Ego, individual or collective, is the root of evil.
Ego is rooted in total identification with the illusion of having or owning. It feeds on pride, greed, fear, hate, jealousy, suspicion, insecurity. Any perceived threat to that illusion will b mostly responded with anger & contempt.
Both anger & contempt (including those hidden deep under the disguise of smart, clever, scholarly, intellectual argument) will not bring anything xcept more anger and contempt. If spread, they can grow xponentially in a chain reaction (reactions of reactions of reactions so on....) to eventually xplode into a social nuclear bomb that destroys everything, regardless of where one stands.
There seems to b an alarming social nuclear bomb lurking underneath the collective consciousness of Malaysians today. It feeds on anger and contempt. Many people call it racism. Wake up and deal with it, they said. I agree. But what then fuel racism? Racism for me is a skewed sense of collective ego and false sense of pride towards that collective identification. It looks at other forms of collective identification as threats. It immediate reflex will b anger and contempt.
Anger and contempt today have become too over-stated & over-rated (perhaps hip too) almost like a daily wear or toxic addiction especially in the social media. Today, more of us seem to choose to b angry and contemptuous. We seem to chose to focus and invest our mind and feeling on what we dont like, not what we like and enjoy. Perhaps deep inside our consciousness, we enjoy being angry and contemptuous towards whoever or whatever we have chosen and defined as our sworn enemy - individual, group, race, political party, ideology, thought pattern, preference, taste, who/that dont share what we fancy.
The funny thing is that most of what we have chosen to b angry with are things that we didnt really experience directly. Instead, we just react upon other people's reactions to anger and contempt. More absurd is when we let ourselves slaved by the toxic urge to spread or share our anger and contempt on social media, even getting more angry and contemptuous if others in our circle chose not to entertain (like) our anger and contempt. Absurd.
Plus, there seems to b a simplistic binary in such contempt too, reducing argument into lazy blaming between 2 sides. No grey area, no third and fourth positions, just blaming all problems on whatever we assume our chosen 'binary opposition' stands for. We become obsessed with finding faults, blaming and pointing fingers, accusing, assuming without checking, more than committing towards solutions.
If we allow such blind anger and lazy contempt to rule our consciousness and the public consciousness, there wont b any substantial transformation, xcept doom.
Wake up la. B a neuro-transmitter of love and peace. Why busy focusing on fighting anger & contempt (darknes) if one can simply switch on the light (to make the darkness disappear without too much drama).
Focus la on being & doing more good, instead of responding, entertaining & spreading anger & contempt. Thats the reason 'amal ma'ruf' (do good) is placed before 'nahi mungkar' (preventing vice) in Islam. This is my ceposen, based on personal xperience of being a slave to anger & contempt.
Ramadan is a path for the Muslims amongst us to hijrah (shift) to fitrah (true nature) within. We did it by detoxifying our thoughts and feelings from their destructive patterns (addiction to bad patterns of thots and emotion). Not just refraining from eating and drinking, but from whatever vicious cycles of thots & emo that we have grown accustomed to, until they become our self-destructive habbits (like my addiction to rokok, to use a poor example, hahahhh). Whats within is our inner-net. Here, fundamentally, we r all connected as one big family of humanity. Here is where we return to, our abode of peace, through unconditional love.
Its an uphill battle to clean our clouded inner-net, easy said (or in this case, written) than done. Its an inner jihad (struggle), regardless of where one is physically. Jihad is not simply waging war against whoever one can conveniently label as an enemy. Jihad is a war against the tyranny of one's own evilness that lies within one's thought and feeling.
No one can 'cakap besar' (brag) in facing this inner jihad because the real Darth Vader or evil to fight is not 'out there', but here deep inside our own selves, our own thots and emo that like to pretend to b the 'I'. Its a slavery of total identification, attachment, desire and lust to a false sense of self or selves, individually and collectively.
Freedom is the ability to b free from the toxication or attachment to destructive thots and emo. That is true freedom. Its where one's illusion of self is still there (ego), its lingering cravings still there, but they cant bother or distract our higher consciousness anymore. We dont feel like feeding it's insecurity with toxic emotional and mental foods.
A pure free heart is not attracted to anger or contempt, nor does it allow itself to b distracted by them. If it does, the heart is still not pure. Clean our inner-net. B love, b good do good. Spread them. Transmit peace and love. They r free, and they can free us too, from the slavery of ego.
We really need to save our beloved nation.
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