Pointedness

Here is the critical point. In negotiations we will get ourselves in terrible difficulty if we allow ourselves to believe we can ever manage or control numerical results, other people's actions or the flow of time. Because we cannot manage these things, in our frustration and despair we will fall into need, lose hope, and our integrity will be impaired. For this reason the moves in Ring 1 and throughout The Five Rings focus on our own actions and behavior over which we have some large measure of control. By asserting ourselves here we gain some incremental margin of influence over the uncertain and destabilizing forces of life.
— Julian Gresser, Piloting Through Chaos, p. 35.

"I have no parents. I make heaven and earth my parents.
I have no home. I make awareness my home.
I have no life or death. I make breath tides my life and death.
I have no divine power. I make integrity my divine power.
I have no means. I make understanding my means.
I have no body. I make endurance my body.
I have no eyes. I make lightning flash my eyes.
I have no ears. I make sensibility my ears.
I have no limbs. I make promptness my limbs.
I have no strategy. I make unshadowed-by-thought my strategy.
I have no designs. I make opportunity my designs.
I have no miracles. I make right action my miracles.
I have no principles. I make adaptability my principle.
I have no tactics. I make emptiness/fullness my tactics.
I have no friends. I make you, mind, my friend(s).
I have no enemy. I make carelessness my enemy.
I have no armor. I make compassion my armor.
I have no castle. I make heaven/earth my castle.
I have no sword. I make absence of self my sword."
— 14th century samurai, in Ibid., p. 57.

If we can extract the deepest insights from Shakespeare, we can do the same with Goethe, the Bible, the Baghavad Gita, Leonardo da Vinci, Lincoln. Gandhi, and all the great figures of history, living and dead, and from literature, the epic heroes, the wisest people, and they can all, by means of the computer, become our friends and teachers! If we had the financial means we could construct for every country its Wisdom Genome — the core of its contribution of wisdom to humanity — to be updated continuously and made available, as a birthright, for everyone.
— Julian Gresser, Ibid., p. 140.

     As science has grown in power and prestige over the past century, too many philosophers have served as science's public relations agents. This trend can be traced to such thinkers as Charles Sanders Pierce, an American who founded the philosophy of pragmatism but could not keep a job or a wife and died penniless and miserable in 1914. Pierce offered this difinition of absolute truth: it is whatever scientists say it is when they come to the end of their labors.
     Much philosophy since Pierce has merely elaborated on his view. The dominant philosophy in Europe early this century was logical positivism, which asserted that we can only know that something is true if it can be logically or empirically demonstrated. The positivists upheld mathematics and science as the supreme sources of truth. Popper, Kuhn, and Feyerbend — each in his own way and for his own reasons — sought to counter this fawning attitude toward science. These philosophers realized that in an age when science is ascendant, the highest calling of philosophy should be to serve as the negative capability of science, to infuse scientists with doubt. Only thus can the human quest for knowledge remain open-ended, potentially infinite; only thus can we remain awestruck before the mystery of the cosmos....
— John Horgan, The End of Science, p. 33.