Sunday, June 19, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Life presents us with an ongoing stream of experience — with experiences of situations and events, of interactions of all kinds with our environment and the other people in it. These experiences are multidimensional, involving visual images, sounds, physical contact, sometimes smell and taste. We attach emotional reactions to them. Some experiences feel good; we are drawn toward them and want more like that. Others feel bad and we try to avoid them. We tend to think of experience as something that just “happens to us” as we go through life — the automatic result of the events and situations in which we find ourselves. It doesn’t feel like something over which we have much direct control, except by taking action to change the situation being experienced.
It’s really much more complex than that. You have a great deal more control over your ongoing experience than you may realize or acknowledge, and many aspects of experience that seem determined by external events actually result from choices you make. These choices are automatic and unconscious, for the most part, which is why they don’t feel like your choices, But they are. The more you understand that, and the better you understand the mechanisms by which you make those choices, the more control you will have over your life.
You compose your experience on an ongoing moment-to-moment basis. You do this by filtering and selecting bits and pieces of information from the much richer stream of information in which you are constantly immersed. You combine those bits and pieces with information and structure from your past experience to create your current experience. The kind of life you have — happy or sad, secure or fear-filled, bland or exciting, meaningless or rewarding — may ultimately be determined more by the way you manage that creative process than by the external circumstances you encounter.
Think about watching a movie. At first glance, this seems like a passive experiences. You sit and watch as the movie rolls by. Yet movie watching is really a very active process. The viewpoint you adopt — the filter through which you watch — plays a major role in the experience with which you leave the theater. Consider some different filters and the experiences they might produce.
- You might identify with one particular character, experiencing events through her eyes, sharing her fear, joy, excitement, etc.
- You might watch the same scenes as an outside observer with no sense of personal involvement, seeing them as events happening to other people.
- You might ignore the story altogether, concentrating instead on technical aspects of the moviemaking such as lighting, camera work, or set design.
- Or, realizing that there’s really nobody really up there — no people, places, or events, just patterns of colored lights on a white wall — you might just sit back and enjoy the light show.
Different filters produce very different experiences. The first may lead to an intensely personal participation in the story. The second might be less personal but still very empathetic. Both of these, though different, flow from the basic story the movie tells. The third filter focuses not on that story, per se, but on how it is told — on the craft of the moviemaker. The final filter ignores both the story and how it is told, simply taking in and responding to the raw flow of visual pattern that the movie provides.
You may choose your filter consciously or unconsciously. You might go to the movie with the intent of identifying with a particular character, or you might simply find yourself drawn into that experience as the movie progresses. If you work in the movie industry, you might want to learn from or critique the directing, editing or costuming, or you might find yourself unable to step out of your professional role and into the story itself. But whether you choose your filter consciously or unconsciously, you are making a choice. The more conscious you are of that choice, the more you control will have over your experience, and the greater your chances for a satisfying experience.
The same is true of your experience of life. You encounter and participate in a stream of events, like scenes in a movie, which seem to “just happen” to you. But those events do not completely determine your experience. You experience a filtered and interpreted version of the events in which you emphasize (and possibly distort) some aspects while you downplay (or filter out) others. This process of filtering and interpreting has as much influence on your ultimate experience, as do the events themselves.
Imagine, for example, attending a dinner party. On arriving, you mill around having a couple of drinks and making small talk. Then you sit down for dinner. You eat, the plates are taken away, and dessert and coffee served. You talk some more, and then those plates are taken away and you leave and go home.
What was your experience? As with the movie, there are different filters you might apply to the dinner party. You might focus on the food, making the dinner primarily a gastronomic experience. You might focus on your conversation with your dinnertime companions, letting the food play a secondary role. You may be interested in the content of the conversation, or you may be using it for other ends such as cementing business relationships or finding a new love interest. You might give considerable attention to the setting — the furniture, dinnerware, etc. — or you might give it very little. You might observe a large number of people, or devote most of your attention to one or two. Your overall experience of the dinner party will flow from the way you make these choices.
This is not to say, of course, that life is the same as watching a movie. The movie scenes roll by in their predetermined order; the only choices you have are how to experience them. In life, you don’t just observe but you also act. You respond to events and that response affects what happens next. Your choice of where to sit at dinner and whom you talk with will affect the flow of your experiences in ways that have no counterpart in the movie. Life is, as computer people say, “interactive.”
That interactivity goes much deeper than your conscious responses. Composing experience involves choices you are not aware of making, choices you may not even think of as choices at all, such as which muscles you tense when you’re under stress, how you orient yourself in gravity, or the breadth of your awareness. These choices can significantly impact aspects of your experience that you may think are beyond your control, such as the ease or difficulty with which you move, the competency or lack thereof you feel under stress, and even your overall sense of security, or anxiety.
You may have learned growing up that life is difficult, and that you need to work hard to accomplish anything. If so, you may habitually use more effort than necessary in everything you do. You may hold your breath and stiffen your chest when you read something difficult, make a presentation to a client, or work at your computer. This extra effort is a bit like riding the brake when you drive. It diminishes the performance of the vehicle and creates unnecessary wear and tear. But it accomplishes nothing, except perhaps to validate the belief that life is hard, and make life harder than it needs to be.
Extra tension and effort also contribute to many common sources of pain and limitation, such as back problems, the epidemic of repetitive stress injury currently associated with computer usage, even the increasing stiffness and decreasing mobility that we normally blame on aging. This isn’t to say that you “choose” those ills directly. Rather, you make choices that contribute to and support them, without realizing that you are doing so. You really don’t have to do it that way.
This extra effort and tension can even affect your sense of security and emotional well-being. Your most basic support comes from the solidity of the earth beneath you. Your sense of safety and security is intimately tied in with feeling that support, and unnecessary tensions in your body reduce your ability to do so. On the one hand, not feeling the ground contributes to anxiety, because you feel insecure and unsupported. On the other hand, anxiety diminishes your sense of contact with the ground, because you respond to it by tensing and lifting yourself away from the ground. The tension and anxiety create a self-amplifying feedback loop in which each feeds the other. If this feedback loop becomes habitual, you may experience it as on ongoing sense of angst and insecurity.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Miracles Do Happen
I'm a radiographer (Aussie version of an X-ray technician) in a small private practice. A patient whose doctors had just discovered he had bowel cancer came to me for a CT scan and, unfortunately, the result was not good, with huge metastases in his liver. Once this type of cancer has reached that stage it's usually only a matter of time before the end.
He suspected the truth and even though it's not my place to discuss the results with the patients, while waiting for his family to come and collect him we had a chat. I told him about another patient whose first scan showed tumors on both kidneys that were inoperable and a sure death sentence who'd gone to a Naturopath-MD near our practice. Set on a path of a healthy diet, meditation, visualization and a lot of mindpower, this man had astounded us all. About eight months and three scans later, the tumors had totally disappeared.
I told the current patient that miracles do happen. He asked for a pen and paper, wrote down those three words and stuck the note in his shirt pocket, and asked for the name of the Naturopath-MD.
After the conservative treatment of bowel surgery and chemotherapy, he returned for a follow-up scan, and his liver had improved far more than expected. This, he believed, was due to the alternative treatment supplementing the conservative.
Over the next few months he returned for regular follow-up scans. The last time I saw him I was absolutely thrilled to find only a trace of the biggest metastasis left. He did come back once more, unfortunately while I was on vacation. But he asked the office staff to give me a message. Apparently he patted his pocket and said, "Tell her I still read it every day." And yes, his last scan was perfectly normal.
Miracles do happen.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
On men pleasing women in bed — Dina Zaman
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
A dream of Malaysian unity — CKL
MAY 31 — I have read with sadness the many letters you have published regarding Malaysia’s brain drain. I am one of those, who left Malaysia for many reasons, chiefly, because I did not see any future for my children in a country which had become increasingly racist, moving from moderate to fundamentalist Islamic and also increasingly intolerant.
To those who say that I am unpatriotic and that I should stay on to help change the country, I tell you that it cannot be changed! Whilst working as a professional in Malaysia, I also served for 14 years in the Territorial Army of Malaysia (Rejimen Askar Wataniah), rising to my last rank of Major.
Rejimen Askar Wataniah is the army reserves of Malaysia and we undergo weekend military training every fortnight. During those years, not only was I prepared to risk life and limb for King and country, but I also initiated and helped set up Askar Wataniah societies in mainly Chinese tertiary institutes which recruited Chinese students into the Askar Wataniah. Every year, those societies recruited some 100+ Chinese students into the Rejimen Askar Wataniah, compared with a miserly 10+ in the regular army.
I expected nothing from my efforts because I enjoyed my time in the Askar Wataniah and I was patriotic, then! But I certainly did not expect brickbats and every effort being made by my fellow Malay officers to run me down because they were jealous (my efforts in recruiting such large numbers of Chinese into the Askar Wataniah had caught the attention of the military top brass and also assorted politicians, in particular MCA politicians) or as one of them told me, “perasaan dengki” which Malays always seem to have for those who are more successful than they are.
Perhaps they thought I was taking their rice bowl away from them. Whatever their reasons, it was made very clear to me that I was not one of them, even though I had sweated and toiled with them during military exercises in the jungle and training courses.
That was when I realised that no matter what I do or try to do, I would always be to them, and legally too, firstly a non-Malay, secondly a non-Bumiputera, thirdly a non-Muslim. I was not a Malaysian to them first and foremost!
However, I was lucky. I was a successful professional with skills and experience which could be transferred overseas. I have been working for the past few years in the Middle East, which although fully Islamic, treats me first and foremost, as a Malaysian!
There are only two types of people here, locals and expats. Yes, locals have better conditions and benefits but it is their country, isn’t it? And they certainly don’t discriminate amongst one race or another amongst their citizens.
For those who have been here, you would know that there are many Indians who have settled in this area for many years, ending up as citizens in their adopted countries. There are no discriminatory laws which favour one particular race amongst their citizens above others, unlike in Malaysia!
I was certainly luckier than those non-Malay officers serving in the regular army as, without an exception, every single one of them had tales to tell me about junior Malay officers being promoted over them, even though these non-Malay officers had both the qualifications and experiences which entitled them to promotion!
One particularly poignant tale I heard came from a retired Chinese senior officer who had been passed over many times for promotion even though during the final years of the communist insurgency, he had actually commanded an operation which caught a communist insurgent.
But the non-Malay officers were in many ways luckier than the non-Muslim Bumiputera officers, i.e. Ibans. They are supposed to have the same rights and opportunities as Malay officers, yet they did not receive them. They suffer the same fate as many non-Malay officers in having junior Malay officers with less experience and qualifications being promoted over them!
Just talk to any Iban officer and you will hear their frustration and anger at such discrimination against them, even more anger than non-Malay officers. As they used to moan to me, “Sama bangsa tetapi tidak sama ugama”! To those who have served in the military, you will know exactly what I am talking about, that is, if you have not buried your head in the sand like an ostrich!
Everyone seems to have forgotten how the Malaysian Constitution was achieved. It was negotiated, chewed over and fought over in words at the height of the Emergency, at a time when the British and Malayans thought that the communist terrorists was not winning but certainly not losing either.
The British basically gave Malaya its independence because they had been bankrupted by the Second World War and it was the platform that the communists were ostensibly fighting for. At a stroke, by giving Malaya independence, which was also what Malayans were fighting for, they helped removed any public support for the communists.
Yet, it was not easy to achieve the compromises that the Constitution eventually became. Many Malays and the Islamic parties at that time wanted an Islamic state with limited rights for non-Malays and non-Muslims.
In fact, the biggest dispute was about granting citizenship rights to non-Malays. It was only after intense negotiations with the British acting as referees, that our present Constitution came about.
Please remember, the original Malaysian Constitution gave equal rights for all Malaysians, regardless of race, religion or creed. Islam was recognised as the religion of the country but with no special rights over other religions and original, the Malays were given certain rights over other non-Malays in order that they could achieve economic parity.
Further, ethnic bargains between the Alliance parties were the mainstay of the Constitution. The MIC and MCA agreed to give special rights to the Malays and maintain Malay as the national language. Umno, on the other hand, agreed to allow Chinese and Indian participation in politics and be awarded citizenship. After much discussion, the Constitution was finally agreed upon and became known as the Merdeka Constitution.
Those rights were originally meant to last 15 years after independence and were actually recommended by the Reid Commision, which was set up by the British to look into the requirements for an independent Malaya.
They were meant to act as a walking stick and not a crutch! As to the effect of those, originally 15 years of Malay rights but which later became permanent, well, one has only to look at the Malays in Malaysia, 53+ years after Merdeka, and ask the simple question, are they ready to stand on their feet without any special rights or government assistance?
As to Malaysia’s brain drain, one has only to read the prophetic words of Tun Tan Cheng Lock, the first president of MCA, when in 1943, he wrote:
“The best way of treating the Chinese is to trust them and to give an opportunity to those of them, who have resided in Malaya, especially if they have done so with their families, for a sufficiently long period and have become domiciled in the country, to acquire the right of Malayan citizenship by naturalisation, so as to enable them to identify themselves completely with the interests of the land of their adoption. This is the wisest course to adopt by way of solving the so-called Chinese problem in Malaya in the humble opinion of the writer.
“It is the firm conviction of the writer that the ideal to be aimed at by every community in Malaya is that they should learn to regard themselves as Malayans first irrespective of their race. This should not only for inter-racial unity and harmony such as has so conspicuously characterized, for instance, Switzerland, but would also contribute to the unity, strength and stability of the Malayan State, which would thereby enabled to raise itself (the country) to the rank of a worthy and important partner in the great British Commonwealth of Nations”. (On the occasion of drafting a Memorandum On “Self-Government” in 1943)
And in 1945, he wrote:
“We are strongly of the opinion that the only safe, sound and wise policy for the future Government of Malaya should be to rally to its support those true Malayans, who passionately love the country as their homeland and those who intend to settle there, and who are united by the legitimate aspiration to achieve by proper and constitutional means the ideal and basic objective of Self-Government for a united Malaya within the British Commonwealth and Empire, in which the individuals of all communities are accorded equal rights and responsibilities, politically and economically, including a balanced representation of the various communities in the Government to ensure that no one community will be in a position to dominate or outvote all the others put together”. (On the occasion of submitting a memorial relating to Malaya to Secretary of State for the Colonies, London, in 1945)
Prophetic words indeed, and the chickens have certainly come home to roost!
* We asked readers who have left the country to tell us in their own words why they migrated. This is one of the stories.