Shoshin-Zazen

Whoohoo!

Awakenings is one year old!
This issnt really a call for a celebration but it just shows how time flies when you blog so much crap!!

Coincidentally, APOD also celebrated its 11th birthday yesterday. Well, it posted this mosaic of pictures on its website yesterday and i thought it was quite nice. Since i source most of my pictures from APOD, i want to say, “Happy 11th Birthday!” and, “Keep those pictures coming!”

This year is THE year for birthdays. In the deludge of birthday invites and festivities, i have often thought of the significance of merry-making. I had perhaps even transgress a few moral lines and in doing so, upset alot of people by thinking that many of such birthdays thrive on the border of superficiality. Yet i feel that designer handbags, watches and other trends of this age don’t count for nuts in one’s “positive baggage” in life. Instead, how often do we find sincere words and kind actions in this world - a world that accentuates material wealth.

It is a dilemma that also confuses me. Recently, i attented a birthday party of a person whom i never met for about 5 years. More interestingly, i hardly know her. Not wishing to disturb the traditional sensibilities, i bought a present for her. The present is immaterial, however, the more i delve on it, the more i find it quite meaningless. Gift-giving is harmless and is probably just plain taboo not to give presents while gobbering up the buffet table, yet there is a serious undermining of what is sincere and what is not. There is an issue between superficiality and sincerity.

I have no doubt that birthdays are a joy to celebrate. However, they should not be remembered for just mere gift exchanges and clashes of glasses filled with booze. It is a time to recollect old memories and make adjustments for new ones. Inexorably, birthdays are most important, of course, to the person himself! Take time to reflect upon the past year as one gears up for the next round of life. As for the others, and those who are “true-enough” to be called friends, don’t just feel happy for him or her on that birthday; friendship is a life-long deal. Such a deal is worth any present in this world.

the great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he actualizes his age.
- Goerg Wiholm Friedich Hegel, Philosophy of rights, translated by T.M Knox

Meanwhile, i will be cooling off the slopes of Mount Kinabalu in a one-week trip to Sabah; a welcomed hiatus from life on this puny island! I will be back in a short week.

As a trombonist, can I perfectly understand this cartoon!

At last, somebody out there who knows something about the spacial difficulties about being a poor trombonist and is not embarrassed to say it out.

Another jibe i have about being in a trombonist is that there is always people slamming doors whenver i start practicing my favourite transcribed Bach Cello Suites in my room.

Don’t people appreciate loud music nowadays?

I still like my infernal blasting machine.

I read this article titled “Prayer for my daughter” from Richard Dawkin’s “A Devil’s Chaplain” and i found it very interesting. The entire article can be found here.

Here is an except:

Dear Juliet,

Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun?

The answer to these questions is “evidence.” Sometimes evidence means actually seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling….. ) that something is true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The “evening star” looks like a bright twinkle in the sky, but with a telescope, you can see that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing ( or hearing or feeling….. ) is called an observation.

Often, evidence isn’t just an observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there’s been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots or other observations which may all point toward a particular suspect. If a person’s fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn’t prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it’s joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realise that they fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.

Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess ( called a hypothesis ) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: If that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started.When a doctor says that you have the measles, he doesn’t take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: If she has measles I ought to see…… Then he runs through the list of predictions and tests them with his eyes ( have you got spots? ); hands ( is your forehead hot? ); and ears ( does your chest wheeze in a measly way? ). Only then does he make his decision and say, ” I diagnose that the child has measles. ” Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-Rays, which help their eyes, hands, and ears to make observations.

The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called “tradition,” “authority,” and “revelation.”

First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited because they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by “tradition.” Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like: “We Hindus believe so and so”; “We Muslims believe such and such”; “We Christians believe something else.”

Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn’t all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite right and proper, and he didn’t even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn’t the point I want to make for the moment. I simply want to ask where their beliefs come from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they’ve been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over the centuries. That’s tradition.

The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn’t true, handing it down over a number of centuries doesn’t make it any truer!