Recommend a Psychiatrist

A reader has asked me to recommend a good psychiatrist in Singapore, for treating kleptomania. If you know of any such psychiatrist, please email me at mrwangsaysso@gmail.com or leave a comment below. Thank you.

So Is Life Rosy or Not?

One of my readers, Mr Han, requested that I comment on the following letter which was published in the Straits Times:

ST Forum, June 4, 2007
Future not so rosy for working-class S'poreans

MANY Singaporeans must be celebrating at the moment, with the buoyant economy, high employment, higher salaries and, for private home owners, skyrocketing property prices and 'en bloc' frenzy.

However, is the current state of the economy and future as rosy as it appears for most working-class Singaporeans?

According to data published in a report on the wealthiest cities in the world by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) on March 11, Singapore ranks 36th out of 70 cities based on gross domestic product (GDP) in 2005.

A look at the rankings will reveal that, apart from Singapore, all the cities in the bottom half are in Second and Third World countries.

Singapore's GDP of US$129 billion (S$197 billion) pales beside other Asian cities such as Tokyo (US$1.19 trillion), Hong Kong (US$244 billion), Seoul (US$218 billion) and Shanghai (US$139 billion). In fact, we are only slightly ahead of Mumbai (US$123 billion).

These rankings are arrived at by using purchasing-power-parity exchange rates.

However, unlike Singapore, our Asian counterparts in Hong Kong seem to have more to look forward to. The projections for city wealth in the year 2020 show that Hong Kong is likely to rise to 14th position, while Singapore is likely to decline to 40th.

The study (taking into consideration deduction of taxes and social-security contributions) reveals that net salaries in Asian cities such as Tokyo, Dubai, Seoul and Taipei will surpass Singapore.

However, these sobering statistics apply only to the average Singaporean citizen. The top bracket of earners in professions such as medicine, law, banking and, of course, within the ranks of the Government, will earn as much, if not more, than some of their counterparts worldwide.

What do these figures tell Singaporeans? We can conclude that even though we pay a relatively low rate of personal income tax, the net amount of wages we take home leaves us in the bottom half of the 70 cities in the PWC report.

Edmund Khoo Kim Hock

I'm no economist, but this letter doesn't strike me as being particularly well-reasoned. In fact, it reminds me of Edmund Khoo's other recent letter to the Straits Times.

The same difficulty arises here - Edmund seem to form his conclusion first, and then only formulate arguments in favour of it. In the process, he loses objectivity and mangles the facts. Next time, try analysing the facts first, BEFORE forming a conclusion.

Here's one big mistake that Edmund makes:

Singapore's GDP of US$129 billion (S$197 billion) pales beside other Asian cities such as Tokyo (US$1.19 trillion), Hong Kong (US$244 billion), Seoul (US$218 billion) and Shanghai (US$139 billion). In fact, we are only slightly ahead of Mumbai (US$123 billion).

GDP can be used as an indicator of various things. However, if the intention is to use GDP as an indicator of the average citizen's standard of living (and that's clearly Edmund's intention), the least we could do is look at GDP on a per capita basis. That is, take the GDP and divide it by the size of the population.

That's because GDP is basically a measure of how big an economy is. A big city with a large population could have a GDP much higher than a small city with a small population. But on a per capita basis, we would realise that the average person in the big city isn't necessarily any richer, and in fact could be much poorer, than the average person in the small city.

The report that Edmund cites is based on a comparison of cities and GDP. In this report, Singapore is ranked 36th out of 151 cities , approximately in the same range as cities just as Shanghai (32nd), Melbourne (33rd), Mumbai (37th) and Rome (38th).

However, Shanghai and Mumbai are MUCH more populous than Singapore; while Melbourne has a slightly smaller population than Singapore; while Rome has a much smaller population than Singapore. If you go by a per capita approach, you'd probably see that the relative rankings of these cities would change quite a lot.

Now, if you compare countries based on GDP on a per capita basis, Singapore fares much better than 36th out of 151. Wikipedia tells us that Singapore would be ranked 25th out of 182 countries.

Of course, countries like Denmark, Sweden and Finland still rank far above us (8th, 10th and 12th). This is despite the fact that like Singapore, these countries are quite small, and not well-endowed with natural resources.

According to MM Lee Kuan Yew, the governments of these countries are even "mediocre", and therefore their ministers deserve to be paid much, much less than Singapore's PAP leaders.

An entirely believable claim, as long as you choose to disregard the facts.

How To Touch The Face of God

I realise that my last post may have been a little too esoteric for some. Someone described that post as being "occultish and mystical".

So for today, I am sticking to more conventional ground (otherwise I may be accused of being a member of some cult). Today, we'll just learn how to touch God's face.

I say that this topic is entirely conventional, because it is entirely based on the work of a very well-known psychologist. He's so well-known that he appears in every standard textbook prescribed for undergrads taking Psychology 101. Many generations of NUS students would have studied him, for he is quite an important exam question.

Yes, we're talking about none other than Abraham Maslow.




Maslow's interest was in human motivations (what do people want? why do they want it?) and he is best-known for his hierarchy of needs (see above). Briefly, human needs are categorised into five levels. Only when you have satisfied your needs at one level, will you start being interested in satisfying your needs at the next level.

The lowest level of needs are physiological. They are your needs for air, food, water and so on. Once those needs are satisfied, you will become interested in fulfilling your next level of needs - for physical safety and security. After that, you will become interested in the 3rd level of needs, represented by your need for love and belonging (for example, friends and family).

The fourth level of need will be for self-esteem, confidence, achievement, and other people's respect. At this level, you may feel motivated to try to gain people's respect, by pursing conventional symbols of success and status (eg in Singapore, this could be the infamous 5 C's).

The first four levels are known as "deficit needs". In other words, they represent the lack of something. Once you have obtained enough of that thing, your need disapppears. For example, suppose you are very hungry. You then are motivated to get food. However, when you have eaten enough to feel full, you will not want food any more (not at least for a few hours).

The fifth level of need is quite different. This is the level of self-actualisation, which is not a "deficit need". Instead Maslow calls it a "being need" or "growth need". If your first four levels are satisfied and you come to your fifth level, you will seek to fulfill your "growth needs". How exactly a person will seek to do so, will vary from person to person - Maslow describes it as follows:

"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write., if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualisation ... It refers to man's desire for self-fulfilment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualised in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming".

The thing about growth needs is that they will never be satisfied. You will always want more and more and more. You will always want to grow. It is the desire to fulfil your full potential. An extract from Wikipedia:

Self Actualization is the intrinsic growth of what is already in the organism, or more accurately, of what the organism is. Maslow writes the following of self-actualizing people:

They embrace the facts and realities of the world (including themselves) rather than denying or avoiding them.
They are spontaneous in their ideas and actions.
They are creative.
They are interested in solving problems; this often includes the problems of others. Solving these problems is often a key focus in their lives.
They feel a closeness to other people, and generally appreciate life.
They have a system of morality that is fully internalized and independent of external authority.
They have discernment and are able to view all things in an objective manner.
In short, self-actualization is reaching one's fullest potential.

Only a small proportion of the general population are believed to be at the 5th level. If you like, you could say that Maslow sees self-actualisers as representing the most-highly evolved, the most developed, members of the human race.

Maslow also thought that although just about everyone has the potential to get there, most simply will not. The reason is that most people are unaware of their potential, or have been conditioned by society to believe that they are "mediocre" or "average".

Another Maslow quotation, to make this clear:

"There seems no intrinsic reason why everyone shouldn't be (self-actualising). Apparently every baby has possibilities for self-actualisation, but most get it knocked out of them ...I think of the self-actualising man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away."

I mentioned touching the face of God. Where does that come in?

Well, according to Maslow, self-actualising people can be further categorised into two groups. He calls them the peakers and the non-peakers. The peakers are the self-actualising people who have peak experiences.

What are peak experiences? Read for yourself - here and here. Essentially, they are quasi-spritual, or mystical, or religious experiences, far beyond the ordinary. (In most reported cases, these peak experiences do not last very long, not more than a few minutes). I call this "touching the face of God". Here's a brief extract from the account of one individual, Osho, who had a peak experience in 1953:

"And the last day the presence of a totally new energy, a new light and new delight, became so intense that it was almost unbearable -- as if I was exploding, as if I was going mad with blissfulness. The new generation in the West has the right word for it -- I was blissed out, stoned.

It was impossible to make any sense out of it, what was happening. It was a very non-sense world -- difficult to figure it out, difficult to manage in categories, difficult to use words, languages, explanations. All scriptures appeared dead and all the words that have been used for this experience looked very pale, anaemic. This was so alive. It was like a tidal wave of bliss.

The whole day was strange, stunning, and it was a shattering experience. The past was disappearing, as if it had never belonged to me, as if I had read about it somewhere, as if I had dreamed about it, as if it was somebody else's story I have heard and somebody told it to me. I was becoming loose from my past, I was being uprooted from my history, I was losing my autobiography. I was becoming a non-being, what Buddha calls anatta. Boundaries were disappearing, distinctions were disappearing.

Mind was disappearing; it was millions of miles away. It was difficult to catch hold of it, it was rushing farther and farther away, and there was no urge to keep it close. I was simply indifferent about it all. It was okay. There was no urge to remain continuous with the past."

Or in Maslow's words:

"The power of the peak experience could permanently affect one's attitude toward life. A single glimpse of heaven is enough to confirm its existence even if it is never experienced again."

Peak experiences aren't as rare as you might think. They also come in varying degrees of intensity. A belief in "God" isn't an essential pre-requisite for touching God's face, either.

If you go and think about it, Buddha's enlightenment under the bodhi tree would, in Maslow's terminology, be an unusually intense peak experience. Subsequently, it became a plateau experience (Maslow's term again) whereby the experience becomes permanent and continues indefinitely (in Buddha's case, for the rest of his human lifetime).

Maybe you too would like to touch the face of God, if only briefly. If so, well then, hurry up, climb through Maslow's hierarcy of needs, and go to Level 5. Don't waste time being mediocre. Go and become everything you were supposed to become.

Can Success Be Easy?

Well, of course. If you bother to find out how.

Mr Wang's methods are somewhat unorthodox. If he told you all about them, you'd think he's crazy. So he will be very careful about what he tells you. Take note - what you read about here today is merely a watered-down version of Mr Wang's unorthodox methods.

Mr Wang is a mindhacker. He didn't come up with that term himself. Mindhacker is the term that another blogger, Alvin Soon, once used to describe Mr Wang. It is an apt term.

Alvin Soon is a qualified neurolinguistics programming coach, who has used NLP to, among many other things, cure his clients' phobias (for example, of heights, public speaking etc). So Alvin Soon is quite an expert, quite a professional, at mindhacking too. Heheh, but Alvin knows that Mr Wang still has a trick or two to teach Alvin.

By mindhacking, I am referring to a collection of methods, techniques and processes whereby you will alter the way you think. One such method is meditation. Another method is hypnosis. Another method is NLP. There are others - some are esoteric and strange, and some are very simple and straightforward, such as writing down all your goals twice a day, every day, day after day after day, until they have been imprinted onto your subconscious.

Since the topic is vast, I can't address it in any real depth here. The applications are just as diverse. For example, one hypnotherapist I know helps her clients to quit smoking by hypnotising them to believe that cigarettes are vile and disgusting. When the client sticks a cigarette into his mouth, he immediately feels like throwing up (and in a 100% genuine physiological reaction, he WILL throw up, if he doesn't take that cigarette out of his mouth). Very quickly, the client will succeed in quitting his smoking habit.

Once you realise how malleable the human mind is, you will begin to see the endless possibilities. Life becomes vastly easier, if you can master just one or two mindhacking techniques and use them regularly. For example, suppose that you hate maths. If you could actually hypnotise yourself into loving maths, being excited and thrilled by formulae, equations and so on, aha ..... you'll see how very easy it could be, to succeed in doing well in maths. You just won't be able to keep yourself away from your maths textbook.

To better understand mindhacking, you must first understand that what we normally think of as objective reality, is actually highly subjective. What you think that the world is like, is mainly a result of what you think. What you believe that your circumstances are, is mainly a result of what you believe.

If you still do not understand that reality is very subjective, simply consider how different persons, placed in identical circumstances, can hold very different opinions about those circumstances. For example, two employees, X and Y, could be employed to do exactly the same kind of job in Company Q. They have the same pay, the same boss, the same colleagues and the same working conditions. X loves the job passionately and feels utterly fulfilled at the end of each workday. But Y hates the job bitterly and can't stop complaining about it.

Or two NSFs, A and B, are platoon mates in the same SAF unit, P. They are of the same rank and the same vocation, and their meals, pay, training, living conditions etc are identical. A thinks that army life is quite fun, exciting and adventurous, and he thoroughly enjoys the friendship and camaraderie of being with his army buddies everyday - these are the best days of his life. B, on the other hand, is so depressed about army life that he is secretly comtemplating suicide.

In truth, the job in Company Q is neither good nor bad, until someone thinks it is. Life in SAF Unit P is neither good nor bad, until someone thinks it is. Nothing in the world actually is, until someone thinks it is. That is why Prince Siddharta, you see, was trying to tell you that reality is just one big illusion. Albert Einstein agreed.

Now, if you are a mindhacker, you will learn the arcane arts of tinkering with your own mind. You will consciously choose the kind of thoughts and beliefs you want to have, and then you will penetrate into the deeper levels of your own consciousness, and you will plant those thoughts and beliefs there. And then you will be ready to play with that big illusion known as reality.

For example, if you are working in Company Q, you could hack your own mind and plant a mindset like X's, deep into your own head - and everyday, it will be a joy for you to go to work. If you are an NSF posted to SAF Unit P, you could hack your own mind and plant a mindset like A's,. into your own head - and everyday, life in the SAF will be fun, the most memorable days of your life.

Wherever you go in life, whatever you do, you could just keep hacking your mind, and planting whatever you want, into the deeper parts of your consciousness. You will truly believe that Company Q is a great place to work. You will truly believe that SAF Unit P is a marvellous place. You will truly believe that cigarettes are nauseating. You will truly believe maths is fascinating and exciting. And as far as you're concerned, all these things will truly be that way.

(A brief digression. If you truly believe that Jesus is your saviour and your path to eternal life after death, that's probably going to work too. But that is a topic for another day).

Of course, the first limitation is how good you are at mindhacking. It does take practice. If you are not very good, you may not be able to plant certain thoughts too deeply. For example, just as you may not succeed in ridding yourself of a fear of public speaking, you may not be able to create in yourself the belief that army life is enjoyable - even though there are clearly some people who love public speaking, and some people who love army life.

But as you grow more and more adept at mindhacking, your ability to consciously change your beliefs will grow. Whatever situation you find yourself in, you will have greater and greater ability to consciously select the optimal thought patterns for your situation.

Remember - there are all kinds of people in the world. Some enjoy climbing cold, hazardous mountains or running marathons. Some fearlessly give public speeches even to 10,000 people. Some love the challenge of studying for the most difficult exams. Some are calm, focused and good-humoured even under stressful working conditions. Some are very skilful and confident about dealing with the most difficult clients, bosses or colleagues.

So if you ever have to climb a mountain, run a marathon, give a public speech, study for difficult exams, work under stressful conditions, deal with difficult people, whatever else ....... all you have to do is steal the relevant mindset, and go deep, deep, deep into your own brain, and plant it there. You can do it, if you know mindhacking.

And yes, success will come more and more easily then - whatever you want to succeed in.

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This post is dedicated to PC, who knows the reason why. Go bend reality, my friend.
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A Quick Note

Some of you may wonder why my "Comment Moderation" is usually turned off, but is sometimes turned on.

I turn on "Comments Moderation" at certain times, for specific reasons. For example, currently I have a post about Grand Season International, and due to the nature of the subject-matter, there is a possibility that some readers may leave comments which may be construed as defamatory.

Thus while the post is still topical, I would leave the "Comment Moderation" function on. In other words, a reader's comment will not automatically appear, but will appear only after I have "approved" it.

Unfortunately, Blogger does not allow "Comment Moderation" to be selectively turned on or off for particular posts. So "Comment Moderation" is currently is activated for the entire blog.