Need for the great unboxing

I HAVE come to realise a most important and fundamental truth in life about why conflicts arise between people in society. They are the product of our formal and informal education institutions. We have all made ourselves “stupid” and “ignorant” through our education – yes, even at the PhD level.

We have boxed up our minds and don’t know or realise that we have done this to ourselves.

In many ways, the “boxing” up of our minds is a necessary way of dealing with all aspects of life, but the tragedy is that most of us don’t realise this fact and go on living day to day with boxes imprisoning our minds.

Philosophers, poets, prophets and spiritualists become awakened when they realise the simple idea that our concepts of things and people in the world are all placed neatly into little boxes and that true enlightenment is simply to leave the boxes whenever we want to or have to.We can always return our minds to the boxes if we need to but we can also create new boxes or enlarge them or open whichever sides of the box we want – or even throw them away entirely.

I would like to invite my readers to do all those enlightened things, to leave their boxes, to enlarge them, to get new boxes, to open boxes or to discard them completely.

My greatest spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, wrote that if you name a thing or call a thing by a certain name, then you have subjected it to an existence of a restricted understanding from your own narrow perspective. Ten people who see a tree will each have different boxes, or concepts, of it. One will see it as a beautiful object and thus would care and fight for its existence. Another would see the tree as nice shade for his car but doesn’t like it when birds sitting on it poop on the vehicle and so he would probably wouldn’t mind if it was cut down. A landscape architect would see money in the tree, and recommend to the client it and others like it be lined up along a boulevard to the prime minister’s office.

But the tree is a thousand times more important and valuable because of its very own existence.

Similarly, a boss may see his or her employee as just some worker in a factory line, a number on a spreadsheet, or numbers attached to letters forming a name. So the numbers can be erased, anytime, just like that! The boss has no appreciation of the human entity that is represented by the worker’s staff number or financial statement.

We have boxed up our minds to think in this fashion and thus treat everyone around us in the manner in which we have boxed them up.

Take a student pursuing Engineering. The lecturers, universities and the Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA) have all boxed up engineering with some calculations and machine interaction. The MQA’s box doesn’t require the student to appreciate music or art or anything outside its narrow box. The student then graduates with a 4.0 cumulative grade point average without reading Tolle or Wayne Dyer or Mustafa Akyol. No need. Not part of the box!

Also, if the student is Malay or Chinese or a Kadazandusun child, his or her religious teachers and social-family network boxes his or her mind up to think that he or she only needs his or her race and religious fraternity to survive in this world and the next. Cukup-lah!

Other people and faiths are extras that one needs to know how to interact with and do business with, and then its back to the safe race and religious boxes of our minds.

So too in politics. I am from a race- or religious-based party. My party is my box dulu, kini dan selama-nya (before, now and forever). Other parties are just entities for me to beat or work with in order to beat them at another time. This is how the common narrative goes.

Wah, ini macam kah? Are we thus to live our whole lives like this?

Our secular, religious, social and religious education must be addressed to say that all the boxes of history, geography, science, religion and professions are just boxes. The most important lesson is to recognise that these things are just BOXES of concepts that are extremely restricted! The world is bigger than that. People are more unique and valuable than that. The tree is not just for selling Musang King durian, the forest is not there just so we can build condos, and rivers are not just longkang (drains) into which we can dump waste water and rubbish. All are God’s gifts and have their special places for themselves and for our spiritual wealth.

Everything in life has now been reduced to economics and technology, those two boxes that are destroying humanity and the planet.

Before our bodies go into boxes six feet underground, we must release ourselves from the imprisonment of our mind’s boxes that contain half truths and untruths so we can realise that there is beauty, worth and completeness in everyone and everything. And so that we can honour all creations, not destroy them with our narrow concepts and ideas.

Prof Dr Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi is Professor of Architecture at UCSI University. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.