Over the course of unprecedented super virus spread all over the world, we witness both the best and the worst of humanity. I have had my hard time pressing my old folks to stay home, only to realise how hard it is to change people’s habits.
Many of us stood as spectators of some of the entertaining videos of world leaders making controversial remarks which created unnecessary attention storm leaving us often confused whether to doubt their sanity or laugh at their naivety.
Indeed, it is a common sentiment that the pandemic arrives as a force to press the re-set button, signalling to all humans to put things in order again. So in what way were we screwed?
The famed Descartes dictum “I think, therefore I am” has left us body-mind imbalanced in that we know things by thinking but hardly any attention about living about our world of feeling, emotion, empathy or about our needs and the needs around us.
Our schools, organisations and institutions has long advocate this type of imbalance. At a young age, we were asked to sit still and swallow tons of information about history, science, mathematics but rarely support us to have contact with the essence of living a healthy and contented life.
The value placed on going through stress and tension, instead of on learning how to skilfully work with it, is reflected throughout our society. Companies still pay staff when they are sick but there is no reward for being healthy and staying on the job. The drug companies are overwhelmingly successful in production of pills that suppress the symptoms and discomforts of stress-related diseases, but no weight placed on the effectiveness of self-help and self-healing techniques.
Then there is gym mentality of mechanical exercises which attentions is on performance and body-image. In school, students are told to do 100 sits up and instructed to stand up straight but never told how to do it and what it means for everyday life. People are not taught how certain sports or body activities that they participate can be brought into play of life.
As we continued to have this culture of living in brain-based world, we will produce more people that lack the ability to feel and empathize with another’s experience.
Such ability is greatly desired during this pandemic, staffs are hoping the company will understand their fear of exposure, loyalty of staffs is evidenced by those who are still willing to take a pay cut for the companies to go through this hardship, tenants are hoping landlords would allow some waiver during closure of business, people are reaching out for light of kindness and compassion to help those in the frontlines, in the old folk’s home and more.
We know we do not need people who has good job and right car at this juncture to fulfil the world’s need but people who could feel what others could possibly feel. Brain-based people lack such ability because when he couldn’t feel himself, he couldn’t feel others. If he could separate himself from his own world of feeling, emotion and integrity with his own body, then he would also separate himself from other people.
In this global crisis, we now realise how dangerous it is to remove principles from feelings, especially for a man with power.
What is missing in our school educations and organisation trainings system is the experiences to acquaint us with our inner knowing. Practice in the life of the body and mind discipline would establish the condition for this knowing to take place and for the development of a type of responsibility that could increase our ability to self-learn and self-educate.
An urgent need for engagement of healthy body-mind discipline is sincere, we need to be in touch with what is needed from the inside. In short, a new reincarnation of human value should rise from “I think, therefore I am” to “I feel, I aware, therefore I am”. This is the first step on the journey to “heart-based” human mankind, the only way we can press the re-set button for a better order to arise again.
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