On technology, death and stories from ancient sages

You tell me about chaos, and chaos will never say a word but just sweep you off your feet and you will find yourself back in the alien world you come from.

What a weird August for me my dear readers.

First, I just completely lost all my marbles in the office. Just work keeps on piling up, documents over documents, paper over paper, deadlines over deadlines. I sometimes really genuinely ask myself, how do I survive each single day?

But this is not the only thing I want to talk about, because there is like a big drum of chaotic stuff going on in my life right now, which brings me to the next part of the list.

Second, my desktop is dead. Oh well, it was showing symptoms of decay and death little by little for the past months, but this time, death has been its reality for the entire week, usually signalled by three 'toot, toot toot' sounds whenever it decides to just boot but it never really rebooted itself. So, I am really in state of shock, my files, my documents, the things I saved all gone, without a trace. 

*enter chaotic music  

Anyways, full of frustration from such untimely death, I turned to my laptop, Guadalupe. She (laptop) died last year as well, I think I wrote something about it to commemorate its death. The pain of losing all the files I kept years and years and even decades inside its digital womb just gone without trace. What a heartbreak! 

*enter chaotic and ominous music

But when I finally tried to turn on Guadalupe, wow it woke up from its death! and its files are still intact and she has really kept the documents inside her digital womb all this time! It's a miracle! OH MY OH MY OH MY,

*enter chaotic music with some gleeful accents

so I am typing this entry today from Guadalupe. Who says technology is predictable? Who says technology is just a lifeless inorganic current that we can command to turn off or turn on anytime. Actually technology has a life of its own, it actually uses a lot of organic elements as its base core. Our objects of receptors from this living organic technology has a tinge of ultra-modernity in it, yes that's true, but actually we are just looking at the receptors, but we don't really notice the invisibility of spirit of technology, which I think is as ancient as our oceans and our mountains and the wind system and the sun and stars.

I actually don't know how long will Guadalupe live. I am under her mercy. She has a mind of her own and I am just lucky to be able to utilize her gifts. I hope she lives long and well so I can create more with her. 

Three, actually before I was pushed to turn on the desktop, I was thinking of Aristotle and his famous line: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. I am sure we all read it when we were younger and like you, I also tried to understand what it means. It is actually a very profound sentence and it took me decades to finally understand what it means, what it really means.

The whole is like a wave, it has a peak but we will never know the beginning or end of it. It is just a kind of ocean wave that shows its peak when it appears. A wave rolls, then keeps on rolling until it builds into a peak, like a climax and then it will disintegrate and will be leveled as ocean surface when it hits the shore or the sand. It is like a team, like a collection of people in an organization or a department. The energy generated by the people is so invisible but it is a living spirit within the collective. This energy will keep on interacting with the group of people as they perform their task. There will be moments of a person getting the peak, there will be moments when the person will be the start, the spark, the initiator. Then there will be the person who will receive the end of the energy for culmination. The energy keeps on shifting so the person can be an initiator in one cycle, or the same person can be at peak in the next cycle while another person gets to be a new initiator. See, it is the collective, it is a group and the group is not just people, their energies, their spirit merge and it keeps them bouyed up or it can actually drown them too. The parts do interact with each other and in those interaction, relationships are born and this relationship can start, then it will continue and it will perish too, because of the law of time. 

See, so many factors make up the group, which is the whole as we quoted from Aristotle in the beginning. Time, relationships, spirit, merging, goals and weaknesses and challenges and achievements and failures and of course the vow of the group, its core mission. 

Interesting how this simple sentence from Aristotle can really resonate to us until now. 

I am also thinking about the story of orchard from Socrates which was retold by my spiritual teacher in one of her talks. She said that we have to learn to choose our direction from the very beginning and keep our commitment to it until the last day of our lives. This is how commitment and determination live on in a person. It is why we need to make vows because these vows give us the energy to power through any obstacles. 

The story of orchard from Socrates begins with Socrates calling his students one day in front of an orchard full of fruit trees (in some accounts apples others, oranges) and he instructed his students to pick the best looking fruit and to keep on holding onto it until they reach the very end of the orchard. Some students find the best looking fruit and picked it and reached the end of the orchard while carrying the fruit in their hands, but some students came to the end of the orchard empty handed. Socrates praised those students who found the best fruit for them and kept it, while he felt sorry for those students who never found any fruit at all. Some students who came empty handed asked Socrates for a second chance to walk the orchard again, but this Socrates declined, telling them that he gave all of them equal time to find the fruit. 

That is the story of the orchard.

Oh well, have a blessed full moon everyone and I will help myself to some of my ice cream in the fridge.