Politics of the Mind

Recently, we saw North and South Korea leaders met in a peaceful manner in order to sign the historic end of the Korean War. In Malaysia, we see the change of government from the leading Barisan Nasional to the coalition Pakatan Harapan party for the first time in Malaysian history. Anyway, the point of this article isn’t about politics… Lol! It is about how everything changes when something we perceive to be positive and beneficial occurs. 

I am not out to deny the positive effects for these historical events. I am here to talk about how we perceive the world based on our projections of how things are. According to the leading psychologists, we view the world 97 percent of the time according to our memory of things and not based on direct perception. Our memory of things have the most powerful effect of coloring our perception and judgement of things. That would mean that we pass heavy judgement on everything that happen to us based on what we had experienced prior to this. 

In fact, we don’t realize but our reaction to experiences is heavily dependant on our memory of things. Hence, if we had a lot of bad memories, we grow up to have phobias and negative perception of ourselves and others. This explains why children who are abused often grow up to be abusers and why children often resemble their parents emotionally and on how they handle emotions. Furthermore, most parents often indoctrinate their children based on cultural norms. 

An example of a cultural norm like success in today’s world is normally defined by academic studies, a corporate or business career, boyfriend, girlfriend, marriage and wealth. These are attainable for some people but they don’t necessarily bring happiness ultimately because it takes tremendous amount of effort and time to acquire and when we have it, they often betray us in the end because it doesn’t last or it does not fulfil our expectations. In the end, we spend our whole lives chasing them and its never enough.

After years of pursuit, we find that we gain nothing out of it and in fact, it does nothing to prepare us for life’s final journey. Hence, if we really look at the world with eyes of Dharma, we will see the reality of projections and strive to find true meaning with our spiritual practice. I hope this explanation and example help you guys out there and if it doesn’t, feel free to drop a question or two. That’s all for now.