty of its writing. Books are durable supplies which we carry along with us through the journey of life, providing us the right nourishment at different way-stations along the path. And what wonderful nourishments do they provide!

One thing that has been constant all my life is my love for books. Thinking back, I've been an avid reader ever since I was a child and this habit did not let up even when I started working. 20 years ago, when I was working in Singapore, I spent many happy nights reading in my small HDB room in Bishan; I had spent long flights to US, engrossed in the collected works of Vivekananda and the autobiography of Isaac Asimov; I remember cold nights in Californian motels poring over books on the Mutiny on the Bounty and fond memories of myself sitting at a park in Geneva, reading The Horizontal Instrument by Christopher Wilkins; Yes, I was reading Sukarno's biography on one of my many happy train rides to Bandung; And that magical year 1995, spending hours reading Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi at the Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong, while waiting for my flight back to KL.

To me, part of the pleasure of travel is the opportunity to read. When you sit down at a cafe or a park at some foreign location, you get to slowly absorb the local rhythms of life. Travel is not simply shuttling from one tourist distraction to another. Travel, at least to me, is diving deep into the soul of a place. No better way to do that than sitting at a public place, with a good book and simply watch the world go by, as your attention dips in and out of your book, in between sips of freshly brewed coffee.

There's no greater joy in life to me than reading. Perhaps that's why I'm a reasonably happy person--because I have an endless supply of books to read! As I close the last chapter of 2017, I am opening another delicious new book: 2018. I welcome the new year with the anticipation of an eager reader, ready to dive into another new tome of adventure filled with thought-provoking ideas and wonderful leaps of imagination. Life is great simply because there are books and because there are readers and writers who partake in the ecstatic joy of the written word.

As I look back at all the books that I've read throughout my life, at various locations that I've been to, at various points in my life, I marvel at the many works that have enthralled me and influenced my thinking--seeds that I've gathered across space and time, seeds that have germinated in my mind and made me, for better or worse, the person I am today.

Let's now turn the page and dive into our new book: 2018!

A Child of Christmas

Festive holidays are a great time for philosophical reflection. It is time for another one of my rambling posts on...whatever that pops into my head at the moment.

It is raining outside, and rain usually brings a certain feeling of nostalgia--I remember the fresh smell of the wet grass in the garden of my childhood home, the cacophonous croaks of frogs somewhere in the distant, the dark looming foliage of rubber trees, all wet and damp under the incessant patter of raindrops, and especially on nights like these--Christmas Eve--a certain feeling of peace and contentment envelops the night.

On nights like this I feel forever a child, and even at my age, I feel as if I've never outgrown that childhood sense of wonder and beauty, of carelessness and curiosity. It is a childhood innocence that is at once naive and noble.

This Wordsworthian conception of childhood has always been a part of my soul. Even when life plunges me into depths of despair, I would stare into the abyss, and see the child staring back at me. It is what gives me strength. It is what reaffirms life. It is what keeps me out of the abyss.

Newton famously said that he felt as if he was a child playing on a shore, engrossed in the beauty of pebbles and shells while the great ocean of truth still lay undiscovered before him. The great man knew how little we know about our universe, how much there is to learn, how humbly small that we as humans stand before the great immensity that is space and time.

It is the knowledge of our smallness before a greatness, a greatness which some reverentially refers to as 'God', that makes all children. And it is this enchanted child within all of us that saves us from the dreariness of everyday life. The saviour has always been within us. No one sees more awe and beauty than the child. And as long as we do not crucify the child within, we are the Messiah of our own fate.

The Envelope, please

I've been wanting to blog over the long Hari Raya break. Now is my chance.

I haven't been working that much over the past couple of days. In fact I've been taking it easy since Friday. I had some errands to run in Cyberjaya, so I went to my apartment with the intention to set up shop there for the day, answering emails if any and do some light coding work. But I spent almost the whole day sleeping and reading instead.

It was a good break because I was feeling very exhausting due to the late nights that I've been keeping over the week. My Cyberjaya apartment is my sanctuary, even though I don't even have a bed there as I see it more as an office and library for me to think and work. Occasionally I'd crash on the sofa or pick out some tunes on my digital piano.

Being alone has never bothered me. One is never lonely when one is truly alone. Being alone keeps one alive: it sharpens one's senses; it keeps one balanced and focused. And if you are wise enough, you'll realize these are genuine moments of happiness.

We spend so much of our time worrying about finding our place in society--to have a social standing, to have a family to call our one and to leave behind a legacy. In other words, satisfying our physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs. So we work, find a life partner, start a family and try to find success in our chosen career. And on our deathbed, we'll go with the satisfaction that there are loved ones who will mourn and remember us. We don't want to die alone and insignificant.

Is this a so-called meaningful life?

Part of life is seeking an answer to the question above. There may not be a single definitive answer to the question. To live is to examine this very question of life. Perhaps each one of us has a sealed envelope hidden somewhere in this universe with the correct answer. One thing's for sure though: it won't be handed to us on a silver platter.

Perhaps this envelope contains more envelopes with even more questions, hinting at other envelopes elsewhere?

There are definite things that come in envelopes: like the stacks of bills on my desk, which I clear at the end of every month. So we spend our entire lives, serving these envelopes that come with clockwork certainty. Every envelope contains the karmic price that we have to pay for our needs and desires. We consume and we pay for it. The bills that come in envelopes are the easy part. These are kind of tangible needs, of which we choose to pay with our hard-earned money.

The really costly things are our intangible needs, which we usually have to pay with time and energy. The bills for them don't come neatly quantified in sealed envelopes. Sometimes you don't even realized that you are paying or have already paid for them.

Sometimes we literally do receive the answer to the meaning of life in envelopes--religious pamphlets that claims to know the ultimate purpose of our existence. I used to read them very diligently in my youth. They can be very uplifting.

In this age of emails and electronic messaging, thankfully we are getting less and less of these paper envelopes. That bad thing is that they come in even bigger torrents, clogging up your inboxes and buzzing your smartphone every other second. Sometimes, they also claim to elucidate the meaning of life--in 140-character nuggets of wisdom.

So, be prepared to open more envelopes--some virtual, some emotional ones with hidden bills. The flood of envelopes will not stop. Life is a series of envelopes. Sometimes they contain bills, sometimes junk, sometimes a plea for donation. Handle each envelope once (as the paper management gurus would say). Handle them decisively. More importantly, know how much that is asked of you in each of these envelopes. Each one brings you slightly closer to the answer.

Religion as a Hobby

Let me write about religion.

Now, haven't I said enough about this subject? Perhaps. Maybe it's because the subject of religion has been bothering me a lot lately. Why is religion so important to so many people?

Why do people do unspeakable things in the name of religion?

Three words: fear, ego and ignorance.

At the root of our existence is fear: the fear of death. Nothing terrifies us more than the annihilation of our existence. So we seek answers to the eternal mystery of death. Is there a life after death? Where do we go after death? How do I transcend death. Religion do provide some ready-made answers to these questions. It gives us a certain sense of comfort to know what to do here and now to guarantee our salvation. It provides us with a philosophical doctrine that pseudo-intellectually convinces us of its authenticity. Equipped with this certainty, we feel more confident of our place in the universe. We have a path to follow; a moral guide for leading our lives.

Religion also feeds our needs for ego and identity. It immediately aligns us with a group of like-minded people: your fellow believers and comrade-in-arms who will defend you and help you in times of need. You can proclaim your religious identity proudly on bumper stickers; you can judge the conduct of others with the moral authority of scriptures and you can show off your piety and flaunt your religious credentials on social media by spouting verses from the canon. You are right and the poor unbelievers are wrong, to be condemned in this and the afterlife in the fires of hell. How great a feeling it is to wallow in self-righteousness.

You think you are fortunate enough to be enlightened by your so-called spiritual knowledge. The light of spiritual awakening is so dazzling that you feel that you are already on the right track. Can't others see how true and deep this feeling is? Why are others so ignorant? Just read and listen to these wise holy men who talk with such confidence and exudes such charisma. If you follow what they say, you would be safe. Let's all hide under the umbrella of their all-encompassing wisdom. You will read their books and lap up every word they say. And that's all you read.

When you think you've found the answers to everything, you tend to be self-assured. You force your family and friends to follow what you've discovered and experienced. You are supposedly doing it out of love. You are saving them. You want to share your spiritual joy with them. Why are the unbelievers so stupid? Why can't they feel the glory of the divine? You are determined to transform their lives. They too will soon see the truth.

The life of a spiritually-inspired person is very different. It is like being born again. It is like falling in love. You see the divine in everything. Every incident in your daily life has some cosmic significance, in alignment with some divine purpose. The glory of that purpose brings you ecstasies, which the unbelievers can never comprehend.

To understand religion is to understand the primal instincts that drive our behaviour. If the human species is mostly wiped out but for a few pockets of survivors everywhere, the human race will likely rise again, and new religions will be reinvented. Religion is an inevitable product of life itself, like art and culture. Every civilization creates its own doctrines and dogmas anew.

Religion becomes a problem when we take it too seriously. Religion should be treated as a hobby. Everyone is entitled to pursue theirs as a hobby. You can pursue it as seriously as you choose to, but you should never impose your hobby on others. Every hobby has its therapeutic value; it might even make you a better and more well-balanced person. You could be even be obsessive about out it, like how some people are fanatical collectors of Star Wars memorabilia. But everyone knows that ultimately a hobby is a hobby and the hobby you choose to call yours is a matter of personal taste.

Isn't there some deep metaphysical truth about religion itself? You feel it in your gut. You get a glimpse of this deep connection with something higher when you pray or meditate or worship or do whatever you do as your spiritual practice. Perhaps. Artists and musicians experience that too when they are inspired, even astronomers when they peer into a telescope and see the majesty of our universe. It is not a monopoly of religion.

For the good of humanity, do not take your religion too seriously. Your religion is not better or truer than others. Be humble about your insights. Be aware of the fear, ego and ignorance that underpins your religious belief. Treat religion as a hobby. The world will be a much better place for it.

The Beauty of Life's Purpose

I marvel at people who are driven by an ambition to earn as much money as possible. Their objective seems so clear and inevitable. I need this and this much to support my family and to pay for my children's education. I have no choice. I have X number of children, hence I'll need to make sure I have X x amount in the bank for their education.

I myself have gone through periods in my life when cash was tight. Even now, I would not consider myself very well off, even though I live comfortably enough. I am not ambitious in the conventional sense. That's perhaps one of the advantage of being a confirmed bachelor: I don't really have to worry too much about the next generation. Neither do I have thoughts about emigrating to another country where the grass is supposedly greener.

My philosophy has always been to focus on doing good work in whatever I do. Money will take care of itself. Being frugal helps. I consider luxury a bit of a handicap--once you've tasted it, you cannot do without it. So I like to keep my life simple. My only 'luxury' is books (both the dead-tree ones and their audio counterparts). And I have more than enough books that I could ever read in a lifetime.

Why do I work so hard then? I answered that in another blog entry of mine. Rereading it makes me kind of chuckle a bit: so that one day, I can afford to live without a car and have the luxury of taking public transportation.

Why did I think that taking public transportation such a luxury? Well, it's the luxury of time: time to wait for the next train or bus; the luxury of not having to hurry, of having the leisure to enjoy the journey. I wrote that entry in 2006, more than 10 years ago. My philosophy in life still hasn't changed that much.

I've been asked this question before: What's your goal or purpose in life? I can't give the conventional answers, like: to see my kids through college and retire comfortably or to build a successful business that will sustain me and my family for the rest of my life. These 'achievements' somehow feel empty to me. I'm not exactly a card-carrying Buddhist, but I have this Buddhistic impulse in me that compels me to see all worldly attainments as ultimately 'unsatisfactory'.

Then how does one live one's life? Is a life dedicated to spiritual pursuits the only 'meaningful' one?

That could be slippery slope too, if one sees spiritual pursuits as a 'goal' in life. How then should one approach life? Our mental thirst for a definite answer to these things is insatiable.

It is in precisely situations like these, pursued by the ever inquisitive student, the Zen master would further befuddle the poor guy with a seemingly dismissive koan: "When hungry, eat; when tired, sleep".

There are many such Zen sayings that pop into my mind whenever people ask the question about life's purpose.

"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."

"Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and grass grows by itself."

This I think, is probably the closest answer to what my goal in life is: Everyday, I chop wood and carry water; when hungry I eat; when tired, I sleep; time passes and the grass grows by itself. Such is the beauty of life's purpose.

One Man's Pleasure

We've all become suburban creatures: unshaven weekend slobs in slippers and shorts, jostling carts along the hypermart aisle, grabbing discount toilet-rolls by the dozens, helped by our once delectably lissome spouses--now tubby tiger mums with icecream-cheeked kids in the tow.

We choose our pain to get the happiness we want. Pain and pleasure, like a particle-antiparticle pair that comes into existence together in equal but opposite strength.

A monk values solitude as a time to pray, meditate and develop spiritually. The layman sees solitude as unbearable loneliness, utter and desolate.

So each one of us seek out a life partner that we may have a companion for life's journey. To start a family with bright bubbly kids that one may be proud to call one's own; and then to see them growing up, being educated and successful. That's happiness. So we are more than willing to take the pain that comes with it.

What's the pain of middleclass life? Mostly the fear of the future and the unknown: Will we be able to keep our jobs? Will we be able to afford to send our kids to the best schools? Will our kids grow up to be successful? Will we remain healthy to see our mission through?

Of course, we shall take the office politics with gritted teeth so that we may get our five-figure pay-cheques at the end of the month to pay for all the good things that we give our families. That's pain that we have chosen to accept for the prize of our middleclass happiness. It is a happiness we have taught ourselves to believe in. It is good happiness.

But one man's pleasure is another man's pain. A monk would see such a middleclass existence as empty and hopeless. A life wasted in the pursuit of petty things. A life of accumulating stuff that ultimately disintegrates. A life as hopeless as one could imagine; a life in denial of the ultimate spiritual purpose. A life utterly unexamined.

And here I am the eternal student, marveling at the play of pain and pleasure, awakening a little more with each passing sip of experience.

Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps

I run quite consistently, at least every Saturday morning. This morning was another great session in the park, with continuous running for half-an-hour followed by some simple calisthenics. And while running (as always, ideas come streaming into my head) it occurred to me to blog today about the scientific method. This is probably because I've been catching up on some of the developments in particle physics recently and I'm back in my "scientific mood".

I think I've blogged elsewhere before that an education in the science stream during my secondary school days has been one of the biggest influence in my life. Since those feverishly passionate days of devotion to science, I've always adopted a scientific attitude towards everything in life.

What do I mean by the 'scientific attitude'? Well, it is at its core, a respect for hypothesis, experimentation and data. No assumption should be left unexamined; skepticism should be the guiding principle towards everything, including everyday life situations.

Does that mean that one goes about life not trusting anything or anyone? Certainly not. It means, first and foremost, never prejudging any situation or anyone. Always go by the facts and never jump to any conclusions. Even when something seems 'obvious', always verify. Never assume.

The other scientific attitude that I adopt is: always go for the simplest explanation as a starting point. It doesn't mean that I'm being simple-minded or naive, on the contrary, it reflects a cautious attitude towards any superfluous explanations of things. Occam's Razor is my favourite instrument. Someone texts me about some rumour; I'll read it and say in my mind 'perhaps'. 'Perhaps' is my mind's favourite word. And perhaps not coincidentally, one of my favourite oldies is the song, 'Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps' (of which Nat King Cole's rendition Quizás, Quizás, Quizás is my favourite).

I am comfortable with not full knowing everything. Sometimes we just don't have sufficient facts to conclude about something; so just let it be and wait until there's further data. Ask more questions, investigate and always ask yourself: is there an alternate explanation for what is being implied by something or someone.

A scientific attitude towards everything is even more important nowadays when our social media is littered with unverified or downright fake news. Sometimes we just believe what we like to believe. What we want to believe in is usually driven by our ego and prejudices. A true scientist knows that he has to put aside his favourite hypothesis, no matter how reluctantly, if the facts do not support it. As did Johannes Kepler (read my previous entry, Perfect Ideas), who had to give up his idea of perfect circles for the orbits of planets around the sun when Tycho Brahe's accurate measurements indicated that they moved in ellipses.

The scientific attitude also comes in handy in my line of work, which involves a lot of debugging and troubleshooting. We coders know that it is very difficult to detect our own bugs. That's why, alpha and beta testing phases are very important in development. Similarly, anyone who writes frequently also knows that it is difficult to detect one's own typos. Our minds tends to move faster than our hands or fingers.

We must be aware that the mind has a tendency to assume and gloss over things. The only way to overcome this mental bias is to habitually relook at things from a different perspective. Break the pattern: Read, starting from the last sentence to the first. Or go do something else first: get something to eat, take a walk, water the plants and then come back to tackle your work with a fresh mind.

Looking at things from many different perspectives is a very scientific attitude indeed. After Kepler successfully described the elliptical orbits of planets around the Sun, Isaac Newton re-looked at it and figured out that Kepler's laws are a natural consequence of a universal force of gravity acting between objects with mass: the Sun's gravitational force keeps planet in their elliptical orbits and they can be proven mathematically from the basic principle of an inverse square law. And then, in the 20th century, Einstein astounded the world with his General Theory of Relativity which re-formulated Newton's law of gravity as the geometric curvature of space-time. How simple and ingenious is Nature!

To adopt a scientific attitude is to apply some very basic common sense. With so much data and information bombarding our senses should our phones, tablets, computers and televisions, it is increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. But one should not despair: access to information is better than none. Question is: will we always be able to distinguish the true from the false? I don't really know. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Learning, Unlearning and Relearning

Most people will be starting work tomorrow. The past week has been good as the traffic in KL was still rather sparse; it was great being able to zip from place to place easily.

I've made a resolve to be more independent when it comes to work. I used to have to depend on the services of a graphics designer to do some of the design that comes part and parcel with app and web development. Engineers are usually hopeless when it comes to even the simplest graphics design. They are almost aesthetically blind, having no sense at all of the basic elements of balance, contrast and harmony.

I've been spending the past week doing some of the graphics on my own. All graphics designers have Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator as their basic tools. Many use pirated copies. I don't own or pay subscription to any of these tools. And I was reluctant to invest time to build up proficiency in using proprietary tools, even though they are considered industry standards.

Frustrated by the entire industry's dependence on these tools and how we are forced to pay for them, I made a resolve to find open source alternatives. Here, I'm glad to say that I've tested and found good open source substitutes: GIMP for bitmap images and Inkscape for vector graphics. Using them, I'm already able to import all my old Adobe Illustrator assets and make modifications to them. I am finally free, at least for what I'm doing, from the need for the services of a graphics designer and the tyranny of Adobe tools. And it feels very liberating indeed.

I've also made another resolve (I actually have new year resolutions after all!), to be free from the Windows operating system. Unlike many of my friends in the industry, I'm also not a Mac die hard. On the server side, I've been using various distribution of Linux for years and have no issues with it. My laptop is set up to dual-boot with Windows and Ubuntu. And lately, I've been finding myself using Ubuntu exclusive for all my needs and I'm doing just fine. GIMP and Inkscape work beautifully on Ubuntu. Being completely free from Microsoft, Apple and Adobe definitely gives me a great sense of satisfaction.

I rarely write about IT matters on my blog, even though that's been my profession all these years. Today's entry must seem like a rare exception. But I'm also trying to inject fresh subjects into this blog of mine and there are many philosophical insights that one can gain from IT too. These will be interesting blog topics for the future.

I guess 16 years is long enough time for me to get over any disillusionment I had with the industry. I realized that it is the only industry where the skill to learn is perhaps the most valuable skill of all. The pace of change in this technology is staggering and the only survival skill one needs is the skill to re-skill oneself. As the eminent futurist Alvin Toffler once said: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

And that's the only thing that I've been doing consistently all my life.

Running Meditation

A good run and workout at the park early this morning completely rejuvenated my system. It was much needed after all the gluttony and food-induced torpor of the Chinese New Year festivities. A good exercise session is like rebooting your computer: you get to clear away all the background processes that are hogging your memory and restart again with a clean slate.

I've been running on and off at the same park here at my neighbourhood for more than a decade now. The park is located just beside the mosque about 10 minutes walk from my home. I enjoy waking up to the sound of the azan, which is the time when I usually go for my run.

As the handful of faithfuls stream to the mosque, I run my routine 6 circuits around the park. Running when it is still dark with the crisp morning air coursing through my lungs is extremely invigorating. All vestiges of the previous night's sleep are wiped away, setting myself up perfectly for a productive day ahead.

I even turn my morning runs into sort of a meditation session. You see, some people, like the author Murakami, listen to music; others let their minds wander aimlessly when they run. I prefer to "meditate".

What I do is that I embark on a session of Buddhist loving-kindness meditation in my mind as I run, mapping each phase of the meditation into a single circuit around the park. That way, I get to kill two birds with one stone: exercising both the mind and the body. The distinct phases of the meditation also helps me to 'count' the number of rounds I've completed.

I simply love this running meditation practice of mine. Meditating in close proximity to a mosque also puts one into the right reverential state of mind. After my run, I do a series of calisthenics making use of the exercise and children play stations that are available in the park.

My exercise session closes with some deep breathing, a routine involving outstretched arms, open chest and toe-touching--all these facing the minaret of the mosque. This breathing 'puja' is a great warm-down routine, allowing my tired limbs and torso to stretch and relax. Sometimes I also do some breathing meditation here: focusing on the in-breath and out-breath, allowing my body to merge with the dew-covered greenery of the park.

When I finish my session and start walking away from the park, the aunties will start trickling in for their morning walks and tai-chi sessions. Usually the sun will be rising, with the LRT rumbling in the distant, shuttling the early commuters to their workplace. Every time I get to complete a session at the park, I feel confident that my the day ahead will be harmonious and productive. I'm not a religious person, but my morning exercise is the closest thing that I have to a worship ritual. And I'm all the healthier, mentally and physically, for it.

Welcoming Work

I'm back to work tomorrow. Glad to have my routine back It is highly possible that once my daily stream of daily activities is back, I will not be blogging that regularly anymore. That is, unless I can include blogging as among on the activities on equal footing with the rest...

I spend most of my daytime at work. Work involves meetings, writing code, writing proposals, building slides, solving customer problems, learning new technologies, managing projects and cooking up new ideas to pursue. I still adhere to my philosophy of work as a "workout" for the soul.

Some people say that I work too hard. On the contrary, I do not see what I do as "work" per se, it is simply, living--a process of ushering on the flow of activities in the most productive and efficient manner. Work keeps the mind fit. Work, without an attachment to its outcome, is actually a legitimate spiritual practice--the path of karma yoga, as expounded in the Bhagavad Gita.

One does not need to be saving the world every day to lead a supposedly meaningful life. Every ordinary folk has an important role to play within the sphere of their existence. Everyone, adds their light to the sum of light.

Work gathers momentum when we tend to it daily. It important to remember is to move forward--no matter how small a step--everyday. An email answered, a bug fixed, a few lines of code written, is better than no activity at all. The wheel of life spins perpetually if we give it a small nudge everyday. And that's my attitude towards work.

Being productive and being able to do useful work, to a large extend, defines us. Without work, our lives disintegrate. We work, therefore we are. So let's get over our Chinese New Year stupor and welcome the start of the first work week in the Year of the Rooster!

The Magic of Living

I was thinking about writing something about the subject of happiness, when the thought occurred to me: hey haven't I written about this many times before? A simple search reveals that this is indeed the case.

In an entry entitled "The Happiness List" (Nov 5, 2005), I wrote about how one can be made happy by the simple things in life. In "The Happiness of Small Things" (Jan 7, 2005), I wrote: "We define our own happiness. Happiness to me is just a simple and quietly fruitful life".

Those words we written more than 10 years ago. And my view about happiness has not changed at all. I still believe what I wrote in "A Diamond Soul", that happiness cannot be achieved by manipulating the external world; real happiness comes from an inner transformation, a spiritual realization, a crucible of pain, which forces us to relook our life in a different way. Perhaps joy is a better word for this deeper happiness. Most people find this transforming joy through religion (another one of my favourite blogging subjects).

Our real-life situations are never ideal: we have relationship problems, we face work-related pressure in the office, we have financial worries and we are concerned about our future. These non-ideal circumstances make us "unhappy". But if we look closer at it, they all stem from a need to control what is in essentially beyond our control. We can never dictate how others should behave towards us, nor can we predict what tomorrow will bring. All we can do is do what we do, to the best of our abilities, to continuously grow and learn with each moment of experience, be it a painful or a pleasurable one.

Some people find happiness in family life--the bustle of kids and large gatherings with relatives. Some like yours truly find happiness in simplicity and restraint--not owning much and not desiring extravagantly. The simple and ordinary things in life already make me ecstatic. An insightful sentence from a book, a sublime movement from a sonata, a beautifully executed piece of cinematography from a movie--all these things give me enormous pleasure and joy. I certainly do not need the peak experiences that come from bungee-jumping or careering at high-speed in a fancy sports-car.

Every word I write is an emanation of joy--the joy of being able to think, write and express. Every time I write, something is created out of nothing: suddenly a thought from my mind is now lodged in your head. Isn't that magic?

When one has an opportunity to create magic everyday, one has absolutely no excuse to be unhappy.

A Different Kind of Writing

This blog is almost 14 years old. Last night I stayed up late reading some of the old entries that I wrote when I was living in Indonesia. I have to admit that I kind of enjoyed reading them. It is quite interesting to see how much my thoughts and my life have evolved over this period of time.

During that time, I blogged daily, mostly from the cybercafe. All entries were written within 1 hour--the block of access time that I usually paid for. It was a simple, carefree and happy life. I'd loved the freedom of living alone and the daily discoveries of life in a foreign land.

Fast-forward to today. I have not set food in Indonesia for perhaps 8 years. I have kind of lost a bit of my wanderlust. Which probably explains my hiatus in blogging. For the past 2 years, the only travel out of the country that I made were business trips to Bangladesh, of all places. Life has been very different for me.

I'm glad that I have this blog as a depository of my personal ideas and experiences. Rereading some of my old blog entries inspires me to continue writing. To be writing consistently, the activity has to be woven into one's daily routine. I had one in Indonesia because my life was very well-regulated then. I was living alone in a hotel room and life was simple. I had likened it to living in a monk's cell. I was like a monk, spending my days in study, observation and deep contemplation of life.

I've come to believe over the years that one should always tackle life head-on. To face whatever challenges that one is presented with strength and fortitude. All of life's experiences are, to use Ram Dass's words, "grist for the mill". We experience what we experience because of the way we see the world and the way we respond to our experiences. Every experience is in a sense perfect.

I've always enjoyed writing. It is the best way to know oneself. I called it "writhink". I still keep a longhand journal, even though the entries are sparser than what they used to be. I've never been overly attached to periods of happiness nor be troubled too much the occasional sadness. Equanimity has always been my attitude towards life. I enjoy all the good things in life and I've also come to realize that one doesn't need a lot of money to enjoy life. Most of the good things in life are actually simple and cheap.

An old university classmate I met recently asked me whether I still write. He is not aware of my blog but he remembered that I used write short-stories and had even won a writing prize before. I jokingly told him that I write code mostly nowadays because it is a much more profitable enterprise.

Which is actually not far from the truth. Over the past decade I've been writing a lot of software. It is different from what I used to do in Singapore and Indonesia, which was mainly technical selling and consulting. I was never a software developer, even though I had a good conceptual grasp of software technologies. But since I returned to Malaysia, I have been writing software. I suppose it is another form of "writing". I type instructions, constructing elaborate logical structures to achieve certain applications and effects. There's artistry and skill involved.

To write--be it a grammatical sentence or a line of computer code--is to make things happen. The software I wrote certainly did make things happen, albeit in an understated way. Even though it didn't make me a fortune, it did support me over all these years. And they were difficult years indeed when I had to divide my time between work and caring for my Parkinson-stricken dad.

This year marks a slightly different chapter in my life. Perhaps I'll write more frequently on this blog. Perhaps not. Whatever it is, I will be writing. For to write is to live. I've also been toying with the idea of writing in a different language--and I'm not talking about a different programming language. :-) The thought is intriguing indeed. At the meantime, whether it is code or text, I will certainly continue reading, writing, and thinking. And the thought of being able to continue doing these things makes me, momentarily at least, happy.

Lunar Rhythms of the Cosmic Fugue

I was drinking last night with some old friends at a pub in Damansara Jaya. We've always had an affection for that area because we all used to work there. I also lived there a many years as a student and when I was working in KL. The newly rebuilt Atria Mall is a grand remake of the previous one which used to house a Parkson Supermarket and some small boutique stalls.

As we all grow older we see things in a different perspective. Once we were all young, ambitious and eager for adventure. Now we've all mellowed and are appreciative of a peaceful and stable life. We tend to have less illusions.

Today is Chinese New Year's eve. The usual barrage of fireworks and firecrackers is starting to fill the night air. I can see gratitude in the faces of my old friends last night--mostly for being reasonably healthy and still able to catch up with old friends on festive occasions. We talk about some of our less fortunate acquaintances who had succumbed to cancer, stroke, heart attack or accidents. We all wake up in the morning with a great sense of gratitude.

The more philosophical among us would come to see that life is transient. We are but momentary wavelets rising and falling on the surface of a restless ocean of which the universe is. The universe comes alive through us, to experience itself--like awakening from a dream--only to fall back into the void of sleep before rising again in another form. Each life is a momentary flowering of consciousness. A spark of the divine fire.

On Chinese New Year, we cherish the ties of friendship and kinship and at least once a year, we renew these bonds and reaffirm each other of our faith keeping the divine spark within ourselves alive. Our flames get rekindled slightly, recharged by the warmth of each other's glow.

And that's how we carry on: dwindling fires, needing that occasional boost of air to reignite ourselves. It is the cycle of time that makes us realize life's faith and futility. A new generation would rise up and dares to dream bigger than us. They too shall soar and reach for their visionary peaks. Some shall grasp them momentarily and bask in their splendour. It is the birthright of every generation to conquer, as is the deathright of every waning soul to philosophize.

And on the cusp of another lunar new year, we wish each other well for our journey ahead: some waxing and some waning, like the interminable moon, like the eternal dance of existence itself, each but a single tenuous strand of notes within that larger tapestry of the cosmic fugue.

The Dance of Existence

Let me continue my meditations on this blog. It is always a joy to find time to write, though such opportunities do not come often enough. And since it is the last day 2016, it is a good time to reflect back on the year that's passed and to look forward to the coming one.

My last blog entry talks about creativity as a natural impulse of the universe. Destruction is part of the creative process. I've always believed that a life is like a small impulse of energy injected into material form at the moment of birth. The rest is just a process of unfoldment. The music starts playing at the moment of birth, and we the dancers improvise our steps as we go along.

Sometimes we dance well; sometimes we are completely out of whack with the rhythm. As the song goes, "guilty feet have got no rhythm" (line from Careless Whisper, a tribute to George Michael who passed away 5 days ago). To live is to dance to the music of life.

We are 'guilty' every time we are not true to ourselves. To be true to ourselves is to listen to that inner music that defines us. Everyone is born with a theme--like the soundtrack of a movie and one must know one's own very well. With each passing year, these things are clearer and clearer to me. In the end, everything is an expression of this musical energy. I've alluded to this in a few previous blog posts, e.g. here and here.

People listen to music in different ways. The young tend to be attracted by rhythm and lyrics. In general, people like 'melodious' music. Any song with a catchy tune is considered good. But melody is just one aspect of music appreciation. Music can be appreciated in many different levels.

I even enjoy reading music. Yes, I find pleasure in reading sheet music, especially those of classical music. Even now, I have 2 volumes of Beethoven's piano sonatas within arms-length. Tracing the notes while listening to the music gives me a better understanding and a better appreciation of the music. There's so much beauty in music and so much wisdom to distill from it.

Our taste in music is actually a good indicator of the inner music that drives us. Which is why musical taste is so varied. Certain types of music are harmonious with our soul; other types we find somehow incongruent. That's our personality. That personality--that resistance to certain things, and obsession with others--is the karma that we have to work out within our lifetime.

Life is a series of attractions and repulsions. This dynamic drives our everyday life. A melody moves from note to note, creating tensions and resolutions by cleverly moving through notes that are harmonious and discordant. The melody finds rest in the tonic of its key. It begins and ends there. In between is a journey, like the Hero's Journey, of which our lives are expressions of.

As 2016 ends and 2017 begins, We start another journey within a journey. We try to follow the cadence of our inner music and dance to its rhythm. We are compelled to dance as long as the music is playing. And in the end we'll realize that the dance is the whole purpose of existence; and we are all dancing, with the planets, the stars and the galaxies, within this pulsing universe that is but a gigantic Cosmic Fugue.

Supernova of the Soul

During the day, drowned in the incessant flow of sensory input we tend to forget ourselves, blocking the inner light of our soul which shines through the intellectual lens of the mind. But in the wee hours of the morning, like now, the mind is especially clear. Thoughts spring up from the depths of the mind unimpeded, untainted in the glory of their inherent wisdom.

I've been awakened early by a stubborn mosquito which had been buzzing around my head, rudely dragging me out of my peaceful slumber. Unable to sleep again, and being a bit too early for me to start the day, I had wandered back to my grossly neglected blog. And in the sacred silence of early dawn, thoughts began the flow.

How remarkable is this creative wellspring that lives within us! How unceasingly resourceful it is! I've always believed that if we are capable of allowing our minds to be quiet, creative thoughts will naturally arise. It is the inherent tendency of nature to be creative and we are but its instruments of expression.

As plants grow from the their nourishing soil, bearing their beautiful bounty of fruits and flowers, so does the human mind taps into the silent womb of creativity, bringing forth all the possibilities of life. To live is to be a true and authentic vessel of this creative force. It is this vital force, this sacred flame that drives us and make us who we are.

How true we are to the commands of this inner voice depends on our willingness to listen. The world draws us out into its many distractions; we end up having our energies dissipated, serving the many false gods of the material world.

Even the simple act of procreation is but nature's gross form of creativity. Form materializes, form dissolves. And this eternal dance of the universe continues with its myriad expressions. Nature cannot help herself but to create and in the process destroys existing forms so that newer ones emerge.

Every atom in our body are forged in the cauldron of stars. Stars explode and die, spilling its rich ingredients into the interstellar space for suns and planets and ultimately biological life to emerge.

We are all stars awaiting our supernovae. What kind of creative ingredients do we cook within our soul so that our inevitable extinction become the source greater possibilities? We just need to listen. And in that listening, we hear the stirrings of a supernova.

The Fuels of Happiness

Today is Chinese New Year's eve and as always it is a time for rest and reflection for me. Most people will be away for an entire week and it is a great time to catch up on work. A certain peace descends on the city after everyone has finally made their way back to their hometowns.

It is a time I relish. It feels like I have the city all to myself. I was at the mamak cafe just now, enjoying a cup of coffee and the last chapter or Orhan Pamuk's The New Life.

Why, one might ask, indulge in such a melancholic read on the eve of Chinese New Year when every household is so boisterously happy and the expansive night skies are punctuated with bursts of celebratory fireworks?

Books make me happy, even a sad one. Every book, no matter its subject or genre, makes you a better person. To finish a book, having digested and integrated every thought and idea of the author into one's system is a great feeling. It is happiness of the most sublime kind.

Reading and writing to me are sacred activities on par with prayer and meditation. These are activities of the heart and mind and one finds tremendous happiness when these inner faculties of ours are engaged in lively interplay.

The pleasure of a writer, like that of a dancer, is expression. Allowing the vibrations of the soul to seek their outward potency. The reader on the other hand, derives his pleasure from absorption and integration of ideas and emotions into his inner being. It is deeply spiritual. And spirituality is but a form of yearning that is inherent and primeval in every individual, finding outward expression in the multitude of organized religions that we see in the world today.

Let me stay clear of the subject of religion for now as I have written a lot about it in the past and still have many unexpressed thoughts on it that I might want to articulate at a latter occasion.

And let's go back to the happy occasion of Chinese New Year. The ethos of the Chinese is growth and expansion. Gloom is anathema to the spirit of Chinese New Year. To move forward with a healthy sense of confidence and optimism is how one should lead one's life. Attaining prosperity and material success in this world is the happiness one seeks as a Chinese.

Such is the positive mindset of the Chinese that drives them towards such great heights of achievements. It is on occasions like these that I reconnect with my ethnic virtues and harness its motivational power. The outer motivation is the sunshine that makes the plant rise skywards. And my spiritual quests are like the invisible reach of its roots that seek nourishment deep within the ground. Both are fuels for the happiness of the plant.

Many New Days maketh a New Year

As always, a blog post before the year ends. A brief moment of reflection, a breather and a respite, an opportunity to reconstitute myself to face the challenges of another year.

How often do we look towards a new year with hope and optimism. We make resolutions and vow to be a better person. We dive gloriously into the new year, only to be sucked into its thick currents of turmoil and challenges and then emerge at the end of it, panting and bruised. We take a deep breath, and the whole cycle repeats again.

I've always had this resolve to be a better person today compared to who I was yesterday. Every day brings fresh experiences to us which shapes us closer to perfection. That is the paradigm that I choose to view life. Life is a gymnasium for the perfection of the soul.

A new day to me is more significant than a new year. We should be celebrating New Days everyday, so that we don't have to wait a whole year before we seriously reexamine ourselves again. What a miracle it is to wake up every morning and to find that we are still alive!

There's actually no guarantee that we'll be able to regain control of our mind and body again once we succumb to sleep. Yet we conduct our daily affairs, making appointments and such with the confidence that we'll wake up the next day alive. How strange it is!

Every night we die and are reborn again the following morning. So be grateful for the "reincarnation" that is granted us everyday. There is no reason why we cannot wake up and do better than we did the day before. We already have the lessons of yesterday fully digested and we wake up with the accumulated wisdom of an entire life behind us.

The New Year is nothing but a fresh series of New Days. If we falter for one day, we can pick ourselves up again and continue afresh. Dive into the New Year like you always do: with hope, with joy, with wonder and optimism. But remember: take it a day at a time. And celebrate each New Day like how you would this New Year.

The Edge of Epiphany

"This is the very perfection of man: to find out his own imperfections" - St Augustine

For a while I've been wanting to write. There have been too many things hovering in my mind and I want to put them into words so that I may transcend their apparent confusion and see them in the light of understanding. Furthermore, it is year-end and Christmas day--usually the time where I take stock of things, where I am now and where I will I be heading.

Or perhaps I'm just looking for an opportunity to rant. There have been things that disturbed me lately and I'd like to get them off my chest. As I write this, Christmas fireworks are going off in the night, redolent of many forgotten festivities of my childhood years.

I write these words here in my hometown--the house where I grew up in. The same table where I sat, poring over interminable pages of tedious textbooks, in preparation for many a dreaded exams.

I've come a long way since, and yet strangely, I'm kind of back to where I began. I was a boy, seeking the Truth. I am now a man with a glimpse of the Truth--like the astronaut Bowman of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as he make the final descend into the mysterious alien Monolith ("My God, it's full of stars!").

All of my life's pursuits--the science, the history, the travels and my entrepreneurial quests, are but attempts to grasp the Eternal Mystery. Everything I do has been, at its core, spiritual in nature. That is the inescapable conclusion that I've come to realize.

I see around me people who have found their calling in the religion of their choice. They have their moments of epiphany and then latch on to what they believe is the Ultimate Answer, one which gives them a purpose and a compass for living. Each believe that they are on the right path, and sometimes exclusively so.

My life's experiences have taught me that at every point in your life, you are like a mountaineer who has scaled what you think is the highest pinnacle, only to find, beyond it, are peaks much higher, with promises of even grander views.

Religion is like that. It provides you with the paths, the tracks, the ropes and harnesses to secure you up the mountaintop. You are promised great views from that vantage points, vistas that will bring tears of ecstasy to your eyes. And yes they often do. The trouble is, they tend to make you stay rooted to the very spot. You look down and yell at the people below you: "Over here, over here!". The view here is stunning. Follow my path; use this track; avoid those pitfalls.

Little do you know, that the journey has only just begun. How little have you seen. How easily deceived you have been with the little epiphanies that you've managed to stumble upon--like an astronomer who raves on the grandeur of the solar system without realizing the greater immensity of stars, galaxies and universes out there.

How important should religion be? As important as the scaffolding that enables a skyscraper to be built. The end-goal is the skyscraper, not the scaffolding. One must not lose sight of the forest for the trees.

What religion should teach us is humility. Humility in the face of awe. Humility in the light of insight. The humility to admit that we don't know more than the next person before us. The idolater is no better or no worse than the one who prostates himself before an invisible Almighty.

We are ultimately, all fellow travellers on the spiritual path. There are still many twists and turns on the path ahead. And when you reach the edge of an apparent epiphany, be extra careful: it could be a very slippery slope.

Reflections on Simplicity

As always, Chinese New Year's Eve is a great time for me to pause and reflect on things. The city streets are so quiet today. It is great to be left alone in the city, far away from the madness of small towns and kampungs during this time of festive madness.

The quietness of the city and the look of joy on everyone's faces makes one feel very relaxed and at ease. I spent the day in the office, troubleshooting some technical problems. One makes great headway when working in such a relaxed atmosphere. The best time to enjoy a holiday is the day before it actually begins: the anticipation of freedom, the guilt and pleasure of slowing down coupled with a work-can-wait attitude is as close to real happiness as one can get.

I've been going to bed and waking up early lately. I like life that way: to keep life simple and strip things to their bare essentials. You need to start with simplicity always. Simplicity is the key for life has a way of getting more and more complicated over time.

To simplify is to keep track of one's original goals. Life diverts and distracts us from our real intentions. Time entangles us in its many obsessions. Complexity is the devil that lurks in every corner. Complexity kills.

To be simple is to live--to taste life in its rawness, in its most elemental form. Naked came I into this world, and of course, naked must I go out. The naked simplicity that is life, brings out our true nature. So much of life is avoidance: of pain, of fears and of uncertainty. To acknowledge simplicity is to do our best and let nature take its course.

Simple isn't it? We'll see. Let that proverbial happy and prosperous new year begin!

My Father's Golden Treasury

My most treasured book is one that I inherited from my late father; he passed away peacefully in his sleep at the age of 82 last Sunday.

The title of this small hardcover book is, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, selected and arranged by Francis Turner Palgrave. It was one of my father's textbooks for his English class in Standard VIII, 1950.

Neatly scrawled on the first page is his name in blue ink, the date of purchase: 21/12/50 and the price $1.75. The pages are all yellowed but the binding is still sturdy. This classic anthology of poems has been a favourite of mine ever since my secondary school days. It is from this volume that I was introduced to English poetry and developed a love for the major Romantic poets: Byron, Shelley, Worthsworth and Keats.

When I was in University, this volume was my constant bedside companion. I would often read a poem or two before going to sleep. These timeless English verses inspired me a lot and became my springboard for exploring some of the modern poets like W.H Auden, Dylan Thomas, Yeats and TS Eliot. I remember spending many happy hours in the university library, scouring the literature shelves, flitting from one musty tome to another, immersed in the insatiable pleasure and beauty of the written word.

I have my father to thank for my love of books. In his younger days, he was fond of buying books, amassing a small collection which I had the pleasure of exploring during my childhood days. In his later years, with increasing family commitments, he became more prudent with his spending. Still he would bring me during school holidays to bookshops along Jalan TAR in KL, where he would indulge me with one or two books of my selection but very rarely did I see him buying any for himself.

This is how I would like to remember my father--always self-sacrificing for the family. Yes, he was a stern and strict parent (like all parents in those days), but he inculcated many values in me that I'm thankful of: discipline, diligence, care and prudence.

And as I type these words, my father's volume of The Golden Treasury sits quietly on the desk beside my laptop, an ever-present reminder to the times we spent together, and the many life lessons that he passed on to me and the many more that I have to learn on my own, as I grow older.

I remember when I was small how my father used to speak fondly of his English teacher. Imitating his bombastic style of teaching, he would quote a fragment of poetry: "...a violet by a mossy stone. Half hidden from the eye" -- which only much later did I recognize was a line from one of Wordsworth's famous "Lucy" poems.

In the last decade of his life, my father struggled with Parkinson's disease. It was one of the reasons why I decided to quit my life in Indonesia, where I had so many beautiful friends and experiences, to return home.

Over the years, as his strength faded and his dementia worsened, it became difficult for him to coherently express himself. Neither newspapers, books nor television programs interested him anymore. We tried our best to keep his mind active and occupied to impede the retardation of his mental faculties.

My father was quite fond of watching movies in his younger days. War movies, especially those on the Japanese occupation were his favourites As a child I had watched many of such movies together with him. There's one particular war movie though that was an all-time favourite of his: David Lean's award winning A Bridge Across the River Kwai.

In his later years, whenever I put on the River Kwai DVD, and when the famous Colonel Bogey whistling march tune came one, his face would lit up. After a brief 3 hours, all signs of fatigue and dementia would be gone as he became completely engrossed with the adventures of Alec Guinness and William Holden in the tropical jungles of Burma. The River Kwai DVD served as my secret medication to revitalize--albeit so briefly--my father's mind. It was one of those rare moments when I say a flicker of joy lit up in his eyes.

On other occasions, I would try to engage him with recollections of his schooldays. Once when I brought out and showed him his 1951 copy of the Golden Treasury, there was moment of fond recognition. Thumbing through the yellowed pages, I tried to trigger his recollection of that "violet by a mossy stone" phrase from the Wordsworth poem, but was unsuccessful. Instead he surprised me with another fragment that either I had not heard from him before, or I had not recognized previously: "I die, I faint, I fail!".

Having read all the Romantic poets, the line sounded familiar to me but I was not sure from which particular poem it was from. I suspected Shelley. True enough, upon flipping through the pages of the Golden Treasury, I found the poem: Shelley's Lines to An Indian Air. It was a love poem, and the last stanza goes:

O lift me from the grass!
I die, I faint, I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;
O! press it close to thine again
Where it will break at last.

I bade my last farewell and cremated my father last Tuesday. The thought that I had spent the last decade living together with him and caring for him daily, gives me some small measure of comfort. Perhaps, growing up, there were many areas that I had failed him. For that I seek his forgiveness, and I shall continue to strive and do better.

We are all creatures of our upbringing. "The Child is the father of the Man". Like it or not, everything I think and do carries the echoes of my father's beliefs and values, ingrained in me as a child. We are all fugues strung together by the voices of our ancestors. "Music when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory".

May my father's soul now rest blissfully in some untrodden way. He has climbed Shelley's last steps of Time. His copy of the Golden Treasury--my secular bible--that I clutch dearly to me now shall continue to be a constant source of solace and wisdom, helping me to find strength in what remains behind, in years that, hopefully bring forth the philosophic mind, promised by Wordsworth.

A Gymnasium in Paradise

I had always imagined paradise as a kind of library. - Jorge Luis Borges

The most enduring image that has lingered in my mind from the movie Minority Report (starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg) was the final scene where the pre-cogs were seen in a some kind of rustic cottage, surrounded by piles of books, blissfully reading. I thought to myself then, heaven must look like that--filled with wonderful books and all everyone does is read all day, and all night.

Reading is one of the greatest pleasures of life, and among the cheapest too. People like to complain that books are expensive. No they are not. The price of a paperback book is probably about the amount you'll spend on a typical outing with friends at Starbucks. And how many books does an average person read a year?

You'll be considered quite an avid reader if you manage to read a book a month. If the average paperback costs RM50.00, that amounts to only about RM600.00 a year spent on books. I'm sure your smartphone (which you'll probably change every year) costs more than that.

And don't forget, you can also read for free at the local library. Not to mention all the free e-books that you can also download to your favorite reading device. No other equivalent pleasure in life comes that cheap.

Why don't people read more then? In Malaysia, if you ask someone what he or she is reading now, you'll probably get a blank stare. Ask them what TV series they are watching now or which nightspot do they hangout these days, they'll probably light up immediately.

Most people consider reading boring. It takes a lot of effort to focus page after page of words. Reading is hard work. Reading is passe. Why not surf the web? Isn't it a much more efficient way of absorbing information in today's fast paced world?

Yes and no. I don't disagree that the internet is a great source of information and knowledge. One can probably find out more up-to-date information about a certain subject much more quickly from the web. I'm a great fan of Wikipedia and Youtube. One can learn whatever one desires to learn these days. All knowledge is available on one's fingertips, if only one is willing to invest the time to absorb them.

No, surfing the Net does not provide one important benefit one gets from reading printed dead-tree pages: the practice of concentration. Reading a book from cover to cover, tracing the authors thread of thought one word at a time, watching his ideas and concepts take shape sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph is like a kind of meditation, with words acting almost like prayer beads.

It is the hard work of slowly scanning line after line of monotonous text, lumbering along page by page at snail's pace that provides the necessary exercise that our mental faculties need. The book is the mind's exercise machine. One reads to sharpen one's mind. Reading keeps the brain sizzling with healthy electro-chemical activity, forging fresh connections among neurons, stimulating neuro-transmission across synapses.

Reading keeps one mentally fit. And I can imagine Borges, who passed away in 1986, blissfully working out at the gymnasium of the mind in Paradise.

The Nectar of the Material World

The Chinese Lunar New Year eve, when screeching fireworks blaze the skies and the blasts of firecrackers punctuate the silence of the night heralding another round of gaudy crimson celebrations, is my usual time for some self-reflection.

I have some Beethoven sonata playing in the background to put me into a reflective mood. Beethoven always brings me back to my childhood days, of bright morning sunshine bustling with birds, of thick jungles and citadel-like rubber trees where we played our childhood games--ah, that wellspring of innocence and happiness that has sustained me throughout my life.

When I was an engineering student at a local university here in PJ, I spent a lot of time reading and writing poetry. My bible, which I kept on my bedside, was Palgrave's Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language--a small hardcover volume which I inherited from my father. It was this volume of poetry that introduced me to the world of poetry; my favourite was the Romantic poets--Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats. I still have the volume with me, even now, beside me as I type these lines on the computer. It remains my most prized possession.

I've been nourished by so many books that I've read. Reading has been and continues to be the greatest pleasure of my life. I make no apologies nor pretensions for being a bookish person. I'm as hedonistic as any one of my friends who chase the pleasure of material things and of the flesh--only that my pleasures are those of the mind. I find pleasure in learning, and that pleasure, to me, is an end in itself.

Let me make it clear: the pleasures of the mind are not superior to the pleasures of the flesh. All pleasures contain the seeds of pain. (or they wouldn't be called pleasures, would they?) You just need to know where these seeds lie and deal with them wisely when they sprout.

There should not be a conflict between the mind and the body, between saintliness and worldliness, between intellectualism and pragmatism. Everyone is born with a tendency towards one, or the other or if one is lucky, an aptitude and appreciation for both.

The spirit of the Chinese New Year is growth, abundance and a hopeful positive attitude towards what's ahead. It is an unabashed celebration of the material life. The school of the material world is where one hones one's mastery of karma yoga. The pleasures of the material world are explicit and beguiling; the painful lessons, unrestrained and merciless.

In the material world, one learns quickly but one also learns the hard way. We must never be blindsided by its pleasures, nor be deterred by its pain. It is the interplay of pain and pleasure that creates wisdom.

Let's all celebrate the coming Year of the Horse, let's wish ourselves great wealth, health and abundance. Let's reflect again at the end of the year and see, how much wisdom we have distilled from our life experiences, and drink the intellectual pleasure of its nectar.

The Cycle of Creation

A moment of reflection before the year ends. Stop. No cliche remarks about how fast time flies, please.

That shall be my New Year resolution (if any is needed at all): avoid cliches. It is difficult to be fresh and original everytime in whatever we do or say. But it is the nature of life to be constantly reinventing and regenerating itself.

Life is defined by regeneration. The old withers away to be replaced by the fresh and young, sprouting from seeds of hope. The universe is creative. On one end of the spectrum, it is creativity at the physical level: reproduction and procreation. On the other end, artistic and scientific creations.

To cease creating is to die. To work is to create. Everyday I strife to create something new. The mind continues learning because it is like a tree that draws in water and nutrients from its surrounding to produce new branches, leaves and flowers. Nature is constantly creating and recreating itself.

It is our duty to continue learning and creating. The businessman creates new opportunities for material wealth to manifest; the poet puts new combinations of words and imageries to evoke deep thoughts and feelings; the engineer imagines new structures, to be shaped out of matter and energy to accomplish ever more challenging tasks; the painter fuses colours and forms to unleash fresh visions of the world.

We honour life by creative work. All work is creative. The housewife who cooks and sweeps the floor is an artist whose masterpiece is a harmonious household, filled with happy kids and a loving husband, brimming with a love that is like sunshine.

We welcome the new year, like an artist welcomes the sight of a fresh canvas. Smell the fresh paint on the palette, pick up your brush, mix your colours and apply the first stroke on the blank surface:

Let there be light.

Thoughts on Christmas

It's Christmas Eve and I'm spending some quiet moments listening to some Chopin Nocturnes. It's a good time to blog and because it's Christmas, let's talk about Christ.

I must admit that I am a big fan of Jesus Christ. But I've always felt that the true spirit of his teachings has been obscured by centuries of man-made dogma, perpetuated by the Church.

To me, Jesus is a mystical figure; he fasted for 40 days and 40 nights in the desert after being baptized by John the Baptist. John himself lived on locust and wild honey. Both of them were semi-ascetics, probably Essenes or practicing something similar. All religions have mystical roots. The Prophet Muhammad himself was approached by the Archangel Gabriel while he was meditating alone in a cave. Both men, like the Buddha and many other spiritual leaders, gained their insights through solitude--the wellspring of spirituality.

The Gospels emphasize a lot of Jesus' miracles, which I do not find that very interesting. I was more impressed by his charisma, how he taught in parables, which made his teachings easily understood by the country folks, his compassion for the sick and the poor, his non-judgemental acceptance of 'sinners'--adulterers, prostitutes and tax collectors ("Let he who is without sin cast the first stone").

He eschewed material riches and famously said that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God". And of course, his greatest exhortation was to demand that we, instead of demanding an eye for eye, a tooth for a tooth, love our enemies instead, and to "turn the other cheek".

And of course: Forgiveness ("Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"). Forgiveness is the beginning of healing. Forgiveness breaks the endless cycle of karma. Forgiveness dissolves the ego and let Love shine through. Forgiveness is letting go, and allowing the moment to be as it is.

Jesus was a great man, and they have been many more before and after him. The message is the same. But followers who interpret the teachings of these great men tend to hero-worship and focus on rules, rituals and dogmas. All of our religions have so much redundancy--that if we 'zip' their doctrines into their raw, essential bits and bytes, they contain the same kernel of truth.

But we are not interested in that. We love the soap opera of creation, judgement, reward and punishment. We long for the perpetuation of our small selfs--afterlives, better rebirths and eternal lives. We jostle and claim for superiority of our adopted creed.

True religion needs no words. It is there. It is within. It is here. It is now.
Nothing more needs to be said.

The Bounty of Knowledge

Listening to Mozart on a rainy Saturday afternoon, sitting idly under my bedroom window, catching shafts of light through its curtains, dipping in and out of a Paul Theroux book--such are the simple pleasures that make life worthwhile. Rare pleasures that I indulge in on weekends.

Weekends provide a much-welcome respite from the punishing exertions of the workday week. However my weekends are often filled with leftover work--work that requires special care and insight from a state of mind unatainable on a typical day at the office.

I'm not in love with work, nor do I indulge in it as a form of escapism. Like a professional footballer who needs to play regularly to be match-fit, I welcome work as an opportunity to keep myself mentally fit at all times. Too much work induces fatigue; too little work makes one mentally sluggish. Like any athlete, one needs to find the right balance.

So much of life is seeking this elusive balance: between work and play; between pain and pleasure--the psychological piston that drives one towards one's goals in life, pulverising obstacles along the way.

Perhaps I work a little bit too much, often with too little rewards. That's fine. I've mentioned it elsewhere in my blog before: my dictum is that no work is ever wasted--one's reward from work comes from the knowledge one gets in the process. It is what keeps me going all these years. It is the bounty of knowledge that I relish in, at the end of a hard week's work.

The Quest for Understanding

I've always been interested in science and mathematics. It was my passion in these two subjects that drove me to take up engineering in university, which then led me, quite by accident, to a career in IT.

A career-minded person, I never was. Engineering was sort of a compromise: it gave me an opportunity to learn more of the sciences (or at least the practical side of it) and at the same time, it was a professional qualification that put me in good stead in the job market.

I had chosen electrical engineering because it was, to me, the most mathematical among all the engineering branches. I wanted to understand all the latest discoveries of science in the field of quantum physics. Mastering the applied physics of the electron (which is what electrical engineering is, in essence) was a stepping stone towards my ultimate goal: the fundamental nature of the universe itself.

I first fell in love with science and mathematics when I joined the science stream upon entering Form 4, at the age of 16. At that time we we required to study physics, chemistry, biology, modern mathematics and additional mathematics. I was especially enthralled by additional mathematics. Through "add maths" (as we called it then), I was exposed to the beautiful world of calculus, algebra, trigonometry and analytic geometry.

Mathematics gave me a glimpse of the enormous power of the human mind. I gave me great satisfaction to know that through a sequence of logically consistent steps, one could work out astounding conclusions about the nature of the universe. Mathematics, the language of science, was to me the key towards understanding the universe. If was as if God spoke in mathematics.

Yes, deep down inside, my desire to learn mathematics and science was driven by an existential need: the need to know who we are, where we are going and what is the meaning of our existence. In other words, it was a religious quest.

What others had sought through religion, I responded through a love for mathematics and science. Through these subjects, I endeavoured to catch a glimpse of the beauty that was in God's mind.

Nature never looked the same again after I had the opportunity to penetrate its inner workings through science. The entire universe, to me, was pulsating with with atoms, molecules, light and energy--all dancing in accordance with physical laws that could be beautifully described by mathematics. The knowledge of it gave me such great power and insight--it had the life-shattering fervour of a religious conversion.

 That was the start of my journey, which had continued until this day. My pursuit of scientific understanding led me--through a variety of popular science and New Agey books--to eastern religions and western philosophy. The Tao of Physics, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and A History of Western Philosophy were the pivotal texts that hastened me on my path.

Over the years, I've tried to expound some of the personal beliefs and philosophy that I've gleaned from my spiritual quest on this blog.  The journey is still an on-going one, and it shall be so until the day I cease to exist on this earth.

A Decade Ago

What a pleasure it is to have finally found the time and space to post this blog entry! How swiftly time passes--without me realizing it, this blog is already 10 years old!  What has happened in my life this past decade? This is probably a good opportunity for me to do some reflection.

I started this blog when blogging was just becoming the latest craze on the Internet. In 2003, the American invasion of Iraq had just begun; everyone in cyberspace was debating about the justness of the war. Everyone was "warblogging".

In Malaysia then, Jeff Ooi and Oon Yeoh were the first serious socio-political bloggers. Jeff Ooi was against the war and Oon Yeoh was on the side of the Americans. Both their blogs had a huge following.

Inspired by the these bloggers, I too started writing, and my first blog entry was posted on the 19th of March 2003. It consisted of only two cryptic lines:

Writing this from my office in Jakarta.
Love the city. Love the isolation.

I was warming up :-)  And yes, I was living in Jakarta then--perhaps the happiest period in my life.  Unlike now, I had time on my hands. Time, which I thought could be put to good use by blogging.

Initially, my blog entries, like everyone else's, were mainly comments on currrent events. Ocassionally, I would be inspired to post some philosophical musings like this entry that was posted on April 16, 2003: A Meditation on Time.  Entries like this were later to become my specialty, mainly because I found that I could write on such topics with reasonable ease. And the writing process itself was curiously therapeutic to me.

Of course, I had a lot to write about my life in Indonesia then: my observations about Indonesian life, especially the delights of Jakarta. I was and still is extremely fond of Indonesia and Indonesians. I found that I could blend in very easily with the locals and I was thoroughly entralled by the history and culture of the country. There was so much to discover and learn. There was so much to savour. Everyday was an adventure. I wrote so many entries like this, this and this, attempting to understand my love for the city and the country. It was a love affair that lingered until today.

I blogged from the office and on weekends, at the cybercafe. I was staying long-term at budget hotel then. Those were the days when Internet access in hotels was still considered a  bit of a luxury and Wi-Fi technology was just being introduced to the market. Internet access was difficult and slow. But for some reason, that was the time I was blogging most prolifically.

My years in Jakarta were like an exile for me. It was an exile from the corporate world of Singapore and Malaysia, from the ceasely barrage of e-mails and con-calls--the lifeblood of multinationals. I wanted some time to reflect, some peace and quiet to look back on my life.  And after that period of exile, I decided to return to Malaysia, to start a different chapter in my life. This new chapter spanned a decade but that is another story for another blog post.