Good Friday and Death, Ressurection etc....

This is one of those days.

Boredom is a good thing for it makes me think about boring things: death and resurrection. 

Since this is Good Friday, and the music playing in the barangay's PA system is a soundtrack from the cenakulo, lots of horns, timpani, etc. kinda put me in the frame of mind because this is what is lent all about: death and resurrection.

I am already in my middle age and the idea or the reality of death is already in the peripherals of my mind. It's creeping in and there are times that I have dreams about death, not nightmares but more of a feeling of disassociation or flying and fleeing from reality, like a ghost. There's nothing scary about being extinguished in death, what is scary is the idea of the consciousness surviving into the unknown.

I remember having nightmares about death. Hell has been so hammered in my mind that it left me with an morbid fear of death, or  going to hell. But death is a reality that will come upon everyone; it is the great equalizer. The idea that there's a place out there where the good would be rewarded and the veil would be punished is comforting but as to their reality...I guess that's beyond proof.

We don't know what happens after death. No scientific instruments have been able to probe into the afterlife and no one has been able come back from the afterlife to life and describe what is after after death. Sure there are many reports about near death experience (NDE) but there are many explanations for the NDE's out of body experiences, hallucinations from the anesthesia is one of them. Or people coming back from death but it's never been scientifically proven that these people really died. 

The fear of death is really the fear of the unknown. One way people have dealt with death is by looking at it spiritually. Death is the crossing from the physical reality to the spiritual realm.  I think most religion have this feature in their belief system: life after death. 

Not only is life after death all about existing into another realm of reality, it is also predicated on the idea of rewards and punishment: morality. Remove the idea of heaven and hell from religions and they will die quickly and permanently. Religions exists because they play and prey on the believers hope for immortality in heaven or nirvana or its equivalent. This is the real foundation of religion: fear. 

Remove the object of fear and you remove the fear. of course the act of removing this fear is difficult because the fear of death and hell has been deeply ingrained in the psyche. But there are those who have overcome this fear and have lived an exemplary moral life, in fact it could be said that they lives a life holier than than that of the believers. The idea that the deletion of the idea (or reality) of heaven and hell would lead to an amoral and chaotic society is unfounded.

Death is real. Do we think about it? It cannot be helped...

Resurrection?

Immortality is something to think about and it is quite tempting. I am not going to ask whether it is true or not, I don't want to offend my fundamentalist friends. 

The question is: what is special about it?

There's eternal repetitions. Going back to the same experience again and again and imagine this happening to you in eternity.

What gives meaning to life is its temporal limit.

Anyway...there are a lot of things to think about life and death but as it is, we are existing in this world without our choice. Our circumstances are but product of accidents (or designed by God if you're a religious). Whether we believe in life after death , resurrection, eternal damnation, or annihilation, doesn't matter for now.What is important is that we live, we go about our lives. What we do with our existence would provide meaning for it.

Or...life is absurd, which fine with me too. Causality is just a mental construct.

Interstellar the Movie

I saw "Interstellar" on Putlocker a couple of days ago. Although the slow internet and the quality of the video was stressful for me (made me want to throw the keyboards out the door), the story did manage to hook me despite of everything.

1. 1. 
      
   2. In Earth's future, a global crop blight and second Dust Bowl are 
   3. slowly rendering the planet uninhabitable. Professor Brand
   4. (Michael Caine), a brilliant NASA physicist, is working on plans
   5. to save mankind by transporting Earth's population to a 
   6. new home via a wormhole. But first, Brand must send former 
   7. NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and a team of 
   8. researchers through the wormhole and across the galaxy to find
   9.  out which of three planets could be mankind's new home.

The movie is slow and more of thinking movie than a techno-action sci-fi.

1. Time Dilation 

There are many movies that featured Einstein theory of relativity, but this film did great in showing the effects of time dilation. When Cooper, Doyle, Amelia and robots TARS and CASE landed on Miller's planet, a water planet, to investigate if it could support life, they were caught off guard by giant waves that killed Doyle and marooned the shuttle for an hour or so and when they returned to their ship Endurance 23 years had already passed..

The time dilation was due to the strong gravitational pull of the black hole Gargantua. The stronger the gravitational pull, the slower time ticks. And according to Einstein's theory, inertial and gravitational mass are the same. That's why when an astronaut is in a speeding vehicle like say a rocket nearing light speed, his time slows down compared to the people on earth. Speed increases mass, and mass is relative to gravity: the larger the mass the greater the gravity. black holes have massive mass and gravity that light could not escape from it. That's why they are called black holes, by the way. Hmmm...obvious enough.

Bending time and space.

2. Wormholes.

Distance is the main problem with interstellar travel. Even if a ship that could travel as fast as light, it would still take years to visit the nearest star and hundreds and even millions of years to explore our galaxy.

So, instead of inventing an engine that could move a vehicle or a spaceship from point A to point B at great speed, scientists have this idea of bending time and space. It's like driving a car from Taytay to Cebu but instead of the vehicle moving, the whole of the Philippines was bent allowing the car to get to Cebu without leaving its position, its the roads under the car that moved! Of course,this will take massive amount of energy and according to a physicist about the power of a star.

In the movie, a wormhole appeared near Saturn (or Jupiter) and NASA sent probes and later astronauts to search for habitable planets for the emigration of the survivors or the genes of the survivors on Earth.

3. Fifth Dimension

We live in a three dimensional world. 

3 Dimensions: L,W and H.
spatial dmension

2 deimensions: L and W

Easy to understand think of movies. 2 D movies have length and width or lines: plane. One Dimension is line and the other is plane. Now with 3D movies, depth is added: space. The third dimension is space. these are spatial dimensions. This is how we are able to coordinate location .

4 Dimensions 3 spatial dimensions+Temporal
Dimensions.

Fourth dimension is time. In three dimension we could place location but with the addition of time as fourth dimension, it is now possible to locate "events". Think 3D movie again, but since we are outside the 3d movie, we could go to and fro through time in the movie.

In the movie, Cooper  sacrificed himself so that Endurance and Amelia could survive. He was sucked into the black hole and later found himself floating behind his daughter's multi-level bookcase. with each level, he could see events in the past. He was later able to manipulate objects to send messages to her daughter in the past. In the  present, Murphy, Copper's daughter, realized that it was her father who has been talking to him in codes from the past. She discovered that the data on gravity was being transmitted by her father in morse code through his watch which was given to her before Cooper left for space.

The tesseract (3 dimensional representation of time-space) collapsed and Cooper was sucked into the future rescued by a NASA space station travelling towards Edmund's planet. Cooper was reunited with his daughter Murphy who was 120 years old then.

There will come a time when humanity will
surpassed the limitations of biological bodies
brain and move on to the next level: the Singularity

What's the fifth dimension then? Cooper was outside space and time. Sapce-Time was represented in 3 dimensions where Cooper was able to move about inside looking out at temporal locations. This is the fifth dimension.

4. They.

Humanity was saved by entities called they.  They created the wormhole that enabled NASA to travel interstellar and they, according to Cooper, also allowed him to go into the fifth dimension. Who are they? They are us from the future.

Lent: Healing, Spirits,Amulets and the weirdness of it all...

I was watching TV. 

Well, I was watching TV passively since I was engaged on the computer FB-ing, surfing and looking at some bonsai pictures for ideas on how to developed my bonsai materials when my attention was caught by a TV news feature about a man who allegedly can heal people's sickness through the power of a spirit that possessed him.

This has started a series of crazy thoughts.

Of course the Church is quick to announce a caveat about the phenomenon saying that people should be careful about the healing and they should discern whether the spirit is from God or from the enemy, Satan (by the way "Satan" means the enemy).

Holy week is a special day for spiritist/faith healers in the Philippines. Good Friday and Black Saturday is the most potent day for their rituals and prayers. They believe that they have access to powers and spirits in the belief that God is dead during this period. 

As to they do prayers and rituals during periods when they believe that God is dead is itself a telltale sign that they are dealing with different spirits other than the Christian Holy Spirit.

This belief in the multitudes of spirits is inherent among the Filipinos who were originally animists; they believed in multitudes and hierarchy of nature spirits. This animistic worldview has changed very little even with the introduction of Christianity to the islands in the 1500's. 

Many Christian traditions and holidays are infused with indigenous animistic elements while many indigenous animistic beliefs are infused with Christian elements hence there is no polarization between two different world views. in fact they co-exist harmoniously in the Filipino's belief system. Instead of delivering the Filipinos from animism and converting them into Christianity, what resulted was the fusion of both faiths into one belief system that resulted in Folk Christianity, which is very different from the theological and philosophical Christianity of the west.

But what do I have to say about this?

Well, this primitive belief in the spirits and amulets only show the psychology behind it: primitive, unschooled, heretical...etc. No one should believe that there are power in amulets, incantations, trees, spirits, ghosts, mountains. Hell, all these beliefs are alike to believing in Santa Claus, St. Valentines, The Greek Mythology...

The true faith is this: God, the father in Heaven, created humanity. But humanity sinned against God, the father. God the father loves humanity so much that he gave his Spirit, who is God the father himself but not God the father himself, to a virgin woman so that he could go down on earth as a man, God the son himself but also God the father but different from God the son but the same as God the Father but different: God the Father is God the son Himself but they are two but one.  To offer his death as a propitiation to God the Father, who is God the son himself, for humanity's sin and transgression against  God, who is himself  God the son, so that humanity will be saved from the punishment of God the father, who is also God the son. 

Hmmm. Theology sucks.

On second thought...the weirdness of it all. Santa Claus seems more comprehensible. Anyway, we are just human beings seeking trying to understand powers and realities that are beyond us. 

So...let's eat.

Lent meanderings etc.

Photo not mine: torture porn?

I heard snare drums and shouts. I looked out and saw a group of children and teenagers dressed in first century Roman and Jewish clothing re-enacting passion of the Christ through our narrow eskenitas.

This is a yearly tradition that I used to join when I was a child, when were still Roman Catholics. But now that our family has been converted to the Southern Baptist tradition, we now believed that the humiliation and the sufferings that Jesus Christ went through was a one time event that happened tow thousand years ago and was meant to give saving grace to humanity: Christ has done it so that anyone would not have to go through the sacrifice again and again.

Old ladies singing the pasyon the traditional way.

Being a Baptist, there's this negative attitude towards how Filipinos observe lent: the pabasa, prusisyon, penitensya, bisita iglesya etc. I believe,as taught by pastors, that all these activities and traditions were unbiblical and hence are un-Christian. But as the Catholics would argue, the Roman Catholic Church has existed for almost four hundred years without the Bible (as we know it now) and has done well using traditions as its guide, which is really a good argument for their doctrine that tradition is an equal authority along with the Bible on church matters.

I cannot imagine lent without the pabasa and the senakulo. The pabasa is getting rarer now, at least in our neighborhood. I missed the off key and and atonal harmonization singing of the passion of the Christ. Lately, they have been adapting modern tunes though there's nothing wrong with it and it is even encouraged by some to promote the pabasa to the younger generations, I missed the old tunes and the vibrato that goes along with the singing.

Bonsai overload. Why would anyone commit fraud because of bonsai?

I have five bougainvilleas. I starved them until their leaves fell 

off and then watered them with a 1:1 urine-water mixture. Of
 course, the stink permeated inside the house. My daughter 
and wife complained but there's nothing I could do
 about it but to let the stink pass.

Ok. I admit it. I'm starting to have problems with bonsai. It started out as a simple hobby but it got to a point where it is starting to get out of hand and unless I stopped now, I may end up with too many trees for me to handle. Hiring help is out and my wife and daughter are not into the hobby; they just like looking at it.

      

I accumulated around a hundred bonsai materials and almost every nook and cranny of our lot is filled with them in varying stages of training and development.

What happened?

Materials: bluebells and tugas, waiting for signs of life.

Before, I used to go to CP Garcia in Diliman Quezon City to buy materials. The travel and the effort of carrying trees from Quezon City to Taytay limited my purchases to once a month. But since I discovered online bonsai groups, it was only a matter of time before I got into online buying. The affordability as well as the convenience of door to door delivery plus the freebies given by the sellers made online purchasing irresistible.  

My Root-on-rock bonsais. I did not buy these trees. They were
Red Ficuses that I collected from the adobe walls of
St. Joseph Parish Church in Taytay, Rizal and Ficus Microcarpa
cuttings from the school garden.

Aside from the convenience of online purchasing, I was also able to acquire species that are not available here in Rizal Province. I now have Tugas from Mindanao and Blue Bells from Ilocos Norte. The transaction is simple, just surf the posts and if a photo of a materials catches your fancy, just pm the seller then give your address and the mode of payment, the items will be delivered at your doorstep. 

But lately, there are hobbyist who gave in to buying impulsively: they have made purchases beyond their means to pay. It's the hunter-seller that lost here since many of the purchases were done on credit.

Of course I also understand the seemingly irresistible urge to buy because bonsai materials are not identical. Once a photo catches the attention, the idea of not buying that particular item could keep one awake at night. I too, experienced this. I guess everyone does if an item (whatever it is) catches their fancy. It's just matter of controlling the urge. Anyway, this is classic shopping disorder that I thought only ladies  suffer from but I found that bonsai hobbyist do too.

Addiction.

Keep in mind that these materials were once healthy trees pulled out from their habitat and then sold to the bonsai market.

Well, time to stop. I have enough trees to keep me occupied till old age.

Kalyos material

I got this broken computer chair from the school's janitor
for sixty pesos and nailed a circular plyboard
 on it  and it worked well as a turntable for working on
 bonsai materials.

It's frustrating how some of the bonsai materials I have been working on do not seem to grow or develop fast enough. It's been almost three years now since I have started the hobby and yet there's not a tree in my collection that I could say even resemble a tree because most of them are still stumps. 

I know, patience...

My niece Brielle who together with my mother and sister were
vacationing here in Cainta.

I have not been doing much with my hobby except pull the weeds off the trainer pots but since I have collected almost a hundred bonsai materials, this is keeping me busy most weekends. It's good because it keeps my hands off from twiddling with the developing materials that may  end up killing them. 

I went to Katipunan this morning to look at the materials that "Barok", the bonsai hunter, had collected from the wild but I met him on his way home, which obviously meant his materials were already sold. I asked and he smiled and told me that this was so. 

Anyway, I continued on towards the street where he and his hunter friends ply their trade to check some materials hoping that I could find that "perfect" trunk form, which does not exist, of course, because they are all stumps and perfection is really nothing but a subjective blah, blah, blah wishful thinking. 

I got these three kalyos (strabler asper) for a hundred each. This was a bargain considering the hunters dig these up and travel them to Quezon City all the way from the mountains or wherever they hunt for these material which definitely is not in the metro manila area. Of course whether the materials live or die is another thing. That's the risk of buying raw materials instead of buying established materials, but there's the excitement and fun with looking out for the little leaf buds that could mean that the material survived or it  could turn out to be nothing but the trunk releasing its reserved energy and it was really already dead. Yes there are time where materials sprout leaves but not roots. Ficuses especially Ficus benjamina is notorious for this. Anyway, established materials are about five to ten times more expensive.

Kalyos is a good material but looking at these yamadoris, there's not that much to expect from them but I guess with or without the "artistic potentialities", it's really  up to me, the hobbyist ( I dare not call myself an artist) to train and shape this tree to its ideal form.

Well, lets see after a year or two.

Another molave

 I potted this molave (vitex cofassus) about two years ago. It's time to "operate" on it.

Checking the root growth.














Reduction area identified.




















 Reduced.

Potted.

Molave reduction

 A molave (vutex pavlifora) tree planted in a pot.  I have had this for two years. 

I decided to reduce it now.
















It is big leafed vitex but with the reduction it will adapt and produce small leaves (I hope).

I exposed the roots. It looks like a giraffe...

School Repair

Grade six is housed in the Rodriguez Building which was commissioned in January 1969. The building is 45 years old. 

I'm not an engineer but judging from the size of the concrete columns and the  concrete beams, the structure  was made to last except for the floor trusses and slats which was made of wood.

The wood trusses and slats were heavily infested and consumed by termites that the tremor created by a pupil jumping in the room at end of the building could be felt in the room at the other end of the building.

We were informed that there will repairs (maybe retrofitting) of the building. Most of the teachers would like to see the old building demolished and a new building erected in its place but since the school has no available space, I think the demolition will not happen in the near future. I just can't see where the contractor will put the debris and the construction materials aside from the disruptions it will cause to the whole school.

I am glad that the old building will be rehabilitated but I just have one question: Why are they doing this today in the middle of the school year when classes are in full blast and the work will cause disruptions? I mean, we have two months of summer vacation. 

I'm not complaining just asking. 

Anyway, I'm just a classroom teacher.

Mulawin Materials

I don't know which is the mulawin aso from the mulawin surot.

Balete

A potted balete from cuttings.  It has grown wild and too big for me.

 I decided to cut it into two.

 I was checking where to split it.

 Because it has been growing in a large pot, it developed radial roots.

 These are the two materials I got out of the tree. Planted in my crude trainer pots. Aside from the trunk, I also planted the top part for future use.