To save the world, each of us brings with us the awareness and aptitudes to materialise our awareness into this world. And while most have this treasure buried, my excavations into my own soul has shown me that I am making my digs in the right direction.
As a child, I was always told not to waste food because other people are dying from having nothing to eat. I answered, "If you adults know that, why don't you just send extra food there? That way, everyone will have enough and no one would have too much that they waste nor will others not have enough that they starve."
You grow up realizing that most adults know nothing about saving the world. If people can make so much money why waste it on extravagant and luxury items instead of sending it to people who need the money? And if one group of people know how to make money, why not everyone else?
So you grow up to realize that all that advice and ambition adults fire you up about 'growing up to be rich and famous' are actually the same causes that creates poverty and oppression. Abundance, wealth and opulence have different meanings, the latter two closer to each other than the first. We live in a world of abundance, and Gandhi has summed it up that "We have enough for our needs, but not for our greed."
How do we balance the scales? The
Friday, December 5, 2008
Saving the world - Reverting back to ourselves
As a child, I could not help but wonder how come adults allow the situation I was watching on TV to happen, to exist; I saw images of children in African countries starving to death on the 8 o'clock news, followed by Hollywood shows that portray extravagance and wasteful, hedonistic habits.
As a child, I could not understand the preoccupation people had with schooling, testing, examinations, career, succcess, wealth. It was as if it was some linear, fool-proof assembly line that was failproof. With the sort of vigour and emphasis people put on those benchmarks, it was as if they were the signposts to the yellow brick road. Then there was marriage and child-rearing and status and glory and fame, etc. Not to mention the rigorousness of religion, the fear of loss, the upkeeping of traditions. If adults had it all figured out, why was ther so much war, poverty, suffering, fear and violence in our world?
Obviously, we have to realize that the adult model is completely illusory and self-destructive. As such, it would make sense that to inherit the same old ways of thinking about life will produce the same old world with its war and its poverty and its insatiable destructive greed. And then we become the adults that children wonder why, if we were in charge, aren't we doing anything to save the world?
It is us who are doing this to the world; we adults. It is us who created wars and hunger and poverty. It is us and the same model of thinking which we inherited through various vehicles such as religion, race, traditions, culture, schooling, nationality, customs, etc that keeps us trapped, removing the curious, faithful child and replacing it with the type of adults that replicate the adults before them and contribute to the wheel of destructive momentum we find ourselves in.
We cannot eradicate any of the world's problems if we continue to think, behave, believe, react and respond in the same ways the generation(s) before us have. To save the world is to revert to the way we were, before the corrupt layers of unknowing, ignorance, ignomity became encrusted like carbuncles all over our soul. Interestingly, the word "mualaf", the label Muslims give to new 'converts' of Islam, means 'to revert back to the truth'. Perhaps this reversion Islam reminds us is to return to our soul-state, eventhough Mohamadenism itself has also become a victim of traditions.
As a child, I could not understand the preoccupation people had with schooling, testing, examinations, career, succcess, wealth. It was as if it was some linear, fool-proof assembly line that was failproof. With the sort of vigour and emphasis people put on those benchmarks, it was as if they were the signposts to the yellow brick road. Then there was marriage and child-rearing and status and glory and fame, etc. Not to mention the rigorousness of religion, the fear of loss, the upkeeping of traditions. If adults had it all figured out, why was ther so much war, poverty, suffering, fear and violence in our world?
Obviously, we have to realize that the adult model is completely illusory and self-destructive. As such, it would make sense that to inherit the same old ways of thinking about life will produce the same old world with its war and its poverty and its insatiable destructive greed. And then we become the adults that children wonder why, if we were in charge, aren't we doing anything to save the world?
It is us who are doing this to the world; we adults. It is us who created wars and hunger and poverty. It is us and the same model of thinking which we inherited through various vehicles such as religion, race, traditions, culture, schooling, nationality, customs, etc that keeps us trapped, removing the curious, faithful child and replacing it with the type of adults that replicate the adults before them and contribute to the wheel of destructive momentum we find ourselves in.
We cannot eradicate any of the world's problems if we continue to think, behave, believe, react and respond in the same ways the generation(s) before us have. To save the world is to revert to the way we were, before the corrupt layers of unknowing, ignorance, ignomity became encrusted like carbuncles all over our soul. Interestingly, the word "mualaf", the label Muslims give to new 'converts' of Islam, means 'to revert back to the truth'. Perhaps this reversion Islam reminds us is to return to our soul-state, eventhough Mohamadenism itself has also become a victim of traditions.
When does our Life Story lead us to our Purpose in Life?
I think if I were to answer the question : "What's your story?", a personal narrative of the events of my life, told with dramatic effect would not sum anything up at all. I've realised that it is because I do not have a fixed identity about who I am. I have come to a conclusion that what happened to me does not make me who I become. That is why I seldom evoke stories about my past unless it is to quote something anecdotal or to offer an empathetic response cultivated from my own personal experience instead of remaining completely detached from another person's narrative.
If who I am and where I came from does not make an interesting story even for myself, then what I 'am' is also not a story, because who and what I am is nothing but a collection of the things I have chosen to believe and discard about myself and the events and things that have happened in my life. As a younger person, I spent quite a significant amount of time trying to figure out what I am as if knowing that will predestines something more purposeful, meaningful, to accomplish in my 'life'.
I've also realized that I cannot define myself by the roles I play; daughter, mother, teacher, sister, niece, Chinese, Malaysian, friend, urbanite,Buddhist, Muslim, Atheist, communist, opposition, mainstream, rebel, etc. Building up a sense of self based on any role requires one, sooner or later, to feel a sense of needing to abide by definitions and stereotypes. I was once described as moving on the same axis with other people but spinning on my own orbit. That itself is another label, another definition but that also does not say anything.
In the end I've come to know this : that none of us have a history, we are all living characters. Our stories have not been written, our plot still running and there is no ending yet. We might have realized that some of the conflicts have already been written for us while we create, with a direct hand or not, other conflicts that arise within our lives. To already settle with a conclusion that we are this or that, rich or poor, clever or not, Indian or Chinese, Muslim or Christian, mother or child, teacher or student, worker or boss, etc is to stop living the story but to replay the set of conflicts that were given and to lull it to a monotonous, painful boredom towards the end.
However, everyone has a story, just not a story of 'me' but a story of "now". To have a story of "now" collapses the entire spectrum of 'past' into a single defining momentum that allows one to have a real 'present story' and to collapse the entire doubts and worry of future into the freshness and creative power of Now. Can each of us know what our story is without making it a summary or a patchwork of events that happened to us in the past, without the plasters of labels we attach to ourselves and without the worries and fears about how we want the future to turn out?
If you can look beyond the events of the past and the ambitions for the future, you can find that story, the story of yourself. And I believe, that story leads the way for the rest of the plot to unfold, the plot of discovering our purpose in life.
If who I am and where I came from does not make an interesting story even for myself, then what I 'am' is also not a story, because who and what I am is nothing but a collection of the things I have chosen to believe and discard about myself and the events and things that have happened in my life. As a younger person, I spent quite a significant amount of time trying to figure out what I am as if knowing that will predestines something more purposeful, meaningful, to accomplish in my 'life'.
I've also realized that I cannot define myself by the roles I play; daughter, mother, teacher, sister, niece, Chinese, Malaysian, friend, urbanite,Buddhist, Muslim, Atheist, communist, opposition, mainstream, rebel, etc. Building up a sense of self based on any role requires one, sooner or later, to feel a sense of needing to abide by definitions and stereotypes. I was once described as moving on the same axis with other people but spinning on my own orbit. That itself is another label, another definition but that also does not say anything.
In the end I've come to know this : that none of us have a history, we are all living characters. Our stories have not been written, our plot still running and there is no ending yet. We might have realized that some of the conflicts have already been written for us while we create, with a direct hand or not, other conflicts that arise within our lives. To already settle with a conclusion that we are this or that, rich or poor, clever or not, Indian or Chinese, Muslim or Christian, mother or child, teacher or student, worker or boss, etc is to stop living the story but to replay the set of conflicts that were given and to lull it to a monotonous, painful boredom towards the end.
However, everyone has a story, just not a story of 'me' but a story of "now". To have a story of "now" collapses the entire spectrum of 'past' into a single defining momentum that allows one to have a real 'present story' and to collapse the entire doubts and worry of future into the freshness and creative power of Now. Can each of us know what our story is without making it a summary or a patchwork of events that happened to us in the past, without the plasters of labels we attach to ourselves and without the worries and fears about how we want the future to turn out?
If you can look beyond the events of the past and the ambitions for the future, you can find that story, the story of yourself. And I believe, that story leads the way for the rest of the plot to unfold, the plot of discovering our purpose in life.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Intelligence lies beneath all those layers.
In so many ways I have been spared the decaying crusts of traditions and beliefs that layer so many aspects of human life. I believe I have not been completely spared and my mind has been compromised in many ways. Yet, the more I observe, the more I realize that I am quite fortunate. The act of observing, by itself, keeps the mind fresh, and the fresh mind in turn helps to make further observations which allows one to finally be aware of what constitutes the layers that encrust us with dullness and weighs us down with the suffering we bring upon ourselves.
Now and then, people wonder where I'm actually coming from, what's my background, my agenda, my 'qualifications' or training as if it's supposed to be illustrious or an indication of 'intelligence'. If that were true, I should've felt some kind of achievement, for intelligence is associated with a superior accumulation of knowledge and facts. I feel this thinking is actually contradictory because I am a witness to myself that I have never applied any of the widely accepted standard methods of knowledge accumulation, at least not consciously.
If I were to describe the experience of how i know what I know, it would feel more like a type of absorption or cessation/reduction of the pace of outward movement instead of a type of external movement often associated with knowledge accumulation which has become synonymous with 'learning'. The change will take place without you actually feeling it and then, like a rain cloud, it pours out like rain in the form of some epiphany...and the awareness of one leads to another and another like the rain cycle. Each rainfall drenches the mind and refreshes the environment and makes the mind, the soil, more fertile. Precipitation never cakes the mind dry......but makes it hungry enough to hang out patiently and to forget about it completely, until the clouds get heavy enough, and they know when they are.
In observing this, I came up with an analogy encouraging myself to discard old habits and old fears - to empty my cup. I told myself that a lot of people are like onions with the dirty layers on the outside. As we age, we accumulate more and more of these unfresh layers which encrust us. Beneath all these layers that we have accumulated around ourselves actually lies our natural, intelligent self. This intelligent self exists throughout. It is only the accumulation of all those crusty layers that hides that intelligence from ourselves.
When I doubtmy own Intelligence as a Being, I ask myself to observe nature and the Intelligence of plants and animals - beings that have a lot less brain-matter than us. I ask whether it were not possible that we were more intelligent than the plant, the pigeon, the cat? I ask if it were not possible that it is the many crusty layers upon their mind that has cast them in so much self-doubt, low self-esteem and enveloping us in the fear and diminishing joy of life? And these layers are keeping us from identifying the Intelligence within.
I think it is completely useless to idolize intelligent people since we are all intelligent beings. Idolizing the intelligence of others, be it in one specific field or another is merely surrendering a personal responsibility to observe, notice and peel away the layers which hides our Intelligence. It takes away the responsibility of needing to look within in order to bring our Intelligence to surface.
All patterns of authority have that in common though - to remove accountability of being able to find intelligence in oneself by surrendering personal authority to a third party. Religion, schooling, traditions, rituals, customs, superstitions, peer pressure, trends,....in one way or another, they create layers upon us and then it gains enough momentum to run an auto-pilot self-perpetuating crust layering existence. There are primary, secondary layers and then layers that are a few times removed from the original layers but is a consequence of. It is a wheel, a chain-reaction, a self-perpetuating mechanism that gains momentum by the mere adoption of existing layers as a part of oneself, as a part of living.
It might sound condescending to tell another person that one is only as intelligent as the layers one has shed. We live in a world of quick fixes and dummies for anyone that we have to also label self-transcendence and spirituality in the same way we do everything else. But it is the application of the same ways that eludes us of the transcendence and clarity we seek. Using the ways of a living that dulls and creates emptiness, that encrusts us with deviated truths, methods that spin ourselves the web we find ourselves in is not going to release us. Before any form of transcendental happiness can be achieved, before enlightening epiphanies can arrive, there must first be a conscious knowing about the state one is in. To have a conscious knowing requires one to drop the spindle, to allow the smoke to clear, to find a stillness where crusty layers peels itself off to reveal bit by bit. Any ambition to speed up the de-layering is again a reincarnation of the spindle-effect that encrusted us. Being able to identify ambition and then set it aside is the giant step.
Clarity can only come when you do not seek it - because the act of seeking creates smokescreens for ourselves. The ambition to seek is the product of the way we were brought up - we were brought up by people who were also brought up to want to achieve more, better, faster, etc. We are merely photocopies of photocopies because we lost our originality the moment culture, traditions, parenting, invasive nurturing stripped us of the freshness and originality we were born alight with and dressed up in the clothes our environmental conditionings find ideal.
If you are wondering how is it possible for us to not conform or to know whether it is right or not to reject tradition, you would have witnessed a product of conditioning in yourself. A baby does not question a lot of things in order to be able to figure out which things comforts it and helps it blossom. The original light in us does not require thought for it is capable of internalizing truths. If something leads to correctness it will gravitate towards that in a natural way, as if following a rhythm. It will crave what it lacks and will reject what doesn't feel right.
If you ask how is it possible that we know something as the Truth without questioning the way towards the Truth? If you can for a moment imagine yourself, as a baby, born with light and truth within you, you would be capable of following the natural rhythm of Truth because you are a part of it. You would be able to follow it the way your thirsty mouth turn towards the nipple and sucks vigorously at it. You will know It because it is You. Truth was you until conditioning tucked it away, wrapped it up, layer upon layer.
That which I call conditioning is simply the collective of the unquestioned mind. I see clearly now what the Buddha means by, to question. It is not to question Truth, or to ask questions to eliminate things so as to arrive at some destination. It is simply to question what YOU have come to accept as the truth! Truth itself does not need to be questioned because it Is. It is the untruths which have been accepted or thought of as Truth that needs examining.
Now and then, people wonder where I'm actually coming from, what's my background, my agenda, my 'qualifications' or training as if it's supposed to be illustrious or an indication of 'intelligence'. If that were true, I should've felt some kind of achievement, for intelligence is associated with a superior accumulation of knowledge and facts. I feel this thinking is actually contradictory because I am a witness to myself that I have never applied any of the widely accepted standard methods of knowledge accumulation, at least not consciously.
If I were to describe the experience of how i know what I know, it would feel more like a type of absorption or cessation/reduction of the pace of outward movement instead of a type of external movement often associated with knowledge accumulation which has become synonymous with 'learning'. The change will take place without you actually feeling it and then, like a rain cloud, it pours out like rain in the form of some epiphany...and the awareness of one leads to another and another like the rain cycle. Each rainfall drenches the mind and refreshes the environment and makes the mind, the soil, more fertile. Precipitation never cakes the mind dry......but makes it hungry enough to hang out patiently and to forget about it completely, until the clouds get heavy enough, and they know when they are.
In observing this, I came up with an analogy encouraging myself to discard old habits and old fears - to empty my cup. I told myself that a lot of people are like onions with the dirty layers on the outside. As we age, we accumulate more and more of these unfresh layers which encrust us. Beneath all these layers that we have accumulated around ourselves actually lies our natural, intelligent self. This intelligent self exists throughout. It is only the accumulation of all those crusty layers that hides that intelligence from ourselves.
When I doubtmy own Intelligence as a Being, I ask myself to observe nature and the Intelligence of plants and animals - beings that have a lot less brain-matter than us. I ask whether it were not possible that we were more intelligent than the plant, the pigeon, the cat? I ask if it were not possible that it is the many crusty layers upon their mind that has cast them in so much self-doubt, low self-esteem and enveloping us in the fear and diminishing joy of life? And these layers are keeping us from identifying the Intelligence within.
I think it is completely useless to idolize intelligent people since we are all intelligent beings. Idolizing the intelligence of others, be it in one specific field or another is merely surrendering a personal responsibility to observe, notice and peel away the layers which hides our Intelligence. It takes away the responsibility of needing to look within in order to bring our Intelligence to surface.
All patterns of authority have that in common though - to remove accountability of being able to find intelligence in oneself by surrendering personal authority to a third party. Religion, schooling, traditions, rituals, customs, superstitions, peer pressure, trends,....in one way or another, they create layers upon us and then it gains enough momentum to run an auto-pilot self-perpetuating crust layering existence. There are primary, secondary layers and then layers that are a few times removed from the original layers but is a consequence of. It is a wheel, a chain-reaction, a self-perpetuating mechanism that gains momentum by the mere adoption of existing layers as a part of oneself, as a part of living.
It might sound condescending to tell another person that one is only as intelligent as the layers one has shed. We live in a world of quick fixes and dummies for anyone that we have to also label self-transcendence and spirituality in the same way we do everything else. But it is the application of the same ways that eludes us of the transcendence and clarity we seek. Using the ways of a living that dulls and creates emptiness, that encrusts us with deviated truths, methods that spin ourselves the web we find ourselves in is not going to release us. Before any form of transcendental happiness can be achieved, before enlightening epiphanies can arrive, there must first be a conscious knowing about the state one is in. To have a conscious knowing requires one to drop the spindle, to allow the smoke to clear, to find a stillness where crusty layers peels itself off to reveal bit by bit. Any ambition to speed up the de-layering is again a reincarnation of the spindle-effect that encrusted us. Being able to identify ambition and then set it aside is the giant step.
Clarity can only come when you do not seek it - because the act of seeking creates smokescreens for ourselves. The ambition to seek is the product of the way we were brought up - we were brought up by people who were also brought up to want to achieve more, better, faster, etc. We are merely photocopies of photocopies because we lost our originality the moment culture, traditions, parenting, invasive nurturing stripped us of the freshness and originality we were born alight with and dressed up in the clothes our environmental conditionings find ideal.
If you are wondering how is it possible for us to not conform or to know whether it is right or not to reject tradition, you would have witnessed a product of conditioning in yourself. A baby does not question a lot of things in order to be able to figure out which things comforts it and helps it blossom. The original light in us does not require thought for it is capable of internalizing truths. If something leads to correctness it will gravitate towards that in a natural way, as if following a rhythm. It will crave what it lacks and will reject what doesn't feel right.
If you ask how is it possible that we know something as the Truth without questioning the way towards the Truth? If you can for a moment imagine yourself, as a baby, born with light and truth within you, you would be capable of following the natural rhythm of Truth because you are a part of it. You would be able to follow it the way your thirsty mouth turn towards the nipple and sucks vigorously at it. You will know It because it is You. Truth was you until conditioning tucked it away, wrapped it up, layer upon layer.
That which I call conditioning is simply the collective of the unquestioned mind. I see clearly now what the Buddha means by, to question. It is not to question Truth, or to ask questions to eliminate things so as to arrive at some destination. It is simply to question what YOU have come to accept as the truth! Truth itself does not need to be questioned because it Is. It is the untruths which have been accepted or thought of as Truth that needs examining.
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