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Welcome to a place where art, philosophy and mythology come together.

Beautiful Thoughts :

“Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.”

― Rumi

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Destiny & Fate | From ancient Greece to psychology

It is common to hear the outcome of events being described as being the result of fate, destiny or sometimes a result of both.

But fate and destiny are not just concepts with an entertainment value, these ideas point to serious issues of great interest in a number of important areas such as: philosophy, theology, physics, psychology, and, of course, biology.

Destiny & Fate | From ancient Greece to psychology

According to an online Greek translation service (Craine, 2004), fate and destiny in ancient Greek came from exactly the same word: moira. This may suggest that the ancients saw little or no difference between the terms in their own times. In Latin, the word for fate is fatum and derives from the verb meaning “to speak.” Bollas (1989) notes that a fatum is a prophecy and that a fatus is an oracle. This definition centers on the fact that most knowledge of one’s fate came through a verbal statement or riddle. Destiny comes from the Latin word Destinare and means “to fasten down, secure or make firm” (Bollas, 1989). Rollo May (1981) states that destiny means “to ordain, to devote, to consecrate” and is connected to the word destination, suggesting that destiny includes both a direction and a plan. Bollas states that “[D]estiny is linked to actions rather than words. If fate emerges from the word of the gods, than destiny is a preordained path that man can fulfill”

Greek Mythology

The ancient Greeks had a strong sense of fate and destiny that appeared frequently in their myths. A person might learn about one’s fate in one of two ways. First, the three Fates were depicted as three old, but godlike, women called the Moirae. The Moirae could appear directly to the person’s parents and create the destiny of the child prior to or just after their birth. The first Fate was named Clotho meaning “spinner.” She spun the thread of each individual’s life and determined the complexities and major features of that life. Lachesis, the second Fate, measured the length of the life. Her name means “distributor of fortunes” as in a long or short life. The third Fate was named Atropos meaning “inflexible.” She was the most feared since she cut the threads of the mortal lives (Rosenburg & Baker, 1992).

The Way Of The Samurai | Bushido

The ancient warrior culture of Japan produced a sophisticated martial philosophy that we know today as Bushido—the Way of the Warrior. There are eight virtues of Bushido, the code of the samurai: justice, courage, benevolence, politeness, sincerity, honor, loyalty, and self-control. These virtues comprise the essence of Japanese cultural beliefs, which are still present today.

Dating back to the feudal era, samurai first began as armed imperial guards, but would later be regarded as one of Japan’s highest social castes. Also known as “warrior nobility,” samurai were part of Japan’s ruling class for over five centuries.

What’s more, samurai are still relevant today, appearing in anime, comics, movies, novels, video games, etc. Known for their iconic armor, katana (samurai sword), and swift fighting style, as well as their disciplined way of life, samurai are as recognizable as they are popular.

Bushido

Bu-shi-do means literally Military-Knight-Ways—the ways which fighting nobles should observe in their daily life as well as in their vocation; in a word, the “Precepts of Knighthood,” the noblesse oblige of the warrior class.

Bushido, is the code of moral principles which the knights were required or instructed to observe. It is not a written code; at best it consists of a few maxims handed down from mouth to mouth or coming from the pen of some well-known warrior or savant. More frequently it is a code unuttered and unwritten, possessing all the more the powerful sanction of veritable deed, and of a law written on the fleshly tablets of the heart. It was founded not on the creation of one brain, however able, or on the life of a single personage, however renowned.

It was an organic growth of decades and centuries of military career. It, perhaps, fills the same position in the history of ethics that the English Constitution does in political history; yet it has had nothing to compare with the Magna Charta or the Habeas Corpus Act.