Nowadays,  especially at parties, I hear more and more people joke about things like AIDS, rape, and even murder.  Sometimes, I even pretend to laugh along so as not to appear unsocial.  However, deep down I feel disgusted that people make light of these things and even more disgusted with myself for tolerating their antics.

Although  joking about rape will not necessarily cause people to go out and commit the crime, it desensitizes them to an act that should be greeted with disgust and revulsion at all times, even in a rowdy and boisterous setting.  Just as being drunk is not an excuse to commit a heinous crime, alcohol is no excuse to joke about categorically evil acts.

Although I’m no psychoanalyst, I think to trivialize a morally objectionable act by joking about it at least partly reflects a subconscious penchant for the act.  Joking about rape, for example, reveals one’s misogynistic side. Similarly, making fun of someone suffering from AIDS reflects one’s lack of respect for life.

I understand that when guys get together they tend to talk about women, sometimes not in the most respectful ways.  However, we should draw the line somewhere and not allow these unbecoming thoughts from getting out of hand.  Just as good, healthy thoughts  lead to good acts,  so could bad ones.

According to Transparency International, Cambodia ranks 154th out of 178 on the Corruption Perceptions Index.  Having lived here for a while, I hardly need Transparency International to tell me that this is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

One thing that we need to understand about corruption is that it is a major cause of poverty and a barrier to overcoming it.  So, it shouldn’t be surprising that the poorest countries in the world are also the most corrupt. Corruption fosters ill-will and resentment and is a major obstacle to social harmony.

Another thing about corruption is that it is easy to blame others who we see as “corrupt,” but it is not so easy to see how our own actions and behaviors contribute to the corrupt system. Okay, so maybe you don’t drive a Rolls Royce or live in a huge mansion while your countrymen are rummaging through garbage for food.  You’re not corrupt, right? Wrong.  That live-in maid you hired for $50 a month would not be working for such menial pay if she was not so poor and desperate.  Corruption promotes poverty and cheap labor.  Even when we don’t see ourselves as “corrupt,” we still benefit  from corruption when we enjoy luxuries associated with social and economic exploitation.

Perhaps it helps to consider the broader definition of corruption. To be “corrupt” means to lack integrity or wholesomeness.  So any action that lacks wholesomeness and integrity can be said to be corrupt.  So, one does not need to accept bribery or steal public funds to be corrupt. We have to realize that no one is immune to corruption as long as we live in a system that is corrupt.  Further, no country is absolutely free of corruption.  You might be surprised to learn that the United States ranks only 22nd on the Corruption Perceptions Index.  Rather than pointing fingers at others, it is more productive to be mindful of our own actions, to understand how they play into the system, and hopefully to adjust them so as to mitigate their harmful impacts.

No one can be perfect. Sometimes, it may not be possible to avoid contributing to corruption without being a social outcast.  As long as we do our parts to monitor our own actions and to do the things that will lead to good will, mutual prosperity, and social harmony, that is the best we can do.  Corruption will eventually go away on its own.

Of course, it’s always good to have laws against corruption, but if no one follows them, what good are the laws?  Cambodia is not corrupt because of the lack of anti-corruption laws, but because of the lack of respect for the laws. Ethics is just important as legislation. The development of good moral and social ethics is key to respect for the law, and thereby, the rule of law.

The worst way to deal with corruption, I believe, is to point fingers at those who we perceive as “corrupt”  and deny our own roles in the corrupt system and our responsibility in overcoming it.  It takes a conscious and concerted effort by everyone in society to defeat corruption.  Obviously, if you’re at the very bottom rung of the social ladder, you have very little social, political, and economic clout– there is not a whole lot you can do to end corruption.  However, it is always a good idea to maintain a healthy and positive attitude and to focus on the things that will lead to personal prosperity and social harmony.  If you choose to become bitter and resentful, on the other hand, you’re really empowering corruption and thereby contributing to it.

Personally, I don’t care what others have or don’t have and focus on my own life.  I try to keep inventory of my actions and to identify which ones are positive and which one are negative.  While it’s not possible to avoid negative, harmful actions altogether, it’s good practice to keep tab of them.  Just like balancing a check book, this helps me stay in the positive and not slip into the red. While it may not be possible to take the world upon our shoulders, it shouldn’t be that hard to balance a checkbook.

Is it possible to be generous to a fault?

I think so.

Throughout my life I’ve helped a lot of people. Yet, of all these people I could recall no more than three or four  who successfully had been helped by me. Actually, I can’t take credit for these three or four people at all because, in retrospect, I did not do very much to help them. I simply provided a spark and they did all the work for themselves.

It’s really not possible to help an able-bodied person who is unwilling to help himself. To be sure, there are those who cannot help themselves and legitimately need the help of others. These include infants, children, the disabled, and the elderly. These people belong in a different category; I’ll limit this discussion to those people who can walk, talk and use their heads and hands like the rest of us.

As the saying goes, you must help yourself before helping others. In fact, helping oneself is the first step to helping others because being self-sufficient means you won’t be a burden to others, including (and especially) your loved ones. If everyone is willing and able to help himself or herself, then no one should be dependent upon others. So, focus on pulling your own weight.  If you can pull your own weight, you’ve already done your part.

What happens when you try to help someone who is unwilling to help himself? He becomes lazy and dependent. He does not bother to develop the necessary skills and personal qualities to make it on his own. You are creating an artificial disability in an otherwise able-bodied person, eventually enslaving yourself to his dependency and ill-conceived sense of entitlement. However well-intentioned you may be, this is not helping at all.

What does it mean to help yourself? Helping yourself means getting an education, securing a good job, taking advantage of opportunities, and providing for your family. It also means taking good care of your health, planning ahead, and constantly doing “what if” exercises in your head so that you do not become a burden to others in the future.

What does it mean to take advantage of an opportunity? Here in Cambodia there are so many people in desperate situations because they do not have the opportunities to improve their lives.  If you offer assistance to ten needy people, maybe one or two of them will take advantage of the opportunity you give them in a healthy and constructive way.  The rest will try to take advantage of you!  To get to the one or two worthy people, you may have to deal with a lot of leeches and parasites along the way.  This is true of people in any country, not just Cambodia. A person who is really serious about helping himself will  take advantage of the opportunity he gets, not the people who give it to him.

If the first step to helping others is to help oneself, I think the next step is to avoid hurting others while helping oneself. Actually, these really aren’t steps to be followed in chronological succession; they are to be carried out simultaneously. Some folks end up with huge fortunes after making a life of unfair and exploitative business practices. One day they wake up and decide to give much of their wealth to charity. Although giving to charity is better than not giving, all the donations they “give back to the community” may not be enough to compensate for the sufferings they’ve caused along the way. So, it’s better to be mindful of one’s actions (so as not to hurt others) than to mindlessly gain at others’ expenses and give back after all the destruction has been wreaked.

Anger is a conditioned response to a perceived threat to the ego.  It is a complex experience that combines unpleasant physical symptoms with upsetting memories, personal assumptions, deeply held beliefs, prejudices, and other characteristics of the ego.  Often when we are angry, all that we are aware of is our angry mood, which may range from mild irritation to intense rage.  When we look for the causes of our anger, we usually direct our attention to the outside world, to people or events that we perceive to be threatening our ego.  In reality, internal factors play as large a role in our capacity to control the destructive emotion.  Once we understand how to deal with the anger inside of us, we are in a better position to deal the causes and conditions from the outside world.

People differ widely in their ability to tolerate frustration. We all get angry from time to time. Our surroundings, associations, occupations, and other external factors all play a role in how often we get angry.  Anger does not make us evil; it makes us human. Nonetheless, it is important to understand that anger is a destructive emotion that compromises our ability to handle heated situations effectively and to find a long-term solution to combative atmosphere.

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For many of us driving is an inconvenient and time-consuming daily routine. Traffic jams, poor road conditions, and reckless motorists have become familiar nuisances in this daily ritual. The heart-sinking sight of mangled vehicles on the road and the wailing sirens of ambulances rushing to the scene of an accident offer a grim reminder of the dangers we face every time we step into a vehicle. Yet, driving has become such a mindless activity that we often eat, use the cell phone, and even apply make-up while at the cockpit of two-ton vehicle traveling at tremendous speeds.  The laws of physics are not very forgiving. Even a split-second lapse in attention can lead to disastrous consequences.

We must never confuse mindful driving with sitting meditation. In sitting meditation we attempt to reduce sensory input by focusing our attention on a specific meditation object, such as our breath.  In mindful driving we do not want to enter a deep meditative trance that may limit our field of vision and compromise our ability to react quickly in emergency situations.  What we want to achieve in mindful driving is a heightened state of alertness in which awareness is directed simultaneously at all the perceptions and physical actions necessary for safe driving. If you find that you’re spacing out as you drive, then you’re not driving mindfully.

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Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night feeling that I haven’t accomplished anything in my life.  Actually, I think I’ve accomplished quite a bit– it’s hard not to, considering that I work 12 to 14 hours a day.

All  of us have had our shares of successes and failures in life.   Still, we sometimes awaken to despair and even panic that so many of your years have managed to slip away virtually unnoticed. We may blame our hectic lifestyles and the demands of work and family.

The truth is, if we don’t dwell in every tiny moment that makes up our reality, our whole lives will have passed uneventfully. Every moment in our lives is immensely sacred in its own right. To awaken to the present moment is to experience the sanctity of being alive.

We may consider getting married and giving birth to a child as exceptionally significant moments in our lives. In fact, they are. However, if we give value to only a handful of memorable moments in our lives, the countless other moments that make up our existence will have seemed pointless.

If birthdays, anniversaries, travels to exotic destinations, and other important events in our lives can have so much meaning for us, then why not the present moment? The present moment is the only moment in which we are truly alive. This is not to say that we should not celebrate our birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, and other major milestones in our lives. It’s  just that every moment has an intrinsic value in itself.

Attention is what gives meaning and significance to everything. By attending to every moment in our lives with great care and diligence, we render it as special as our wedding or birthday.

We seldom ponder about being present in our own bodies because we already know that we are. Therein lies the problem. So many aspects of our lives are put on automatic pilot that we have come to rely on habituated thought patterns to sustain a stable, predictable world. We know that we are in our bodies so that we do not have to be aware of being in them. While daydreaming, planning, speculating, and so on, we effectively have an “out-of-body experience”.  Our minds are projected away from our bodies into the realm of thought.

In reality, the mind and body are inseparable and, to a large extent, indistinguishable from each other. We normally think of the body as the physical, tangible “stuff” of which we are made, and the mind as the nonphysical faculty of consciousness, perception, thought, emotion, and memory. In reality, every thought or emotion arises from an electro-chemical change in the brain or nervous system. That is, every mental event is made possible by a physical event involving bodily components– without the body, there can be no mind. Vice versa, the mind contains the cosmos of information that directs every aspect of the complex biological machinery that is the body– without a mind, there can be no body.

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What does it mean that every moment is infinite?

A person’s lifetime, no matter how short or long, is made up of an infinite number of smaller moments. A single day is made up of an infinite number of smaller moments. Even a single second is made up of an infinite number of smaller moments.

If we are able to dwell in the infinitesimally small moments that make up every second of our realities, then we can experience infinity itself. Time would seem to stand still. This is why we often experience timelessness during meditation.

Mindfulness is the art of arriving at the present moment. By inhabiting our bodies, accepting all things that are happening both inside and outside of us, without resisting, we arrive at the present moment. We can say to ourselves, “This is it, I am here.”

Mindfulness is the quality of being here now. Being here now means dwelling in the present moment and actively participating in the unfolding of our own reality. When we actively inhabit our bodies and attune our awareness to the here and now, we dwell in the eternal stillness that is this moment.

Having a desire to succeed in life is great. It drives us to work harder and to make the most of our abilities. At the same time, attachment to success habituates us to equate happiness with career achievements. When we strive for something, we should remind ourselves that what we really want is contentment.

We may think of contentment in terms of earning an advanced degree, making a lot of money, driving an expensive car, and winning approval from family and friends. But these are just motivations for striving, not contentment itself. When we reach a new milestone in our career, we may be happy for a while, but our feelings of contentment are quickly replaced by a more powerful desire to reach the next target. Life then becomes a state of constant grasping, always reaching for something onto which we cannot hold.

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In mindfulness we embrace stillness. Stillness leads to clarity. If puddle of muddy water is left undisturbed for a period of time, it eventually becomes clear on it own as dirt particles settle to the bottom. Clarity is an addition by subtraction– we value what is not there rather than what is there. Just as clear water is a potential of a muddy puddle, a clear mind is a potential of mental clutter. When we breathe mindfully and observe the arising and passing of our thoughts, without resisting or clinging to them, our mental turbidity will gradually decrease, leaving a clear mind that dwells in stillness.

If we were lost in the woods and came across a small muddy puddle of water, we would be wise to wait patiently until the mud settles before drinking from it. To still the mind also requires patience. In the same way that agitating a puddle of water with a stick makes it muddy, we muddle our minds by getting caught up in our thoughts. Getting involved in thoughts saps our energy and contributes to the restless chatter in our heads. If we can gain some degree of detachment from our mental phenomena, our thoughts and feelings will come and go without taking hold of our minds. The mind then calms on its own.

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