russia

A friend of mine shares some pictures of his recent trip to Moscow on Facebook, that brings back some old memories of mine...

Back in late August 1998, I was sent over to Russia by the company I joined earlier that year--a publicly traded company in LA that bought the intellectual property right of the voice-over-IP system I developed in exchange for company stock and a fat check VP Engineering position which really meant VP Traveling Salesman, to demonstrate and install my internet-voice systems with national telephone companies and internet service providers all over the world that the company was negotiating co-operating deals with.

It was the end of August when I arrived in Moscow, but the weather had already turned damp gloom cold there, totally taken me by surprise, coming from sunny California. A stodgy young man named Valery came picked me up at the airport, and would become my day-to-day care taker meeting arranger liaison officer buddy companion for the next two weeks in Russia.

I was arranged to stay in a "5-Star" hotel right across the Red Square/Kremlin Palace. It was where all the foreign dignitaries stayed during the Cold War, they said. But to me it's really an old and dingy place with 5-star room rate, and I had to batter my way through a slew of young women--sexual solicitors they were--gathering at the lobby every evening just to get back to my room. 

I met with a few people who were our local Russian contacts and associates for lunch and dinner, but my main mission was to install and demonstrate one of my VoIP systems there. And here came the Murphy's Law: One of the systems I brought showed no sign of life when I tried to turn it on for check. It seemed the mother board of the "luggable" PC I carried half the world over just wouldn't take the shaking and beating of travel any more.

"Is there anywhere I might get some PC parts?" I asked Valery the next day, doubtfully. "Hmm, let me check," he said, and surprise, he did locate a local computer store where I found a made-in-Taiwan PC mother board that was exactly what I needed. I then spent one night in my hotel room under dim night-stand light reassembling and rebuilding my proprietary system back to working order.

The testing and demonstration went well at an internet service provider that was the country's largest at the time. It was located in the same facility where they said the old Soviet Union's national science research center was. (Valery used to be a Red Army officer and had his connections, by the way). I don't remember much of the place or the testing process except the gusting cold winds blowing through the open hallways, that without the sweater Valery lent me I probably would have been frozen to death right there. 

Then off we went to St. Petersburg, the second largest city in Russia about 400 miles away from Moscow--just about the same distance between LA and San Francisco, on a midnight express. We visited and met a very gentleman-like manager of a national telephone company housed in a museum-esque building near the beautiful Baltic sea. We swiftly installed and tested another of my systems there in less than half a day's time so the gentleman manager took us to sight-see some famous palaces and then a canal cruise crisscrossing the city for the rest of the day. Valery and I then had a celebration dinner at a classy restaurant where we ordered full course Russian dishes that included the famous oxtail soup (or "Russian soup" 羅宋湯, as we call it in Chinese) that I forget how it tasted since I am no foodie except that it's quite different from the one we grew up eating Chinese style.

Perhaps encouraged by the success of the installations I made in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, the company back home decided to send me over to yet another city, this time Rostov-on-don, the largest metropolis in southern Russia, for another testing and installation. We flew this time, on a Russian domestic airlines flight. The Russian-made Ilyushin airplane might be notorious for its safety records, but the service and food on board was actually not too bad. The city itself, like Moscow and St. Petersburg, was calm and orderly, and the people friendly, but probably not as international conscious as the prior two. I felt being gawked at when walking on the streets as if I were the only foreigner in this town of 1 million people.

The Rostov-on-don testing and installation was a success too. Now it's time to go home. Valery dropped me off at the Moscow international airport and we said good-bye and parted ways. It was a totally strange, Russian airport to me, with no English signs or directions anywhere and long lines everywhere. I found my way to the airlines counter and handed in my passport and ticket to the clerk. After viewing my passport for a brief second she said "Sorry, but we cannot let you out of this country today... Your visa had just expired yesterday."

What happened was the visa I got for Russia was for 4 weeks only, and my departure from the States was postponed by two weeks in the first place, then my stay here was extended for one week. As a result I had just become an illegal in Russia by one day. Nobody noticed this until now probably because my passport was turned in for "safe-keeping" by the hotel as required by law the day I checked in.

I surely had no intention of overstaying my welcome in this country and asked the counter lady what recourse do I have other than going back to the hotel and applying and waiting for a new visa for God knows how many days. She told me there was a consular from Russian Foreign Ministry that could issue temporary visas to people like my situation. So I waded my way through to the place she referred me and found that consular and got him to put a stamp on my passport for $72, cash only, he said. I was damn glad I had that extra money at hand.

I then came back to the airlines counter and started going through multiple stands and checkpoints with multiple lines of solemn Russians, with no signs, no directions, and no flight information update panels along the way, for hours, until it was way past the scheduled departure time of my flight and I completely gave up on hope of getting on my plane in time.

Then when I finally reached the waiting area of my flight's departure gate, surprise, I saw a United Airlines plane still sitting down the tarmac, and a roomful of people still waiting. The flight had been delayed and would be for another few hours, they said. Sometimes many wrongs can make one right :)

I arrived safely home in California the next day.

* Here's a YouTube video converted from the tape Valery made for me using his hand camera during my stay in Russia. It started at the underground subway station mall, to the Red Square and Kremlin Palace, midnight express to St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg palaces and canal cruise, etc., and ended with some sagely advice on happiness from Valery, my top secret KGB agent companion :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR22LG7oYsA

** Here's a news announcement made by the company after my trip to Russia. The company's stock shot up from less than $2 to $8.5 a share in one week after the announcement: 

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Digitcom+Links+St.+Petersburg,+Moscow+and+Rostov-On-Don+for+Internet...-a021104820

on d

The most vivid fear I remember I have about death probably occurred when I was a little boy, when one day I heard a wild story at our kids' hang-out about a mother in our neighborhood who mysteriously disappeared and never returned. The thought of "what if this happens to my mom" caused great fear in my little mind.

And when I first heard the saying: "Death is part of nature," it was an uneasy and incomprehensible concept to me. Death is a terrible thing that ends life. If it's not outright anti-nature, it's definitely un-natural, I thought. 

We Chinese are pragmatic people, who don't think about things that are not of much practical value or grand ideas that are too much out-of-this-world. The old Confucius saying "Don't ask me the meaning of death, I am yet to figure out the meaning of life" (未知生, 焉知死) is pointed out by some as reason why Confucianism never developed into a full-blown religion in Chinese culture, because it shied away from that big "D" question. Without at least exploring and trying to understand the meaning of death, you can't understand the meaning of life either, they say.

So the Western (and other) religions delved deep into that question and came up with some answers, that our life on earth is transient by design, that it's a trial to better our character, and we'll have a perfect life in heaven once we get there, (or we may need to reincarnate quite a few times before we reach that Nirvana, according to Buddhism) ...

And there are people who say "I don't know if I even care for an eternal life, all I do is live one honest day at a time, and when my time is up, it's up." To these people I salute their integrity and even more, their continuous conscientious living. For not even the best of the Christians I know can maintain that "pray without ceasing" practice 24/7, and many people "live like they didn't know they will die one day, and die like they had never lived"--inertia seems to be the only force that keeps many hang on to life. 

Is there life after death, does our life continue to evolve in different form after our earthly body disintegrates? All right, I now accept decay is part of nature, just like growth is part of it, they form a cyclical process, like sunrise and sunset, flowers blossoming and wilting, and so on. But how about our spiritual or mental strength, that continues on an upward path through our life if nurtured right, so when we reach the end of our bodily existence, we are supposedly at the peak of our spiritual or mental climb. Do they then just drop out and disappear like our physical body?

My mother passed away some 19 years ago. It was a shocker for all of us. She was only 67, for one thing, and other than feeling a little short-breathed and palpitations just a couple weeks prior for which we took her for a thorough exam and the doctor assured us everything was OK, she showed no signs of illness. I still remember the shock and heart rending pain I felt when I received that mid-night phone call from my sister in Taiwan that Mother had just passed away in her arms.

The shock came from the loss of something I thought I would always have but now realized it's gone forever. It's no longer the fear, but the great pain that came from the sudden, ruthless take-away of my dear mother, and then the deep, nostalgic sorrow of feeling things better in my life have been lost for good.

In the end we sob for the dead not because we feel sorry for them, but because we feel sorry for ourselves. Rather than saying we fear death, we love life. Even those little, routine emotional highs and lows--those that make up inertia living, you may say--are enough to carry us through the day, every day, even though our hard-to-please soul always fancies something grander. 

And where do these precious little contentments come from mostly? Relationships, I gather. A bear hug from father to son, a complimenting smile from wife to husband, an encouraging note from one friend to another... These are what happy living is made of. 

Some relationships we have in life are born, such as familial relationships (parents, siblings, relatives); some are chosen (spouses, adoptions, business partners); and some are in-between (co-workers, classmates, church members). We tend to hold on to born relationships closest and longest simply because it's most natural thing to do, hence the pain deepest when that relationship is severed from us--like a death in the family, literally. 

But the truth is all relationships--like spiritual and mental growth--get richer and deeper if nurtured properly and continuously, and will give us same satisfaction whether it originates from familial, social, or cultural background. Thus we all have experience having friends with whom we are more intimate than with our own brothers or sisters, and adopted children are in general closer to their foster parents than their biological ones.

One dear uncle of mine just passed away last month. Out of the four brothers my father had, this was the one closest to him and to us since we were kids. It was again a sudden thing: In March he started coughing severely and went to the doctors, where it was diagnosed to be lung cancer at its terminal stage.

I visited him a couple times when I was there last month, didn't get a chance to talk to him. But then I heard from my sister who had once had a long talk with him at the sick bed, and he told her, after reflecting back on his life, "I have no regrets."  I was somehow quite moved and comforted hearing this.

No fear, no dissatisfaction, only peace at the end.

God rest your soul, dear uncle.

egypt, greece, rome ...

scotland? Yes, this according to an erst-while New York Times best seller "How the Scots Invented the Modern World" I picked up at Barnes & Noble bookstore a couple months ago. Though the title may make you chuckle at first (how in the world can a lowly country make such audacious claim), I was most impressed by this well researched and written 450-pager and enjoyed learning some interesting facts and stories that I didn't know before.

The book starts with an incident that occurred on one cold August day in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1696, when one inappropriate remark by a young theology student led to the relentless prosecution and eventual hanging of him by the authority-that-be of the day, the all-encompassing Presbyterian Church of Scotland founded some 150 years ago by John Knox, a devout Calvinist whose life-long mission was to make Scotland the "New Jerusalem" of the world during the days of fierce Protestant Reformation movement. 

Rigid and uncompromising as it was, the Presbyterian church-state of pre-modern day Scotland did instill a deep sense of self-governance and common people's rights against the monarchy, as well as awareness and establishment of universal education (boys and girls must know how to read Holy Scripture, therefore nearly every parish in Scotland had some sort of school and a regular teacher), making Scotland's literacy rate the highest in the world (it was probably not by coincidence that Encyclopedia Britannica was first compiled and published by a group of Scottish publishers in Edinburgh), and sowing the seeds for its intellectual enlightenment movement during the 18th century, when Scotland enjoyed economic prosperity after its successful union with England at the beginning of that century. 

The Scottish Enlightenment shared same humanist and rationalist outlook of European Enlightenment of the same period, with some firebrand ideas of its own, though. 

For more than two thousand years Western philosophers had praised the primacy of reason as the guide to all human action and virtue, that the job of reason was to master our emotions and appetites. With one earth-shaking book, "A Treatise of Human Nature," David Hume, one of the most influential Scottish thinkers of the day, and some call modernity's first great philosopher, turned the theory on its head. "Reason is," he wrote, "and ought to be, the slave of the passions."

"Human beings are not, and never have been, governed by their rational capacities," he elaborated, "Reason's role is purely instrumental: it teaches us how to get what we want. What we want is determined by our emotions, our passions, or our desire to live according to the rational principles. We are, in the end, creatures of habit, and of the physical and social environment within which our emotions and passions must operate."

For Hume, self-interest is all there is. The overriding guiding force in all our actions is not our reason, or our sense of obligation toward others, or any innate moral sense, but the most basic human passion of all, the desire for self-gratification.

Now Adam Smith, another great Scottish intellectual of the day, and later recognized to be father of modern science of economy by many, was a good friend of David Hume's. He was somewhat disturbed by such characterization of human nature, for his insight of man came from a different school of thoughts, one held and infused in him by his teacher/mentor, another great Scottish thinker, Francis Hutcheson, who insisted morality is inborn, a gift from God and nature, not something that has to be imposed from outside, as Hume suggested.

What Smith eventually came up with was what he called "fellow feeling," a natural sense of identification with other human beings. When we see someone suffer, we suffer; when we see others happy and celebrating their good fortune, it raises our own spirits. "Empathy," in today's term.

"Nature, when she formed man for society," Smith explained, "endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favorable, and pain in their unfavorable regard."

So being moral demands that we put ourselves in another person's place, and put another person in our place. It leads us to promote the well-being of others, by making them as happy as ourselves.

For Adam Smith, then, our moral life, as well as our cultural life, is a matter of imagination. The richer the inventory of objects for its diversion, and the deeper our own fellow feeling, the happier we become, but also the more we can perceive happiness in others. The rich man is the man with the most fertile imagination. By devoting all his efforts and those of his employees and tenants to his land or his warehouse of factory, he ends up producing far more than he can consume himself. Thus, without intending it, without knowing it, as if led by an invisible hand, the rich "advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species," he said in his book "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," 17 years before publishing his other classic, "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776.

**************************************************************

The latter part of the book talks about the diaspora, or dispersion, of Scots around the world through expansion of the British Empire. From Canada (Nova Scotia, one of Canada's four founding colonies, is Latin for "New Scotland") to United States, South America, Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and so on, many Scots served the roles of valiant soldiers, shrewd merchants, prominent educators, devout missionaries, and hardy homesteaders that helped build and maintain the Empire upon which the sun never set. 

One particular branch of Scottish migration actually occurred well before the British colonial expansion to the world. Beginning in early 17th century, many Scots were lured to settle in Northern Ireland on lands confiscated from Irish nobility by King James I, who had been king of Scotland before becoming king of England, as well as driven by famine and poverty at home, through the whole of the 17th century. 

Waves of these "Scotch-Irish" (or "Ulster Scots," Ulster being the ancient provincial name of Northern Ireland) again began to move to British America in early 18th century, landing on Eastern seaports such as Philadelphia or Chester, then quickly expanding into the Appalachian Mountains, across southwest Virginia, North Carolina, and eventually Tennessee.

The habits of colonizing Ireland and seizing arable land from Catholic enemies carried over to the New World. Their insatiable desire for land, and the willingness to fight and die to keep it, laid the foundation of the frontier mentality of the American West.

Place names and language reflected their northern Irish or southern Scottish origins. They said "whar" for "where," "thar" for "there," "critter" for "creature," "nekkid" for "naked"... These were the first utterings of the American dialect of Appalachian mountaineers, cow boys, truck drivers, and back country politicians. The term used to describe them was redneck, a Scots border term meaning Presbyterians. Another was cracker, from the Scots word craik for "talk," meaning a loud talker or braggart. Both words became permanent parts of the American language, and a permanent part of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created.

Well known Americans of Scottish origin in the early pioneer days include Andrew Jackson, army general who defeated both Indians and the British army and the 7th President of the United States; William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific Northwest; Sam Houston, soldier politician who led Texas to the Union. Notable modern day Scottish Americans include Andrew Carnegie, steel industry tycoon and philanthropist; Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of telephone and his namesake telephone company; and President Woodrow Wilson, an idealistic politician whose father was one of the founders of Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States.

Nope, MacIntosh Computer was not invented by the Scots, nor were the McDonald's restaurants, even though the names sound Scottish and both are tell-tale contraptions of modern world :)

cool

I don't know if the Oxford Dictionary or Encyclopedia Britannica keeps a category for the "chic-est" words used in the world for the day. If they do, I think "cool" should be right up there. 

Say, 

You wear a new suit to a party, and people compliment you: "Cool outfit!"

You talk arrangement or business with a friend or partner, and to consummate the deal, you say "Are you cool with it?"

You give a fancy new toy to your kid, his/her eyes round up, mouth opens wide, and cheers out "Cool!", and you are the coolest dad in the world at that moment!

Just like a group of children, we expect our leaders to be cool, level headed, like they knew what they were doing all the time, so we feel secure. Witness General Haig's quivering "I am in control" statement right after President Reagan's failed assassination, or compare Richard Nixon's nervous appearance vs John Kennedy's calm demeanor during the presidential debate, and their political outcomes, you'll understand that the appearance of uncool can be detrimental to a politician's public life, just like some say the appearance of stupidity, more than stupidity itself, can hamper one's career advancement in the corporate world.

At the risk of seeming politically uncool, I'll say in general men are more cool than women. How else to explain that we always look for "the coolest man in Hollywood," (George Clooney, for that matter, for now, perhaps) but no woman in that category. (Instead, we have the "hottest woman" category we like to focus on). The flip side of this is jerks are always men, none woman.

One easy way to achieve coolness is to put oneself in a neutral position, like a TV anchorman/woman, for example, posing questions to their interviewees, jarring or intriguing as they might be, they are all asked on the audience's behalf, so he/she can stay above the fray and watch--as we audience do--their interviewees squirm and turn in their answering.

But once in a while, an interviewee might fire back an edgy jab towards the interviewer themselves, unexpectedly, then you might see that anchorman/woman get visibly disturbed, become defensive, and lose that professional calm air they've been wearing. It's not cool any more when things get personal, is it?

Probably because coolness is such looked-upon quality in our society, many try to fake it, or "play cool", even when they don't have it. Or they at least try to play it passively, to hide their uncoolness by following that "Never let them see you sweat" motto. Coolness over-or-mis-played can become downright cold-heartedness, or deranged mental cases like those zombie-like killers we see in many of Hollywood's violent movies. 

Like meekness that comes from reined-in strength, I think true coolness comes from a very warm heart, that can still cry and empathize, but with great wisdom and wit, humor and humility, that combined so enchants us we want to be surrounded by it, or by that person rather, all day long.

There was a guy born a couple thousand years ago, who didn't go with the "in" crowd, cried for the death of his friend, took all things personally, and sweated profusely in his last petition to his father God for life. Yet his magic brings life and hope to all people ever since. That's a very cool guy in my book.

Happy Easter!

mayday in march

Though we have been living away from Taiwan for over 30+ years, my jolly girly wife has never lost her adoration of anything Taiwanese or missed following every move of every entertainment celebrity she can keep track of there. So I was not totally surprised when she so excitedly announced to me a couple months ago "the great 'Mayday' (五月天) rock band from Taiwan is coming to LA for a live performance" and wanted me to buy tickets online for her, her nephew and his girl friend, and the mandatory companion driver husband myself, altogether 4 tickets for a whopping sum of $600 or so.

Came last Saturday, the day of the concert, the plan was to first go to a restaurant in Beverly Hills for an early dinner with an auntie of hers and her son, who had also bought tickets for the concert once they learned about it from us, then head for the concert at Sports Arena, the erstwhile Clippers basketball court near USC.

The dinner reservation was made for 5 PM, we left our house a little over 3:30, thinking that should be plenty time ahead. But a couple of slow-and-go's and the usual snarl on Fwy-405 when nearing West LA made it past 5 already when we finally got off the freeway onto the busy surface streets. Adding the parking look-around and last-block pedestrian walk, we ended up about 15 minutes behind when we entered the restaurant.

This is an upscale Vietnamese/fusion style restaurant, famous for its "tiger prawn garlic noodle" and crab meat, so we ordered some and more. It's all good and delicious, but pricey as well--I honestly think we can get same quality food for half the price at somewhere else in LA or Orange County, but this is Beverly Hills, as you know. 

My wife's auntie Winnie's son, Sean, picked up the tab for his mother, who was the one suggested the place and said she'd be the hostess for it in the first place. I have known Winnie and Sean and his brother and sister since I came to the States over 30 years ago, when they just started their new lives in America as well. From swap-meet booths to doughnut shops to used car sales, and now owners of one of the largest AT&T wireless chain stores in the US, plus a couple of bakery stores Winnie herself owns, theirs is a rags-to-riches, another great American-dream-coming-true story that I undoubtedly feel proud of and happy for.

The drive from the restaurant to the Sports Arena again reminded me of the treachery of LA traffic that I almost forgot after years of cushy driving in Orange County. Again, when we finally pulled into the vast, flat, but well packed parking lot of the Arena, it's 15 minutes past the scheduled concert start time already.

Fortunately, the concert hadn't started yet and it took us only a few minutes to find our seats, ones right facing the stage, even though it's a distance away and on the upper level. This is a big arena that can seat up to 16,000 people, and one thing that much surprised me was the overwhelming majority of the near capacity crowd I saw here were young mainland Chinese in their early 20's, many of them recent immigrants/students from China, I supposed.

The concert blasted out with a couple of big smoky cannon bolts and all the kids went wild, cheering, yelling, jumping, flash light waving, one song after another, just like a typical rock concert crowd would do. My wife's nephew got an LED flash light ($15 per stick) for us and she started waving and jumping like the young kids were, while I sat and enjoyed the scene and the music in most gentlemanly way. 

Other than hearing my wife mentioning their name a couple times before, I really had no idea who this "Mayday" group are or what their songs sound like until tonight. And they weren't too bad, frankly. The rhythms were soothing and melodramatic, at times rapt and at times subdued, captivating and "resuscitating"--meaning worthy of savoring over and over again; the lyrics were earthy and poignant, ebullient and titillating, circling around love, friendship, dreams of their lives, etc.

Granted, their stage props (and fireworks) were not as grand, and their vocal and instrumental skills not as over-the-top as a couple of big old vintage Western rock bands such as Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac that I've been to, and I sure wish I were familiar with their songs so I could sing along with them, like I did with those groups whose music I grew up with.

But herein lies the point, this is a group of their generation, singing songs for their generation, a generation of young Chinese all over Asia, from Taiwan to mainland China, Singapore to Tokyo, whatever dialect they speak, society or political system they live in, they seem to communicate perfectly well in this music, that touches their hearts, tells their dreams, and vents their frustration in trying to break away from whatever chains they feel themselves are under.

Somehow the song "Give Peace a Chance" from the hippie generation keeps reverberating in my mind, seems to say "let's give these young people a chance, to make a better world they know how themselves..."

It took us about half an hour just to get out of the log-jammed parking lot after the end of the show, and then just as we were finally cruising along in light late night traffic on the 405, Caltran completely shut down a major freeway transition and forced us all down the freeway to go through a bewildering detour route for another extra half hour. It was well past midnight when we finally got home.

I think I'd done a masterful good job chauffeuring my wife and had a great time myself for the night!

* Here's a video clip for one song I recorded at the Mayday concert:

http://youtu.be/wIKsk7SS_88

that we can't see

"Are you thinking what I am thinking," there are moments in life when our thoughts for some mysterious reasons coincide with others'. Did it ever occur to you this might be just the tip of an iceberg, semblance of something fundamental at work that we consciously know little about?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit priest who was also a prominent paleontologist involved with the discovery of Peking Men in China, believed in an upwardly moving cosmos that had gone through several breakthroughs in its eons past--progressing from inanimated matter to organic biosphere, single cells to complex life forms, then the advent of mankind and their "thought", that invisible "within" that makes them the crown jewel of the evolution so far. Further, following the same mysterious force that unites all things throughout the process, these thoughts don't live alone by themselves, but form a connected world of consciousness that de Chardin dubbed "noosphere" (from the Greek word "nous" that means "mind"), and continue to evolve towards a maximum level of complexity called "Omega Point" that he believed is the ultimate goal of the cosmic evolution.

Carl Jung (1875-1961), founder of modern day analytical psychology and on par in prestige and achievements with the other psycho-analysis maestro Sigmund Freud, also believed in the existence of universal consciousness, and hidden elements of human unconsciousness he called "archetypes", which are the accumulated patterns and forms of the collective human psyche inherited from the past.

Have you ever experienced some fleeting images of some places and times that you know you have never been to but feel like you have lived there before, like in your previous lives?

If the universal consciousness and collective human mind do exist, modern day information technologies help spread and cultivate them at micro-electronic speeds that's never been seen before. Besides "going viral", another bio-infected term "meme" (pronounced "meem", from an ancient Greek word meaning "imitate") is now used to describe the essence of an idea, behavior, style, or cultural phenomenon that can be transmitted, varied, mutated, duplicated throughout cyber space, just as a gene's DNA does through living bodies. Thus, a street dance in LA posted on YouTube can be instantly seen by kids in Tokyo and mimicked with some adaptation and re-posted, then mimicked and adapted again by another group of people on the streets of London or Paris and re-posted, etc., in a matter of days or weeks. Also, a video clip with a cute cat doing funny things can inspire many "copy-cat" postings of the same theme, thus the popular "cat-meme" phenomenon, that may rage on for months or years.

Or you might say this is just a "varied, mutated" way of saying the good old term "fad" in cyber lingo, a "vernacular meme" by itself, so to speak. 

If the uncovering of collective mind and hidden unconsciousness itself is not fascinating enough, some go even further to allege and try to prove that such metaphysical force fields can and do interact with the physical world we live in. The Global Consciousness Project (GCP), conducted by Princeton University since 1998, uses a distributed network of Random Number Generators to register, compute, and verify if certain dramatic, emotionally-charged world events create anomaly to the supposed randomness of the numbers generated by the machines. The GCP claims that, as of 2009, the cumulative result of 300 events, including those of the September 11, 2001 attacks, does support such hypothesis. In another example, a study conducted during the peak of the Lebanon War in the early 1980's indicated that the more people gathered together to meditate for peace, the better the peace movement seemed to progress (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFa6Wtuxu8).

Not that these allegations and their supposed proofs are concrete and indisputable already, but the fact that you have read this writing through this point, able to follow the thought and reasoning, even though we may be thousands of miles apart, from different cultural or ethnic backgrounds, these words written hours or days before you see it, proves that we are somehow on some same tracks, that are intelligible, universal, and transcendental. That's amazing enough for me!

"All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been coordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason."
-- Marcus Aurelius (121-180), Roman Emperor

club med

It's probably triggered by my curiosity-driven hunt for new things in a new environment after I moved down to our new residence here in deep south Orange County some 20 months ago, but also for a long while I had been looking for a meditation group where I might be able to share the meditation practice I had been doing by myself for years with like-minded people. 

Based on my previous experiences, I knew Catholic churches are the most likely places where such "contemplative prayer" groups might gather. I browsed through a couple websites of Catholic churches in south Orange county, didn't find one. However, I did find a small Episcopal church, which–based on my limited knowledge on Christian church history–is a Protestant denomination that's closest to Catholic practice, in San Clemente. It says on its website: "Please consider this your invitation to join us for our Monday Meditation Class.... We are a small, understanding group of friends who would love to have you with us..." (http://scbythesea.org/content/meditationgroup.html)

So on one late August 2012 Monday evening I went, and I have been going there basically every Monday evening ever since.

Out of the 7 regularly attending men and women I met there, Annie was probably the one I got most impression with right from the beginning. She's a tall, red-hair lady, very intelligent, knowledgeable, witty, and articulate--I can learn quite a few things just by listening to her talk, be it about movies, books, people, places, spiritualities... they all come so episodic and off-handed from her it's mesmerizing for me to hear. I also sense she's got a great, tender heart underneath her swift talking and she can sense people's feelings and needs fairly well and care for them in a considerate way.  

Evelyn is the wife of the group's founder, Randy, who started the group about 11-12 years ago (just about the time I started doing meditation on my own, that's how I remember), who passed away about a couple years ago, before I joined the group. A Japanese American born and raised in the Southland, she is our faithful meditation "gong striker," keeping the 30-minute time period for each meditation session for us. She's a little reserved, but articulate as well (they all are articulate, I find out pretty soon), and makes great cookies and innovative desserts like a "yin-yang" cake she once brought to the group for someone's birthday to share.

Brigitte is a German American who emigrated to this country when she was a little girl with her parents, who are still living in the East Coast. She's an avid reader and would occasionally bring up some spiritual verses from the books she read for the group to share. Although she looks like only in her early 50's, she's just recently become a grandmother for the second time, we have learned. And she's a fantastic foodie, who likes to learn and try new delicacies and cuisine of different kinds. She once invited us all to her house for a full course Indian food try out, which she self-taught through some cook books just a few weeks before and everything looked and tasted so professional and greatly delicious! She's a "Wunder Woman" in my book.

Grace is a lady from Pasadena married to a Belgian man and now lives here in San Clemente, with grand children in San Diego she occasionally would baby sit for her children. Don't be fooled by her tiny frame and very genteel and gracious manners, she's been an anti-nuclear activist for a while and had been rallying and attending seminars and conferences throughout the fight against Southern California Edison for the closing of the San Onofre nuclear power plant that finally happened last year. I once joked that "she was the lady who single-handedly shut down the nuclear power plant here in San Clemente" when introducing her to some new member to the group :)  

Matt is officially the leader, or contact person, of this very democratic group of meditators. He's a handsome looking fellow with charming smiles whose day time profession is an industrial designer. We once went to his house for his birthday and I was impressed by the artworks hanging on the walls that I heard were all his own doing. He's also our official sommelier (the wine server) because he's the one who always brings wine to the group whenever we have a little celebration (for birthday, holiday, or just Evelyn or Brigitte having some new cookies or cakes for us to try out) at the church's little library room where we do the meditation.

Mel and Joanne were the late comers (after me) to the group. Mel is probably the most senior person in the group--in his late 70's--but in very good physical and mental shape. Me and my wife once went hiking with him over the back hills between their home and ours, and he walked and talked at a pace that we had to play catch up with. He and his wife Joanne came from Catholic backgrounds, have 4 grown-up children and a handful of beautiful grand children, as we can see in the pictures at their cozy home we once visited. They are both actively involved with a homeless shelter ministry they co-founded as well.

So every Monday evening we meet at the homey library room of the church, chat a few minutes, then sink into a 30-minute silence, "wake up," chat some more, then leave. We have also tried a couple different forms of meditation over time as some of us would propose and we agreed to. For example, Joanne once led a "visual meditation" session where we picked and cut pictures from various magazines she brought as they caught our mental eyes and pasted them on a board to form a theme or story that we then shared with each other. Annie facilitated another one where we all lay down on the floor listening to spiritual music and meditated on things that happened through our lives that we remember most vividly, then shared them with others at the end if we wanted to.

Though I am probably the least articulate among them all (English not being my first language, for one thing), I feel comfortable there, probably because we speak the same "spiritual language," that I don't feel I have to "hedge" my expressions so not to offend some people or make them feel uncomfortable, not knowing where those words or thinking of mine came from. Going deeper, even more important than that "like-mindedness" that might have attracted me in the first place, is "loving kindness," a loving heart combined with an open mind that tries to understand, engage and include--not label, mark off, or block out, that's the sign of true Christian love and fellowship, and that's what I see in Annie, Evelyn, Brigitte, Grace, Matt, Mel, and Joanne, at what we call our Club Med(itation)!

  

     

        


Brigitte and Matt holding the "yin-yang"            The full course Indian food Brigitte

cake Evelyn made for their birthdays                  made all by herself at her kitchen

         

Evelyn, Matt, Joanne, Mel, Grace, Brigitte         Annie and her cat at her apartment

at the library

Here's the link to the picture and news article of a public hearing on San Onofre nuclear power plant where Grace served as a panelist :

http://www.ocregister.com/news/nuclear-374117-plant-san.html

One thing I introduced to the group and they all like is using my smartphone timer app to play a "wake-up" music instead of Evelyn watching the clock and "hitting the gong" at the end of the meditation for us. The music I use nowadays is "Be Still My Soul" by Libera: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbAuTB8uLaQ