Everyone gets stuck in habitual patterns, including emotional, behavioral, and relational habits. We have the same arguments repeatedly with our parents, partners, and children despite wanting to stop. Often by the time we realize we’re stuck, we no longer know how to get unstuck. The secret to finding freedom is to understand karma and free will.
Why is it useful to understand karma and free will correctly? If you misunderstand karma, you’re more likely to get stuck. And if you misunderstand free will, you’re more likely to stay stuck.
Joining Western psychological science and traditional Buddhism, experimental psychologist and Zen monk Ven. Dr. Douglas Cheolsoeng Gentile describes how our minds can be simultaneously our greatest weakness and greatest asset. We are controlled by both external forces and internal habits of mind, while simultaneously believing ourselves to be ‘free’. This conundrum can be solved by seeing where our biases begin, how our natural ability to learn traps us, and how we unintentionally undermine the progress we intend to make. This book can help you find freedom from negative habits, relationship patterns, and feelings.
You don’t need to be Buddhist to be able to use these ideas to be happier, just as you don’t need to be a mathematician to be able to add. You just need to have an accurate understanding of the processes to make them work for you.
Catagory: Non Fiction
The Apple and the Tree
When an apple falls, does it roll far or stay close to its tree?
Is it an exact clone of all the other apples the tree produces or something entirely different?
This is the question that has perplexed the public about Marina for the simple reason that she is the daughter of the man who has governed Malaysia for almost twenty-four years. Does she echo him in his view of the world, or does she chart her own path?
Why is it that in her own public life, in her writing and speeches, she expresses opinions that seem to contradict his?
This book hopes to detail how she has navigated her life as the daughter of a charismatic politician and a loving father, even as sometimes she has chafed at being constantly under his shadow. It talks about how she has struggled to find her own identity, to defend her worldview at times and to reconcile them with his at others.
She tells the story of growing up as the daughter of Malaysia’s most influential leader, from the values instilled in her as a child, right up to the day he was forced to step down as the 7th Prime Minister after leading the historic ouster of the government he used to lead.
The Stories Women Journalists Tell
Twenty-two women journalists in Southeast Asia share their personal experiences in essays spanning politics, culture, travel, human interest and lifestyle.
In these insightful and compelling essays, the former and current journalists take us through the journey as a woman covering news in male-dominant newsroom culture while keeping eyes on the ground. The Stories Women Journalists Tell is an inspiring collection of essays that celebrates kinships, camaraderie and strength, while highlighting our most important and interesting history in events and news.
Themes
1. Politics: The essays reflect events that happened in a local environment while providing balanced coverage of key organisations and political events.
2. Life & Style: The essays in this volume foreground the role that life & style writers and editors played in reporting news while staying grounded in an image-obsessed world.
3. Human Interest: The human interest essays here focus on details that resonate emotionally with the readers, and sometimes can be described as ‘getting the story behind the story’ or ‘putting a face on the news.’
4. Culture: The essays discuss a particular belief or values of a particular group of people at a particular time.
5. Travel: The essays here are part travelogue, part literature, which can double up as a historic travel narrative.
Final Reckoning: An Insider’s View of The Fall of Malaysia’s Barisan Nasional Government
From the innermost sanctum of the Prime Minister’s private offices among the Minaret-studded buildings of Putrajaya to streets filled with tear-gassed protestors in downtown Kuala Lumpur, Romen Bose, a former international correspondent and political communications consultant to then Prime Minister Najib Razak, provides a gripping and engaging true story of drama, intrigue, violence and incompetence that finally ended the rule of Malaysia’s sixty-one- year old Barisan Nasional Government in May 2018.
With a front-row seat to the major controversies that hit the Najib Razak administration, Romen reveals for the first-time how the country’s leadership reacted to the disappearance of MH370 and the still classified covert moves to retrieve the remains of Malaysian victims following the shooting down of MH17.
Final Reckoning also gives a blow-by-blow account of how the 1MDB scandal rocked the Government and the attempts by the country’s top politicians and their advisers to contain and explain it away. Through numerous conversations with key players and his presence at various top secret meetings amid the global investigations into the scandal, Final Reckoning pieces together how a sitting Prime Minister became, Najib claims, ‘the fall guy’ for a mastermind who had managed to pull off the single biggest con of the century. In doing so, Final Reckoning tells the story of an ultimately futile scramble to try and preserve a crumbling political legacy that had long been out of step with the realities of a new Malaysia.
This book is the story of the wild roller-coaster ride that marked the Barisan Nasional Government’s rule, from the 2013 General Elections, until its 61-year-old hold on power came to an end on the night of 9 May 2018.
A Nation’s Disgrace: Singapore’s Shocking Scandals
Singapore is often known as a ‘clean’ country and its citizens ‘law-abiding’. However, every once in a while, the island has been shocked by an incident or a crime so unexpected and shocking, it grabs headlines and piques the interest of locals and international press alike.
Spanning across all kinds of crimes, this collection has one thing in common – shock value. Cases covered in the book include high-profile ones like the NKF scandal, the City Harvest Church debacle, Singapore’s most-wanted terrorist, Mas Selamat, and how one man in Singapore – Nick Leeson – brought down one of the UK’s oldest financial institutions, Barings Bank. Plus, there are a few shocking murders thrown in too.
This book is a collection for anyone interested in Singapore society, law and history, to find out more about how these cases were discovered, the law-enforcement processes that followed and what happened to the offenders after the cases ended.
Bloody Saturday
Saturday, August 14, 1937 – that summer Shanghai was expecting to be hit by a typhoon of ‘violent intensity’. The typhoon passed, but what did strike Shanghai was a man-made typhoon of bombs and shrapnel that brought aerial death and destruction such as no city had ever seen before. The clock outside the Cathay Hotel stopped at 4.27 p.m. precisely as the first bombs landed on the junction of the Nanking Road and the Bund; the second wave of explosions struck the dense crowds outside the Great World amusement centre in the French Concession. Bloody Saturday reconstructs the events of that dreadful day from eyewitness accounts.
A Dead Body Never Lies
Words and actions can mean a thousand things in any mortality case, but only the body can provide the truth to decipher the cause of death. Dr Rohayu, a forensic pathologist, knows she has a duty to the dead and lives by the statement, ‘a dead body never lies’. She has taken the unsaid oath to be the voice of and safeguard the ones who are not able to tell their story. With Malaysia’s diverse melting pot of race, culture, and religion, Dr Rohayu has been through a plethora of extraordinary scenarios. Despite the social stigmas and taboos that come into play, Dr Rohayu is committed to seek justice and provide closure. A food enthusiast with an infectious bubbly demeanor, Dr Rohayu never fails to bring a little flare into her field of work. With the help of her co-author Fatin, they have transformed her work into a compelling piece of art for the world to see and understand.
No doubt in Dr Rohayu and Fatin’s mind, every single person deserves to be heard, the right to love, and freedom to be their true self. With a combination of science and empathy, they have created a unique piece of writing. Step into Dr Rohayu’s shoes as she brings you through these ten cases, which she believes will serve as a beacon of hope to the people who feel their voices are not worthy enough to be heard.
Accelerating Women
The greatest source of innovation in any organisation is its people, and one of the highest contributors to achieving sustained performance comes from Accelerating Women. This means leaders need to be committed to a sustained change to support, coach, mentor, listen and sponsor women every day. This is #1 issue holding organisations back from greater success in their business. Society is 50% women, yet it’s rare to find organisations with even 30% participation in management. So you’re missing 30% of the talent pool!!!
So, this book is about tools, approaches and real experiences to help you, as a manager/leader to create a workplace that Women want to join and contribute to. It will help you attract talented women and retain them, helping your team grow and innovate.
The book is split into 4 key parts:
Self – what you can personally do to support change
Leaders – what do you need to do with the leaders
Organisation – what can you do to sustain a broader change
Community – what can you do to facilitate a change in the community
This is written for business leaders with real stories that make it easy to understand what to change. The book is designed to help every manager and leader to change the way they operate, especially men in leadership roles on how to lead differently and make a real difference on gender diversity. Accelerating Women, is a journey without a finish line but is the most rewarding investment you will ever make.
Divining Duterte
First published as opinion pieces, the essays in Divining Duterte provide contemporaneous commentaries on the context, course and consequences of the policies Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte pursued after his 2016 election.
Duterte became the first president in seventy years to come from Mindanao and the first to vault from a city mayor’s office to Malacañang Palace. Exploiting the potential of social media, Duterte was an Asian example of the elected “populist strongman,” like Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Orbal, and Russia’s Putin. His policies challenged the commitment to established political values assumed unassailable: human rights and the rule of law; separation of powers; and the preference to ally with the United States and other nations that shared its democratic liberal values rather than with authoritarian regimes. Despite these policies and problems coping with the pandemic, public opinion polls rewarded him with high approval ratings.
Restricted to a single presidential term, he will inevitably exert an influence on the 2022 elections. Duterte’s 2016 underdog victory rewrote the rules for presidential politics. In reviewing the path he took to bring the country towards 2022, Divining Duterte explores his success in overturning Philippine political values
Covid 19: A Black Comedy of Emotional Intelligence
The pandemic crisis is not showing us our lives are irrevocably damaged. On the contrary, it reminds us of our role towards humanity and that some areas may have been neglected and systems need to be upgraded.
From weak healthcare systems, poor leadership, to the frailty of human communication, COVID19: A Black Comedy of Emotional Intelligence is both a social satire and a reflection exercise towards becoming a more engaged citizen of the world after the virus turned the world upside down. So much was conveyed from mainstream media, social media, skeptics and conspiracy theorists alike which rose to the surface like crema, an interesting tapestry of reexamining life as how we know it. A pandemic united the world, many agree to disagree on how the future of the planet ought to be handled. People saw ugly truths of their governments with their backhanded policies. But will life ever be the same again? It isn’t just about the world in action but also about countries and their inaction. And where do we go from here? All of these are discussed in short reflective pieces that make up the entire book written during quarantine.
Each chapter fuses aspects of both science and arts, swinging from psychology, sociology, politics to economics providing both comic relief and cognitive stimulation. Students, educators and readers alike can benefit from the compilation of facts and sardonical approach.