R.A.G.E. Media

Thanks to Google Books’ new API, one can embed entries from Google Books into a web page. So I’ve done so with the preview of “The Way of the Christian Samurai” both on that website, specifically on the free preview page.

CNN has a story on how people are ‘freaking out’ over the stress from the economic fallout.

It seems even if we are not headed into a depression financially, many of us are in the midst of a psychological depression due to the recent bad news on Wall Street.

Isn’t this one of those things that are outside our control? Even if you are not religious, aren’t we all supposed to act, not react?

All fear is anticipation of loss. In this case, loss of money, financial security. I’m not sure financial security is all that secure; even if you hold onto cold hard cash it can be stolen, lost, or become worthless due to a fluctuation in the market - or the government. Someone once told me that the retail price of soap has increased more in the past 100 years or so than gold; ‘precious’ substances, in the end, are less valuable even in monetary value than non-perishable necessities.

If, while you are holding onto something (in this case money) and are so afraid of losing it you cannot function, there is something wrong with the way you are living. I’m not trying to be preachy. This has nothing to do with faith or religion. If you are getting emotionally sick over something you have no control over, do something that you can have control over. For one thing, I’ll hazard a guess that despite the credit crunch we are going to see a surge in small businesses in the next 6 months.

I’m not going to quote a Scripture here, but rather a pagan Samurai warrior:

“If you are full of anxiety and constantly fret about this and that, you will never be able to handle anything well… Samurai were trained as a matter of course to live simply with a minimum of possessions. It is much better to be free of attachment to things and events; when one has attained a high level of insight, he is unconcerned with the ceaseless flow of activities and objects” (Yamaoka Tesshu, quoted in the Way of the Christian Samurai