Vanity Insanity Part 2

Wisdom is the integral essence of inner beauty, and to achieve this essence, one must be enthusiastic and open-minded. Enthusiastic to learn as many things as possible, open-minded enough to not discriminate against anything one reads, sees and listens. It should not matter whether you agree with the subjects or objects, you should accept that you want to learn the subjects or the objects, then the rest should come from your deepest truth to analyze them, just bare in mind that your truth is your truth, even when people disagree with you. If you find that you cannot decide if you agree or disagree with the subject matter, try to look for more truth to that matter, you should repeat the process till you are comfortable with what you think is the ultimate truth.

In addition, you should always have an open mind to evaluated others point of view. I get really angry when people are so myopic to the point that they only select what they “believe” is the true even when evidences from others present themselves. Close mindedness like this is as good as Ann Coulter, Bill O’Railey, and many others from Fox News.

Sometimes I just do not understand that with a handful of modern technology, especially internet, people should be able to improve their knowledge leaps and bounds. I am always telling people whom I come in contact with that if I have had internet as advance as right now, I would have been a million time wiser then what I am right now.

I remember when we were doing research for our paper back then, we have to bury ourselves in the library for days on ends just to get a topic down. Friends my age should be able to remember what microfiche is all about. Now, you have can google or baidu for almost anything under the sun. I can google my Rick Tan and the internet will come up with millions of hits on me, sometimes I think that the computer knows me better then I know myself.

I do believe that one should be very good at what they do for a living but too much concentration on your only job knowledge and disregard other interest outside you working environment or things that does not concern you is just as good as living your life like a zombie. Ask yourself what you think zombies do everyday? They just have one thing in their “dead minds”, if they even have one to begin with, they just want to feed themselves even when they have so much time at their hand, since they can’t get any deader, I feel sad that they don’t do anything else at all.

Only ignorant people say ignorance is bliss. Only an ignorant person believes that ignorance is bliss. For those who find themselves being lazy to work on their mind, I really pity them. I'm blessed for the quest of knowledge and wisdom, by pursuing the truth and wisdom makes me feel alive and happy.

I choose not to agree with clichés. I feel sorry for the people who do. Always remember, material goods and money can disappear in many circumstances like fire, quakes, robbery... but no one can actually rob you from your intellect while you are still alive.

Ignorant people, being oblivious to their environment, tend not to possess a sense of emergency quality. They won’t weight out their options and give alternative solutions to the future unforeseeable disasters, why would they? Being ignorance is, by definition, simply not wanting to know anything else… period!

I’m anything but an ignorant person; I like to know many things under the sun, from technology to archeology, from philosophy to psychology and the list goes on, the only thing I’m not interested in is sports but, by no mean, not all sports, it’s the contact sports that I’m applaud. I can tell you why contact sports are so profitable? It’s rough, it’s easy to understand, there is not days and nights of rehearsals. If half of the money that goes to sports can be redirected to the artistic fields, then I think the world could be more beautiful.

Sports, in general, do not create beauty, on the contrary art does. If male leaders of each individual country could stop telling the world which sport team they follow, and start telling people which ballet or opera they love, maybe we will have a world that’s less indulgence to war and genocide. Sport is about winners and loosers, do you see ballet or opera dwelling in this concept? It’s the “superego” the leader has been shaped.

Sport is associated with toughness, on the other hand, art is associated with being feminine. In order not to show their soft spot, they have to build a façade of a mindless “terminator from the future”. Not that there is anything wrong with showing off the softer side of a man, only the ultimate man who is secured enough has the sensibility to not hide that quality that’s, in my eyes, admirable. I don’t hide my disdain towards anything associated with sport for the mere fact that the money could have been better utilize for beautifying the world.

The above mention was just a minuet portion of my Zen and view towards the differences between stupidity vs. smart, hooligans vs. sophistication, masculine vs. feminine, but I haven’t even touch on the subject of intellect vs. wisdom. And to me wisdom is the ultimate nirvana that an individual could achieve.

Wisdom is utmost you can do to achieve the ultimate inner beauty. If you are able to philosophize you knowledge, then you will be able to accumulate your wisdom much easier. Knowledge is like a piece of raw material and philosophy is like a sculptor, a sculptor might be given a piece of beautiful marble; it’s raw, unpolished, unimaginative, but when Michael Angelo starts to put his creativity into the stone, he starts chipping away the rough edges, follow by refining his work with finer tools revealing every curves and every lines of David, Michael Angelo start nurturing David into life by polishing him. Viola, David was born.


Some people have a “philosophizing deficiency”. It’s as unexplainable an most of the auto immune disease, no body can explain why and there is no known cure. You can explain it as old soul vs. new soul. I don’t want to quote anybody around that has the deficiency, people gets to testy about that, but I can tell you who don’t; My mentor Dee, Dan, Michael, my friend Rebecca, Damien, Gidania, Jane, my Friday Night Café Flore Gang, and they are all consider old soul.

For those who hasn’t been tested for this deficiency, you don’t have to rush to clinic nearby for screening but you should know yourself better. The only screening I can think of is to talk to me and within 5 minutes I size you up enough to tell you if you suffer from this deficiency. But how can people like us lead if we expect everybody to be like us? The truth is, if everybody is philosophical enough, we don’t leader nor do we need followers. Now, imagine a world that we able to talk about issues with one another, exchange ideas and philosophize thought with one another, we can take and reciprocate at the same time one an equal level without watering the conversation down… What a wonderful world it would have been.


“Beauty comes from inside” is an age old common expression, though it’s an utter cliché, it’s hold some truth to it. To see if a person has inner beauty all you have to if a very has self-confidence. To have self-confidence is to be secure, to be secure is to have enough wisdom.
Self-confidence and secure is not mutually exclusive; a person exuding self-confidence does not automatically make a person secure, where as if a person is secure, the possibility that a person is confidence is more evident then not.