Ikhlas dari Lepat buat Shamsul Bahari AKA Cheeseburger Buddha.

From conversations at Kassim Mustafa Nasi Kandak on Chulia Street on 18/9/10. Present was Lepat, Shaparin Othman and myself.

The Searcher and the Trap

Reflections at Three in the Morning

It was three in the morning.

While sitting quietly and realigning my body and mind, a thought about Artificial Intelligence crept into that supposedly empty space between thoughts. I have always regarded AI as a gift to humanity, following the Internet. Perhaps the final gift, but Wallahu Alam — God knows best.

I tried to brush the thought aside and return to the silence, but it persisted. Then I realized something rather amusing: I was clinging to the very idea that this empty space was preferable to having thoughts occupy it.

Is that not another form of attachment?

We sit down to meditate, hoping to quiet the mind, and sometimes end up struggling to achieve the very silence we seek. In trying to empty the mind, we become occupied with the business of keeping it empty.

So much for a quiet morning!

From there, my thoughts wandered to an old friend, Ismail Arrifin, better known as Lepat.

Lepat is an artist I knew many years ago in Penang. We would occasionally meet over coffee or dinner at Kassim Mustafa on Chulia Street, whenever our pockets permitted such luxuries. I still possess a signed sketchbook he gave me, containing a few pages of his drawings.

                                               

One Lepat's sketches done in Brenan, Germany.
 

He was younger then, a street artist with a colourful life and a circle of friends that included many Western visitors to the island. I was impressed by his knowledge, particularly his ability to quote verses from the Quran with the familiarity of a religious scholar.

Life has taken him through considerable changes since those days. Having embraced Islam, married a German woman, and subsequently experienced a difficult family dispute involving the custody of his son, Lepat has travelled a long way from the young artist I remember.

Recently, I stumbled upon some of his videos. I was struck by the maturity of his thinking, although I wondered whether, in some respects, he might have become a little too mature for his own good.

Lepat has become something of a preacher in his own way, expressing his understanding of religion and challenging the religious establishment in Penang. He has his own character, his own convictions, and his own battles to fight. A lone wolf, perhaps, with an axe to grind against the system.

I have no intention of passing judgment on a man whose life I have not followed closely. Nor do I presume to know the full circumstances of his personal struggles. I am simply comparing the man I knew with the man I see today.

And that comparison brought me to a more interesting question.

Must we keep searching until we reach some ultimate destination, or can we learn something from the place where we stand right now?

My own feeling is that searching and learning are always happening in the same place: wherever we happen to be.

We may travel the world, study sacred scriptures, read books, meditate, or spend years examining the nature of existence. But every discovery is encountered here, in the present moment. There is no other place from which we can begin.

The destination may be an idea, but the experience of discovery is always taking place where we stand.

Perhaps the difficulty begins when the search itself becomes an identity.

The man who sets out to challenge religious authority may eventually become a preacher in his own right. The critic may become so occupied with exposing the faults of a system that the system itself begins to define him. The seeker may become attached to the identity of being a seeker.

And the man who sets out to escape one trap may unknowingly construct another.

This is not a criticism reserved for Lepat. It is a possibility that confronts all of us, including those of us who pride ourselves on questioning authority and thinking independently.

We can become attached to our beliefs, our doubts, our spiritual practices, and even our idea of enlightenment. We may spend years trying to discover who we really are, only to become attached to the identity we construct along the way.

Perhaps wisdom is not simply the accumulation of knowledge, nor the ability to argue convincingly for what we believe. Perhaps it also involves recognizing the limitations of our understanding and remaining open to what we have yet to discover.

Pink Floyd once captured the melancholy of reaching for something beyond our grasp in their song High Hopes. It brings to mind the danger of reaching for the secret too soon, before we have fully lived the experience that might have taught us what we were looking for.

But must there be a final secret waiting to be discovered?

Perhaps we should allow ourselves to live with the questions without feeling compelled to resolve them all.

As for my friend Lepat, I remember the younger artist with affection. I observe the man he has become with curiosity. Whether his present battles have brought him closer to the truth is something only he can continue to explore.

And as for myself, I began the morning trying to return to an empty space between thoughts. Instead, I found myself thinking about AI, an old friend, religion, and the curious ways in which the human mind becomes entangled in its own search for understanding.

Perhaps that was the lesson I needed that morning.

The mind does not always have to be empty for us to learn something. Nor must we arrive at some final destination before we can appreciate the journey.

Sometimes, all that is required is to recognize where we stand, observe what is happening, and refrain from turning every discovery into another thing to cling to.

The searcher and the trap may not be two separate things after all.

And with that, I think I shall leave Lepat to his search, return to my own, and see what the next moment brings.

Wallahu Alam.

Salam and Gasho.