This is very interesting to me...and I think lies at the heart of budo as I understand it. Really, forget budo. It lies at the heart of the human condition.
Quote:
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The question has been asked, do you live in a fundamentally friendly universe or a fundamentally hostile universe?
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My quick answer is "yes." The longer one is that the Universe can be described as a gradient between the two, "indifferent," being the middle point. I think it's mostly indifferent, but I try to account for "both" extremes...in fact I tend to look to extremes in order to understand what I consider to be the boundaries of reality; to (hopefully) understand the unifying principles holding those extremes together. So, when I walk past someone, I try to hold two ideas in mind at the same time: 1) this guy might want to kill me for no reason at all; 2) this guy might want to be my best friend. I assume the reality is
probably somewhere in between, while trying to be prepared for either possibility. Mostly they don't care who I am...although I just had a "gentle" reminder to the contrary when a pregnant meth-head took one look at me as I came out of a store and flipped me off saying, "fuck you pig." Maybe she thought I was a cop who arrested her one time? I don't know. Whatever the case, she's an addle-brained tragedy. She is part of the Universe, just as are my two darling boys. Examples of light and dark abound, and the rest is a constantly shifting shade of gray.
I discovered a bullet hole above my bed when I was kid. If I had been sitting on my bed I would have been shot. To describe this "side" of life I like to point out that we're invisible specks in a small bubble flying through blood-boiling space. It's a fact and it's hard to ignore. But it's also so very awesome and so amazingly beautiful! To my mind, it's the Grand Irony. Be serious; have fun; I try to do both at the same time.
"The world is what we make of it." This rings true to me in a couple ways. We act based on what we perceive. Even when we're trying to remain neutral our body/mind responds in sublte ways. The people around us perceive this to varying degrees and in turn respond in various, often subtle, ways. And on and on it goes. We train to adjust our responses to adjust their responses, etc.
That's how it seems to me.
...and what that all means exactly, I'm not so sure, but there's my two bits.
Be excellent to each other (and yourselves).
Matthew