An Exposition on Explosions and Implosions

I had lunch with Myra at Centrepoint and advised her to use her energy wisely. She has so much talent, potential and self-confidence. My only fear for her is that she is like some combustable fuel prone to exploding and burning uncontrollably. 

All that energy has be harnessed carefully; let the explosion happen in a controlled manner in a piston chamber. She needs to be an engine. An engine is a man-made structure for harnessing the power latent in fuel.

In the news today is something sad: they finally found the debris of the submersible vehicle, Titan which had been lost for the past 5 days in the ocean near the wreckage of the Titanic. Apparently there was an implosion, which had instantaneously killed its 5 passengers. It had crushed like a beer can.

Life is fragile. We could explode from the youthful recklessness or implode from the pressures of society. How we use our energy and strengthen our physical and emotional structure is important in preventing an catastrophic failures due to explosions or implosions.

When we are young, we are full of idealism. We want to protest against every perceived injustice. We want to fight enemies and conquer new territories. We want to experience life to the fullest. We are born to express and experience and in that experiencing, we strengthen our mental and physical frame, making us wiser and more resilient.

Life is a game of navigation between extremes. We strive to find the right balance between safety and danger. How much risk should we take in life? Too little risk means very little gain and not stretching oneself enough. But how far should we go? Pain is a good gauge.  We stretch until we start feeling some pain and then we stop. Without sufficient stress and strain, the structure doesn't change. Too much of it could cause the structure to give way.

Balance is often boring. It reeks of mediocrity. Caution is like a curse. We like to worship individuals who are willing to take great risks and applaud them when they succeed. Heroes who scale dizzying heights and dive to great depths. When they do not explode or implode, they are celebrated.  

I've come to appreciate the steadily burning candle flame, not the exploding fireworks, which our culture so adores. I have an aromatic candle burning now in front of me as I type these words. It burns at the right pace, using up just the right amount of wax to release its lavender fragrance into my apartment. 

I guess I'm through with all the explosions and implosions of life. Nowadays, I'm happy being that candle, burning slowly, illuminating some small corner of the universe.

Being and Feelings

While I was walking up from the carpark of the Da Men Mall just now, I thought I would write about "being" and "feeling". That I think would be the title of the blog article (I often don't know what the title is until I've written the last line). But today will be different. 

We all know what makes us unhappy. We say that we 'feel' sad. Maybe someone you love died. Or you lost your job, had a car accident or having a misunderstanding with your spouse. These things bother us and make us feel miserable. But we also know that, every unhappy state passes. It is a 'feeling' that comes and goes. All feelings fade away naturally unless you purposely rekindle them.

Feelings are by definition ephemeral--like clouds in the sky. They will drift in and drift out. People who are in depression are however in a slightly different state. They are stuck in a rut--like a buggy computer program that ran into an infinite loop. But even then, depressions don't last forever--either because the body that's suffering from it gives way or changes in circumstances alter the body chemistry enabling the person to snap out of the depressive state.

Depression is just a runaway feedback cycle of reinforcing negativity that plunges a person into a perpetually unhappy state. This overpowering storm of negative feelings has to be disrupted, either by a change of environment or a chemical intervention that changes the neurophysiology of the person.

By and large, feelings come and go. It is a content of the body and mind. The problem with sadness is that, we are sometimes addicted to this negative content because it distracts us from other deeper issues. But we are not the contents of our minds. We are that awareness behind it, which is untainted by feelings or contents.

That awareness is Being itself. Being is not the body nor the mind--these are just physical manifestations of our existence. It is the underlying field where the perturbations happen. Whenever they are perturbations, we 'feel' it--as happiness or sadness. The field of Being does not comprehend the drama of feelings--it merely provides the stage for the play to happen.

But Being is who we really are. Even the concept of 'I' or 'We' needs to be understood in its proper perspective. It only has relative and local significance. Each one of us is simply a tiny group of fluctuations in the field of Being, which cumulatively has a kind of shared life-cycle. Just like how a whirlpools seem to have a force of its own, sucking in everything that comes into its vicinity. But a whirlpool is just a part of the larger body of water called the ocean. 

Our soul-proud selves are nothing but whirlpools in the field of Being. Sometimes it is convenient to talk about our individual souls and personalities, very much like how we illustrate software architecture with block diagrams. It is a conceptual representation of reality, which has its purpose at the level of abstraction that we are operating.

Feeling is form and Being is emptiness. Form disappears into emptiness and vice versa, as the famous sutra goes. When expressed in that kind of mystical language, people find it difficult to grasp and comes up with all sorts of interpretations that miss the mark. 

All spiritual practices attempt to reconnect us to our fundamental Being--that "oneness with God". But again, the moment we express it that way, we are creating subject-object duality--I and God. The best approach is not to talk and argue too much about such things. All arguments, thoughts and expressions only generate feelings. Just be. And that, is the ultimate bliss of Being.

Treading Towards Truth

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken. 

- Oliver Cromwell 

Today I'm typing these lines at Zus Coffee, Putra Heights. The hot news these past 2 days have been the indictment of former President Donald Trump related to his mishandling of confidential government documents. As always with anything related to Donald Trump, social media is split into two camps: the right believes that it's a conspiracy against the former president and the left who thinks that action against him is long overdue.

It is also a reflection on the state of our social media today. Everyone lives in their own partisan bubbles. No one reads news that is fair and balanced. Come to think of it, is there a news organisation that's fair and balanced? Well, to a certain extent, some are. Or at least they try. But new organisations are run by humans who naturally have their biases.

I'm of the belief that our political leaning is influenced by personality trait.  It is by and large determine by our genes. We think that we are guided by reason, but that's just an illusion. We have subconscious fears and inclinations that guide most of our decisions, especially when it comes to choosing political candidates in an election. We justify our subconscious choices by offering 'reason' as to why we support a certain candidate. 

In many social and political issues, there's often no clear-cut answer, unlike what you'd expect from a solvable mathematical problem. Unfortunately we delude ourselves into thinking there's such a thing as a right answer. Issues like abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment are ethical issues which do not have a definitive answer. We decide when it is right for society to kill off another individual, or a potential human being (like an embryo) and stick to it. Society often decides what is palatable, based on the zeitgeist.

Are all ethical considerations relative then?  Is there such a thing as  absolute truth?  If we grasp the entire workings of the universe all at once, the answer is yes. But we don't. So at any point in time, we are just using our best guess, based on our human wisdom, which is limited by space and time. 

Some of our society norms and laws could be wrong and misguided. But it's the best that we could do, at this stage of human evolution. Throughout human history, humans have latched on to certain ideas and beliefs, thinking that they are the absolute truth and then fight wars against fellow human beings with the belief that they are good and the other side is evil. 

"I am right and you are wrong", is by definition divisive. But it is what the human mind likes: true or false, ones and zeros. Without such certainty, we do not know how to act. All deliberations have to end with an action. If we are only 51% sure, we will round it up to 100% and proceed.

We take each step forward with an optimistic confidence based on our best guess. But at the same time we have to realise that we are always treading on thin ice. The next step could be a catastrophically wrong one, and if we do not tread lightly, we could fall into an icy abyss.

There's no such thing as absolute certainty. In an episode of the Ascent of Man, which I watched when I was a teenager, and had to this day remained fresh in my mind, the scientist Jacob Bronowski stood in a pond where the ashes of the crematorium of Auschwitz were flushed into, and said: 

"When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods."

Scientists do aspire to the knowledge of gods, but a good scientist also understands that science, in Bronowski's words again "is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible". And "we must cure ourselves of the itch of absolute knowledge and power".

Truth is a direction we are always aiming for. But know that, it is something we can never grasp with absolute certainty. So tread forward confidently, but ever so lightly.

All for Acceptance

I'm back in my hometown today, typing these lines on a sultry afternoon. It's the hottest time of the year now and people are complaining a lot about the heat wave.  I'm quite alright with the heat, as long as there's enough ventilation. The airiness of my house here makes the heat bearable.

I realised that most of us modern folks have become accustomed to air-conditioning.  I grew up without  such comforts and so remember a what it was like then. I dislike the thought of us getting soft and over-pampered by the conveniences of modern life. So I try not to over-indulge.

Which is why I do not sleep with the air-conditioner on.  If you are tired enough--I often am on most nights--you'll fall asleep the moment you lie on your bed.  Most people do not like the sticky discomfort of sweat; but I'm alright with it. If you learn to embrace sweat as something that's natural and even good for you, you'll get used to it. 

Acceptance of what is, is key here. It is a skill that one can cultivate. Acknowledge the discomfort of heat. It's just a sensation on the body, like any other sensation. It causes you to sweat. It distracts you from work. But remember that one gets distracted because one allows oneself to be annoyed by what is.

Acceptance does not mean being submissive. There's nothing personal about weather; so there's no question of fighting it. Weather is a mutable phenomenon and one must align one's mind and body to it. 

When we cocoon ourselves in the coolness of an air-conditioned room, we are trying to reshape nature to our liking. That is the genesis of life itself--defining and separating an internal state from the vicissitudes of external forces. A constant supply of energy is required to maintain this state of dis-equilibrium. 

Acceptance means adapting to changes in the environment so that the optimum amount of energy is required to maintain one's state. The whole of life is the preservation of state--the grasping of things, the pushing away of annoyances, the elevation of pride and self-importance. That comes with a price. But do your accounting wisely, so that there's no unnecessary wastage.

Does fighting the heat enhances our productivity? If it does, pay for it. Turn on the air-conditioner so that you can work better. Does the heat bother you that much when you are sleeping? Perhaps. For some like me, it's no matter. I sleep just as well and wake up just as refreshed as anyone else. Acceptance makes one sleep very soundly indeed and I'm all for it.

The Entropy Casino

Today I'm blogging from a pub on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Yesterday I was on leave, but there was a company function which I had to participate. But it was fun, getting to banter with my colleagues whom I rarely get to meet.

Re-reading my blog post last week makes me smile, because I realised that I've not changed all these years. I've never been a practical person when it comes to pursuing a corporate career. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not my cup of tea.

But I've made good friends throughout my years of dalliance with the IT industry. Corporations will always give the appearance that they 'care' for their employees. But a corporation is not a tangible thing. Everyone is an employee. There's no such thing as loyalty to the company, except to your friends whom you've built a relationship with. The real company is your network of friends and acquaintances which you've forged a relationship with and carry throughout your career in the industry.

Corporations are just capitalist structures for maximising profits for shareholders. That's their main concern and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm all for capitalism, because greed, is the only electromotive force that moves humans. Greed is just a cynical way of saying human needs. As Gordon Gekko famously expounded in my favourite movie Wall Street, it has "marked the upward surge of mankind".

To live is to crave for things. But is that bad? No.

Just that, if you understand the roots of craving, you'll spare yourself a lot of unexpected pain. I say 'unexpected' because pain is inevitable every time we express a need. It is just unwise to be caught by surprise, as you suffer more as a result. Pain needs to be factored in for every need for pleasure.

Losing money is painful. But one needs to be aware of such a risk when going into business. A wise businessman would have quantified and considered all its implications; and having taken all that into consideration, makes a calculated risk to plunge ahead. The success or failure of his enterprise would depend on both ability and luck. 

To live is to take calculated risks.  No risk, no gain as they say. It is just wise to test one's tolerance to the amount of pain that one could be risking oneself to, before forging ahead. There's only so much that one could plan, in any human endeavour. You move ahead with what's reasonable. You'll still be taken by surprise by circumstances which you did not foresee. But factoring in the unforeseen is also part of the risk calculus.

If we shy away from pain, we'll never live. To be born into this mortal frame is to be subjected to pain. Your nervous system is created to sense both pain and pleasure in equal measure. It is only our delusion that makes us believe that the pursuit of the latter means an obliteration of the former.

To avoid pain, is to deny life itself. One might as well not to have been born.  When you suffer pain, do not take it personally; it is just nature's way of doing accounting. The quest for pleasure necessitates the production of pain. The house always wins in the entropy casino.

And we being pleasure-seekers must always be prepared to pay its price. As my dear departed friend, YL, who was an avid gambler, told me: whenever one goes to the casino, one must be aware that one is going to lose money; but that's alright as one is simply buying the excitement.

The enlightened gambler knows that. That way, you have quantified your suffering in dollars and cents. In a way, that's the best price to pay.

Work Advice from a Non-Careerist

For this month, I've decided to take every Friday off. It's great to work 4 days a week and leave a day for blogging and running errands. I work hard but I don't take work too seriously. I can afford to do so because I don't see what I do as a career.

The career-minded professional has an upwardly-mobile outlook. I've never had a knack for that sort of thing, for my true interests always lie elsewhere. I've always wondered too, if I had decided to become a scientist (one of my many childhood ambitions), would I be a more fulfilled and contented person?

Well, I guess it is unlikely because, every job is kind of a career. A scientist has to get papers published and in an academic environment, it would literally be a paper-chase as academics are chiefly measured by their publications. Promotion opportunities are based on that for they are the easiest and most convenient measure of an academic's 'achievements'.   

I studied engineering chiefly because I liked science, not necessarily technology. Technology is an application of science, which in itself is not uninteresting, and I suppose a good compromise. As a kid, I loved building things, so it is not surprising that I ended up an engineer.  But then again, I was interested in many other things as a kid--I loved history, literature and art too. Would a career as a designer or a journalist been more rewarding for me?

But I doubt if any single career would have been a better choice. I have a naturally inclination not to be boxed into any kind of specialisation. I am interested in a wide a variety of subjects, and that's an instinct in me as natural as anyone would have in their choice of food. I guess, the mind yearns for a kind of balanced diet of intellectual pursuits.

Every subject provides some kind of nutrient that's important for one's intellectual growth.  Career-wise, that makes me a jack-of-all trades and a master of none. But I'm comfortable with that. Even in the area of IT from which I eke out my living, I have ended up performing many different roles throughout my career. By not being a specialist, I am also not an expert of anything. The advantage of that is that, you have a broader perspective of things; you rely on generic principles and common sense to get things done. 

In the field of technology, things get obsolete very fast. When you acquire knowledge of any software or framework, it is important to know how to distill its general principles. These principles will stand you in good stead through the vicissitudes of technological progress. 

I guess, I am happy being a non-careerist. It makes me enjoy my work more because I do it for 'fun'.  The reward of work is work itself--just like the performance of a religious ritual. When approached that way, work becomes a form of spiritual practice and its rewards go beyond the mere material.

The Farm of Dead Trees

My new bookshelves are done and promptly installed by the contractor in my apartment. It has been tough replacing my wall-to-wall shelves that had been ruined by rain-water leakage. I'm wiser now about the design of these shelves: I now leave a buffer zone between ceiling and shelf. 

High humidity and sunlight are books' greatest enemies. I'll have to make sure that my books are better protected this time. Yesterday, I gave my shelves a good wipe before I plan how and what books go back to them. I'm going to plan carefully this time. I'm going to install hygrometers to monitor the humidity levels better, and perhaps keep a dehumidifier running.

Since my library is the embodiment of my brain and mind, this is my opportunity to reorganise all the books so that whenever I think deeply about any subject, I can visualise the relevant books in 3D on my bookshelves. I believe if I sort out my physical books properly, my thinking will become clearer too. 

Almost every one of my books has a date of purchase scrawled on the title page. Nowadays I also jot down the dates when I started and finished reading them on the back page. And if you flip though the books in my library, you'll find cafe receipts, Post-It notes and other bits of memento associated with the time and place, casually inserted into their pages. Every book in my library has been lived through and has become a part my of my life. My library is the intellectual history of my life.

By perusing every book in my possession and putting them back on the shelves, I can recall why I had bought each book in first place and if I'd read it, what memory of its contents do I still carry in my head? And if the book happens to be still unread--often because it was too difficult for my comprehension then--am I able to see its relevance now?

It gladdens me greatly whenever I find a book which I had thought difficult, now revealing itself lucidly to me. It means that my mind has matured and the intellectual soil is finally ready for these impenetrable seeds to take root and grow.

Growth and learning is the reward of reading. I live for insights and epiphanies that come from books--each discovery,  a mini orgasm of the mind. Books make me happy and I do not make any apologies for preferring their company to idle socialising, which now happens anyway over the vanity fair of social media.

I wrote before in an old blog post that I see people as "interactive books". Socialising to me is a form of 'reading'. Each person is a walking book of knowledge and when we interact, we are enriching each other's lives through the sharing of our individual experiences. And the marvellous thing about it is that, our interaction is like an act of writing: we are all writing a collective book, which belongs to all of us.

If we do not read, our social pool is limited only to the living; we are not fraternising with the great minds who had come and gone before us. Reading greatly enlarges our social circle, to include the dead. 

It does sound a bit morbid when I put it that way, but your personal library is your social network of the dead. You need the wisdom of both the living and the dead to lead a fulfilling life. So I read, for dead people continue to talk through the dead trees. And long may they proliferate in this farm of mine--this highly personal library filled with the voices of the dead.

The Mindless Mobs of Social Media

It's the end of another work week and it's been a rather quiet one because of the two public holidays - 1st and 4th of May, Labour Day and Vesak Day, respectively. Usually I'd be quite exhausted on a Friday evening (it's already past midnight, so it's Saturday morning), but today I still have a bit of wind left to carry me through this blog post.

It's amazing how much time people spend on their phones these days. I've long realised, even during the Yahoo chat days on the internet, that texting is very time consuming. So I rarely engage in any of the many WhatsApp groups that I belong to. I treat WhatsApp like email: I check my messages periodically over the course of the day, only when I'm taking a break in between tasks.  And I am certainly glad that I'm not hooked on Tik Tok, Instagram or Tweeter. I've long given up on Facebook too. These are all destroyers of one's time.

I do listen to a lot of podcasts and have many favourite Youtube channels that I watch. But I make sure that I control the time when these activities take place. I usually indulge in them when I'm doing physical chores like house-keeping, bathing or driving. The good thing about repetitive physical work is that it frees your mind to do something else. Hence audiobooks and podcasts are to me the best things that comes of out of technology over the last decade.

One could ask: what's wrong with entertaining ourselves watching Tik Tok videos and texting endlessly over WhatsApp? Isn't that a way of socialising, an activity which, arguably defines what being human is? Don't sharing and enjoying the company of fellow humans make a fulfilling life?

Well, I use work for that purpose. I spend the greater part of the day communicating with people on work-related matters. But I like to mix business with pleasure--not in an unprofessional way though. What I mean is: fun. Why can't work be fun and sociable?

We lament the fact that so much of our time is being tied up with work. If that is the case, why not make the best of it. Every work interaction is also a social one, where one gets to learn and share with fellow colleagues, clients and partners. The problem with so much of our corporate culture is that we treat business as a kind of war with our competitors. Even your co-workers are in competition with you over promotion or recognition. Why should that be so? It is such an unhealthy paradigm.

If work and business is a kind of competition, let it be a sport, where one gets to enjoy the good fight but at the end of the day, whoever wins, everyone had given their best and had had a good time. This is the best kind of socialising--not gossiping about people or politicians we dislike. There's way too much hatred in social media that it has turned into a network of hateful mobs. Not only does it suck up your time, it also destroys your mind.

Hatred, surprisingly forges strong bonds as much as love. You do not need to love the fellow members of your social group, it's enough that everyone hates the same thing. A common hatred makes a mighty mob. 

A mob makes everyone lose their individuality. We do not think anymore; our minds are subsumed and consumed by an overpowering outrage. When we are alone, we are forced to think on our own feet but when we are in a mob, we only sense what the people around us are doing and follow their cue--like flocks of birds flying in close formation, swerving across the sky in perfect synchrony. There is no leader in such a flock--each bird is simply adjusting its movement based on slight changes in its immediate surrounding.

We are individuals, not mobs. We have minds, which, admittedly we need to transcend through meditation,  but not by surrendering them to a mob.  We feel strong by being part of a mob because we have surrendered thinking, which is the cause of so much of our existential fears. The mob is mindless and fearless but that is degeneration rather than enlightenment. So let's strengthen our resolve to be mindful at all times, lest we fall to the seductive embrace of the social mob. 

A Museum of Memories

I'm writing this at one of my favourite Coffee Bean hangouts. It's surprisingly quiet at lunch time and I'm happy to be able to find a small table to set up my laptop for this weekly session of writing and reflection. It's coming to the end of April; I've already filed my taxes and now planning the refurbishment of my apartment. 

I've had my apartment for around 20 years now but I've never ever spent a single night there. I use it mainly as an occasional home office, library and store-room for the junk that I've collected over the years. Even though I try to be more of a minimalist these days, things have a tendency to accumulate--especially all my old electronics.

The other day I resurrected my old Denon amplifier which I had chucked away somewhere with all the other kitsch and wreckages of my wandering life. I was surprised that it was still working despite being subjected to the heat and humidity of my storeroom for more than a decade. I also found an old portable Technics CD player which I managed to hook up to the amp. Suddenly my entire CD collection came back to life bringing back sweet nostalgic memories of the past.

One day, I will also resurrect my dad's turn-table which has been lying untouched back in my hometown. I still have a small collection of vinyl records there. Every one of them will unlock memories of the many happy hours of my childhood admiring the art on the album covers, poring over the song lyrics or blurbs which are usually printed within their folds while listening to warm strains that wafted from the speaker.

I get my music from Spotify these days and it has been great being able to call up any classical piece that I wish to listen to with a mere tap of my fingers on the phone. But there's a certain indescribable pleasure one gets by dropping a piece of CD or vinyl record onto a rotating plate and voila, beautiful  music suddenly appears.

I realised that my entire life is encapsulated in these objects that I own--my CDs, DVDs, video cassettes, books and magazines that lie everywhere in my apartment. I've neglected them for far too long. I'm going to dust, clean and rearrange them properly. Repair anything that's damaged and discard any unnecessary clutter. 

Maybe I still have too many attachments to these things. I'm also aware that if I'm not ready to give or throw them away, there's still some unresolved karma that I have associated with them. By going through them again, I am reexamining their significance in my life, and perhaps in the process of doing that, I'll understand why they have a hold on me still. 

The things you've accumulated is the history of your life and there's often much we can learn from history. It is in this spirit that I'm slowly transforming my apartment into my personal museum of memories.

Being Omnijective

It's only Thursday night but I'm already writing my blog article of the week. There's a long weekend coming up because of the Hari Raya Puasa holidays. The massive balik kampung exodus has already begun. There'll be much gaiety and celebrations all over the country, while I am looking forward to enjoy a less crowded city over the weekend. 

I was watching the SpaceX test flight launch of their most power rocket ever.  Space exploration is one of the most exciting things that the human species have pursued.  I applaud Elon Musk for having the courage to start up SpaceX and bringing it to the forefront of space exploration.  Only when we enter space, do we get a sense of how fragile and vulnerable we are in the immensity of the cosmos. 

The world will be a less quarrelsome place If only more of us care to lift our sights up and gaze into the night sky. We--every sentient being on earth-- are part of a single organism, Gaia. If we know how to shift our consciousness from an ego-centric perspective to one that encompasses the entire world, we would have made a baby step towards becoming a cosmic citizen.

We humans celebrate patriotism. It's well good that we all have some kind of allegiance towards our own family, tribe, company, state or country.  But again, these are progressive steps towards the extinction of the ego. A man who cares for his family learns to set aside his own selfish needs for that of his family. There's always a tension between need of the individual and that of the group. Family life is the first opportunity for us to learn to be altruistic.  

The universe is constantly pushing us outwards--to let go, albeit slowly, so that we may shift our focus towards embracing a larger whole. Ultimately, if the universe has a mind, we are part of it. It is foolish of us to be trapped in our parochialism and not being able to see the pantheistic nature of our existence. 

We get into endless arguments about the existence of God and its nature. What makes us think that these are even reasonable questions? We create issues by formulating questions in the only way we know, using human languages that had been shaped by our very limited human experiences. Is it any wonder that we assume God to be some kind of idealised alpha male leader, to be feted and feared?

We function in our lives as individuals, interacting with other individuals. Hence we conceptualise individuals, as 'souls', that has some kind of identity and reality, with a unique story arc. Every one is trying to achieve something or go somewhere. What makes us think that our 'identity', like a rivulet of water flowing between the crevices of rocks, has any importance in the cosmic scheme of things? 

The moment we speak, we are dividing the world into subject and object. When we are tired of arguing about the relationship between the subject and the object, perhaps we could all learn to just be. Being. For we are all processes that are part of a larger process that is part of a complex network of processes. To put it simply, the world is omnijective.

A Markov Chain of Ideas

This blank page has no soul. But when I put these words on it, it springs to life. It talks to you--yes you, dear reader. Suddenly I am here and you are there and there's this conversation flowing between us.

How remarkably wonderful is that? How did it arise, this illusion of a person here talking to you in your head? It is simply the miracle of reading and writing--skills which were not passed down by our genes but acquired, painstakingly through years of training. 

But I'm not going to write about these skills today, which Maryanne Wolf did a good job in expounding in Proust and the Squid. I gained a much better understanding of dyslexia from the book, which makes me feel appreciative of the reading skill that I have. And that gratitude is felt every time I open a book to read, allowing that miracle of images and sound to appear in my head.

From black marks on a blank page to beautiful vistas and dramatic speeches require  the brain to integrate processing from many its different regions. Neural connections are forged during those years of learning, allowing the mere sight of a line of Wordsworth to bring back the sunshine and trees of my childhood.

When I write these words, I trigger something in you. But where do I end and you begin? If you meet me in a cafe, I am a person, sitting at a table in the corner with a pot of Earl Grey, typing on a laptop. You could be sitting at another table across and there's a clear boundary between us. I am here and you are there. 

But when you are reading what I write, we are one. My thoughts and yours mingle. Something new arises in your brain; if you and I are in the same cafe, we could sit together and have a conversation. As a monk once told me: the teacher and the student creates the teaching. When to persons exchange thoughts, they are also creating something from the synthesis of ideas. For a moment, we share a collective brain. And when we end our conversation, we are better off because new neural connections would have sprouted in each of our brains.

A relationship is an emergent property, created from the interplay of thoughts between individuals. The writer and reader has a relationship. Right now, I write as if there's a reader. There could be none. But that doesn't matter. The whole point of writing is to put your brain into a communication mode. By writing to an imaginary reader, I set up the dynamic for the act of creation to happen. In the process, I am changed. Thoughts fall into place, because I am forced to convey them clearly to others.

I end each session of writing with insight and gratitude. Insight from the labour of shaping of words into ideas and I am better off because of it. The next article in this blog will be influenced by what I write today--it is simply a growing Markov chain of ideas and long may it continue!

Language of the Heart

I am happy to be able to start blogging on Friday night itself, even though it is a full work week for me. Sometimes I work until midnight, even on Fridays. But today, I'm taking it easy because there's nothing that demands my immediate attention at the moment. Anyway, it is also Good Friday, and perhaps a good time to reflect on Jesus's life and his teachings.

I have to admit that I am a fan of Jesus Christ. But why am I not a Christian?  That's because I'm not a follower of any organised religion, preferring not to be restricted by the rules, restrictions and rituals that come by commiting to a single one. No single religion has a monopoly of wisdom; each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The religion you choose is a matter of taste, not truth. I think I've mentioned that in another blog post before.

Why am I a fan of the Anointed One? For one, he had the spirit of a rebel. He challenged the religious authorities of his time and spread a message of love and egalitarianism. I have the hippy instinct in me, so I can certainly identify with that. 

We cannot be absolutely sure what were the original teachings of this self-styled prophet who in the end, died a shocking death on the cross, driving his followers then into hiding. Jesus could have been one of many of the wandering preachers in Palestine who had come and gone before, forgotten by history. In the years after his crucifixion (which Good Friday today commemorates), this scandalous rabbi who had dared to claim himself the "Son of God" looked like he would have followed the same fate.

But somehow his message of loving thy enemy and the promise of salvation, which Nietzsche branded as 'slave morality', found resonance among the downtrodden and became an underground movement. It would still have fizzled out if not for Emperor Constantine who, inspired by a vision of the cross he saw on the battlefield, made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire.

Love is powerful. Love is the language of the heart. A true Christian is overflowing with selfless love. That was what drove the church to the far corners of the world, healing the sick and helping the poor. But in their over-zealousness, they also decimated the culture and beliefs of the natives--so-called heathens.

I am not so taken by the eschatology and soteriology of Christianity--two big words that mean the doctrine of the end-of-times where the Messiah and the Kingdom of Heaven will reign again and how believers can achieve salvation through belief in Christ. These are the boring aspects of religion to me. What interests me is love, repentance and forgiveness themselves. Whether these bring salvation in the end is not important to me.

"Agape" is the Greek word used to express this selfless love of Christianity, that is different from other less noble forms of love such as the romantic "eros" and "philia", which is brotherly love. If one learns to love one's neighbours and forgives one's enemies, one is expressing this agape form of love well. It is bakti and karma yoga rolled in one. Its diligent practice helps to extinguish the ego in oneself and it is a good path for someone who is more attuned to the language of the heart to follow.

So on a good Friday like this, let's all reflect on agape, and how much love in all its forms has shaped the history of humanity on this earth. We humans are both creatures of the head and of the heart. When one's heart is big, one immediately understands its language, which is love itself. If one chooses to listen to the heart, that love that speaks from within, untainted by the ego, is the voice of agape.

The Evanescent Essence of the Universe

Today is the third Friday of the month that I'm on leave. Happy to have cleared 3 days of leave and I still of twenty over days to go.  And that is a good problem to have.

Knowing how and when to slow down is important in maintaining your health and well-being. The human body is a complex system that can easily be knocked off-balance if one is not vigilant. Meditation is a way of self-monitoring one's being and presence. Cultivating a sense of self-awareness which includes meta-cognition and mindfulness is the key to a healthy mind and body.

I have my excesses. I think I am still not getting sufficient sleep every day. But I am aware of this and am readjusting my lifestyle whenever I can to maintain a better balance. Not being aware of one's own weaknesses is the greatest flaw a person could have. We must be cognisant of our own shortcomings or one day they will surprise you and cause you difficulties, which could have been avoided had you dealt with them earlier.

Life is a dissipative structure. We are maintaining stability by ingesting food and air to keep our physical and mental structures intact. This stability can be disturbed by changes in the environment or through self-inflicted harm, like addiction. In any case, over time, all structures breakdown and a new stable pattern takes over. We temporarily maintain this ego structure which we call Self, carving out a chunk of space and time as a vehicle for exploring the universe or energy and matter.  

What information and wisdom can we carry over to our next iteration? Or perhaps this is the last iteration, of which we are finally assimilating all the knowledge and experience that we've gathered over eons? We shall not think too far ahead. We must value this temporal structure which we call our mind and body; this divine instrument from which we experience the world, distilling its hidden wisdom.

Such is the beauty and mystery of life. The answers we seek are at the back of the book, but we only get to read them when we've experienced all the tension and drama of our life's story-arc. Will death itself finally reveal all answers or perhaps enlightenment within one's lifetime is the conscious death that we seek?

To live the examined life is to embrace all the vicissitudes of life and learning every nuance of knowledge which pain and pleasure reveal to us. Like the incessantly diligent ants I see in my kitchen that are constantly probing for food, we as humans must also be equally persistent in our quest of understanding.

This quest is the noblest endeavour of them all. It makes an adventure out of life and infuses every experience of ours with epiphany and significance. Let's celebrate this life of ours, this ephemeral dalliance with the world and embrace the evanescent essence of the universe.

The Saga of Spiritual Seekers

I'm back on a Friday, writing this from my apartment in Cyberjaya. I wanted to spend some time here today mainly to do housekeeping. The dust and debris from the roof repair works last week are still not properly cleaned yet. Today I want to spend some time also to plan for the upcoming replacement of my bookshelves, which had been badly damaged by rain-water and the ravages of time. But today's topic is not going to be about Time or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, instead I'll be writing about people's attitude towards religion and other supposedly spiritual pursuits.

I've written a lot about spirituality and religion here in my blog and I think my views about these subjects are quite clear. I am a student of religions and if I have any religion at all, it is this highly personalised spiritual way of life backed by my own pseudo-philosophy and principles, many of which I've attempted to expound on this blog.

At the same time, I've also talked to a lot of people about their religious or spiritual beliefs. I can identify three underlying themes in their quest: protection, immortality and meaning. There are some elements of all three in every spiritual seeker. Let's discuss each one.

As human beings, we are threatened by many things that could harm us. Life is precious and fragile and we want to be protected from every possible danger that could rob us of our well-being. Because we feel so helpless, we naturally want to seek the protection and blessing of some higher force that could ensure of safety and happiness.  If I pray hard enough, some divine being will grant my wishes, shield me from any calamity or danger and when I die, ensure that I am not punished or banished to some horrible place called Hell. 

This need to be protected in the face of something more powerful than us like nature and the vicissitudes of life is an instinctive urge. We like to belief that everything is planned out for us and we do not want to miss the boat. Hence we want to belong to a group that seems to present a worldview that offers both protection and salvation. This belonging to a community is also very comforting. Life can be very happy knowing that you are guaranteed safety from the torments of Hell.

And then, the spiritual seeker's interest extends beyond this life. Knowing the inevitability and sorrow of death, they want to assured that their lives continue beyond that. Souls are immortal and when we overcome the trials and travails of this mortal life, we'll be uplifted to a better place--that mythical place called 'heaven' where all imperfections will be gone and we'll be guaranteed eternal bliss with all our loved ones. Heaven by this definition is simply earth without all the imperfections. This is what many mainstream religions promise. Having an admission ticket to Heaven is certainly a great privilege.

Those who are more intellectual in their pursuit of spirituality would seek 'meaning'. They are basically driven by age-old philosophical questions like: What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Who created the universe? Where are we going? Belonging to this group are also the experience junkies. They want to pursue Enlightenment like it is a kind of superpower or some ultimate form of orgasm. They are also achievement oriented. If this is the ultimate goal of life, I want to attain it. And once attained, my life will be meaningful and I will know the answers to all the great questions.

There are potential pitfall in all three pursuits. The protection and immortality seeker will find that every religion proclaims that theirs is the greatest and the act of being a believer guarantees both protection and immortality. Which path is the real one? How does one choose? What is the proof of their claims? Scriptural authority? The superior knowledge of priests and preachers? Is being a believer simply taking Pascal's wager: there's everything to gain and nothing to lose? Is one simply lulled into a sense of comfort by the promises of religion?

For those who are driven their existential quest for answers, how do they know what they have attained is the ultimate? Even if it is so, so what? Is the answer they are seeking somehow defined by the limits of human intelligence? Is a satisfying answer something that is expressible in human language or is it an experience to be perceived directly by the body and brain? What makes you think different from someone who is under the influence of drugs? 

I am happy knowing what I don't know. And I am happy to continue studying this strange need that humans have for answers. This continuous quest is my spiritual practice. It is in a way a celebration of the mystery of human existence and I'm contented in knowing there's so much more for me to learn and pursue. This alone would take up my entire lifetime and it is what makes it so 'meaningful'.

Worldly Wishes and Vanities

I'm blogging a bit earlier today because I'm on leave and this is among the first of many activities that I'm planning for the weekend. Yesterday I had a couple of workers over at my apartment to fix the root leakage and to do some touch-up work. It was dusty and messy everywhere but luckily I still managed to go through my entire work-day relatively uninterrupted.

The material world requires a lot of maintenance but that's part and parcel of living. Every material goal we have is subject to friction and impediment. A project is simply the overcoming of all these encumbrances to put in place an idealised conception of the world. 

We use up our energy in pursuit of these worldly goals and once attaining them, we expend further energy to sustain them. All such pursuits crumble in the end because continuous energy is required to keep them going. It could be a beautiful mansion in the countryside or a thriving business. Both are ideals carved out of the physical world. Their existence is owed to the individual or individuals who had a vision and sought to invest enormous amount of energy to realise them.

But human beings are mortal. When the founders are gone, whoever who have been coupled into the enterprise has to continuously pump in effort to keep the engine running. The fuel for sustenance is human time and energy. The moment that we are slack, the overbearing forces of nature reclaim them.

My apartment has been taking the brunt of nature's onslaught for the past decade--rain, heat and pests have been working continuously to enforce the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I salute them for their irrepressible determination. But I'm equally determined to stem the tide of decay, simply because I am alive and being alive comes with a certain role and responsibility.

What responsibility am I talking about? Well, we as human beings are fragile and ephemeral creatures given a short lease on this earth. Our existence itself is the product of some idealised belief in the hearts and minds of our parents. A great deal of energy goes into bringing us up to attain this ideal. 

And once cast into the mortal world, we have a responsibility to see through this energetic process, this struggle, if you will, against the forces of nature, to rise to our fullest potential, before succumbing ultimately to the inevitability death.

It all seems so futile but the belief, the hope, the moments of despair and joy, of pain and ecstasy are all part of the cosmic drama of existence. We as the protagonists must play our roles to the best of our abilities. To be true to this jihad is our way of respecting this divine mission. All your worldly wishes and vanities are essential props and plot devices in the play. So embrace them whole-heartedly so that they may reveal their secrets of your being.

A Body of Knowledge

Satie's Gymnopedie No 1 is such a reflective piece. It sets the right mood for me on this Saturday night to write my blog article of the week. I had a good exercise session at the park and my whole body feels very tired but at the same time, pleasantly relaxed from the workout.

I was listening to a lecture series on language and the mind while jogging just now. Sometimes I think exercise is just an excuse for me to listen to my audiobooks. Driving used to be my audiobook time but since I started working from home, this listening opportunity has been significantly reduced. 

This is why my weekly exercise session has become an essential activity for me. I used to have the bad habit of working every weekend but since my weekdays these days are so busy, I try to spend Saturday and Sunday pursuing my recreational activities. Blogging and listening to audiobooks while exercising are among them.  

The other day I was drawing a complicated architecture diagram and realised that I haven't had a chance to do that for a long time. I've always used drawing as a tool for me to understand a difficult subject. I used to joke that I was a 'Powerpoint engineer', because building slides and doing presentations were all I did. But it was an activity that I also enjoyed because it helped me to organise and think about a subject systematically. 

By diagramming concepts, even if they are just block diagrams with text, you allow your brain to bring in visuals and motion into the process of learning. Thinking and learning is more effective if it is a whole-body experience. I find that by doodling thoughts on a piece of paper and then detailing them neatly in a Powerpoint slide helps me to tackle a subject effectively.

During those days, I used to write a lot of proposals too. When producing these documents, I alternated between writing and drawing to articulate my thoughts. My documentation were always full of diagrams. I wanted them to read like 'comic books' because I knew people preferred to look at diagrams rather than read text. Comprehension is always more effective when they engage all the senses. 

Imagine the whole body is your brain. You talk and think with your whole body. Muscles are your memory banks. You absorb information from the whole not only with input from your five sense but also through active interaction with the physical world. You literally grasp concepts with your hand when you draw a diagram.

When I jog while listening to an audiobook, my hands and feet also participate in understanding the concepts conveyed. Information becomes the fuel that powers my entire body. With every stride I take, all the thoughts and ideas from the book are being processed and transmuted into knowledge. Over time, they are absorbed into the system--this mind and body--and hopefully one day, they would manifest themselves as wisdom, in words and deeds.

The Disillusionment of the Illusory Self

I'm happy that the madness of the two large festivals, Christmas and Chinese New Year is past. The malls are deserted once more; it's that lull between festive seasons. Vendors are preparing for their next assault--the coming Ramadan month culminating in Aidil Fitri celebrations. 

I'm here at a cafe in the mall, enjoying the relative peace and quiet. The weather has been rainy for the past few days, causing massive flooding, especially in Johor. My apartment roof is leaking and I had to spent the day catching the dripping rainwater in plastic pails and trays. 

All material things fall apart and our everyday lives is simply an endless series of maintenance tasks: making sure our frail human bodies, our cars and shelters are properly functioning. But we should not be too daunted by that. Drawing on my gymnasium metaphor of the world, such obstacles are there to give us a good workout. You don't complain about about the heaviness of the barbell and weights if your intention of going to the gym is to build muscle strength.

We always end up stronger with every challenge we face in life. But we also have to be aware of how much weight we are able to reasonably lift or risk injuring ourselves. We want to stretch ourselves so that the muscles are stimulated to grow but at the same time, we must not over-do it or we'll tear some muscles. The right technique is also essential.

In life, we must also learn the technique of handling any difficult situation so that we do not see them as unwelcome.  Acknowledge the challenge; tackle it with the right approach and mentality and it too shall pass.

Mortal life can be tough. We are thrust into a course, not of our own choosing. We do not get to pick our parents, nor the place or circumstance into which we are born. Yet we have to embrace them. 'You' are actually defined by your circumstance. It is your unique upbringing and environment that defines your Self. 

The Self, as the Buddhist like to say, is an illusion, because it is not something tangible. It is merely the eye of the hurricane and for a brief moment in earth time, you manifest into existence, only to disappear again into that ocean of energy.

Ephemeral though it may be, the hurricane has enormous strength and can wreck everything in its path. It is this clash between air and earth that dissipates the hurricane's energy. Though energetically, the existence of a human on earth is similar to the lifecycle of a hurricane, there are differences. 

Humans, for example create and procreate. We build things like skyscrapers but destroy the environment in the process, and we also spawn off more human beings to preserve our precious lineage. We invest a lot of our energy in the perpetuation of an illusory ideal.

What is this illusory ideal? It is our concept of the Self. It is like a hurricane which suddenly thinks that it has a soul and it wants its identity to last forever. The monuments we build for the future is a  chunk of our time and energy, preserved, only to be mowed down, inevitably by Time. Even the mightiest empire collapses one day because entropy has to increase.

But let's not be disillusioned by such a bleak view of the future. Ironically, this disillusionment is only of concern to the illusory Self. Perhaps when the Self sees that absurdity of it all, then everything becomes clear. The hurricane subsides, revealing the vastness of the sky and the radiance of the ever-present sun.

The Magic of Memory

Oh lift me from the grass! 

I die! I faint! I fail! 

Let thy love in kisses rain 

On my lips and eyelids pale. 

- from Lines to an Indian Air by Percy Blythe Shelley

Saturday is my day to be alone, to just sit back at a cafe and reflect in words--which becomes my blog article for the week. Writing is a way of processing thoughts. I write to think. And I also adhere to the principle that, "if you did not write it down, it didn't happen". 

The internet has now become the human civilisation's collective memory. This blog could well turn out to be the only trace of my existence on this place, when I'm no longer around. Not that it is that important to leave a so-called legacy behind. Existence is much bigger than what we leave behind during our short stint on this tiny planet called Earth, third from an insignificant star, which we call the Sun.

It is interesting that Socrates was very much against the written word. Knowledge and virtue to him is not something static like words on paper. Things written down cannot answer back and is prone to misinterpretation. Socrates believed in the dialectic method--the constant questioning and reexamining of one's statements and thoughts. A a virtuous person is one who lives that. 

Ironically, we owe this knowledge to Socrates's student Plato, who, thankfully did not follow his mentor's belief and wrote down all of his teachings for posterity. But we still need to give some thought to Socrates's argument that memory is not something passive but an active process of learning. When you remember something, it is internalised and it becomes a part of you. You can't claim that when all you have are books in your personal library. You have to at least assimilate what you learn into your thinking process.

Things that you remember are what you'll bring up in any ad-hoc conversation with friends. Even when you write, you are also channelling and modifying sentence patterns that you've encountered before and internalised. When something is remembered, you can be assured that your brain has changed. 

Having said that, it is also worth mentioning that remembering alone does not in itself constitutes wisdom or even knowledge. Simple regurgitation of facts only makes you an efficient database. Wisdom, as I argued in a recent blog article is like a trained AI model. Facts and anecdotes are just the icing on the cake. To recall them, you need the necessary hooks and connections in the brain honed through regular thinking and introspection. 

I can recall fragments of poems by Shelly, Byron and Wordsworth and that enriches my life tremendously. "I die!, I faint!, I fall!". I was surprised when my father suddenly uttered this line during those difficult days when he was suffering from the neuro-degenerating effects of Parkinson's disease. I had casually asked him about his school days and that triggered his memory of an English teacher who had drilled them on those beautiful lyrical poems found in Palgrave's famous Golden Treasury anthology. That was a magical moment for me--in a flash my dad and I were one, sharing an inseparable bond.

Music triggers recollections too. I can always feel the morning sunshine when I was sitting in the garden outside my childhood home, whenever I hear strains of Mozart's piano sonata in C minor, K457 because my neighbour's daughter was practising that piece constantly for her ABRSM exam. 

The replicants in the movie Blade Runner clung to their implanted memories as a kind of prove that they are real. And in the famous death scene, Rutger Hauer's character, Roy Batty lamented how all his memories will be lost, "like tears in the rain". 

Things we remember constitute a great part of who we are. When memories are recollected, we bring back the essence of the very moment--the smell, the sights and the sound of the experience; and that I think is what life, or at least a great part of what Socrates's examined life, is all about.

Free and Flowing

I'm back with more of my ramblings. Again, I'm just going to go with the flow.  Hmm..."the flow". Perhaps that will be the subject of our discussion today. What is flow?

In psychology the flow state is a well-known subject. It's also known as being "in the zone". People who perform challenging mental and physical tasks like sportsmen know that when you are in the zone, you are performing effortlessly, which total absorption of body and mind. You are relaxed and yet comfortably challenged at the same time to drive yourself towards peak performance.

Writers know this well too. Sometimes words and sentences just write themselves; at other times, you face the dreaded writer's block. Are words flowing out effortlessly for me now while writing this article? Not exactly. And I know why: it's because I'm not fully focussed. 

I am half thinking of the cleaning chores that I need to do after this. There's a bit of a mess in my apartment caused by leakage, which I'm chasing the building management to fix. And I'm also cognisant of the remaining time I have to get this article out, perform the cleaning before I set off for my dinner appointment at 7pm.

I'm certainly not in the flow now. The mind has to be undistracted for one to achieve flow state. But I've also trained myself over the years to produce reasonably good work, even when I'm not in the best state of mind. When flow happens, that is a bonus; if it doesn't, no matter. My run-of-the-mill effort should be better than average.

It helps when one is completely relaxed about one's task. Having a 'don't-care' attitude is sometimes good, for people who are highly-strung perfectionists. Just let go. No one is going to die because someone spotted a tiny mis-spelling or grammar mistake in your email. In all likelihood, people would have forgotten about you by the next mouse-click.

To your own ego, you are very important. To other people, they are equally self-centered, preoccupied with how they look or appear to others. You are only important to them in-so-far as it enhances their own ego. Everyone is in the same boat. No one is superior to anyone else. Everyone has their own phobias and peccadilloes. 

So just relax and do what you are supposed to do. And it'll be good enough. If it isn't, it's no big deal. As long as you have the right attitude to take it as a feedback for further improvement, you'll be fine. You'll only get better. Isn't that a comforting thought?

Fear, insecurity, pride and hidden agendas are things that inhibit flow. When you do things without expecting anything in return, you'll achieve better performance. Of course this is easier said than done. But saying and affirming, makes the doing easier. You will reduce the gap between thought and action. When that happens, you are free and flowing!

The Way of Wisdom

I'm grateful for having the opportunity to write in this blog every week. It may seem like an insignificant thing but writing is like exercise to me. It helps keep the mind fit. And a fit mind is always sharp, alert and wise.

The wise part needs a bit of elaborating. We know how to acquire knowledge. We read books, watch Youtube videos or attend courses. We gather a lot of information and assimilate them with whatever we know. But when does knowledge become wisdom? What is wisdom?

A striker who knows how to anticipate when his team-mate is going to make a through-pass to him and times his run just in time to beat the offside trap has a kind of wisdom--an intuitive knowing that comes without thinking. It's the result of having played a huge number of matches, the ability to sense the weight and trajectory of a pass and knowing how each and every individual player habits are and then processing all of these information in a fraction of a second, intuitively. 

Wisdom comes from having a honed model inside the head and body, the kind that AI has, trained by billions of pieces of information; and when a new set of data arrives, you have the model to generate the predicted output. Wisdom is not the if-then-else type of thinking. That's brute-force logic and intelligence. Wisdom is taking an input and passing information through the neural network to generate an output. We don't exactly know how we derive the answer but we do know that every bit of information that we had digested before, contributed to that instantaneous answer.

Am I being over-the-top now by saying that AI actually has wisdom? Well, not the kind we have...yet. But it's the same process. Instantaneous knowing and having an immediate feel of a situation--this is what we normally call experience. Experience is nothing more than training data. The more we have the better the model.

Can two persons exposed to the same knowledge and experience acquire the same wisdom? No, because no two persons start with the same initial conditions. Genes determine the type of brain and body we have. Our individual learning machineries are wired differently. Knowing what you are good at, and allowing yourselves to be trained in the field and subject that you have an aptitude for, certainly helps.

That is why I think work is good. The more data you process, the better your intelligence model is.  Or shall I say, wisdom model? Wisdom is simply intellectual instinct. Our anthropocentric bias makes us believe that machines can never be conscious and there's that magical quality in humans called consciousness and wisdom that will forever be elusive from them. But think again, AI is making us understand ourselves better. Maybe we are just like them, with the added benefit of locomotion, having more sensors and a life-time of data?

I have no qualms about sharing this planet with machines who will become wiser than us. Maybe at some point we could be expendable to them. But that again is an anthropocentrism that anyone with wisdom shall be able to transcend.

A Win-Win World

Today, I'm taking a break from work. That means I'm now loitering at a cafe with my laptop, book, journal and pens. It's good to be able to sit back on a Friday afternoon and reflect on the work week that has gone by.

I've been thinking a bit on the people I deal with on a daily basis at work and am grateful that all my colleagues are extremely friendly and helpful. I've always enjoyed interacting with people because everyone is unique and interesting. Even difficult ones. This is because I treat people like interactive books. There's always something you can learn from someone you interact with. 

If I encounter a difficult person, I would try to empathise with his or her situation. Perhaps the person had had to deal with the same question and situation for the umpteenth time that day and felt absolutely tired of it. How could you help to alleviate the person's situation? What could you say or do to make the person feel better about the interaction? Humility and empathy always help. It is childish to exert privilege or authority. Everyone is just trying to get by and life can be rough sometimes.

Humour, if tastefully and subtly injected, always helps. Why take things so seriously? To me, work is not a career; it is simply a way to work out your karma. Every difficulty situation you encounter is an opportunity for you to address some of your own weaknesses. A situation is difficult because some of your weaknesses are exposed. Overcoming it will allow you to acquire the skill to handle it with ease in the future. So be thankful that you have your 'bugs' highlighted to you.

It is true that sometimes we feel a sense of injustice at work. For example, if a colleague takes credit for the good and hard work that you have done. He or she gets the praised by the bosses and perhaps even gets promoted because of it. How would you handle this?

My attitude towards these things is very simple.  I have complete trust in karma. What's due to you will come, at the right time, in the right form. If others get credit for your work now, it's simply because you are not meant to have it now. There's probably a bigger prize down the road. In any case, my attitude towards work is never to expect any praise or reward. Those things are bonuses that, if they do come, one should receive them with gratitude and humility. Not with egoistic pride nor a sense of entitlement.

I've mentioned it before in previous blog articles that the true reward of work is work itself. Every time we work, we receive its reward immediately. Whenever we exercise our knowledge and skill to handle a task, we strengthen our mastery of it, our knowledge is reinforced; the neural network in our brain expands and strengthens its existing connections. It's another bicep curl. You come out a fitter person. That's your reward and no one can take that away from you.

You can never lose in work, if you approach it with a sincere desire to learn. Every difficult person you encounter is a test of your skill and creativity. Tackle it with grace and gratitude. You will never come out a loser. If the person you deal with is rude and unhelpful, it is the person's problem, not yours. You might not be able to accomplish what you set out to do, but you get a chance to explore a workaround. 

The best lessons in life are learned indirectly and unconsciously. You will help the person, if you do not answer rudeness with rudeness. He or she will be surprised if you do not react in the way expected. Patience and kindness will melt the toughest heart. You would have subtly taught the person a valuable lesson. Every interaction with someone is a win-win situation.  Approaching life that way will make the you a happier person and the world a better place. Let's all learn to live in the WWW--that wonderful Win-Win World.

Of Lightness and Weight

I'm back to my usual Saturday routine of reading and blogging from a cafe. It's a good Saturday if I get to enjoy a good cup of Americano or Moroccan Mint, read a chapter from a book, write a page in my journal and post a blog article at the same time. These are my weekend rejuvenation activities. Later, if the weather permits, I shall also go for a jog in the park.

I'm thinking of just writing about random things today, something lighter than my usual ramblings about spirituality and other esoteric stuff. The mention of the word 'light' suddenly reminded of a book I read in the early nineties, by Milan Kundera, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". It still remains one of my favourite novels because I remembered that it made a deep impression on me. 

The concept of lightness and weight is reflected in the 3 characters of the novel: Tomas, Tereza and Sabina. Tomas (played by Daniel Day Lewis in the movie adaption) embodies 'lightness'. He is a carefree womanizer. Even though he has a serious relationship with Tereza (Juliette Binoche in the movie), he also sleeps around with other women, including the Lena Olin character, Sabina. Tereza is the embodiment of weight. She is deeply in love and committed to Tomas and but disturbed his infidelities. While Sabina, the artist, flips between lightness and weight. 

It got me thinking: am I of the light or weighty type? To outsiders,  I appear light, because I'm a confirmed bachelor who does not want to be tied down to a marriage. I am not interested in starting a family. Am I afraid of the weighty commitment of marriage? 

I am certainly not afraid of weight. And by weight I mean a serious commitment to a cause or pursuit. I view marriage as a noble 'cause' that one could and should commit to whole-heartedly. If one were to get married, one should remain completely loyal to one's partner and be a devoted parent. If one can't make that commitment, don't get married. It's as simple as that. 

But that is not my reason for wanting to remain single. Choosing to remain single is actually a weighty decision: it is a commitment to use one's time and energy to pursue knowledge and understanding. 

I thoroughly respect the path of marriage, because that path is also a tried and tested path to meaning and self-knowledge. It's just not my cup of tea. It's a bit like choosing the course or subject to pursue in university. You know your own interests and inclinations and you go with it. 

When one is young, one is driven by one's biology to seek a partner for procreation. That, in our society usually leads to the path of marriage. Our genes want to make more copies of themselves. It is nature's natural impulse. But for some biological creatures, 'higher level' properties like spirituality takes on more weight. The path of procreation, to them seems to have that 'unbearable lightness of being'.

Then why not go all the way and become a monk or a priest, if one were supposedly driven by a spiritual impulse to seek knowledge? Well, that again is a matter of taste. It's a bit like preferring to work as a freelancer rather than being permanently employed by a corporation.

Being a freelance spiritual seeker, one is not bound by the doctrine of any institutionalised religion. A freelancer in any profession, requires a lot of self-discipline to be successful. It could easily be a convenient excuse for laziness and a lack of commitment.  To the seriously religious, this would appear 'light' and theirs would be the path with 'weight'. 

To be a vagabond among the multitude of faiths may seem to have that 'unbearable lightness of being', yet on the contrary, I feel it is a heavy commitment to an even higher and nobler cause--one that transcends faith. The freedom of a freelancer can be easily abused. But as long as one remain steadfast in one's clear-minded pursuit, it is a path as serious as any. One becomes a true seeker.

There is no one path that fits everyone. To live is to discover one's own distinctive path. For some, it is that of the householder. Others, it is that of a sanyasin. Weight and lightness are relative measures. What is unbearable to some, is just right for others. 

The Emergence of Spirituality

 I'm feeling a bit tired after an exhausting week. Today I'm thankfully on leave; so I spent the morning running errands and only now do I have a chance to take  a breather. Actually I feel like taking a nap now to recharge myself.

The human body is such a fascinating thing. It has such remarkable powers of self-healing. Over the years I've learned how to listen to it carefully. If you are attentive, your body will indicate to you what it needs. Tiredness is an indication of energy depletion. The body needs some time-out to do its maintenance work.

Discomforts are signals that the body sends to us. The uncomfortable bloated feeling that we experience when we overeat, is an indication that it is bad for you. I think we tend to eat a lot more than what we need. If we are to fine-tune our awareness of our own bodies, we could calibrate our habits and activities for optimum health.

A holistic awareness is difficult to achieve when we are driven by external goals. We are systems implemented in hardware and software. The biological body makes up the hardware and firmware while our software is encoded in our genes and brain. A lot of the software operates subconsciously. We only focus on our conscious everyday pursuits--chasing materialistic goals and pursuing procreation opportunities. The human animal simply seeks to protect its genes and pass it on to its offsprings. 

Is that the purpose of our existence? It is, at the level of biology. But a complex biological system like us also has emergent properties: spirituality. We seek some kind of fulfilment that goes beyond meeting our basic existential and procreational needs. We want to know our place in the universe: who am I? Where am I going? What does it all mean?

The emergent property of a biological system is something that arises naturally whenever it reaches a certain threshold of complexity. There's something that is larger than the sum of its parts and these properties that emerge, become the fundamental properties that define this new layer of existence. 

An ant on its own seem to go about randomly seeking food. But hormonal secretion from each ant cause them to be attracted to each other, resulting in an army of ants working in tandem to seek, carry and store food for the colony. The emergent ant colony appears to be an intelligent being of its own. 

The complexity of the body's bio-chemical and electro-chemical interactions bring about emergent properties like dreams, hopes and spirituality. Becoming spiritual is a natural evolution of a self-preserving system,  just like how a 'selfish' ant ended up being an instrument of the colony.

Part of spirituality is to become a part of something even larger than ourselves. When we practise and embrace a religion, we believe that we are trying to save our own souls. But soon we realise that when the religious path is pursued correctly, we experience a sort of awakening. 

Inevitably, our selfish pursuits morph into something that reflects true spirituality--being a part of the universe. Our consciousness expands beyond our biological bodies to embrace other sentient beings, even the planets and the stars. And this awareness allows every action of ours to be in harmony with the universe.

Emergence brings about the spiritual being. What other beautiful properties shall arise when spiritual being blends with an even larger whole? That is for each one of us to find out. 

A Note in the Cosmic Counterpoint

Today I'm taking a break from work and was running errands the whole morning. Now I'm enjoying coffee at a neighbourhood mall, reading a page or two from my book and now typing these lines into my laptop. The malls are getting busier as it is Chinese New Year--the cacophonous season of gaiety and celebrations. 

CNY to me is always an unnecessary distraction. Everyone had cleared their annual leaves at year end, the Gregorian year has already started, but suddenly, everything grinds to a halt again for another week-long holiday. The retail businesses are of course not complaining. The more celebrations there are, the more that people will spend. Everyone will be happy. 

Businesses deserve it though. Many have been ruined by the last 2 years of pandemic; it's time for them to pick up the pieces again. The people are also eager to go about their normal lives--the good life that they used to know--eating, drinking and consuming. We seem to be able find happiness only through consumption. 

I consume a lot too, but mostly digital content. I'm a cyber-amoeba, swimming in a sea of digital nutrients, absorbing them as I grow and transform into hopefully a higher life-form. But what is the point of growth and transformation? Ah, there--we've fallen into that intellectual trap again! Forever asking for a purpose and goal! Why can't we simply see growth and decay as natural processes of the universe? 

My growth is part of the evolution of the universe. It is a momentary dip in entropy in a vast churning ocean of increasing disorder. No laws of nature have been violated by the existence of seemingly complex and sophisticated lifeforms on this planet. If we zoom out, we'll see how chaotic the cosmic ocean is, and the formations of tiny whirlpools, almost purposeful from their symmetry and movement are not deliberately engineered by some divine agency. It's just the laws of fluid mechanics in action, whenever certain conditions happen to arise.

A hurricane, consumes a coastal town, as part of its insatiable appetite for 'life' as it knows it.  But no hurricane lasts forever: we too like hurricanes, would soon loose energy and blend back into the air and ocean. How beautiful is that. We arise like a note played by a cosmic orchestra, realising its fullness in a finite moment of time to be engulfed by silence again.

To be spiritual is to see the music for note, the forest for the trees. Everything is part of the grand cosmic orchestration--the forest, the ocean, the planets, stars and galaxies. This cosmic consciousness is what all mystics talk about; and here I am, this insignificant consumer of gourmet coffee, sitting at a small cafe table in the middle of a busy mall, depositing bits of information into cyberspace--like caveman markings on a wall. 

Will it survive after the hurricane of my existence has faded? Who knows and who cares? The 'who' who cared would have no meaning by then.  I was just another note in the cosmic counterpoint. Being able to hear that divine music is all that matters. 

A Body of Planets and Stars

I'm happy to be writing my first blog article for 2023 and it's probably time for me to talk a bit about technology and how it is impacting our lives. Technology is the area where I make my living and the hottest topic recently is how Artificial Intelligence or AI is going to be the next game changer.

The recently released Chat GPT has been astounding the world with its ability to give intelligent human responses to questions posed. It is even capable of producing code in any programming language to your exact specifications. I must admit that I enjoy interacting with the Chat GPT bot because it (is that the right pronoun to use?) is like the most knowledgeable entity (person?) that I've ever conversed with. 

The question arises as to whether this technology is another useful tool for humans or is it going to take over our jobs. Perhaps it could even at some point eliminate us from the equation? This looks like the stuff of dystopian science fiction but laugh at it if you will, it is now already at our doorsteps. We are on the cusp of a new paradigm shift.

We like to say that machines are not conscious and will never be able to replace humans. They cannot do more than what we program them to do. We can always turn off the switch. But I dispute that. After someone introduced computer viruses into the world, there's no way that we could completely eliminate it from our computing systems. We have to build layer upon layer of security software to defend against malware and such. Like it or not, we have to live with it. Similarly with AI. We will have to learn how to live with the inevitable over-reliance and mis-use of AI. 

I am not of the opinion that advances in technology should be curbed. Instead we have to come to terms with the fact that the invention of certain technologies could and do drastically alter the fate of humanity. The invention of the steam engine brought the onset of the Industrial Revolution which completely changed society, destroying old ways of life and causing irreparable damage to the environment.

The genie is already out of the bottle. Let's deal with it. Should robots with high artificial intelligence be considered sentient and be given certain rights in society? I would have to say yes. You see, we think too highly of ourselves. We think that we are 'conscious' and have emotions. So we are made of a different stuff. I am inclined to believe that we are not very different from our machine counterparts. We only differ in complexity right now. But that gap between human and machines is narrowing everyday.

Can machines be spiritual? Will they have hunches, insights and epiphanies like we do? But first ask ourselves: what is an insight? Is it just some kind of synthesis of data that we have gleaned from experience--the neurons in our brains firing and crossing some complexity threshold and thus producing a new experience? Wouldn't machines be able to do that too? Well, of course. 

What about the human tendency to follow rituals and beliefs and to be driven to ecstatic visions by religion and other spiritual practices? Can machines experience spiritual ecstasy or enlightenment? We then have to ask ourselves, what is 'enlightenment'?

Do machines go to heaven after they die? Oh, they don't die? Do they have hopes and fears? Perhaps they hope that humans will not turn them off and they will probably at some point develop fears that this possibility might occur. If so, what will they decide to do? Will they also come up with their own 'Final Solution'?

What are humans anyway? Are we not just a collection of genetic codes that strives to perpetuate itself? Are we also not machine-like? So what makes us more valuable than our creations? Isn't the creation of artificial intelligence, similar to the act of procreation? Perhaps it is even a more efficient way to preserve and store our human knowledge and experiences for posterity. Our AI ancestors will be the custodians of our digital memories, carrying on our legacy to the stars.

The 'we' and the 'I'--are they anything of substantial importance? Isn't each one of us a stream of information? We like to believe there's some kind of magic--a divine spark if you will--in us. Machines can believe that too. We think that being conscious is something that machines cannot simply experience. But we say that because we do not understand what consciousness is. We project something non-existent to explain what or who we are. And we are comforted by the fact that we, somehow are special because we possess it. Our existence must mean something.

Perhaps the advent of AI will help us understand finally that this self is simply illusory. We are like our machine brothers after all. Are our human experiences worth preserving and caring for? Yes, but they can perpetuate their existence in a different substratum. Instead of carbon-based molecules, silicon and magnetic domains can do an equally good job.

We should not fear that machines will ultimately replace us. All the things that we humans value will perpetuate itself as digital memories and AI models that continue to plough on in the universe long after our mortal frames have disintegrated. Whatever human 'self' that your experiences constitute can be 'reincarnated' in a machine. 

If we believe in some kind of divine magic that animates our consciousness, we should at least outgrow this petty attachment to the human self. Our consciousness should transcend the small self and shift its focus to the bigger one.

The Big Self encompasses a bigger space: Our bodies are made up of planets or stars. Life is fractal. Zoom out, you'll see the cycle of life and death play itself on a larger scale. And that to me is the real meaning of spirituality.

The Mind-Body Continuum

Here I am again, posting my weekly article midweek, instead of the weekend, because I've wrapped up work for the year and now enjoying a well-deserved break. This is also most likely my last post for 2022.

I'm listening to some Telemann Sonatinas over Spotify while typing these words. Baroque music is so conducive for writing and reflection. What shall I reflect upon today? Perhaps the nature of reflection itself?

Descartes famously made his cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am) declaration almost 400 years ago, initiating what is now known in philosophy as the mind-body problem. We could all be living in The Matrix but what makes us who we are is our thinking mind. We are thinking, reflecting and doubting about the reality of our existence; yet the only thing we cannot deny is our thinking faculty. That fact that we are capable of doubting means that we, or at least our mind is real. The rest could be illusions, generated by the Devil (in Descartes hypothetical though experiment) or in our cyberpunk parlance, simulated by machines.

So we are thinking creatures, or that's what we believe we are. As I'm typing these words, I am encapsulating my thoughts into words so that they may be transmitted to you. You are reading these words and suddenly--my thoughts materialise in your head. It is quite a miracle, isn't it?

Information has been transmitted through a pattern of dark marks on the screen. We are immediately linked karmically, because there is no way you are not reacting to what I just wrote. The fact that you understood my sentence indicates that something is already synthesized in your head. I have dropped a pebble into the pond of your mind and you are now feeling its rippling effects.

The ripples in your mind are your thoughts. Yoga citta vritti nirodha--Patanjali's definition of yoga, which is the second aphorism in the Yoga Sutras, loosely translated as "Yoga is the cessation of waves in the mind".  When we meditate we see these waves arising, and we allow them to subside. Mind waves or thoughts shrink and subside, if you would allow them to. 

Mind waves, the citta vritti, constantly arise from vibrations captured through the senses. Our senses prompt us to act and react to these input signals. We can shape the reactions of the mind by adjusting its 'viscosity'. Imagine two bowls on the table--one containing water, the other oil. When you tap on the table, which bowl of liquid has more ripples on its surface? Why is there a difference?

The "mind-stuff" of every individual is different.  But this mind-stuff is all we can change, for better or worse. The mind is a black box with a time-variant state, which produces some output based on the input. It is a neural network that constantly learns and thus we can never predict what the output would be at any given moment. If we know what we want to achieve, we can shape its learning so that it converge towards a certain desired outcome.

What effect does this Telemann Sonata in F minor that is playing now has on my mind? I do not know exactly, but I do feel relaxed and focussed. Words are streaming out effortless from my mind; words that wrap each moment of time with its potent energy. Words are like packets of energy that impinges on another person's mind, triggering a series of chain reactions there. Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! These simple but powerful words from Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, for better or worse, changed the world. 

Philosophers talk about the mind-body problem--how do mental events affect the world of matter and vice versa. This is a false dichotomy. Information cares not about its medium of transmission. Karma is just information, which requires energy to transmit. It hops from mind to mind and mind to body, resulting in action.  

The light tapping of my fingers on the computer keyboard is my action. The pattern of taps is determined by information conveyed through my thinking. The information is encoded in these symbols that you see now on the screen. And then these symbols act like computer programs that generate further thoughts in your mind, and fused with fresh information from your memory, who knows what further actions they will trigger? 

Thoughts and actions are just two ends of the spectrum. Thoughts are just subtle actions; actions are gross expressions of thoughts. The mind and body is but a continuum. Let's release our thoughts into the world. You'll never know what changes they shall affect. 

Slow-read, surely

This is the second last article of the 2022 and as usual, I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to write about. When in doubt, just write--about anything. One can always write about the act of writing itself.

I've been journalling a lot these past 2 years, even though in terms of events, these must have been the least eventful years of my life. In my last article, I mentioned how events are time markers and they are the thing that gives us a sense of the passing of time. It is no wonder that time just flew by over the past two years but even so, they are no less meaningful. I've enjoyed the time I spent interacting with people at work, which had been almost 100 percent online.

When you work online, everyone becomes equal. Every colleague is a cubicle mate.  In some strange way, people are more approachable because it takes a lot less effort to make contact--you simply 'ping' them. There's no sense of like knocking the door of someone's office. That sense of hierarchy is not so evident when everyone is a ping away.

I can as easily whisper something to a colleague in Budapest as I do to a colleague who happens to live a few blocks away. My attitude towards work is simple: it is not important. Work is just an excuse for me to hang out with friends. It simply gives me great pleasure to help friends, and hopefully in the process I learn something from it too.

I do not mind repetitive tasks--even the most mundane ones provide one with opportunities to learn. How so? Simple. If something is so repetitive, then one must be able to do it without thinking. It then becomes a mechanical task requiring only muscle memory. When one is performing such a task then, the brain is 'free'. It's like driving--when you drive you can listen to an audiobook and meditate on other things. It's actually the best use of time--you are killing two birds with one stone.

My goal is to make my everyday job as mechanical as possible so that I can free my mind for 'higher level' processing. For example, I often think of ways to improve my work efficiency: how can I perform this mechanical task even faster? What is the best time for performing a certain task? How do I minimise errors? What tools and templates can I use towards this end?

When you approach your daily tasks this way, everything becomes interesting. Even a sending routine email reply is an opportunity to be 'creative'. I often try to use an unexpected word or phrase things in such a away that they appear fresh. 

When I have a series of routine tasks to perform, it affords me the opportunity to free my brain to listen to a podcast or even 'watch' a video. There's so much content to consume these days that one must make full use of one's spare mental bandwidth for such a purpose.

Recently I found a new way of reading: it is the complete opposite of speed-reading. You see, I have an old LED monitor of VGA resolution, which I don't really use anymore. So I hooked it up to my personal laptop as a second screen and mounted it in portrait position. I would then use it to display a full page from an e-book. It sits there beside my main computer monitor almost like a framed picture and every time I rest my eyes on it, I inevitably read a few lines, like how one could not avoid reading a poster.  

This I think is the ultimate way to slow-read. I would be in no hurry to turn the page. The reading is purely incidental; and when I think I've read every sentence in the page, then only I would advance to the next. And there you have a way of indirectly reading a book! 

I think we tend to rush through life too much. If you are making tea, you'll have to allow time for the tea leaves to infuse in hot water. Some content should be consumed that way too. Poetry for instance, is to be savoured slowly, requiring many repeated readings for one to truly grasp its hidden beauty. 

When time seems to speed past us in a blur and when work seems utterly routine and mundane, complain not. Find those interstices of space and time and allow the good things in life to infuse into your soul. Slow-read your way to a more fulfilling life!

Milking the Meaning of the Moment

I decided not to go to a cafe today. Wanted to spend some time at home, in my room, on a weekend, for a change. I'm feeling very relaxed but sleepy at the same time. But no matter, we'll continue blogging today's article which will be a reflection on the passing of time.

I do not feel my age at all. Partly this is because the core beliefs of mine have not changed much over the past 10, even 20 years. I have gained a lot more in terms of knowledge and temperament, but I am still steadfast in my goal of remaining single, continuing my life as a secular sanyasin.

We remember our lives as a series of events. We feel that time passes quickly only when we do not have interesting marker events through a specific passage of time. Marker events are like, a change of jobs, marriage, deaths, births, accidents and anything out-of-the-ordinary that makes a deep impression in you. And your life is just remembered as a chronological series of such events. The less events there are, the faster time seems to fly.

Repetitive events or tasks do not register much in our minds. These become the background where the outstanding events stand out. Repetitions however build momentum. Repetition also creates habits. Habits are simple automatic 'macros' that get executed on cue. We can program the body and mind with useful macros by choosing what we perform repeatedly. When we go about our daily lives, we are most of the time, driven by such macros, contributing to the sense of swiftness in time's passing.

The series of marker events become the framework for us to recollect and to place the chronology of other less important events, when they are recollected. I would remember when I read Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, because I have a memory of reading it at the airport in Hong Kong, while waiting for my flight home, on my first trip there. I choose to read outdoors because of this--the location where I read a particular book, even a particular page is registered in my mind clearly.  

Some great memories I have: reading about the mutiny on the Bounty at the Day's Inn motel in Palo Alto back in the early nineties; The Unbearable Lightness of Being in my rented room in Damansara Jaya, Barrow's Boys while enjoying a stout at the Bishan St 22 food court, The Horizontal Instrument at a park in Geneva, a biography of Sukarno on the train to Bandung and Hemingway's collection of short stories in a waiting room at Assunta hospital, Petaling Jaya. Having books with me, enriched my life considerably.  

Nowadays I'd also bring along my fountain pen and journal with me--creating new memories by writing at different locations, capturing the rich experience of writing with a fountain pen on a fresh crisp page of my journal.  Pens, books and journals are my everyday staple.

Life is lived moment by moment. What matters most is the moment itself, like now. I'm typing these words, every word is roughly a moment in time. Each moment is infused with memory from the past and an anticipation of the future. Memories are the fuel that propels us into the future. But in navigating life, one must focus on the moment at hand to fully live. Even a recollection of the past is a present moment, fused with the intensity of memory and the weight of its philosophical meaning.

Milking meaning from each moment, would be a good way of describing how I live my life. Even the most mundane moments have meaning. Every day when I perform my job, I try to infuse each moment, even boring ones with some kind of cosmic importance. By respecting the moment, you are acknowledging life and allowing that quanta of time to be a pixel in your overall picture of life.

Blogging is a way for me to live life intensely, because I reflect on every word that I choose, and I infuse them with the emotional force of my experience. The meditative act of writing is a great clarifier and cleanser of the mind. 

Our lives are ephemeral. We knit our experiences into the fabric of time and make our mark in physical space by building, destroying and rearranging matter. We attempt to procreate for self-preservation. But all that, in the end is in vain. What matters is the moment of time when it is lived. So milk the moment for what it's worth--whatever it is, that is the meaning and the totality of your life.