Between Science and Religion: How to Live in a Post-Religious Age - Terrorism, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Life, Chapter 1

Chapter 1 of How to Live in a Post-Religious Age
: Terrorism, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Life

This is the English translation of How to Live in a Post-Religious Age: Aum and the Meaning of Life, Complete Edition. This book was originally published in Japan in March 1996, when I was 37 years old. It was then rereleased as a “complete edition” with the addition of a new “Foreword” and “Afterword” in April 2019. Today, with religious terrorism and the brutality of war waged by strong nations receiving attention again around the world, I am very happy to be able to make this English translation available to international readers.

The writing of this book was triggered by the sarin gas attacks on Tokyo subways that occurred in 1995. A religious cult called “Aum Shinrikyo” (hereafter referred to simply as “Aum”) manufactured sarin gas, a chemical weapon, and deployed it in multiple subway trains. The result was an unprecedented incident in which thirteen people were killed and roughly six thousand were injured. I was profoundly shocked by this event. I was shocked because the leaders who made the sarin gas were scientists of my own generation, and they engaged in this terrorism using sarin in the sincere belief that it could save people’s souls. There were also those among them who earnestly pursued “truth” and “the meaning of life” through the path of religion. In this I saw a reflection of myself in my twenties.

I entered a science program at university to study the truth of the cosmos through physics. Realizing that natural science is severely limited, however, I became drawn to religion. But I could not bring myself to believe in God or Buddha. I had no choice but to look for a path that was neither science nor religion. How was I different from the Aum leaders with a similar intellectual background who took the path of religion and ended up making sarin gas? This problem is surely not mine alone. There must be many young people around the world who find themselves wedged in the gap between science and religion, unable to move forward.

This book was written for such people. I very much hope that its message will reach readers around the world.

The phrase “post-religious age” is used in the title. When the book was first published in 1996, it referred to an era in which religion was no longer able to play a leading role in society. According to a 2015 survey of the global population by the Pew Research Center, Christians form the largest group at 31%, followed by Muslims at 24% and “unaffiliated” at 16%. People who do not believe in religion are already a powerful force. In many countries, the percentage of people without religion will presumably continue to gradually increase.

But are people without religion not troubled by problems with a religious dimension? No, they most certainly are. I know this because I myself, someone with no religious affiliation, continue to wrestle with such problems today. Why was I born? Where will I go when I die? How can I be saved from this painful life? What is the meaning of life? People without religion must take a non-religious approach to living and to thinking about these questions that can never be answered by natural science. How are we to do this?

Religion has long contemplated these questions. There is much that people without religion can learn from it. At the same time, there is presumably much that people who walk the path of religion can learn from those who do not. It is sad to see division between people who follow a religion and people who do not. I would like to call an era in which these people respect each other without rejecting each other’s path and can learn ways of approaching problems in the spiritual dimension from each other a “post-religious age.” This is a new definition of this phrase. Here non-believers can turn to religion and people of faith can give up their religious affiliation without issue. How such a world can be made possible is one of the themes of this book.

Aum, a cult religion related to yoga, is a very modern religious group that has engaged in violent terrorism based on religious faith. It began as a yoga studio in 1984, and later grew into a large religious organization as its adherents increased. Its doctrines changed over time, however, and eventually it evolved into a group trying to send people to a better afterlife by taking their lives. On June 27th, 1994, it carried out a terrorist act using the chemical weapon sarin in Matsumoto City, and on March 20th of the following year it deployed sarin once again in an attack on subways in Tokyo.

Aum founder Shoko Asahara (born Chizuo Matsumoto) and the leaders who carried out the sarin attacks were arrested, and after long trials thirteen of them, including Asahara, were executed in July, 2018.

Hearing only a broad outline of the incident, it may seem to have been mass murder carried out by a fanatical group lacking in reason. The depth of this incident, however, lies in the fact that this was not the case. What shocked people was that among the leaders of Aum there were many brilliant scientists who had graduated from top universities. They belonged to what was called the “Ministry of Science and Technology” within the group, and manufactured the sarin used as a chemical weapon themselves. At the time, no one could give a satisfactory answer to the question of why elite scientists would join a cult and commit mass murder. From the perspective of the average citizen, it could only be described as a completely incomprehensible incident.

As I have stated, I could not think of these leaders as having nothing in common with me: I was from the same generation, and I too had come face to face with the question of “the meaning of life” after entering a science program at a top university. I could very easily have become a member of Aum when I was a university student. I could have participated in crimes along with its leaders. I truly believe this. For me, therefore, to think about Aum is to think about myself during that period.

I mentioned “the meaning of life,” but readers may find it hard to believe that people who committed mass murder with sarin were thinking about such things. They may consider it impossible that people who commit crimes like murder could attempt to seriously contemplate the meaning of life. On this point there is a very interesting document I would like to cite here. It is a manuscript entitled “To Students” written by an Aum leader named Ken’ichi Hirose in 2008 when he was in prison awaiting execution. He had been asked to write it for use in talks at universities warning students against cults by the photojournalist Shoichi Fujita.

Ken’ichi Hirose was one of the perpetrators of the sarin attacks and belonged to Aum’s Ministry of Science and Technology. Hirose graduated from Waseda University’s Faculty of Science and Engineering at the top of his class, and despite earning high praise for papers he co-authored with his master’s course supervisor in graduate school he abandoned this life and entered Aum. He was a brilliant student who would surely have become an outstanding scientist had he remained in university. (Waseda, the university at which I currently teach, is one of the leading private universities in Japan.)

Hirose abandoned his faith in Aum in prison. He then dispassionately analysed the process by which he had been brainwashed by this cult. His manuscript opens with the following passage.

Hirose opens with “the meaning of life” when addressing university students. He says that “the meaning of life” is not meaning found in everyday life, but something involving “the purpose for which I was born.” He also says that the reason he was sucked into Aum was that it seemed to provide a direct answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?” The desire to seek “the meaning of life” is indeed one route by which young people enter religious cults.

In this book I aim to make this route clear. Both Hirose and I first tried the path of natural science before changing course toward religion or philosophy. But while Hirose became a believer, I was left outside religion, unable to have faith. What determined this difference in our paths?

In Chapter One, I consider science and religion. I believed that truth could be learned through natural science. When I actually began a specialist program at university, however, I realized this was not the case. Still seeking truth, I then approached religion. But I was faced with the enormous barrier of “faith.” I had been turned away from both science and religion.

In Chapter Two, I consider mystical experiences. Mystical experiences were of pivotal importance to Aum. In this chapter I give a detailed account of the “mystical experiences” and “trap of a closed community” I have encountered myself. The reader will see how the sweet nectar of “only we are right” is formed. This kind of self-righteousness seems to be increasing in the current era.

In Chapter Three, I consider Yutaka Ozaki, a singer who died young after having been active during the same period as Aum. Readers of the English edition may not be familiar with this Japanese performer. As a precocious rock singer who made his debut at an early age, he sang passionately about absurd or irrational aspects of society, about himself being destroyed by desire, and about “the meaning of life,” and died young under mysterious circumstances. There are presumably similar singers in the reader’s home country. I would like you to keep such a figure in mind when reading this chapter. In fact, Ozaki manifested a similar structure to the trap of a religious cult. He took on the expectations of his audience, and through them acquired their desire for his death. Why was Ozaki unable to avoid turning toward death while seeking the salvation of his soul?

In Chapter Four, I consider the ingenious structures that allow us to avoid seeing things we don’t want to see in which nearly all of us, not only adherents of Aum, are caught. These “blindfolding structures” have been put in place throughout society and in every corner of our minds. I look for what might be needed to escape from them. What is the nature of a path that is neither science nor religion? Where does such a road lead? I hope you will consider these questions with me.

What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of my existence? Natural science does not provide any kind of answer to these questions.

Unsatisfied by science but unable to take the path of religion, how am I, left hanging in this way, to go on living in this world?

The sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway perpetrated by Aum in 1995 was an event that affected me deeply. It caused me to reconsider what life is and what it means to live in this society.

What I have assiduously pursued in this book is not the question “what is Aum?” but rather “what is this ‘I’ that must live in the era of Aum?”

I have taken this approach because the question the Aum incident puts to us is not “what is Aum?” but rather “who are you who have witnessed what Aum has done, and how are you going to live from now on?”

When a person who is not satisfied by science but cannot enter the world of religion tries to think about “the meaning of living” and “the true self” with their own mind and their own two eyes, they descend into inescapable isolation. This occurs because the answers to such fundamental questions must be excavated from within oneself.

But you are not the only one carrying out this task in solitude. In this wide world there must be many others enduring the same suffering and writhing in the same hole.

There is thus a need for some kind of system by which these people who are trying to stand up on their own can support each other’s solitude in a pluralistic way and encourage each other from afar. What is needed is not the creation of a closed therapeutic community but rather a way for individuals to find hope in the midst of mutually supported solitude.

But to simply organize and restate the history of thought and philosophy in easy-to-understand language is not philosophy.

Philosophy ought to be the act of this “I,” who is living its one and only life here and now, putting its whole being into thinking through the nature of the world and the meaning of life with its own mind and in its own words.

At what level of depth do we engage the Aum incident and confront it? Focusing on this point should reveal whether or not the words of thinkers living in the same era as this incident ring true.

Among the people close to me, I have many friends who believe in religion. They are all good people. In terms of character they are far superior to me, and what they do in their daily life is wonderful. I often cannot help thinking that compared to them I am a useless person.

But when I am with them there are times when I am suddenly beset by an uncomfortable feeling. This is caused by the conviction many of them have that “absolute truth has already been revealed by someone.”

Whenever I encounter this kind of conviction underlying their casual remarks, I feel an infinite distance open up between us. “Absolute truth has already been revealed by someone.” This is a conviction I can never have. If I were to say such a thing to them my religious friends would surely give up on me. But I must state this here before moving on.

“Absolute truth has not been revealed by anyone in the past, and it will never be revealed in the future.” This is the conviction that comes most naturally to me. It goes without saying, of course, that this intuition of mine has no basis.

When I write this, one response will no doubt be, “So are you saying it is stupid to seek absolute truth, or to seek enlightenment or salvation?” I have a straightforward answer to this question: I think seeking absolute truth, seeking enlightenment or salvation, and engaging in devotional practices or spiritual training in pursuit of these aims are all wonderful activities. Does absolute truth exist? What should I do to be saved from this life full of suffering? What is the purpose of living in this world? I think a person who is moved to agonize over these sorts of questions and who engages in activities with the aim of resolving them displays the noblest form humanity can attain.

I have no desire to reject or deny this kind of human passion that lies at the bottom of all religions. This passion exists inside me, and in a sense it can be said to be the motivation behind my own inquiries. I therefore do not think it is stupid at all.

I am simply unable to accept the conviction that absolute truth has already been revealed by someone. This may be because there was a period when I was deeply immersed in what is referred to as “science.” Science assumes that the knowledge we currently possess is always insufficient. Science must therefore always be moving forward. Science is an endless process of pushing ahead in pursuit of answers that have not yet been found. Science has no end. Science cannot, therefore, ever arrive at ultimate truth.
Of course, there is also the perspective, sometimes found within religion itself, that the essential character of religion is an endless process of pursuing absolute truth and engaging in devotional practices. Let us for the moment accept this view. Even religions that take this stance, however, do not deny the fact that their founder obtained absolute truth or received it from god and then passed it on to their followers. If such a denial were made, the foundation of the religion would crumble. It is because of this requirement that I cannot get on board with religion.

The biggest reason that, despite being captivated by questions of life and death, I cannot turn to religion, is that I cannot “have faith” in it. I can rely on other people, come to like them, and believe what they tell me. It is only religious “faith” I find impossible.

Faith also has various aspects. Faith is believing in the “absolute truth” preached by the founder of my religion. Faith is also believing that I will be saved if I follow the words of my religion’s founder. Accepting the existence of a transcendent being by focusing on my own limitations as someone who cannot attain absolute truth is also a kind of faith.

Almost all religions are constructed around belief in their founder, doctrine or a transcendent being. This is true of Christianity and Islam, and also of Japanese schools of Buddhism such as True Pure Land and Nichiren. Of course, faith becomes a less significant factor in the case of religions like Taoism and Shinto that are rooted in the everyday lives of ordinary people and embedded in local customs. Within the field of sociology of religion, it has often been asserted that it is a mistake to take the view that there is no religion without faith. In one sense this is indeed correct. It is a fact, however, that a great many religions have been constructed with faith at their core, and by using faith as a foothold have gone on to acquire enormous power.

I have long been captivated by questions of life and death. But I cannot pursue them by taking the path of religion because I cannot accept the idea that someone has already revealed absolute truth and I am incapable of having faith in this kind of truth or absolute being or founder. When I say this, the response will presumably be, “So you are an atheist, materialist, and proponent of scientism.”

What I want to suggest in this book is that this kind of “people who do not believe in religion are materialists” dichotomy be abandoned. For me this point is very important. I hope the day will soon come when one can say things like “I do not believe in religion, but I am not a materialist,” “I do not believe in religion, but I am not a devotee of scientism,” or “I do not believe in religion, but I am not an atheist” without anyone finding it remarkable.

Some scholars declare that there is no such thing as yogic levitation, no “next world” exists, and there is no god, but this is not how I see things. Presumably no one can conclusively assert whether levitation is possible or not until this phenomenon appears in plain view, it is impossible to objectively prove whether a “next world” exists or not, and it is indeed impossible to declare whether or not god exists. (I do not want to get into a detailed philosophical discussion, but saying that something does not exist and saying it is impossible to prove that something exists are two different things.)

In short, I cannot make any determination about the existence of things like gods, a next world, or levitation. They may or may not exist. In cases where we cannot make a determination, isn’t saying “I don’t know” the most honest stance to take?

Furthermore, as I stated above, I believe that thinking about questions like “what is absolute truth?” “does another world exist?,” and “what is the meaning of life?” is a very important thing for human beings to do. I understand very well the feelings of people who cannot help thinking about these sorts of questions; pursuing them is one way of proving your existence as a human being, and this kind of passion exists within me as well.

I therefore choose the path of continuing to think about questions of life and death and grapple with my own way of living in this world as neither a religious believer nor an atheist.

I had had these feelings for a long time, but after encountering this Aum incident, I was pushed to the point of needing to make a public declaration. In this sense the Aum incident was a deeply significant experience for me. Why had young people who wanted to know the meaning of life and death, who wanted to be saved, and who wanted to obtain supernatural abilities found it necessary to be bound by faith in Asahara, the founder of the cult? Isn’t one reason for this the fact that today’s society has provided only religion as a means of pursuing such questions? Is it not the case that this society has come to accept only a dichotomous structure in which one either lives an ordinary life mired in the realities of the secular world or enters a religion and pursues the meaning of life and death? As a result, is it not the case that some people grappling with these issues have had no choice but to enter a religion and have been unable avoid getting bound up in absolute faith in its leader?

Is it not also the case that those who lack the courage to knock on the door of religion have no choice in this society but to give up struggling with issues of life and death and dedicate themselves to boring, mundane everyday tasks? Being occupied with one’s daily work drives complicated things like questions of life and death out of view. If you go out on the town there are many momentary diversions that have been prepared for you. Complicated issues can be forgotten in this cycle of daily work and nightly pleasures. When they learned of the Aum incident, some of those living this way must have had a sudden realization that they themselves could have joined such a religion and experienced a sober moment in which they questioned their current lifestyle. When Yutaka Ozaki died in 1992, his fans who had become fully integrated into social institutions as upstanding members of society must also have briefly had the same kind of feeling. But these fans, too, had to immediately banish these reflections from their minds and return to their ordinary daily lives. “In this managed society, there is no room for individuals to consider questions of their own life and death.” This is indeed the case, but it is also an excuse people give themselves.

Knock on the door of religion and enter a life of faith, or remain in the secular world and live your life oblivious to questions of life and death. Is our society, which seems to provide only these two options, not indeed terribly impoverished? Is it not possible to find a third way between these two paths?

Here I would like to cite some of what Tetsuo Yamaori said about the Aum incident. He had had a dialogue with Aum founder Asahara and was inundated with requests for interviews from the news media. At first he refused. During his interactions with the mass media, Yamaori turned to a group of TV directors and asked them, “What is your religion?” Almost all of them replied that they were atheists. Yamaori writes, “Journalists on the front lines of the mass media are scrutinizing and attempting to report on this major incident rooted in the deepest levels of religion from the atheist perspective.” “If so, what kind of perspective is the atheist perspective? This is also something that can be debated ad infinitum, but we can say, for example, that the atheist perspective is one that attempts to scrutinize, analyze, and explain this incident not from the point of view of god or Buddha (i.e., from the perspective of people who believe in religion) but from the point of view of society (i.e., from the perspective of those who view this kind of event from the stands).”

The dichotomy that appears in this text is an example of the kind that bothers me.

Yamaori divides the ways of looking at Aum into two categories. One is the god or Buddha perspective. As Yamaori himself notes, this is the perspective of those who believe in god or Buddha, i.e., the perspective of faith. The other is the societal perspective. Yamaori says this is a perspective that observes the incident as an onlooker; those who take this perspective are spectators who enjoy watching events unfold from the sidelines.

It is precisely this sort of criticism, one that establishes a perspective of faith on the one hand and spectator on the other and uses this dichotomous scheme to attempt to examine religious phenomena, that oppresses those like me who, despite remaining in the secular world, cannot be spectators, and instead grapple with the Aum incident as something that should not be considered to be simply someone else’s problem. This dichotomous scheme completely ignores the many people in this society who, while they cannot place themselves on the side of believers, cannot simply sit in the stands as indifferent spectators. The many silent individuals who, while remaining in the secular world without being able to take the leap of faith, nevertheless cannot give up on their passion for “mystery,” “life and death,” and “enlightenment,” surely suffered greatly when they were forced to confront the Aum incident.

I had the urgent sense that with one false step I myself could have entered this cult. What always irritates me when reading criticism on the topic of Aum is that I can never feel this kind of urgency in these writings. I once picked up Asahara’s book with a photograph of yogic levitation on its cover in a bookstore and started to read it. In the end I decided not to buy it, but others, such as, for example, former Aum Nagoya branch head Mr. A, bought it, read it enthusiastically, and became members of Aum. What is the difference between us? Was I too not just a slight push away from ending up in their position? After all, I had picked up the book because of an embarrassing feeling of excitement caused by the picture of levitation used on its cover. It is clear that one of the reasons young people were attracted to Aum was the desire to acquire supernatural abilities, including levitation. I understand this feeling. It clearly existed within me as well. I too wanted to levitate and bend spoons with psychic power. I was very interested in transcendental meditation (TM), a practice that includes the same kind of levitation. Without honestly reflecting on this point in my past, the essence of Aum does not come into view. (I discuss this point in more detail in Chapter Two).

What is the meaning of life in this world? What happens when you die? What is the right way to live? Our society, in which religion is the only doorway that has been left open for people who cannot look away from these problems and have devoted themselves body and soul to addressing them, is truly impoverished. There is something wrong with a dichotomous society in which to address these issues one must either embrace a religion with faith in the absolute truth someone has revealed at its core or else give up thinking about these issues completely and simply consume the pleasures of daily life in a managed society.

When I say this, one response may be, “Buddhism acknowledges ‘zaike (lay devotee)’ as a third way between living a secular life and withdrawing from the world as a monk. So it is in fact your perspective in which you declare Buddhism to be dichotomous that is narrow-minded.” But being a zaike is for people who, while living in the secular world, nonetheless aspire to a path of faith. In this sense this approach too falls into the category of religion based on faith. It is therefore not the kind of third way I have been discussing.

Let us consider this point using a different example. According to an Asahi Shimbun article, high-ranking Aum member Kazuko Miyakozawa, who had been arrested, responded as follows during an interview. “‘The first thing I thought was how dirty this world is!’ Going outside, the scenery of steel and buildings visible from a car window felt very cold. Restaurants looked vulgar, and people wearing suits seemed bizarre. ‘Those people’s bodies were bound in twine, and they seemed to have no sense of freedom.’”

What is this world? What are human beings? It is natural that such sights should appear if you look at the world as it exists with these sorts of questions in mind. She is observing its scenery very earnestly. “As someone who must live day after day in this dirty, vulgar, and oppressive society, what am I?” Questions of this sort must have been on her mind.
Using this kind of inquiry as a springboard, she would then presumably have been able to continue examining, with her own eyes and mind, questions such as “what is the meaning of living in this world?” and “how should I confront this society?”

She goes on to say, “From now on my task is to determine how to act in accordance with the will of my guru. To implement my guru’s will 100%.”

The tragedy of Kazuko Miyakozawa can be seen as the fact that a person with an acute ability to reflect on herself and society could not help choosing the path of believing in the guru she had embraced and living as his robot over the path of addressing these issues with her own mind and her own two eyes. I would suggest that one of the factors behind her being unable to avoid this path is the kind of dichotomy found so often in this society.

3. Why Did Budding Scientists Turn to Aum?

When the subway sarin gas incident occurred, and when it began to be suspected that Aum was the group behind this crime, I did not see this as anything other than a simple act of indiscriminate terrorism by a cult group. Apart from the uncanniness of having been in Tokyo on a work-related trip until the day before the incident, I did not have any particular feelings about what had occurred.

My attitude was suddenly transformed, however, when Hideo Murai, a high-ranking member of the cult, was assassinated in broad daylight. My feelings changed because of the fact that Murai and I were the same age, a detail that was perhaps trivial but nonetheless had a very strong effect on me. What’s more, he too had majored in astrophysics at university before entering Aum. For me this fact was very troubling.

In the reporting on Aum, much attention has been paid to the existence of a “Ministry of Science and Technology” within this organization. It appears that young people who were in university and on track to become top-level scientists gave up their promising careers to join this “Ministry” within Aum. It has been reported that they then developed weapons of mass murder, including Sarin gas. “Why would budding scientists at prestigious universities be drawn to Aum’s cult religion? It is incomprehensible.” This was the sort of thing that began to be discussed in the mass media. In newspapers and other media, the argument has been made that this incident occurred because post-war Japanese science education has been inadequate; if science education were being conducted properly, presumably there would not be any scientists who brought together science and the occult.

Listening to these sorts of opinions makes me sigh. For me it is all too easy to understand why budding scientists are flocking to new religions. I want to shout at the top of my voice, “It is because of people like you, people who say ‘I don’t understand why they would do such a thing. Let’s make science education more comprehensive,’ that young scientists in the making are running to new religions.”

In any case, the existence of this “Ministry of Science and Technology” troubled me greatly. Hearing about it was a shock from which I found it very difficult to recover. I can understand the earnest desire to address life’s questions within those who entered this “Ministry,” and at the same time I can also understand the evil temptation of the desire to immerse oneself in the theoretical possibilities of the technological development of chemical weapons within that closed-off environment. I think that if I myself were in that position it would not seem at all strange.

In a round-table discussion with Hayao Kawai and Shin’ichi Nakazawa, Hidetoshi Takahashi, a former Aum adherent, said that there were several types of people among those assembled within Aum. “Various types of people were gathered there together, people who wanted supernatural abilities, people who were drawn to the leader’s Buddha-like nature or compassion, people whose illnesses had been cured, and people like me who were harboring spiritual pursuits or philosophical questions.” There were people like Mr. Takahashi, who, while conducting scientific research at a university, also had a strong interest in questions concerning humanity and spirituality.

When he was a university student, Mr. Takahashi had been enrolled in the geological science department. At the same time, however, he had been unable to put the questions “what is humanity?” and “what am I?” out of his mind. It was in the midst of these circumstances that he attended a lecture by Aum founder Asahara. At the lecture Mr. Takahashi asked Asahara what he thought about the approach of scientifically examining the questions he was confronting. Asahara’s reply left a strong impression on him:

Mr. Takahashi had also long asked himself whether it might in fact be impossible to come to any understanding of why he himself had been born into this universe by investigating the properties of the universe in the field of astrophysics.

The science he was doing would not provide him with answers to his questions about life and existence. When a religion that authoritatively and concisely lays out answers to the questions “what is humanity?,” “what are life and death?” and “what is existence?” appears in front of scientists struggling with these sorts of issues, it should be easy to imagine them being drawn to it. It is easy for troubled scientists to jump over into the world of religion or the world of spirituality. This is a point worth noting.
Dr. Ikuo Hayashi, a physician at Aum’s Astral Hospital Institute, had also been a member of the young elite in the field of medicine. He abandoned the path to a successful medical career and entered Aum. According to media reports, Dr. Hayashi, too, is said to have turned to Aum as a result of his own deep contemplation of “questions of life and death.” Were his own advanced medical techniques actually helping patients’ souls? He is said to have experienced these sorts of doubts. Hidetoshi Takahashi describes his impression of Dr. Hayashi as follows:

As one of the perpetrators who made holes in the bags of sarin gas during the subway attack, this same Dr. Hayashi was a direct participant in indiscriminate mass murder. This tragedy was caused by sincere motivations. Was entering a new religion really the only path open to him?
To move from being a scientist to working in the field of spirituality.
This is an issue with which I too have grappled.

I too entered university with the aim of becoming a scientist. I was then confronted by the same doubts as Mr. Takahashi and found myself becoming hopeless. As a result, I ended up changing paths and exploring the world of spirituality. In my case, the move was from a science program to an ethics major in the humanities department, but I think my destination could just as easily have been certain new religions active within my university, or even Aum, which had just been created around that time. Even after transferring to the humanities department I hardly ever went to the university, so there was ample room for this to have occurred.

Reading the personal history of Hidetoshi Takahashi quoted above, hardly anything emerges to separate us. I have seriously wondered whether I too might have ended up a high-ranking member of Aum if circumstances had been slightly different. I think I would probably have felt restricted within the relationship between myself and the leader and left the group, but it is indeed possible that I would have witnessed the production of sarin gas. This possibility is quite real given the fact that many of those who became high-ranking members of the organization or researchers in the “Ministry of Science and Technology” were of my generation.

I myself could have entered Aum. This awareness is my fundamental stance when examining the incidents that occurred. It seems clear that there is a need for other options so that people do not have to choose this path. I want to move forward thinking along these lines.
　
4. Disappointment with Science

It may be a bit of a digression, but I think it is necessary to write a bit more about myself before moving on. Was the fact that I did not enter a new religion like Aum merely some kind of coincidence? Or was there a reason? I think that reflecting on my own past is essential to examining this issue, because the pattern I followed when I was young was presumably not unique to me and must have been shared by others living in the same era.

I have written about this elsewhere, but when I was in junior high and high school I was very interested in physics and mathematics. I liked solving math problems, and I even competed with my friends to find alternative solutions not listed in our exercise book’s answer key. I also liked physics. I was excited by this fascinating branch of science in which mathematical techniques are used to reveal the structure of the world one step at a time. In addition to the physics I learned at school, I also remember reading and re-reading introductory texts on the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. My interest then turned toward astrophysics and particle physics. At the time astrophysics was beginning to be connected to particle physics through the big bang theory. Questions about when and how the entire universe had begun were starting to be answered, through, of all things, the behavior of the tiniest particles. This wondrous fusion of macrocosm and microcosm was taking place at the leading edge of contemporary physics.

My young mind was captivated by this spectacle. I decided to become a physicist and do research in the field of theoretical particle physics. I would uncover the shape of the universe.

I was also deeply captivated by the “measurement problem” that the field of quantum mechanics faced at the beginning of the 20th century. When you measure the behavior of very tiny particles, this act of measuring itself influences the movement of the particles you are trying to measure. Leading physicists such as Einstein, Bohr and von Neumann disagreed about how this phenomenon should be interpreted. When it comes to the domain of the very small, the seer is no longer separate from what is seen. They are in a relationship of mutual interference. This is astounding. Someone has to solve this mystery.

When I was in high school, I studied very hard for my entrance exams with this dream in mind. Looking back on it now, there are signs that I was confusing physics and philosophy. I naïvely believed that the mysteries of the universe, the world, and myself could be solved by physics. Why did the universe come to exist? Why does the world take the form it does? Why was I born into this world? What is the meaning of life and death? I thought it was physics that would give me the ultimate answers to these questions. I believed that physics was the only discipline that could provide a final answer to these kinds of questions about “the whole,” and mathematics was to be used as a tool in this endeavor.

I entered my university’s course for students planning to proceed to the science or engineering departments. I knew it would be difficult to get into the physics department, but I thought I would at least try.

So was I a “science person” in high school? Not really. Beginning in junior high school I was constantly reading novels, so I could in fact have been described as a “literature person.” Then in high school I became obsessed with philosophy. I enjoyed reading the works of thinkers like Pascal, Nietzsche and Freud as if they were works of literature. I can remember reading these sorts of texts on my own because I had no friends with whom I could discuss them. As for why I enjoyed reading these works of philosophy so much, it was because they dealt directly with humanity’s “life and death” questions. I suspect this is something everyone remembers going through, but the biggest issues for men in their highly sensitive teenage years are normally sex and death. Unstoppable sexual urges and feelings of romantic love welled up inside my body. What was I to do about them? Then there was the separate question of what would happen after I die. Would I alone cease to exist, or would the entire world disappear along with me? What would a world without me be like? Could I bear the thought that I would become nothing? When I began to think about these things the night became frightening and I could not sleep. No matter how much I thought about these questions the answers could not be found. The best solution was not to think about it. I therefore tried to keep them out of my mind as much as possible, but they returned to assail me on a regular basis. They would not let me sleep.

As a result, within this young me, questions of philosophy and religion, such as “what will happen after I die?” and “what is the meaning of life?,” existed alongside questions of physics, such as “how is the world constructed?” and “how did the universe come into being?,” without any kind of contradiction. I thought that I would become a physicist, or, failing that, a novelist. Today I am neither of these things, but at the time physicist and novelist were interchangeable to me. What tore apart this natural idea of mine was the “science program or humanities program” dichotomy deeply rooted in the Japanese education system. This “science program or humanities program” system still angers me. It caused me no end of suffering. It is quite hard to forgive what it did to me.

In any case, I went to university with the intention of becoming a physicist and unraveling the mysteries of the world, the universe, and the self.
I entered university in 1977. All traces of student unrest had disappeared, and there was nothing interesting happening on campus. At first I diligently went to all of my classes, but after about two months I had stopped attending almost all of them. I stopped going to the university and spent my time hanging out in Tokyo with close friends. There were three reasons for this. One was that while I had been at the top of my class in high school, once I entered university I was surrounded by people who were as good at academics as I was. I lost the will to study even harder and rise to the top of this group. This is the first reason I dropped out. The second reason was that the flames of youth that had been suppressed within me suddenly broke free and began to blaze intensely. I burned with regret at not having been able to have a single girlfriend because I was studying so hard for the entrance exams and with the desire to make up for lost time. Both of these causes of distress are commonly experienced by students who have done very well on their entrance exams.

The third reason was my disappointment with natural science.
This was indeed the biggest issue in terms of a problem I faced within myself.

After entering university and beginning the science program’s basic training course, and after watching my friends devote themselves to their studies, I gradually began to have the sense that I was “sobering up” and becoming disenchanted with natural science. The science I aspired to was not supposed to be this kind of dull, dry collection of techniques and methodologies. It was a more dynamic, exciting effort to unravel the mysteries of the world, the universe, and the human spirit. Instructors who yawned as they guided students through experiments, mathematics and physics formulas lined up in an orderly list, mechanical statements of the solution to differential equations in class – each time I encountered these things I was beset by an uneasy feeling that perhaps I was not in the right place.

Of course, being disappointed in natural science as a whole on the basis of having taken a few introductory courses in a university science program may be described as arrogant. I would not contest this description, because it may well be that the sort of excitement I was looking for can indeed be experienced once you have completed your basic training and progressed to specialization. There were in fact some exceptions, such as chemistry classes on the three-dimensional structure of molecules, that were quite interesting, so the me who abandoned natural science without sticking it out and proceeding a bit further may indeed have been an arrogant and lazy person.

Sitting beside my classmates who were on track to become first-rate experts in their fields and watching the professors who were already prominent scientists day after day in my classes, I think I may have begun to sense something. I think I may have had a premonition that what I was looking for would not emerge from this group of people. Later, looking at my friends who were specialist scientists in the making, I rarely saw the thrill of excitedly unraveling the mysteries of the universe and humanity. Contemporary “big science” is constructed like a bureaucracy, with the majority of scientists working day in and day out as nothing more than a single cog in a complicated team effort. There is the joy and excitement of glimpsing the intricacies of the universe through hypothesis building and small discoveries, but contemporary science has become too complicated for one person to directly relate this to understanding the universe, humanity, and the self.

When I say this kind of thing, I am often misunderstood to be rejecting science. Of course, I have no such intention. There is only one thing I want to state, and that is that what I really wanted to do cannot be done within the field of natural science. Natural science will never provide the answers I really wanted. That is all I am trying to say. Those who feel that natural science is their calling can be very happy. I would never reject natural science for these people.

What is the meaning of the existence of the universe? What is life? What is death? What is the meaning of life? Why do I exist? I thought science was something that could answer these sorts of questions. Immediately after entering university, I realized that believing this had been a mistake. After learning a bit about the philosophy and history of science this became clear beyond any doubt.

One year after entering university I was plunged into the biggest identity crisis (destruction of the image of myself in which I had believed) of my life. I faced the shock of realizing that what I had been aiming for up until that time was the wrong goal. Ahead of me lay total darkness. I quit going to my university classes, but I didn’t know what to do instead. I slept during the day and stayed up at night, and all I did was try to enjoy myself. Day after day I went on living in this way.

As for my state of mind at that time, I felt as though I could see a set of railroad tracks leading far off into the distance, but the train I was riding had wrecked and I had been thrown off alone into a field of grass beside the rails. I didn’t dislike or despise natural science. The intellect within me was clearly scientific, and I felt a thrill of excitement when I solved a math puzzle or read news accounts of the latest scientific discoveries. Even now these sorts of thoughts and feelings remain strong within me. I was someone who under ordinary circumstances ought to have become a scientist. I should have been someone who shut himself in his laboratory all night, staking everything for the joy of making a new discovery. I should have taken the standard route of doing research and drawing steadily closer to the mysteries of the natural world one step at a time. Guilt about having intentionally abandoned the path of natural science at its earliest stage is something that remains deep within me even today.

Looking back even further into my childhood, I had not decided to become a scientist simply because I was good at the intellectual games of mathematics and physics. When I was in high school there was a certain scientist I admired greatly. I wanted to be like him with all my heart. This object of my admiration was Dr. Serizawa, the one-eyed scientist who appears in the movie Godzilla. The scientist who dives beneath the sea on a suicide mission to kill Godzilla with an “oxygen destroyer,” a supremely powerful weapon he himself had invented, the scientist who does battle with an evil created by mankind (Godzilla) in order to save humanity – this was my ideal man. To me, science was neither just a game nor the pure pursuit of the joy of discovery. Science was something that must save humanity, something that must fight against the evil mankind has created. This is the kind of feeling, romantic and embarrassing to think about now, that I had towards natural science.

Even after becoming a university student, I think this view of science remained somewhere in the back of my mind. My dream of becoming a member of a scientific community working to save humanity remained intact. I suspect that this is what made my disappointment with my science classes so hard to take.

Around this time, invitations to join new religions abounded on university campuses. Universities were swarming with organizations like research group G., which caused social controversy by forcing students to engage in group living, and research group T., which aggressively urged students to study the teachings of Shinran. I myself was approached many times and engaged in intense debates with research group T. students and members of organization S., which originated from the Nichiren sect of Buddhism. I was a science student, so I often started with the topic of how questions of life and death cannot be answered by science. They immediately agreed with me on this point. I then remember asking them to show me how their religion could produce answers to these questions. In the end they could only answer with the tautological claim that the truth was written in their sacred texts so these texts must be correct. To me, someone who had aimed at becoming a scientist, this was not a convincing response.

One reason I was not drawn into any new religions during this period may have been the ineptness of their solicitations. Looking back on it now, I may well have expressed an interest if I had encountered a method of recruitment based on mystical experiences at that time. If this is indeed the case, then it may have been simply because I did not encounter this kind of appeal that I did not enter a new religion, making it indeed just a matter of chance.

5. Things Natural Science Cannot Address

Let me write a little bit more about myself.

I was in a university science program for three years. I then moved to the literature department where I also spent three years.

I therefore know something about the atmosphere of both humanities and science programs.

I don’t know about today, but at that time the science program was very different from the humanities program. To begin with, the science program followed a stricter curriculum. If you wanted to get good grades you had to attend lectures every day from morning until evening. Science classes built on each other, so if you fell behind somewhere you wouldn’t be able to follow what was going on. Humanities classes were less demanding. You could skip over things here and there and still keep up.
Science classes were very systematic. This corresponds to the way contemporary science itself has been systematically organized as a hierarchical system with journals like Nature at the top. University education, too, is connected to one end of this competitive race in which everyone is trying to have their articles published in what are deemed to be the most prestigious international journals. This race is a fierce competition in which you try to release your results faster than your rivals, even if only by a minute or a second, and it is won by people with the kind of ability and personality that allows them to concentrate solely on their goals without getting sidetracked. In order to have their research proceed efficiently, these winners obtain funding, organize graduate students and young researchers, delegate various tasks to them, and put together and present the results of these efforts in their role as a research leader. Scientists who cannot pull ahead of the pack and reach this top position can only ever function as a gear in the machinery of other people’s research. This is the reality of contemporary scientific research.

Of course, it is not as though these sorts of circumstances exist only in the world of natural science. Within today’s large organizations, including corporations and governments, people go about their daily work on the basis of this kind of theory of power. In this sense, therefore, “scientist” is now nothing more than an ordinary profession within one of today’s large organizations. The sorrow of contemporary science is precisely the same thing as the sorrow of contemporary bureaucracy and the misery of working in a contemporary corporate organization.

So what did I perceive by observing science education and the science students receiving it? And what did I notice later when I interacted with regular scientists working at the leading edge of scientific research? What I found through these experiences was that in order to keep cranking out result after result within the contemporary scientific research system you must not think about “extraneous things” in your life, i.e., things that do not serve to advance your research. People who are able to thrive within the contemporary scientific research system are people who can wipe the “extraneous things” in their lives from their minds and dedicate themselves to their research day and night, or people who can cleanly separate their research from their private lives such that “extraneous things” in their lives are never brought into their research. These sorts of students get good grades in university and move on to graduate school or a first-rate corporate laboratory, or in some cases rush off to study in America. They then succeed in having papers published in first-rate journals and are appointed to important positions at universities or research institutes.
The converse can thus also be stated: with very few exceptions, people who cannot wipe “extraneous things” in their lives from their minds will fall behind or drop out of the mainstream science race. These people who fall behind face an identity crisis. It is here that new religions extend an inviting hand.

I will take myself as an example. The things that concerned me when I was a university student were as follows. “I made it through studying for entrance exams and now I am studying the fundamentals of science at a university. But in order to get into the physics or information science departments I will have to get good grades. In order to beat the other students and get good grades I will have to study single-mindedly without being distracted by anything else. If I succeed, then what? I will presumably go on to graduate school and continue doing research, but this time if I don’t get results on the international stage I won’t be able to become a professor at a university. In order to do this I will have to beat my competitors to the punch, even if only by a minute or a second, and have my achievements become known throughout the world. This race to succeed in the world of science will continue for half of my life. But is this really what I wanted to do? When I dreamed of becoming a scientist, was I really dreaming of taking part in this kind of horserace and taking the top prize? What is the meaning of my life as a scientist? Will continuing down this path really bring me happiness?”

I remember these sorts of doubts occurring to me one after another. They then progressed to the following questions.

“What I wanted to do by studying physics was to consider, in the way I found most satisfying and convincing, questions like ‘why does this world exist?,’ ‘what is the meaning of my living in this world?’ and ‘what will happen after I die?’ I have a feeling that if I continue on my present path and enter the world of natural science I will not obtain truly satisfying answers to these questions. Isn’t natural science an academic system that has been established by putting aside these sorts of questions? Should I really devote half of my life to such a system?”

I was concerning myself with these “extraneous things.” I confessed these worries to friends in the same natural science program at university. Their response, uniformly, was that no matter how much you think about such things no answer is likely to be forthcoming, so they themselves chose not to think about them. I was very disheartened by this. They were all good friends (we went to baseball games, organized group dates, and took part in our university’s student festival together) but deep in my heart I thought I had to enter a world different from theirs.

Of course, someone could have offered me the advice that these sorts of “extraneous things” are the standard worries of youth, and that, since everyone passes through this kind of period and becomes an “adult,” I should put these thoughts out of my mind for now and focus on my current studies. But I suspect that such advice would not have helped me, because what bothered me was the process of “putting it out of your mind and forgetting about it” itself. This is the same process that is used to forget about the question “what will happen after I die?” You put this question out of your mind for the time being, only to have it ultimately return once again in the second half of your life as you begin to feel the effects of aging. And it may well be that the longer you have been able to ignore this concern the more intense your anxiety will be when you are finally forced to face it.

This process of putting “extraneous things” out of your mind is in fact deeply connected to the fundamental nature of contemporary natural science, which is modeled on physics. In natural science, when you investigate a given phenomenon you try to consider it in isolation by reducing the number of variables involved as much as possible. This is the way of thinking that best suits contemporary natural science, and through this radical process of elimination science has produced result after result in a variety of fields.

But the idea of this kind of process of elimination itself was something to which I had difficulty reconciling myself from the start.

Surely the world moves according to various factors that cannot be ignored. When we understand a natural phenomenon, are we not throwing away something important by reducing the number of factors related to it? Are there not indeed things of importance among the fine particles that pass through the holes in the sieve of natural science? Will it not prove impossible to answer questions such as “what is humanity?,” “what is the mind?,” and “what is existence?” without grasping these things that are discarded? Will answering questions like “what is the meaning of being born and dying?” and “what is the meaning of life?” not also be impossible?

My classmates said, “Such questions cannot be answered no matter how much you think about them, so I don’t think about them at all,” and there is a certain individual who reached the pinnacle of scientific research by strictly adhering to this kind of attitude. His name is Susumu Tonegawa, and he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1987. He believes that all biological and mental phenomena can be explained by the behavior of matter. During an interview he responded as follows to questions posed by Takashi Tachibana.

Tonegawa adheres to a way of thinking which holds that biological and mental phenomena can be reduced to the behavior of matter and thereby explained, or in any case this is his “belief” regarding his work, and it is clear that the result of his pushing ahead with research on biological phenomena supported by this belief has been a record of outstanding accomplishments.

Furthermore, because the state of the world depends on our brain’s cognitive principles, according to Tonegawa it is possible to say that “the world exists because the human brain exists.” And if we can unravel the material phenomena within the human brain, “we will come to understand what kind of situations, what kind of stories move human beings.”
Tachibana is bothered by this extreme physical reductionism and asks the following question. Tonegawa’s reply is worth noting.

Tachibana’s question about “a world in which every one of these brains that serve as subjects of cognition has disappeared” is, in other words, the question of whether or not the world will exist after we are dead. In short, he is asking how the phenomenon referred to as “my death” is viewed within Tonegawa’s physical reductionism. Tonegawa’s reply is that “scientists have a tendency to skirt around things that are essentially beyond our ability to understand and things that are intuitively deemed to have no chance of actually occurring.”

When I read this reply for the first time I was dumbfounded. Looking back on it now, however, I get the sense he was being completely honest about what he believed.

He was frankly stating that it was because he avoided “extraneous things” that cannot be resolved within the framework of natural science that he was able to win the race for the Nobel Prize.

This is the kind of person who is best suited to doing scientific research.
I was not able to adopt this way of thinking.

What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of my existence? What is the point of continuing my studies? Is my current way of living making me happy? Unable to put these sorts of “extraneous things” out of my mind, I left the path toward structured scientific research at the undergraduate university education stage. Of course, I assume there are also great scientists who have succeeded in the world of natural science while continuing to consider these sorts of “extraneous things.” But I think such cases are exceptional, and I myself was incapable of living in such a clever and admirable way.

I think there must be many others like myself who set out on the road to natural science but were forced to leave this path because they were not able to put their concerns about “extraneous things” out of their minds. Some of them then entered Aum, a religious group seeking a spiritual world. It appears that among the scientists in Aum’s “Ministry of Science and Technology” there were some individuals who had entered the organization because of the appeal of ample funding and the freedom to conduct their own research. There were surely many others, however, who followed the path mentioned above.

I dropped out early, but Hideo Murai didn’t drop out until after he had gotten as far as graduate school. It may indeed be the case that his jump in the other direction was more radical because of the length of time he had served as an apprentice within the scientific research establishment.

Let us now consider the ways in which people affiliated with new religions approached young people with doubts about natural science at universities. I have experienced this kind of invitation, but since I have never approached someone in this way myself and have never seen a manual describing how it is to be done, please consider the following merely a hypothesis formed on the basis of my experience.

“You are trying to become a scientist. Within the world of science you will investigate the truth and seek to unravel the world’s mysteries. In the world of science, however, even simple things like ‘what is death?’ are not understood. Have you ever thought about what will happen after you die? Do you think there is only nothingness, or do you think you will travel to another world? You normally avoid thinking about these sorts of things, don’t you? Thinking about them is scary, isn’t it? I bet you try to enjoy what is right in front of your eyes without thinking about these scary questions.

But isn’t the question of what will happen after you die very important to you? At most you will only remain alive on this Earth for a few more decades. You may die even sooner because of illness or an accident. At present most people die of cancer. What would you do if you were told you had this disease and your case was terminal? You have only a short time left to live. What will happen to you after you die? Is this not a very important question? How long will you go on ignoring your own death?
The science to which you are planning to dedicate your life will never give you any sort of answer to this question of ‘death.’ Science is fundamentally incapable of answering the question of what happens to you after you die. Medical science can explain in detail the physiological process that occurs when a person dies, but it cannot tell us anything about what happens to that person after death or where they will go. What the average person most wants to know, however, is not the details of the physiological process of dying, but rather what will happen to us and where we will go after we die. Science thus tells us nothing about what we most want to know.

Imagine a terminal cancer patient who is so anxious about what will happen after they die and where they will go after death that they lie awake at night trembling in fear. What can science do for them? All it can offer is sleeping pills and antidepressants. Science cannot directly respond to the voice calling out from their soul. This is how powerless the science to which you are planning to give your life is when it comes to a person on the brink of death.

Is the path to which you should dedicate your life not indeed a different path rather than the way of science? Our religion, for example, clearly explains what happens after you die. It’s like this...”

I think there are quite a few people who would be affected by this kind of approach. If someone happened to be experiencing the kind of identity crisis I faced when I was a student, they might give themselves over to the religion in question out of desperation.

The fact that natural science cannot fully resolve questions concerning death is indeed a serious problem. For example, as became clear in the academic debate over brain death, while biomedicine could describe “what kind of state brain death is,” when it came to the question of “whether or not brain death is the death of the human in question” physicians had to remain silent and leave it to a social consensus and legislation. There were some who declared that from a scientific perspective brain death was equivalent to the death of the human in question, but they were nothing more than narrow-minded experts who had no genuine understanding of the nature of science. The most valid conclusion to be drawn in the academic debate over brain death is that the question of whether or not brain death is the death of the human being in question is to be resolved through an agreement or determination arrived at by society, politics, the law, religion, and culture. There is no place for natural science at this level of discussion.

The same can be said concerning near-death experiences. In the last few years, near-death experience research using scientific methods has made it quite clear that this phenomenon actually exists. It has been observed that just before death many people have a similar experience of passing through a dark tunnel and being drawn into a world of light. The scientific approach, however, then inevitably proceeds to the branch of brain science that examines what sort of internal physical processes of the brain correspond to this kind of experience. This is the only path science can take, because in the end it can never provide a definitive answer to the question of whether the world of light people visit during near-death experiences is the “next world.” The study of near-death experiences as science can thus only examine the processes of brains that exist in this world. Regarding what we most want to know, whether or not the next world can be known via near-death experiences, once again science can only remain silent.

A second line of questioning that could be used on young scientists concerns “the meaning of life.”

“Step by step natural science is moving towards the definitive resolution of the mysteries of this world. You too may have believed this when you set out upon the path of becoming a scientist. The science of the 20th century has indeed revealed the microscopic structure of the world, the process by which our universe began, and the structure of DNA, one of the fundamental components of living organisms. These can all be described as truly wonderful achievements.

Among these developments, the study of the life sciences, which has moved forward by leaps and bounds in the second half of the 20th century, has begun to elucidate several major components of the workings of living organisms that had not been known before. Going forward, if the life sciences progress to a true study of complex systems including molecular biology and the behavior of whole genomes (genetic information within our cells in its entirety), new light will undoubtedly be shed on areas unique to living beings such as the emergence of life and evolution. While incorporating brain science, the life sciences of the future will close in on the secrets of life and the human body.

There is also a question, however, that will never be answered no matter how much progress is made in the life sciences. This is the question of the meaning of the lives of the people who are doing this research, or, in other words, the meaning of your own life. Why were you born into this world? Why must you eventually die? The life sciences cannot answer such questions. What is the meaning of the life you yourself are living right now? What is its purpose? Natural science does not answer these sorts of fundamental questions about life at all.

This is the science to which you are devoting your life. You are giving your life to this science that offers no answers to life’s fundamental questions. Is this the right choice? Is this the choice that is most true to your self? Are you not becoming a scientist simply because you want to avert your eyes from the problem of your own life and death?

In doing so, are you not moving one step at a time further and further away from the fundamental questions that you really ought to be tackling?
Surely what you really ought to be working towards is the elucidation of the meaning of your life and death as much as possible by yourself. Unless you resolve this question in a way that you yourself can be satisfied with, you will be living a false life. And resolving this question within the framework of natural science is impossible. What you must engage in right now is not natural science. What you must tackle are the questions of your own existence, your own life, and how you ought to live here and now.
So come with me. Our religion will teach you how to live and provide you with the ultimate answers to these questions....”

Young people who continue to be captivated by the youthful question “what is the meaning of my life?” will find this invitation alluring. Will I be happier if I forget about this question, lose my naiveté, and go on with my life, or is it better to be led down this path?

A third line of questioning takes a slightly different angle but strikes at the same target: “science cannot address the irreplaceable existence that is yourself.”

“Modern natural science has made great strides as an experimental science. The foundation of natural science is a process of formulating hypotheses using mathematical techniques and then confirming them through experimentation. What is important in this process is “reproducibility;” when an experimental result is obtained it must be possible for other people to obtain the same result by performing the same experiment. The law of universal gravitation confirmed experimentally by Isaac Newton several centuries ago can be confirmed in the same way by a person living in Japan today. It can therefore be called a scientific law. All other environmental conditions being equal, the results of an experiment confirming a law of natural science must be the same even if the experiment is performed by a different person or in a different time or place. If the results of an experiment someone did yesterday are completely different from the results of an experiment I do today, then what is being tested is not a scientific law.

When a new scientific discovery is made, it is only accepted as true if the same results are obtained when the experiment is carried out by other scientists. To put it another way, something that cannot be replicated or for which an experimental model cannot be constructed is not to be called experimental science.

Here some may object that this would mean sciences that examine history, such as evolutionary biology, which examines the history of the evolution of living creatures, and astrophysics, which includes the elucidation of the history of the universe, would not qualify as experimental sciences. Indeed, what has been and gone cannot itself be reproduced in an experiment or replicated over and over again. In this sense, these historical sciences can be said to differ from standard chemistry and physics. Nevertheless, in the case of astrophysics, electromagnetic waves from distant celestial bodies can be measured, and this act of measurement can be replicated. In the case of evolutionary biology, fossils can be excavated from strata and dated, and this act of dating can be replicated. By ensuring this kind of reproducibility, historical sciences can be squeezed into the framework of experimental science.

But there is, in fact, a phenomenon that in principle cannot be reproduced by any experimental models. It is nothing other than your own life. You were born in a certain place at a certain time, grew up over a period of many years, and now exist here in the present. Your life and existence here and now cannot be exchanged for those of anyone else, and are indeed irreplaceable. This life that occurs only once, in which you are born at a specific point in time, grow up, grow old, and die at another point in time, cannot ever be repeated. Your life is open only to the unique human being that you are, and you yourself must live out, only once, this irreplaceable life that can never be experienced by another person. In this sense, moment by moment your life is a series of irreplaceable experiences and not something that can be repeated.

You cannot live your own life over again. That moment you couldn’t speak those words to a person close to you will never come again. You must live the rest of your life dragging this moment that has passed and can never be taken back along behind you. This is what it means for you to be living an irreplaceable life. What is lost cannot be recovered. Even if you get it back later, this is only “restoration after the fact.”

In life there is no “if that moment comes again.” When it comes to your irreplaceable life, the idea of testing something “once more under the same conditions” is absurd. It is impossible in principle.

“Reproducible experiments” concerning your own life are thus impossible. You yourself cannot replicate and confirm the irreplaceable life you are living right now.

Modern experimental science, therefore, cannot address this one-time-only life of yours. Natural science can never address the existence of “this you” living your own unique life. Nor can it ever address the “irreplaceability” of your existence.

In other words, natural science cannot address the irreplaceability of our individual lives that are being lived here and now and will one day end in death. This individual, irreplaceable being that lives and dies while interacting with others is called “life (inochi),” but its irreplaceable reality cannot be grasped by natural science. It cannot be understood, as I have already stated several times, because natural science cannot grasp the irreplaceability of the events that occur in this world. It is impossible because what can be grasped by natural science is only what is replicable, namely the replaceable, interchangeable aspects of the world. How can natural science grasp this aspect of life, the essential quality of which is that it occurs only once? What is visible to natural science is only the physiological aspects of life as a living organism. What natural science can understand is only the characteristics of living creatures in general that can be commonly observed in you, me, or any other person.

This life of mine that occurs only once cannot be explained by science. The meaning of living this one-time-only life cannot be grasped. The meaning of my encountering various people and events over the course of this lifetime that occurs only once cannot be understood. The fact that in the midst of this one-time-only life I am suffering and agonizing right here and now cannot be made the object of investigation as it actually is. Science cannot stand beside this me living the irreplaceable moments of my life.

Is what you are looking for not in fact something that can stand face to face with your life being lived here and now and address it directly? Do you not feel a need for something to stand beside you and allow you to contemplate, grow and be healed? Science will never do this for you. Science will coldly turn its back on the raw existence of the you who is alive here and now.

It is by no means only natural science that loses sight of “irreplaceability.” Take a look at today’s society. No one thinks of you as an irreplaceable human being. Say you enter a company. Eventually you will probably be promoted to supervisor or manager. But think about it for a moment. What is it about you that the company needs? Do they require your existence itself? Surely not. What they need is only your specialized skills and your ability to do work. As evidence for this, imagine, for example, that you get into an accident on the way to work one day, become partially paralyzed, and have no choice but to quit your job. Will your company be thrown into confusion and collapse as a result of your absence? Surely it will not. Another person doing roughly the same amount of work that you used to do will take your place at your desk and everything will go on as it had before without skipping a beat. What your company requires from you is your skills, capabilities, and functions. That is all. To your company you are nothing more than a single cog in a profit-generating machine. If you break you will simply be replaced. Unless you are someone with very special skills, any number of replacements can be found.

This is the principle that drives modern society. From the perspective of society, you are not some kind of irreplaceable being. You are an interchangeable part that can be replaced at any time. The society we live in today is one that says, “we don’t need you. We don’t have any need for you as an irreplaceable human being, but we do need you as an interchangeable part.” Society operates on this kind of principle.

This is by no means only something that goes on inside corporations.
The same trend can be found in today’s scientific and medical technology. Organ transplantation, for instance, is an example of this way of thinking. The idea behind organ transplantation is that organs inside the body are nothing more than interchangeable parts. So if an organ breaks down, the response becomes to simply replace it with a healthy one from the body of a brain-dead person. In truth, even organs must presumably have their own individuality and have been engraved with the history of the person in whose body they were grown. But these aspects are nullified, and thanks to the progress of technology that aims to circulate them as colorless, transparent parts, a great many of the organs and tissues in the human body have become recyclable components.

It’s no different even when it comes to scientists. Apart from people with extraordinary capabilities, they are only used as disposable pawns to advance an enormous system of scientific research with their specialized skills. The scientific research and development system wants you as a specialized worker who will perform a specific function as a single component of a larger mechanism. No heed is paid to your internal thoughts and feelings as a unique individual.

It’s the same with the current education system. When we are at school, we are raised to do as we are told. After graduating into adult society, we are trained to work as an efficient part utilized by a company. And when we become seriously ill or physically disabled, we are discarded by this company and sent, along with a gift of money, to die, hooked up to tubes in a modern hospital that views the human body as nothing more than a collection of parts. This is the form our lives are currently being given.
Today’s society has reached this state because it has lost the flexibility to respond individually to each irreplaceable life. And because it has lost the joy of awakening and entering into a greater spiritual life that does not suppress the individuality of each life within it.

Don’t you think there is something wrong with a society that is so suffocating and suppresses your life? Don’t you think a less oppressive world in which people could stretch and grow and live freely would be better? Don’t you think the world should be a place in which you are accepted as you are by everyone around you and you are able to move forward with your own self-realization in the midst of your connections to these other people? Shouldn’t we live in a society in which you can appreciate and live to the fullest your irreplaceable life?

We are working towards the creation of this kind of society every day. Won’t you join us in building a society in which we can live more freely and happily? ...”

Getting someone to directly perceive the suffocation of modern managed societies and then offering them release from it may also be an effective approach.

I have mentioned three methods of persuasion, but what are the feelings of the young people who are subjected to wave after wave of these sorts of appeals? Various doubts will enter their minds, but since the main thrust of what they are being told is persuasive, it will presumably be difficult for them to definitively argue against these sorts of appeals.
Let us stop here and think for a moment.

These arguments I have put forward to entice people into becoming religious are not mere rhetoric; they do in fact accurately portray one face of modern science and modern society.

I therefore think the young people who nod in response to these appeals as a whole, even though they may have various (correct) arguments against them, can be very thoughtful and sincere individuals. They are people who want to look directly at themselves and their society and try to discover how they ought to live. There are presumably many thoughtful and sincere people of this type among those who take a tentative step forward in response to invitations from new religions, including Aum.

The question is, even if I can agree with these assertions up to the point of “what I need is neither natural science nor this kind of modern society,” can I also agree with what comes next?

In describing the three types of appeal above, I said nothing about the next step. But the actual appeals of new religions will go farther. In the invitations to join new religions there will be claims such as “in our religion, every day we are putting the truth into practice, and everyone is smiling and full of joy” and “human beings are reborn in the next world, and the form we will take is described in our sacred text.” If you ask them how they can say these sorts of things, they will give various responses, such as presenting more documents and saying, “Because it is written here,” saying, “Because our founder said so,” and promising that if you follow their religious practices diligently you will experience these things for yourself.

The main reason I could not proceed any further was as follows. When these people criticize modern science or modern society, they approach these subjects from various angles, logically and empirically building up a collection of things that are wrong or strange, but when it comes to their own religion, this skeptical, empirical spirit suddenly evaporates and they believe in their sacred texts or the words of their founder without question. I could not join them in this radical shift in attitude. Of course, they rely extensively on logic and empiricism regarding the internal consistency of sacred texts and doctrines, but when it comes to why the original words of holy figures can be said to be “correct” they suddenly fall silent. They have nothing to say because from that point on you enter the domain of faith.

As I stated at the start, I am a person who is unable to believe in religion. Modern science cannot resolve the meaning of life and death, and modern society does not address the irreplaceability of our individual lives. Even though I feel these deficiencies deeply and desperately desire a way of life that properly addresses these issues, I still cannot enter a religion built around faith (here I have in mind religions with a founding figure and sacred texts).

First, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I cannot intuitively accept the notion that “absolute truth has already been revealed by someone.” I cannot experience this sense or intuition for myself; it somehow rings hollow. I therefore do not feel any inclination to accept claims that absolute truth has been spoken by some great person in the past, has been bestowed on human beings by divine revelation, or has been recorded in sacred texts.

Second, religion often speaks about “the afterlife” with certainty, and I cannot accept this. Presumably no person living in this world can speak definitively about the afterlife, and when someone attempts to do so unabashedly this is a stance I cannot accept. Of course, anyone who hears a definitive account of the afterlife will have a desire to cling to it. But when it comes to the fundamental question of what happens after you die, I don’t like it when someone speaks with certainty what to me can only be baseless speculation as if it were the truth. As I have already mentioned, even near-death experiences, which have been interpreted as journeys to the next world, may someday be explained by mechanisms within the brain as advances are made in the field of brain science. If the existence of an afterlife is a hypothesis it is understandable. As a definite assertion, however, it is completely unacceptable.

In Christianity, for instance, “God created the world” is considered an absolute truth. In other words, someone who believes in Christianity cannot put their life on the line and seriously doubt with their entire being the proposition that God created the world. This is the case because a person’s faith begins when they stop actively questioning whether or not God really created the world and resolve to live their life assuming that this claim is correct.

It’s the same with Buddhism. Faith begins when a person stops wondering whether claims such as “the Buddha attained the enlightenment of non-self” in the case of ancient Buddhism or “believers will reside in the next world after they die” in the case of Pure Land Buddhism are truly correct and resolves to live their life assuming that these assertions are true.
To put it another way, what I am saying is the following.

“God created the world” and “believers will reside in the next world after they die” are presumably things someone told you and not something you discovered through your own efforts. In other words, people set out down the path of faith when they decide to stop trying to answer questions that are not easy to resolve by thinking them through on their own and start living their lives assuming that an answer they have received from others, for example, “God created the world,” or “believers will reside in the next world after they die,” is correct.

The third reason I cannot believe in religions is that, regarding these fundamental issues concerning the existence of the world and the universe in its entirety, I cannot take the stance of asserting that “such and such is correct.” In other words, I cannot intentionally give up my endeavor of doubting with my whole being the correctness of such claims.

The fourth reason I cannot believe is that I cannot take as my own the answers provided by other people to these sorts of fundamental questions. I cannot fit myself into the shape of the thoughts and words of others and accept these thoughts and words as if they were my own.

These four points are the biggest problems for me.
And I think these problems must also be a serious hindrance for many others who have the same questions I do but in the end cannot commit themselves to a religion.

Here I have used the phrases “give up my endeavor of doubting” and “cannot … seriously doubt.”

These expressions could easily be misunderstood, so I would like to add a bit more explanation before moving on.

To begin with, the long road a person takes before choosing the path of faith is full of ongoing contemplation and doubts about religion. There must be many people who arrive at faith only after a lot of thought, doubt, and anguish. It is not as though everyone who enters a religion is averse to contemplation.

There are a variety of processes that can be at work when a person sets out on the path of religious faith. There are those who do so after having reached the limits of thought, and others who dispense with contemplation and take this path straight away.

No matter what process they choose, however, when someone heads down the path of religious faith they must presumably intentionally and actively give up doubting the correctness of what is said to be absolute truth and the assertion that this truth was spoken by a particular religious leader. Whether these claims are in fact correct or mistaken is something the individual in question cannot determine on their own, but they must resolve to live their lives on the basis of the strong conviction that they are true.

Even after a person has entered the path of religious belief, at times their faith will waver, and they will have doubts about the correctness of their religion’s ultimate truth. No matter how strong their faith may be, there are probably very few people who are able to escape from these sorts of doubts completely. It is human nature to swing like a pendulum between belief and doubt.

But these sorts of doubts that arise naturally in the midst of a life of belief are completely different from the act of “seriously doubting the correctness of absolute truth” mentioned above. The former “doubt” consists of wavering back and forth within the framework of a decision to believe. The latter “doubt,” however, is a serious reconsideration of your decision to set out upon this path itself. People who believe cannot seriously engage in this latter form of doubt, because to do so would mean to leave their religion.

But without choosing the path of religion, I nevertheless want to pursue, as far as my own eyes and mind will take me, the meaning of my own existence, the meaning of life and death, and the question of what I truly am.

What I can say at this point is that when I address the mysteries of the world there are four things I want to affirm from the start.

1) I will be faithful to my sense that absolute truth has not been revealed by anyone (including myself) and will probably never be revealed in the future. There is only the journey in pursuit of understanding. We keep asking over and over again no matter how many times the answers fail to emerge. It is the trajectory of questioning that is important.

2) I will not speak with certainty about the existence of an afterlife. It may exist, and it may not. Similarly, I will not speak with certainty about the existence of the absolute, the transcendental, or God. They may exist and they may not. I will clearly state my ignorance of what I do not know.

3) When it comes to fundamental matters concerning the existence of the world and the universe in its entirety, I will not take the assertive stance that “such and such is correct.” I will not adopt a stance of intentionally and actively ceasing to doubt, with my entire being and with my life on the line, the correctness of the proposition in question.

4) Regarding these fundamental matters, I will not fit my own thoughts into the shape of those of others. My answers will be found through my own thoughts and words.

8. The Problem of Spirituality

Tetsuo Yamaori employs the following dichotomy: you are either in the world of “faith,” or you view religion from the outside as a “spectator.” I have criticized this scheme and said there must be a third way between these two poles.

If such a third way is possible, I think it may be described as follows.
It is an approach in which, while neither relying on religious faith to answer questions of life, death and existence nor abandoning their consideration, you confront our scientistic, materialistic society that turns a blind eye to these questions and live your life while considering these issues for yourself and pursuing them with your own eyes, mind, body and words. It is an approach in which, while maintaining the four-part stance described above, you take sole responsibility for undertaking this pursuit of these questions of life, death and existence through communication with others and arrive at your own conclusions regarding your own life and death.

I call this state of mind, and the way of life supported by it, “life studies.” Of course, very little of this approach has been outlined so far, and I plan to consider it carefully in An Introduction to Contemporary Life Studies, a series of articles to be published in the magazine Buddhism, beginning in the autumn 1995 issue. I refer to this approach as life studies, but of course other people may well conduct similar programs under other names.

Whenever you seriously address questions of life and death, connections with religion inevitably arise. After all, for more than two thousand years it has been religion that has focused most intently on the consideration of these issues. There are indeed many things to be learned from the religious tradition in regard to these questions. This is something even I acknowledge.

It is my intention, however, to open up, here in contemporary Japan and without taking a religious approach, an intellectual path to directly addressing and thinking through these issues that have in the past been dealt with by religion. This is also the meaning of this book’s title: How to Live in a Post-Religious Age. Religion itself will no doubt continue to exist for a long time. Religion has many roles left to play within this society. For me, however, there is already no religion. For people who have also stumbled at the same place I did, there is already no religion. How are people who no longer have any religion to confront what has until now been primarily spoken about by religion? Thinking about this question leads to thinking about what approach one should take in order “to live in a post-religious age.”

I am not opposed to religion. I want to avoid being misunderstood on this point. Religion should function properly for those who desire it. No one has the right to prevent people from finding salvation in religion.

What I have stated is only that there ought to be a way to pursue questions of life and death without taking the path of religion, and that I myself intend to confront these issues without taking a religious approach.

Nor am I opposed to natural science. Here again I hope I am not misunderstood. I have of course spoken extensively about the negative aspects of modern science. I think these issues must indeed be looked at unflinchingly. In order to overcome its negative aspects, natural science must correct its trajectory going forward. Making these sorts of criticisms, however, is completely different from rejecting natural science. It is a fact that natural science has enriched society in numerous ways, and humanity would surely not be able to continue to grow without it. While continuing to embrace natural science, I believe that we must assemble the wisdom of many individuals to consider how modern society should be run.

What I have argued is that there are problems whose solutions will not come from natural science, and I want to find a form of inquiry in which these issues can be addressed directly. This will probably be a field of study quite different from today’s natural science, but I want to pursue it nonetheless.

In other words, without being against either religion or natural science, I want to create a third way that does not depend on either of these approaches. This is not something that can be done by me alone or within the span of a single lifetime. But it is something I am working toward.
When I declare my intentions in this way, some people respond by suggesting that if I gather like-minded people and create an organization to pursue this goal, in the end it will amount to the same thing as creating a religion. Indeed, to adopt that kind of approach would risk ending up on the same religious path I am supposed to have renounced.

Some of what I have done so far has in fact already been mistaken for religion, so it is important that I root out the source of this misapprehension as soon as possible. When my first book, An Introduction to Life Studies, was released, one reader told me, “until I met you I thought it was a Tenrikyo text.”

These sorts of undertakings that are not based on faith must therefore be solitary efforts in which individuals primarily think things through on their own. The individuals who think and act on the basis of this kind solitary approach can create a loose network to exchange ideas, share wisdom, and learn from each other. It is important not to build an organization of comrades in lockstep or create a group of people who stand in solidarity with each other. And care must always be taken to avoid a charismatic individual being worshipped or their words being taken as absolute.

Supported by communication within this kind of loosely affiliated group, with my own eyes, mind, body, and words I cultivate my own thoughts on the meaning of the life and death of this “I” that exists here and now and on the essence of the society, world, and universe in which it lives. This is the kind of approach I have in mind.

It is a point that has often been made, but “spirituality” is not the same as “religion.”

Here “religion” is an active body combining different elements such as a founder, doctrine, and religious activities, while “spirituality” refers to religious themes concerning the fundamental nature of human life such as “what are life and death?,” “what happens after you die?” and “why do I exist?”

What I have returned to over and over again is this spirituality. What is the meaning of my being alive here and now? What will happen when I die? Why do I exist? How do I live a good life?

Using the word “spirituality” somehow makes it sound a bit difficult, but it is actually quite straightforward. For example, right now I am living over here. You are living over there. So why is it that we exist at these points in space and time? It presumably would not matter if we did not exist on the surface of this planet at this particular time in this particular era within the long history of the universe. But we do exist in the present era. When you think about it, this can only be described as a miracle. Or perhaps it can only be described as a mystery. What emerges at this juncture is spirituality.

What I want to say here is that these questions of spirituality can be pursued without relying on religion. It must be possible to think about these issues even without religion.

To take the four-part stance outlined above and pursue the questions posed by spirituality to the last without setting foot on the path of religion – surely someday we will discover how to do this.

To live in a post-religious age, it is necessary for us to confront our own spirituality without relying on religion. Supported by a loose network of people walking a similar path, with our own eyes, minds, bodies and words we must pursue to the very end, without abandoning contemplation, the search for the truth of the world and the meaning of our own life and death.

This is also a struggle that will test how much solitude you can endure. Human beings cannot, of course, live in complete solitude. We live by leaning on others in various ways and receiving their assistance. Human beings are not strong enough to live in a state of total solitude.

Nevertheless, when it comes to investigating the truth of the world or the meaning of my own life and death, this is something that I ultimately want to undertake and accomplish entirely on my own. I want to maintain a solitary struggle to the very last. This means that when I get to the point where this investigation has gone quite far and is reaching its limits, I must confront the world in total solitude as a single individual. Having rejected the path of religion, it is inevitable that I will be in complete solitude when I reach the outermost limits of my journey. People bearing this kind of resolve towards solitude inside them, exchanging faint signals from the inky depths of this solitude, delicately interacting with each other within a network: I think this is one form this third way of pursuing the truth that is “neither religion nor science” can take.

There are people who are attracted to the natural sciences but somewhere inside themselves have a sense that this is not where they want to spend the rest of their lives. There are people who, while working busily within one of modern society’s massive organizations, think that functioning as this kind of cog is not what they really want to do. There are people who, while they may ignore them in their daily lives, cannot help but care about questions like “what is the meaning of my life?” and “what is this world to me?”

But there are doubtless many individuals whose souls have nowhere to go because they cannot acquire the kind of “faith” religion demands.

I want to call out to the many others who I am sure are living secretly within the holes and gaps in this society.

There must be a way to follow the investigation of these questions through to its end using your own eyes, mind, body and words without either descending into materialism or taking the path of a religion based on faith. Life is short. Rather than squandering your short life ignoring these questions, there must be a path that lets you return to them again and again at your own pace over the course of your lifetime.

So my message to those of you who are troubled by the same sorts of questions I am, and who, while refusing to ignore them, don’t know what to do, is that I hope that you will go on confronting, from your own standpoint and at your own pace, these questions without giving up.
People who grapple with these sorts of questions must live their lives in solitude.

But it is this very solitude that is the key to opening up a third way of addressing these questions.

People for whom the weight of these questions has become too heavy a burden to bear must not be allowed to gather at the feet of a charismatic leader. This kind of situation will almost certainly transform, at some point, into a community of abdicated responsibility in which you no longer think about these questions for yourself but rather let someone else think about them for you and taste only the resulting nectar they provide. It will end up being just like the Aum community.

We who examine these questions by ourselves, therefore, must each one of us stand on our own two feet as an isolated, solitary individual.
To confront these questions in solitude, however, is an undertaking so painful it is difficult to endure. It is natural to begin to think that if it is going to be this painful it would be better to stop worrying about these sorts of things and lose yourself in your daily work or the things you enjoy. As a human being, it is only natural to think this way.

That is why I want to call out to you, and to everyone who is trying to address these issues entirely on their own.

Let us communicate with each other by sending out faint signals from our horizons of solitude. Our beings themselves are not likely to directly interact, and indeed they should not be allowed to interact too easily. Instead, when the opportunity arises, let us send each other faint signals carrying elements of our contemplation, action, and self-expression. Let us send each other the message that we are not alone in being captivated by these sorts of questions and dedicating our lives to addressing them.

Perhaps by doing so, I can give you just a little bit of courage. I can in no way shoulder your burden. It is all I can do to carry the weight of my own. What I can do, however, is encourage you ever so slightly from a distance. And you can likewise encourage someone else somewhere in this wide world.

I would suggest that this kind of loosely woven network of mutual encouragement and inspiring messages can provide a supportive infrastructure for anonymous individuals who are trying to address these questions by themselves to help anchor them to this world.

We live in solitude. But we can connect ourselves to others while maintaining this solitary state. And it is this kind of approach that will lay the groundwork for a new form of human connection that does not rely on religion. There must be a way of connecting with each other through mutual displays of kindness and temperate courage without in any way shouldering each other’s burdens or creating tightly knit communities or organizations.

Tetsuo Yamaori, “The Atheist Perspective,” (山折哲雄「無神論者の眼差し」『イマーゴ』臨時増刊号〈オウム真理教の深層〉), August 1995, pp. 26-27.

『現代』 August, 1995, p. 80.

『朝日新聞』 August 16, 1995, Osaka evening edition.

In this book the Japanese phrase “新々宗教” has been translated as “new religion.” In many cases this phrase refers to “cult religions” that have recently appeared. The definitions of “new religion” and “cult religion” are contentious and have been the subject of much debate both inside and outside of academia.

『イマーゴ』 August 1995, p. 12.

p. 10.

p. 11.

p. 17.

For a description of this kind of sorrow see Tadashi Nagase, “Aum Technology: Awash in Fantasy Science and Illusory Weapons” (長瀬唯「綺想科学と妄想兵器にまみれたオウム・テクノロジー」プランク編『ジ・オウム』太田出版), 1995, pp. 272-299.

Takashi Tachibana and Susumu Tonegawa, Mind and Matter (立花隆・利根川進『精神と物質』文春文庫), 1990, pp. 322-323.

p. 329.

On the actual recruitment methods employed by cult religions on ordinary people see Steven Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control, Park Street Press, 1988.

See Masahiro Morioka, Brain-Dead Person (『脳死の人』東京書籍), 1989. Translations of some chapters are available at: http://www.lifestudies.org/braindeadperson00.html.

This point is emphasized in Wataru Tsurumi’s Complete Suicide Manual (鶴見済『完全自殺マニュアル』太田出版), 1993, which became a bestseller in Japan.

Ayumi Aoyama also uses the phrase “third way.” See Ayumi Aoyama, The Smart Way to Leave/Enter a Cult (青山あゆみ『カルトのかしこい脱け方・はまり方』第三書館), 1995, p. 32.

Buddhism (『仏教』) vol. 33.

I have said the same thing in Brain-Dead Person.

森岡正博『生命学への招待：バイオエシックスを超えて』勁草書房, 1988.

Tenrikyo (天理教) is a “new religion” established in 1838.

Philosophical study of life, death, and nature