"Whether this has happened, is happening, will be happened, or will not be: a husband and wife become local tourists when the President of Indonesia announces that every citizen is allowed to enter the Merdeka Palace. After a tour, they bump into the president. 'Mr. President,' says the husband, 'I know this is a great imposition, but—would you mind... ?''Hmmmh, this is enough to add my branding!' the guardian of national values thinks, and immediately replies, 'It's okay, it's okay, I don't mind at all!'So, they give him their camera and pose in front of the Merdeka Palace.""For Indonesians, friendliness and familiarity are Indonesian identity. Meanwhile, cheating and dishonesty are not Indonesian, authentically, because apart from being outrageously and ridiculously unfair, they also open the way to enmity, thus 'unity in diversity' is just a fantasy," sunflower moved on."In Osho's perspective, your hatred, your anger, your love–all these are related to your emotions, not to your thoughts. Most of the activities in life originate from the world of emotions. You must also have noticed that you think one thing, and when the time comes you do something else. The reason for this is that there is a fundamental difference between emotions and thinking. You may decide that you will not become worry; you may think that anxious is bad, but when the fear gets hold of you, thinking is left aside and you become scared, then you begin to be controlled by the Jinn.Of the many dimensions that emotions cover, there are four aspects through which emotions can become pure. These are also the four aspects that can reverse and become a womb for impure feelings. The first of these aspects is friendliness, the second is compassion, the third is cheerfulness, and the fourth is gratitude. If you were to include these four emotions in your life you would achieve purity of emotions.These four each have their opposite. The opposite of friendliness is hatred and enmity; the opposite of compassion is cruelty, violence and unkindness; the opposite of cheerfulness is sadness, misery, anguish and worry; the opposite of gratitude is ingratitude. Someone whose life and emotions are in the four opposite aspects is in a state of impure emotions, and someone who is rooted in the first four aspects is rooted in pure emotions.Anger has energy but friendliness also has energy, says Osho. Someone who only knows how to generate the energy of anger will miss a major dimension in his life. Someone who has not learned how to awaken the energy of friendliness is someone who is powerful only in hostile situations and becomes weak in friendly situations. You might not be aware that all the nations in the world become weaker during times of peace, and during times of war they become more powerful. Why? Because they don’t know how to create the energy of friendliness. Silence is not a strength for you, it is a weakness. Today, the power of America and Russia also comes out of hostility. Someone who has not learned how to awaken the energy of friendliness is someone who is powerful only in hostile situations and becomes weak in friendly situations.Up to now the history of mankind shows that we only know how to generate the energy of enmity; we don't know about the energy of friendliness. If you feel powerful in hostile conditions, that when you are in a state of awareness and silence you become powerless and weak. This means that you are being ruled by impure emotion. And the stronger the impure emotions are, the less you can enter within yourself. What is it that prevents you from entering within yourself? Your hostility is always focused on the outside; this means that hostility happens toward someone who is outside of you. If there were no one on the outside, hostility could not arise in you.Love is intrinsic, friendliness is intrinsic. Love is not focused on the outside: even if there is no one on the outside love can still happen within you. Passion is triggered by the outside. Hatred is triggered by the outside, love wells up inside. The spring of love flows from within, the reaction of hatred is provoked from without. Impure emotions are created on the outside, pure emotions flow from within.Fear never creates love. If someone says that there can be no love without fear, their statement is completely wrong. If there is fear, there is no possibility of love. There can never be love with fear. Even if love is shown superficially there is no love inside. The seed of enmity is very developed. Why? There are natural reasons for this because it also is needed. It may be needed, but it is not meant to be a lifelong companion. There are times when it is needed and there is also a time when letting go of it is needed. On the contrary, friendliness is a quality that has to be developed. Friendliness has to be developed because there is a source of friendliness within you, but life gives very few opportunities for it to develop. It remains undeveloped, it remains like a seed in the soil of your being–it cannot grow.It has to be developed in spite of all the primitive instincts which do not give it a chance to develop. The life that you lead doesn’t allow it to grow, only hatred is developed. And what you call friendliness is only hypocrisy and politeness. Your friendliness is only an arrangement to escape from hatred, to avoid it–but it is not friendliness. Friendliness is a completely different thing. You have to give it energy, you have to activate that space of friendliness. You have to constantly create a milieu of friendliness around yourself.Regularly, every day, do something for which you don’t expect to get anything in return, nothing at all. That way, friendliness will slowly, slowly grow. A moment will come when you will be able to be friendly with someone who is a stranger. Then there will be more growth, and a moment will come when you will even be able to be friendly with someone who is your enemy. And then a moment will come when you will not discriminate between who is a friend and who is an enemy.Then, how about dishonesty? Dishonesty is usually paired with lie. Christian B. Miller and Ryan West suggest that while there are morally justifiable lies (e.g., lying to save a life), in many cases in which lying is an attractive option, morally justifying reasons are nowhere in sight. What often is in sight is our own personal benefit—we commonly lie to gain an advantage or avoid some disadvantage.And why we lie? One common way to manage information that others possess is to lie. When we lie, we affirm a statement that we believe to be false with the intention that others take what we say as true or treat us as if it were true. Persons typically lie with the intention to deceive. Indeed, it is intention that on many occasions plays a part in why persons lie.In the minds of laypeople, the mention of virtue quickly evokes such ideas as kindness and honesty. To be honest is to be a person who tends to tell the truth, and some situations that do not strictly require truth telling may be such that it would be a good thing to volunteer it. Truthfulness may also occupy certain contexts in which the utterer can manufacture truth by her action: she makes the claim true by bringing its truth about. This kind of honesty spans truthfulness and justice. Honesty as respect for property rights is another kind of justice: for someone to have a right to a certain property is for others to owe him respect for or observance of that right. Honesty as playing by fair rules also seems to fall under justice. It would not be dishonest to fail to follow rules to which one has no (even implicit) commitment. So, compliance with rules can also be seen as owed to the other participants, and thus as a kind of justice, where justice is basically giving others their due.What is truth? The untruths characteristic of an untruthful person sometimes stem less from the intention to deceive than from careless inquiry. The truthful person thus cares about truth both in the context of communication with other persons, and in the context of investigations and knowing. Truth, let us say, is how things are, not simply as they are, but considered in relation to subjects apprehension, for example, by way of belief, claim, or perception. Truth’s values are also connected to its value in personal relationships. Human relationships thrive on trust and ail on betrayal. Typically, a person feels devalued, insulted, belittled by another (especially in a close relationship) when lied to, and truth telling is valued both as a matter of justice—something we owe to each other—and as a cement of personal relationships, a kind of fidelity of one person to another. Truth has value also, and in a way most fundamentally, because we humans are seekers of knowledge and understanding, for both of which truth is a necessary condition.Honesty as truthfulness is not merely a disposition to make true claims, or to seek the truth, or to face the truth (e.g., about oneself). It is a character trait, a habit of the heart, only if such a disposition originates in or is constituted by a caring about truth qualified by an appreciative understanding of truth’s value—that is, some wisdom about truth and the way it interacts with other features of a human life (justice, the trust of others, promising, friendship, respect for others). In short, the virtue of honesty as truthfulness is circumspect concern for truth in communication, and thus an emotional sensitivity to the values of truth.Well, when we are talking about honesty, the related word is integrity. Perhaps the least controversial thing to say about integrity is that it is something both admired and sought, its absence lamentably common and its loss costly. Integrity matters to us, and it seems to matter in a way that is neither merely instrumental nor conditional upon valuing other things. Even if having integrity is good for business, and lacking integrity would cost us the good opinion of others, this seems incidental to the value of integrity itself. Perhaps the second least controversial thing to say about integrity is that it is a moral virtue: it is an excellence of character, specifically as it relates to good conduct. Persons of integrity, it seems, are not morally corrupt, are committed to and act from sound moral principles, and so on.Why, exactly, does integrity matter? Persons of integrity are characteristically concerned with the truth. A disregard for the truth—being insincere, duplicitous, or shifty—seems incompatible with having integrity. Persons of integrity exhibit characteristically proper concern for their judgment, where this proper concern essentially involves responsiveness to facts and evidence and thus, a fundamental concern for truth.Even those who regard other traits as more central to leadership will acknowledge that integrity is a virtue. Developing the virtue of integrity is in many ways much like the process of developing any virtue. We receive direct moral instruction, and learn to empathize with those around us, but the process gets underway in earnest when we glimpse, however dimly, the special goodness of this particular virtue, and desire to instantiate it. Exemplars are studied and emulated. One’s own successes and failures in emulation are scrutinized. Concern for integrity is not properly merely a concern for the quality of one’s own character, but rather a concern for how one’s commitments, and how they are lived out, influence others around us. Someone who is merely concerned with her own self-integration purely for its own sake is not thereby a person of integrity.Is integrity an ethic? Integrity suggests that we should carry out ethical principles in our daily lives and activities, rather than espousing an ideal and then doing something contradictory. Ethics are principles that guide behavior. It's true, ethics is in the head. Nonetheless, it doesn't seems right, ethics is starting from the tip of the big toenail, which we maybe haven't cut from Friday to another Friday, up to the tip of our long hair. We can also say, 'Yea, the ethics that is on your face!' or 'Ethical in your eyes!', because ethics is also in your facial expressions. But the problem is, language is not just speech, but includes feelings. It will be different for who utters it: if one who delivers it as Kirun, or Asmuni on Srimulat, it might be considered a joke, and it would be unlikely if the one is a 'Southeast Asian Tiger,' probably, that the charm for those who listen to it, fades away, although it can be understood that it aims are only to familiarity. However, in any case, instead of comedians, if you notice, you will be presented Charlie Chaplin's hilarious actions on Indonesian political theater these days, and the door, won't be openned.Indonesian language has indeed undergone evolution. In the New Order era, the term 'ABG'—angkatan babe gue [my father's generation]—appeared. The language of Jakarta's urban youth was the 'prokem', peppered with English terms (fashionable, catwalk, impossible, top-scorer), and prestige markers of 'international' consumer culture (Airwalk shoes, fettucini, pizza, black forrest , Toblerone, Walkman, skateboard, grunge, usually comes from TVRI's advertising). Some of its linguistic humor is completely dependent on wordplay between English and Indonesian, 'Ayam sorry, Ayam sorry, Mom! Gout lagi busy seqalle!' [‘Ayam’, which sounds like the English ‘I am’, means ‘chicken’ in Indonesian]. Also what si Boy's mother [in a novel 'Catatan si Boy'] said, was a combination of English and Sundanese, 'What happened dieu?' Even though the nuances of this humor elude translation into any single language, but it's an Indonesian Identity.We'll continuing on the next episode, bi 'idhnillah."Afterwards, while welcoming the moments of the new one, the sunflower sang Armada's song,Tak perlu kau tanya lagi[You don't need to ask anymore]Siapa pemilik hati ini[Who owns this heart]Kau tahu pasti dirimu[You know for sure you are]Tolong lihat aku[Please look at me]Dan jawab pertanyaanku[And answer my question]Mau dibawa kemana hubungan kita? *)[Where do we want our relationship to take us?]
Citations & References:
- Osho, The World of Emotions: Creating a Milleu of Friendliness Arounf Yourself, 2014, Osho Media International
- Christian B. Miller & Ryan West, Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking, 2020, Oxford University Press
- Krishna Sen & David T. Hill, Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, 2007, Equinox
*) "Mau Dibawa Kemana" written by Tsandy Rizal Adi Pradana
