Spirituality for Living

Failure is one of the biggest demons anyone faces, and poorly understood in part because people feel it has to be understood as they conceive of it. Natures wisdom gives us what are very natural negative feedback mechanisms, but in our thinking we tend to push them aside. In doing so we are controlled by [...]

The first emotion of failure is frustration. People mistake frustration, and take feeling frustrated personally. Frustration is at first a feeling, both natural and valid. It comes about when we are thwarted from achieving something we were highly motivated to achieve, but it doesn’t usually stop at a feeling. We have emotions about the feeling. [...]

The next emotion of failure is aggression. Yet aggression is even more villainized in peoples minds than frustration is, and ignores huge parts of how the human mind works. It’s seen as more dramatic than frustration, but it is just another part of what is a very natural aspect of how we function.
Aggression doesn’t mean [...]

Insecurity is another emotion that stops us. Emotions are not inherently bad, though people often declare that they are because they feel they are powerless to deal with them. Their emotions are how they are dealing. The emotion that makes us cuddle a lover or a child isn’t bad. But these emotions I speak of [...]

We are not of our nature solitary creatures. When we feel lonely and make declarations of how we don’t need anyone, that isn’t about people. It’s about ourselves. We feel frustrated, so we try to deny that we have worth. In a perverse way it’s a tactic for putting ourselves on the side of those [...]

People in the name of ego will refuse to take risks, and make choices. So their freedom of action is very limited. They refuse to make a mistake so they refuse to do anything at all. Thus in the name of ego they withhold themselves. They withhold there own happiness (which is infectious and a [...]

Resentment is an effort to address what has passed, and you cannot influence. It keeps you very much trapped in ego, and keeps you from maintaining much of what you value and want to keep in life, let alone new things.
Resentment is an effort to undo something in your past. Something you can’t undo. Even [...]

There are those who jumped every hurdle, play the game perfectly, and none of it was ever them. They learn the game really well, but because they weren’t coming from that place inside of them they succeeded to fail. It was success, but not their success. They started off on some one else’s foot, so [...]

Many people find the concept of resolution really confusing, or feel there is something wrong with them because it just doesn’t seem to work. It’s really pretty simple as most things are when you see the way of them. You resolve to do things all the time. It’s plain and simple decision making. Eat or don’t [...]

Change has given us a lot of great things. Change has given us everything. A new human life is a whole lot of change. We get a new human form from material we can’t even really see. You cannot guide what you will not touch, and what you will not allow to touch you, and [...]

I have scary news, and it’s terrible.  There is no failure. No matter what you do, you did that.
Failure is the unexpected outcome, defining that which was not in your definition of success? Yes, but is it your definition of success? How many people have something that is genuinely their personal definition of success?
Is your [...]

Does superstition play a part in Bushido? In a sense, any tradition is a superstition. Does any belief survive? Because that is the literal meaning of superstition.
Does any form of Bushido persist in modern Japanese society, or is it all historical? Actually yes. It doesn’t exist unmodified, but it is how the “do” disciplines got [...]

Looking back for my future. Looking forward it’s past. The only time I can love you is in the now. Not a race. Hey, wrote a poem.   Yes, that’s the truth.  If right now I just cannot accept my now, I can take radical action. Nothing is truly circumstantial, but things are balanced. You choose radical change [...]

Sun Tzu wrote the Art of War. What is bigger and more scary than war? Anything?
War is about as worse as it gets. Suppression is bad too. Oh, suppression is bad. Suppression is war on self, and people love their wars on self. They will fight them, because they are told they should. But what [...]

What is waste, my friends?

A lost opportunity.
Stuff we don’t need?
Something squandered.
Excess.

All answers are valid because we all see it differently, and that is perhaps the key point. People often judge another with the lament, “What a waste”. I would ask, how do they know? Every choice of one thing involves an action that excludes another [...]

I’m changing with time. Time. Interesting notion.
Bushido teaches something I find helpful, metaphorically at least. “I am already dead.” You have already lost the fight, so you can decide what to do with your “failure”. If everything is a failure then what is failure? I am a huge failure. I never sustained gainful employment. I [...]

I will begin by defining regret in contrast to other states. What does it mean to regret nothing? If I say I regret nothing, I am saying my actions are totally in keeping with my intention, is this not so?
True, but what if the outcome is not in keeping with the intention? That is the [...]