Author: edwinsetiadi

“Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work” by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal

This book is high on adrenaline. Right after Steven Kotler published the phenomenal book “The Rise of Superman” about individual flow state, he encountered so many people that came forward to tell their stories about biohacking for performance.

“But what caught our attention were the conversations we were having after those presentations”, Kotler remarks. “On too many occasions to count, people would pull us aside to tell us about their clandestine experiments with “ecstatic technologies.””

Ah yes, ecstatic (or ecstasis). As Plato describes it, it is “an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.” In other words, group flow.

Kotler then continues, “We met military officers going on monthlong meditation retreats, Wall Street traders zapping their brains with electrodes, trial lawyers stacking off-prescription pharmaceuticals, famous tech founders visiting transformational festivals, and teams of engineers microdosing with psychedelics.”

What on Earth is going on here?

It took Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal 4 years to undergo the research for this ecstasis phenomenon. A journey that “has led us all over the world: to the Virginia Beach home of SEAL Team Six, to the Googleplex in Mountain View, to the Burning Man festival in Nevada, to Richard Branson’s Caribbean hideaway, to luxurious dachas outside Moscow, to Red Bull’s headquarters in Santa Monica, to Nike’s innovation team in Portland, to bio-hacking conferences in Pasadena, to private dinners with United Nations advisers in New York. And the stories that we heard stunned us.”

Their findings are then broken down into 4 categories in this book:

1. Psychology: How the mind works.
2. Neurobiology: How the hacks to reach ecstasis work in the brain.
3. Pharmacology: The controlled usage of substances (such as psychedelics) to enter this state.
4. Technology: The tools they use to induce or measure the altered states. Tools such as VR, wearables, and neurofeedback.

Indeed, the findings are exceptional. But what makes this book an even more incredible read is the stories that illustrate the points in action, from the story of the SEAL’s intense ambush operation in Afghanistan, to the appeal of a CrossFit “bland” gym with less distractions but more intensity, and of course to the high point of this book: the tales from the Burning Man festival, among many others. They show that by entering the ecstatic state we can increase productivity, heightened creativity, have deeper insight, can learn faster, and can even have a spiritual growth.

I mean, I felt that, in a much lesser degree. I often find it in the energy of music concerts or festivals, when watching a football match directly in the stadium, or on the low-key side of the spectrum when participating in a mass prayer or engagingly witnessing a cultural ritual.

Now, imagine what we can do if we are able to hack that group energy and synchronicity into a deliberate action? Like the myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and give humanity the ability to advance their civilization and improve their lives, we might just found the secret fire to an advanced life through the state of ecstasis. This is what the book is all about.

“Ian Fleming: The Complete Man” by Nicholas Shakespeare

This is a 823 pages book that dives deep into the fascinating life of Ian Fleming, a person most famous for creating the character of James Bond.

The author, Nicholas Shakespeare, was granted access from the Fleming estate to all of his files, making this long biography as close as accurate as can get: a narrative based on information gathered from unpublished letters and diaries, declassified files, previously uninterviewed witnesses; as well as interviews with Fleming’s past biographers, friends, and family.

The biography reveals the privileged upbringing that Fleming had – including studying at Eaton and Sandhurst – but a difficult childhood nonetheless after his father’s death in World War I and while having a controling mother. It shows the era when he was working at Reuters going around Europe covering the rise of Hitler, among many other now-historical pivotal events, and a brief life as a stockbroker in the City of London.

The book also shows his time at the military during World War II, serving as a personal assistant to Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, where Fleming contributed in planning covert operations, and helped to create a special commando unit known as 30 Assault Unit (30AU). The occurrences in this era later hugely contributed to his early ideas of James Bond, where the spy character is actually inspired by his own experiences and from the people around him.

But his James Bond part of his life, as we shall see in the book, comes much later in his life. In fact, the character only appear in the last fifth of his life, almost as an afterthought. And instead, there’s so much that Fleming himself did in his lifetime that makes this book a real page turner, the kind of life that would be a force of nature even if he had never created James Bond.

“The pre-Bond Fleming was a patriotic Scot who had lived in Austria, Munich and Geneva as Hitler was coming to power”, Shakespeare remarks, “He made a noteworthy contribution to the Second World War – and not only in organising covert operations in Nazi-occupied Europe and North Africa that helped to shorten the conflict.” Shakespeare then continues, “He was also one of a trusted few who were charged with trying to bring the United States into the fight, and worked to set up and then coordinate with the foreign Intelligence department that developed into the CIA. Following the Allied victory of 1945, he continued to play an undercover role in the Cold War from behind his Sunday Times desk.”

It was during his stint at Sunday Times (that he held from after World War II in 1945 until his death in 1964) that he really began to write the Bond novels, where he incorporated his years of knowledge to pen and paper while overseeing the network of foreign correspondents and playing an undercover role. Particularly after he bought a 6.1 hectare estate in Jamaica for a holiday house (that he named Goldeneye) with a house on the edge of a cliff overlooking a private beach. It was there when the idea of writing James Bond novels really came to him as he was swimming in his bay. As Fleming remarks, “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.”

And it’s very intriguing, for example, that Fleming got his inspiration for “From Russia, With Love” from his time in Moscow as a Reuters journalist covering a controversial international trial during Stalin’s Soviet. Or his own experience in money matters (including being excluded from his wealthy grandfather’s will) can come up in the way James Bond refused a 1 million Pounds dowry from Marc-Ange Draco in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” Or the fact that the villain’s nerve center in “Moonraker” was the actual site of Fleming’s pre-war Pimlico address. Or the headquarter of the terrorist group in “Spectre” was inspired by a real-life encounter in France during World War II. Or how “You Only Live Twice” ended with James Bond on a small island peacefully living on the sea, with no memory of his past, that is until he gets a message that sends him back to the world that will corrupt him, which was written during a period of time when he had a turmulous marriage and just wanted to get away from it all.

But the novels didn’t become an instant hit from the get go. In fact, none of Fleming’s first 5 novels sold more than 12,000 copies in hardback. So much so that he was so sick and tired of Bond at one time and was very close to killing off the character in 1956. But as luck have it, the novels then took off in 1957 following the Suez Crisis in the autumn of 1956, when British Prime Minister Anthony Eden (whom was at Jamaica at the time to rest from sickness) decided to use Ian’s Goldeneye home as his basis for global operation hub, with the sick leader “sending secret telegrams to London, Washington, Paris, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Ottowa, Sydney, Wellington and Cairo.”

His Goldeneye base gave Fleming the unintended exposure, which eventually led to people reading his books. And much later, JFK helped to boost James Bond’s popularity into the stratosphere as the young American Senator (and later President) publicly lauded the novels as some of his favourite books.

If fact, the book recorded the moment when James Bond became instantly popular: “In the 1950s, the idea of individual agency was not yet so strong. It took off two months after Ian’s dinner with JFK, with the shooting down on 1 May 1960 of a top-secret U-2 surveillance plane over Soviet territory. On parachuting free, the American pilot, Gary Powers, was captured by the Russians, forcing President Eisenhower to admit what had occurred. As soon as it was revealed that spies really existed, the fantasy of James Bond became more real to American readers.”

Moreover, this book also shows the human side of Fleming, such as his troubled marriage to a toxic Ann Charteris, his love to his only son Caspar (whom he wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for), the dire effects of their marriage on Caspar, and his numerous affairs (all of which reflected in the demeanor of James Bond as a playboy). It mentions all the people that helped him along the way, and his many writing influences, such as William Plomer, Alfred Adler, Leo Perutz, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, including his number 1 inspiration Ernest Hemingway. But Hemingway was not by all means his only inspiration. In fact, Fleming read a wide range of books in impressively several languages, with the German edition of “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy mentioned as his dessert island book.

Furthermore, the book also delightfully shows the random name pop throughout the story, such as Fleming’s downstair neighbour during his time working at the City of London that happened to be T. S. Elliot whom was working at Lloyd’s Bank, or meeting J. P. Morgan Jr. when he went to America, having a contact with Alan Turing in World War II, casually diving with Jacques Cousteau, having a family connection with Winston Churchill, being friends with Roald Dahl, having dinner with JFK, having a brief encounter with Alfred Hitchcock at an airport, and of course his encounter with the real James Bond: an American ornithologist by the name of Dr. James Bond, whom Fleming (an avid bird watcher) had a copy of his book “Birds of the West Indies.”

Perhaps nobody can summarize Fleming better than Christopher Moran, the professor of US National Security who specializes in Ian Fleming’s Secret Service work. Moran was quoted in the book where he said, “It’s impossible to cling to the orthodoxy that Ian Fleming was a nobody. He was unique, there is nobody to compare him with. He was invested in and aware of the whole cycle of intelligence, which is remarkable when you think of the compartmentalised world – “the need to know” – of intelligence. Fleming transcended that world. He was not a desk officer, he was the desk officer. He knew it all, as a spy chief should, operating as a proxy spy chief for three to four years. He was the glue that glued these bits and pieces.”

All in all, this is a long book filled with impressive intricate details. If this is in a film form, this would likely be several episodes mini-series rather than one whole movie. It is in my opinion best read in a slow pace, in order to fully emmersed at every aspect of Ian Fleming’s life, which in turn he poured into the character of James Bond. And once you read his whole story, you’ll understand how and why James Bond can be such a brilliant spy novel.

“The Castle” by Franz Kafka

This is Franz Kafka’s last novel, an unfinished novel before his death, that is different from the other “Kafkaesque” style that any reader of Kafka will be familiar with.

It is a story about a small village, ruled by an administrative staff of a castle on top of the hill, a property owned by an absent nobleman. The story follows around the protagonist (simply named “K”), an outsider coming to the village as a land surveyor. When inspecting the remote village deep in winter, he soon discovers the weird way life is organized around the mysterious castle (which he cannot access). But everything else in the village can be accessed and this is where the story evolve around, the investigation.

It is quite a departure from Kafka’s other novels, which often rely on small bunch of strong characters in his stories. Instead, in The Castle the characters are plentiful with intricate relationships, but yet they are still neatly characterized, so much so that even those who appear only briefly – such as the village schoolmaster, the schoolmistress, and her suitor – they still have a strong presence.

In the story, K learns that the village is a community that has deep ties between friendships and hatreds that go back years into several generations. The village has two inns: 1. Bridge Inn (operated by humble people) 2. Castle Inn (the more pretentious one); with interesting stories how the owners acquired them. And among many other notable characters, K meets the families of the tanner Lasemann and the cobbler Brunswick and learn about their standing in the village, and has an interaction with the castle messenger, Barnabas, and his family, whom all have bad odor because of their resistance attitude towards the castle.

The novel sees authority differently from Kafka’s previous novels. Instead of one controlling abusing figurehead (which creates the Kafkaesque world) The Castle dwells on various different kinds of authority without a clear figurehead, which clearly showed in the way the castle is being operated.

For example, it is said that the castle is owned by Count Westwest, a mysterious figure whom we will never meet. In his absence, the castle is operated by a big staff of bureaucrats, which are arranged in a strict hierarchy. This is where the book excels, finding stories in between the bureaucratic confusion and inefficiency. Moreover, besides political power, the castle (and its staff) also bizarrely receive religious devotion from the villagers. Both of these examples have ignited plenty of interpretations from well known philosophers and critics alike of what the castle really symbolizes.

For context, Kafka wrote The Castle in a turbulent time in history, just after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. And thus his tone of writing was partly influenced by the then-contemporary zeitgeist of a new movement, that ask the question of what replaces the traditional monarch authority (i.e. the figurehead at the top). Hence, the analogy of an empty castle at the top.

This is what makes the book so good, despite being unfinished and thus with an ending that will forever be mysterious. All the open-ended symbolisms and the many possible interpretations, as well as K’s search for meaning and connection to society throughout the journey (not to mention his attempt to access the empty castle), still become the subject of inspiration and debate until this day.

“The Five People You Meet in Heaven” by Mitch Albom

I’m hooked from the get go. This is a very well written book about a character named Eddie, an old man who works as a maintenance guy at an amusement park for the majority of his life. Straight from the beginning of the book Mitch Albom wrote this incredibly descriptive backstory of who Eddie was, well enough that only few pages in I started to develop a compassion for him and not wanting him to die. But of course he died, and this is where the journey takes place, in heaven.

Albom’s idea of heaven is quite interesting: When you die you get to meet 5 people separately one by one. These are the people that you’ve crossed path with, who will explain the most significant events in your life and each will give you 1 or 2 important lessons. “There are five people you meet in heaven”, one character in the book explains to Eddie in heaven. “Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth.”

It is layer after layer of plot twists that are difficult to guess, with the story intermittently switches from Eddie’s time in heaven and the many stories of his different birthdays in the past that slowly paint a bigger picture about who Eddie is and the backstory of every single character in the story.

The 5 people that he meets are:

1. A blue man “freak” who worked at the amusement park, whom Eddie barely know, and whom he accidentally killed when he was a little boy running across the road chasing a ball, forcing the blue man to instinctively skid while driving a car, spiking his adrenaline, which then led to a heart attack minutes later. His lesson: Everyone’s actions in the world are all connected to one another, even the smallest most seemingly insignificant move can unsuspectedly create a big ripple effect. And also: Why some people die and others get to live.
2. Eddie’s commanding officer at the army during their time serving in the Philippines. This chapter tells an incredible story about Eddie’s military days, especially what happened with his legs that crippled him for the rest of his life. His lesson: About sacrifice. “Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”
3. About his dad. This surprise mystery person number 3 provides a deep backstory about Eddie’s difficult relationship with his abusive and alcoholic father, which shows the foundations of a character which Eddie will have in the future. But this person also shows Eddie’s father’s life, as a contextual explanation of his own eventual behaviour. The lesson: On empathy and forgiveness.
4. His wife, and finally the story about her whom has been sparsely told throughout the book without any further elaboration. It is the most heart-warming chapter for me, and the most heart-breaking at the same time that almost reduce me to tears while thinking about my own beloved wife. And just like what Eddie feels, I really wanted him to just stay there and not move forward to the 5th person. The lesson: Life has to end, love doesn’t.
5. A total plot twist that I would not even dare to mention here (an already spoiler review). It is crazy how the book can get to this totally unexpected person. And the lesson of this person is the insanely brilliant conclusion of the entire story: About letting go.

The book is so beautifully-written, perfect from start to finish without a flaw. It narrates the scene by scene very descriptively as if I’m watching a good movie that feels like a blend of Forrest Gump, Big Fish, and Benjamin Button, with a back-and-forth sequences like The Butterfly Effect, or Slumdog Millionaire, or even that brilliant 21 Grams. Every chapter is a mystery and wonder, every new information about Eddie reveals an extraordinary life behind what looks like a painfully dull old man with a boring life.

I genuinely wish that this is what happens when we die, we get to learn and review our lives from 5 pivotal people. And I’ve never even though of this before; but I think if I can get my way, if ever I can choose who to write my obituary or biography, it would be Mitch Albom. Such a brilliant storyteller.

“Poor Folk” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is a story about an exchange of letters between two characters, distant cousins Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova. They both live on the same street opposite to each other on their respective terrible apartments, but yet very rarely physically meet. And instead, they write to each other.

The letters show the dire conditions that they live in, as well as the poor situations surrounding them, told in a first-person experience. And the more the book progresses, the more we get to know about the backstories of these two characters. The contrast between how poor people and rich people live are also very well described throughout the exchanges of the letters.

It is an overall bland novel, however, where apart from the interesting personal history the letters are mainly filled with neighborhood gossip and rants, as well as loads of unnecessary anecdotes that did not lead to any bigger story in the book.

Nevertheless, this is Dostoevsky’s first ever novel, which shows his earliest form of ideas and raw writing style. An important reading anchor before reading his more famous novels, in order to see his growth as a writer.

And the premise of writing a book based on an exchange of letters is truly refreshing, on a topic that was still foreign to a lot of people back then, which shows how the poor live their lives. No wonder that the novel became such a nationwide hit after publishing in 1846, and was dubbed as Russia’s first social novel.

“Warren Buffett’s Ground Rules: Words of Wisdom from the Partnership Letters of the World’s Greatest Investor” by Jeremy C. Miller

It’s chaos all over the world. Trump’s liberation day tariff 2 April 2025 sent a shockwave to the global market, and the trade war that it instigates could possibly cause a global recession after the market crashes subside.

During this mayhem, in the list of 10 of the richest people in the world 9 of them lost a significant amount of money (all in the billions). That is, except for 1 person. Warren Buffett. And so I thought, there’s probably no better time to revisit the wisdom of the Oracle of Omaha than now.

Just like any other finance geeks, I’ve read my fair share of books about Buffett, from the cartoon biography by Ayano Morio, to “Tap Dancing to Work”, “the Tao of Warren Buffett”, “The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffett & George Soros”, the brilliant “University of Berkshire Hathaway” about the content of plenty of Berkshire’s shareholders’ meeting, not to mention the many generic investment books that mentions about Buffett’s style, such as “Money Masters of Our Time”, or a bit of cameo in “Tao of Charlie Munger” and “Poor Charlie’s Almanack”, or gaining his insights from the books that he reads, like, of course, “The Intelligent Investor” by his mentor Benjamin Graham.

But never have I read a book about Buffett’s pre-Berkshire days. This is the strength of this book that sets it apart from the rest of the pack. In the sea of books, podcasts, videos, etc about Warren Buffett, this book is probably the only one that dived deep into Buffett’s early investment career, when he formed Buffett Associates, Ltd (1956-1970).

It covers the earliest investment thinkings of Buffett, fresh from graduation and mentorship with Benjamin Graham, through his Partnership Letters where he poured everything down and explain them all to his fund’s investors. It shows the thinking behind a young investor’s mind, working with a modest sum of money not unlike the most of us, but can still somehow generate a substantial amount of returns.

As the author Jeremy C. Miller remarks, “[The Partnership Letters] make a powerful argument for a long-term value-oriented strategy, one that is especially viable in turbulent times such as our own, when people are vulnerable to a speculative, oftentimes leveraged, short-term focus that is rarely effective in the long run. They provide timeless principles of conservatism and discipline that have been the cornerstone of Buffett’s success.”

The book is organized around several different topics, in which it extracts Buffett’s take on them in the Partnership Letters, reorganize them into the appropriate chapters, and then add a summarizing introduction at each chapter’s beginning, followed by the most important excerpts on each topic that was presented in full, which allows us the reader to learn directly from Buffett’s words.

The topics covered include: compounding, passing investing (or market indexing), active investing, on incentives, his switch from net-nets cigar puff strategy (“buying fair businesses at wonderful prices”) to “buying wonderful businesses at fair prices”, arbitrage, control over companies, coattailing, how to avoid common mistakes in investing, taxes, on managing growth, and so much more; all with the real-life examples from what Buffett did during his early investment years.

Buffett never published a book. But instead, so many books are written about him and his investment style, using the letters and articles that he has written, as well his many speeches and talks. And this Partnership Letters from his earliest days of investing shed an interesting light into his way of thinking, which makes this book a very important puzzle piece to read and understand Warren Buffett.

A headline at Reuters on 10 April 2025 says: “US recognizes Panama’s sovereignty over canal, Panama says after talks.”

What the hell is going on? And what’s with Trump’s obsession over Panama?

The Panama Canal is controlled by a Hong Kong-based company CK Hutchison Holding (owned by Li Ka-shing), which operates both the entrance port at Pacific ocean and Atlantic ocean. And last month, the company said that it would sell its interests in a deal worth $22.8bn to a consortium led by US investment firm, BlackRock. The deal covered a total of 43 ports in 23 countries, including the 2 in Panama.

But then on Monday 31 March the Chinese government blocked the deal (Hutchison is a private company but operates under Chinese government’s financial laws), citing a thread to its national interest. And two days later, Trump launched the tariff bombshell and hit China pretty hard. Coincidence? The timing is definitely suspicious.

A week later on Monday 7 April, Panama’s comptroller authority suddenly publish an audit that claims to have found irregularities in the renewal of a 25-year port concession with Hutchison, which put more pressure for Hutchison to let Panama go. And coincidentally (juuust coincidentally), the report was published on the same day the US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Panama to participate in a regional security conference.

He’s the first Defense Secretary to visit Panama in decades, and in the conclusion of his visit on Wednesday he said that the US recognizes Panama’s sovereignty over its canal, and announced an agreement to deepen US military training in the country (you know what happens when Murica decides that a country needs “freedom” LOL). But why the sudden interest on Panama?

Note that Trump has been talking about America’s plan to “take back” Panama for months in a matter of national interest. Because, get this, around 40% of US container traffic (roughly $270 billion/year) passes this canal. Imagine what will happen if “China” suddenly closes the canal? Looks like Panama is a key puzzle piece to this whole shenanigans, as this leverage China has is driving Trump crazy.

1. Announce a bombshell of tariffs on Wednesday 2 April 2025 to multiple countries (except, suspiciously, to Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and Cuba). Using amateurish calculations that include charging two inhabited islands filled with Pinguin, even charging Australia whom the US actually has a trade surplus against.
2. Within the duration of one week, markets crashed whiping more than $6 trillion, China retaliated, hedge funds’ “Basis Trade” exposed, Treasury yield spiked to 4.5% on Wednesday 9 April and was this close to needing a Fed bailout.
3. Giving a face-saving speech filled with ego, saying “these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are dying to make a deal, please, please sir make a deal. I’ll do anything, I’ll do anything sir.”
4. And then back off from the move, pausing the new tariffs for 90 days. Markets rebound, and Peter Navarro somehow taking claim: “This is one of the greatest days in American economic history.”
5. Except for Chi-na. Their new tariff is now 125% (so 20% + 125% = the total tariff against China is 145%) and the trade war is ON full blast. But of course. this is a big problem for another day.

Elect a clown, expect a circus.

“Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn” by Stephen Mitchell

What is Zen? According to Zen master Seung Sahn Soen-sa, in its most basic form Zen can be described as the following: “if you are thinking, you can’t understand Zen. If you keep the mind that is before thinking, this is Zen mind.”

And what exactly is a mind before thinking? The answer, apparently, is not that simple.

This is a confusing book that recorded the conversations between master Soen-sa and his students in the 1970s, broken down into 100 short chapters that cover stories, formal Zen interviews, Dharma speeches, and letter correspondences.

In almost every single one of these chapters, he teaches, above all else, how not to think. As Soen-sa remarks, “Zen work is becoming empty mind. Becoming empty mind means having all your opinions fall away. Then you will experience true emptiness. When you experience true emptiness, you will attain your true situation, your true condition, and your true opinions.”

You would think that with a statement this intriguing he would proceed to show us the proper way to attain this state? But what occurs instead in the book is Soen-sa adding more to the confusion. Like this line in chapter 4: “Anything that can be written in a book, anything that can be said—all this is thinking. If you are thinking, then all Zen books, all Buddhist sutras, all Bibles are demons’ words. But if you read with a mind that has cut off all thinking, then Zen books, sutras, and Bibles are all the truth.”

I’m sorry, what? Unfortunately Soen-sa never elaborate or explain what his vague words mean, and instead he ask the students to have some kind of spiritual journey and figure out the answers themselves.

Just like this one example: “The next morning, the same student walked into the interview room and bowed. Soen-sa said, “Do you have any questions?” “Yes. What is death?” “You are already dead.” “Thank you very much. Now I understand.” Soen-sa said, “You understand? Then what is death?” The student said, “You are already dead.” Soen-sa smiled and bowed.” I mean, what kind of teaching is this?

There’s more. Soen-sa seems to use this teaching method quite a lot: “Soen-sa asked one student, “What color is this snow?” The student said, “White.” Soen-sa said, “You have an attachment to color.”” Ok sure, attachment to color. But when a student throw this trick back to him: “”I ask you once again—what color is this door?” The student was silent. Soen-sa said, “It is brown.” “But if I’d said brown, you would’ve said I’m attached to color!” Soen-sa said, “Brown is only brown.”

I mean, from my limited understanding (hey, this is why I read this book in the first place, to learn deeper about Zen Buddhism), Zen Buddhism is supposed to be simple and clear. But what Soen-sa is doing is making the understanding complicated and blurry at best, especially when he was asked some difficult questions that he cannot answer directly. Heck, in most conversations, the answers that he gave often left the students more confused and lost, which is well documented in the book.

Moreover, as I read through I keep on questioning myself whether I have read this story or that story before or if I have mistakenly read the wrong early pages of the book? Nope, just the book repeating the same story or similar interraction in several chapters.

Therefore, it is perplexing for me that the book is one of the highly recommended ones by several [caucasian] meditation gurus. And this probably deserves a little background check: Soen-sa was a Korean Seon master of the Jogye order and founder of the international Kwan Um School of Zen. And he was one of the earliest Korean Zen masters that came to the US and introduced the religion to Westerners in the 1960s and 1970s, during the height of the hippie movement. Hence, the recommendation I found to read this book by the “ten percent” gang.

If this feels a little bit borderline fraud, it does have the same feel as the cult community built around Osho, doesn’t it? Bold accusation, I know, but Soen-sa did get himself into a bit of controversies in the 1980s when he was caught having a consentual sexual relationship with his students, while he supossed to be a celibate monk. Consentual sex with the leader? Now that’s a very cultish behaviour.

And another sign of a cultish behaviour? Soen-sa gave a hint that Zen masters can somehow perform miracles, when saying: “Many people want miracles, and if they witness miracles they become very attached to them. But miracles are only a technique. They are not the true way. If a Zen Master used miracles often, people would become very attached to this technique of his, and they wouldn’t learn the true way.”

I know what you’re going to say, what was I thinking when deciding to read this book without researching about it first? I didn’t. And by not thinking, maybe that’s the whole Zen point after all.

“Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths” by Karen Armstrong

Once upon a time Jerusalem was nothing more than a piece of land in the middle of nowhere. Originated since around 3000 BC, the city was largely forgotten in its early days in between the more powerful and prosperous neighbouring empires.

As the author, Karen Armstrong, remarks, “Ironically, the city which would be revered as the center of the world by millions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims was off the beaten track of ancient Canaan.” And so what happened between its obscure beginning and what it becomes today?

This impressive book tells the immense 5000 years history about the origins of Jerusalem. It is a story about the city, the people who inhabit it, the politics, the many conflicts and misunderstandings, the cosmic battles, and the atrocities committed in its name, that left some traces in the battle scars of the city today.

It is the story over the various different rulers of Jerusalem and how it fares under their respective control: From the Canaanites, to Judahites, Persians, Greeks, Hasmoneans, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, to Israelis, not to mention various Christian and Muslim nations who have their religious interests in the city. And it shows, perhaps above all else, how the city can rise and fall and rise again, destroyed and rebuilt, and simply refused to disappear into obscurity.

The book is also the story about how for centuries Jews, Christians, and Muslims were able to live harmoniously together in the city. It is, as Armstrong remarks, “an attempt to find out what Jews, Christians, and Muslims have meant when they have said that the city is “holy” to them and to point out some of the implications of Jerusalem’s sanctity in each tradition. This seems just as important as deciding who was in the city first and who, therefore, should own it, especially since the origins of Jerusalem are shrouded in such obscurity.”

So, did Armstrong eventually reveal who is the rightful owner of Jerusalem? Not quite, not that simple. But she does illustrate how it becomes a holy city; how various different sects, religions, and races get to claim their spot in it; and how their complex dynamisms with each other have created the environment like no other cities in the world. And perhaps most relevantly for today’s geopolitics, the book shows that the current Israel-Palestine conflict actually had a beginning, and it was not a religious conflict but a political one.

All in all, it is a slow burn book, with intricate details filled every page of the stories. It is never meant to be a light book about a city, and instead it is truly a complex book about the history of humanity. I expect nothing less from a Karen Armstrong book.