A Personal Belief About Beliefs

Belief is an amazing thing. While belief is neither a fact nor an empirical, it can hold great sway among many of us.

Perhaps this is because belief brings order to a chaotic mind, a chaotic world.

Belief decrees, and so demarcates, and while it arranges, it is divisive. The more there is of one kind of it - the more likely that those who stand apart from that kind of belief may be excluded by it. Often, those who make the choice to question a belief, or challenge it, put themselves at great risk of exclusion or derision by those greater in number who stand by it.

Belief is perception. It is not reality. Often we forget. But then, what is reality but a prevailing agreement of the most common perceptions. So, widespread belief can immolate reality with its fervour.

Thankfully, belief is known to evolve. Change. It must. Because the human mind is a fickle thing.

And that which finds home within, like a belief, may also change. Evolve.

Yet, belief would rather forget that the only constant is change. Mostly, belief hates this . Because belief believes it exists to bring order to a chaotic mind. Belief thrives in diplomacy, which advocates order. But belief does not need diplomacy. For when a belief is strong enough, diplomacy is a hindrance. Like a stampeding horde, a popular belief that has never been challenged will trample underfoot those who linger in inquiry or doubt. Or even in diplomacy.

Belief unchallenged is a ball of snow allowed to roll down a slope. Belief unchallenged may grow bigger, but that does not mean it will grow better. A snowball, no matter the size, is always just a snowball. It cannot pretend to have turned into an igloo. That needs work. Needs craft. Needs inquiry and discussion to shape and mould it into something more useful.

That’s my belief. What’s yours?

Wake Up The Village!

MM asked:

How do we change mindsets towards women so that they are no longer the victims of violence and abuse?

The word "abuse" isn't exclusive to physical harm. Many women around the world, across races, religions, income, class & cultures, are equally subjected to psychological, social or mental abuse, which are sometimes even more damaging than physical violence.

How can sexist, derogatory & abusive attitudes be overcome?

What role do the rest of us play in this process of change?

So I answered:

Mindsets and attitudes can only change with education and illumination, over time ... and each of us have the responsibility to do what we can when we see injustice of any kind.

We must speak out because evil triumphs when good people do nothing.

We must be proactive - teach young people to be empathetic and compassionate. Give them the awareness to recognize injustice, and how it can damage and hurt.

Bring home the truth of what hurts and destroys, what is evil and what aids the negative actions of others.

Young children should be nurtured on parables and fables, all those great stories that can fuel the imagination and strike a chord in the heart.

Those neurons must be sensitized from a young age. And this also happens when children themselves are subjected to care and compassion by adults. Are we spending enough time with them on these story-lessons?

Parents need to spend precious, quality time with their children. Adults need to set strong and clear examples. Abberant adults should be taken to task by those who witness their intolerable actions, especially when children are about.

It is true that it takes a whole village to bring up a child, and our villages need to come together fast!


Then I decided to take advantage of Yahoo! Answers:

Question:

I am unable to stay focussed on goals that I want to achieve. What can I do?

Question Details:

Too many ideas, not enough cerebral RAM or physical energy. I seem to be chasing my own tail on many things. I know that once I set my mind to it, I can make things happen. The universe has been good to me that way - providing many opportunities, and connecting me with wonderful helpful and generous friends and family. But I still feel unfulfilled. What's really missing?

I can't wait to see what answers come back.

Wake up the Village Idiot!

That Damn 4-Letter Word

Love is a feeling. Feelings pass.

For love to remain eternal, it needs commitment and sacrifice.

Love is a journey where the destination is happiness. Getting there needs a roadmap.

The journey may be pleasant, or long and arduous, but it is the journey of trials and tribulations, and where struggling gives it meaning and depth.

Arriving there at the destination isn’t as important as how the journey is enjoyed and endured.

Love is a banquet which leaves you filled and contented at the end. It is made up of many ingredients, brought together with great effort.

The flavours mingle and co-exist, and hitting the right flavours at the right times create beautiful melodies of sensations, and of memories.

Love is best endured when there is a sense of duty, like a religion that demands ritual and responsibility.

Love is not about you. Love is about the other - the one that you love.

And yet to be loved, we must love our own self the most.

Because when we do, we are attendent to our inner, most true thoughts and feelings, and we are then able to communicate them in all honesty and without agenda to that person whom we say we love.

The purest of all love after all is honesty unclothed. Like a new born before its mother.

(For B, and maybe for W - written on 11 July 2006)

The Race Forward

In Malaysia, the Malays mostly think I'm Chinese, the Chinese mostly think I'm Malay - neither wants to have me as their own. I have also been mistaken for a Chindian. A frequent mistake is that I am Sarawakian Iban.

In Australia, I was called both Paki and Nip (Japanese) by Skinheads looking for a fight. My classmates at high-school nicknamed me 'Refo' - short for 'refugee', and accorded with the greatest affection.

At university in Australia in the early '80s I had a stranglehold on any coloured part that was up for auditions during my theatre arts course - playing Gautama Buddha, Red Indian Chief, Pakistani schizophrenic, a black sex slave (??), a Chinese cook in the Wild West, and a Russian of Mongol extraction in Fiddler On The Roof. I think these days, most white Australians would be able to tell the Asian races apart.

In Dijon, France a beautiful mademoiselle once insisted that I was facially too expressive to be fully Asian. I found that an interesting echo of the inscrutable Oriental.

I don't think a mixed-race person is more attractive - just less provocative in that the level of racial specificity is blunted somewhat, and therefore garners greater acceptability across racial lines. Yeah - less provocative: more inclined to 'sameness', and less of 'the other'.



If you ask me Devon Aoki looks distinctly Asian against someone like Nicole Kidman. And I believe I do have Catherine Zeta-Jones and Mariah Carey look-a-likes among my millions of Serani cousins.

IMHO, when those celebrities who look unmistakeably of their non-Caucasian race, can be accepted and deemed attractive and sexy by others outside their race - I think that's when humanity is really moving forward.

And, people - the first Serani's are a result of that cross-cultural/racial acceptance, attraction.and collaboration. :-)

Enough of me.

(I wrote the above piece in response to a SeraniSembang.Org thread referring to a Psychology Today article entitled MIXED RACE, PRETTY FACE: Why we are drawn to exotic beauty. You can read the article by clicking on the thumbnail.)

Perhaps An Answer

(This was written in response to a request that a form be filled to introduce myself to other members when joining a virtual community.)

Is it necessary? Is it necessary to commit myself to what I am, and what I think I am about? Today I think this way. Tomorrow I think that. Somedays I like Alannis Morissette. And once in a while I retreat into the embrace of Nat King Cole. I am as ever changing as change will allow. As growth will construct. As inclination or expediency may destruct.

When I fill out this form I will do it simply out of a sense of duty. Not because I want to. Not because I have to. But because someone asked me and that someone matters. And, to refuse to do so seems like saying "Yes" when the answer should be "Maybe". To complete the form would complete me to a fault. I am not ready to be complete. Nor do I wish to be faulty.

This I know:

No matter what I do, say or believe now can hold me hostage - and your form bears down on me like a Chechnyan kidnapper. I fear for flickering images of me atrophying in someone’s mailbox, and then to be re-cast like a bad pirate VCD on someone’s memory. Like a photograph that no longer flatters its subjects. Or like magazines out of time in the doctor’s waiting room. More than that, I do not wish to remain a website profile. I do not wish for the virtual completeness of my being sculpted by my tapping fingers at a moment in time slither away from the grasp of my complicity.

If you want to know me, to really know me, ask me over for tea, coffee, or ... just simply. Let’s have a conversation that ripples along like a brook, winding this way and that through different terrain. Where its twists and turns will sometimes confirm and sometimes contradict your conclusions about me. Yet, give interest to the canvas like swirls on a painterly Vincent.

Yes. If you are my friend, please take time to enjoy the inflections, the pauses, the rise of a brow, the flare of a nostril, the open vowel through a constricted larynx, a hesitant utterance, each one meaning one thing to you and maybe another to me. When sometimes we will concur and sometimes we won’t.

If you are a good friend, we will repeat these rituals to illuminate you, baffle you, reveal truths to you and hide secrets from you. Where pregnant pauses between us will bear greater progeny than paragraph spaces between you and your screen. Is it necessary this form of yours? Can we not just learn to be good friends? Is it really, truly necessary this form of yours?

It turns my reality into roadkill. A rotting carcass slowly becoming something else from what it originally was.

Don’t ask me to fill up a form. I wish to remain formless. And I do not wish to leave a smell.

"Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same".
- Michel Foucault