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Essay - Manifesto of a Seeker after Truth

A specter is hunting me – the specter of the curiosity for Truth. In dreams it came. In sleep it speaks my name. The voice urges me to abandon the aggregate of all my pleasure and pain, for they are of small importance compared to Truth, the appreciation and contemplation of beauty, and a certain intrinsic excellence of mind which, apart from its practical effects, appears to me to deserve the name of virtue, and ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

People who said that pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil are not on my road, because the opposite seems to me self-evident. I do not believe the contemplation of Truth on the whole tends to happiness. It gives moments of delight, but these are outweighed by years of effort and depression. People who devoted on their family and professions or dreamed for a happier society are not on my road, because, though I have no doubt that by doing economics, political science, or technology I could add more to human happiness, it appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life, and that unless the contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs.

Only works on Philosophy bring me temporary satisfaction. I no longer believe in People’s lie on the happiness of knowledge, for true knowledge is pain. I no longer believe in People’s lie of the passion on truth, for the only road to truth is walking on the verge of a despairing abyss. I do not expect companion. I do not expect understanding. My successors, stop! You should not take this road rebelling humanity. Only me, enough!

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Essay - On Technology

I come from a war zone, the war between the indifferent universe and humanity. The universe condemns humanity to destruction, and with technology we resist. It encircles us with darkness, so we lit the bulb. It devours us by wild beasts, so we manufacture guns. It infects us with virus and bacterium, so we develop vaccines and antibiotics. In my world, humanity is constantly seeking the opportunity to finally win over the universe, for the sorrows of famines, epidemics, and poverty are still prevailing on the earth.

But now the history of human development foreshadows the hope to victory. From the 100,000 years’ evolution of mankind to the 10,000 years’ agricultural evolution, we can see the accelerating speed of evolutionary paradigms. The scientific evolution spent 400 years, and industrial evolution finished within 150 years. The new evolutions will continue to accelerate themselves to reach a technological singularity, as Ray Kurzweil has warned, an intelligence implosion, for which we should be prepare.

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Essay - On Meditation

I sit still.

In front of me there is green tea in a porcelain cup. Tea in the cup; cup on the table; table on the floor. The universe is, paradoxically, “turtles all the way down.” Emptiness grows and I meditate.

Tea is water. Water is shapeless. To be shapeless is to accept. Water adapts to all manners of disturbance. I flow through ecstasy and sorrow to deeper wisdom and meditate.

The Japanese said tea is “Ichi-go, ichi-e”. Every second is unique. Every person is a passerby. I will encounter to let go, and back to meditate.

Still I sit.

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Essay - On Stars

Hello stars my old friend; I come to talk with you again. Beneath you the water in silence flows through the Victoria Harbor. Beside the harbor here I in silence stand. The orange street lamps dim the empty pavements. The neon lights decorating the skyscrapers brighten the mid-night wind. People who cannot fall asleep amble along the harbor and gaze afar the loaded cargo ships passing to and fro. The sirens are dragging their sound through the air. The harbor is a miracle of civilization, for whoever sees it at night will mistake the night as daytime. It is again a triumph of human desire over nature – the desire for light in the natural darkness. From the moment our ancestors for the first time illuminated their caves with fire, to the era of electricity when countless ports similar to Victoria Harbor lit the Earth, we humans who are desires and are driven by desires have sought from the limited the unlimited to quench our insatiability. The desires never cease: the neon light ever expands its brightness; the water in the harbor ever flows.

Hello stars my old friend; my only question is what life with endless desires is for. Over there across the water the wealthy and the poor are sleeping in the boxes of a concrete jungle with curtains drawn to protect their dreams, the manifestations of desires, in which the secrets of longing softly creep. Astronomers said at the place far as the star, the stories of old days happened on Earth can still be seen. Is there an observer on the far away planet who has witnessed a child desiring his mom behind the iron gate of the school in the rain? Did he notice that years later the child began to desire a good college, a reputation, and success? Did the observer then pity the death of his friend and the separation from his lover to whom he had desired to devote his life? The child has now grown up and realized the impermanence of mundane desires and the transience of their accompanying happiness and sorrow. He is now standing beside the harbor and understands his existence floating on the ever-flowing river of desires is the dream of Freud and life of Segismundo: an illusion, a shadow, a feather.

Hello stars they said I am a child of thine. The unbearable lightness brings me to talk with you again. On the ever-changing desires my life cannot stand, so a solid existential foundation I once traveled around the world to find. Up on the Tibetan land, I heard of a Buddha sacrificing himself to a hungry tiger with his universal love. Down along the river I saw the Nepalese burning the remains of whom once they loved. Out there in the Arctic an old lady drove to bury herself with her dead lover under the Northern Lights. Back on the hospital bed, she took away her smiles but in me left her love. From the sorrows of death that I encountered, I realized the only desire surviving death is love, for it is our deepest attachment which can exist even after death. During my journeys, I read the ethics of Immanuel Kant; I talked to Spinoza’s God, and I learned from physics the universe’s indifferent grand design. From the joys of knowledge that I acquired, I realized my desire can be the pursuit of absolute truth, for it is humanity’s lasting contribution beyond our fleeting life. Hello stars my old friend, when the crowd chases after money in the gilded consumerist world, let me fall into your divine darkness to pursue love in death and truth in life – the two immortal desires telling all stories that have ever happened under your infinite gaze; the two heaviest desires anchoring my unbearably light existence.

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Excerpt - On Truth

“I was taught as a boy the truth shall make you free.

So I ventured to seek the truth. And I found it.

And did it make me free? Hell, no.

Did it make me frightened, defensive and insecure?

You bet it did.

So now I know the truth about the truth.

Avoid it at all costs.

Make up your own truth and stick to it,

no matter how little sense it makes.

And sooner or later, you'll have converts.

Trust me.”

------- Jules Pfeiffer

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Chapter I - The Ascendence of Amelia

Amelia, imagine now you are floating up and looking down to the world. From the height of a bird, you see people laughing and crying. The cuboid giant apartment building is a collection of boxes. You open each of them and read the secrets buried in the heart of the person sleeping inside, which are usually about love, for it is the forever thesis of all stories that ever have happened under the gaze of the stars. You find the impermanence of everything and the lightness of happiness and sorrow. Then you step on the road of acceptance. You continue to ascend and are now at the height of a spy satellite. You see the black hole around everyone and the absence of meaning in the void. You realize the little happiness in life are incredibly valuable and it seems to have such fullness in this emptiness, but it cannot be the essence of your existence. It is decoration and delicate patterns on a piece of white cloth, but it cannot itself be the background of your life. Then you step on the road of seeking.