Publications following my masters thesis
“Excuse me, I might be wrong but it is my assumption that you have been following me the past couple of weeks” I asked. With no reply he sent his right hand into the left pocket of his jacket, pulled out a pack of Winston, lighted one and started smoking. A good 30 seconds or so passed before the next words were uttered preceded by few puffs. “You are not wrong”. Then a few more puffs. This was probably one of the strangest encounters I have had in my life and I was still desperately waiting for words to come out of his mouth. Now the cigarette was half smoked. He took one more puff and threw it away.Destined to listen to it, I barely paid attention to the fact that I am not the only one who likes to smoke cigarettes half away. My attention barely flinched to the thread of thought that focus did not flinch I barely Part of my realization
The prequel
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It was one of those mildly cold autumn nights with its backing vocalist with soothing voice, a tender and incessant shower. The randomly laid colorful leaves were bare witnesses of the season. In quasi successful attempt to escape the down pour I was walking as fast as I could. As I kept pulling my feet one after the other in the hopes of wrapping myself, from head to toe with the 30 degrees of air inside my apartment, I saw him again. This time in the alley between the two old buildings a few blocks down my apartment. He was looking at no one but me. He was standing in the middle of the rain with no desire of escaping from it.
I paced even more, to a point where any rise in speed and I would been lifted off the ground. Gosh, that moment of sticking my keys to the key holes of the front door seemed eternity.
One hour later, sipping a hot chamomile tea, mindlessly staring at a screen while the full weight of my attention span around quite number of prior encounters, with you know who.
I don’t remember when I first saw him and truth to be told I am entirely sure if it is a he but that isn’t important at all. He usually wears dark baggy trousers, with gray shirt, woolen long coats with a thick black scarf and brown boots. This is outfit remained unaltered for months. When his ubiquity turned from being mysterious at first to exasperating in a while, I was but forced to attempting to resolve his identity, only to no avail.
Once as I was leaving my usual breakfast diner after a croissant and a caffe latte, when I spotted him across the street. This is a few months after I started seeing him randomly many times a day. May be it was the unusually high caffeine in my latte that morning but I made a jerk and headed towards him.
As I got closer and closer I noticed he was as tall as me but in a much better shape. He had broad shoulders with a pale face, which was semi covered by a lightly shaved beard. His brown eyes were playful and seemed to have their own story to tell. As I was busy carefully scanning this man from top to bottom, it took me a while before noticing my stretched hands didn’t receive a shake back. I slowly retracted my hands while staring at the his eyes just to make sure whether he is aware of my embarrassment. Who is this stranger and why does he look so mysteriously familiar and most importantly why does he seemingly keep going after me ?
Meeting her was a total accident. It was my first time at the yearly festival in the city where I recently moved into and a typical first timer, I was going around trying to absorb it all in as much as I could. I was with a few friends who at the late hours of the night sank into the crowd never to be seen for the rest of the night. Despite having started to drink a cocktail of vodka and lemon, which was comfortably disguised in a blue plastic water bottle, since 8 o’clock in the night, the alcohol didn’t take a toll on me as much as it should have. I was tired but I continued my aimless walk in search of my friends and there she was in the middle of the big square. We knew and didn’t know each other at the same time. After a brief greeting we started chatting about this and that . Moments later, as it was already dawning, I asked her if we could watch the sun rise close to the tower which was not so far away from the piazza we were at. I have never been at the tower in such hour of the day but with her at that moment, no place seemed so right. We started strolling. Before we reached the end of the piazza which we were at, I locked my arm with her arm. As we continued strolling, the natural flow of conversation made us seem as though we knew each other from years ago but not just as two virtual strangers who met few minutes short of an hour. As we turned right to the street of Via Santa-Maria heading to the tower, splinters of sun light from the early morning twilight lighted her face and it was then I comprehended how, despite looking tired, delightfully beautiful she was. Meanwhile the mix of the morning light and her blondish curly hair was also creating a show of its own. Our arms were still locked and the conversation was still flowing. She didn’t speak too fast and she didn’t speak to slow either. My throat was suddenly starting to get dry and I remembered I still had some vodka lemon in the plastic bottle which I had kept in my back pocket. When I left my house for the night I was laden with enough alcohol to get me through the night and apparently my foresight was commendable for I have something to drink even this late in the night. She started to giggle as she saw me perform a great early morning miracle of pulling out a blue plastic bottle filled with vodka out of no where. The sound of her laughter was a refreshing thrill and definitely better than the ubiquitous morning song of the birds which was feeling the fresh morning air. A thought in my head whispered, “nothing feels good like making a woman laugh in the wee hours of the night huh”. She had thicker lips, the kind which reminds me of my mother’s. I lightly kissed her on her cheeks. Before we knew it we were standing in front of the tower whose white marbles were scattering the golden early morning sun light creating a halo and posing even more majesty onto itself. To the left of the tower there was the cathedral and we headed to it. The small passage from the main street to the cathedral was blocked with a low hanging chain where a written notice forbids visitors not to head to the cathedral before 7AM in the morning. The blockade forced us to stand facing each other. I looked at her tired but keen eyes, her thick eyebrows, her lips, her face which was beaming with involuntary smile, her white blouse and the light dark pant suit she was wearing. This was no time to waste chatting, As I went for a gentle kiss on her neck an invigorating scent filled my nose. My lips stayed locked onto her neck for a while my fingers were going through her hair adding more dynamics to the still on going foreplay between her hair and the golden sunlight. I then moved onto lightly kissing her cheeks and naturally our lips found each other in a short while. The touching of our lips mixed with the taste of tobacco in her breath sent an electric shock in all my body. We kissed for a moment before we both recoiled back for an unintended deep stare into each others eyes. When it comes to worldly pleasures, a few of them I enjoy the most for the first brief moments and these include the first sip of a good beer, the first puff of an occasional cigarette and a woman’s first kiss. Passion was raising high and not breaching the “No crossing before 7AM” notice felt so unnatural so we trespassed to sit at the stairs of the cathedral and continue melting into each other under the rising sun.
She was beautiful in every sense of the word, she knows how kiss, when to stop and talk, how to send fiery signals into the eyes, I was awe struck by it all. We moved on to the green grass field in front of the cathedral. After what felt to be an extended moment of oneness, as we were both laying down, her head on my chest, we started to look at the fiery sun slowly revealing herself from the back of the tower. It was then that I began to sense the long lost feeling of utter tranquility that was starting to dawn on me. I was suddenly light and bright inside just as a room which was lit with rays of sun light after its dirty glass window had been cleaned. My legs locked with hers while my fingers kept ramming through her hair and my nose absorbing the totality of her scent as she lied on my chest carefully listening to every beat of my heart. It all made the front of the cathedral the right place to be and to remain at for a long time.
We started talking again and this time her physical beauty seemed her least quality. The captivating conversation was starting to reveal how intelligent and engaged she was to what she was doing. The conversation began to dwindle again as we slowly drifted into our own threads of thought while holding each other tight. At 7 AM a blasting alarm from her phone awakened us both from the soothing bliss we were submerged in. She stopped the cacophony from her phone and started to kiss me on my neck then on my lips and I also started to kiss her back all along reciting in my head the words of Rhett to Scarlet on Gone with Wind: “You should be kissed my dear Scarlet and often and by someone who knows how”.
As I woke up from what I presumed was a brief sleep, she was gone. At first I was confused if it was all a hallucination from too much indulgence of alcohol from the night before. But the sweet odor I was smelling on myself made hallucination unlikely. I then remembered about the alarm at 7 AM. What did it all mean? What if it was a signal to mark a transition from land of the ideal to the real. A signal to mark the abrupt end of the stretch of imagination. I stood up, composed myself and started to walk in the direction of my house suddenly thinking about the tale of Cinderella which I read many years ago. I am not exactly the fan of fantasy love stories but I couldn’t help but draw some parallels between the Cinderella of the fables and my Cinderella of the night. Cinderella left prince charming her glass slippers while she escaped before her reverse-metamorphosis into her old poor self at mid night while my Cinderella of the night left me with a crack in my heart before the clock of gray reality struck at 7 AM and she left abruptly: a crack to let more light to sparkle my soul which was already growing weary or a crack which might grow into a sink hole.
Behold, a brief historical synopsis first
In the first decade of the 19th century, a couple of years after the wave of revolution in France had settled, Joseph Fourier, priorly an active member of the revolution, joined the group of scholars that accompanied Napoleon to his campaign to Egypt. Fourier eventually became the governor of southern Egypt but he returned to France in a few years. He then started working on one of the then active research areas, the characterization of the the flow of heat in a material.
Okay now something to chew
As water naturally flows between two points only when there is a difference in height between them, heat also flows between two points when there is a difference in temperature between two bodies. Now imagine a table: If I ask you to tell me the temperature of the table what you would do is put a thermometer at a random position on the surface of the table, read the temperature there, assume the temperature across the table would approximately be the same and tell me that value, end of story. (You would also probably warn me not to ask you such moronic questions but that’s not the point 🙂 ). Such an approximation isn’t harsh in the grand scheme of things but in the quantum level it wouldn’t hold water.
The distribution of temperature on the surface of the table and its variation over time is modeled by what is called a heat equation. Simply stated the heat equation is the expression of the distribution of difference of temperature across the surface of a material over time. (At this point you are asking yourself “what’s with the freshman science lecture biruk, get to the point.” But bear with me for a second okay 🙂 ). The heat equation is a partial differential equation (partial differential equation or PDE is an equation used to determine the value of something, in this case heat or temperature, in relation to other variables such as the heat source, position etc… and the variation of these variables over time and/or space.)
Before Fourier’s contribution, there had been quite a remarkable progress in the determination of the heat equation. What was missing was an appropriate model of the complex characteristic of the heat source. Since the heat source was part of the equation, it had to have a proper mathematical representation but it was impossible to come up with some simple equation/model because of the complex(messy) nature of nature. Here comes the light bulb moment. Fourier’s idea basically was that any complex mathematical model of something, as messy as it gets, is the sum of many (infinite) but very simple equations known as basis functions. It’s sort of decomposition of the composite but in a clever way. baam…
Let us take a simple example. Consider a simple pasta sauce. My pasta sauce usually contains, among other things tomatoes, onions, garlic, olive oil, basil & black olives. In between the utter orgasm of their taste buds after devouring my pasta (you guessed it, my pasta is delicious 🙂 ), if someone were to ask me what my sauce is made of, a usual answer would be 100g of tomato paste, 65g of onion, 20g of garlic, 30ml of olive oil, 2g of basil and 45g of black olives and I cooked it for 15 minutes. An amalgam such as a tomato sauce can now be represented by a bunch of basis functions (the ingredients, their amount & time it took to cook them). In other words [100, 65, 20, 30, 2, 45, 15] would be a code for my sauce. The index (position) of each number in the list (vector) is associated to each ingredient (in this case position 0 is tomato paste, position 1 is onion etc..) and the numbers represent the amount of ingredient associated to that position/index in the vector This is the sheer brilliance of Fourier transform: Changing the representation of something from one domain to another (in our case from organic ingredients to bunch of numbers).
Fourier transform has a wide range of applications in engineering but we aren’t interested about that today. Rather we are gonna stretch our imagination to what it would be like to have a Fourier transform of more subjective concepts such as love, intelligence, happiness, fear etc… Meaning understanding subjective emotions using an objective frame work.
For example the human brain has been studied by being broken down into different regions. Neuroscientists are always mapping particular states of emotions with different regions of the brain. You are familiar with expressions such as “when you are happy there is some activity in this part of your brain, when you are in love it’s like a fire works in this and that part of your brain, when you are meditating for a long time such and such parts of your brain which are associated with stress shrink, if you are good in math this part of your brain has a 5% larger size than an average person’s brain etc… ” Now this is a case of an unadulterated Fourier transform: mapping of organic emotions to brain activities and sizes. Here the basis functions are the different brain regions and the transformation involves some sort of representation (electrical, chemical etc…) of the states of these regions. It is now almost possible to tell your state of emotion by looking at the chemical content of each section of your brain. Some other domain such as the electrical state of a person, can also be chosen as a basis function to represent these states and understand them from a different light.
Now if the complete mapping of abstract emotions, which have long been considered subjective, to a different, perhaps more objective form were to become possible then one question should definitely be raised. Will this mark the end for these states to be considered personal i.e specific to each person or will the subjective endure and perhaps lead us to a third previously unknown dimension i.e subjective of the objective.
It was by sheer accident that I came across the name Shunryu Suzuki and his epic book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s mind”. Before that I only had a marginal knowledge of zen and the ensemble of wisdom piloted by philosophy from the east.
I wouldn’t dare to provide an exhaustive definition of Zen here but simply put Zen is the the art of living wisely by forming a genuine connection with the flow of life. Being engaged to your activities of each moment. When you cook you cook, when you sit to meditate you sit to meditate, when you attend a lecture you attend a lecture etc… By being constantly present and by letting our mind pervade our body when doing things, we express our true nature.
“…to cook is not just to prepare food for some one or for yourself; it is to express your sincerity. So when you cook you should express yourself in your activity in the kitchen. You should allow yourself plenty of time; you should work on it with nothing in your mind, and without expecting anything. You should just cook! That is also an expression of our sincerity, a part of our practice… “.
The other most interesting thing about Zen is the inherent pragmatism embedded in it. Here there isn’t a lot of concern about the metaphysical aspects of all natural things, nor there is no craving to take a dip in the uncertain realm of speculations about the primary causation for the existence of humans, the universe and the world as we know it in general.
“…Buddha was not interested in the elements comprising human beings, nor in metaphysical theories of existence. He was more concerned about how he himself existed in this moment. That was his point. Bread is made from flour. How flour becomes bread when put in the oven was for Buddha the most important thing. How we become enlightened was his main interest…”
The title, “Beginner’s mind”, by itself unlocks a fundamental zen wisdom. Beginner’s mind is the state of your mind when you start doing something for the first time. It can be starting to play an instrument, learning a language, starting a job or school, a little child starting to learn alphabets or basic algebra etc… There might be some frustration if you demand an immediate mastery of the skills but the state of the beginner’s mind is usually marked by utter excitement and not wanting to stop to learn. But what happens after more recitals and a few months/years down the line ? The original attitude towards what ever you were learning usually gets eroded if not gone completely.
Don’t most of us also suffer from this in our relationships with our loved ones? Be it with girl/boy friends, wives/husbands, friends, co-workers, neighbors etc… relationships don’t usually continue with the same enthusiasm they started with. It’s not uncommon for the excitement to start to fade away after we get to know each other a little bit better.
There is no doubt about repetition being the path to mastery and ascending confidence in doing something but when this is done mindlessly it leads to the “experts mind” which isn’t a “ready for anything mind” but which is a mind accustomed to doing things a certain way. Therefore maintaining our “beginner’s mind” intact should go along with our quest to achieving mastery in anything or pursuance of relationship of any sort.
“In the beginner’s mind there is no thought, ‘I have attained something.’ All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something”.
Perhaps one of the pillars of Zen teaching is the teaching of the “the single minded way”. Being unable to muster our mind into the whatever we are doing is a very common phenomena and a transient attention span is a thing of concern for many. This could be caused by something external such as distractions which can’t be ignored by our sense organs (like the extremely loud music that was flooding from headset of the guy sitting next to me while I was writing this :-)) or internal causes such as having preconceptions, doubts, fear etc… about an activity before doing any of it.
“…When we do something with a quite simple, clear mind, we have no notion or shadows, and our activity is strong and straightforward. But when we do something with a complicated mind, in relation to other things or people, or society, our activity becomes very complex… “
“…In order not to leave any traces, when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely…”
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