An exhibition was held recently at the Singapore Marriott Hotel of the rare memorabilia collection of Singapore’s founder, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, purchased at the cost of US$1.2m by a private buyer. The 70-item collection has been acclaimed as the best so far recalling the former British administrator, who lived from 1781 until his sudden death in London on 5 July 1826, one day before his forty-fifth birthday.

The Straits Times lists books, personal artifacts, a lock of Raffles’ hair, and private letters in one of which he described his second wife as “ugly.” His first wife, Olivia Devenish, a widow ten years his senior, had been his true love. After her death he had married Sophia Hull who bore him five children, all but one of whom died in Sumatra before the family returned to England. Her surviving child died on the eve of her marriage and 19th birthday. Raffles died after only nine years of marriage to the courageous Sophia, who surely does not deserve to be remembered as ugly.

Raffles worked at first for the British East India Company in Penang as an assistant to the island’s governor. Rising through the ranks, he beat the Dutch and French forces and worked to secure the island of Java for Britain, becoming its lieutenant governor. He was knighted and sent to Bencoolen, Sumatra, and from that base he developed a small settlement on the island of Singapura (Lion City), then also known as Temasek (Sea Town), under the protection of a small British military force.

Despite his father’s having been personally involved in the Caribbean slave trade, Raffles, as the island’s administrator, humanely suppressed slavery during his time. After his death, the vicar of  St. Mary’s church in Hendon, whose family had benefitted from the slave trade,  refused the family’s request for his burial to be made inside the church as his rank and connection with the parish might have merited.

WODEN SAYS:  Come on, chaps, let’s all pop over to the posh old Raffles Hotel and down a Singapore Sling or two in honor of Sir Stamford. Or shall we?

Why remember him at all? Why remember this ennobled civil servant of heavy-handed European colonialism rather than the villagers on the island who were there when the British, Dutch, and French were squabbling over their so-called “possessions” in Southeast Asia? And why, for heaven’s sake, pay all that money for a collection including a letter slandering his less-favored but oft-pregnant wife? Will the show actually help young people in the Republic of Singapore to know about these things, or assist ex-pats from Europe and America, living on the island, to feel more at home in the world’s fifth-wealthiest city?

When our souls come down to planet Earth and incarnate as human beings, we select in advance our gender, race, family, and geographical background. We also pick the lessons we want to learn. These are freely chosen in terms of their content but not as specific experiences. We may choose, as Sophia’s soul presumably did, to experience loss and abandonment. It may be presented to us when our parent leaves the marriage, or dies, or when a sibling marries and moves away, or our spouse cheats on us, and so on.

The Republic of Singapore provides its children with practical experiences rooted in its history and geography. Its wealth now as a trading society gives social advantages to some (which may carry negative lessons) and teaches lessons, such as jealousy, to others who are less privileged. From the colonial past come attitudes of a carefully structured society which some claim breeds very different attitudes to learning and self-expression among school children in the Island’s different schools.  These educational differences will encourage some kids to conform to social rules and in others suggest that social norms may be questioned—characteristics that persist in those children’s subsequent lives.

The same is true the world over. North African immigrant children living in the high-rise slums of the Paris suburbs have a very different upbringing from children growing up in the Latin Quarter of the 5th and 6th arrondissements of central Paris. Muslim children in Bradford, England, are very differently nurtured from a Christian farmer’s brood living in rural Devonshire. And none of the above share the dislocation suffered by children living in military or diplomatic families, constantly on the move.

If you are looking for a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in this commentary—there is none. If souls freely chose to be your children, then you may be sure they did so deliberately to aid them in learning the lessons they have chosen to learn. The effect of Sir Stamford Raffles on the type of society that is now Singapore is similar to the French and British colonial past lived out in retrospect in Paris and Bradford. That doesn’t mean, however, that we must be tied to the past and cannot work to open up the society we live in to be more attuned to our ideals.

Our guides are here to help us in whatever environment, tribe, and family in which we find ourselves. They live in the Now, and look at the challenges we face in our present lives, whoever we are and wherever we may happen to live. Nor are our souls inescapably tied to our upbringing. Raffles broke with the legacy of his father’s involvement in the slave trade, and deserves an historical mention as having been socially more enlightened than many of his generation. Probably a greater legacy than his being the Founder of Singapore. Woden toasts this achievement. Now, how about all of us doing something to end the sweat-shops of Southeast Asia? That really would be a break from the past.

(The Masters of the Spirit World’s weekly blog is at: www.mastersofthespiritworld.com.)