The wanderer

For so long I have wandered

Through heatless blinding sun

Through endless windless night

Through waveless great ocean

Through countless universes

To find you, my one and only.

That night I imagined you were a princess from a doomed kingdom.

The other night I saw you a humble beautiful daughter of a merchant.

And tonight you were… gone.

Where are you, my beloved?

Long ago we were one soul.

In unison we were, in unison we shall be again.

Come back to me, I just want to see you.

I just want to see you… 

After countless night of this longing torture,

of not being with you,

When loneliness doesn’t matter anymore,

when life no longer holds any meaning,

I look inside

at the trench of my soul

where everything is ever and never

be and not be

where God resides

where dream and reality becomes one

where anything is possible

There I found you

You and I were never separate.

In Karma

In Karma, there is no saving.

In Karma, there is no escape the fruit of your ill deeds.

In Karma, once you do bad, there is no salvation, only dilution.

In Karma, you deserve every misfortune that befalls. (Even for the worst possible thing to ever happen to human beings)

In Karma, you are not forgiven.

In Karma, you are on your own.

Yet, I still choose to believe in Karma.

Continuing from my rant

Having said all of those in my previous post. What is the meaning of life? I don’t want the answer: the meaning of life is to find meaning in life. I want a concrete answer.

First I imagine if someday a meteor hits earth and then all humans and animals die, no exception. I believe live will still survive, at least bacterias, cyanobacterias, or anaerobic bacterias. Imagine as if this world has no observers anymore. What arts humans have created will amount to nothing. All large buildings turns into mere physical structures for moss to grow, and will be destroyed in millions of years time. Memories are erased. Trace of we ever exist is just oil. Just like the bacterias who have died millions of years ago.

Then what is the meaning of all your hard work then? All your long hours working, your stressing work load, your heartbreak, your disappointment, your struggle to achieve something. Is life meaningless?

After imagining a scenario where meteor hits earth, I now imagine a scenario where you are the only human in this Earth. What good is surviving. What good is reading books if you have no one to share your thoughts at, or to discuss about it. What good is all that money or gold you have. Maybe I’ll get curious and build something, some building or tool, but what good does it do if after you die, no one’s going to use them. Ah maybe I’ll collect animals or plants, nurturing, making them my mission in life. But it’s me, maybe there are some people who really are able to live alone with purpose. Then I imagine myself as a tiger. Maybe a tiger is fine living by itself without other tigers. Maybe my focus is eating and resting and dying. Maybe I don’t think, instead I utilize my instinct and it’s fine. Maybe if some creature is used to living by itself without other creatures, then solitude is not a solitude to them. The word ‘solitude’ itself is meaningless to them, because it doesn’t exist. So my conclusion is, as a human, without other humans, life is meaningless.

Then, because I’m a human, purpose is found by having the existence of other people. Well after all, humans are the dominant creature because of their ability to coexist in large numbers. We are 100% social creature at its core. So ‘my purpose is dependent on the existence of other people’ is not my choice, it’s embedded in my biology.

Still related to being together with other people, in the bigger picture, if we follow what nature programmed us to do, our purpose as a species is to multiply and survive. That’s why sex feels amazing, mothers naturally love children, and we naturally avoid pain. If you are those who don’t want to multiply, well shocking news, you are (still) the minority.

But if our purpose as a species is to simply multiplying and surviving, it is depressing, isn’t it? So to me, I have to differentiate between our purpose as a species and our purpose as an individual. So the purpose of life as an individual is to enjoy it while it lasts. To live this human experience. Imagine yourself as a soul, then this soul inhabit this body, experiencing human life. Of course while saying ‘enjoying it while it lasts’ doesn’t mean to do it irresponsibly. It includes the things such as: to love; to care about something; to learn new things and fulfill your curiosity. Unfortunately, as a human in our current society, to survive you must work. You must benefit the society so you can survive, which is done through work. So look for the things that make you happy, while also doing work to sustain yourself. If you find meaning through work, then do it.

But after writing all of those. I imagined that billions of humans currently exist, everyone is different. Maybe in the gene pool, all of us are considered mutations. Just like a bacteria who are slightly different every time they multiply, and each different bacteria does different things, just like our personality. They do different things based on the combination of 2 factors: the environment they are at and how they are wired. The things they create then affect one another. Maybe a bacteria can learn from another bacteria. All of those is to advance as better bacteria species. Maybe all that we think, all that we contemplate, all that we as humans create, is ultimately just to advance us as better human species.

I just want to yap, rap, rant, whatever.

Sometimes I worry maybe what I portray in the social media about who I am seems a little bit.. hypocritical? Like I see things from positive side, I think I’m always lucky and blessed, I respect people, I see people based on their character instead of their status, and maybe there are more, but I can only remember those right now. I worry that maybe from my actions, people see me differently and I’m not those things. The worst part is I don’t even know that I’m not those things. Maybe I project what I think is right to myself, without me necessarily doing those things, instead I portrayed myself as such.

But also, at another state of my brain, I’m not worried at all about what those people think (WTF, contradictory to first paragraph?) When you’re human, you can think in multiple ways about a sort of thing, without tying yourself to that POV/thinking. Sometimes I wonder if other people’s brain also behave like this. I have been questioning everything since I can remember. I can always put myself in others’ shoes. I think it has something to do with my quirk, that leads to my unacceptance that made me question everything. The thing about seeing from everyone’s POV, slowly you lose your identity. You don’t know which side you’re on. But does identity even matter? Why picking side when we can pick the truth side? And why do we need identity if it means separation from other human beings? By picking a side, then you basically antagonize the other side. If you can mold into anything, does that mean you have no integrity? I think integrity has to have a subject. Like, integrity to violence is different from integrity to justice. About me, integrity to one way of thinking, I don’t have. But pretty sure I do have integrity about certain values like don’t do what you don’t want to do to others. I keep looking for the answer, until I deep-dived more into buddhism.

After learning about buddhism, and a few practices of meditation, this is what I realized. (I think I have a talent for meditation, sometime I’ll tell about it). Our ‘true self’ is separate from our thinking. This loud mind who does the thinking most of the time. it’s not singular. It was influenced heavily by ‘karma.’ Karma here is not ‘what you reap is what you sow,’ no, not at all. Karma is any factor that influences everything in life. So when I say, our thinking is influenced by karma, it means that what I think, is influenced heavily by a collection of:
1. My birth trait which was influenced by my parents’ DNA (internal)
2. What I experienced so far (external)
3. What I reflect about everything that has happened to me (internal).
Our true self, in a sense, is God. But not that ‘God’, not that all-po

werful God. Not that God that gets angry when someone doesn’t pray to Him. Our true self is the universe itself. Neutral. Without consciousness. This definition of Karma, is what Buddha truly meant. Our true self, you can call it soul, is something pure. Only if you grasp the essence of soul through meditation, then you will finally understand what this ‘soul’ I’m talking about is like.

Through this meditation, I have a question that arises, is reaching the state of Nibbana (or Nirvana) the same as having a mental state of death while being alive? Because through meditation, although temporary, I had the experience of feeling the ultimate endless peace. I suspected that’s how death felt like. Almost every near death experience (NDE) survivor said death feels peaceful. And in some religion they say death is meeting with the creator. It is definitely true. But it’s not like a person meeting another grand person-God. It is that you are back into the universe.

This time I’ll connect death with science a little bit.

Have you ever asked why every living thing is afraid of death? If you contemplate long enough, you will eventually arrive at the answer further than just, “because we’re wired so.” My answer is because being afraid of death is what makes ‘you’ survive. Forget about all fictions about how humans came about. I 100% believe we truly started from chemical compounds. They say life is improbable, that life’s chance was 1/billionths years. Even if the chance of life is so minuscule, like 1 second per 1 billion years, then just wait for 1 billion years, then in that 1 second, life is created and that is all that is needed for life to conquer the earth: its own creation. Life is called life, because this simple chemical compound has a special ability: multiply.

Multiply it goes, and with each multiplication, there are differences and that’s where natural selection happens. Those that are suited for the earth, survived. If you understand this, you will realize just how magnificent the discovery of natural selection by Charles Darwin was. It was truly eye-opening and explained so much of our world and why things were. And back to the question of why we are afraid of death, it’s because the traits that were not afraid of death, did not survive. Being afraid of death is the one trait that was brought by our ancestors since life was just a single-celled organisms. So you can imagine the magnitude of this certain passed traits.

Okay so this rap/yap/rant/whatever has been going without direction. This is what ADHD feels like. Thinking about one thing, and then it wanders around a different topic, but it can somehow still connect. Actually there are a lot of branches from what I have written but I tried to stay focused so that this writing is more readable.

Tom vs Summer

I will say it out loud, I am team Summer all the way.
To be perfectly fair, there should be no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the movie. Not at all. This discussion should not happen at all. End of story. I should stop writing about it.

However, on the internet, I have found a lot of people blaming Summer for giving false hope to Tom, by giving Tom the affection someone who’s in love would have given to his/her spouse. And actually, very few blames Tom, because those who blame Tom, actually do that because they think there’s no problem here at all and they just want to defend Summer (well when I say, ‘they’, it’s actually myself hahaha.)

Okay, here’s my analysis. Let’s start by breaking down the story.

So 500 days of Summer tells a story from Tom’s POV, who met a girl named Summer, and fell head over heels with her, because of her personality and her actions that felt like the actions of someone in love. However, when they first start dating, Summer had stated that she didn’t look for a relationship, she just wanted something casual (read: sex.) However, throughout the story, Tom believed she would change her mind, and Tom tried hard to win her heart. He tried and tried, and he saw (I repeat, from his POV) that maybe he had a chance and Summer would finally changed her mind and would love him from all her heart. In the end, Summer rejected Tom’s advance and after a few things the casual thing finally ended. And after that, Summer got married, leaving Tom heartbroken.

After reading my synopsis. Isn’t this just a tragedy? No one is at fault. Because there is no problem at all. What is the problem? Is it Tom’s heartbreak? How can one’s heartbreak is another person’s responsibility? A heartbreak is always the responsibility of its bearer.

Or you want to argue that Summer lied because she said she didn’t want a relationship and suddenly she got married? Oh how stupid can you be? Sorry, you’re not stupid, you’re just a hypocrite. Have you never, in your life, changed your mind? Changing mind is a 100% legal thing to do.

I have my own personal experience that I want to share, related to this.
Someone, let’s call her J, asked me, where I was going to go that evening.
I said, oh I wanted to go to mall A to shop. She said, OK. However, while I was riding to mall A, I suddenly changed my mind, I went to mall B because I felt like it, maybe I wanted to have dinner at mall B. After arriving at the mall B, J texted and told me that she wanted to ask me to buy a few things from mall A and she would pay me back later. Then I told her that I couldn’t buy that thing because I went to different mall. J was angry with me because she said I told her I wanted to go to mall A.

If you think J’s anger was valid, well you were so wrong. It was not valid. I believe that when we’re angry, we should be angry for the right reason. For example, when an employee made a mistake, we shouldn’t be angry at him/her if it’s an honest mistake. But if it’s negligence or mens rea, then we should be angry at him. I don’t know about other people, but I control my emotion. Yes, emotions may arise without our control, as it often does, they come to the surface of our sea of feelings and materialized as our actions. But if we let every emotion that arise to materialize, then we’d be one hell of unstable immature person. Emotion may arise, but there above the sea, there should be a filter, let’s imagine a layer of oil called reason, that calms the rising emotions so it doesn’t burst without control. Sometimes my filter fails, but I try maintaining it.

Now back to my story (not to Tom and Summer, not yet.) When it first happened to me, I was confused, was I at the wrong side here? I usually went places by myself, freely, why should I suddenly be shackled when someone asked me where I went. When I was by myself, changing my mind shouldn’t be a mistake. Since when changing mind is wrong, WTF? Since then, I always made sure when someone asked me a similar question, I made sure to him/her that I was still unsure and I might change my mind. Heck even if I was sure, I should still be allowed to change my mind.

Now, looking back, now wiser I am, I should just ignore J’s illogical burst of feelings and not take it personally. She was a sucker at controlling her feelings. Her anger feeling arose and she couldn’t control it, she couldn’t understand who’s at fault there, and she let it out and hurt someone else.

It was the same thing as what Summer did. Summer told Tom she didn’t want a relationship. Her aversion to relationship was a promise she made to herself, not to Tom. A promise to our own self is allowed to be cancelled by ourselves. Just like a promise to another person can be cancelled is both parties agree on breaking it. A promise to our own self is simpler because if we ourselves agree on breaking it, then it is the same as both parties breaking it (do you get it?) Back to Summer, she shared her ‘promise to herself’ to Tom so that Tom understood what he was going into. And into he went. That’s why when Summer finally married another person, she was allowed to do it without being called a liar.

And then Tom supporter argued that Summer did to Tom what a person in love would do, even though she knew Tom wanted a real relationship, and her decision to let Tom felt in love with her was cruel, she should have cut Tom earlier.

Okay for this one, you thought about it this way because the movie portrayed this so called tragedy from Tom’s POV. What if you viewed it through Summer’s POV.
“There’s a guy, he’s fun to be with, and he’s also good in bed. I don’t want a real relationship, I just want something casual. I have made it clear to him. But he gave me affection like someone in a relationship, should I return the same kind of affection to him? Okay since we’re close I think I should reciprocate. Wow I think he really wants a real relationship. What he did, he’s doing more than he should. Will I believe in love again, with him? Okay let me try loving him with my heart, who knows with his heart and his effort, it can open again. Oh god damn after a few tries, it still won’t open, it’s closed. This heart just doesn’t feel the spark. I should end it. *after a few months* Welp I met someone and I FINALLY FELT IT IN MY HEART. He proposed to me and I will be married!”

See now? Someone’s feeling is not something to be forced upon. You can’t love someone and expect him/her to love you back and if he/she doesn’t you’ll blame him/her. There’s nothing to blame. It’s heartbreak. If anyone should be blamed, it’s us, it’s our own self, it’s our own heart.

If you said that Summer gave him false hope. It’s so subjective and so your opinion. To you it’s false hope and misleading. But maybe to her, she’s just reciprocating, she could be clueless about it, or she could actually gave hope and tried to let her heart open but it just wouldn’t.

My actual stance is you can’t blame Summer, you can’t blame Tom either (again, no one to blame, it’s a tragedy.) The heart wants what it wants. We can’t control it. What he did, trying to change Summer’s mind was not a mistake. In some scenarios, it could work, and the story would end in Tom and Summer lived happily ever after. But somehow the author decided Summer would not change her mind with Tom, no matter how hard Tom tried.

Dopamine addiction

It’s been thousands of years since I last wrote something on this blog. I could have lied to you and said that I was busy. I had been ill. The muse was gone. But reality is, I was just being lazy. But saying I was lazy was not accurate, too. But I felt like something else was in control of my body. It’s not some spiritual being, I’m damn sure it was dopamine. Yes I am a dopamine addict.

Dopamine addiction feels like you are not in control of your body. When you lay in bed, you felt like tomorrow you can do many productive things. But in reality, when you’re about to start doing that thing, something drained away so quickly. Imagine a dementor sapping Harry Potter’s life force, but it went so fast Harry died before he had a chance to cast Expecto Patronum. That where I’m at right now.

I could have been cruel and punished myself. Said that I was too spoiled. I lack effort because all my needs have been fulfilled. Yes it was true. But it was also true that it is so very hard to get out of this … I wanna say hellhole but it wasn’t that bad, maybe a ‘trap hole’ could be fine.

This realization came when I noticed I was sitting at my office. I had done only the urgent things. But for the things that were not urgent, I tend to procrastinate it. But the danger of procrastinating is not the deadline, it is when you should do the things that don’t have a deadline, like building a business.

But right now, after a glass of cold brew lemonade, I could feel the rush of being productive. First of all, by writing this lmao. As if this is the first priority I should be doing currently. Actually, there are a few things that come first, but somehow these hands could feel strongly against doing it. Since it is an admin-like job and I don’t feel like doing them. But this is my current belief: once I have a ‘palugada’ assistant, I will finally flap my wings and soar high above the sky. After a few flaps, I will be above the earth. A few more flaps, I would travel between the planets, just like the vision I often had in my dreams when I fly.

ABSJL (Possessed)

Big eyes, small pupils, eyes that follow you anywhere,
strands of hair, messy, a chaotic movement by a dancer, arms bent backward, feet spinning in unnatural ways, but the head kept still, its eyes locked on me.
No blood in sight, just dried black-red ink, which covers the eyes, shut forever.
Woken up in what feels like a millennia, somehow I can’t remember what happened,
but now I’m petrified, unable to move, what am I?
“Tomorrow,” I said. Always expecting that someday I might get the answer.
one day turns into a week, then a month, a year, each passing day feels like an eternity,
I no longer have patience, but what choice do I have?
I counted, I am going insane, do I exist? Am I a being? Is there a God?
Oh! What sin have I done?
It took me more 500 years to know what I am now, a stone statue.
And it took me another 300 years to know what time that was.
Now is 2025, this body I possessed, gave me a chance to explain what I am,
This kind man, knowing I’m trapped in this accursed ancient item, pulled me in and let me talk,
At that time, it was my birth and I gave myself a name, ABSJL.
I only wish to die. To disappear. To never is or was. Let me.
I crushed this host’s head to the wall. Wishing I’d die.
As soon as I woke up, I can’t move. In front of me, a lying body of the good man.
I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! If only I could shed tear!
All I could do is smile. Smiling to the only companion that I ever have!
I feel like I’m going insane. Ah, in being insane, I will have died! What a revelation!
So a good idea it is to start believing:
– I (the statue) am floating.
– 1 day is 60 hours.
– 60 hours is 60 seconds.
– The moon is larger than the sun.
– I think, I don’t exist.
– word s doen’t exit.
– word are now chaotic.
– rea ninglemea rdwo.
– ti ! rkwo uallyact oww.
– acepe etr I ni allyfin.

Fake Bhikkhunis

Here I am sitting in the most crowded cafe in Bandung. Beautiful place it is. With comfortable plush sofa and wood-hard armrest. Semi-romantic ambience, perfect for dating, with 26 celcius temperature and wind blowing periodically.

Then I noticed it. There are 2 lady bhikkhus, or buddhists call bhikkhunis, accompanied by another 3 unsignificant people. However, the bhikkhunis are fat. like 100-120 kg fat and height around 150-155 cm. Having learned about bhikkhus and what they practice during high school time, I can’t help but wonder.

Are bhikkhunis allowed to be fat? The same goes for bhikkhus (male one.)
Aren’t they supposed to be abstaining from worldly desires, such as desire for food?
From what I learned, any food they eat, will be eaten with care as such not to be eaten as delicacy. Food is just to survive, I reckon.

Then I thought, in such a short time, there can only be 3 explanations:
– they have been fat before they join the Sangha (basically the brotherhood of bhikkhus)
– they are not careful in their practices
– medical issues, though unlikely since there are both of them
– fake bhikkhunis

Doubting is important

If you never doubt, and are always sure about everything, you certainly the biggest fool for the essence of intelligence is through doubt. I speak from experience when speaking with someone so full of conviction, seems like he never wants to be on the losing side, even though conversation is not even a battle, so the losing side is nonexistent, only truth.

Have you ever met someone, having said something, he tried so hard to defend his previously said argument, however out of common sense it was? He defended his argument not because it was the truth but because he already said it. That guy, I said, is definitely an imbecile. And to be honest, there are quite a lot of these kind of people.

Sometimes I think, what is the point of writing this. What is the point of pointing out what I think about these people. Like, if someone reads this, what is the insight that they can get? Wouldn’t they think I’m an arrogant?

To be honest, I don’t know. Maybe I just want someone to know, and maybe some of the readers will feel, “I feel it too.”