"The Culture of the Self" - Foucault.

What we are really suffering from today is the ills resulting from our lack of having a lineage, a clear line that leads us back to our ancestral origins and cultural heritage. This was what i was trying to share with a Chinese lady and a Maori Wood sculptor at the MGTF -USM while chatting after our lunch at the VIP table.  A loss of our connectivity to our tribal as well as family  bonds based on mutual respect and the need for an unwritten faith and belief of the better good for all, a sanctuary where we can look upon as an anchor from which we can launch ourselves into the future without loosing our sense of who we truly are and how we fit into the scheme of life as it is. We have become lackadaisical over time from generation to generation over where we originated from making assumptions as to who or where we come from, like I am a Chinese and my ancestors are Chinese and that is all i need to know, as you are a Malay and he is and Indian, and Arab or a Jew. We have lost the sense of looking deeper into what kind of a Chinese or Malay we are or what kind of Arab or Jew we are and how our ancestors has gotten to where we are today, in the form that we are. Our assumptions are based on the assumption that no one cares any more or that it really is not a great deal to think about any more as the world gets smaller by the day due to modern technology. We assume when we say I am a Chines it is fully understood who we are and how we behave towards others. The fact that i am Chinese from Taiwan, Hong Kong or Kawloon, Singapore or Malaysia makes no difference or that i am a Cantonese or a Hakka, or a Teochew or from the Funan or Hainan provinces is irrelevant. The sad thing is , it does and it does greatly when one is interacting on a global level.
 Human minds are formed by the cultural environment that it has been exposed to most of its formative years and the society in which the individual mind coexist helps to formulate its mode of thinking. No matter how far removed a person is from his original environment as he grows up he will resort to his ancestral ways of thinking if and when the time arises as this is how he is able to justify as why or how he thinks. There is no such thing as a 'Global Mind', at least not in the present or the near future as as we can see most people attach themselves to a race of creed, a background of cultural heritage or origin of ancestry especially when cornered in some argument or having the need to justify for a behavior. I am a Chinese and this is how I think or i think in this way because of my Judaic background.
As for me to relate to any other races or people with a different ethnic background from mine i have my preconceived ideas of how i should go about it, it cannot be helped especially if i have a notion of what the other's background is. Like I would deal with a Chinese in this manner or an Indian in this manner or a Swiss or an Englishman based on my past experiences as a Malay or who I am according to my cultural racial history and the kind of community I was raised into.This will be my yardstick, the criteria i gauge by when I am engaged in a communication with another person of a different ethnicity. Most of my approach into this conversation or communication will be based on assumptions and predilections of who I am talking to.I have found myself painfully taking proper etiquette and respect when I talk to strangers regards or what nationality he or she may be, young or old, however after a few rounds of sentences exchanged i find myself telling myself this is the Chinese speaking or and Indian emerging from what or how it is being said. My mind will switch to how i would normally deal with Chinese or an Indian, like certain guardrails and road signs will rise in the the landscape of our communication and i  will negotiate accordingly making lee way for how my communication will progress. My initial approach was to be as neutral and non-judgemental as I can be that is approaching with 'Bare Attention', however in the course of the conversation upon discovering the familiar nature through tonal and ideas values expressed I would drop my neutrality and assume the judgemental attitude of who it is that i am addressing. In essence I lost my sense of 'Bare Attention.'
Today I also discovered Michel Foucault!
"In his 1983 Berkeley lectures in English on “The Culture of the Self,” Foucault stated and restated the question in a variety of ways—“What are we in our actuality?,” “What are we today?”—and his investigations amount to “an alternative to the traditional philosophical questions: What is the world? What is man? What is truth? What is knowledge? How can we know something? And so on.” So write the editors of the posthumously published 1988 essay collectionTechnologies of the Self, titled after a lecture Foucault delivered at the University of Vermont in 1982. "
“The self is not so much something hidden and therefore something to be excavated but as a correlate of the technologies of self that it co-evolves with over millennium.”
"It is never too early or too late to occupy one self with one's soul. it is in constantly 
Being occupied with oneself is not therefore a simple momentary preparation for life but, it is a life form.
,..The importance of writing in the culture of the self, It is often assumed that personal writing is a modern discovery, maybe an innovation of the 16th. century or the Reformation. The relation to oneself through writing  has been a very long tradition of the West and I think it is possible to observe a shift from the culture of memoir which is still dominant from the Socratic  attitude from the  towards the practice of writing and taking notes in the Greco -Roman period. The culture of the Self implies the use of the note books, and in those note books you have to note your readings, your conversations, the theme for future meditations, you are also to write your dreams, your daily schedule, writing letters was also something important among those who practices of the self, because in a letter you have to entertain at the same time a relation to your self and a relation to somebody else who can be a director or a friend or somebody to whom you give advises which are valuable both for him and for you... The self becomes a field of observation.
 The theme  concerning of oneself to oneself...is not to be found within a particular doctrine, it is a universal precept and it is also real practice. Many individuals responds to its call. it is a practice that has its institutions, its rules and methods, its techniques, its exercises, and it is also a mode of individual but also a collective experience  experience with its means and its form of practice...."
Excerpts from Michel Foucault, lectures at University of California on You Tube.
It is said that if you look hard enough and really sincerely yearn for the truth, you will find the help and teachers along the way and they will appear at the right time and in the most unlikely manner. I found this lecture by Foucault on the subject of" The Culture of the Self", immediately after my chat with James Lancelot, the Maori sculptor and a Chinese lady at lunch given by the Museum in honor of the New Zealand High Commissioner to Malaysia. We were talking on the subject of the preservation of cultural heritage and how it is diminishing all over the world. The point i was making was the fact that one has to know oneself inside out in order to be able to share fully what is one's cultural heritage. For a Malaysian like myself it is not easy as I am of mixed lineage and ancestry and none has to do with what indigenous Malay culture is all about However i grew up in a predominantly Malay community and most of my childhood life was also exposed to Chinese as well as Hindu cultures. hence what I am is really the culmination of all three cultures basically and the later addons of western cultures from having lived in the West for 21 years of my life.
To recognize this in myself is paramount to what i have been trying to achieve all these years with my blogging, although i never thought of it before but my blogging  has evolved pretty much into a memoir, a literary account of my life from day to day followed as closely as i possibly could.
I am more then ever before am convinced that in knowing your own true nature you truly get to know the universe or at least those around you even if they come from different cultural heritage and backgrounds. Simply put, what have you got to offer of your self if you have no idea of who you truly are in the first place? if so then you are merely a spectator or a bystander in any circumstances or events and not the participant or the actors promoting your own views and concepts towards enriching those of others. You can only offer the original ideas if you have come to know the original you that which is the Unborn Buddha Nature, that which precedes your coming into being in this realm of consciousness. To attain to this level of understanding, of becoming, or being, you have to wade through your cultural history, your spiritual anchorage and your innate intelligence from the beginning to the very end of your life and fully have a grasp of who you truly are in reality and in essence.
If and when you have attained to this status, this platform from which you are delivering your views and opinions only then what you say will be heard for it will carry authenticity and genuine understanding: this is called your Dharma Position. From the summit of this mountian you speak not as a Malay or a Hindu, a Chinese or a Musluim, Christian or Jew but as Man himself.