Fujiko Suda / Reflection

Knowledge management

Maybe the fad-like interest in "knowledge management" is waning now, but I do hope instead of being content with having knowledge, that we will learn to actually use these knowledge.

Soichiro Honda never used the word, knowledge management, but he did say that most important thing is people's ideas that ultimately serves people. He said his company's mission is to produce products that would serve people.

When we talk about "knowledge", we can't forget that knowledge is idealy to serve people.

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Fragile existance

Unusual night. Disturbing feelings because of what was happening around me tonight.

Tokyo was full of demonstrations and lots and lots of military and police about the town, because US President Bush is in Japan today. Funny, I felt most unsafe when hundreds of armed guards were marching towards me down the hills from Roppongi area. All the guard buses parked alongside the road. I heard a man said to his companion, "This is the safest place in Japan tonight!". But there's something that evokes hate when force is gathered, kind of force that would not question value of life. Force that kills when ordered.

I know individually, these military men are human beings, but dressed in uniform and in formation, they became more of machines who merely reacts to orders. And those people demonstrating against whatever. Those individual human beings become something else when they are gathered together, united in anger against something.

I guess I have been most fortunate, because this was the most collective hate emotion I have ever felt around me in my life so far.

This made me think of how people behave sometimes. Treating another as non-human. So when I came home, I opened up Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. How he survived the concentration camp during WWII.

One of the demonstration tonight was about Iraq situation. These people gathering together to hate Bush, hate US, hate the Japanese guards who are herding them.

I am hypersensitive to people's emotions, and I react immediately to people's emotion around me. That's probably why my older two boys learned how not to show their emotions too much, because I would be right there, reacting to and augmanting their feelings. I felt such big collective "hate" tonight. It felt too hard, too sharp at the edges, too patchy, too miserable.

Still on Reflections on the art of living 2

Actually, if I wrote of all the thoughts that wells up from inside of me while reading this book, it would surely be one thousand pages in small prints.

Heinrich Zimmer is quoted in the book:

She is the mute security of lif in itself: from the ashes of burned forests she raises eager fresh flowers whos decay is pregnant with new life, a new life which all around it sees only life in its transitions and transformations with no shadow of death, just as we ourselves, when we sink our teeth intoa ripe fruit, or draw a living plant from the garden, are without awareness of death.

Ashes. Dusts. It seems the ultimate of life into nothingness. But stars are formed from dusts gathered together by gravity in the space, right? By human time frame, it might as well be forever floating in nothingness, but there it is. Ultimately, new form emerges, the Genesis in the making. It isn't like the feeling one has when walking away after seeing the 2001 Space Odyssey. It seems more familier and more grand than we think.

Serendipity

Mahayana Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara who is represented in Japan as Kwannon ... I was reading about that. Then my husband chooses the place for our vacation at Kwannon Point, which is only 1 hour away from where we live.

The place is sad: history of war in the past. How did the local people feel when they spotted Perry's ship coming into the bay? The people chiseling away the rocks and stones to create roads to protect the country, to prepare for war. Those people who ruled the country, many wished for power, had ambitions. Yet people who toiled to fulfill those ambitious people's design surely gained insights and fulfillment through work they performed. The roads and paths within the beautiful Kwannon Park. Outside of this beautiful national park, beaches full of rabbish and trash. We have much work to do. How? How do I start?

The place is enchanting: <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor">kites</a> hovering over the bay and mountains. Incredible sunset into the mountain, moon rising over the island.

Riding the windy road along the bayside on my bicycyle was such a treat. Serendipity, because I just started learning in ernest about buddhism. And I was lead to the place with its name.

Still on Reflections on the Art of Living

This is not a big book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060926171/qid=1065537149/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/104-0598512-8565508?v=glance&s=books&n=507846">Reflection on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion</a>. It's only 311 pages. But every page or two require me to think, reflect. And often light from sudden understanding of tacit aspects of my thoughts and feelings bursts out. It is taking a long time for me to read it. I can only read maybe 10 to 20 pages at most per day, because the book touches on basic struggles I have been going through all my life.

Like questions about God, eternal life, science and where it leads, love and war that never ceases among humans, death wish that just will not go away, so many feelings, happiness, jealousy, sadness that keep coming and going.

Then the words

<i>To say "yes" to life:
"yea" to it all.

Yea to all those questions.

Participate joyfully
in the sorrows of the world</i>

The sorrows will not ever go away! Neither will this joy that keeps welling up inside of me when things seem quite impossible.

The great Mahayana Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara who is a man and a woman at the same time, who is represented in Japan as Kwannon,

<i>in another manifestation has thousand hands surrounding him like a halo, and in the palm of each is an eye that is pierced by the sorrows of the world...</i>

I've thought all these years, why can't I be truly optimistic? Why do I feel others' joy and sorrow so keenly? Understanding Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, it means it is natural, human to feel like that.

I've hung on this time. I hung on to the feelings I had, not bolting from them, accepting and then seeing if it departed or grew. Fear, anger and hate departed. It became something else, peaceful joy. I felt there must be something wrong with me wanting to say yes to all, but light needs darkness to know it is light. There was nothing wrong with me. It may not keep happening in the future, but the spell has been broken, the vicious cycle of fear that lasted for over 40 years ended.

It peaked over the last few weeks. It has been feeling as though I was stuck in the mud. Slow thoughts, mind in thick field. Body not able to move in agile manner... But then it gave full bloom to beautiful lotus flower. Bright, shining, knowing the sadness yet rejoicing.

Business Organization Life Cycle

Any living organism is born, lives, and dies. Business organization is a type of living organism, and it seems many major companies in Japan are getting to be ancient in age.

Maybe some companies can transform itself. But I believe best life for organization is just like in human's life, that is, born, live, give life to another being, die. So it seems that the best way for company is give birth to companies (subsidiaries), let them go (for God's sake, don't send people who became redundant at the existing company!), and live out the remaining life fully, then die.

Perhaps our unwillingness to plan for death is reflected in the economy situation.

Business Organization Life Cycle

Any living organism is born, lives, and dies. Business organization is a type of living organism, and it seems many major companies in Japan are getting to be ancient in age.

Maybe some companies can transform itself. But I believe best life for organization is just like in human's life, that is, born, live, give life to another being, die. So it seems that the best way for company is give birth to companies (subsidiaries), let them go (for God's sake, don't send people who became redundant at the existing company!), and live out the remaining life fully, then die.

Perhaps our unwillingness to plan for death is reflected in the economy situation.

Does your weblog own you?

Not as much as you, Seki-san!
<a href="http://wannabegirl.org/quiz/owned/">Does your weblog own you?</a>
<center><table bordercolor="#003060" height="15" border="1" cellpadding="0" width="320" bgcolor="#003060" cellspacing="0"><tr><td width="100" bgcolor="#FF6800"><center><font face="ocr a extended" size="2" color="black">31.25 %</font></center></td><td bgcolor="#003060"></td></tr></table></center><br><center>My weblog owns 31.25 % of me.<br><a href="http://wannabegirl.org/quiz/owned/">Does your weblog own you?</a></center>

How I Think

Some people comment that I am a hard worker because I read a lot. Well, not really. It's the way I learned how to interact with the characters in the book when I learned to read at age 3. It is a way I focus, how I think.

Reflection on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion:

My Confession would be that I'm a thinking-intuition type, short in both the feeing side and the sensation side. Okay, that's the boat I have, and that's the one I'm using. My sensations and feelings are there, but I couldn't guide myself by them.

What's my boat? Do I know?

When we talk about scientific truth--just as when we talk about God--we are in trouble, because truth has different meanings. William James said, and it's valid, "Truth is what works."

What a way of putting it! I like it.

When they get that tremolo in the voice and tell you what God has said, you know you've got a faker. When peope think that they, or their guru, have The Truth--"This is It""--they are what Nietzche calls "epileptics of the concept": People who have gotten an idea that's driven them crazy.

I guess I have been succeptible to this. I live my life with lots of exclamation marks. I go mad, then return to sanity. Repeat.

Do not give up your vices.
Make your vices work for you.

If you are a proud person,
don't get rid of your pride.
Apply it to your spiritual quest.