Arrested in Malaysia? Know your rights!

I’ve never been arrested before, although there have been times I thought I just might be.

With the police seemingly very keen to arrest all sorts of people who are merely embodying democratic principles, while completely ignoring or making excuses for people who should be locked up and the key thrown away, I think this publication is important.

If you can’t memorise it, keep it on your iPhone or whatever so you can refer to it quickly.
Ironically, 4 lawyers were detained briefly while distributing it at a mall - even though they had permission from the mall owners to do so. Read about this incredible story here.

Get your copy of the Red Book: Know Your Rights here.

Rezeki

Some years ago I began to be sensitive to the idea of ‘energy’. Perhaps Lyall Watson’s book ‘Gift of Unknown Things’ started it all rolling way back in 1986. My flatmate (well actually landlord though we seemed more to be flatmates than anything) had a copy of the book and I devoured it.

Then also ‘Supernature’ the book which really launched Lyall’s literary career while just about killing off his scientific one. I guess scientists who set out to find the link between mythology or superstition and science don’t get greeted too warmly in those academic circles.

One story in ‘Gift’ sticks in my mind till today. Well, a few do actually, but this one I have told and retold many times. If I remember correctly, Lyall spent a year in a small community in Indonesia, getting to know the people, their customs and so on. One festival - was it a harvest festival? - he gathered with the villagers in a rice field late one evening, waiting for the signal from the village headman to begin the festivities. The headman in turn waited for a signal from the ‘Ketua Adat’ or head of customs and traditions, who seemed to be listening to the heavens. Lyall concentrated hard and thought he eventually could hear the wash of the stars in that brilliant twinkling night.


Then, the Ketua Adat heard something, waved his arm and a big drum was sounded, signaling the start of the celebration. All through the night and for the next 24 hours, there was music and dancing and merriment. And that big drum. It sounded out its own rhythm, completely out of time from the music, yet consistent and regular. Lyall took a note of how many times the drum was sounded in an hour or so and thought no more of it until some years later when he was doing some reading on Resonance.

It seems the Earth has a heartbeat - every so often, there is a peak in all the vibrations and the Earth, as a complete entity, lets out a heartbeat as it were.

What was startling was that the frequency of that beat was exactly the same as the frequency of that big drum in the middle of that rice field in Indonesia.

Somehow, these simple folk could tap in to the rhythm of the Earth. It was that which the Ketua Adat was listening to that night.

I have never been sensitive to that beat, but in the last decade or so I have realised I am indeed sensitive to other things. I am completely uneducated in this area - despite the fact I once owned a holistic business which offered yoga classes, tarot and angel card readings sold ‘new age’ books and where I practiced as a hypnotherapist.

In the last few years though I have become more attuned to the ‘feel’ of a person or a place. Acting completely on instinct, I’ve become sensitised towards the energy of someone or someplace. People and places give off signals which I interpret in my own way - some people give off good ‘vibes’ and other don’t. Some places are great to work in, others to relax in and so on.

When Mei and I got married and moved to the flat we now occupy, it felt to be a great place to live. There was, and continues to have, a great sense of calm and warmth. Certainly I have never felt more loved or loving in any other place.

And yet, that energy changes - it is affected by people and things. Not long after we moved in, I felt a slight negativity I the air. I put up with it for some time as it really wasn’t a big deal. But eventually I figured it was time to develop other skills so we chose and bought a Singing Bowl - one we chose after testing quite a few. This one sounded just right - completely on instinct of course.

We made it peal and sing and did our own instinctive ‘space clearing’ and the flat felt so different after that.

More recently, I had a friend come over who just about swims in negativity - to her, everything had a ‘no’ or ‘but’ or ‘cannot’. Even with my positivity, I made no dent in that aura she insisted on carrying about her person.

The next day, I could feel remnants of it hanging about the place and so for the first time in months took the singing bowl off the shelf, walked around the flat and cleared the space.

And how that bowl sang that day! It was almost as if it was rising to the challenge with gusto.

‘Energy’ is an interesting idea. I’ve walked into flats and offices which have just felt so ‘dead’. And invariably these places are associated with problems, illness and so on. And yet, it can be so easy to make incremental changes.

One good way is to do what the Malay kampung folk have done for generations. Their kampung houses are closed up at night to prevent animals and other unwelcome guests from coming in. In the morning - and those are very early mornings indeed as people prepare for the Azan Subuh or early morning prayers - the wooden shutters are flung open to let in Rezeki or Good Fortune.

It isn’t just the quality of air in a kampung, for I get the same effect living in a flat in Singapore. You should try it too - fling open the windows of your flat early in the morning and stand there for a minute or two, breathing deeply. Make sure it’s early. Close your eyes if you want to. There’s a freshness in the air, the smell of grass or morning dew perhaps, which invigorates. And energises. It clears the head and sets the tone for a great day ahead.

Bucket List Part 2

Is your life just a short measure?

“You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.”

I love this line. We often talk about measuring up to others, or being unfairly measured by some - usually our parents. Well, here is a way to work out if we lead lives that ultimately ‘Bring Joy To Others’.

Look at the people who look up to you. What sort of people are they? What values do they espouse? What, in the greater scheme of things, difference do they make to the world around them?

Come to think of it,
what difference do you make to the world around you?

I did a quick audit, had a brief check-through of my friends and family, ascertained (thankfully) that quite probably at least a few of them do indeed look up to me, and then tried to answer those few questions above.

Perhaps I have been lucky, or maybe I have indeed chosen wisely, for the people I have included in my list are on the whole, a bunch of people I would measure myself against most readily. I may not reach their heights, but I have certainly tried to emulate their integrity, their openness, their dedication to family and friends, their living commitment to those around them. I recognise too their frailties, just as I have begun to accept my own.

I think we would do well to occasionally look around us at the people who have chosen to be close to us and who see us as mentors or role models and try to see what it is within them that has drawn them to us. In there will be a tiny picture of ourselves and a good way to work out if we are indeed worthy of their measure.


And in the end…


“When he died, his eyes were closed and his heart was open”

I think back to my father who died twenty-two years ago after an all-too-short struggle with lung cancer. I was there when we heard he had cancer but I wasn’t when he went through the gamut of emotions that are companions of one’s final journey. He died four months after we found out, and two months before I could defer my overseas studies to come home and spend some time with him.

It cut me up to not have been by his side, and more, to not have had the experience of a man-to-man relationship with him in my 21st year.

But I take away more than a slice of respect for the man I loved. A month or so after he’d finally realised there was no hope, he said to the parish priest who’d dropped by one day ‘You know, I am at peace, and I can go. Any time.’

This was a man who’d done much, and seen much. Not in a materialistic way though for that was not his way, just as it is not mine. The things he’d done connected him to nature and to people. Perhaps a little anecdote would explain the kind of man he was:

Dad used to take the boys on a drive to the East Coast every year or so when we were kids. In those days it was a 12-hour ride and we stopped frequently. Once, we took a little detour near the hilly Bentong Pass. This side trip took us down into a valley and bypassed the slow timber-lorry filled Bentong Pass, at least for a few miles.

We stopped by a road-side stall to buy some fruit and when I looked up at a hill nearby where the new highway was being built, I spied two men on scooters pointing down at our car. They mounted their bikes, roared off then reappeared some moments later on the little village road we were on. They came speeding up, stopped, jumped off and greeted my Dad warmly ‘Uncle Cheong!’. Here in the middle of the country, miles from any town, were two men who’d met my Dad, become friends and who rushed to meet him when they spied his green Peugeot 404 stopped by the road.

That was Dad - a simple chap who never made a pile of money, but made heaps of friends.

And when he died, yes, his eyes were closed but his heart was indeed open. It always had been.

So, after the movie ended and I’d wiped away my tears - yes, yes, I can be immensely sentimental and a real softie - I picked up my errr laptop and started on these two blog posts.

And a bucket list.

But this one’s different. No, I have no intention of dying anytime soon and this list is not for a dying man. This list is for a living man. To keep him on track and to make sure he lives a full, rewarding life. One that would help me answer ‘Yes’ if indeed I am asked
“Have you found joy in your life?
Has your life brought joy to others?”

Maybe you’d like to do the same?

Bucket List Part 1

My thoughts have drifted over the idea of death recently. I guess it started with that whole conversation we had in Johor when Johann, Joe, Brian and I went cycling there recently. This was where we talked about how great it would be to plan our own funeral.

My Facebook status message proclaiming the same attracted a fair amount of comment, some of which was surprising.

In the couple of weeks since, there have been the deaths of a senior minister in Singapore and the very tragic suicide of Tyler Clementi to occupy my thoughts.

Then last night, after my evening plans were disrupted and I chose to stay home for some quiet time on my own rather than join Mei and some friends for a birthday celebration, I decided to put on a DVD I’d bought some years ago but had never watched: The Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.


Maybe it was a touch predictable, but a movie starring either of these two cannot be anything but brimming with excellent acting. What more one with both of them? Nicholson’s edgy, just this side of over-the-top characterisation fit the role well and contrasted nicely with Freeman’s quieter, more understated style.

More importantly to me, the theme sat perfectly with my recent thoughts of mortality and the impermanence of life. There were a couple of stand-out moments in the movie for me, most notably these:

Is it really Egyptian?
The two questions you get asked when you reach Heaven’s Gate or wherever it is they believed you went to, that is.

“Have you found joy in your life?
Has your life brought joy to others?”

We’ve made our lives more and more complex. Our day-to-day is an amalgam of career (with its own intricate mix of goals, interaction, satisfaction, remuneration and so on), home, children, recreation, familial obligations and so on. We’ve long recognised we need to return to basics, to somehow rediscover the simple purity we had at childbirth, and to divest ourselves of the bits that bring us to the edge of stress-induced paroxysm of panic and nervous ruination.

We attach importance to so many things that really don’t matter in the greater scheme of things. Douglas Adams discussed it in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when he described the perpetual human state of unhappiness:
“Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

How succinctly and well put.

To understand these two questions on a deeper level, I guess we’ll need to examine what actually ‘joy’ is. For the purpose of brevity and because this is my blog, I shall simply think of ‘joy’ as a state of pure contentment that is divorced from external causes and influences i.e. it isn’t showing the middle finger to the driver who cut you up, or bumping into your ex when you’re out with your new, drop-dead-gorgeous, ultra-rich, uber-sexy girlfriend. Nor is it winning the lottery or that multi-million dollar account you;ve been chasing for 6 months. OK, you get the idea of what it is NOT?

So what is it?

Well, I guess it’s different for everyone, but perhaps it can be described as that feeling you get the moment every part of your being connects simultaneously and completely with every part of the universe. That point when you suddenly understand who you are, and why you’re here in the first place. And that it has nothing to do with small green pieces of paper (heck in our currency that’s only five bucks), or the idiot in the Mercedes, or your ex.

It’s that moment when everything makes sense, and you can see and feel and understand that despite suffering that may be around you, or death, or destruction, that you are indeed one with everything you can see or hear or feel or touch or smell.

So, if we were to condense our life’s purpose into two questions, I guess these two would be it.
Many have said it, sang about it, led people towards it, even preached about it - and some in the process have moved many small green pieces of paper from other people’s pockets into their own - and indeed some of my favourite lines have been in Lennon’s songs and Richard Bach’s books and so on.

But at the end of the day, or perhaps at the end of our lives, what really matters is whether we, personally, can answer ‘Yes!’ to both.

Part 2 coming up soon…

It's my own funeral after all!

My Facebook status message about planning my own funeral elicited quite a few comments and I thought I would paste here some screen captures of them.