Hi everyone! Pardon the silence as of late, but I’ve been toying with the idea of writing on here about the character traits and well the “personal code” that I have. My “Eight Virtues” if you will. Well the first post is turning into a pretty personal one and wasn’t quite sure if I should post it. Now I should say that this whole concept of eight virtues isn’t my idea at all, but it was something that I heard and really identified with then I was a kid.
As you may now I am a recovering addict… a video game one that is! :-P Ok ok I’ll be serious. That was actually true though, but I deal with it well, and for some reason I have found it pretty easy to ignore “the stuff” most of the time. (it helps that the closest real arcade to me is in NH) Well, I got to playing this one game series called Ultima. The first time I saw someone play Ultima IV I fell love and really wanted to play it. The game was genius.. y’see it was an RPG (role playing game), but it wasn’t about stopping the evil thing that was about to destroy life as you knew it. After the 3rd one, the evil was pretty much gone. Instead, in Ultima IV, the king at the time was trying to join all his peoples together in hopes that they could rally behind one great virtuous person….”The Avatar”. In it you played as the hero travelling across the lands, and trying to figure out how to become the most virtuous person in all the lands.
In this game there were eight virtues. Honesty, Honor, Valor, Justice, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Compassion, Humility. Each virtue was part of one of the principals of Truth, Love, and/or Courage. Your goal was to learn these virtues in and out and meditate at that virtue’s shrine with a particular mantra… once you were virtuous enough you’d get an eighth of an ankh. Once you had a full ankh you could go to the biggest dungeon and get the book of ultimate wisdom to finish the game.
I don’t know what it was, but I took all of those virtues to heart in one way or another, and i still do today. Some more than others of course…Either way I find each of them blog worthy.
It was kind of cool as each virtue had its own color, and as the primary colors mixed you’d get other virtues. Spirituality was white (the combination of all the virtues), and humility (opposite of pride) was black as pride is the absence of virtue. Humility is the foundation of all virtues.
So that’s my background on that… eventually I’ll get to them all. I’m almost done with Honesty… :: gulps ::
Hope to have it done soon!