Sun Tzu’s True Art of War – Why the Pen is Mightier Than the Sword December 14, 2008
Posted by vikasreddyd in Satire, Politics, and Religion.Tags: dynasty warriors, lu bu, military history, military strategy, sun tzu, the art of war
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Sun Tzu’s True Art of War – Why the Pen is Mightier Than the Sword – Associated Content
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The pen is mightier than the sword.
Enough said.
There’s a difference between the blade of a sword and the ink of a pen. The old saying always reminds us that the pen is truly the dominating warrior in the battle between violence and serenity in mankind. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War shows us the genius tactics that a general can use to defeat overwhelming odds and combat technology. His life as a heroic general during the Spring and Autumn Period of China under the King of Wu is testament to the realism of his war tactics.
Sun Tzu's strategies have spread throughout the world and were used by many warriors, including the Samurai.
As a gamer I’m familiar with that kingdom because I’ve played the Dynasty Warriors series on the Playstation 2 for years; Wu is one of the main factions in the game. Decimating thousands of enemy NPC soldiers as Ma Chao and Lu Bu never gets old. I never did like Wu actually because I was a Shu warrior gamer at heart. I’ll also never forget that priceless cut-scene in Dynasty Warriors 3 when Lu Bu appears for the first time. Two enemy soldiers freak out and one of them yells in a hilariously accented high pitched voice, “Oh my god, it’s Lu Bu!” (Lu Bu to China in the story was the equivalent of Achilles in the West)
But the way it was said sounds like “Omg it’s Luu Booo!” so I can’t help it but crack up each time.
Getting back on topic, let me explain to you what I have done as an online freelance writer. I’ve been writing since the age of eleven but started out as a humble kid polishing his skills in creative writing, unaware that you can actually get paid (too bad the world thought I had to be 18 to legally exist). Writing is a talent I would have never worked on if it weren’t for my genius English teachers in all my schools, even from my playground and recess days. They taught me it is more than something you learn in the classroom. It’s more than essays and term papers that make me want to stick my hand in an oven. I once had an essay paper I had to skip meals to finish, and you know what happens as soon as I walked out of my house to go to school?
It rains.
Not just any rain. To bystanders it was a sudden downpour but to me it was like my life’s work was getting urinated on by God himself. That was the inevitable pain I had to deal with as a writer. Picture Agent Smith from The Matrix movies series saying “inevitable” and the point will hit home.
I’m in medical school abroad in India, thousands of miles from my hometown near Chicago. And still I’m getting paid for what I write online. Thousands have been influenced by my writing. When I talk about writing as more than a physical connection, I mean it breaks physical laws in nature, something the blade of a sword can never do.
What people say in real life to you is understood normally. But the letters and words you read on paper only happen in your mind through incredibly high speed neural impulses of information. With the power of the internet, humans have defied nature’s boundaries and made writing a way you can actively change the lives of millions of people in the world at real-time, across the continents and oceans.
Writing is psychological and I’m all about psychology. When you put yourselves in the shoes and mind of another person, you discover all the different ways you can take 26 letters and create a nearly unlimited combination of words and syllables to understand what will make a reader laugh, hurt, and learn – something a weapon of war like a blade can never do.
And unlike the sword, writing can be used to create peace as well as starting wars. Believe me, I tried an experiment to see if the sword can also do both and I learned something. Never use yourself in an experiment. Get someone else.
And who the hell said the pen can’t kill a guy better than a sword?
We have people like Jason Bourne running around and using every house hold item to beat up professional cold-blooded assassins from places in Europe where we say we want to go but are too lazy to make the damn trip. I still remember The Joker from The Dark Knight hilariously dispatching that hechnman by making his pen ‘disappear.’
The Joker can make pens 'disappear.'
What house-hold item will Bourne fight with next?
And if you still don’t believe me that writing is the true art of war, then you must realize that Sun Tzu’s masterpiece The Art of War was not created by a sword, but with the ink of a pen. Sun Tzu was a mastermind who knew he could influence billions of people over generations of life and death. He knew that if he was lucky, his words will be read even today. The pen had made Sun Tzu immortal.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
-Sun Tzu
The Art of War’s final secret is that it is truly the act of writing that can defeat enemies when you’re ashes and dust in the winds or buried six feet in the ground.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
The Truth About Reputation and Respect December 12, 2008
Posted by vikasreddyd in Satire, Politics, and Religion.Tags: business world, careers, partnership making, power and money, reputation, respect, social status, society
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The Truth About Reputation and Respect – Associated Content
My two cents.
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Gaining Respect and Learning What Status Really Is
It’s funny the things we end up doing to protect something called our ‘reputation.’
Reputation you say? Let’s see what the dictionary says:
1.the estimation in which a person or thing is held, esp. by the community or the public generally; repute
Okay, none of you need a definition to know what reputation means. We all know reputation makes who you are, or at least that’s that we’re taught.
There’s a tricky line between reputation and the essence of who you are. Because the two can be entirely different things. Reputation is how the community sees you and It is your image in the light of society’s eyes.
And the essence of who you are is more simply: who you are in reality.
Any objections when I say the two can be different things?
People do some risky things to protect their reputation because in the end, that’s all they’ve got. When we walk down the street, our reputation is perception to outsiders. To those who don’t know us, what else do we have but our name? Reputation is what you wear, who you are friends with, your race, what God you worship, and the size of your wallet. It influences how the world reacts to you before you take a single action. The world doesn’t care who you are inside. It only cares about what you look like you can do.
If you demand respect, you better deserve it first.
There’s just one loophole:
Reputation can be created, imagined, faked, fabricated, framed, and defended.
The essence of who you are is not an illusion. It cannot be faked, and only you, your closest family members, and friends know the truth. Why don’t people simply accept that as their reputation?
To look better with the conformists of society, men and women go against their own core beliefs to fit the ‘accepted’ image that’s been spoon-fed to them from the day they’ve been born. That includes the way they dress, the music they pretend to like, the people they marry, the races they associate with, and even the people they shun or kill. To what lengths do we go to keep our reputation perfect? We all realize it’s an illusion but we make it so real we forget it isn’t who we are.
We’ve run from our own judgment to the abstract judgments of a ‘higher’ power. We’ve married people against our will, have not divorced because it would ‘look bad’, withdrawn from society because of being a rape victim, committed suicide, and other miscellaneous tragedies. And those who matter most to us end up being permanently scarred by the consequences. So many times we’ve held ourselves back in order to look better to people we don’t even know or will ever meet. The Samurai that followed the Bushido code frequenty committed ritualistic acts of suicide called seppuku. They were done out of relief for people who believed their reputations were shamed forever.
And what about Oedipus Rex? He gouged out his eyes after his found out he killed his father and married his mother, out of pure pity and shame. But there was no way he knew what he was doing and it was not his fault. Any reasonable person could have kept his sanity but reputation can sometimes corrupt important decision making.
Oedipus Rex sacrificed his eye sight to cope with his shame. Not exactly smart because it changes nothing.
In the end, who you are is the most significant thing you can be. Attach whatever you want. Race, religion, gender, rank, and wealth. Do labels truly define you?
The measure of a man is his internal self. Take away his job, rob his bank account, burn down his house, deface his marital image, and shatter his armor. And what’s left underneath? Absolutely nothing. Without his armor, he’s weak and defenseless. He’s a trapped ant under a magnifying glass. The ‘man’ who holds that magnifying glass is who we fear the most.
The point is that nobody is actually looking down on us. A near-fact:
The average person does not care about the way you look or what you’re associated with. He is more concerned about himself and his own reputation. Another never-ending cycle. So most of the stress that goes with trying to look cool is for nothing.
But there’s only one way to redeem ourselves. We have to be true to ourselves. Do not sacrifice our personal beliefs for the sake of looking good. The honor of our family and glory of ourselves are just illusions. Many people would die for honor but really, what is honor? What is glory? Take a moment and figure out what they mean.
Now that you know what they actually mean, are they worth destroying peoples’ lives? Are they worth war, racism, and damage that threatens the people you love? All that for abstract words.
Abstract:
1. thought of apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances: an abstract idea
2. expressing a quality or characteristic apart from any specific object or instance
3. theoretical; not applied or practical
Can you taste honor? Can you touch glory? Now is it worth spending your life and resorting to extreme things such as war and family banishment to achieve them?
The world is a cold place and people only believe in reputation, no matter what you are underneath. And who you are on the outside is a stage.
What we must do is stay true to ourselves. We have to do what we think is right. If it means defacing our reputation and destroying our family’s image in the eyes of people that don’t matter, we have to be prepared to do it.
Key word: In the eyes of others.
The truth and reality of your decisions must be accepted by you, your friends, and your family. They are the real reputation.
There are very few instances in the world where a man can be stripped of his entire armor and retain his indomitable spirit. He can go beyond what people say and set out to accomplish what he truly knows is right. The people want to do the same but are reluctant, too cowardly to face society’s judgment. And so, they turn on him and make the man a martyr. Very few men have the courage to do that, the power to disregard opposition and to do what matters to them the most.
Reputation and the essence of who you are – are two very different things.
And the day a person starts to care about the latter is the day he will be a man of respect.
Reincarnation and the Conservation of Souls December 12, 2008
Posted by vikasreddyd in Satire, Politics, and Religion.Tags: astrophysics, black holes, buddhism, conservation of energy, hinduism, reincarnation, religion, spirituality
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Reincarnation and the Conservation of Souls – Associated Content
Here is one of my first submissions to AC. Although reincarnation is a religious and spiritual topic, it still holds true in theoretical physics.
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Conservation of Matter and Energy is Real, but What About Souls?
An animal dies in the jungle.
Where its soul goes and what afterlife it will venture to, no one knows. Will it be reborn in a different realm of existence as intelligent or will it be destined to be a rock? Reincarnation nonetheless.
The law says matter is always conserved like energy. Anything that escapes, including the soul, has to be conserved. It will have more entropy but it has come back into existence. In a closed system, the amount of mass and matter is always constant.
What goes into a black hole… theoretically will be ‘conserved,’ and still exist. What goes into a wormhole can come back out in different points in space and time. Matter is always conserved like energy.
The black hole singularity point is one of nature's greatest mysteries.
Is the animal going to come back as an animal or become an inert thing? No one will ever know that answer.
But what we do know is that if there was a calendar depicting where we are in time (day, month, year), it would be us as a dot smack dab in the middle of ” 0″ and “Infinite+”. And what are the chances that us right now are a reborn version in soul and cognitive mind of an animal or thing of the far past? Energy must be conserved like matter. Is it possible that maybe souls are conserved too?
Maybe one day we can see the reality of reincarnation, and not focus on its roots.
Theoretically this may be possible. Empirically it will suffer because it cannot be observed. But that was what they said about black holes and the world was dead wrong.
What goes into a black hole must be conserved as energy despite being obliterated. There is almost no force more powerful and God-like than the black hole. If matter can survive that, then there are a few simple rays of hope for mankind in the idealistic sense that life will go on forever.
But will we ever know where the swallowed entities of a black hole go? A real question of common sense.
- Reincarnation Manifested in History
Or does the story end like it started:
An animal dies in the jungle.
