27. A JOURNEY OF A DIFFERENT KIND.

From Om to Ow


My love affair with the sarong is the Malaysian in me.

This marks a departure from the usual trip........this time I shall take a narcissistic one. This page will be my photo gallery. If not now, when? If not I, who?

My fellow Singaporean bloggers currently making waves are some sweet young things. They've used their youth, sex appeal and colourful language to make their blogs controversial. Kudos to them for such savvyness - there's hope yet in our young 'uns.

I'm up against tough competition - who would want to read my blog out of the millions circulating out there? Don't know, don't care. This is for my own gratification.

26. BACK TO SCHOOL..............

....in BATA shoes! This was a favourite refrain in the old days. Just before school reopens for the new term, this shoe manufacturer will have the same old ad in the papers. Parents and their kids will troop down to the shoe shop to pick up their new pair of white canvas rubber soled shoes, for everybody wore the same style as part of their school uniform. The girls had their ballerina flats and the boys, lace-ups called Badminton Master. It was a big thing for the whole family and there was much excitement on this outing.

I found myself back in school this month, this time as a teacher assisting the head teacher in an ESL class at an international school for foreign students. My students are teenagers from China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. They came to learn English from native speakers of the language. Many are left with guardians.

Their families are well-to-do for it costs a tidy sum to attend an international school in Singapore and to pay the guardian to keep an eye on them. Most of my kids have just arrived for the new academic year and one of the first things they did was to turn their dark hair blond, add colourful streaks, equip themselves with bags and shoes bearing cool youthful labels from surf shops which these youngsters love. They try to look with it with their spiky coloured hair, leather wrist bands, rubber bangles and metal studs.

My kids from China and Taiwan have adopted English first names! They've 'misplaced' their spectacles and have switched to coloured contact lenses. One just had a hair extension added!

They struggle with pronunciation and intonation. Some days they rest their heads on their desks and fall asleep. They text on their mobiles during class. If we were'nt firm enough, they would be on their laptops playing games. After 3 warnings, it's detention for an hour after school. They're smart kids but at an age when they are'nt too enthusiastic about school.

Once away from the confines of home and family and their society, the kids savour real freedom. They express this through colourful hair, weird hairdos, pierced ears. I'm quite sure, by the time the 2nd semester comes around, I would see more pierced body parts and possibly their 1st tattoo. What started as a show of rebellion or individuality has now become conformist everywhere.

The nicest thing I see is, the boys from Taiwan and China are buddies. The girls from Japan and Korea chat and joke in fractured English - they get along so well. Away from their home countries, they are not caught up in the games their politicians and local media play to keep themselves in business. Their rhetoric has always been to play on the emotions of the masses. 

Looking at the kids in a large group at recess, I can't tell them apart, they might as well be just one nationality. Far as I'm concerned, they're citizens of the world.

My exhausted kids during a field trip.

'Let there be moments unexplainable. Let there be a few things that are mysterious, for which you cannot supply any reason. Let there be a few doings for which people will think you are a little crazy' - Osho

25. MOTHER - AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

Mother, ever changing ever new

Mother, the Yin Energy - the female Creative aspect of 'God'

Mother, the Beautiful



 There's only 1 race – the Human Race. Only 1 religion - Truth. To care for the less fortunate members of this one race is akin to caring for one's family members. It is easy to dismiss the poor and downtrodden as 'that's their karma' but it is the karma of the fortunate to help fellow souls evolve.


Mother Earth is home to this Human Race who live on her Body. She's a living, constantly changing organism.

'Mother' suggests nurturing, giving, caring. She has provided us with food from the Earth (Her Body) in the form of seeds, fruits, nuts, roots. There's plenty of water to sustain us (most of Mother's Body is water). Her trees provide shelter and keep the air fresh, for the human mammals need oxygen and Mother's trees, through photosynthesis, take away the poisonous carbon dioxide so detrimental to them. Carbon dioxide is to the trees what oxygen is to the humans. Such perfect balance, only Mother's love is so complete.

Mother never erected fences to separate her children - the divisions, in the form of religions, boundaries and immigration controls were created by the humans and their politics of power, control, dominance, greed, ambition, pride and ego.

Mother Earth's resources belong to the entire Human Race, not to any goverments, individuals or corporations. The wealth reaped by mining her body - on land and sea - is to be shared by all - it has to be given back to society for the larger good. What we have created instead are goverments acting in cahoots with corporations and individuals to form cartels which control supplies and prices.

The human mammals, in their ignorance, have hurt Mother's body. Her arteries are clogged by their pollution of her rivers, streams, her seas. She has a fever - large tracts of her body have been burned to clear land for 'development', and farmers who slash and burn. The smoke and other pollutants are choking her, killing her trees, destroying her forests which support other life forms, poisoning the air.

Under the Earth's crust, Mother is very much alive, with plenty going on. It's not just solid, inert earth and rocks. She's criss-crossed by water-tables and subterranean water bodies. Deeper under, she's real hot, like our own internal bodies - throbbing with heat and vitality. As most of Mother's body is water, so's our own.

The Earth's crust consists of plates which shift with movements by Mother's body, either in subtle ways or through great upheavels like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Our skull bones are like that when young, they overlapped and were flexible before they fused with age. Great upheavels by Planet Earth are Mother's attempts to heal her body, to balance it, to right the damage.
 
Mother's larger body is a constantly changing landscape. Our bodies change all the time too - cells die continously, new ones replace them. Stars in our Universe implode all the time, new ones replace them. This physical, created, material universe is the macrocosm - the big picture - of which we are the microcosm - the small picture. As above, so below.

'Mother' is the female creative aspect of 'God' - the one we can see, feel, experience. She presides over the physical, material world. 'Father' presides over the spiritual realm. 'Father' is the authority, the disciplinarian who passes judgements and punishments according to the Law of Karma, which determines our next birth. (Link: Post 24 -The Beast In Man)

Absolutely nothing remains the same forever and every single thing including our bodies, is in a constant state of flux. It is a Law of the Universe that Change is the only constant. This applies to our daily living as well - from ways of thinking and doing, to reforms by goverments, corporations and schools, a paradigm shift is required. Change the gestalt. It is us who will inherit the Earth.


There is no religion higher than TRUTH - The Theosophical Society

24. THE BEAST IN MAN

Reading about and watching the images of the hurricane's sweep through New Orleans, I'm reminded of William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

Citizens of the most advanced, 'civilised', wealthiest and most powerful nation on this planet, degenerated into beasts. All Hell broke loose and released its dark and dangerous denizens who were previously ordinary folks going about their daily grind.

The human mammals living on Mother Earth's organic body - for 'Mother' is an organism - are far from being an evolved species. A huge number are still stuck on the bottom-most rung of the evolutionary ladder.

All around the globe, we see acts of extreme violence and destruction - by human mammals on their fellow mammals and their environments. This has gone on for centuries but if one thinks back to just the last 10 years, one recalls how creatively the forces of evil manifest itself.

9/11 was planned over a period of time and executed with precision. At my doorstep, in Indonesia, some 8 years back, when the country was thrown into upheaval, ordinary and young Indonesian mammals went on a stampede and looted, beheaded, raped their fellow Indonesians who not too long ago, were their neighbours and friendly neighbourhood grocers. The victims were chiefly Indonesian Chinese, Indonesian Christians or of a certain ethnic tribe.
 
Any excuse is a good excuse for mob violence - in a large unruly, anonymous group, one gets away with murder. Its a form of catharsis - for those who do not have the freedom to express themselves due to religious, cultural, social and family conditioning.

Watching the mobs on TV in Iraq, the Gaza, New Orleans, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, more recently, South Thailand, Paris and Sydney, one sees wolf and hyena packs attacking, drawing blood, chopping off limbs.........the beast in the human mammal is hard at work in a feeding frenzy.

Thought forms are creative - as a man thinks, so he becomes. It takes lots of thinking to plan and execute a war plan, likewise, to think up different creative methods to destroy, torture and break the spirits of the 'enemies'. WMD, chemical and biological weapons, land mines, originated from the fertile, imaginative minds of the human mammals. In times of war, whole nations are involved......hundreds and thousands of human mammals are contributing their energies - chiefly negative.

In some castles in the UK and Europe, on display in the dungeons and catacombs, are handmade wooden contraptions used for different styles of torture. In Vietnam, the war museum has exhibits showing how the war was won by tiger traps and narrow underground tunnels. As the human mammal thinks, designs and plans, his hands manifest and bring to life those thought forms.

The human mammal has the freedom of choice and free will to invent something - anything - after which, it's up to him to use his inventions for good or evil purposes - to save and heal or to destroy and maim. As one scans the globe, the choices made have gone terribly and horribly wrong.

In post 'Living the Teachings', I've jotted down my observations. I'm convinced that unevolved souls living in perpetual darkness life after life, will continue to reincarnate in bodies and minds that don't function any more - such souls are trapped in their body prisons in which they're unable to express themselves, to experience life and learn its lessons in order to attain freedom from the cycle of births and deaths.......for physical life in this manifested world is a school for the soul.... with each rebirth, the grade.

Still others will reincarnate in some war-torn or famine ravaged lands or some God-forsaken corner where existence is just a living hell.

Physical life in this material, manifested world is Hell and we are born into Hell to work out our karmas. Hitler and Pol Pot were each a Satan during their tenure, their underlings were their demons, devils, call them whatever, (Orcs even!)  and there, we have corners of Hell. There are many examples all over the world throughout history and till today, different pockets of the globe are playing out the cruel, destructive, ignorant acts of unevolved souls.

 
Incidentally, as I see it, the Orcs, in the Lord of the Rings - 2 Towers, forging their weapons of war in the bowels of the Earth, is an allegory of the above. The Orcs were once Elfs who went down the slippery road to damnation due to choices made.

The Thinker 1880:The Thinker is one of Rodin’s most famous sculptures which captures so well the human struggle to understand. Rodin wrote that the Thinker was conceived when he was designing the Gates of Hell. The Thinker was to be Dante who was contemplating the poem and characters from the Divine Comedy. Later, he decided that the man should be naked, seated on a rock, his fist against his teeth, thinking. He is trying to understand, to think so very hard that he will be able to go from dreamer to creator. Note the man’s unrefined facial features, but deeply felt emotion.


I THINK, THEREFORE I AM - DESCARTES