Thursday, July 31, 2014

The Essence of Prayer

The Essence of Prayer
By Masahisa Goi

Living with Prayer

This earthly world will never improve if people adhere only to the religious activities of their own creeds and sects.  We are entering an age when people gathering from all nations and ethnic groups and with the true understanding of the divine will are to rescue the earth.  Therefore, the groups that focus only on expanding their own organization and boast of their membership of three million or five million will deviate from truth.  God will not exercise its power unless people who are truly filled with humanitarian love and cherish their fellow human beings work at the top.  The earth is doomed to collapse unless this condition comes true.

The way we live is to pray for the peace of the world, first and foremost.  This is expressed in my following poem:

As we pray for peace of the world in the morning and at night
We also fling our wishes for our own happiness into the prayer words

In our world peace prayers we place all our personal wishes such as happiness of our households, cure of diseases and our prosperity, and we are naturally purified through the great light vibration possessed by the prayer.  Thus, our circumstances will naturally improve by as much as we are purified. 

For the first two or three years, it is permissible that you offer this prayer only for the sake of the cure of your disease or improvement of your financial condition.  However, if you have come to truly understand the meaning of the prayer for peace, you ought to merge all your thoughts – the desire to have your illness cured, the wish to become affluent, and the desire to have status – into the aspiration for peace.  If it is convenient that you become rich, you will be made rich.   If it is preferable that you are perfectly cured and refreshed, you will be completely freed from your disease.  If it is better that you have a high status, you will be promoted to a high status.  All these things lie in the divine will – the mind of your Guardian Deity.

It happens oftentimes that one’s soul improves through the agony of a disease.   Therefore, it is not necessarily bad that you become ill.  You may experience illnesses as the process your karmic causes in previous lifetimes fade away, or due to the influence of someone’s thought.  Whatever the cause of the disease,  it will turn out good eventually.  What is important is that you awaken to something and your soul is polished through the experience. 

In addition to illness and poverty, you may have to go through various other difficulties – you may be thought negatively by your friends or acquaintances, or you may not be liked by people to whom you gave kindness and good will.  All of these sufferings are attributed to your past karmic causes – they are manifested in the process of fading away.  And what is crucial is the time you experience these manifestations.

Prayer is irrelevant to what is manifested

There will be no problem of only good things are manifested in our lives.  However, inconvenient and unwelcoming things do come about from time to time.  You may think at such a time, “What’s the good of my belief?  It’s worthless praying!”  However, it is mistaken that you relate the negative manifestation with your belief.  Your belief and prayer are irrelevant to the what manifests – poverty and disharmony.  The latter is fading away, and has nothing to do with the prayer you have offered. 

When you are praying, your thought is immersed in the divine heart; while praying “May peace prevail on earth,” you are keeping unity with God.  On the other hand, the illness and misfortune you are faced with have arisen from the  thoughts stored in – the innumerable recordings you have made from past lifetimes until now.  They are the manifestations of your past recordings and have nothing to do with the prayer you are offering now.

While you are practicing the unification meditation, various miscellaneous thoughts may cross your mind. Miscellaneous thoughts are the past accumulated thoughts that come up to the surface mind.  It is irrelevant to the prayer you are offering now.  Although your mind is perfectly immersed in God through the prayer for world peace and gratitude to God, miscellaneous thoughts may keep coming out one after another, making you feel that you are not in the state of unification with the divine.  The fact is, you are certainly united with the divine, while the miscellaneous thoughts are drawn forth by the light of the unification, and are quickly extinguished. 

Therefore, no matter how much you may be bothered by miscellaneous thoughts, it is irrelevant to the sitting unification meditation (Toitsu)  you are practicing now.  It is ideal that you understand this truth.  Whatever miscellaneous thoughts you may be having now or however bad destiny is manifested to you now, it is not ascribed to what you are doing now.  Through the prayer for world peace, you are now immersed in the divine mind, and achieving unity with God.  Whereas, past karmic causes are being manifested as evils, diseases, misfortunes, and disasters, and will then disappear.  That is to say, bad elements are decreased by as much as they are manifested.  Negative manifestations are the processes through which bad elements disappear.

If you borrow money from someone, you must return it.  You are obliged to return the debt by all means.  If you return the debt, your money at hand will decrease, but that doesn’t mean you suffered a loss, does it?  Since you returned the debt, you are now free to use the remaining amount.  Similar to this, through the inconvenient manifestation you are experiencing now, you are paying back the past debt; you are letting your past karmic cause disappear.  What remains after that will be yourself that is united with the divine or your radiantly shining self. 

Therefore, you ought to readily accept whatever manifestations.  After all, fading-away phenomena will keep disappearing one after another, and in the end, the brilliantly shining paradise will emerge after the final fraction of karma has disappeared.  It is to achieve this end that we have been engaged in the world peace movement through the prayer together with the teaching of fading-away. 

It is of no use worrying about various things and moving about in confusion thinking, “I must do this and that.”  We should have an undaunted belief that since God is love, we will surely be uplifted.  God sent to us our Guardian Deities and Spirits, as well as Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus with an intention of rescuing human beings. 

We should receive the vibrations of the teachings of these great saints, and add to them the modern teaching – the prayer for world peace – to jointly go on rescuing humanity.  Rescuing humanity is synonymous with rescuing ourselves.  So why don’t we go on accomplishing the simultaneous awakening of the individual and humanity – this is how we are meant to live.

Polishing our souls from moment to moment

People who are concerned about keeping their bodies clean take a bath every day, but it is more important to wash our souls than to wash our bodies.  It is not a big problem even if we do not take a bath for three or four days, but if we remain lazy and fail to polish our souls every day, our souls will get grimy rapidly.  If you spoil yourself thinking, “I don’t need to polish my soul because I am already enlightened,” your soul will quickly get tarnished.  Therefore, you need to polish yourself constantly, from moment to moment.  It is out of the question to have such thoughts as, “I saw a light once.  So, I no longer need to train myself,” or “I no longer need to polish myself because I once had a sensation of achieving the state of Emptiness.”  We all need to polish ourselves incessantly, from moment to moment. 

I often refer to this episode of Mr. Munetada Kurozumi – the founder of Kurozumi-kyoo.  Once, Mr. Kurozumi was on the way to a lecture, and crossed a stream walking on a bridge made of a log.  When he was about to finish crossing, the log shook giving him an alarming sensation.  After he managed to safely cross the river, he knelt down on the river bank and apologized to the Great Sun God.  He deeply begged apology from his inner divinity – the Great Sun God – for having upset and disturbed Him through the alarming sensation.  On top of that, he showed apology also to his followers who came to hear his lecture saying, “I am still imperfect in my faith,” despite the fact he was a wonderfully great person and was surprised only a little.  What a good story this is!  I feel inspired every time I remember it.

However high your status is, and however elevated your soul has become, you should constantly reflect on yourself.  However, you should not grip at your karma that is fading away.  You should think, “Ah, this is fading away.  How good!  After it fades away, I will shine more and more.”  You need to clearly acknowledge the evil without being hypocritical. 

Many of the religiously minded people tend to have an imperfect understanding of bright thinking, and mistakenly try to grip only good sides.  Actually, however, we have good mind and bad mind, and this world is comprised of both good sides and bad sides.  We cannot live without gripping the both sides.  So you can clearly grip the both; you can see the evil inside of you and others, and you can regard someone to be a bad person.  However, you should next think, “The bad thought I see in that person now is about to fade away.  That person’s Guardian Deity, please uplift him quickly.”  Likewise, you should also wish for your own improvement thinking, “May I be uplifted.”  Thus, by constantly wishing for our own improvement and by praying for world peace day and night, we ought to polish our souls from moment to moment.

By cleansing and polishing our souls in this way, we should live from day to day with a refreshed heart.  By polishing ourselves, we can contribute to the good of world and humanity.  The greater the number of people with such polished souls, the more expansively the great light vibration will permeate the earth and the universe through our physical entities.  In this circumstance, people’s evil intentions will end in vain, and their will to start a war will also disappear, improving the world little by little.
 Recently re-printed in:

(July, 2014 issue of Byakko magazine - Excerpt from Opening Up Our Inner Selves by Masahisa Goi)
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