Michael’s International Exposure

As well as extensive travels throughout Europe, Africa, Australia, North and South America and Asia, I have lived (that is spent more than 6 months in any one place, living as a local, as opposed to simply traveling through) in:

• Australia: Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne
• Malaysia: Kuala Lumpur and islands (including running a Jungle Bar in a predominantly Muslim area where alcohol was prohibited – a not-so-insignificant achievement)
• South Africa: Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town
• Spain: Madrid, with extensive travel throughout the country and two road trips through France and Spain
• Taiwan: Taipei, with extensive travel throughout SE Asia
• Thailand: Islands and Bangkok
• United Kingdom: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cambridge, London
• United States: Washington DC, Phoenix AZ

I’ve slept in 6-star hotels, sprawling houses in the most expensive suburbs, flashy apartments, military barracks, prison, under the stars, tents, on board yachts, a ramshackle tree house and even camped out in a friend’s townhouse for a few weeks when I couldn’t pay the bills.

I’ve dated women from 8 nationalities and visited more than 300 places in over 40 countries.

• Create your own travel map or travel blog
• TripAdvisor has airfare search

So What?!

So what, I hear you say, and what an excellent question. Who cares what my exploits have been?

I mention them not to pat myself on the back, but to give you a sense of how much international exposure I’ve had.  I’ve been particularly interested in the differences between East and West.

The major differences (highly summarized) between East and West are:

• Interdependence vs. Independence;
• The offering and settling of favors.

These differences impact the individual’s entire worldview, from life as an individual within the Cosmos, to family units to the view of the Universe.  For most Westerners it is difficult to understand the interconnectedness of all systems, because of the strong emphasis on independence.

What scientists are now finding at the outermost frontiers of every field is overturning all the basic premises concerning the nature of matter and reality. The universe is not a world of separate things and events but is a cosmos that is connected, coherent, and bears a profound resemblance to the visions held in the earliest spiritual traditions in which the physical world and spiritual experience were both aspects of the same reality and man and the universe were one. The findings that justify this new vision of the underlying logic of the universe come from almost all of the empirical sciences: physics, cosmology, the life sciences, and consciousness research. They explain how interactions lead to interconnections that produce instantaneous and multifaceted coherence—what happens to one part also happens to the other parts, and hence to the system as a whole. The sense of sacred oneness experienced by our ancestors (and now Easterners) that was displaced by the unyielding material assumptions of modern science can be restored, and humanity can once again feel at home in the universe.

Easterners understand and embrace the state of being, vs. Westerners who know only planning and controlling.  This approach effectively shuts out the influence of the Universe.

Planning and controlling usually only takes cognisance of the immediately visible (material) aspects and completely ignores the spiritual/meta-physical in decision-making.  This is why so many Western decisions result in less than stellar outcomes.

Forgive the diatribe.  The takeaway is that the more widely exposed one is to different cultures, the more embracing one’s belief system becomes.