Bushido

Back in the day a friend, jerajdai, made me a  banner for this site. I don't know what happened to the banner but we are still friends, I think.  It was a surprise, as she simply sent it to me one day, and I appreciated it as soon as I saw it. I emailed her and asked if she knew what the kanji that she used in the banner was, and she did. She'd read a post I'd written some time ago on Bushido and thought it was fitting. The post has become very popular with someone in the Netherlands, who has become obsessed with, well, his bushido, which is very different from mine. Since the post has become so popular I've decided to update it a little with some further observations. The passage of time doesn't necessarily bring us more wisdom or light unless we're doing the things that make room for more wisdom and light internally.

The word is Japanese and means, the traditional code of the Japanese samurai, stressing honor, self-discipline, bravery, and simple living. Its roots are in Chinese. Bushi, warrior (from Chinese wu shì, knight, warrior wu, military + shì, brave warrior) + do, way (from Chinese dào). The Western equivalent might be likened to King Arthur’s Court and the Knights of the Round Table. Everyone has a code by which they live. Some know what it is because they chose it carefully, consciously or accepted it from another and modified it according to their personal strengths and weaknesses. As no one can have another’s experience, no one can have another’s code or bushido. No matter how disorganized the code may appear to us in another’s life, it is there. It is not what we say it is, but what we do. A person may say they don’t steal. They may then rationalize taking time at work to do personal things in order to hide from themselves the broken code. Their Wa will be disturbed because of the contradiction. What is this Wa about which I write and speak? Imagine, if you will, a pool of clear, clean, fresh water with smooth, round stones on the bottom. The stones may be observed if the water is troubled or calm. How they appear to one when observed will be determined by how much the water is stirred. The calmer the water the more clearly the objects in it may be observed. Bushido and Wa work together like that. Drop a pebble in the pond and the ripples will change the appearance of everything we may see in the pond and also the reflections that we may see on the surface of the water. The water in the pond represents your mind, your internal state.

What makes all this work is the Tao. The Way, the Is-ness of Life, the Immutable Principles of the Universe. The Tao is not Bushido. Bushido flows out of the Tao the way plants spring forth from the earth. From the earth grow both weeds and plants, which each bear fruit after their kind. Bushido can be like that. It all works together. The murderer has his Bushido and the saint his. The difference in Bushido will determine the quality of Wa. If one's Bushido is in harmony with the Tao their Wa will be strong and harmonious. The quality of Wa will also determine the Bushido chosen and followed. My Bushido is based on my experience of the Tao. The test of the accuracy of my perception is the quality of my Wa. If my Wa is disturbed my Bushido has not been followed. If I am conscious of the change I have the opportunity to find and correct the error I've made. If it's important to me I will work to bring myself back into harmony with my Bushido, and thereby the Tao, which will restore my Wa. These are my words and my experience. I learned it from the Universe, the Way, the Tao. I believe all beings live in the Tao. Some accept it, some fight it, but no one gets out of it. Because the Tao is benevolent all things that flow from it are connected by a Will. We misunderstand what Real Love is because we misunderstand Real Will. You must will to be in harmony with the Tao, and if you do, you will will to love all. Your Wa will be harmonious. If you hate, you oppose the Tao by opposing what is in the Tao, and your Wa will be War because you resist the Is-ness of Creation. It's up to you and no one else. What you do matters. Your thoughts, attitudes and feelings are where what you do in the world comes from. They are your Tao. They are your Bushido.

Credit

No, not Visa, Master Card, American Express, Discover, etc. This is the other kind of credit. This credit is public acknowledgment or praise, typically that given or received when a person's responsibility for an action or idea becomes or is made apparent. It's only fair if you consider we're pretty quick on the trigger to bash Xanga when they don't deliver. Seems like a good idea to be just as quick on the trigger when they deserve credit. Remember how I said that Xanga couldn't keep the dogs out? Well, they still can't keep them from coming around leaving nasty little deposits on your lawn, sidewalk, yes sometimes even your porch or living room if you leave the door open. When it's hot like this in the summer we like to leave doors open for our friends to come by and have some iced tea or lemonade and some conversation. Sadly, other things come in those open doors too. Mosquitos, bees, hornets, dogs, and yes, even pigs wander in sometimes while we're out. They never wipe their feet until they get inside though. Then they wipe their feet on your oriental rugs, sofas curtains. They just don't care. Why should they? Their brute beasts, like a bull in a china cabinet or a pig in a poke. One of them got into my Xanga home and ripped around snorting, pawing, rooting and leaving a load of stink in nearly every room. Not wanting my friends to have to step in that crap I cleaned it out. Well, it didn't take long before that herd ran back through depositing their filth everywhere again and again. So, I did what anyone who cares about what his friends step in would do. I closed all the doors and windows to keep the beasts out. That meant my friends had to knock or ring the bell or wonder what had become of me.

Not having just fallen off the turnip truck, I had enough presence of mind to go have a look at the Xanga Terms of Use. You know, the ones we all agreed to when we started our sites? It's updated from time to time, but it hardly matters anyway because most of us didn't read them when we signed up. We were too anxious to start blogging. Anyway, lo and behold, there was this part in their where we agreed not to be nasty, smelly brute beasts who crapped all over other people and their homes. So, I reported the offender and his/her three sites started within hours of each other with no posts, just comments and only in once place. At my house. Comments is a misnomer. It was pure hate spam. To make a long story longer, Xanga took a couple of days after I reported the sites but they shut them down and thanked me for letting them know. Not what I expected, not what I'd come to expect from Xanga so I was surprised. It was like I actually had someone on the home team who cared and was willing to check it out and enforce the Terms of Use.

In a perfect world there wouldn't be a need for such things as Terms of Use agreements. Sadly, though this world may be perfect, what populates it often has wires crossed or in one way or another is wrongly connected. Or as my friend, Wil Carter would say, They were not properly socialized to humans when they were young hedgehogs. Whatever the reason may be, they are full of unpleasant manifestations, lack social graces, feel entitled and fail to understand a certain sense of decorum that the more civilized amongst us try to develop and display. Yes, they have many justifications for their rude, crude and socially unacceptable behavior. What do you suppose tops the list? Right, they don't like someone. Someone didn't treat them the way they think they should be treated. Or, that old stand by, my dog ate their homework. Xanga may not be able to keep the dogs out, but they have proved to me that they are willing to take out the trash and for that I am grateful. Thank you, Xanga! I'm actually going to open the doors and air the place out now that I know you've got my back.

Protected

It kind of sucks that I'm not gay, African American, or one of the other groups that are protected by law. Seems the only people worthy of protection from harassment, hate, slander and death threats are minority groups. Sorry I've had to lock down the site but xanga left me no choice. They still can't keep the dogs out. After all these years you'd think they'd get it.

Bitchin'

There are sites dedicated to bitchin', and by bitchin' I mean, express displeasure; grumble. Some of the sites are free. You can just sign up and bitch. Any bitchin' session has to be governed by rules though, so the sites are categorized. Let's be real about this. Who wants to read someone's bitchin' on something about which we do not want to bitch? That's just annoying. Bitchin' is only annoying when people are bitchin' about something we don't want to bitch about. There's just no interest and no interest makes things boring, tedious or downright annoying. What to do? Start bitchin' about it. There's a certain finesse that goes along with bitch sites. You have to have a bitchin' moderator to make sure the bitchin' stays on track, the flame wars stay directed at the bitchin' target and no one comes in who has thought about it too much. Thinking ruins bitchin'. Oh, I don't mean the kind of thinking bitches do. I'm talking about real thinking. The kind that takes effort and weighs pros and cons. The kind of thinking that looks at something from every possible angle. What? You've never heard of such a thing? Sure you have. You've just not seen much of it in our world today. There was a time when people did that kind of thinking, at least some people did. I'll bet there are still people who do that kind of thinking. The problem is they're not welcome on bitchin' sites. Those people are truly annoying. The bastards! They take apart our flimsy, negative bitchin' line by line and ask embarrassing questions about it. Questions that make us look like the foolish bitches we are when we go around foolishly bitchin' about something because we didn't understand it or it didn't make us look good or feel good.

Bitchin' used to be done in people's homes more often than not. When I was a child I remember my mother going over to a neighbor's house for coffee with a number of other women. They'd all get together and bitch about their husbands or some other woman in the neighborhood that wasn't there. She was out doing something the others could bitch about. They didn't really know the woman but they knew all about how she should behave and live and talk and think and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Written out, that string of blah, blah, blahs doesn't look like much, but I sing it in my head while I'm writing it and it's quite melodic and pleasing. Bitchin' is discordant and grating because it lacks harmony. Life is better with harmony but we don't really understand harmony so much. We think it's something they used to have in music before all there was in music was big bitchin' bass and bitchin' beat. Sure, it's about music, but it's about so much more than music. Harmony is the quality of forming a pleasing and consistent whole. There's not a lot of harmony in our world today, but there's a lot of bitchin'. We've become bitches bitchin' about everything from the President and his bitch to the guy next door and his bitch that keeps us up all night with her barking. We bitch about the government, the economy, the world, people, animals, the rain forest, global warming. You name it! We'll bitch about it. We've become a bitchin' culture.

Blame it on the internet! That's the bitchin' thing to do. People can bitch on the internet with impunity. Impunity means exemption from punishment or freedom from the injurious consequences of an action. Now that's bitchin'. The internet is anonymous. Anonymous means not identified by name; of unknown name. It's cool. You can bitch every which way but loose and never have to think about injurious consequences. There are no internet police or courts. It's like the Wild West without the Earps, Bat Masterson or Marshall Dillon. There doesn't have to be a shred of truth in your bitchin'. It just has to be interesting. Remember what makes something interesting? Someone has to be interested in it. That's all. With the negative social mood on the planet today it's easy peasy lemon squeezy to find someone interested in bitchin' about some thing, some one or some cause. You may have figured out by now that today's bitchin' is about the same thing as yesterday's gossip. The rules are still pretty much the same. It's as effective as it's ever been because we're as ignorant as we've always been. Ouch. Sorry. We only think we're getting smarter. We're really getting dumber. There's a difference between being informed and being intelligent. Intelligence is the ability to adapt. Being informed is the ability to collect information. You don't have to understand the information you collect. You do have to be intelligent to adapt new information into new knowledge that can be used in a productive way. I don't blame the internet or the bitch sites. I take responsibility for it. How I do that is I don't read it, listen to it or believe it. Okay, my bitches, class dismissed.

Ha!

Is this really happening? Can I actually post with Safari now and not with Firefox? My, how the xanga world has changed. I can't even sign in with Firefox. Screw it! Okay, the xanga world hasn't really changed, but we like to think it has. We like to think everything is getting better all the time. It gives us hope. False hope in most cases, but that's something to which we can cling in a world that seems to be spinning out of control. It makes us feel like we're evolving, getting better, smarter, more advanced. Or at least that we could. What are we getting--really? More complex. Complexity is not a sign of intelligence. Sadly, in most cases, complexity is a sign of obfuscation. Like a cuttlefish that hides itself in its own ink. A friend of mine is a programmer. He spends most of his time sorting out bugs that come from building programs on buggy programs rather than fixing the buggy programs. Why? We're stupid. By stupid I mean, dazed and unable to think clearly. We get so much invested in the program that we can't afford to start fresh, or so we think. Many years ago he worked for a company that had a monster program that kept getting bigger and bigger. They kept adding code on top of complex ill functioning code because they couldn't just write a new, fresh program. Their poor customers kept dropping off the grid as the program became less stable and more unusable with each improvement. Finally they had to bite the bullet and start fresh with a new program. Only when it became financially impossible to keep adding to the monster did they see that it was time to retreat, regroup and reinvent. The company is still in existence though I can't imagine why.

What the hell am I talking about? Look, cut me some slack. It's been a long time since I've posted much of anything here. I'm rambling. Why are you reading this? Maybe that's a better question. It's almost always ourselves that we look at because we're so busy fixing everyone else. I can't be fixed. I'm broken. Too broken to even throw myself out or give myself to AmVets or the Salvation Army. Why do we do that? Why do we take things that we know are broken beyond repair and give them to some organization that can't use them? Never mind. Who cares why? We're not going to stop doing it regardless of the answer. Answers aren't all they're cracked up to be. What's true today isn't necessarily true tomorrow. Like our favorite shoes when we were kids. We outgrew them and had to give them up. Okay, let's see if this posts. Yeah, that's right. You've been reading a test.