The Knights Code

MadHatter wrote:

Senan wrote: . The Knight's Code is for Knights to follow. Period. Asking anyone else to consider it before they are a Knight is akin to asking a 12 year old to drive a car because they hope to have a driver's license some day. They can study driving all they want, but until they take the test and pass, they aren't a licensed driver. Let's take this one step at a time, please.

Ok feel free to answer this in PM if you feel it derails this thread or goes too far from the original topic but should not one start acting like a Knight to the best of their ability from the time the start Apprenticeship aka the first step on the path to Knighthood? If that is the case then should not all Apprentices look to the Knights Code?

Acting like a Knight does not make one a Knight. Following the Knight's Code does not make one a Knight. One can act like a Knight at any time on their path, but that does not make them beholden to that Code. I can act like a priest and I can study what they do, but any code or vow or oath they have does not apply to me, whether I follow it or not, until I am ordained as a priest. What is at risk here is people choosing to study and follow a code that does not apply to them yet, then potentially abondoning it when it is no longer convenient without any consequence. A Knight does not have that option once they vow to uphold the title, nor should they. Encouraging people to strive toward the ideals represented in the Code is great, but I would assume a Teaching Master would do that as part of Apprenticeship. There's no need to put it elsewhere. It is a nugget of wisdom that will be discovered by those who put the effort in to uncover it.

Senan wrote:

MadHatter wrote:

Senan wrote: . The Knight's Code is for Knights to follow. Period. Asking anyone else to consider it before they are a Knight is akin to asking a 12 year old to drive a car because they hope to have a driver's license some day. They can study driving all they want, but until they take the test and pass, they aren't a licensed driver. Let's take this one step at a time, please.

Ok feel free to answer this in PM if you feel it derails this thread or goes too far from the original topic but should not one start acting like a Knight to the best of their ability from the time the start Apprenticeship aka the first step on the path to Knighthood? If that is the case then should not all Apprentices look to the Knights Code?

Acting like a Knight does not make one a Knight. Following the Knight's Code does not make one a Knight. One can act like a Knight at any time on their path, but that does not make them beholden to that Code. I can act like a priest and I can study what they do, but any code or vow or oath they have does not apply to me, whether I follow it or not, until I am ordained as a priest. What is at risk here is people choosing to study and follow a code that does not apply to them yet, then potentially abondoning it when it is no longer convenient without any consequence. A Knight does not have that option once they vow to uphold the title, nor should they. Encouraging people to strive toward the ideals represented in the Code is great, but I would assume a Teaching Master would do that as part of Apprenticeship. There's no need to put it elsewhere. It is a nugget of wisdom that will be discovered by those who put the effort in to uncover it.

That is a risk at any time though. However, I get what you are going for here. I just view it as act like the job you want not the job you are in. If that makes sense.

One cannot become a Knight, one is or is not, there is no way in between. The Knight exists thus is not made but acknowledged

I would disagree with this - Is a 5 year old an engineer, or a gymnast, or a pilot?

Some people may have qualities that suit one thing or another or be predisposed toward a behaviour or set of skills (in this case, Jedi Knight I suppose) - That does not necessarily make them that thing, complete and whole, from the get go.

Ok feel free to answer this in PM if you feel it derails this thread or goes too far from the original topic but should not one start acting like a Knight to the best of their ability from the time the start Apprenticeship aka the first step on the path to Knighthood? If that is the case then should not all Apprentices look to the Knights Code?

Yes and No - Whilst it may be the end goal, when you are an initiate you should focus on the qualities of a good initiate, when you are an apprentice you focus on the qualities of an apprentice.

Each "step" includes all the aspects of the steps before it - So a knight is still a good student, but good student need not necessarily be a knight.


I hope I said that somewhat conherently.

I'm not sure our doctrine is currently divided into stages, instead the headings of each items represent its scope. But nah, to me the 'title' is just an external recognition of something.To get a pilots license I'd recommend learning the theory before taking the lessons. I knew how to fly before I knew how to drive, and before I could drive or fly. Indeed you have to demonstrate flying solo before you get the license. I think its doctrinal and not policy, so see no reason it wouldn't be in the doctrine for my reasons posted on the last page. But again, I don't mind... my path is full of doctrine which is not here. So to me the question is are those attributes of the Knight Code used to determine an Apprentice moving into Knighthood, and if so the only reason I would imagine they would not be in the doctrine is if they were kept secret as a test to assess if those qualities are naturally being displayed in the candidate. So if it wasn't in the doctrine, then I wouldn't have it anywhere not accessible to Knights... else it doesn't make much sense in how'd I'd view the balance of things.. and that is ok!

To get a pilots license I'd recommend learning the theory before taking the lessons. I knew how to fly before I knew how to drive, and before I could drive or fly. Indeed you have to demonstrate flying solo before you get the license.

I mean, I was trying to use it as some kind of metaphor. I wasn't really catering to the Jedi Pilot crowd...:silly:

I live in the SA/NT - As far as giving out licences goes, we roll with a more... "If you believe in yourself" system rather than the Pass/Fail that most of the other states employ :whistle:

I'm not sure our doctrine is currently divided into stages

I'm not sure how many conversations are going on here...

Anyway, not being a knight myself - is the Knight's code part of it, or is giving your understanding of "A" knights code just part of a question to see what yon initiate does with it?

I don't really see an implicit link between the Doctrine as per the Doctrine page, and the Knight's code as per the question in the IP....


the Knights Code is...far more militant than the tone in the Doctrine.....

The "just be a Knight regardless" argument is akin to something oft said in martial arts: Train as if you were a black belt and the belt will come.
That's all fine and dandy, but it really only applies at around the probationary black belt level, or possibly the level below that. It's hardly applicable to the white belt that just walked in the door.

Whilst it is nice to have access to the Knights' Code when you reach a point in your training that Knighthood becomes an achievement somewhere on the horizon, it's less useful to a member that joins simply to be part of the community. A member in training can certainly aspire to live by the Knights' code, but it's not a requirement (nor should it be) until attaining Knighthood. Which is fine, it allows for the occasional mis-step without significant concern for consequence.

Honestly, as someone for whom Knighthood is a distant aspiration, including the Knights' Code in the doctrine would simply make things more convoluted. Between the Code, Tenets, Maxims, etc. I feel there's enough to commit to memory and to aspire to 'living' without adding the Knights' Code to the mix. In my opinion, leave it where it is in the latter stages of the IP as bonus material or include it in the Apprenticeship program and that is enough. For the sake of transparency, perhaps make a separate article in the library (I haven't checked if it's already there) and simply link to the article from the doctrine for those who desire further reading.

The Jedi faith and this Order are founded upon the acknowledgement, the wonder, the curiosity ... (as a 'belief' or just as a 'hintergedanke') in or/and about the Force. It is organised around a reverence for Life, from the smallest pre-biotic molecular event to the un-fathomable universe in its entirety. Over the relatively brief span of human existence - our species of human, that is (after all, our species is the only one remaining out of at least six that we co-existed with before) - we have organised our wonder about the ways the world (whatever its scope) works and all the 'whys' that go with that wonder into myriad systems of exploitation. Similar existential beliefs are one of the primary elements for fostering social cohesion ; it allows groups of people who do not know one another intimately to cooperate on a large scale.

The reason I began with this is because throughout history, the title, the roles and duties, of (a) Knight are extremely recent, but the symbol - and the sense behind it - which alludes to our icon of the Knight dates back to when we were first telling stories to figure out (hence "organise") the world. In other words, the most ancient stories told of the heroic acts of men and women who brought order and peace to the hostile and chaotic landscape. For as spiritually lofty as terms like Chaos and Cosmos sound, they imply merely the organisation of the un-known into a known (more or less) order : to move from disorder to order. In any population of living organisms, there are some that exhibit an aptitude at this organisational capacity more than others, whether it be killing monsters, evil-doers or infidels.

The reason why this mythic icon is so lively even now is that we are still in the wilderness -- even more so than just 70 years ago. Our world has been transformed by that very same cooperation between people(s) with similar enough beliefs (in money and commerce) that we have gone in just a century from an obscene infant mortality, rampant pre-mature deaths of adults (the average life-span of an adult man at the turn of the 20th Century was 42) to those numbers being at an all-time low ; we have engineered and refined our transportation and telecommunications technologies and networks into very secure, very safe and very effective means of being able to interact with a very large segment of the planetary population of humans daily/hourly/minute by minute. The result : our chaos is turned inward... Our species has 'mastered' the planet (and without the 'mastery' to have done are soiling our own unique nest), but we have not yet adapted to sharing a world with 7 billion other human dwellers while taking into consideration the symbiosis of all the other expressions of Life. Long story short : all our knowledge has generated even more 'whys' than we had when we were living as intimate groups of hunter-gatherers on the plains ....

One will notice that although hunter-gatherer societies were perhaps more egalitarian, they were not democracies ; the concept didn't even exist. "Fair and unfair" were indeed considerations that they didn't do any better with than we do in the 21st Century, but hell, even Chimpanzees and Bonobos (our quite close cousins) do one another dirty turns rather frequently -- and get punished for it by the group. The tales of the Hero were not ones that promised that everyone could be elected "Hero". Indeed, the Hero was often one who found himself in the position of having to learn a different response to something from within a set of circumstances where the usual/ordinary methods didn't work by taking part from the commonly known/commonly believed ways of the group (adventuring thus away from the normal set of influences shared by the group - or perhaps s/he was a stranger to the group) to discover other ways of bringing the situation under control (curbing the hunger, disease, hostility &c). Throughout all these centuries of storytelling, some characteristics of the Hero (strength, integrity, honesty, altruism and the like) have come along to us with the symbolic figure.

These days, in the industrialised-digitised parts of the world, we do not have to deal too much with hunger, disease and hostility. For even as brutal as the news services tell us the world is, we run much more of a risk of suicide (wrought by some internal, subjective chaos) than being done in by human-perpetrated violence -- except those "violences" that are of an egotistical nature, psychological cruelty &c. Naturally, there are accidents and chronic illnesses that do us in too - but these are not the same dis-order as chaos. In fact, they've been normalised ...

Now, what does all this have to do with the Knights' Code ?

We have been talking about cars and aeroplanes as though the Knights' Code were merely an instruction manual. It is not -- it is a series of statements about some ideals one finds to varying degrees in the character of the symbolic Knight. And because the iconic Knight is a symbol, the ideals upon which her/his character is moulded cannot be seized conceptually as knowledge, but only allegorically intuited, they cannot be followed like an ordinary algorithm for producing a set of results.

Senan, your driving license analogy is not bad : you're right, one would not want to give a 12 year-old a driving license just because they hope to have one some day. On the other hand, the analogy breaks down after that. Although one wouldn't give the child a driving license, s/he has probably been around 'cars' all of his/her life ... s/he knows what a car is, what it is for, has seen the car being driven by older people (mentors) for probably all of those 12 years. In and about the age of 7, the child probably began noticing things like stopping at red lights, yielding the right-of-way to other motorists ... basically that there were a set of rules that the driver was following, all the while having the same conversation, singing along with the radio or just evidently not having to reflect too much on the driving to be able to do so safely without so much of the attention being devoted to driving the car. It just becomes natural ... So, the child sees the behaviours and the procedures of driving the car become intuitive. They are learning about driving years before they "study" le Code de la Route or take driving lessons. Neither the Code de la Route nor the driving school are locked away as arcane knowledge, nor are children shielded from seeing things like cars, traffic (or traffic accidents) and road networks -- including the 'stop' lights.

Now, in this day and age, an 18 year-old is almost expected to get a driving license ; it has become a cultural index. It is not a necessity. It could very well be that one decides s/he does not want to drive cars ... that is not as weird as it sounds (I, for one, absolutely hate it). That doesn't mean that one just doesn't go anywhere, doesn't know what drivers of cars do, nor that one would never get into a car driven by another. And the more mature one gets - both physically and psychologically - one would be even more aware of the Code that drivers do not only learn, but "internalise" to the point that they really don't have to think about it.

The Knights' Code says : "A Knight is sworn to valour" -- not that s/he "thinks about" valour ; "His heart knows only Virtue" -- but were the Knight to focus on 'being virtuous' then s/he would get derailed from true Virtue ; "His blade defends the helpless" -- here too, the "blade" is symbolic, but even so, and even with the training that it takes to wield the symbol virtuously, one has to have had observational experience of what that symbol alludes to. "His word speaks only Truth" -- this is just saying that we don't outright 'lie', not that we can't be wrong about things as everyone is from time to time. And so on and so forth ... These are not merely 'instructions' to follow ; it requires mentorship and experience to refine them and to internalise them.

I feel that the Knights' Code ought to be part of the Doctrine because there is a sub-set of our community sworn and held up to the ideals that it points towards. And insomuch as none of our Doctrine - nor any doctrine of any social organisation - can be obeyed to the letter, the Knights' Code shows people that the Knights who serve them have indeed been on a spiritual journey that never ends. Do we screw it up ? You bet ! And how sometimes ... That is just a fortunate aspect of being a living being in/with the world. The most experienced drivers also have accidents and get traffic fines ... But it would give people an indication that embodying the symbol of a Knight - certainly to serve the needs of people in the chaotic world-wasteland of the post-modern, addicted/addictive, instant gratification, electronic Disneyland of the 21st Century - is founded on the inductive and internalised ideals it describes. And the Code is only a description ...

So, yes, I would like for everyone to know what cars and aeroplanes are and how much training goes into manipulating them, whether they actually do so themselves (yet) or not.

Alexandre Orion wrote: The Jedi faith and this Order are founded upon the acknowledgement, the wonder, the curiosity ...

I'd quote it all in its entirety, because I really want to - but to save space...

Look, I don't mean to have a guy like me totally fangirl over this, but hey - I can't help it! LOL

Master Jedi, you've put it more plainly, more rightly, more beautifully than I think anyone ever could - I whole-heartedly agree!!

I feel like I should thank Alex just because it seems like anyone who writes that many words deserves some kind of kudos. :lol:

I can't remember the thoughts I had at the beginning, now that I am at the end...

Oh well, time to flippant.

one would be even more aware of the Code that drivers do not only learn, but "internalise" to the point that they really don't have to think about it.

Unless you're one of those people who is always breathing manually....

Anyway you have explained superbly why the Knight's Code would and should be available even for those who are not Knights, and some really good stuff on internalising behaviours instead of just doing them because it's written down somewhere....

I'm still not sold on the knight's code itself (And I think I just had an idea why...It's very...ego-y? It's about how great the knight is, which is...different to how I see jediism....

Discussion for another time perhaps)

I don't mean to have a guy like me totally fangirl over this

I enjoy gender bending as much as the next bloke, but wouldn't it be fanboying?

Thank you for clarifying, Alexandre. I hadn't thought about internalizing the info before actually practicing it. That is a fair point.

As I thought about my feelings on the subject more, I'm coming to the realization that to me it is more about a right of passage. Campbell talks about the lack of right of passage rituals in modern society that leave young people searching for validation.

Becoming a Knight is a right of passage at TOTJO, and while the Knights Code should be available to anyone to read, actually committing to follow it and being held to its standards seems a part of the Knight right of passage to me.

I guess this leaves me somewhere in the middle. Encourage everyone to be aware of the Code and internalize it from the beginning, but don't make it actual Doctrine as not everyone will be able to reconcile it with their path. I don't know. I'm rambling now.