RUBIK'S: AS COMPLICATED AS LIFE ITSELF

Way back when I was just a wandering kid, learning to tie my shoe and welcoming the breeze of life unto my little nostrils, I wonder what was Rubik's Cube for? It was so grotesque for me, I mean for me it's more than just a toy (because of its symbolism. I guess you really have to read further)

I was so awed by its multi-rotary sides and perfectly engineered mechanism. A cube within a cube. A handfuls of cube each moving in a perfect mechanical route.

Consequently, a single color dangles miles and miles of moves while you don't know the techniques yet. Thus, if you want to see your cube still arranged correctly, then careful in twisting it the first time you bought it, else that's the first and the last time you'll going to see it that way (except if you excuse me putting them back!).

I bought one vended at the side-walk. With affordable price (I guess its 20 pesos) comes affordable quality. After a day of use the colors become unison white!

Wow, before, I pound my head how to put respective colors back to its respective sides, now it's the other way around, since it's all white! Well, just a simple thought. If you can, buy the original. Anyway, as I am writing this stuff I have my new original one beside me (as my coach).

The thrill of learning makes me see things far, yet so near – I could ever come to the point where I can really assemble the cube again despite its complexity.

I put it this way. It's 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. It's 99% of my effort and patience has been tried on the table and 1% of it from the World Wide Web where I get the necessary thought to do it. I'd like to clap my hands to this groundbreaking human brainchild, the Internet.

Hmmm, learning the cube is not a joke, as it is not a joke really when you'll get frustrated after a little consolation of completing one side and then losing it again for the sake of the other. Your head turns with the cube, as what your sit mate might have told you once.

The primary and simple colors you see (white, orange, blue, blue yellow, green and red) can never be mistaken to its complex assembly. These simple colors forebode great puzzle wonders that you'll ever meet in this world (no doubt it's one of the best puzzle and puzzle game in the toy kingdom).

The cube offers one of the most difficult puzzles in the world, paralleled to that of the Bermuda and other daunting phenomena in this world. I guess, the only difference is that, Bermuda is still manifesting its puzzling activities, while the cube has long been recreated to manifest more puzzling turnouts.

Anyway, it took me some kind of a week or two to learn and master the cube (of course I did eat my meals, took a bath, go to work, brush my teeth, go to sleep and forget about it, it's not so engrossing after all, besides that it's fun and annoying sometimes).

Nonetheless, there is only one thing I could admit and realize, Rubik's cube offers the same dilemma and complexity as life itself offers. The cube offers so much headache if you wanna go into a solo. It offers teasing puzzles. It offers bright and vexing color combinations.

But not much!

Take this: a standard and default Rubik's cube which is 3x3x3, offers you 43, 252, 003, 274, 489, 859, 000 possible configurations. I don't know how it came that way.

Well, that's what authority said. As for me, huh, I don't know about that, that's Math you know!?

It offers multifarious moves and combinations. All is corollary and mutually dedicated to a single purpose – to solve the cube. Each single move out of that color combinations plays a big part in solving the cube.

So, what do you think in your life as well as mine? If you have a problem, isn't it so easy as eating an apple pie if you were given those possible combinations to solve your problem? And yet life is more than just a hefty turn and twist of a cube. I'm quite sure life offers more “possible configurations” than the cube itself.

Yeah, life is hard; the craziest man on earth would not admit that!

But the way life offers daredevil puzzles and atrocities, is the same the way life offers possible solutions to them – we really just have to know the techniques.

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PILI, PINANGAT AND PEÑAFRANCIA UNDER A POLITICAL PLATE

(This has been my reactionary paper on one of the lecture given by a schoolmate, poet and author – Mr. Christian Cordero way back October 5, 2005)

The lecture of Christian Cordero, a former seminarian and alumnus of the Holy Rosary Minor Seminary, bears tripartite elements that epitomized his discussion, dubbed as Pili, Pinangat asin Peñafrancia. These are the things copiously found and enjoyed by Bikolanos in different respects. Each of these threesome elements would ring a bell even by just a muter of their names. These proudly configure a Bikolano spirit wherever he may go; from a delectable delicacy all throughout the venerable religious esteem.

In Christian Cordero’s Bikol sociological exegesis, I could not help but capture his points into two contrasting concisions – the two faces of Bikol – beauty and poverty.

These also got its substantial showcases, as I happened to browse a fabulous coffee table book, “Ina and the Bikol People,” published last 2002, as spearheaded by Rev. Fr. Wilmer Joseph Tria. The book has a considerable parallelism with that of Christian’s lecture. Wherein, inside the book, edits Bicolano’s way of life mobilized by their culture, religiosity and industry. Nonetheless, beside the enticing beauty of the Bikol panorama, are strings of poverty in different tunes: homelessness, unhealthy housing, unemployment, ill-health, inadequate education and the like – all strung together to bring melancholic rendition behind the consoling beauty of Bikol.

Thus, the two faces of Bikol.

Behind the noble symbolism of pili, pinangat and Peñafrancia are smoldering political and social issues. Bikol at her very best has indeed a God-given beauty; beauty that brightly yielding with another “sense of beauty.” However, could ‘she’ be at home amidst quagmire of poverty?

In a halfway or perhaps, obvious reason, dirty politics is deemed as the sinister that brings about the toll of poverty. Few others (as well as in Cordero’s lecture) advocated the change in constitution for a better socio-political condition, rather than change of every individual’s thrust in life. I retorted, on the other hand, that, “no effect is greater than the cause” (barrowing a philosophical ideology).

If poverty is the effect of dirty politics, how much more is dirty politics are the effect of dirty political individuals.

If it was not of this ‘particular individual,’ thousands of Filipinos must not have suffered much of being political prisoners, of being tortured, of being harassed of their own property, of basking under the heat of the sun trumpeting the dawn of the EDSA phenomena.

There is no conflict in the world that big that would outsmart the conflict inhabiting within man’s soul, though he is just a mere speck in the universe. Therefore, no matter how much change and beautification we do with our constitution if within it are ‘deleterious serpents,’ we would still be singing the melancholic hymns of poverty and political strife.

I believe that a better metamorphosis of a political society begins not when you try to capture it from a distance. Rather, when one begins to see it from within and radiates it all throughout. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen would rather say in his book, Peace of Soul, “there can be no world peace, unless there is soul peace.” I further believe that one cannot give what one does not have.

As for Bikolanos who’s determination is as tough as a pili-nu shell; with gentle character as welcoming as the exceptional taste of pinangat and with religiosity patterned after the heart of INA, our Lady of Peñafrancia, I believe, we will be going home joyfully carrying our sheaves.

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YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK (A JOHN LOCKE PHILOSOPHY)

(As far as I know, in college, we have our nose bleed just to catch a bit of John Locke’s inner thoughts. But this is the way I get it. I don’t know if you will, good luck as you read.)

John Locke is so engrossed with regards man’s process of cognition, the whys and hows of it. He is an empiricist, but apparently idealistic in approach and treatment of the matter. He used to circle around the concerns of the idealistic philosophers, negating platonic and that slightly Thomistic realist.

Locke puts his best foot forward by exerting that our knowledge and ideas are courtesy of our sense experiences or rather, we can know nothing except things that passes through our senses. In particular, the further mastication of sense experience underwent several “processing mechanisms;” from simple ideas (a mere actual cognition), complex ideas (the manipulation and fusion of diverse ideas) and the general ideas (which cares for essences). Further development of ideas are obtained by combining, comparing and separating; just likely a sort of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

The crux of Locke’s endeavor is quite focused on the mechanism of man’s mental faculty. Though an empiricist, he sounds on the rare side as an idealist, plundering areas under the dominion of idealist philosophers.

Locke also puts out a sketchy psychological analysis of a child, who calls his subject according to the well-framed ideas in his mind, such as the idea of a nurse, a mother or a father. Later the child grew and discovers many contributory or commonality in them, thus calling them in to one (by virtue of the particulars) – a man, for example.

On the other hand, John Locke’s Tabula Rasa or “blank slate or piece of paper” is perhaps a concrete paradigm of his empirical idealistic advocate. And it is at this point that I will draw my thoughts.
I have read a philosopher who says that “what enters into us via sense experiences radically forms our soul.” If man’s action depends on the ideas that he accumulated and, these ideas are sketched on a “blank sheet,” then it follows that whatever enters into a man’s soul forms it in conformity to the kind of ideas he gathers.

With this, I’ve got the notion that a man’s character or moral upbringing is directly affected by these formative stimuli that enter and taint his soul.

Say, a man highly inclines himself to keeping tabs on pornographic relish, and then shortly thereafter, he could be a rapist, a fornicator, and molester and later be one of them. Yeah, where did it all started, but from small beginnings which dramatically mushroomed to a crime.

Think, what are you made up of as of now?

The oriental philosophy, in particular, the Indian religion stressed out that the kind of embodiment or reincarnation a man will possess depends upon the “karma” (worldly attachment) he posses during his earthly pilgrimage.

The more Karma, less chances of attaining “nirvana” or in a state of a perfect bliss. On the other hand, if a man lives life like a pig (gluttony) he is more likely to inhibit or reincarnate a pig’s nature. Because, everything that has been said is of beastly nature - and we aren’t so different from that. We do have it, and even worse sometimes.

These philosophies and belief have also been supported accounts after accounts from different teachings. The Thomistic philosophy teaches that “nothing has come into the mind without passing through the senses.” A person must be very careful about the stimulus that meets his senses and sense experiences.

The ideology is logical enough to say that what formed a person from the inside is due to what transpire from the outside.

The Holy Bible itself tells us that “you are what you eat.” What enters your mouth become part of you – and in a very transcendental way defines who you are – and how you think.

So guys, YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK, SAY AND DO. Be careful!

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