Welcome to the real world?

This post is to further a discussion with a friend of mine, Adele.

There are 2 concepts that I find very interesting and we have different view of:

1) The real world vs everything is perception
2) Being genuine vs modeling someone

I'll start by tackling the concept of how we look at the world around us. I have a belief of everything being only perceptions of the mind. It's not that I don't believe in concepts like genuine love or faith, but then again, when you go deeper, what are they? They are feelings, or more acurately labels that we adopt to explain the state of mind we're in. If you try to describe the feeling of being in love, you might say it's the warm fuzzy feeling 'inside' of you. Cause some chemical reactions are taking place in your body and signals are being sent to your brain telling you that you're experiencing the feeling of love.

Again, it's important to know that the trigger of the feeling of love, or any other states of mind, is different for everyone. That's why you'll get different feelings either kissed by your boyfriend/girlfriend or a complete stranger, rite?(and I'm not talking about Brat Pitt or Angelina Jolie here)

Knowing all this is important when you introduce the concept of CHOICE into the equation. Why? Because it gives you power. Power to control life's circumstances instead of it controlling you! Pretty big words, huh.

What I mean is you and I have a choice as to the state of mind we adopt, in reaction to external events/stimuli. We choose to respond to the same kind of stimuli in different ways. Based on our upbringing and our life experiences. Agree? Knowing we have the power of choice in our hands, the question is how many of us actually utilize that power? Does other peoples behavior effects your mood? It's not their fault. It's yours! Cause you failed to employ your god-given power to choose a meaning for their action. It's your PERCEPTION of their actions that counts! If you could look at it in a positive way and get good feelings from it, that's the TRUTH for you. If someone else looked at it in a different way and go kill himself, that's the truth for him too. Cause in his body, different chemical reactions are going on and unique signals are sent to his brain, and it's all real for him! Something real for you is different from me because we have different interpretation in our brains. Savvy?

Let's look at the concept in extremes. Let's talk about the movie 'The Matrix'. In the movie, Neo got out of the Matrix into the real world, rite? Then there's one part when they're having a meal and one of the crew member brought up a fascinating topic of discussion. What if the food they have tasted when they are 'plugged in' the Matrix is misinterpreted by the Matrix? Since none of them have tastes a lot of real food before, what if chicken tasted like something else. All the Matrix do is to send electrical signals to your brain to tell you what you're feeling or sensing.

Think about it. Why can't this happen in the real world? All your five senses do is to collect stimuli from the environment and send it to your brain to be interpreted, rite? What if I am one in a million and i have got a different wiring in my brain. Nobody would be able to tell the difference. Everytime I see the color white, because of my 'defect', my brain will interpret it as black, and vice versa. You see, black and white are just labels. If I have this 'defect' in color interpretation since i was born, nobody would be able to tell the difference. White to my brain is black to everyone else, but I'll still name it as black cause I learned to call it that from everybody else. Crazy?

So just what is real? The real world is just what meaning your brain decides to give it. And that depends on the interpretation of your brain, doesn't it? What software does your brain uses? Matrix is a sofware for the brain, hence, my concept of 'all of us live in our own matrix'. Understanding this, you will see perception as a tool that will change how you live your life. So, when I have negative feelings, despite triggered by some external uncontrollable events, I know that I chosed to feel that way. And knowing I have a choice to change the perception of these events give me much more positive power than just succumb to life's unpredictability.

On the second concept of modeling someone means not being your genuine self, I've been asking myself this question for years: Who am I? What is genuinely me?

For me, we all started out as blank papers, filled up along the way with life experiences to be who we are today. Except for the basic instincts born with us, we have zero personnality when we started. So where do we acquire our personalities? From our external environment, of course. From our parents, our teachers, friends and all the people we meet, even books. Whether concious or not, we acquire our personnality from modeling all these people. In a seminar by a well known speaker on human behaviour, participants are told to list down five names of people they have the most contact with in their life at the moment. When they are done, they are told that they are looking at what they will become five years down the road. You are a reflection of the people you're with, your family, the friends you hang out with.

Many years ago, I've come to realise an ugly truth. I don't like some of the personalities I have. I've suddenly realised I'm not the person I want to be. The thing is I have only myself to blame cause right till then, I have not really made any concious effort to mould myself to become the person i dream to be, so without a plan, I got influenced by what comes along in my life.

Since then, I've taken up total responsibility of who I am. Yes, my family and my upbringing had great influence on me, but I still have a choice, I can change anything I like with enough discipline. I hear people all the time complaining about how their family background had made them the way they are and it's hard for them to change. I agree it's hard, but it's POSSIBLE. Just take up the responsibility and stop blaming someone else for who you are. Makes sense?

Do modelling someone really stop you from being creative and unique? I disagree. I've struggled with the concept of creativity for years too. My interest in the concept of creativity spiked when I came across books by Dr Edward De Bono in lower secondary school. Became a fan since then. I've always been quite a creative person especially in arts despite never taking any serious arts lessons. Always got involved in designing logos, t-shirts or arts in school magazine. I got stuck for many years and felt I could just be average and can't really come up with something revolutionary. All because of the defination of 'creativity' and 'innovation' I learned from a lesson in 'Kemahiran Hidup' (Do they still teach that in school?).

Creativity is being able to come up with something that nobody else has think of before and innovation is taking someone's ideas and make improvements into something better, rite? That is what got me stuck! I've been working on coming up with ideas from thin air! That is so STUPID. Since then, I've done a lot of research and came up with my own defination of creativity and realised creativity only comes with a lot of knowledge, not producing ideas out of thin air.

I see examples in this in the life of 2 of the most creative person in history. Thomas A. Edison and Bruce Lee. We all know the great inventor, Thomas Edison who invented the light bulb and thousands of other inventions. He showed me what creativity means. If you can put 2 or more existing ideas that might seems totally unrelated together and make it work, that's creativity. In short, creativity is just playing with ideas already in existance to fusion it into new ones. When creating the light bulb, he brings the ideas of light, electricity and heat together and made it work, and voila! A preequisite to being creative is to have a lot of knowledge in that particular subject, so you can have a lot of ideas/concept to play with in the first place. Do you think he would be able to invent the lightblub if he's not knowlegable in physics, chemistry and maths?

What's so special about Bruce Lee, apart from being a silver screen icon and a respected martial arts expert? If you look at the history of martial arts, all types of martial arts are created more than hundred years ago, be it aikido, karate, teakwondo, chinese kung fu etc. You don't see new forms of mainstream martial arts being created by a modern man, with the exception of Jeet Kune Do, the supreme art created by Bruce Lee. Now THAT is something. isn't it?

To be able to come up with with a new form of martial arts is extraordinary and if that isn't creativity, I don't know what is. So how does he do it? I think it's pretty obvious he has immense knowledge of martials arts, trained in kung fu since young. But he didnt just stop there. He travelled all over the world to research and learn other types of martial arts. Modeling, isn't it?! That's not all, he has a personal library of more than 100 books on martial arts, all thoroughly researched, with notes scribbled here and there.

What I'm saying is to be able to become unique, you have to do it conciously, by modeling the right person for the right traits. You become unique by becoming a mixture of different people. If you go with the flow, then everything is up to chances. You'd be lucky if you end up with parents, friends and teachers with good traits. But that's just what you are, lucky.

I try not to leave anything to luck if I can help it. For things I can take control of, I'd like to take responsibility. Of course, luck is part of the game. But for me, it's only a small part. A really, really small part.

Enough rambling for one post, chow.