On Trusting the Mind

To quote Chuang Tzu one of the foremost Chinese philosopher, “I dreamt I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?”, profoundly expresses one of the ways of how the human mind should deal with the transient nature of all things.

 Here's another popular anecdote. Let's say you are asleep and dreamt that you are a rich man surrounded by extensive material wealth. Suddenly, someone appears in the same dream to say that you are neither rich nor wealthy and that you are merely dreaming. You will immediately disagree and will not hesitate to point out that all the wealth around you is tangible and therefore very real. But when you awake, you realize that it was just a dream. So, as Chuang Tzu says it makes one wonder whether we are really a human being going through this life, or something else dreaming of what we are now.

 So, isn’t everything based on the mind's perception? One may argue in great length that if we can see and touch something, it is real. But it is the mind that does it and it depends on the five body senses to gather data, interpret, compute, store and use them as references to process new incoming data in a continuous process. Therefore, anything that our senses can detect whether tangible (material) or intangible (ethereal) and accept as real, depends on the mind.

 Then again, I'm always asked, “Why is there so many types of ghost, and why does a Chinese ghost differ from an European ghost, a Malay or an Indian ghost?” Obviously they're all different, because your mind says so. It depends on the data (image) in your mind of what ghosts look like. A Chinese would have several versions including one dressed in courtly Mandarin attire and goes around hopping on both feet and a European would have others including vampires and werewolves etc…. So, when somebody shouts “Ghost” in the dark, a Chinese could expect a hopping Mandarin, and a European, a vampire or werewolf, or in general some fiction horror movie image.

 Another proposition, can you describe a color that doesn't exist (or you've not seen)? Technically, you can't, because it's not in your mind's data-bank. The moment you can (e.g. by mixing the colors you know), the color then exists, at least in your mind to be described – a paradox!

What then am I trying to say? Here, I'd like to quote part of Mr. Ng’s comment on my post 'On Karma', “… someday it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days. All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else. Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance. It does not matter what you owned or what you owe.”

 Now, that's the real picture ... which lies beyond the mind.

On Adultery

Often, I've been asked what my views on adultery are. To that, I feel there are some things marriage councilors don't always tell us before a couple signs on the dotted line "for the better or worse" or even after adultery has been committed. Most marrying couples in their self-induced bliss are usually oblivious to the fact that the union comes as a package. Like everything else in marriage from health to sickness, bliss to grief, pleasure to pain, adultery is one. There is of course, no "bed of roses" and getting to "happily ever after" is hard work indeed. Then again, at the point of exchanging those devout and ideal vows, none would be attentive enough to listen anyway. Least to say, the vows don't guarantee partnerships' successes even under the most stringent of cultural and social rules.

Henceforth, when adultery occurs; often for the victim the cookie crumbles. But if one understands what the contract entails should have no reason to panic. It takes a mature mind to do this and by and large, the younger the couple, the more susceptible they are to delusive and idealistic thinking. In such a partnership, accepting the good and bad, positives and negatives and rights and wrongs, is a question of individual values and judgments at whichever point of time. Even during the aftermath, the contract also neither calls for the salvaging nor rescinding of a relationship.

However, under the traumatic conditions of adultery, the natural response to this type of view would be, "It's easier said than done". But think again ... although one's happiness is at stake, life doesn't stop there. There are multitudes of the hurt finding contentment after the impact wears out. Suffice to say that at the beginning, getting married is a decision, and now it is still a decision to resolve the predicament.

In the process of surviving and recovering from the emotional crisis, all other matters should be held secondary so as not to cloud the mind from formulating a painful and/or practical solution. Difficult, but necessary since it is also going to be an endurance exercise as well. Similarly, certain religious, social and cultural “should be or must be" values have to be temporarily shelved from influencing the decision that is to be made. But always remember, the sun shines tomorrow and the next day no matter what direction the solution takes. Life has to go on ... pieces to be picked up ... emotional housecleaning administered ... lifestyles revamped ... and the good thing is, time is a great healer ...