Showing posts with label Masahisa Goi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Masahisa Goi. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 11, 2015

True Courage, True Belief

Learning from Goi Sensei – 1 – final 


True Courage True Belief
From May Peace Prevail On Earth by Masahisa Goi

Are the actions of humanity and each individual motivated by karma or by the divine will?  If we only look at the physical, visible phenomena, the actions of each individual as well as humanity appear to be motivated by various desires including the greed for power.  Perhaps this is how most people regard human beings; however, Goi Sensei did not share this view.

Goi Sensei clearly saw the divine will behind each of our actions – even those that appeared to be karmic.  He declares that human beings are originally spirits branched out from God, not karmic existences.  He explains that we are constantly protected by our Guardian Spirits and Guardian Deities, and that the rise and fall of nations as well as ethnic groups lie in the mind of God.  Regardless how a nation or an ethnic group is flourishing at this time, it is doomed to collapse if it deviates from the law of total harmony, that is, the divine will.  This universal law also applies to each individual.

When we derail from the universal law, our true mind intends to correct the derailment.  Although this may manifest conditions that appear to be unhappy and unfortunate, it is an adjusting process implemented by our true selves and our Guardian Spirits and Guardian Deities.  Even though we may have to endure this hard period for some time, once we as an ethnic group, a nation or an individual get on the right track, we will continue thriving thereafter.

Therefore, however difficult or affluent the present conditions are individually, ethnically or nationally, the thing for us to do first and foremost is to continue endeavoring to get on the track of the universal law.  And in order for us to get on this track, we need to accumulate virtue, and at the same time, to deepen our belief in God.  Goi Sensei recommended we offer the prayer for world peace as the best means to achieve this end.

Ethnic groups, nations, and humanity are all aggregations of individuals. Therefore, when each individual believes in God, accumulates good virtues, prays the prayer for world peace, and gets on  board  with the  universal law, then over time ethnic groups and nations will accumulate good virtues and will also be able to board the universal law.

It is toward this endeavor that we pray for peace in each country of the world and perform the Symphony of Peace Prayers Ceremony every year, which jointly offers peace prayers from various religions and sects.  We believe that this prayer for peace is most fundamental.  Thus, regardless wherever we may be, we offer this prayer every day. 

As the text of this series, I chose Goi Sensei’s book Prayer for World Peace that was published in May, 1981.  On page 104, there is a chapter titled, Let us unite our hearts to praying for world peace.  Goi Sensei wrote this upon hearing news of the successful launch of America’s space craft Apollo 8, amidst a great joy around the world.  I suggest that from the descriptions, we once again learn what “belief, courage, harmony and endurance” mean, as I believe that these four elements are vital to the present-day Japanese, and humanity.

On pages 105 and 109, Goi Sensei writes as follows:

While blessing the success of Apollo 8, I deeply confirmed the necessity of promoting the world peace movement through the prayer even more strongly and expansively.  If people around the world emulate the will and courage of the astronauts who endured the daily severe training in order to ensure the success of the flight, then the achievement of world peace will not be a dream.

Aside from the scientific technology that guided the flight to the success, I simply cannot help admiring the undaunted will, courage, and self-restraint of the astronauts – they are similar to high Buddhist priests who achieved the very depth of their beliefs.  Their strong belief in science that keeps them fearless in whatever dangerous condition they encounter closely resembles the perfect belief in the divine love cherished by people with spiritual beliefs.

When people believe in their military power and confront enemies trying to destroy them, they do so in a sort of self-intoxication or desperation. Whereas, when astronauts are in the cosmic space, they calmly continue handling everything believing solely in the furnished mechanical devices. In fact, doing so requires a far greater will power than fighting with enemies.

This is the same with the true peace movement.  There are many people who say, “The enemy has increased their military power, so we too must expand our military power,” or “We should give pre-emptive strikes before the enemy attacks us,” but these old-fashioned logics are totally irrelevant.  We can hardly engage in a true world peace movement with such a mentality as identifying enemies and confronting them thinking, “We must destroy that country because it is an obstacle for creating peace.”

Just as the astronauts who fly in the cosmic space use their scientific power that represents the universal law, each individual, each nation, and all humanity needs to attune their minds to the universal law in order to accomplish their lives on this earth.

A true peace movement is a movement that lives in tune with the universal law, in other words, total harmony itself.

Peace is synonymous with harmony.  Therefore, when a person speaks about peace, the person himself or herself must embody a harmonious mental state.  Or at least, that person must be endeavoring to maintain his or her mental harmony.

When people identify enemies that oppose them, and try to confront with them, they become frantic with passion such as, “I’m going to rip them apart!” And when they are in this kind of passion, they manifest reckless power such as bravery in warfare and violent demonstrations.

However, true courage means believing in a law just like the astronauts, and doing one’s very best to accomplish the objective by following the path that embodies the universal law. 
It means to accomplish these things calmly and steadily, while continuing to restrain one’s fear and disbelief.  This kind of courage is an absolute requisite to fulfill the world peace movement – an extremely important movement that aspires for the simultaneous deliverance of each individual as well as all humanity.

A mere temporal passion or a shallow and flippant idea such as, “I‘ll do it because it’s cool!” is the last thing you should have.

A true spiritual belief signifies to believe in the cosmic law of great harmony and to believe in the expansive divine love.  And to achieve this mental state, an incessant endeavor to keep one’s mental harmony is indispensable.  Our daily and tireless effort and discipline are the essential factors to foster such an elevated mentality and character.

We believe in Goi Sensei and form a group called Byakko Shinko Kai – a movement that aims to rescue and uplift individuals and all humanity simultaneously.  Therefore, in order to achieve the objective of this movement and our activity, we are required to maintain extraordinary and continuous will power, endurance, and courage.  It is our unshakable belief in God and our prayers that single-heartedly yearn for God that give birth to these resources within us.
(From Hideo Takahashi’s personal periodical Study of Goi Sensei #129)  


Learning from Goi Sensei – 2 - final

True Courage True Belief
From May Peace Prevail on Earth by Masahisa Goi

In this book, Goi Sensei writes the following on his resolve upon beginning the world peace movement through the prayer:

In the pursuit of humanity’s long-cherished desire to accomplish world peace, I offered my entire life and destiny to God.  It was from this point forward that my world peace prayer movement began.

I have no adversary that I need to overthrow or that threatens to overthrow me.  The only thought I have is the divine mind of total harmony which continues to work within me.  If you identify an enemy and insist that peace cannot be accomplished without eliminating this enemy, it is no longer a peace movement. What ought to fall, falls of itself, and there is no necessity to bother ourselves to make it happen.

The things that pass in front of our eyes, or the things that inhibit world peace are all elements that are derailed from the universal law of great harmony.  They are bound to naturally vanish away someday, and we should not artificially overthrow them with the use of force.  Therefore, it is only necessary for us to have the power of perseverance or true courage; until all these various elements that hamper world peace pass before our eyes and completely disappear, we ought to single-heartedly continue offering the prayer of humanitarian love – the law of great harmony itself – without resenting anyone, fearing anything, or withdrawing by an inch, regardless what kind of humiliation we may experience or what kind of obstacles may surround us.   

I made the descriptions bold since I find these messages extremely important for us. Goi Sensei says that our will to pray the prayer for world peace with perseverance creates true courage. In other words, it means to steadfastly continue to pray “May peace prevail on earth” by ignoring any karmic provocations and by persevering whatever hardships. As an example, Goi Sensei speaks about Mr. Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido.

Mr. Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido cannot be defeated by any opponent regardless of the skill or the weapon.  This is because Mr. Ueshiba is united with the universal law of harmony, and his body is converted into a spiritual body, although it appears to be physical.  In other words, his body is comprised of fine vibration that is beyond the control of the material power in this world.  Mr. Ueshiba proves this principle through his small physical frame of about 150 cm tall.

Our prayer of humanitarian love, that is, the prayer for world peace, represents the same principle as that of Mr. Ueshiba’s Aikido.  Through the vibration of the world peace prayer, our surroundings are enveloped in the divine light vibration, which creates a vibrational gap between the violent vibration that intends to harm and injure people. And due to this vibrational gap, any factors that appear to oppose and hamper us naturally disappear, opening up a peaceful and bright path.

Although there may be a number of difficulties to overcome before reaching this condition, it is essential that we continue praying the peace prayer thinking that these obstacles will all vanish away in the end. Unless we steadfastly adhere to this resolve, this earthly world will collapse someday in a major war or natural disaster.

Although we are unaware of it, our tireless prayer for world peace has surely been changing our dimensional level from that of material or third-dimension to that of high, divine spiritual dimension, or total harmony.  Those of us who are enveloped in the great light vibration are immune to any violent and destructive vibration because nothing negative can harm us due to the dimensional gap.

Since all vibrations that appear to threaten us are bound to fade away, everything will improve eventually if we simply continue praying the world peace prayer.  Those who continue praying the prayer for world peace, calling on Goi Sensei and uniting with him through continuous gratitude are the ones who emanate the vibration of light and harmony.  They will only attract vibrations with similar wavelengths, because this world is a world of vibration.  It is for this reason Goi Sensei writes as follows:

Rather than arguing whether we should have weapons or not, we need to elevate human mentality from that of destruction to that of great harmony. Acquiring endurance and true courage in this endeavor is the absolute necessity for human beings from now on.

While explaining his teachings of fading away together with prayer for world peace as the method that easily makes everyone ride the universal law and attune with the divine will of great harmony, Goi Sensei continues to write:

Our thoughts that acknowledge enemies, accuse social evils, as well as our thoughts that despise, fear and envy others, and blame and judge ourselves – we should identify all these thoughts as unharmonious vibrations in this world, and regard them to be fading away.  Keeping this view in mind, we should continue immersing all such thoughts in our tireless and single-hearted prayer for world peace. It is vital that we continue living in this way.

You need only to live this way naturally just as you breathe from moment to moment; there is no necessity to specifically concentrate your consciousness or strain yourself.  You need only to continue praying while single-heartedly asking for the protection of your Guardian Deities and Guardian Spirits and offering gratitude for their protection.

As for myself, I still feel a great inner urge to ask for protection of my Guardian Deity and Guardian Spirits. Since our Guardian Deities and Spirits are with us to help us, until we become independent and mature in terms of our souls, there is no necessity to feel ashamed to call on them and ask for their support, power, wisdom, and light.  This is because the single wish of our Guardian Deities and Spirits is the growth and elevation of our souls.  We can give the greatest joy to our Guardian Deities and Spirits by developing our true mind and divinity and by constantly offering gratitude to them.



(From Hideo Takahashi’s personal periodical Study of Goi Sensei#130) 
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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