Over lunch I recalled our prawning session late last night. Being personally involved in the life taking of my food always served to remind me to respect my food during its part-taking. It was no different when we were skewering life prawns and roasting them over the fire at the Bishan prawning farm.
It seemed these prawns knew exactly what was going to happen when I brought them out from the sink with my hands to skewer them with satay sticks. Most of them struggled initially, frantically, but released their clinging to life by the time the end of the satay stick protruded out from their head. All except two, one was a very pregnant and the other a really big prawn. Their struggle continued until their heads where baked till half red.
Perhaps I was personifying them, but then again maybe not. Perhaps the one pregnant was hoping till the very last moment of its life that a miracle would happen to save her and her unborn kids? Perhaps the really big one was till the very last moment of its life clinging on to its ambition to become the biggest prawn in the pool?
Nevertheless, I continued my silent offering of prayers to them; praying for them to see this life for what it is, an illusion; praying for them to give up their grasping on it and go in peace. My silent prayers continued up till the moment I consumed their flesh.
Another thought flashed in my mind while I was munching on my rice. If enlightenment as believed in Buddhism is to live totally in this moment, then our current way of life enabled through technology is becoming truly chronic. Here we are in person in a club standing on the dance floor but instead of fully immersing ourselves in the current moment as it is, our mind, eyes and fingers wanders off somewhere else. We worry about what we are going to do tomorrow, we get distracted by what someone else on the other side of the phone is doing, we opt instead to live in a fantasy/digital world of our own creation. Our fingers never leave our phone, our mind and our eyes focused on the screen in front of us. We ignore the person standing in front of us, who so too happen to be doing exactly the same thing as we are doing.
From another perspective, we are ironically in the midst of becoming Gods ourselves, becoming Omnipotent and becoming Omnipresent.
Considering the fact that we can now do teleconferencing and long distance phone calls, are we not already Omnipresent? Can we thus not already within an instant become present in any time zone of our choice on Earth? Can we not too, if we had already setup a computer monitor in Mars, or any other planet of our choice, become present on that planet too?
Considering these features and functionality available in recent spate of games in the online world as well as the social networks we are all involved, are we not in a sense given more and more ability to create and manipulate our own little a universe? Are we not Omnipotent in this limited universe of our own?
Realization suddenly dawned on me – the importance of mastery and perception of the waves as well as the illusion of it. What I now perceive through my 5 senses in fact exist and don’t exist at the same time. My sense of sight is perceives the world of light waves. My sense of hearing perceives the world of sound waves. My sense of touch, smell and taste is perceived through electrical waves that are run from the furthest reaches of my nerve endings. I perceive a light wave at a certain frequency and I assume it a lamp or chair. I perceive sound wave from a specific direction and I that a thing assume a thing exist in that direction. My mental illness must indeed have became chronic!
Alright, if this mental illness of mine is to persist then so be! While we are at it why not make a thorough job of it, why just limit our range of perception to just light wave, sound wave, electrical wave and (if one includes the other waves made available in technology) radio waves? Why not then extend it all waves both known and unknown to man? Isn’t that where the secrets of the Universe and God really lies? Isn’t that where even I-Ching is hinting at?