Forgetful Kindness

I'm constantly amazed by how people get angry easily over small and petty things.  The expression of anger reveals a lot about the psychology of a person.  It offers a glimpse into what the angry person considers to be important in his or her life.

Everyone has sensitive spots which when exposed could lead to an emotional outburst that takes the form of rage or grief. For example, if someone insults your intelligence publicly by calling you stupid, how would you react? If intelligence or competence is something which you take pride in, such a public insult would certainly not be taken kindly. 

Pride in one's own ability is an essential component of one's ego. The ego is an artificial mental construct which we have unconsciously built over time. It is the mental model of your physical existence. An insult to your pride, is a blow to the ego, not unlike the thrust of a sharp object to one's body.

When the ego is threatened, it attempts to defend itself by reacting in anger. So every time someone is angry, see if you can identify what aspect of the person's ego does it reveal. 

Take the case of road rage. Why would someone blocking your way trigger such abusive language and gestures? The person probably thinks that his importance is diminished by someone so blatantly ignoring his right of way or perhaps it also helps to reaffirm his superiority over others by pointing out other people's incompetence on the road. 

The ego is always looking at ways to defend and strengthen itself through confirmation bias. All resentment results from repeated confirmation in the mind that the opposite party is constantly repeating their despicable behaviour. Not again! That's how relationships between husband and wives and also between business partners grow sour. Familiarity often breeds contempt.

Kindness, understanding and compassion diminish and dissolve the ego. A true act of kindness is a voluntary tear-down of one's own ego structure. You let go of your pride and selfishness to accommodate someone else. 

Kindness will always result in personal inconvenience. You are sacrificing time, energy and other resources for someone else's benefit. And if that inconvenience is taken as something negative, the ego takes the opportunity again to replenish its reservoir of resentments.

Even when one accomplishes a great act of kindness, the ego will still try to use it as an opportunity to build another artificial structure--your 'reputation' for kindness. It makes you crave for praise and recognition. You begin to expect it every time and when it is not forthcoming, you feel hurt or unappreciated. That is another resentment trap that one should be vigilant for.

True kindness has no memory. You 'fire and forget', almost like a reflex action. Any act of charity is best done quietly and anonymously, without any fanfare. Kindness heals by softening the ego. Any surge of pride that one feels is but a momentary wave of pleasure that rises and falls, and promptly forgotten. 

Will such a kind person be taken advantage of by others? Sometimes, in the short term. But that is not your problem. It is not your job to keep account of deeds owed and rendered. Outsource that to the universe. In the long run, no act of kindness can result in one's ruination, because it goes against the laws of nature. Just practice forgetful kindness. The attendant peace and joy of the act will be its constant reward.

What's Bugging You?

It's a quiet Friday again, which means that I could start blogging early before the weekend begins. Tomorrow I'll try to ease back into my Saturday routine of reading and writing. 

I've been doing a lot thinking on how to help people with mental health issues. Each one of us has a mind and we assume that other people's mind work the same way. If something is obvious to you, it has to be obvious to others too--or does it?  How do you enter the mind of a depressed person, when you yourself are "normal"?

I put the word normal under scare quotes because, we think we are normal, or at least what we assume what others feel when they are also "normal" is similar to our own. But it is unlikely so. We know from the reaction of people to different things, for example food or music. We attribute that to taste. But taste itself is a reflection on how we react to the stimuli of the world. We react differently because we all have a different default brain states. 

Our so-called "mood" influence our reactions to other people's words and actions. Mood is also part of our default brain state. The mood of a depressed person is obviously very different from a so-called normal person. We can react with anger or laughter to the same situation, depending on mood.

For a depressed person, the chemical balance could be off, causing a person to be constantly plunged in a quiescent state that is dark and oppressive. Just like a body that is walking on a tightrope, when balance is maintained, you could walk forward; but when you are off-balanced, you could end up falling. There's a point of no-return, when no frantic waving or shifting of the body will allow you to remain standing. 

One could try to change one's default state with medication or by changing one's lifestyle. However the company of different people could either irritate or cheer up a depressed person; so that has to be arranged carefully. Family members are often the source and trigger of a person's depressive episodes.  A complete change of environment, far from surroundings which reminds the person of stressful situations could be helpful.

Some people are naturally irritable, grumpy and suspicious. But they are different from people who are depressed. These are behavioural characteristics. Depressed people are often outwardly nice and sunny but inside, they see a dark world.

A nice user-interface could conceal a buggy piece of software. The software of our minds are partly genetic and partly programmed by our education, culture and experience. There's no clear dividing line as to when nature ends and nurture begins. We have to see the human system holistically.  Like bad software, the mind could also be caught in infinite loops, memory leaks and stack overflows. The system crashes or hangs. 

We need to be able to debug ourselves constantly and fix whatever we can through self-detection. That's a tough thing to do. But do take advantage of feedback from your 'users'--the people you interact with everyday. Often they reveal the presence of bugs in you and also in them. Like it or not, we are all imperfect, buggy systems that require constant maintenance. 

Subsuming the Self

It's the end of another work week and today is a good day to blog since it's a rather quiet Friday. I've been maintaining my discipline of rising early and ending my workday early, with the hope that at some point I'll be able to incorporate some exercise routine into my day.

Right now I'm certainly lacking a lot of exercise as my weekend routine has been disrupted since my mother's surgery. Mum is recovering well now and I've been slowing easing off my care so that she could practise going back to your usual routine. Having given care to my father and now my mother, i think I've become quite an expert care-giver for the elderly.

My years of taking care of my dad was great training. I like how it had shaped me into a more patient and compassionate person. Not that I wasn't one before; just that you are ignorant of the limits of your endurance until you have been fully tested.

Meditation trains you to be constantly aware of the thoughts that arise in your mind. And you know how to sandbox them so that none of them take control of yourself. People who lose their temper reveals a lot about the poor state of their minds. An even-tempered person detects anger arising from a very early stage and is able to dissipate their energy before it becomes uncontrollable.

The skill of mindful awareness is one that can be honed through practice. Most of the time, we are consumed by our thoughts but when we are mindful, thoughts are just one of many 'application processes' running in our minds. We have another monitoring process that oversees them. But even this monitoring process monitors itself and ensures that no single thought process consumes all resources.

An angry mind is a mind descended into chaos. The entire mind is taken over by a single all-consuming thought that seeks the path of least resistance. It even induces the body to act violently sometimes. It is a sorry state of mind indeed.

Mindfulness means constant awareness and monitoring of one's state of mind. When a single thought appears to be hogging resources, we ease it off. We allow it to fade away by not reinforcing it. That means letting go--which is another skill I talked about in an earlier article. 

By caring for others, we let go of our own self-serving thoughts. The ego is forgotten because to serve is to subsume oneself to others. And that works better than any self-absorbed meditative practice.

A Boat called The Human Condition

I want to write about something positive today. Something that will lift my mood up; not that I'm feeling down right now but I was reflecting on some people who are plunged in perpetual gloom. I am curious as to what can be done to change such a person's outlook on life.

I've mentioned before that I'm naturally a glass-half-full person, as opposed to someone who always see the negative in every situation. Being grateful for having half-a-glass of water to drink is a much better state of mind than to subject oneself in a tirade of negative thoughts: "My glass never is full", "I knew it: every time someone pours me a drink, it is always half-full", "You see, I never get my full due". 

Such habitual negativity is often found in people who like to see themselves as being victims. They perceive the world as always being unfair to them, and the are being dealt a bad hand. They are 'motivated' to continue spewing negativity because they need people to acknowledge how much they have suffered and how their situation is so untypical of others. 

The need for acknowledgement of their suffering is part of this complaining attitude towards life. Unfortunately grumpy people don't usually attract many sympathetic friends. Such people just need an outlet to vent their frustrations towards everything. Constant venting however is not a solution that will help the person break away from this cycle of negativity.

One thing that can be done is to expose them to the company of cheerful people--people who could lead by example. Let them see how a difficult situation can be tackled rationally and cheerfully, without resorting to anger or blame.  They will find that, a 'giving-people-the-benefit-of-the-doubt' attitude will always make one's life better. You don't accumulate resentments that way. No one in this world is conspiring to make life miserable for you. They are also struggling to overcome their own weaknesses and its resulting suffering.

You see, everyone is in the same boat called "The Human Condition".  Everyone is born with certain strengths and weaknesses. We all try to hide or deny our weaknesses. When they manifest themselves, they cause us pain, simply because we do not know how to handle them. 

Acknowledge your own weaknesses, but at the same time be kind to yourself. Sometimes these weaknesses are just irrational fears that are unnecessarily amplified. See them clearly as they are. Tell yourself, it's alright. It's not a matter of life and death. You are not alone in this struggle called life. 

To call life a 'struggle' is also the wrong paradigm to adopt. You wouldn't call a workout session in the gym as a 'struggle'. Every difficulty that causes you to 'struggle' is just another resistance load added to help strengthen your body and mind. You'll always gain something out of it. 

The Human Condition is a boat launched on a sea with choppy waters. Some sea-sickness is bound to be expected. But after a while, one gets accustomed to its rock and sway and be able to get on with life on it. Blaming the boat or the sea for your discomfort is not going to help. Adapting to it does. 

An Onus on an Opportunity

I'm hoping to get back to my usual weekend routine of blogging and reading. When your daily routine has been interrupted through circumstances beyond your control, try to see it as an opportunity. 

People often quote that the Chinese word for crisis, weiji, consists of the characters for danger and opportunity.  Any major change in our lives, is the best opportunity to plant some new habits because the inertia of routine has been interrupted. It's like an intruder creating a diversion to distract the security guards.

For example, I'm trying to reintroduce an early morning routine again, by waking up at 5am. There was a time once when I used to go for a jog at 6am every morning. But this routine has been interrupted by one too many late social nights, which affected my sleep time. 

To wake up at 5am, I'll have to be in bed by at least 11pm, if not 9pm itself, to get 8 full hours of sleep. Since I don't have an active social life these days, I will try to be in bed before midnight so that I can join the 5am club again.

The 4 hours before 9am is a most wonderful period of the day, if I could access it. I could meditate, exercise, journal, read and shower before the world even begins its day.  I get a head-start and it feels great to be on top of things when actual working hours begin. 

I've been waking up at 5am or earlier for the past 2 weeks. Now that I no longer need to go to the hospital to attend to my mum, I will use this newly inculcated habit to pursue a new set of routines. I'll still have to take care of mum at home during her recovery period but I'll get a lot of flexibility to slowly inject some productive time-slots into my day.

We will all succumb to physical decline and mortality one day. Caring for someone else who is undergoing this phase helps one to prepare for this inevitability. Life is what it is and you make the best of it, with strength, resolve and optimism.

I can only express my gratitude for the opportunity granted by this crisis. In the process, I know so much more about my own strengths and weaknesses. The onus is on me now to make the best use of this opportunity.

The Epic of Existence

I'm typing this from the cafe at the ground floor of the hospital. The place is relatively quiet on Sundays and I'm taking a brief break from my routine of attending to my mother here at the ward. It has been a rather stressful few days but I hope the worst is over.

I realised that, despite the lack of sleep and the long days that I had spent here, I'm actually not very tired--very much less tired than my usual working days. Perhaps it is the break from the computer screen that feels 'refreshing' to me.

I might have to go back to work soon and this 'holiday' has given me a fresh perspective on work and life. One thing's for sure: material success has never been an effective motivator for me. Whenever I find myself drifting towards that direction, my mind recoils from it. 

I treat work as a kind of sport--you play hard to win but, at the end of the day, it's just like another game, which has no real significance in the larger scheme of things. This doesn't diminish its importance; it merely reframes it.

We humans look for meaning in everything we do, because the mind is a story generating machine. Having 'meaning' means having a 'reason' for everything we do or observe. It is the way our brain has evolved. We want to comprehend why certain things happen. The explanation has to have an emotional and logical arc, which when narrated provides a sense of satisfaction and certainty. All our religious myths and political ideologies are good examples of such stories.

The fact of the matter is, a greater part of our lives have no 'meaning' in the rational sense. And there's nothing wrong with that. We do the things we do, because we've acquired what Daniel Dennett calls 'competence without comprehension'.  We have evolved culturally, infected by memes in the form of thinking tools and habits, some of which are beneficial, some not. Once infected, these habits and practices become a part of our 'competence', which is manifested instinctively or ritualistically.

Our evolved brain, which is capable of intelligently shaping the materials of the universe for its own purpose, attempts to provide a logical story retrospectively for practices and behaviours, which had evolved rather 'unconsciously'.

The tendency of the mind to latch on to stories is why we find it so hard to meditate. When we do mindfulness meditation, we try to see things clearly as they are, without entertaining any stories. In such moments of meditative silence, we see the movies in our heads clearly--our fears, angers and desires--all fragments of stories which we had composed to explain, project or justify every sequence of events in our lives.

Stories are higher level protocols of the karmic stack. More stories are generated when we operate at those higher layers, causing enormously complex karmic reactions. At the base level, we only have a causal chain of atomic events, and by paying attention to them, we allow them to play themselves out in the simplest possible manner.

Whenever a thought appears in the mind, ask yourself: what's the story here? See how each thought attempts to spin a story to start another complex chain of events.  By doing so, we save ourselves from the many wild swings between ecstasy and sorrow, which is the bane of human existence.

Remember, the mind is a spinner of stories. Only when we cease listening to them, the stories die. And when they do subside, the epic of existence reveals itself.

Transcending Pain

I had to take care of a loved one in hospital for the past couple of days.  Spending time in the hospital allowed me to observe people at their most vulnerable. Always in places like these, you'll end up reflecting on the human condition and how much suffering we mortals have to endure.

I admire the hospital nurses and staff who have to handle often very difficult patients with such patience and kindness. From what I observe, the suffering that patients go through is often accentuated by their state of mind. Physical wounds will heal in its own time, if proper care is taken. Hospitals do that well. They provide the necessary medication and treatment to heal the physical body. 

But the anxiety in the minds of the patients and even the family members is something else altogether. A stay in the hospital becomes a struggle if you are bothered if every minor discomfort. The mind multiplies every physical discomfort a hundred-fold. Not everyone knows how to let go and allow nature to take its course.

Surrendering to physical pain is the best way to alleviate it.  But that is a very difficult thing to do for many.  It made me better appreciate the whatever little meditation skills that I've acquired; people without such training are so consumed by the anxiety in their minds that they become their minds. The mind is that suffering self: I am in pain!  When all there is a wave of thought which we label as pain. Even the "I am" subject is also another wave.

So this momentary virtual object called 'Self' detects signals from the nervous system which it interprets as 'pain' and creates a cascade of associated thoughts: Why am I in such pain? Am I in deep trouble? Is it going to get worse? I am doomed! I don't deserve this!

The momentary Self takes centre-stage and aims to perpetuate itself through a series of thought-waves. That is how the Self achieves persistence.  It needs the reverberating effects of a story--the story of pain--to further reinforce its continued existence. That's what the arc of life is--a never-ending series of actions and reactions, which give form to virtual objects.

But this is a house of cards which collapses the moment we let go. Yet we can't, because we are living physical creatures with brains that continuously creates thoughts and concepts. Only when we are able to see that everything is as it is--processes, originating from other processes, are we able to transcend them all. And finally what is that awareness that transcends it all, if not the Virtual Self? Is it another illusion? Let's find out for our--selves. 

Ambiguous Ambitions

I completed my work early today and now I'm free to indulge in my free-writing exercise for the week.  There's a long weekend ahead with Monday being a public holiday and I intend to use every minute of it productively. Posting this blog article would be like checking off the first item on my task list.

A lot of what I do is pursuing my interests in a wide variety of subjects.  I guess that's my way of 'enjoying life'.  I'm lucky that the things I enjoy come relatively cheap. A good internet connection, my library of books and the company of good friends are basically all I need. My bar to happiness happens to be set very low indeed. That very fact itself makes me happy. 

Does being easily contented make me less 'ambitious'? Perhaps. But what does ambition mean? I don't have the conventional ambitions of being successful in my career, making a lot of money and gaining recognition, nor any charitable goals of doing good to a lot of people. I am only interested in always delivering quality work in whatever I do, learning things all the time and being of value to the people that I deal with--people within my sphere of influence.

There's nothing wrong in being ambitious. If one feels the stirrings of ambition within one's breast, forge ahead! Be the top of your field, be the best in the world, acquire all that you've ever desired, pursue your dreams. There will be a lot of obstacles ahead but channelling one's energy towards overcoming them builds skill, character and resilience. In a way, that's the coursework that you have to do towards a mastery of life.

Ambition implies having specific goals in life. I guess, ambition is ego plus goals. If  you are clear of your goals, you can ride the ego like a vehicle to move towards them.  That's the way to pursue your ambitions--be clear of your goals, but keep the ego under control. Like a good driver, you must know how to tap the power of the ego engine to propel yourself forward. 

Without goals, we do not know if we are heading in the right direction. In my case, my goal is just to grow. Like a tree. A tree has no ambition, but it fulfils its purpose in life. The difference between a human and a tree is the presence of the ego. 

Ego is something natural and present in every human being. If we recognise its nature, it can be very useful. Treat it like a booster rocket. Let it help you achieve escape velocity, but discard it at the first opportune moment.

To live is to grow, in the areas that matter to you. To me, it is always gaining new insights, seeing things from a different perspective and moving forward. If they happen to result in material gains, or if an explicit pursuit of them makes sense, then I'll put my mind to it. But I'm always mindful of what I'm getting into. 

Life opens up new possibilities all the time. And being ambiguous on ambition gives me that flexibility to pursue different options. All the river has to do is flow, and the terrain will guide it towards sea. 

The Game of Letgo

Another Friday, another day off for me. I'm here in my apartment today, listening to some Mozart sonata, appreciating a respite from the world outside in this oasis of calmness.

Life can be very challenging for many of us, even though most of the time, we lead rather dull lives of being at work with our colleagues and at home with our family members. People are often unhappy because of relationships with their friends, co-workers, bosses, spouses, siblings or children. 

One thing that we have to acknowledge is that people are different. No two persons think and feel alike. People operate by completely different paradigms, resulting in very different world-views. Whenever we expect other people to see things the way we do, we inevitably run into disagreements.

We end up resenting people who always go about annoying us with words and actions that we completely disagree with. Families argue over petty little things on a daily basis because they know each other too well, and familiarity over each other's 'shortcomings', inevitably breeds contempt.

People generally can be divided into two broad categories: those who see the glass as half-empty and those who see it as half-full. The half-empty type are perpetually complaining about things: the food is lousy, the service is bad and people around them are not good enough. They are never ever really happy.

Those with a half-full glass mentality are always grateful for what they already have. Even when things are not what they expect, they are hopeful that things will always work out for the best in the end. If everyone is able to cultivate this simple half-full glass attitude, a lot of pain and friction could be avoided.

Having the half-full glass mindset means that we are always trying to see people as good by default. If they do and say things that we disagree with, perhaps they had a bad day or they had been triggered by something that they are sensitive about.  Or they know something that we don't. So give them the benefit of the doubt. 

Like sportsmen, people can go off-form sometimes. Be forgiving of their momentary lapses. They could be rude, insulting and impossible to deal with. Well, just side-step the person and avoid stepping into the puddle. We can't change other people's behaviour. It's also not our job to do so. If you are a boss who has problematic employees like these, just agree to part ways. They can always find employment elsewhere which could be more conducive to their peculiar style of working. 

Family members, on the other hand, are a much trickier lot to handle. We did not choose our parents and siblings and certainly can't fire them at will. We need to take friction among family members as a test of our nimbleness and resilience. Understand that everyone sees the world through different lenses; often they are shaped by their own personal pain. 

Empathy is always a good starting point. Self-reflection is also necessary for us to realise that, perhaps we could be partly blamed for the present unhappiness. Perhaps we can correct the situation by adjusting our own behaviour?  Be grateful that if we have the power to alleviate a difficult situation through an action that we could affect. Always work within our own sphere of influence. If we can easily will ourselves to lift a hand, we are certainly capable of letting go of a grudge.

It is easy to practise the skill of letting go. Our everyday lives already pose sufficient obstacles for us to identify what it is that we need to let go, and if we have the mental strength to do so. 

Search yourself. Identify every pain or dissatisfaction that you are carrying inside. Explore this virtual reality game that's constantly running in your mind. The enemies that you have to eliminate go by names like Pain, Hatred, Grudge, Resentment, Anger. Your weapon is something very subtle: it's a skill which everyone already possess but few use it well: it's called 'letting go'. 

Every time you let go of some Hatred, you collect pahala points. And over time you'll find that you can be pretty good at it. The more pahala points you collect, the fitter and healthier you become. So let's go: Let's play this new and exiting game in town called Letgo! 

Consciousness Considered

Today, because I'm on leave, I'm back to my usual pot of Earl Grey routine here in my study, listening to Chopin and staring out into the green foliage outside my window and the dull grey skies in the distant, which seem to forebode rain and thunderstorms later. 

Maybe today we'll discuss a bit about consciousness. This is a favourite topic among philosophers and people with religious beliefs. There are a lot of terms related to consciousness, some used synonymically with it like 'mind', 'soul' and 'self'. Each of these terms gives a slightly different nuance to the meaning.

Actually what do we even mean by consciousness? American philosopher Thomas Nagel in his famous paper "What is it like to be a Bat", perhaps gave the simplest articulation of it by stating "an organism has conscious mental states if there's something that is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.".

We all know what it is like to be ourselves. It's the feeling you are conscious of right now while you are reading these words, comprehending, wondering, comparing, objecting or agreeing with what I'm saying. And we take it for granted that other people feel something like that too, when they are sane and awake. "The lights are on", as Sam Harris like to say.

This first-person 'feeling', do other organisms, say a bat with vastly a different neurophysiology, have it too? I know what it feels like to be me but what is it like if I were a bat?  We could argue that we need something complex like a brain to be conscious. Could consciousness be an 'emergent' property of complex systems, like an ant or termite colony which is capable of behaving 'intelligently' as a group?

As it is today, it is safe to say, no one knows. Consciousness is the ultimate mystery, partly because we are using consciousness to investigate consciousness. This is why philosopher David Chalmers calls it the "hard problem of consciousness" as opposed to the 'easier' problem of just investigating the physical brain and its processes which generate so-called consciousness. 

This is the age old mind-body problem--that eternal Cartesian division between the immaterial and the material properties of our existence. "I think therefore I am"--Descartes's famous dictum asserting that the only thing that we can be sure of is that we are thinking, therefore at least that is real. The rest is up for grabs. 

That resulted in all the different schools of thoughts we have today--dualists who think that mind and matter are two distinct substances or monists, which are either idealists who believe that the entire universe is a projection of consciousness or materialists who believe that matter is all there is. And there are those who try to marry the two like the panpsychists, who speculate that perhaps consciousness could be a fundamental ingredient of all matter. 

Religious and mystically-inclined people do not like the materialist view because it lacks that magical substance called 'soul' that defines who we are. Certainly we are not the same as stones and trees. We have a soul that lives on after the material body has disintegrated. But then, there are animists among many primitive tribes who believe that even stones and trees have immaterial spirits and are 'alive'.

Can AI be conscious, if not already? LLMs today already can converse like humans and would arguably pass any Turing test, if not now, in the near future. If they cannot be distinguished from humans, are they not at least the proverbial philosophical zombie who is capable of behaving exactly like any one of us? 

Philosophers use the philosophical zombie thought experiment to argue against the materialist view of consciousness.  There are others who think that consciousness is a false problem, similar to the definition of life. We used to believe in some kind of elan vital substance or 'life force' that differentiates between living and non-living beings. Now we can see many organisms like viruses that are hard to be lumped into either category. Why can't life or consciousness lie on a continuum? 

Could consciousness be a measurable quantity of complex systems? Scientists who believe that have come up with Integrated Information Theory or IIT which defines a mathematical quantity based on the amount of 'integrated information' in a system, measuring how 'conscious' a system is.

Personally, I am open to all ideas. I think there may not be an answer that satisfies us simply because we are computationally-bounded observers based on Stephen Wolfram's theory of a computational universe.  We only perceive things that matter to us and are limited in the way we comprehend the universe. 

I am happy simply typing these words, thinking, speculating and observing. In other words, just being me: Conscious.

A Remembrance of Rosebud

Today I'm writing from a pub, having a beer in the afternoon, instead of my usual Americano or Earl Grey.  On the large projection screen in front of me, they are showing a live telecast of badminton matches from the Australian Open. 

I used to play a lot of badminton during my school days but I found that I was better at soccer and table tennis. Me and my buddies would scour the entire town for available badminton courts: in public parks, kampungs and schools--anywhere that we could string our net, without raising an ire. 

We liked to play early in the morning, sacrificing sleep. And because all the courts were outdoors, wind was always a major disrupter. But the cool and the stillness of morning air was just perfect for badminton.

We usually played doubles because that was the only way to ensure everyone got a chance to play. I also preferred the more fast-paced doubles game. Childhood and teenage years were a lot of fun; friends everywhere within cycling distance. Every year-end school holiday was a month-long outdoor carnival of games and adventures.

Perhaps the opportunity to grow up like that is forever gone now: a childhood untainted by television, video games and social media.  Those halcyon days of innocence and wonder; of excursions into the jungle, of getting ourselves lost deep in a maze of rubber trees, of climbing guava trees and chomping on its delightful bounty, of rapturous hide-and-seek games under the moonlight, shrieking with our childish delight to the annoyance of neighbours.

I always feel that it is a blessing to have that core of innocence, or at least its memory, in the depths of my soul. My days now are spent in front of multiple computer screens, solving issues far removed from anything in nature--lambda functions, automatic scaling groups, api keys and HTTP headers. The replicants in Blade Runner cling on to their implanted memories as a kind of proof of their humanity. Who can forget Rutger Hauer's now iconic dying scene in the movie, where he uttered these immortal lines:

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"

If such a thing as a soul exists, I know at its core, it is infused with our cherished childhood experiences.   Everything we later experience as adults is tinged with its mood and colour. They anchor us and re-orientate us whenever we are lost. 

If we lose the child within,  it is akin to losing our souls. I also see the evocations of childhood wonder in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which makes it the most poignant opening of any novel that I've read:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

I too remember many distant afternoons, full of joy and innocence when I discovered a world full of intriguing mysteries and promises.

I'm not sure why I feel a sudden nostalgia for my childhood here in this stifling pub, filled with techno-music blaring in the background. But it is strangely comforting to be able to reconnect with it. The sight of Lee Zii Jia playing badminton was a Proustian moment that had triggered these memories. 

My childhood, real and imagined, all the books that I had read and the movies that had made deep impressions on me, they all defined who I am, and my path ahead.

No, I'm not facing any existential crisis like those replicants of Blade Runner or Colonel Aureliano Buendia, but I see memory as something that's critical to our identity, the catalyst for the unrelenting pursuits of adulthood.  And like Citizen Kane in the acclaimed Orson Wells movie, perhaps, deep down inside, we all have our own personal Rosebuds.

The Ultimate Music

I often find myself returning to the topic of religion in my blog. I've written so much about it that every time I'm motivated to express my view on the subject, I have to search through my blog to make sure that I'm not repeating the same thing again. And more often than not, I've said it before. I found this blog article of mine written in 2008, which kind of summarises my views about religion pretty well.

What more should I or do I need to say? Well, the only thing that troubles me about religion are religious people. These are the so-called learned preachers who spread messages of hate and spite for other religions and treating 'unbelievers' as people who are too blind to see the obvious truth. They think only they have a monopoly of divine insights.

That immediately screams of ignorance. It is like someone who specialises in a specific genre of music, say Jazz, claiming that it is the only true form of music; all others are false. Jazz is supreme because it sees through the 'falsehood' of traditional harmony. One can see how naive that is.

Music and art in general are creative products of human culture and civilisation. There are many different schools and forms of music that emerges, in response to the epoch which the humans live in. It's a beautiful thing. Why limit ourselves with one type of music? 

Now hang on, I can hear the religionists objecting: religion is not like music. It is Truth with capital T itself. It determines the purpose of our lives and where we end up after death. Isn't the question of death something that should be treated seriously? How can you treat it as like as some kind of frivolous entertainment like music?

I've explained why music is a good metaphor for religion elsewhere before and will not repeat my arguments here. But the most important thing that bears repeating again is this: if only our attitude towards religion is like what we have towards music, the world would be a much better place. We all listen to the music that speaks to us personally, so why deny others their own choice of music? If you don't like the music, switch to another radio station. What's the big deal? Why should I be so bothered that you not dig Jazz?

While comparing religion with music, it is also interesting to note that some religious authorities also take issue with music as a kind of frivolity that corrupts the soul of its listeners.  Throughout history, religions have always been suspicious of anything that involves the pleasures of the senses.  Piety is seen as something that rises above the base cravings of the mortal body. 

Music, dancing and the consumption of intoxicants seem to go hand-in-hand and are often associated with activities that are immoral, in the eyes of the religion. At one time, even coffee--which induces a strong craving and consumed in coffee-houses where people socialise and supposedly engage in licentiousness--provoked strong debates among religious authorities as to whether it should be banned.

Every institutionalised religion sees itself as a kind of social and political framework for building a utopian society. If everyone adheres to its doctrinal rules, it would usher in a golden age where humanity flourishes. That is the dream of many religious visionaries--the realisation of the Kingdom of God on Earth.

We all love utopias, especially when we are young and just becoming aware of all the injustices in the real world. Religion and other ideologies like communism offer a vision of a better society which is worth fighting for. It feels great and meaningful to be fighting for a cause. And sometimes you are even willing to die for it. Dying for a noble (and better still, divine) cause gives life meaning. And God knows we cannot live without meaning.

We've seen this movie before. It gets played again and again, like we are caught in some kind of infinite loop. It is a zeal that is difficult to comprehend, but it is part of the human impulse. 

It is what I see in the software development world too. A new framework comes up that promises to be the ideal one for web development. And religious wars are often fought over them (e.g. React vs Angular), with fanatical supporters on both side. Who is right, who is wrong? Well, it depends. Adopt what suits you best. Inevitably, another framework or programming paradigm will come along, promising a more utopian vision. 

Let's all for once, grow up when it comes to religion. Appreciate them as one would, when listening to music. They might or might not be to your taste. You can celebrate them, but never dictate what others should or should not listen to. There is no such thing as the Ultimate Music. 

The Philosophic Quest

And my productive Saturday begins now: posting a new blog article. What shall I touch on today? I've ranted about the education system last week; this week I'm going to discuss something else: my general philosophy on life.

Anyone who has read some blog posts of mine would know that I'm kind of a Stoic. I value equanimity--which is also a Buddhist attitude towards life, even though I wouldn't officially call myself a Buddhist.  I don't get overboard when Fortune grants me its blessings, nor do I get dejected whenever things do not go my way. I would also admit that I'm a bit of an existentialist because I believe in defining my own purpose in life and living authentically based on what I define as meaningful.

Fate has given us different initial or starting conditions which either encourage or inhibit certain aspects of our genetic dispositions. I do believe that big part of our character is due to Nature; nurture merely sets up the environment which determine which characteristics of ours flourish or languish. 

Our hardwired tendencies make certain outcomes more likely in the trajectory of our lives. Certain characteristics are self-reenforcing--if you are attracted towards a certain subject or object, you will move towards it, acquiring new information, skills and company that make you dwell deeper into those domains.

I find almost everything interesting and I believe in sampling the wisdom of every culture and tradition, appreciating both their similarities and differences. It is true that I often criticise practitioners of institutionalised religions for being dogmatic, superstitious and blindly ritualistic but at the same time I also understand why they are so appealing to great masses of humanity. I am unsympathetic towards religious supremacists who think that they are ones who are privy to divine truths, but I am also an ardent student of all the religions of the world, because I think they all contain some kernel of wisdom within.

Being an explorer of different religions has enabled me to gain insights into mankind's collective psyche: the primal instincts that drive our actions and the spiritual yearnings that lift us up to greatness.  I am driven by the impulse of life to self-preserve this bodily existence and at the same time attempt to transcend it. 

Throughout the ages, humanity has tried to express these complex drives through art, religion, science and technology. I am a student of all these diverse areas because they constitute life as we know it and being able to grasp and appreciate them makes a fulfilling life.

Being able to catch of glimpse, in my very limited way, of all the fruits of human civilisation is a great blessing which I am extremely grateful of. I never cease to marvel at the fact that all the good things in life are so cheaply available and it is our good fortune (and if you are reading this, you can count yourself among the blessed) that we are given the privilege to access them.

The fact that I could write these sentences and immediately anyone in the world with access to internet could read them, is a miracle of technology and we are only on the cusp of this great transformation, which, if we conduct ourselves with wisdom and foresight, can only transform lives for the better. 

Philosophy is the greatest gift of life. If we are religious, it is because we are driven by a philosophical urge to make sense of our lives. By studying philosophy, we are exploring ourselves as individuals and societies, and our place in the universe. We might not be able to find answers that fully satisfy us, but it is the philosophic quest itself that imbues our lives with joy and meaning.

Unlearning to Learn

I decided to write from a cafe today, squeezed--not uncomfortably though--behind a tiny round table, which could barely accommodate my laptop and a cup of hot chocolate. Sometimes I think better in such public places, drowned in the white noise of people's voices and the ambient traffic. 

I have in mind a few topics which I could dwell on, but I think I would like to let them marinate in my mind for a while before I sample them again for taste. Last week, I wrote about my views on our education system, which in reading back, is more of a teaser.

I'm going to riff around the same topic today because there are a few more things that I want to say--not necessarily because I think I have a solution to all the problems that beset our education system, but I just want to add a perspective that's not often expressed. 

When I was in school and even in college, I realised that there are many of my classmates who were more diligent and worked a lot harder than me.  But they did not perform better than me in exams. Is it because I am smarter? Certainly not in the regular sense. Is it because I have a better memory and is able to regurgitate back all the facts in exams? No,  and I know I don't employ some of the techniques that my classmates use to cram things into memory. 

Perhaps my only quality is that I've always understood the strengths and weaknesses of my mind, and was able to find ways to leverage or work around them. I devised my own tools and techniques to learn as effectively as I could, many which I later discovered, were techniques taught by learning experts. 

I understood the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve intuitively, and I was always looking for metaphors and analogies to understand difficult concepts. If this is considered 'intelligence', then I probably have a bit of that. But there are many types of smarts, and fate has dealt each one of us with a different hand. Some have a flair for languages, some have an innate mathematical brain, others have better social and emotion intelligence. We are all products of the genetic lottery.

A good education system has to understand all these differences and be able to help students identify and address their strengths and weaknesses. We hear about falling interests in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths). To some, this is a cause for worry. But I hear others who think that our education system is deteriorating because subjects like philosophy are not taught in universities anymore. If no one is studying science and engineering and the philosophy is no longer taught anymore, what are our students learning these days?

I believe the biggest problem we face is dogmatism. We know one discipline, one culture, one religion and think that is the solution to all the problems of the world. We today are actually blessed with more educational resources than any other generation the human species have ever possessed. The internet is the ultimate resource centre. If we are still not getting educated, it's because we're mired in dogmatism and closed-mindedness. We only use social networks to reinforce dogma. That perhaps is the biggest problem of our education system. We've mistaken dogma for knowledge. A mind filled with dogma is worse than an empty one.

Being educated means realising our own ignorance as a first step. And then only the learning adventure begins. You have to learn where the gaps are in your own mind.  Socrates's exhortation to his fellow human beings to "know thyself", is the first goal of education. Dogma is ignorance. Only when dogma is unlearned, can real learning begins.

The Kernel of Education

Today for a change I'm going to blog about a contemporary issue. I usually shun these topics because most of the time enough has already been said about them. I have nothing novel to contribute. Furthermore, I know exactly what my point of view is and I'm not interested to convince others about it. I blog for my own benefit. 

What's the topic for today? Education in general and our Malaysian education system in particular. I read frequently about how bad our education system is. It is 'broken'; it is 'politicised'; 'we are far behind our neighbours'--these are common refrains. How true is that?

Now, I am a product of the Malaysian education system. 100%, from kindergarten to university. I am a pure product of the public school system. My primary and secondary education were completely in Bahasa Malaysia. Even in university, they tried their best to conduct all the courses in BM. Some courses accomplished that better than others. I remember my 3 years of mathematics of my engineering degree course were taught completely in BM.  

Of course, textbooks in BM at the tertiary level were non-existent. We had to read all our reference books in English but answer exam questions in BM. We were given some leeway for some courses that were only taught partially in BM: we were required to 'answer at least two questions in Bahasa Malaysia'!

I remember my first year Computers 101 course was also completely in BM. I could still remember some of the terms used: the mouse is tetikus; peripherals are called peranti susur-keliling; the UNIX shell, kerang and my personal favourite: nyahpepijat. (which never fail to put my younger colleagues now in stitches). If you can't figure that one out, here's a clue: nyah is a negative prefix often used to replace the prefix 'dis' in English. e.g. discharge is nyahcas. Anyone who has written some computer code would have done nyahpepijat before.

Throughout my entire primary and secondary school years I had no problems learning mathematics and science in BM. That was because they had proper BM equivalents for all the scientific terms. Mass is jisim; velocity, halaju; volume, isipadu; gradient, kecerunan; compound, sebatian; catalyst, mangkin; integration, pengkamilan; arithmetic progression, janjang kira-kira. 

Of course I didn't know the English equivalents then.  I only became acquainted with them when I reached university and found that all the textbooks were in English. But it was not a big deal, because there's always a one-to-one mapping between these scientific terms. 

Now, comes the hotly debated issue: should Maths and Science be taught in English? 

As someone who had the bulk of his maths and science education in Bahasa, my answer is: ideally, yes but not necessarily. Did I face any difficulties when I had to refer to books and technical papers written in English in university? Well, there were slight adjustments required but by and large, all my peers had no issues.  Having the subject taught in BM did not in any way make us less competent in the subject. We all went out into the world to become competent technical professionals serving global multi-nationals, communicating primarily in English.

Would it had been better if we had been taught in English instead? Yes, it certainly would have helped but not by a huge degree. We all had some basic education in English. We could navigate ourselves through textbooks and papers in English, even though the technical terms are different. That's not the main issue, as most of the BM terms were derivations from their English ones anyway (logarithms, logaritma, entropy, entropi).  

The main issue that needs to be addressed in our schools is the poor standard of English. This cannot be addressed simply by teaching Maths and Science in English.  The only real solution is a radical one:  use English as the main medium of communication in all our schools.  Even during my time, the standard of English among all my peers who went through the public school had dropped considerably after the mandatory change of medium to BM, especially in small towns and kampungs. 

Of course, we all know that using English as the main medium for teaching is a non-starter in our present political climate.  What then is the solution?  You know what? I think the teaching of languages in general has to be improved.  I even think our mastery of Bahasa Malaysia is bad. How many people read books BM?  

It actually doesn't matter what language is the medium of instruction. We need to inculcate a love for the humanities--literature, history and philosophy with an emphasis on reading and writing. We should strive to be multilingual, just like how we play different sports in school. We can be very good in one, but we should appreciate and know the rules of the others and be able to play them, if need to.

Am I being too idealistic? Most certainly.  I am advocating a re-emphasis on an education in liberal arts.  That would be the ultimate goal. It means a complete relook on what education is: not to produce a workforce, but to produce quality open-minded, thinking individuals.  That to me, is the real purpose of education. 

A liberal arts education is the foundation of an educated person. Learn the basics of being a well-balanced, decent human being in school. That forms the kernel of one's education. The rest are applications that can be learned from YouTube.

Insight-Seeing

What a busy long weekend it has been for me. I had earlier planned to write my weekly blogpost on Friday when I was on leave but other urgent matters overtook me and I had to attend to them first. Thankfully all that is settled now, and finally I have a chance to reflect on things.

Last week, I talked about attention as being key. When we pay attention, we are minimising noise and ensuring the quality of input data. The neural network of the mind does the rest. It sounds pretty simple. What I've not mentioned as a corollary of that principle is that, we are also being non-judgmental and non-attached when we pay pure attention.

Judging means applying some kind of logic and moral algorithm to process the input information. No, we don't need that at this stage. That is application specific. When we are learning, all accurate data is good data. We don't filter, eliminate or transform them.  Let our deep learning network within be the 'judge'.

Part of the value of taking a break and going on a vacation is being able to get fresh input data. When on vacation, we enjoy new sights and sensations. The mind has a natural tendency to crave for novelty. This 'craving',  given a positive spin, is simply curiosity. Anything that's familiar and mundane is automatically pushed to the background. When too much of the familiar is repeated, we enter into a state called 'boredom'. 

We take sight-seeing as a kind of recreation, which all humans  enjoy as part of the good life. If we think about it, why should we waste time gawking artificial statues and other kitschy constructions made to pander to tourists who are only interested in taking selfies and boasting about what a good time they are having in social media? 

Do we learn anything from these kind of sight-seeing vacations? You might ask: why do we need to be such a boring spoilsport to insist that anything we do must be 'educational' and 'useful'? Why can't we relax and enjoy doing something that doesn't have any purpose for once? 

I'm all for doing 'useless' activities, as long as one enjoys it. What I probably would suggest is perhaps we could also kill two birds with one stone: dumb activities could also be useful data for the neural network, which we call the mind. 

We can enjoy doing silly things but be mindful at the same time. We can be attentive, even when we 'let go'.  When we are attentive in anything, we always gain insight into things. Insight is like a phase shift in the mind: a new pattern suddenly emerges out or chaos; the cumulative succession of things and events reveal a larger picture, hitherto hidden. Insight is emergent. 

Even the most mundane things we do, have the potential to give us great insight into life and the universe. The mind simply has to be tuned to receive them. Sometimes we call these insights 'inspiration'. 

Mindful attention is a quality of mind that comes with practice. There's a sensitivity and sharpness to one's perception that grow over time. How do we cultivate that?  One becomes attentive by not being goal-oriented at every moment in time. Goals are macroscopic conceptions. When we look at every moment of our experience, there's no such thing as goals, hopes or fears. The moment is as it is. We take it in its totality and move on to the next.

When we do that, we are attentive to the moment and all the sights and sounds that wash over us. Let them nourish the mind. Enjoy your vacation by taking a cosmic selfie every moment of your time. It's called insight-seeing. 

Acing Attention

Today I'm fuelled by coffee rather than tea for a change. Unlike weekdays, I usually eat a light lunch on weekends and today it's a nice Subway sandwich, a BMT Italian.  Having wolfed that down together with some mushroom soup, I now settle down to the more serious business of expounding my thoughts for the week.

I feel particularly elated whenever my week has been productive. But how do we measure productivity? We could be very efficient in doing unnecessary tasks throughout the day. Useful output over time is what I aim for. But now we have to define what we mean by 'useful'?

Is going on a beach holiday beneficial? Or Is finishing that 50 page proposal which you'e promised your boss, useful? The former could be good for you in terms of mental and physical health. You need to take time off to recharge your body and mind. The latter could help advance your career. Producing something that you could somehow tie to a desired goal is considered 'useful work'. 

In my case, I hardly ever take a holiday. My way of recharging is simply to spend time like this: relaxing with a drink, a good book, or turning finger movements this into words (voila!). When it comes to work, I don't have any long-term goals: the mere act of accomplishing a task to the best of my ability is sufficient reason for me to feel fulfilled. I am the judge of the quality of my work and I set the bar pretty high. If I fall short, I would analyse why I had not been at my best and learn from it.

The good thing that comes with age and maturity is that one gains perspective on things. Nothing is too big or too small. Any wild emotional swing can be tempered with the steadying hand of wisdom. You care not about what other people think, because everyone is in the same boat. We all have a finite lifetime and are merely reacting to the promptings of our genes for self-preservation.

If we choose to pay attention, every experience in life, no matter how trivial, carries some lesson. Every piece of training data, readjusts some weights in the deep learning network of the brain. The key is to pay attention, and that's what meditation is all about.

Attention means getting quality input data. Usually we are distracted by all sorts of emotional noise in our heads. We don't have to crank our heads too much to 'understand' something; start simply with focussed attention. Tune the cognitive radio for best reception and once you receive the input with clarity, don't touch that dial.  Tune the receiver, focus the lens. The rest of the things will fall into place.

Clarity of thought or insight never comes immediately. We just focus on the quality of the data that's being fed to the mind. As long as we pay attention, we will subconsciously milk them for all they are worth. Apply attention to everything you do. Even the most mundane moments have something to teach us.  Attention is all there is. Just ace it.

The Quiescent Hum of Happiness

The word 'Happiness' comes into my mind when I opened this blank page to write. Am I feeling happy? It depends on what one means by happiness.

In general there are two types of happiness. There's that conventional one: you've got a raise or promotion; your favourite soccer team just won the league; you see your loved ones again after a long separation. This is that surge of elation one feels when a favourable event happens to you. But they always subside after a while. You return to your regular quiescent state.

It is this quiescent state--your everyday background mode which I'm more interested in. Because this is where true happiness manifests itself. If you are truly happy, you have an undercurrent of joy permeating your entire being. Nothing in particular is really happening, but you just feel at home and contented. You are not anxious about anything. You see the past with equanimity and gratitude and you welcome the future with an open optimism. 

You are not exactly walking around with a smile on your face, but your overall attitude is one of cheerfulness and positivity. Neither does it mean that you are shielded from any unpleasantness or pain, rather you know how to see things in their proper perspective. A dark cloud could momentarily shield the golden rays of the sun, but you, that bright resplendent orb in the sky, remain untainted.  

All dark clouds drift away eventually. True happiness is the ability to maintain that background feeling of joy, which like a carrier wave, is ever-present, and only occasionally modulated by bursty signals, which we, with our ignorant minds, label 'happiness' and 'sorrow'. 

True happiness is that positive constancy that emerges when the momentary flashes of pain or pleasure subside. Pleasure is not happiness. Neither is pain, sorrow.  

When this background state drops below zero, and strays into the negative region, we call this depression. A person suffering from depression always needs something or someone to distract him or her from this default state. There's a nagging sense of emptiness, loneliness and fear that surfaces when all the noise of everyday life has subsided.

How then does one establish this level where joy constantly permeates the mind? Well, by not allowing any event or thought to dominate the mind. This is called equanimity. We can slowly train ourselves to acquire this habit by simply not grasping to anything. Every moment is fulfilled completely. And we live for each and every moment of our existence, truly and thoroughly. All we experience are fulfilled moments.

The devotionally type can use the worship of God to cultivate this state of being. Everything is willed by God. Your successes are blessings from God, which you enjoy with a sense of gratitude. The challenges are merely tests from the Almighty, which you face courageously. That quiescent state of joy would arise--which you would feel as the grace of God.

The atheistic or agnostic types can use reason to cultivate this state. Tune the machine of your body and mind to run at this optimum state of happiness. Everything--the crests and troughs of pain and pleasure--are merely perturbations to the system. Make sure that the hardware and software is sufficiently resilient to  maintain stability and equilibrium. 

True happiness is within everyone's grasp. We just have to find it within. Let your mind be quiet for a while. Listen to the hum of quiescence within. Does it ring of happiness?

The Wave Equation of Existence

My all-time favourite opening line from a novel has always been the one from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude". It goes like this:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

I read the book more than 30 years ago and the magic of that first line still lingers clearly in my mind. In just a simple sentence, so much is conveyed--mystery and tragedy (why is he facing the firing squad?), a sense of epic time ("many years later...remember that distant afternoon..."), nostalgia (remembrance of a childhood spent with his father) and wonderment (why was ice such a novelty?).

I'm so glad that they are releasing a miniseries in Netflix based on the book soon. And that very first line itself was cleverly used cinematically as the teaser trailer for the series.  It's a beautiful introduction to this masterpiece of an epic that truly defined the magical realism genre: poignantly whimsical, filled with incidental delights masterfully woven into a thematic fabric of subtle socio-political commentary.  It is a multi-generational tale of the Buendia family set in the fictitious town of Mocondo. The trailer made me want to read the book again and I'm certain that I'll derive so much more insight from a repeat read.

Similarly with books which I had read during my teenage years like Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird". I was probably too young to understand the Southern racism theme in the novel then, but I thoroughly enjoyed the world as seen from the point of view of a child, one with another memorable first line: When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. 

So much of who I am is shaped by the books I've read and movies that I've seen.  Maybe they awaken the archetypes in my subconscious which I resonate strongly with. Our genes determine a lot of our characteristics--physical, emotional and intellectual. But sometimes these genes are not able to find their expression due to the limiting factor of the environment. The environment serves up the "boundary conditions" that determine the possible solutions to the wave equation of our existence.

External content from books and movies are like excitation energy that rouses our dormant genes and push them into full expression. While philosophers debate the existence or non-existence of Free Will, we'll continue to live the only way we know, as no matter how much you scratch your head and deliberate, you will always end up with the present moment and doing the things you are doing.

You are the unfolding expression of your genes, like a flower opening up into full bloom, fulfilling your role in the ecosystem of the garden which you sprouted from.  Deciding the kind of person that you want to be is part and parcel of that unfolding. The feeling of agency that we have in determining the course of our lives is simply a feature of this causal chain. 

All the beautiful books that had touched me as a child, teenager and adult came into my orbit because I had 'attracted' them through the filter of my mind and also the consequence of zillions of micro-decisions that I had made. Driven by the inexorable pulse of life, I had been led to specific shelves in specific bookstores and libraries, resulting in me spending hours and days perusing pages of sentences filled with potent insights.

I can see broad patterns in this grand unfolding; the undulation, the ebb and flow of the elan vital that thrusts one headlong into one's destiny. Embrace it and swim in its warm currents. Life has to be lived through the many irreducible steps of its unfolding computation. And that is the only that we can solve the wave equation of existence.

 

Of Friends, Fuzziness, Fun and the Fount of Creativity

It has been a long week for me, tackling various different issues at work. What a welcome relief it is to be able to finally sit back, relax and reflect, by writing my weekly blog article. I should have written this earlier this morning but I've been catching up with some old friends over lunch.

Sometimes social activities would disrupt my weekend routine of writing and reading but it's a welcome change. Exchanging views with friends is a great learning experience. We all see life from different perspectives and our own views could be narrow and parochial without us realising it. Simply listening to other people would sometimes force us to reexamine our own beliefs. 

When it comes to the subject of religion or spirituality, everyone resonates to a different set of vocabulary. Those with an engineering or scientific bent would like to think and explain in terms of 'energy' or 'states of mind', which I admittedly have a tendency to do too.  Those who have a more literary or poetic disposition would tend to be receptive to a language that uses words like 'love', 'glory' or 'grace'.  The former speaks to the intellect, the latter, the heart.

I have friends who claim that they are not spiritual at all.  But they all have fallen in love, gotten married and have an idea of what makes a 'good life'. They all appreciate, to various extents, beauty in music and art. To me, when you are capable of love and beauty, you have already entered the spiritual realm. We are all, like it or not, homo spiritus.

We become spiritual the moment we start questioning the meaning of our existence. The need to love and be loved, is the germ of the spiritual impulse. When we admire the vast beauty of the blue ocean, or a view of a landscape from a mountain-top, we are seized by a feeling of awe and grandeur, and ultimately, a yearning for something higher.

There must be something more than this; some grand scheme of things where we are a part of. We long to be connected to it. This hunger for meaning and transcendence--is this simply a quirk of the human intelligence, a spandrel of evolution, almost like a useless by-product?

Or is it our real nature--the driving force behind evolution itself? Something like Schopenhauer's concept of will or Hegel's geist? Any philosophical explanation of the world has to be expressed in human language. And there's where all hell breaks loose. 

Words are never truly objective. Every word has a fuzzy boundary--almost like an electron, which has a position defined probabilistically. We kind of know--or intuit--the meaning of a word and what it most likely means. But no two person can see the same bulls-eye. 

For every word, our 'meaning clouds' do overlap, but when we have many words joined together into sentences, the final outcome could convey something very different in the minds of the speaker and the listener. 

Listening with an open mind means that one is aware of the fuzziness inherent in language and is constantly readjusting one's conceptual framework to accommodate different possibilities.  It is the fuzziness of language that makes it fun, and ultimately serve as the fount of creativity. 

The Virus of Ignorance

I wrote about divine revelation last week, on Revelation Day. This week I'm going to explore why religion can inspire huge swaths of humanity towards greatness, and paradoxically, it is also the reason for violence between believers and non-believers.

Religion unlocks the spiritual dimension in all of us. A little bit of religion can be a dangerous thing, because once the spirit is unleashed, it thinks that it is the mightiest force in the universe.  Like first love, religious feelings can feel very right.  If these passions are channelled towards the right direction, great things can come about. A person can be inspired to greatness, with all his good qualities amplified. Cathedrals and civilisations are built this way.

But if the religious person has insecurities and prejudices, coupled with ignorance, then that little bit of spiritual awakening can turn a person into a bigot. It is easy to be carried away by the romance of religion--that sense of superiority and empowerment that one draws from a community of believers. Religion sometimes short-circuits the mind and turn a person into an ugly zealot, capable of hatred and violence of the most terrible kind.

A religious person who exhibits saintly virtues is one whose innate goodness has been made manifest through the practise religion. Religion accentuates and transform them into powerful qualities that make these souls charismatic leaders of their communities.  But because all humans are ultimately flawed, these elevated beings, if and when they fall, they fall hard.

Good religious leaders are never attention seekers. They are sought after because of their wisdom. But they have the self-awareness and humility to know the limited extent of their knowledge and influence.  They know that truth is strong enough to stand on its own without needing to shout from the pulpit. Wisdom is a tree that bears fruit a the right time. It is not a volcano that erupts violently with fire and brimstone.

All religions are man-made institutions. They are built to perpetuate some spiritual truths, which are not the monopoly of any group or sect.  Like different schools of art or music, they celebrate different aspects of the aesthetic impulse. It is also no surprise that all religions inspired great works of art and architecture. Religion expands the realm of consciousness and offers us glimpses of beauty and insight, that transcends the seemingly meaningless world of the mundane.

The true spiritual seeker, like an astute connoisseur of art, seeks and celebrates all religious traditions, appreciating them as diverse expressions of the divine spirit. Doctrinal differences are nothing but a testimony to the richness of human experience and our feeble attempts to express its verisimilitude.

Religion, art, culture and politics are part of the humanity. And as human beings, we live to socialise, philosophise and romanticise. Sometimes we get caught up in the passionate fervour of it all; sometimes we bicker foolishly over trivialities and other times we are completely blinded by our intolerance and ignorance that we are driven to settle them with blood. 

Sadly, ignorance is often spread by preachers in the name of religion. Dogma, superstition and bigotry are implanted into eager young minds, seeking meaning and truth. Ignorance, couched in religious garb, is a virus that kills, literally. Only an open mind, exposed to the whole gamut of human knowledge, acquires the resistance against such attacks. May we all have the strength and resilience to acquire the immunity that is wisdom.

Reflections on Revelations

Today is a public holiday because it is Nuzul Al Quran or the Quran Revelation Day--the day when Muslims celebrate the Prophet Muhammad's first revelation from God through the Angel Gabriel at the cave of Hira' in the year 610 CE.

Iqra!--was the first word uttered by the Angel Gabriel. This is usually translated as 'read' or 'recite'.  Read what? I don't know how to read! This was the first shocked reaction of Muhammad, who was then nothing but an ordinary Arab merchant, wise, pious and trustworthy, but quite illiterate. 

The Angel Gabriel, comforted the cowering man and then proclaimed the famous first five verses:

Read in the name of your Lord who created--

Created man from a clinging substance.

Read, and your Lord is most Generous--

He who taught by the pen--

Taught man that which he knew not.

You can find these verses in the Quran today in chapter or Surah 96, called 'Al-Alaq'. Why are they not in chapter 1 of the Holy Book itself? Well, the chapters of the Quran are not arranged in the chronological order as they were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad over a period of 23 years. This was based on historical and practical reasons. In the beginning the Quran was memorised and transmitted orally.  The arrangement, as it was passed down, was probably arranged based on thematic coherence and linguistic flow.  

I like the three key words that immediately strike the mind with powerful imagery when we read these verses: 'read', 'clinging substance' and 'pen'--iqra, alaq and qalam.   The 'clinging substance' -- al-alaq--from which the surah takes its name, is sometimes translated as 'clot'. It reminds us of the humble origin of man as nothing but a sticky lump of blood, an embryo clinging to the wall of the uterus. The act of reading and the instrument of the pen (by which God taught Man), symbolises the heights of knowledge and wisdom which that clinging substance could ultimately aspire to.

The task for Man as decreed by God is immediately conveyed: rise from ignorance to enlightenment. Reading and writing are indeed the hallmarks of a great civilisation. And the inspiration from the written verses of the Quran, together with their stirring recitations have certainly roused the nomadic tribes of Arabia into a conquering force, creating a civilisation and empire, which at its heights covered great portions of the three continents of Europe, Africa and Asia.

Though I do not know Arabic, let alone the classical version used in the Quran, I could see how poetic and powerful its verses are. I hear the rousing call of azan and sometimes prayers broadcasted from the nearby mosque, every morning while lying in bed. The sound and rhythm of the recitation alone carries deep resonance.

Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God and many other books on religion including a biography of Muhammad, wrote that it was like Muhammad had invented a new literary form--the verses of the Quran struck the minds of the Arabic speaker deeply and emotionally. 

Having the aesthetic sense stirred, is the first sign of spiritual awakening.  The most direct path to the spiritual source of the human psyche is through sound. And the poetic verses of the Quran, combining meaning, imagery and sound, ignites the divine spark in the reader and listener.

We humans have different constitutions and dispositions. Like the Prophet Muhammad, we will all find one or many moments in our lives which completely shift our entire perspective. All of us receive revelations; just that sometimes they pass right through us, because or we did not notice them or are plainly ignorant. So what's the remedy for that? 

Simple: Iqra!

The Art of Acceptance

I'm happy that I don't have to spend much of my weekend on my day job, unlike in the past.  It had been my practice to reserve my weekends for 'real work' -- work that requires deep thought and concentration. The weekdays are for transactional activities--meetings and emails mostly. But these days, my work is chiefly transactional and this is great because I don't have to carry them over to the weekend.

However today, because there's some scheduled maintenance work, I had to spend the early part of the afternoon working online. Now that it's done, I'm free to blog, or as I like to put it: taking my keyboard fingers for a walk.

Maybe these fingers have an intelligence of their own. They bring me wherever they choose to go. Dear fingers, where are you leading me now? Clickety-click, clickety-click...let's write about...'Acceptance'. Hmm, why this topic and what do I have to say about it? 

I've certainly written about this subject before. But lately I've been listening to a lot of people complaining about the hot weather. Well, the temperature usually soars this time of the year, every year. But why do people still complain about it, as if it is the first time that they are experiencing it? 

I noticed that it is hot, but not particularly hotter than any previous years. I don't suffer any major discomfort from it. True, I have my air-conditioning running most of the time while at work but when I'm outdoors, I do sweat profusely, and feel the burning heat of our tropical sun.

I simply acknowledge it and move on. Complaining doesn't make the heat wave go away. Acceptance does. I realised that life is miserable for a lot of people because they fuss over things that they have no control over. We can influence many other things in our lives but not the weather. You can't prevent yourself from sweating, no matter how hard you try. Sweating is certainly uncomfortable but if you keep on harping on it, you'll only make yourself miserable.

Acceptance is a skill that people need to cultivate. It may sound like a simple thing, but it is not because we are so used to not accepting the situation as it is and strive to change it. Yes, I agree that the world is a better place because many enterprising people chose not to accept things as they are and strive to create a better one. What I'm highlighting is that one must be wise in choosing what to accept and not. 

For example, any misfortune that befalls us, be it an illness, loss of a loved one or financial loss, could cause us enormous emotional distress. This is expected and unavoidable. If one were to continuously wallow in despair or self-pity, at some point it becomes self-defeating. You would only create more harm to your physical and mental health.

All pain has a life-cyle. Allow it to reach its fullness and let it decay gracefully. Acceptance is simply acknowledging this natural process and letting it play itself out. Karma works itself out completely and optimally when given the chance. This also applies to simple discomforts like the hot weather. Accept it, and immediately your mind moves on to more important things. Why complain and give it the time and energy that it does not deserve? Take the necessary action to reduce the discomfort, if you need to. Otherwise, save the energy for more important things.

Through acceptance, one becomes 'life-dynamic'--like how a fish moves through water. One senses discomfort and obstacles, acknowledges them and perform the necessary action to minimise their effects. Acceptance is optimisation at work. Acceptance is an art which we all need to practice. And be grateful that life always provides sufficient discomforts for you to hone it to perfection. 

Bibliophilic Bouts

I was at the barber just now and I had to wait a short while for my turn. As always, waiting is never an issue as it means that I am pleasantly rewarded with some reading time. 

How often do we complain that we do not have the time to indulge in our hobbies. Well, if reading happens to be your pastime of choice, then you're in luck. You can squeeze it into the interstices of your life--all those tiny amount of time in between major events or tasks which make up your day.

Reading to me is like eating. Every sentence is a morsel of food, which you savour with your mind. And you'd relish it exactly like a tantalising piece of delicacy dropped into your salivating mouth. Only that the nourishment from the former is, I would argue, exceeds anything that is consumed orally.

I do not only read everywhere, I've also acquired the habit of annotating the pages of my book with a pencil. And I'm not doing it because I have to mark up facts for some research project, just that reading and annotating is my way of fully concentrating and enjoying every word and sentence that the author has carefully and painstakingly assembled for my edification. 

I know, it's a peculiar sight these days to find anyone reading in public, what more with a 2B pencil in hand, dissecting blocks of text on a piece of printed page. And to extend the food analogy further: my pencil is like an eating utensil--not unlike a pair of chopsticks--picking out and shoving bite-sized chunks of savoury delights into my mind.

An annotated page immediately becomes mine: it is the conquered terrain, which I the reader-traveller had ploughed through, with some effort. Experiences movingly carved with the scalpel of my pencil.  The marginalia becomes the journal of my reading life. Thoughts, events and silent chuckles captured in black scrawls, marking the width and breadth of my bibliophilic realm, 

I read for the sheer pleasure of consuming text; the nourishments of its contents is an additional bonus which my mind is rewarded with. And over time, I realised that my sensitivity to words and their multi-various meanings becomes greatly enhanced.  My mental tastebuds have acquired aptitudes in ever-expanding dimensions, opening vistas of delights hitherto unknown.

Ah, I'm waxing lyrical again about the ecstatic joys of reading, especially the form that involves the dead-tree variety--this gluttony of books, which I succumb, unashamedly to; this hill of hedonism which I willingly die on. I do not claim any intellectual or moral superiority--it is simply an indulgence, pure and simple.

So do not attempt to save me from this addiction which had and is consuming my life. This junkie seeks no pity nor sympathy. I read, therefore I am. And occasionally I write too, in blog articles like these here. But these are just the sober interludes between my blissful bouts of bibliophilia.

Grumblings and Gratitude

Today I've decided not to write anything ponderous and pseudo-philosophical, which is my usual staple of weekly ramblings. There are a lot of fun subjects that people in social media write about. Why can't I be like them sometimes? Rave about the best nasi lemak in town; comment on the latest 3R (race, royalty and religion) meme or just bitch about things in general?

What are the everyday things that annoy me? Let me think. I've trained myself to look at the positive side of things that I've gotten into the habit of ignoring anything that annoys me.  But I do get annoyed sometimes. For example, whenever I'm driving and someone honks loudly and unnecessarily. It perturbs me but I tend to let it go immediately.  

I rarely use the horn and if I do, I often apply my well-practiced staccato toot. To me the car horn is one feature that no manufacturer has gotten right. Why can't we have a polite horn--a doorbell-like sound that says 'excuse me', instead of that loud blare that screams "fuck off" or "stupid asshole"?  What we need is the horn equivalent of a small and big flush, like what you see on some eco-friendly toilets. Raising your voice (or horn) should never be your default mode, well, unless you are driving in India. Then it's a different story, for there driving is a social experience. Honking is a way to announce and acknowledge the presence of others on the road.

Youtube ads used to annoy me too but I paid my way out of it by subscribing to its premium version. It's one subscription which I think is worth it because it saves one a lot of time, and spares the mind of a lot of irritating brags by self-styled gurus peddling their get-rich-quick secrets.

Some banking apps annoy me because they don't make things easy for you. Logging in is always a challenge and when you do succeed, they clutter your screen with pop-up ads and security warnings. And these days, the trend is to display accounts in a fancy carousel, which requires you to scroll horizontally. The combination of horizontal and vertical scrolling, though cool, is annoying, at least to me. 

But having been a developer myself, I know how these UI decisions are arrived upon. Most product owners prioritise form over function. Product features are decided by a committee of people. They are just interested to check all the boxes which the management had decided. Developers code features blindly and unquestioningly. And when you have been viewing and testing your UI for months, you fail to see how it would look to someone using it for the first time. What does the user see first?  A few things need to stand out from the clutter. These have to be the few things that the user is interested in. Do your selling later. Let the user get on with the main functions of the app. 

In the brick-and-mortar world, there are service establishments that fall to the same trap of not prioritising the customer. There are some restaurants that annoyed me by serving hot tea in a paper cup, when the main course is served in nice plates and stainless steel cutlery. I can understand if you are a fast-food restaurant, but if you are charging me premium prices in a cosy dine-in place, I think it is an affront to serve hot drinks, and tea especially, in a paper cup.

At the end of the day, whenever we reflect upon all these little annoyances, we should also remind ourselves to be grateful for being able to enjoy all these little luxuries and conveniences of life. At least we are able to afford them and be able to drive, surf, bank and eat in relative comfort.  Find something to be grateful about every time you grumble. You will find that Gratitude is the great dissolver of annoyances.