There are many people, especial our elderlies and those with a habit of nurturing strong opinion, like to make subjective comments on others. Many of the comments reflect their concern and love towards us. However, many of their utterance is also mixed with subjectivity and biased views. At times these comments (a.k.a. good advice) create more negative impact than good ones in terms of one's personal psychological burden. Sometimes I have to endure many such comments which I deem lack of wisdom, or based on superficial basis. At times I wonder why many people who can't see far and deep enough care to offer (and impose) opinion on others. I learn to cope and endure these 'kepo' comments. But deep in my mind, I am wishing for wise, penetrative and heart-ouching advice which are rare but precious.
22.8.17
5.3.17
On interpretation
We interpret so often that it becomes a natural habit akin to breathing. We hold very strongly to our own interpretation so much so that we never contemplate the possibility that our interpretation is inherently subjective and can potentially sway away from the truth. I am not saying all of our interpretation are bad or not reliable. I am just saying we have to give benefit of doubt to others when we interpret, with a clear awareness that we are all subjected to the inherent subjectivity. If we ourselves are not wary of this, it would be even harder to expect others do.
In many circumstances we can't control our own interpretation, so it is even harder to ask others to observe the same. I think the tendency to loss such an awareness is very normal, and it is repeatedly happening in our daily life. It is commonplace whereby things that we know is wrong is interpreted as right (or vice versa) due to subjective believing. So what can you do and what should you do? You just can't do anything. If there is nothing you can do, then do nothing. If you still really want to so something about it, keep reminding yourself and refreshing the awareness that you are witnessing the manifestation of our mundane minds. In the real world, many things just go the wrong way. This in a deeper sense a manifestation of ignorance of the minds. Many people can't see things rightly and can't self-correct, and there is no practical means to rectify the situation. This is a rather unsatisfactory state of matter which keep occurring. When you can embrace such an unsatisfactory nature of things, you grow to the next level of intellectuality.
In many circumstances we can't control our own interpretation, so it is even harder to ask others to observe the same. I think the tendency to loss such an awareness is very normal, and it is repeatedly happening in our daily life. It is commonplace whereby things that we know is wrong is interpreted as right (or vice versa) due to subjective believing. So what can you do and what should you do? You just can't do anything. If there is nothing you can do, then do nothing. If you still really want to so something about it, keep reminding yourself and refreshing the awareness that you are witnessing the manifestation of our mundane minds. In the real world, many things just go the wrong way. This in a deeper sense a manifestation of ignorance of the minds. Many people can't see things rightly and can't self-correct, and there is no practical means to rectify the situation. This is a rather unsatisfactory state of matter which keep occurring. When you can embrace such an unsatisfactory nature of things, you grow to the next level of intellectuality.
11.1.17
Reflections on priorities in life
One continuously progresses, or rather, evolves as she/he grows. Not only in terms of age but spiritual and intellectualness. The following summarises to a good approximation the current state of my own introspection. The following notes was taken by Cheng Siew as she summarises a round of conversation among a group of Dhamma friends in a pre CNY-gathering. Some ideas are her, and the rest are mine. In anyway, all items mentioned below are essentially agreeable irrespective of who mentioned it.
Prioritization: Focus on the importance; e.g. step up to move forward vs continue dwelling in the story / problem
Give benefits of doubt: Not to judge (judgement is based our past experience) as we may not be having right clarity to understand
Be Open: cultivate the skill of learning as we can't learn new things with our existing learning
Less interpretation as interpretation comes with our perspective
Use the guidelines of if any reduction in the three defilements (greed, hatted, delusion) to determine if to continue our endeavor, discontinue it if there is an increase in the defilements.
Living in the presence focuses on cultivating mental faculty to receive the "raw information" as it is and without clouding it with our interpretation and judgement. The motivation is to live happily with less or no defilements.
In the process of refinement, as we aware of the defilements arose (effect), investigate the reason (cause) and then cultivate the right thinking and habit to minimize/eliminate the re-occurrence.
Prioritization: Focus on the importance; e.g. step up to move forward vs continue dwelling in the story / problem
Give benefits of doubt: Not to judge (judgement is based our past experience) as we may not be having right clarity to understand
Be Open: cultivate the skill of learning as we can't learn new things with our existing learning
Less interpretation as interpretation comes with our perspective
Use the guidelines of if any reduction in the three defilements (greed, hatted, delusion) to determine if to continue our endeavor, discontinue it if there is an increase in the defilements.
Living in the presence focuses on cultivating mental faculty to receive the "raw information" as it is and without clouding it with our interpretation and judgement. The motivation is to live happily with less or no defilements.
In the process of refinement, as we aware of the defilements arose (effect), investigate the reason (cause) and then cultivate the right thinking and habit to minimize/eliminate the re-occurrence.
18.7.13
Priority misplacement in our local university
USM is entering its second phase as an APEX university. We was told from the first APEX phase to submit any proposal that could elevate the university status in terms of research output. However bulky bureaucratic procedures and the lack of information channel have not contributed in making the proposal submission by any poorly-contacted academic staff a task worth trying. At the back of this reluctance is the prototypical opinion that any suggestion will either fall into deaf ears or results in lip service responses. I think I have tried to make a few informal attempts there and then some proposals to improve the academic quality in the university, but I do not register any memory that these attempts ever bear results that make a marked difference. Overall, there has been little change in the way how business is done despite the phrase 'business unusual' was the slogan of the day since the university acquired the APEX status many years ago.
As a researcher in the school's academic team I am free to carry out my own research very freely without interruption from the university. This is taken by me as a deep blessing. The university does provide much freedom to their academics to conduct their own research. But on the other hand the university has never been actively improving the academic environment to makes the university a more conducive place for quality research. The primary root cause of the lack of conducive academic environment is structural: that bureaucrats dominate over academicians (not only in our university but in fact in all our local universities). Whenever anyone has a proposal to implement something new (e.g. a new course, a new way to handling things, a new facility, a new system ...), the first consideration by the people in charge is not to think of how to actualise such proposal. Instead their first thought will be: is this allowed by the existing rules? Such an inappropriate priority has a deep negative impact in creating a top class university and an innovative ambiance.
There is nothing wrong about obeying rules. The main issues is people are deeply mired in the lethargic thinking that we must not change the rule but to follow them. People never ask themselves this question: are not the rules created to make things work better? If these rules become counterproductive, should not they be reconsidered, modified or just discarded? No. People don't ask such question. They just follow the status quo, which is the most comforting thing to do, and also the safest.
Most often rules in the university are used as the most convenient pretext to turn down a innovative proposal. For example, can we hire a half-paid researcher and allow him/her to work as an paid researcher in another university? Not so, I suppose, even if he is the first Malaysia having the potential to win a Nobel prize. How about setting up a new course that is deemed most popular in the market? No, you can't simply do that. It takes at least half a year to go through all the necessary procedures before a new course is approved and launched. Can't we just lunch a new course in two weeks time as long as an expert has made all necessary preparation to teach the course? In principle yes, but never in reality. In some overseas universities, as long as an expert in the field wills, he can at anytime offer a new course teaching the most up-to-date findings in his field. So in this specific case, demanding a new course to fulfill all the bureaucratic procedures of getting approval is actually counterproductive. But yet people keep on insisting that fulfilling the rules is more important that delivering new knowledge. If the people in charge is proactive enough it is possible to place academic priority over bureaucratic consideration. I have not seen such thing happen yet.
Giving priority to the rules rather than real productivity has blocked the way for excellence in our local university. Somewhat pessimistically I do not expect in our life time that such bureaucratic-dominated mentality will see any sea change.
As a researcher in the school's academic team I am free to carry out my own research very freely without interruption from the university. This is taken by me as a deep blessing. The university does provide much freedom to their academics to conduct their own research. But on the other hand the university has never been actively improving the academic environment to makes the university a more conducive place for quality research. The primary root cause of the lack of conducive academic environment is structural: that bureaucrats dominate over academicians (not only in our university but in fact in all our local universities). Whenever anyone has a proposal to implement something new (e.g. a new course, a new way to handling things, a new facility, a new system ...), the first consideration by the people in charge is not to think of how to actualise such proposal. Instead their first thought will be: is this allowed by the existing rules? Such an inappropriate priority has a deep negative impact in creating a top class university and an innovative ambiance.
There is nothing wrong about obeying rules. The main issues is people are deeply mired in the lethargic thinking that we must not change the rule but to follow them. People never ask themselves this question: are not the rules created to make things work better? If these rules become counterproductive, should not they be reconsidered, modified or just discarded? No. People don't ask such question. They just follow the status quo, which is the most comforting thing to do, and also the safest.
Most often rules in the university are used as the most convenient pretext to turn down a innovative proposal. For example, can we hire a half-paid researcher and allow him/her to work as an paid researcher in another university? Not so, I suppose, even if he is the first Malaysia having the potential to win a Nobel prize. How about setting up a new course that is deemed most popular in the market? No, you can't simply do that. It takes at least half a year to go through all the necessary procedures before a new course is approved and launched. Can't we just lunch a new course in two weeks time as long as an expert has made all necessary preparation to teach the course? In principle yes, but never in reality. In some overseas universities, as long as an expert in the field wills, he can at anytime offer a new course teaching the most up-to-date findings in his field. So in this specific case, demanding a new course to fulfill all the bureaucratic procedures of getting approval is actually counterproductive. But yet people keep on insisting that fulfilling the rules is more important that delivering new knowledge. If the people in charge is proactive enough it is possible to place academic priority over bureaucratic consideration. I have not seen such thing happen yet.
Giving priority to the rules rather than real productivity has blocked the way for excellence in our local university. Somewhat pessimistically I do not expect in our life time that such bureaucratic-dominated mentality will see any sea change.
14.11.09
Cheers, to a 40-to-be woman
Dear A Lin,
The best way to solve your problem is to live in the moment and embrace a casual heart in facing any situations. I embrace change, and take aging process an promotion to the next stage in life where I become wiser, more matured, more contented and getting closer to the truth of life. I do not see it an regrettable even but a benchmark of alleviation of my life quality.
Many things in life are a result of our proactiveness. In other words, you create your own life and the conditions that lead you to the ideal situation you prefer best. I realise that if I allow my state of mind and happiness to depend on external factors too much, I am at the same time deprive myself of a peaceful and blissful mind.
I talk a lot after reading from you not because I like to lecture or to show you I am more superior, but just to tell you in another way that I too see and realise the existence of the same problems as you face when advancing towards age 40. But I take proactiveness to turn the external factors around instead of allowing then to take charge of my state of mind. I wish to make my mind to lead instead of allowing the external surrounding to.
Cheers, to a 40-to-be woman.
18 September 2009 21:09
The root cause of all the devil
It has been a really luxurious time for me to be in Delft. No any duties or any thing to take care of, so much so that there is no need to check the clock which days of the week is. All of my time is used entirely for reading and code writing. This is especially useful for me to rebuild all the necessary physics i have missed in the pass, in particular, QM calculations, theoretical classical mechanics (lagrangian, hamiltonian etc), statistical mechanics, solid state physics, and of course, computational methods. In the past i wasn't very sure of how to do research in many research areas outside particle physics. In many occasion, i can't truly understand many technical details of the materials i was reading, which could be sometimes frustrating.
After some times of constant contemplation during my reading/learning process over here, I found that the root cause of all the devil is simply that my basic knowledge in those hardcore fundamental physics is not enough. I find that many fresh/young graduate students I have met in overseas seem to have no problem to directly dive into their research topics without much trouble. I won't be able to do so when I was a graduate student. Slowly I come to realise that this contrast is happening because my training in fundamental physics at undergraduate level is simply too poor. I lack solid understanding, despite the fact that I did score some A's in certain subject e.g. stat. mech and atomic physics in undergraduate.
Physics for post graduates and undergraduates are thought rigorously, usually with depth and bredth over here. People who handle the subjects are experts in the fields they teach, so the teaching quality in most cases is excellent. This is a very different scenario back home, where lecturers teaching the subjects do not understand the subject, not to mention to make the students to understand.
I was thinking of a `phase transition' kind of leap in both my intellectual and spiritual level during this sabbatical which is going to end in about 1 1/2 months to come. I wasn't so sure if such kind of leap will really happen. But definitely I have gained certain level of intellectual maturity and have patched up certain 'holes' in the necessary fundamental physics knowledge (which was lacking in the past). I understand better my weakness as well as strength too.
After some times of constant contemplation during my reading/learning process over here, I found that the root cause of all the devil is simply that my basic knowledge in those hardcore fundamental physics is not enough. I find that many fresh/young graduate students I have met in overseas seem to have no problem to directly dive into their research topics without much trouble. I won't be able to do so when I was a graduate student. Slowly I come to realise that this contrast is happening because my training in fundamental physics at undergraduate level is simply too poor. I lack solid understanding, despite the fact that I did score some A's in certain subject e.g. stat. mech and atomic physics in undergraduate.
Physics for post graduates and undergraduates are thought rigorously, usually with depth and bredth over here. People who handle the subjects are experts in the fields they teach, so the teaching quality in most cases is excellent. This is a very different scenario back home, where lecturers teaching the subjects do not understand the subject, not to mention to make the students to understand.
I was thinking of a `phase transition' kind of leap in both my intellectual and spiritual level during this sabbatical which is going to end in about 1 1/2 months to come. I wasn't so sure if such kind of leap will really happen. But definitely I have gained certain level of intellectual maturity and have patched up certain 'holes' in the necessary fundamental physics knowledge (which was lacking in the past). I understand better my weakness as well as strength too.
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