1 ) Because Man depends on his five senses for reception of stimuli, the state of the physical make-up of his senses will determine his reception. If he is born with defective hearing, if he is tone deaf, he will find it difficult to distinguish the different notes of music. This will curtail his ability to appreciate and respond fully to a piece of classical music.
2 ) The programming of a person by his own temperament, his social, cultural, economic, religious and political up-bringing, and his experiences conditions his receptivity. This programming can either be a help or a hindrance to his future learning process (cf, chapter 1) depending on whether it opens or closes him up. A child, from the the very beginning, is trained to accept certain stimuli and reject others according to the norms of his family and society - be it religious, cultural, political or economic. If a child is a Hindu child, he will be taught never to touch beef; if he is a Muslim, never touch pork. He is taught either not to mix with people of another race or to mix with them, either to respect people of another faith or to despise and avoid them, etc..
His own experiences too will condition his future receptivity. If a child playing on the beach experiences the trauma of being almost drowned, he will never like water. This fear of water will be a big obstacle to his learning to swim, although not an insurmountable one. Even the eating habits of a child are programmed by his family upbringing and by his own experiences. As a child grows to be a man, he accumulates built-in set norms. It is according to these norms that he will judge and choose, unless, being aware of them, he freely goes against them or reassesses them himself and accepts some while rejecting others. These norms can be positive or negative.
They are positive if they open him up to the greater learning process of good in every sphere of his life. It is this that matures a person. They are negative if they prevent him from learning more of the good. The prejudices, fears and dislikes that he inherits or imbibes are negative because they prevent him from seeing reality as it is; worse still they help him to distort reality. To put it figuratively, these negative norms became like bars of a grille through which he will see reality. If he is unaware of this, as he grows older, he will continue to add more bars to the grille until the grille becomes so dense that he can no longer see reality clearly. In other words, if this happens, the older he grows, the less open he becomes. The less open he is to reality, the less open he is to the Truth for Truth is the "Total Reality".
The Lord Jesus condemned the Pharisees for being closed: "If you were blind , you would have no guilt; but now that you say, 'We see', you guilt remains." - John 9:41 - Their self-righteousness prevented them from seeing that their dislikes, prejudices and fears obstructed them from recognizing Christ as the Messiah. Yet, they clung to their blindness by insisting that they saw or thought they were right in rejecting Christ the Truth. For this, they were guilty. Religious fanatics are Pharisees. They see only what they want to see according to their prejudices. They refuse to be open to Reality, the Truth, which is greater than what they see.
As can be seen, although dialogue is an essential element of being human, we can undermine our innate ability to dialogue by building into our system bars of prejudices, fears and dislikes which filter or worse still, distort Reality. This is to say that we can become less and less open. If we allow ourselves to be less open, we go against our human nature, and we become less human.
Therefore, to be open to the Truth, we must tear down as much as possible, the bars of the grille in us, that prevent us from seeing Reality as it is. It is a painful process of breaking down what we have already constructed. It is indeed a process of "dying" to ourselves in order that we may be open to see the Truth and rise with "It". And "It" is Jesus Christ, the Truth, who will set us free. - John 8:32; Gal. 5:1 - He frees us from the yoke of slavery to sin. As explained in chapter 3, sin is the refusal to love as God loves us. How can we love if, because of our fears, prejudices and dislikes, we are closed to others? Openness to others, or dialogue, is necessary condition for love. It is for this reason that Our Lord rebuked the Pharisees. Because they held on blindly to what they believed to be true, and insisted that they had the whole truth and no one else had it, they were not open to listen to Jesus the Truth (dialogue).
Why listen to others since they already had the whole truth? This was their argument. It is also the argument of many people in Malaysia. Like many people, the Pharisees reduced truth to their way of thinking. Their self-righteousness blinded them so that they could not see that Truth is so great that "It" cannot be captured by any one system of thinking or even all the systems of human thought. Yet they obstinately cleaved to believing that they were right, that they saw and others did not. This was their guilt. The path for dialogue which led to love was severed. How could they love Jesus if they did not even want to hear what he had to say?
Why this willful blindness? The process of "dying" to our prejudices, fears and dislikes, to what we have constructed in ourselves and to :rise" with better and new ways of looking at things, to reconstruct a new world-view, is very painful. Hence, the majority of mankind prefer to go their old ways. By this, they keep on building more bars to their grilles till their grilles become so high and so dense that they are practically numb to new stimuli.
Although they may be physically healthy, they are intellectually dead to the Truth. Ironically, it is in their very fear of pain in opening up that they suffer more pain. By building higher and denser grilles they cut themselves off from genuine dialogue with others. Misunderstanding crops up when they refuse to understand what others have to say. Misunderstanding breeds resentment. Resentment opens wounds of hurt and produces hatred. In turn, they feel that they have been misunderstood. This could lead to tensions and frustrations which could burst into outward violence in one form or another - verbal violence through virulent condemnation of others or worse still physical violence. At this stage, fanaticism has set in. Fanatics always believe that everyone is wrong except themselves. Claiming that they alone possess the whole truth, they have rejected the Truth.
We, Malaysians, have only to examine ourselves sincerely to realize the fact of this phenomenon. How often have we been told not to trust people of another race, perhaps because the Chinese are money-grabbing, the Indians sly and devious, and the Malays lazy and stupid? These are prejudices, bars of the grille, built into us. So, when we meet a person of another race, we are automatically on our guard, we pre-judge them, place them in slots and become less open to them. How often have we been taught that our religion is the true religion, and that other religions are false?
This ignorance has prevented us from learning good things from other religions. All these fears, prejudices and dislikes have made us less human. Those of us who realize this and try to correct ourselves, can testify to the pain we have to undergo to hack down these bars of the grille built into us. How many of us, even after striving for years to break down our prejudices, our fears and dislikes, still habour lingering suspicions of people of another race or religion? The process of "dying" to "rise" again is indeed painful. Growth is painful, but human beings must grow in every aspect of their lives.
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Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
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