What Are Mystical Experiences?: How to Live in a Post-Religious Age - Terrorism, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Life, Chapter 2

Chapter 2 of How to Live in a Post-Religious Age
: Terrorism, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Life

It seems that among the young people who joined Aum there were quite a few who, having seen the photograph of Aum leader Asahara levitating, became adherents out of a desire to be able to do this kind of thing themselves. Encountering such individuals, there are those who would ridicule them, saying things like “He’s just jumping,” “There’s no such thing as levitation,” “It’s stupid to believe in something like that,” or “Why would you want to levitate?”

Every time I hear such dismissive descriptions of these people as “naïve youngsters tricked by levitation,” I feel an indescribable sense of anger and frustration. This is because I myself had the experience of being struck by the photograph of Asahara levitating on the cover of his book and being compelled to start reading it in the bookstore. Even before encountering this book, I had been very interested in supernatural abilities. I thought that every human being possessed hidden abilities that could emerge in moments of extreme danger or when guided by the right kind of practice.

Aum was not the first group to claim that levitation could be achieved through yogic techniques. Practitioners of Transcendental Meditation (TM), for example, who engaged in the same kind of spiritual training based on yogic principles, had been claiming that after a great deal of practice it could enable you to levitate since long before Aum was founded.

Transcendental Meditation is a yogic cult religion spread throughout the world beginning with America by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who moved to the United States from India in the 1960s. During the 1970s, its yogic techniques were adopted in various fields such as athletic training and its influence grew.

I think I first became aware of the existence of Transcendental Meditation around the end of the that decade. A Japanese woman who practiced TM appeared on a TV program and talked about how wonderful its techniques were. She said that if you practiced TM, you would gain the ability to float in midair. When the interviewer asked if she herself could levitate, she laughed and replied that just that morning she had floated above her bed with her legs crossed underneath her.

If you read a TM text, it becomes clear that in almost all cases what is referred to as “levitation” is in fact jumping. But the claim that in rare cases floating in the air with your legs crossed under you can occur is difficult to refute. If someone tells you “I saw someone I know floating in the air with my own two eyes,” in order to refute this assertion you must prove either that what they saw was a hallucination or that they are lying to you. But since this kind of proof is presumably impossible, it ends up being an unresolvable argument. The fact that it is possible to take a picture of “levitation” by photographing someone jumping using their own muscles does not necessarily demonstrate that all levitation is a form of jumping. This is the difficulty one encounters when arguing about supernatural abilities.

Those who opposed Aum vociferously argued that these levitation photographs were fakes or that all of the mystical experiences its adherents obtained through religious practice were drug-induced hallucinations. Report after report implied that there was no such thing as levitation or supernatural abilities and the problem lay in the intellectual faculties of people who were so easily deceived.

Looking at the mass media coverage, in the end it seemed that what was occurring within Aum was group brainwashing or mind control conducted through the restriction of access to information and administration of drugs under the direction of an insane religious leader.

It must be acknowledged that in its broad outlines this understanding was indeed correct; numerous facts demonstrated that this was the case.

But I think it is a mistake to summarize the Aum incident in this way, because when we adopt this kind of summary we lose sight of the very important fundamental questions posed by what occurred.
One of these fundamental questions is how we are to understand supernatural abilities and mystical experiences, and another is the question of what occurs within a group of people who share these kinds of experiences.

The public discourse seems inclined to steer around these issues, but this is not a sufficient response. We must consider more seriously the things referred to as “supernatural abilities” and “mystical experiences” and their connection to ourselves.

Takashi Tachibana observes that through their training, Aum’s early leaders actually underwent mystical experiences. These arose through a similar mechanism to near-death experiences. Tachibana said the following after reading first-person accounts of believers’ mystical experiences:

He then goes on to state that it was because they were supported by these sorts of mystical experiences that Aum’s senior members were able to commit the extreme crime of killing people to whom they had no connection whatsoever.

The effect of mystical experiences in a religion is extremely powerful, and even when it comes to other religions besides Aum, people who have these kinds of experiences will come to stubbornly believe in the absolute truth of the religion in question.

This is where Aum’s strength lies. The high-ranking senior members who committed murder believed, on the basis of their mystical experiences, that Asahara had truly become a god, and so, thinking it was a divine command, had complete faith that even the killing of human beings was the correct thing to do, without asking themselves whether it was right or wrong.

I too believe that “mystical experiences” clearly did exist as part of the backdrop to the Aum incidents. Regarding the meaning of mystical experiences, we must dig a bit deeper. I would like to delve further into this issue as something that concerns me in my own life here and now.
In this chapter I will attempt an examination of these points to the limits of my ability. This investigation is also deeply connected to the task that is the theme of this book: “how to live in a post-religious age.”

I wanted supernatural abilities. I wanted to have mystical experiences. And I wanted to attain “enlightenment.” I remember a monk from another country, when he was asked, “Why did you come here?” in a documentary depicting the lives of ascetic monks at Eihei temple, replying that he had come because he wanted to attain enlightenment. This feeling, desiring enlightenment, is something I can vividly understand, and I wanted to acquire supernatural abilities and have mystical experiences as an extension of this desire for enlightenment.

When thinking about the recent Aum incident, there is a tendency to avoid the issue of supernatural abilities and mystical experiences, but this leads us to close our eyes to the existence of the desire for supernatural abilities, mystical experiences, and the attainment of enlightenment that lies submerged within us. Until we can look directly this desire, it will be impossible for us to properly address the meaning of the incidents cult religions like Aum have caused.

It is precisely because many people secretly harboring this desire became adherents, and because senior members were given mystical experiences by Asahara, that Aum, a group closed-off from the rest of society, did such extreme things.

So where does the reason for this desire for supernatural abilities, mystical experiences, and enlightenment lie? I would like to consider this question by reflecting on my own experiences.

There are many people who display a strong interest in the mystical and things not of this world.

Behind the surface of this world, is there not perhaps some kind of mystical space, normally unknown to us, whose laws in fact control the world in which we live? I had this kind of sense when I was young. These laws of an underlying world could be things like the world of spirits, the prophecies of Nostradamus, or the Gaia hypothesis.

I therefore wanted to learn the secrets of this other world that most people hadn’t noticed. This kind of intellectual desire was present within me. While hidden from the surface of this world and thus invisible to people living ordinary lives, there are in fact important secrets buried below, and the world we live in moves according to their rules. These secrets are known only to a chosen few. These few will only open the doors of this knowledge to people of compatible understanding. I wanted to learn from them and pursue these secrets of an underlying world. My head was full of these sorts of thoughts.

Of course, at the level I have just described, this desire still barely differs from the inquisitiveness of natural science. As I noted earlier, I had dreamed of becoming a scientist. Natural science, in particular disciplines such as physics, is an endless endeavor to use mathematics and experimental equipment to elucidate the physical laws, invisible to the naked eye, that lie behind the phenomena we observe in the world, so in this respect it is almost exactly the same as the investigation of the mystical. For example, since they deal with things that cannot themselves be caught in the net of direct observation, advanced developments in elementary particle physics such as quark theory or quantum chromodynamics enter something like a world of mystical experience research using mathematics. The wall separating physics from mysticism is lower than might be thought.

There is therefore nothing strange about my wanting to become a scientist and at the same time displaying an interest in investigating the underlying world in the form of phenomena such as supernatural abilities and mystical experiences. And since the investigation of supernatural phenomena has remained, for reasons that are not clear to me, taboo within the established scientific system, I was reduced to turning my attention to the world of the occult where such topics are routinely discussed.

The accounts of mystical experiences I found in the domain of the occult, however, did not satisfy me either; they were highly suspect, containing too many elements that seemed shoddy and self-serving. I continued to feel, however, that a sounder interpretation of things like supernatural phenomena and supernatural abilities must be possible.

Looking back at my state of mind at that time, an intellectual desire to discover the unknown powers and laws that move the world definitely existed within me and was the primary reason I had an ongoing interest in things like mystical experiences and supernatural abilities. Behind these thoughts lay the suspicion that today’s science is not capable of properly coming to grips with the truths of the world. I had the sense that it may not be up to this task.

There is, however, something I want to make clear here before moving on. I believe it is important to affirm that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this intellectual desire itself, the desire to discover the unknown powers and laws that move the world I have just described. The root motivation behind all forms of inquiry, including natural science, is the type of intellectual desire I have just described. Scholars should not blame the intellects of young people who enter cult religions guided by such a desire.

It should be emphasized that within people who are attracted to mystical experiences and supernatural abilities there is a sense of inquisitiveness about these sorts of unknowns. They do not lose their intellectual faculties in the face of the mystical; on the contrary, they are carried away by their intellectual curiosity and desire to thoroughly investigate these phenomena.

Another reason I wanted mystical experiences and supernatural abilities was that I hoped to break through the impasse in which I found myself at the time and change my way of being. Like a pupa breaking out of its cocoon and becoming a butterfly, by acquiring these abilities I wanted to shed my skin and become another person. I wanted to raise myself up into a new world through experiences such as having an unknown energy well up inside my body and becoming able to commune with the universe. By obtaining supernatural abilities other people could not imitate, such as the ability to bend spoons with my mind, I wanted to draw out my own undeveloped abilities and complete my metamorphosis into a new person.
When I was a university student, I experienced an identity crisis. Without knowing what road I should take going forward, and without knowing what I myself most wanted to do, I spent my days seeking only pleasure. Even if I left the path towards becoming a scientist and moved to the faculty of letters, I had little hope of being able to move on to graduate school. But I went on living in a daze, neither taking credits to qualify as a school teacher nor looking for a job at a company.

I think the idea that if I could obtain supernatural abilities or mystical experiences I might undergo a radical transformation was indeed one hope I clung to at that time. Some unlucky twist of fate had left me stuck in this immobile state, but this was not my true form. If some other power were given to me I might be able to transform myself and break down this wall I kept hitting. In some part of my mind, I was hoping to receive this kind of power.

The feeling of “moving to a higher stage” that became well known in connection with the Aum incident, if it can be taken to mean the process of “shedding your skin and becoming a new person” I have just described, is also something I can easily understand. In the mass media, this expression was taken to mean improving your position within the organization, explained through the metaphor of gaining higher titles in society such as going from “manager” to “department head,” but I think it was not only about this kind of external hierarchy. I think it also contained an internal meaning of breaking through to another dimension, transforming yourself and being reborn.

The criticism that Aum’s internal structure was hierarchical and directly reflected the hierarchical society outside it may therefore be a bit one-sided. “Moving to a higher stage” could mean not only gaining a better title and having more people underneath you, but also you yourself being reborn as a new person different from the one that had existed up to that point. It is possible that this expression also carried this kind of significance.

I wanted to be reborn as a new me. This was a desire I held fervently.
Wouldn’t my changing also change all of the circumstances surrounding me? Like an extremely short-sighted person seeing the world completely differently after putting in contact lenses, wouldn’t my internal transformation result in a drastically altered view of the world around me? I clung to this kind of expectation.

“If I change, the world will change.” “If I change, the Earth will change.” This was one of the typical calls to action of the ecology movement that emerged in Japan in the 1980s. I too was clearly swept up in this tide of the times.

With the defeat of the student movement in the 1970s, young people’s gaze began to turn inward. At the time of the student movement, there were clearly many people who thought that if they changed society the world would change. But after the disappearance of the student movement as a force for social reform, this kind of thinking was no longer mainstream. What emerged in its place was the idea of attempting to change not “society” but the “self” – to attempt to change the world by changing your internal self. This is what “if I change, the world will change” means.
Aiming at this kind of internal change, some people turned to self-improvement seminars and therapists, while others flocked to new religions such as Aum. I got as close as a single step away from doing so myself.

If I change myself the circumstances surrounding me will change, and I may be able to escape from them. If I relentlessly raise myself up in this way, a new, heretofore unknown world may open up for me. This kind of “desire to change” and “desire to escape” definitely existed within me.
There was also another feeling that supported this kind of desire: I wanted my self to be wrapped up in something bigger. Within this embrace, I wanted to become one with this bigger thing, rest my mind, extinguish myself within it, and obtain peace and healing. I wanted to be carried into a world of peace by this thing greater than my self. I had thoughts of this kind. I thought I might be able to reach this kind of state through mystical experiences obtained through spiritual training.

I wanted to know why I had been born into this world. I wanted to know the meaning of my life. And I wanted to know what would happen to me when I die. Death was my biggest source of fear and anxiety. Thinking about death kept me awake at night. This is still the case, but at that time it was much more severe.

When I was beset by thoughts of death, I tried to get rid of my anxiety by telling myself, “Everyone is going to die someday, so you have to live each moment joyfully and to the fullest.” In my mind I knew that this was nothing more than a way of putting off my fundamental problem, but this makeshift approach was the only option available to me. All I could do was use this way of thinking to drive the shadow of death out of my sight.
In Buddhist writings, it is stated that if you engage in spiritual training and attain enlightenment your anxieties about death will disappear. Was enlightenment perhaps the only way to completely escape from the fear of death? I thought so. According to the basic doctrine of Buddhism, we are afraid of death because we think that something called “death” exists. But we only think this because we are captivated by illusions and do not see the world as it really is. If we escape from these illusions, attain enlightenment, and view the world correctly, we will realize that there is no birth or death as such. Since there is no death, there will be no fear of death. We will arrive at this kind of understanding.

This way of thinking had a certain persuasiveness. I was strongly attracted to the radical idea that it was wrong to think that birth and death exist. If I engaged in Buddhist training, would I be able to reach this kind of enlightenment? Was there no other way of attaining this kind of understanding? I could understand Buddhist ideas, but it was hard to put them into practice. In Buddhism it is said that only the Buddha attained true enlightenment by himself, and since then even the number of people claiming to be enlightened has not been large. Could I really become one of them? When it comes to Japanese Buddhism, the kind of faith I have talked about is given great weight, so it is impossible for me to take part in this religion. Pure Land Buddhism says that after you die you will reside in the pure land, but this is quite different from the ancient Buddhist way of thinking about death. Difficult issues like this appeared one after another, and it was impossible for me to proceed any further.

But I still wanted to attain enlightenment. I read the writings of D. T. Suzuki over and over again. When I read books on Zen Buddhism, they seemed to be saying that I could attain enlightenment if the framework of my understanding of the world underwent a paradigm shift (fundamental change). Zen interpreted in this way was very easy to understand. It was the same as the idea that “if I change, the world will change.” To obtain this kind of enlightenment, you need to practice Zen meditation. You control your breathing and enter a state of “non-self.” I very briefly tried doing this kind of meditation on my own.

When I continued meditating in this way, there were indeed moments when the way the world appeared seemed to change completely. In my case, it was when I was walking down the street without thinking about anything in particular and not during Zen meditation that I was assailed by a sense of the world being turned upside down. I flirted with the thought that this might be enlightenment. But of course it was not; I was still being assailed by the fear of death.

The first reason I wanted to attain enlightenment was a desire to do something about my fear of death. I hoped to become enlightened and live my life without any fear of dying. In practice, however, I was unable to pass through Buddhism’s gate. I could not take the path of faith, and the tenor of Buddhism as it was actually practiced was not very receptive to the desire of naïve young man who wished to enter it because he wanted to become enlightened right away.

The second reason I wanted to attain enlightened was a deep-seated desire to attempt to understand the true form of the world. In books it is written that when you experience enlightenment you are freed from mistaken worldly perspectives, such as the belief that your self and the world, or your self and other people, exist separately, and you are able to enter into a limitlessly flexible and accommodating state in which there is no border between you and the world or your self and others. It is written that you will obtain a true view of the world that transcends birth and death.

I wanted to learn to see the world in this way. I desperately wanted to see the world that was said to be revealed by enlightenment, a world in which the self and the world danced together without any borders or distinctions between them. I even thought that if such a world could be revealed to me, I would abandon philosophy that is guided by logical reasoning. I wanted to reconstruct this world based on an entirely different perspective so that it would no longer be ridden with such depressing boundaries and limitations. I thought enlightenment would be a more direct method of opening the door to such a world than philosophy.

4. A Desire for Power

I have mentioned three reasons behind the desire for mystical experiences, supernatural abilities, and enlightenment.

But looking inward, deep inside myself I find another major motivation behind this desire. It is very painful for me to write about this, but I feel I must do so.

The desire that lay deep within me and most powerfully drove me was a desire for power. I wanted much more power than I have now. By acquiring an abundance of power, I wanted to become a greater being than I am now. I wanted to become an enormous being and look down on the entire world. This kind of desire clearly existed deep within my mind.
This kind of aspiration to strength and power drove me to seek mystical experiences, supernatural abilities, and enlightenment.

When I was a university student, I didn’t have any power at all. I was physically weak, and of course my social influence was zero. From the perspective of society, my existence was “nothing.” As someone who harbored a secret desire to become big and powerful, this was a cruel set of circumstances. The paths to organized science and graduate school were almost completely closed to me, and there was little chance of my being able to achieve my aims by rising through the existing social hierarchy.
With no way to satisfy my desire in the society around me, I turned towards the possibility of doing so within myself. If I could not make it big within society, I would satisfy my desire by accruing enormous power within myself. By doing so I would become a great and powerful being, and look down on others from above. This kind of passion emerged within me.

I would like to consider this desire for power in greater detail.
To begin with, this desire manifested as a wish that I would become bigger. I wanted to produce a greater power and become bigger and stronger. I wanted to extend my own body, to expand and gather vast quantities of powerful energy within myself. I wanted to let this energy ripen and grow inside me, and then release it all at once into the outside world. I would then be able to shoot out an immense blast of energy and show everyone my power. This kind of desire to grow to immensity, based on a physical sensation, definitely existed within me.

Becoming enormous would presumably also increase my physical/spiritual power and improve my abilities in a variety of areas. I would be able to do many things that I had not been able to do in the past. In one stroke I would make up for the many things that until then had been impossible.
Being able to bend a spoon with just the power of my mind was, to me, a way to acquire this kind of power, make myself bigger, and display an ability to do the impossible. The same went for levitation. I would show everyone that I could do things that until then had been impossible, things that no other ordinary person could do.

That was not all. If I could bend spoons in front of other people, wouldn’t I then be able to receive a great deal of attention? Would I not be looked at with amazement? I craved this kind of attention from others; this kind of desire, too, arose within me.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, there was also the thought that if I acquired this kind of supernatural ability, I might finally be able to obtain an identity. Having abandoned the path of organized science and fallen into an identity crisis, I thought that I would be able to acquire a new identity by becoming able to bend spoons. Readers with common sense may dismiss this way of thinking as risible. “Those are the delusions of a child.” I would not disagree with this criticism. These can indeed be described as the childish delusions of a youthful, immature mind. I think it is wrong, however, to dismiss as laughable the fact that there was a human being who could not help but have such delusions, because I believe we must examine the question of why, at a certain point in my life, I felt compelled to cling to them.

For example, a former Aum devotee and Japanese Self-Defense Forces official gave the following response in an interview.

“I wanted to be strong” was the motivation behind his fixation on supernatural abilities. He was seeking an identity as someone who becomes powerful and protects this country. We must clearly grasp the significance of this fact. We must understand this desire to become great and strong held by people seeking supernatural abilities.
This desire to become great and strong leads to what is referred to as the “lust for power.”

I want to state this clearly. A lust for power lies submerged within the mind of a certain type of person who approaches a religion because of an attraction to supernatural abilities, mystical experiences, and enlightenment. These people may not themselves be conscious of this lust for power, but if they were to dispassionately analyze the motivations that brought them to religion, they would presumably become aware of its existence.

This lust for power is a desire to occupy a position of superiority by acquiring these sorts of abilities and experiences, and from this position of authority to look down on, subjugate, manipulate, educate, guide and save those who have not undergone this advancement. At the root of this desire is an embodied sensation of wanting to stand upstream in a river and reach out a hand to those standing downstream.

When it comes to people who want to have a mystical experience, for example, in some part of their minds these individuals presumably have a sensation of wanting to experience for themselves a “mystical experience that hardly any other people have had.” This is precisely the same psychological process that makes people want to wear on their wrist a brand new model of watch that almost nobody else owns. In short, by having this kind of experience, I want to position myself above all of the ordinary people who have not had it and look down on them. What should this be called if not a lust for power?

I think this kind of lust for power clearly exists within the minds of people who say they want to engage in spiritual training because they want to levitate or bend spoons.

And this then escalates into a lust for power in the form of a desire to teach, guide and save. I have been able to directly observe within myself this kind of process by which the lust for power grows.

Through the acquisition of mystical experiences and various abilities, I am able to place myself above other people who have not yet accomplished such things. This satisfies my pride. What should I do when I want to increase this pride even further? I should reach out to those who do not yet have these abilities. I have climbed up to here. You are stuck down there. Take my hand and let me pull you up to the place I have reached. Try doing as I say. You will be able to get closer to where I am. I will be your guide. I can raise you up with these two hands of mine.

The rhetoric used to describe extending a hand to someone in a lower position involves phrases like “compassion in the form of altruistic behavior,” “love,” and “philanthropy.” I do not want only myself to be saved. I will not be happy until you are happy too. Religious acts involve giving a state of bliss and happiness not only to the self but also to other people. The sense of satisfaction I feel reaching down and pulling my comrades up to the summit of the rocky cliff they are climbing will satisfy the pride hidden inside my heart to no end.

One face of this Buddha-like, compassionate mindset of wanting to undertake spiritual training, obtain this kind of experience, and save other people is, indeed, a loving mindset that gives serious consideration to the happiness of others. Its other face, however, is based on a lust for power manifested as a desire to stand in a position of superiority and pull up those below you in a one-sided act of salvation. I think we must look clearly at both of these aspects that are submerged within the minds of people who turn towards spiritual training or the devout practice of religion. Religious people tend to emphasize the former and close their eyes to the existence of the latter deep down inside themselves, but is this tenable? We must acknowledge the fact that, whether I save them or some transcendent figure behind me saves them, at the source of the “desire to save others” there is a lust for power in the sense that “the person who saves others should be me,” and the same sort of power relationship that inevitably arises between doctors and patients also arise between the “person who acts as an intermediary of salvation” and the “people who are saved.” Even if there is a reverse mechanism by which the “intermediary of salvation” is also saved by “those who are saved,” we must not close our eyes to the fact that at the base of this interaction between two individuals there is a one-sided power relationship.

Of course, power relationships of this kind are not only seen in cult religions that peddle mystical experiences and supernatural abilities; they are something that can be seen in all groups whose members aim to attain technical skills through training and step-by-step advancement. Similar structures exist in the fields of sport, entertainment, and education. But because the criteria for advancing to the next stage of technical proficiency are not based on objective achievements, like being able to hit a home run, but rather on esoteric events of internal transformation and awakening, the power of those who oversee this development emerges with even greater amplitude.

And because those involved believe that by pursuing this kind of internal development they will be able to obtain knowledge of unknown worlds and unknown laws, awaken to a new self, no longer fear death, and display supernatural abilities, those at the top of this kind of hierarchy become even more powerful.

In addition, this lust for power also carries the danger that with one false step it can easily become a desire to manipulate everyone or control everything that happens and continue to develop along these lines. Because practitioners are said to experience things like leaving their bodies and perceiving a fusion between the self and the universe in mystical experiences while doing yoga, is it not particularly easy to induce visions that you can expand yourself to fill the universe and look down on the entire world from above? Can this not easily lead to a delusional desire to position yourself at the top of the world and subjugate everyone’s activity below you?

Mr. A, a former head of Aum’s Nagoya branch, has said that the fundamental flaw in Aum’s doctrine lay in this kind of self-perception. He maintains that Asahara’s enormous “ego” is what caused the organization to go astray.

In a religion entered through mystical experiences and supernatural abilities, it may be difficult to prevent the enlargement of egos supported by a lust for power. And this was by no means a problem affecting only Asahara.

When it comes to the lust for power in the hearts of those who seek mystical experiences and supernatural abilities, do the two desires of wanting to enlarge myself until I am as big as the universe, put everything within my field of view, subjugate it, and take it in, and wanting to acquire experiences other people do not have, placing myself above them, and satisfying my pride, not indeed come together as one harmonious whole?
Without acknowledging the fact that this desire may exist within me, and perhaps within you as well, we will not be able to get to the bottom of what occurred in the case of Aum or understand other religions entered through the path of spiritual training.

I have looked at the desire, submerged within us, to obtain mystical experiences, supernatural abilities, and enlightenment.

But having so strenuously rejected religious faith, how is it that I seem to have no qualms about mystical experiences?

In the case of faith, in the end I must abandon my own thinking. When it comes to mystical experiences and supernatural abilities, however, I can keep trying to acquire these things on my own to my heart’s content. I can investigate them inside the framework of my own experience without ever abandoning my own thinking. This is perhaps why there is so little opposition to them within me.

As I have already mentioned, if I had encountered a religion entered through mystical experiences when I was a confused university student in the midst of an identity crisis, I may well have joined it. “Our approach does not require ‘faith.’” “You can proceed while confirming things through your own experience.” If I had been “rationally” persuaded in this way, I think I might have jumped straight in.

In fact, in the case of Aum as well, particularly in the early stages, its methodology was based on the autonomous training of its individual members with Asahara raising the level of their experiences. This has been made clear by various pieces of testimony. It seems that it was only later when financial problems emerged that this transformed into a massive hierarchical system with heavy drug use.

So far I have discussed my own latent, internal desires for mystical experiences, supernatural abilities, and enlightenment, and I have stated that it is impossible to understand people drawn to organizations such as Aum without fully recognizing and acknowledging these desires.
But while these desires were very strong within me, I did not actually set out on the path of spiritual training. I therefore cannot know what sorts of things would have awaited me there and what I would have experienced had I taken this route.

Having closely examined Asahara’s writings, Tetsu Nagasawa, a scholar of Tibetan esoteric Buddhism, has pointed out that he accurately describes various mystical experiences and supernatural abilities that occur during the practice of this religion. For example, Nagasawa writes as follows about Asahara’s early book, Supernatural Abilities: “Secret Methods of Development” :

Indeed, when you read the text mentioned above or Asahara’s Going Beyond Life and Death, the vivid reality of the physical transformation described cannot simply be dismissed with the single word “delusion.”
Asahara would often engage in “shaktipat,” a practice of directly inserting his spiritual energy into the foreheads of his disciples. This is described by the Mr. A quoted above.

For example, there is “shaktipat,” a ritual in which the master gives his own energy to his disciples. When Asahara touched his thumb to a disciple’s forehead, his face would become pale and gaunt before your eyes and his body would stop moving. I was very moved to see him go this far in giving his energy to another person.

The master approached me.
“Today, you will definitely attain salvation,” he said.
Then he gave me the final initiation. It was intense energy. Spiritual energy (qi) accumulated in my head.

If we believe Hisako Ishii, the power to elicit this kind of experience must have existed within Asahara. Shin’ichi Nakazawa, who is himself experienced in the practice of Tibetan Buddhism, quotes this passage by Ishii and states that “this is something that actually occurs.”

If someone were given this kind of experience by a religious leader directly, it would presumably be very easy for them to develop a strong faith in this leader. The path of entering through experience and proceeding to faith would open up for them.

When it comes to religions entered through experience, I think there are cases in which faith is not required in the beginning. But at some stage in the progress of your training and practice of the religion, there must come a time when you have to pass through the doorway of faith in its doctrine or leader. Until you demonstrate your faith you cannot advance any further. There must presumably be this kind of turning point.
There is just one thing I would like to say to those who have been practicing a religion and have reached this stage.

The experiences you have been able to obtain through your spiritual training or devotional practices, and the experiences you have been able to obtain through the guidance of your religious leader or teacher, are no doubt wonderful things. I am sure they were mystical, pure, full of joy and saturated with indescribable feelings of comfort and pleasure. It is truly wonderful that a person can experience such states. I do not deny this in any way. I do not deny that such experiences exist, and I do not condemn your attempts to obtain them.

The fact that you obtained these experiences, however, may be separable from the “cosmology” preached by your religious leader or written in your holy book. Your having been able to have these wonderful experiences does not necessarily mean that this cosmology is correct. It may be that your mystical experiences simply occurred through a physiological process, and could indeed be experienced by anyone who followed the same steps. Even if you obtained mystical experiences guided by a religious leader or teacher, there may not be any necessity whatsoever for you to accept the cosmology they preach and believe in its ultimate truth.
I want you to use your own eyes and all of the powers of your own mind to awaken yourself to the fact that, while it may seem plausible at first blush, in fact the kind of reasoning that says “I had a mystical experience so I should believe what my religious leader says” has no basis. I want you to thoroughly consider this point with your intellect fully engaged. And I want you to become aware that in this world there exists a greater diversity of ways of looking at things than you may have thought.

For those who have actually been given this kind of experience, to not believe the person who gave it to them feels like an extremely harsh act; surely only a very cold-blooded individual could objectively scrutinize and relativize the person who has lifted them up and awakened them to a new self.

But it is at this point that I hope you will stop and think deeply about the whole picture with your own eyes and mind, because once you go further there may be no possibility of coming back. Use your intellect to scrutinize and relativize the life-changing benefactor who has opened your eyes. This is what I am saying. Coldly hold at a distance and scrutinize this person who has been perhaps the most important individual in your life and without whom you may not be here today as the person you are. No matter how good it feels to be with them, and no matter how much you would like to stand beside them forever, I still want you to try holding yourself at a distance from this person and thinking about them clearly. I want you to try looking at this person from a distance even if they tower over you with the dignity and love of a father. I want you to take a half-step back outside this sphere of influence and engage in “patricide.” And if your mentor displays discomfort at this scrutiny, you may well be standing at a very critical crossroads.

I have no intention of saying anything about the path you end up choosing after undertaking this scrutiny and enduring the suffering it requires. Whether it is the path towards deeper faith or the path towards leaving your group, it will be something you yourself have decided. You should follow through on it while taking full responsibility for your own actions.
Right before entering a faith, just once I want you to think things through as far as your intellect will take you and conduct this kind of relativizing.
As resources to aid in this kind of undertaking, I will write a bit about two things I experienced. These are experiences that have for a long time remained locked away deep inside my mind. The case of Aum has penetrated to this deep level of my consciousness and disturbed me greatly. I must write the following not only for the sake of those who stand unsure at the edge of faith, but also for the sake of my own inquiry going forward.

6. My Mystical Experiences

When I was a university student I succeeded in having such experiences on my own.

For me, therefore, so-called mystical experiences are not “mystical.” They are nothing more than one of the physical states human beings can experience if they follow certain steps. Even I, a person of no faith, was able to have mystical experiences. And I did so without any guidance from a teacher or mentor. What is the significance of this?

It’s simple. There is no necessary connection between having a religion or faith and obtaining mystical experiences. That’s all.

When I was a university student, I was interested in mystical experiences and supernatural abilities. I wanted to experience such things for myself. As I explained earlier, however, I did not take the path of religious devotion or spiritual training in order to attain this goal. Instead, I read a lot of meditation and yoga manuals. Curled up in bed in my apartment, I read about things like what you should do to open your chakras.

I suspected that supernatural abilities such as ESP and telekinesis and the mystical experiences that yoga can provide were the same type of thing. I thought that the human body was endowed with these sorts of unknown abilities, and that when turned outwards they became supernatural abilities and when activated internally they became the mystical experiences obtained when practicing yoga.

In other words, by practicing yogic meditation, even I might be able to have supernatural abilities.

When I read books by people who consciously underwent mystical experiences, they all said more or less the same thing. And this was also quite similar to what was said by a boy who had become quite famous at the time for his ability to easily bend spoons with his mind.

First, fully extend the muscles in your back and breathe using your abdomen. Then hold an image of light in your head. As you continue to do this, the light will grow bigger, and eventually it will envelop your entire body. When this happens, various mystical phenomena will occur. It was also said that spoons could be bent using this approach.

This idea occurred to me when I was a third-year university student, right around the time I started living on my own in an apartment in Itabashi, Tokyo. Even today I can clearly recall that time in my life down to the smallest detail.

Late one night, leaning against the bed in my room, I folded my legs into the lotus position, straightened my posture, and began to breathe using my abdomen. I had read somewhere that you should make your exhalations long and your inhalations short, so I followed these instructions. As I continued this abdominal breathing in the dead silence of my room, I began to feel a gentle tingling in my head in time with my exhalations. When I felt this stimulation, I immediately thought, “Oh, I know this feeling.”

In elementary school, I had often played a game that involved bringing my finger close to the area between another person’s eyebrows. I would have a friend close his eyes and slowly bring my finger closer to his forehead until he said, “The spot between my eyebrows tingles! It hurts!” When I had him do the same thing, the spot between my eyebrows really did tingle and start to hurt when he brought his finger close to it. At the time, I found this strange and wondered what this pain could be.

As I continued the abdominal breathing, this tingling I felt when I exhaled gradually grew larger and more distinct. Eventually it came to feel like a small point of white light. I concentrated all of my consciousness on this sensation.

As I did so, the number of these points of light increased. There were now several such points within my head. It seemed as if star-shaped sugar candies were twinkling behind my eyes.

This was the first time I had tried to meditate seriously, and of course I had never received any meditation training. Everything I did was by analogy to what I had read in books or simply a shot in the dark. At the time I had no qualms about doing something so dangerous. At this stage, these kinds of experiences were still interesting to me. “Wow, when you meditate, stars appear inside your head. I bet when they get bigger, they will be suns, just like in the books.” I thought about these things, as if they were happening to someone else.

On a whim, I decided to try to move these white points around. When I did so, they really did begin to move, slowly, around the inside of my head. This surprised me. The points moved freely, revolving around the top of my head.

I don’t remember how long I spent moving these points of light around.
After a while, they began to grow larger within my head and gradually clump together. Once they had all combined into a single ball, the white light became quite bright. This light began to float up to the top of the inside of my skull. I couldn’t see it with my eyes, but this clump of light was there inside my head. And then this spot began to tingle.

This sense of tingling is a bit difficult to describe. There was a sense of “pain,” similar to what you feel when the tip of a needle is pressed into your skin, but at the same time there was also a sense of tingling “pleasure.” These two sensations combined to create a very odd feeling.
I tried to bring this clump of white light to the middle of my brow. When I did so, it really did move right to the spot between my eyebrows. The clump of white light was in the center of my brow, just above my eyes. The spot between my eyebrows tingled, and it felt very good. In Indian paintings you can often see a third eye depicted on a person’s forehead, and I understood this to be a reflection of what I was experiencing. While it was fixed in the center of my eyebrows, this light seemed to grow even bigger.

I don’t know why, but I then began to wonder what would happen if the ball of light were brought down to a lower position. I tried to make this happen.

While making very long exhalations using abdominal breathing, as I breathed out I tried to move the ball of light downwards from between my eyebrows. As I continued to do this, the clump of white light moved past my nose to a spot near my chin. This did not feel as though a tiny ball were traveling down the surface of my face, but rather as though the clump of light that had been at my brow had gradually expanded in the same place, just like a balloon being blown up, until its inflating spherical surface covered my nose and then reached as far as my chin. The clump of light gradually grew larger, and its edge moved lower and lower.
The edge of the clump of light progressed to my throat. When it reached this point, it was as though everything above my neck were being wrapped in a tingling ball of light, and my entire head felt as though it were being immersed in hot water. The inside of this ball of light seemed hot.

I tried to move this clump of light even lower. It moved past my shoulders and down into my arms, eventually getting as far as my elbows. When it reached this point, my internal sensation suddenly changed. The ball of light began to emit a low, droning sound. This sound gradually grew louder until it hurt my ears. (Accounts of near-death or out-of-body experiences often mention this kind of sound. It has also been observed in cases of sleep paralysis. Here there seems to be some kind of connection between these phenomena.) Then my heart suddenly began to pound so hard it sounded like bombs going off and felt as though it were leaping ten centimeters out of my chest. In terms of my internal perception, it really felt as though my heart were jumping through my ribcage to a spot in front of my body. Then, and even now I find this hard to believe, my arms swelled up to twice their normal size. My entire body was overcome with a feeling that was similar to nausea but at the same time extremely pleasant.

In short, I was wrapped in a tingling, droning ball from my arms to my head, my heart seemed about to burst, my arms were distended like bumpy logs, and it really seemed that I was about to die. The light now reached the fingertips of my arms that had doubled in size and were shaking uncontrollably.

I must honestly record what I was thinking at that time. I intuitively thought, “If I were to move this tingling sphere onto a spoon right now, I could bend it easily.” But I didn’t have any spoons, and I thought that if I moved the sphere any lower it would further stimulate my violently pounding heart and I really could die. I was suddenly terrified and thought I had better stop.

Then, and this too was strange, just thinking that I wanted to stop caused the tingling sphere to immediately disappear. All that remained afterwards was my normal self. The supernatural phenomenon that had just occurred left no trace; it was as if it hadn’t really happened.

Several days later I tried again. This time I had a spoon ready so that I could try to bend it. Following the same steps, I controlled my breathing, produced a ball of light, and began to lower it. The sphere came down as far as my shoulders but refused to go any further. As I was engaged in this struggle, it suddenly disappeared.

These were the only two occasions on which I had this kind of experience; it hadn’t happened to me before and hasn’t happened since. I tried again several times, but it did not even get as far as the spot between my eyebrows. Even now, if I control my breathing and concentrate, a small spot starts to tingle in my head, but it only goes back and forth on the surface of my skull without ever going inside. Interestingly, I can only move this tingling spot from the middle to the left side of my head. It won’t go to the right side. Why is this? Perhaps it is somehow connected to my brain’s left hemisphere.

In any case, this experience was neither a dream nor an illusion. Nor was it a drug-induced hallucination. It was something I actually felt in my body while in a completely sober state.

I can therefore affirm the existence of experiences in which it seems as though your body is being enveloped by light and you are overwhelmed by an indescribable feeling of pleasure. No matter how many people who are called “scientists” may insist that these are merely hallucinations, I can say with certainty that they exist as internal experiences that can occur in a state of sobriety without the use of drugs.

The account given above is based on notes I wrote after these experiences. I still remember what occurred very clearly, so I don’t think my descriptions include any embellishments or exaggerations.
Compare my experiences to those of Hisako Ishii cited above. I will quote the passage again:

The description given by Hisako Ishii, “pleasant sensations washed over me. I trembled. I tingled,” is extremely similar to what I experienced. The phrases “powerful golden light, dazzling as the sun” and “rose from my body to the area between my eyes and the top of my head” also fit my experience perfectly. “The golden light poured down like rain,” too, might be how you would describe it if you were inclined to be poetic. In my case the sun only rose once, but for Ishii it seems to have “risen many times.”

Based on his own experiences, Shin’ichi Nakazawa states that “this is something that actually occurs,” and on this point I am in agreement. This sort of thing really does happen.

This kind of experience can be had without practicing yoga, engaging in the devotional practices of esoteric Buddhism, believing in a cult religion, or believing in the words of a religious leader. This is what happened in my case. I did it with just abdominal breathing, the lotus position, and concentration. Such experiences, at least at the level I described, can be obtained without joining a meditation circle or having a mentor.

There is thus fundamentally no necessary connection between obtaining this kind of mystical experience and engaging in spiritual training or believing without question in the words of a religious leader.

Of course, it may well be the case that it is easier to have these sorts of mystical experiences if you conduct this kind of training. Believing in religion may give you greater confidence and mental strength and make it easier for you to have this kind of experience. It may be that you can attain this goal in a shorter amount of time if you follow the guidance of a religious leader or mentor. This sort of connection may indeed exist between these activities and mystical experiences.

Nevertheless, the fact that I was able to have the mystical experience of entering a world of light on my own without either religion or faith means that assertions such as “you cannot have a mystical experience without spiritual training,” “you cannot have a mystical experience without having faith,” “you cannot have a mystical experience without reaching a high spiritual level,” and “you cannot have a mystical experience without following the instructions of a religious leader or mentor” are all mistaken.
Mystical experiences can be had even without spiritual training. They can be had without faith. They can be had even if you are neither a religious leader nor a spiritual mentor nor someone with a high spiritual status. They are something that should not be considered so precious or extraordinary.

This kind of understanding, if you can obtain it, is surely very useful when it comes to relativizing the religion in front of you. Being able to have mystical experiences is not in itself something of great significance. It is just like having sex, reaching orgasm, and feeling intense pleasure, only more delicate and sustained.

Of course, from the perspective of the entire process of yogic or esoteric Buddhist training, the mystical experiences I obtained on my own are probably nothing more than the first tiny steps. I acknowledge this. Aum’s books describe acquiring powers of telepathy (mind reading) and being able to experience visions of travel to another dimension during meditation. When you hear about these sorts of things, you may feel like giving this religion a try yourself.

However, I think the fact that it is possible to have the sorts of mystical experiences I did without accepting a religious system or engaging in spiritual training is critically important.

Furthermore, and this is even more important, even if you obtain a mystical experience by following the instructions of a religious leader, it does not necessarily follow that this leader’s words are true.

The religious leader who gave you the bliss of mystical experiences says, “The end of the world is coming.” But when you think about it dispassionately, reasoning that “he gave me mystical experiences so his prophecy about the end of the world must be correct” requires a leap of logic. The end of the world may come or it may not. Isn’t this the correct logical conclusion? This is how I hope your thinking will proceed. Just by slightly changing our way of thinking in this way, we can begin to examine things for ourselves. Just once is enough, but I want you to sit yourself down and try to scrutinize and relativize, using your own eyes and mind, the religion right in front of you, your religious leader or your mentor.

One Aum disciple says that he had hated religion before he joined this group, but nevertheless he ended up being drawn into the cult.

I want you to consider this dispassionately once more. Is there really any necessary connection between jumps in the lotus position and becoming able to have “experiences of light” on the one hand, and “Aum’s doctrine must be the real thing” on the other?

Isn’t there in fact no necessary connection between these two things?
Aum’s doctrine states as follows.

Isn’t there an enormous gap between obtaining mystical experiences through training, or by having someone pour their vital energy into you, and believing in this kind of “karma cosmology” preached by a religious leader?

Of course, the correct practice of yoga or esoteric Buddhism accompanying mystical experiences may transform the way the world appears and allow you to acquire a new way of looking at the universe. There is a world of difference, however, between obtaining this kind of view of the universe empirically through your own spiritual training or contemplation and accepting without question the view of the universe or truth preached by someone else.

In the case in which you develop this perspective yourself, it is possible for you to constantly self-scrutinize its foundation, correcting what needs to be corrected and flexibly adjusting your view in the midst of communication with the world and other people. In the case of acceptance of a cosmology or truth preached by another person, on the other hand, you have already entered the domain of “faith,” and in principle doubts about the content of this doctrine will not arise.

There is no necessary connection between obtaining mystical experiences and the cosmology of a religion centered around these experiences being correct. Mystical experiences can be obtained with neither religion nor spiritual training. The cosmology of a religion is not proved or disproved by the fact that you had a mystical experience. It may be correct or it may simply be wrong.

If you have had mystical experiences and are not sure what to make of them and find yourself wavering on the brink of faith, why not try thinking about things in this way? I hope you will stand fast at this point, and calmly pursue answers that are fully comprehensible to you using your own eyes and mind. To say “I don’t have a clear answer” is also a very respectable response. I think it is much more respectable than unquestioningly adopting an answer produced by someone else as your own opinion.

Aren’t there many things in the world that aren’t understood? That’s why we investigate them and try to make sense of them for ourselves. Directly acknowledging that we don’t understand what we don’t understand, we then investigate it with our own eyes and mind at a careful pace.

Of course, there are many people who view mystical experiences skeptically, calling them fake or hallucinations. When the things you have experienced so vividly for yourself are completely dismissed in this way, it would not be at all strange for you to harbor feelings of distrust towards those who do not believe them, or for you to want to turn your back on a society in which such people constitute the mainstream. I understand such feelings well.

Even so, however, isn’t accepting without question the cosmology preached by the mentor or religious leader who has given you mystical experiences also too extreme? There is no reason to believe that everything the person who gave you mystical experiences says is correct or the truth.
While humbly acknowledging the fact that meditation can create mystical experiences, what we must do now, therefore, is attempt to carefully separate this fact from “faith,” “the words of religious leaders,” and “religious truth.” At the same time, we must also carefully maintain a separation from the form of scientism which asserts that “mystical experiences are nothing more than a physiological process within the brain” (this kind of scientism leads to the idea that love and other emotions are nothing more than processes in the brain.)

What is needed is a third path between these two extreme positions in which you investigate, under your own power, the meaning of mystical experiences in the context of your own life and death.

7. My Experiences in a Qigong Community

But for people who have shared mystical experiences, and intuitively felt that this was how to reach the truth, it is very hard to scrutinize and relativize their community; doubts arise, but communities are surrounded by an ingenious structure that crushes such misgivings.

For example, even if a doubt arises and you ask a fellow member about it, a procedure is put in place to throw the question back on you and have you engage in self-criticism: “Who are you to ask such a thing? Go back and think it over more carefully.” This is a technique by which everything that is “external” to the community is thoroughly driven out, and any issues that arise are internalized. Once issues have been internalized, what then unfolds is an accumulation of tautologies, the forgetting of the real self in the guise of self-criticism, and reinforcement of faith in the guise of learning.

Furthermore, members of a community centered around the sharing of mystical experiences can always fall back on these experiences to suppress their unease when they become confused or begin to have doubts. For example, when doubts arise, members of such a group can dispel them by engaging in yogic meditation, savoring that ecstatic experience once more, and convincing themselves that what they have been doing is indeed correct, that their doubts were the whispers of the devil, and that what their mentor says is indeed the truth. I think that when mystical experience, a tangible grounding that can be confirmed with one’s own body, is shared by a community, it is very difficult for its members to scrutinize and relativize it and free themselves from it.

In the previous section, I said we should scrutinize and relativize our mystical experiences and our religious leaders.

In the case of communities built around mystical experiences, however, no matter how much I might say it is important to use your own eyes and mind to objectively examine your religious leader, it is extremely difficult to actually do so. It is difficult because, when it comes to what you experience through meditation, it is indeed with your own “eyes and mind” that you perceive your own physical changes, internal transformations, and various mystical experiences. The more likely someone is to attach great importance to what they have experienced for themselves, the more difficult it is for them to scrutinize and relativize the meaning of what they have experienced.

All I can do is describe what I myself experienced in my late twenties and hope that it will prove instructive in some way. This experience weighed very heavily on me, a weight that I continued to bear until very recently.
When I was in my late twenties, for about two years I belonged to a group in which I conducted research activities as a volunteer. The group’s leader was an older man with a fair amount of charisma. Below him there were two main members, myself and another man, and one additional member. A few university students with shared interests rounded out our very small group. Various individuals from other groups came and went. (The people involved are still active in a variety of fields, so I will refrain from using their real names and discussing anything that could infringe on their privacy.)

I want to dispassionately consider what I was thinking and what sort of state I was in during the two years I spent in this group. This is thus an account of my own self-analysis, and not in any way an attempt to pass judgement on others.

I was in graduate school when I was invited to join the group.
At the time, I had progressed to graduate school in the humanities, but I was studying bioethics, a new field in which very few people were active, on my own instead of doing research of the sort requested by my faculty. I read related literature in English while seeking guidance from Keiko Nakamura and Shohei Yonemoto. Right around this time, Hisatake Katō and Nobuyuki Iida were putting together a collection of materials on Anglo-American bioethics at Chiba University, and I was recruited to work on this project. I contributed several articles to this collection.

One day I received a telephone call at home from someone who wanted to meet with me. When I arrived two people were waiting. They were trying to start a research group, and they had read one of my articles in the collection with great interest. What this research group wanted to address was the state of modern biological science. They said they wanted to consider this subject from a broad perspective. As part of this effort, they were conducting a series of interviews with individuals on the cutting edge of biological science. They wondered if I would be interested in taking part in this research. This was their invitation. What they said was interesting, and for the most part it overlapped with what I was trying to do. I had a surprising amount in common with the man who seemed to be the leader.

I remember being excited after leaving them and thrilled by the sense that this collaboration might open up an interesting new world for me. After checking with the university library to make sure this group was not affiliated with a religion, I began making weekly visits to their office located in a leafy suburb.

We would have long discussions in their office surrounded by greenery, stroll between the trees, go out together to conduct interviews, eat dinner and drink alcohol in their office in the evening, and late at night I would return home by train.

Among all of these activities, the most intense were the focused discussions, referred to as “brain work,” that would sometimes continue for hours. What is “life?” What is “science?” What is “the North/South problem?” We thoroughly discussed and debated these sorts of topics. These discussions came to primarily revolve around an in-depth back and forth between myself and the man who was the group’s leader (I’ll call him “Mr. B.”) As our discussions deepened and new developments and discoveries occurred, the distance between me and Mr. B shrank and we became quite close. At least this is how I felt.

As these discussions grew richer and more concentrated, all of us came to share a certain worldview. This view held that everything in the world was connected to everything else like a thread. We called this state of affairs “life (inochi).” Our individual “lives” were connected to the “lives” of every other living thing on the planet. Thinking about our own “lives” was thus connected to thinking about the “lives” of every other living being. By the same token, thinking about all “life” on Earth was also connected to thinking about the “lives” of we ourselves who were engaged in this contemplation. In this sense, thinking about global environmental issues and thinking about our own health and medical care were the same thing.
Indeed, looking at the state of modern science and civilization, it is clear that life, something that ought to be considered a connected whole, is dealt with by breaking it down into fragments. Reductionist molecular biology also makes this kind of mistake, as does the way of thinking which holds that brain death is human death. The prevalence of the scientism which holds that everything in the world can be understood using the scientific method is also a problem. Science has its limits, and the essence of life cannot be understood through the application of its methods.

Our group strongly advocated this worldview. We organized research conferences and large scale symposia.

This was in 1986, so we were quite strongly influenced by the so-called “new science” (a branch of the New Age movement) that was flourishing in Japan at that time. I enthusiastically brought into our discussions the idea that environmental issues and medical issues were one and the same, while Mr. B brought us the idea that everything is connected to everything else like a thread. “Life” emerged as a key term in the midst of this collision of ideas. I published my first book, An Invitation to the Study of Life, in 1988 after I had already left this group, but there is no doubt that its content owes much to these discussions.

On the basis of this worldview, we advocated a multidisciplinary approach in which life is addressed from a variety of perspectives, criticized the reductionism of the life sciences, and attacked scientism itself. At the time, these assertions were considered quite extreme, but even now I do not think our intentions were mistaken.

Mr. B maintained that all living things are connected like a thread. This was because he was a qigong master. At the time, qiqong had not yet become very popular. I too, though I had heard the name, did not know what exactly was involved in its practice. In qigong, it is believed that the life force (qi ) inside my body flows together dynamically with the qi of the ground underneath me and that of plants and trees growing nearby. The qi inside me flows out through my hands and feet and intermingles with the qi emitted by other people, trees, and animals. Therefore, if we consider this flowing qi as fundamental, all living creatures are connected through this web of vital energy. If your perspective is based on qigong, it is easy to understand how everything is connected like a thread.

Sometimes, when we were tired out by brainwork, we would wander together among the trees. Following Mr. B’s instructions, we would relax our hands, stimulate our bodies’ external pressure points, and stand with our knees slightly bent and our bodies slack. In a daze we would listen to the voices of our bodies. Standing there like this, the sound of the wind rustling the trees around us and the cries of the birds circling above our heads felt very fresh and invigorating. Finally, we would slowly raise both of our arms in front of us, then smoothly lower them as far as our waists. We would repeat this over and over. This activity could also be thought of as an effort to become more familiar with one’s own body by continuing these slow, deliberate motions amid trees and plants.

After continuing this kind of physical exercise for several weeks, suddenly there came a point when I was aware of the movement of qi within my own body. I started to feel a tingling sensation flow from my back into my arms when I was lifting them in front of me. As I continued to do this a powerful tingling began to build in the palms of my hands. When I said that my palms were tingling, Mr. B replied that what I was feeling was qi.

Once I had this understanding, many other things came to mind. For example, sometimes when I get extremely frightened, something like an electrical current flows from my back into my head. The feeling of qi was very similar to a weaker version of this sensation. It was also very similar to a sensation of something squirming and moving around inside my body that I had sometimes experienced. It occurred to me that we may be feeling qi all the time without being particularly conscious of it.

Once you know what qi feels like, you can then practice and polish this awareness on your own. You become able to practice by yourself. There was a period during which I practiced on my own like this on a daily basis. As I did so, I began to be able to clearly perceive the flow of qi from my palms. When my condition was good, I could clearly perceive something like a cool wind flowing out of my palms. In my room I could feel something like a breeze flowing out of my hands even without moving my arms.

When practicing qigong in a group, I once stood face to face with a young woman who was an advanced practitioner and held my hands up to hers with about ten centimeters separating us. She closed her eyes and sent qi into my palms. Even though there was a ten-centimeter space between us, when she did this, I felt a powerful radiation just as if I had brought my hands close to an infrared stove. As you would expect, I was very surprised by this. It was very hot. There may be another explanation for it besides the theory of qigong, but this phenomenon truly exists.

In my case, strangely, when qi begins to flow out of my palms the perceived temperature of my hands gradually falls. At times they become extremely cold, like ice.

When you become more sensitive to the qi you emit yourself, you also become more sensitive to the qi possessed by other people. Arriving at study sessions or meetings, there are times when I have felt the tense qi of the participants with my entire body as soon as I opened the door.

Writing about it like this makes it seem truly occult, but if I were to call it “the atmosphere of a place” then it is presumably something everyone has felt. So what exactly is “the atmosphere of a place?” We often feel that the atmosphere in a certain place is tense, relaxed, calm, etc. What exactly are we feeling when this occurs? Perhaps “feeling another person’s qi” is just a particularly acute version of this kind of sensation we all regularly experience.

This is something I would describe more as a subjective feeling than an objective fact, but when a particular group of people practices qigong together, the members of that group begin to sense that their “qi goes well together.” By “qi goes well together” I mean that they come to trust and rely on each other and begin to feel that other people in the group would not lie to them. I don’t want to generalize this claim, but in my case at least this is how it was. This would presumably be seen by qigong theory as the inevitable result of the influence of each other’s qi.

I was only ever able to sense the qi emitted by myself or other people, but in my group there was someone who, after starting from the same place I did, claimed to have become able to perceive the qi of trees. On his own he would stand stock still facing the trunk of a large tree, his hands held up in front of him. Watching him do this, I thought it would be great to reach that point. In the end I was never able to sense the qi of living creatures other than human beings. I quit before reaching that level.
I don’t know what exactly this qi is. I don’t know whether it is the energy of living things or not, or if it is some kind of autosuggestion. What I can say for certain, however, is that it is a fact that I was able to feel this kind of thing arise within myself, and it is also a fact that I was able to vividly perceive it being emitted by other people.

In any case, what is important is the following two points: by practicing qigong it is possible to obtain this kind of unexplained sense through a step by step process, and it seems that when qigong is practiced by a group of people they may develop feelings of intimacy and trust beyond what would normally be expected.

We were thus simultaneously a volunteer research group focused on the life sciences and a qigong circle. In both cases the leader of our activities was Mr. B, who was also a qigong instructor. Metaphors and examples referencing qigong were often employed in the discussions lead by Mr. B, and phrases such as “heal the planet” and “biosphere Gaia” were used during our qigong lessons. Our research and qigong lessons were intertwined in a way that made them difficult to distinguish from each other.

As I continued this lifestyle, I gradually became completely absorbed in this group. There was a period during which engaging in debate with Mr. B, talking about the future, and occasionally receiving qigong lessons seemed to be my main purpose in life. At the time I was a graduate student with absolutely no prospects of employment (the study of bioethics I was engaged in was still not receiving any attention within Japanese academia), and I think my activities within the group were especially important to me as a form of emotional support because of these circumstances.

Regarding our research, I worked very hard to stand on an equal footing with Mr. B in my discussions with him. Our interests and ways of thinking were surprisingly similar, so at times our debates became very intense. When it came to the ability to plan and conduct research, Mr. B was peerless. On this point I respected him very much. Regarding qigong, Mr. B was my mentor. I tried to do as he said in our lessons. My progress was slow, so in this area I had to follow Mr. B unquestioningly.

As we took part in activities such as practicing qigong together, feeling each other’s qi, and engaging in concentrated discussions in which our thoughts and sensibilities intermingled, gradually the boundaries between oneself and the other people in the group became indistinct. This blurring of the line between the self and others may well have been an illusion, but this is what it felt like. Gradually our qi began to align, and being together with comrades whose qi aligned in this way felt very good. In this atmosphere we brought up things from our pasts, and little by little we became able to talk about psychological wounds we had never discussed with anyone. It was moving to hear stories about other people’s lives, and the fact that I myself was able to discuss such things was in itself very moving.

Once this kind of atmosphere develops within a group, you begin to easily accept things you would normally begin by doubting. For me it was especially easy to accept “mystical” phenomena because we were comrades who shared the experiences of qi, itself a mystical phenomenon whose true nature was unclear.

Early one morning I took the train to our office at the outskirts of the city. As I was jostled about in the crowded train I became lost in a sexual fantasy. I think this is fairly common among young men, but once something set off a series of sexual images it was impossible for me to stop them from flashing through my mind. I became so excited that I wanted to masturbate right away.

When I got to the office, Mr. B was in the room and our eyes met. I greeted him normally, but after gazing intently at my face for a moment he said something to the effect of “Oh dear.” Then he said, “Well, have a seat” and pointed to a chair. This response on Mr. B’s part was markedly different from his normal attitude. We then engaged in small talk. He told me that everyone has times when their qi gets disturbed, and when this happens you should do something to change your mood before getting down to work.

I thought he knew that I was sexually excited. He knew just by looking at my qi. I was very ashamed.

Looking back at it now, I can see that a belief that “Mr. B can see other people’s qi, so my sexual excitement has been given away” had established itself in my mind without any skepticism on my part. Thinking about it more carefully, there was no evidence whatsoever that Mr. B had become aware of my arousal. He may have observed it and he may not have. All that was certain was that he had noticed there was something different about my mental state that morning. If that was all he had done, then it was something of which any slightly sensitive person is capable.
But because we were interacting at the level of qi, without any doubts I found it not at all implausible that someone could sense another person’s sexual excitement. I was still incapable of such things, but perhaps I would gain these sorts of abilities once I became a more advanced practitioner. This is what I thought. These sorts of ideas came easily into my mind. This is the kind of atmosphere in which we were immersed.

Later that day, the members of our group gathered around Mr. B and engaged in a lengthy discussion. After the discussion had ended and we were all eating together, Mr. B said, “When we are debating, you all tend to get excited and irritated in spite of yourselves. When this happens, I send qi in your direction to calm these feelings.” When I heard this, I immediately thought to myself, “Oh, I see, Mr. B is guiding us in this way to make sure our discussions proceed well.”

Let me say it again. When I, who am normally very skeptical, heard the almost unmistakably occult claim “I send qi to calm your excitement during our discussions,” I was deeply impressed and thought to myself, “Oh, that’s what was happening.” At the time I felt that Mr. B, who had shown such concern for us, was a very important person. I felt a strong sense of gratitude.

Once you have shared certain assumptions, had your thoughts, feelings, and qi intermingled with those of the other people in your group, and adapted yourself completely to that space, something that would seem stupid or ridiculous to a total stranger can come to sound perfectly natural and obvious.

One day I was headed to the office with Mr. B. I got out of the car and tried to open the lock on the door. The lock was in bad shape, however, and no matter how many times I tried I couldn’t get it to open. As I was making attempt after attempt to cajole the latch into releasing, Mr. B gently stopped me. Leaving the key in the lock I turned towards him. Mr. B stared at the lock for a moment with an expression of intense concentration. Then he said, “Try it once more.” When I turned the key in the lock that had thus far refused to budge it opened easily on my first attempt. Mr B. said, “Sometimes transmitting qi can open doors.”

I was quite surprised. The power of qi had been demonstrated right before my eyes. That’s what I thought. At the time I believed without any doubt whatsoever that qi had opened the lock. I had no doubts about the validity of describing what had just occurred in front of me as “the power of qi.” I didn’t consider that it might have been a coincidence that the lock opened when it did or think about what Mr. B might have said if it had not opened. I immediately determined the lock’s opening to be the result of the “power of qi” we were training ourselves to manipulate every day.

At around that time, Mr. B would sometimes invite a few students to the office and give them qigong lessons in the meeting room. One day I too was taking part in one of these lessons at the periphery of the assembled group. After we had learned a qigong method of moving our bodies, Mr. B came around to touch each of us. Eventually my turn came. He held his hand above my hipbone. Then he slowly moved the palm of his hand upward. Despite the fact that his hand was not even touching my clothing, as he moved it, a bone just above my hips made a popping noise and moved within my body. This was another very surprising experience. Mr. B explained that he had corrected the position of my bone with the power of qi. I still have no idea what actually happened that day.

After this Mr. B expounded on various topics. Someone asked him how powerful qi was. Mr. B said that when it came to hitting someone, for example, the damage you inflict if you simply hit them is very different from the damage you inflict if you hit them while augmenting your strike with the power of qi. Then he told us a story. One day when he was at a dojo someone asked him to demonstrate the power of qi. Mr. B focused all his energy and directed a blast of qi at the feet of the person standing in front of him who had asked for the demonstration. While maintaining a rigid, erect posture, his target rose straight up to the ceiling and then fell to the floor unconscious. Mr. B used a judo technique and brought him around. It seemed that his testicles had become lodged inside his body. Normally human beings cannot jump up to the ceiling while maintaining a rigid posture. Such is the power of qi.

When I heard this story, I was very impressed. Because I had already seen for myself how qi could open locks and move bones, I was able to easily accept this story as an extrapolation along the same lines. As scenes in which a blast of qi sends someone flying are common in popular media like anime and manga, it was not an image that encountered much resistance.

When we are in a group in which certain assumptions are shared, and in which things like qi, thoughts, and feelings are intermingled, there are times when we accept without any resistance stories or lines of reasoning that have no clear basis. This was true even in my case, and I am normally a very skeptical person. This fact must be addressed head-on.

In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I should state here that I am not denying the possibility that these phenomena occurred as a result of the power of qi. I want to make this clear before moving on. These phenomena may really have occurred because of qi, or they may have occurred as a result of other causes. At this point I cannot say which explanation is correct. What I want to say here is that even though I had no clear evidence that these phenomena were caused by the power of qi, at the time it was easy for me to believe that this was the case. What I am talking about is the psychological processes that were operating within myself.

9. The Sweet Nectar of “Only We Are Right”

The fact that within a closed-off group of people who share the same assumptions it is easy to believe things without any basis is a very serious matter. This is often seen not only in new religions but also in revolutionary groups and student movements, and can even be observed in closed-off bureaucratic organizations. It can even be said that this kind of thing will inevitably be seen whenever we form intimate groups. But this tendency is particularly striking in the case of groups that emphasize the sharing of thoughts, articles of faith, and actual experiences.

In order to get people to leave cult groups like Aum, the normal approach, and this is indeed perhaps all that can be done, is to provide them with a lot of information and repeat over and over again that their beliefs have no basis, but as long as the group continues to exist, this kind of persuasion remains exceedingly difficult.

This difficulty arises from the fact that attacks from the outside along the lines of “what you are saying has no basis” may in fact serve to make the members of a group even more unified.

This is something I suspect everyone has experienced, but when you come under attack from an external enemy the bonds within a group become stronger. This is why politicians intentionally construct imaginary external enemies: by doing so they maintain internal unity.

At the time, our group also encountered this kind of situation.
We believed that modern science had analyzed in separate, discrete sections and broken down into components what ought to be viewed as an inseparably interconnected living world. Within our bodies this approach had given rise to problems concerning the distortion of medical science, and outside of our bodies it had led to environmental issues. We therefore believed that problems with modern medicine and environmental issues had the same root, and to resolve them it was necessary to criticize the “componentism” of modern scientific technology and its “reductionism,” and hammer out a new, truly holistic science.

Incidentally, the entity that supported our group financially and gave our activities legitimacy was in fact an organization whose aim was the promotion of natural science. This organization included many scientists among its executives and provided backing for scientific research. We received this support for the purpose of considering the orientation of the natural sciences in the contemporary era.

As it turned out, what we argued was that modern natural science was the root cause of many of the problems that afflict modern society, and we held seminars with this idea as their basic theme. As might be expected, this brought complaints and pressure from senior members of the organization. The person looking after our group did their best to absorb this pressure themselves, but we who were engaged in making these arguments soon became keenly aware of these difficult circumstances.
In our discussions, we became increasingly preoccupied with these natural scientists who were pressuring us. Various problems were being created because the scientific methodology they employed every day in their work was flawed. Unaware of this fact, and without any attempt to understand the correctness of what we were asserting, they simply found our claims offensive. They were therefore trying to crush the project that was making these unpleasant assertions.

I was not able to meet with these scientist executives directly. I heard about their dissatisfaction and efforts to crush our group indirectly from the person in charge of looking after us. But that didn’t matter. We were seeking the truth, and these scientists were trying to take advantage of their authority to shut us down. To avoid being defeated by these efforts, I had to fight them. This was the meaning of the research we were engaged in, and the fact that they were angry was a sure sign that we had touched a nerve. Taking this view, I continued doing my research and contributing to our discussions.

I thought, “They are in thrall to a flawed methodology. And they don’t know it. Everything in the living world is connected to each other, and science needs to be holistic. We are the ones who understand this truth, and we are under attack. We who are in the right are facing persecution. But we cannot allow ourselves to be defeated by their efforts. We have to stand strong. We have to follow through on our beliefs. There is no need to change course no matter what outsiders might say. I am doing what has to be done.”

As for my feelings at the time, this period, in which I was trying to pursue what I believed in while being persecuted, was filled with a kind of stoic resolve but was also a very blissful time. “People around me who make various criticisms know nothing of the truth. Only we, the ones they see as their enemy, know what is truly correct.” We had the pleasure, for which there is no substitute, of knowing that the truth was on our side. I can still vividly recall this pleasure and happiness.

To put it metaphorically, it was as if we were squatting in a circle within a closed-off, secret garden and lapping up the sweet nectar that was the knowledge only we possessed; being persecuted was something very sweet and pleasurable. There is nothing as sweet and appealing as being confident that the truth is on your side and engaging in a stoic struggle to defend it.

We who know the truth are being persecuted by those who do not. When placed in such circumstances, if it was for the sake of protecting the truth, making the truth known to others, or putting the truth into practice, committing “small evils” is something that cannot be helped. It is natural for one’s thinking to proceed in this way. This mentality may be similar to that of a passionate scientist who thinks it is permissible to falsify the data a little bit if it will help show people the truth.

Once you have tasted the sweet nectar of “only we know the truth,” it is very difficult to break free of the group in question under your own power. There is a well-known story of a daughter who had joined Aum turning to her father who was trying to get her to leave the group and shouting, “Dad, open your eyes!,” and I can well understand the feelings of this daughter who wanted to give her father a taste of this nectar precisely because she loved him so much.

Later, after a series of various incidents, our group experienced an internal rift.

I chose to set out on a different path from Mr. B. When I did so, little by little I began to see things that had been invisible to me when Mr. B was around. When this charismatic figure I felt compelled to trust disappeared and I had to think about everything for myself, I began to learn that the world was more diverse than I had thought. This process was full of an indescribable sense of liberation, just as you might feel if you were able to view from various angles a landscape painting that until that point you had only been able to look at from one direction.

Mr. B taught me many things and helped me to grow. This is a fact. The person I am today would not exist if I had never met him. In this sense he was my mentor and I respected him.

But what I discovered after our separation was that Mr. B’s approach was also just one way of looking at the world. My heartfelt embrace of his way of thinking and determination to pursue it was also nothing more than one way of seeing things.

It was after the breakup of our group that I was able to begin a process akin to plucking scales from my body and discarding them one by one. This was a process that would surely have been impossible for me to complete as long as the group continued to exist. In the interest of privacy I cannot discuss these events in detail, but a factor brought into our group from the outside exposed a certain contradiction that had lain buried in its foundation and as a result we disbanded.

It was entirely thanks to a “foreign substance” brought in from the outside that I was able to realize the narrowness of the group I belonged to and scrutinize and relativize the thought and behavior of the mentor I had idolized. In other words, it was because of an opposing external factor that I was able to thoroughly examine what we had done.

All I can say to others who are drinking their fill of sweet nectar within a community, therefore, is that when something from the outside comes to destroy your world, I hope you will take advantage of this precious opportunity and not miss the chance to take up the task of relativizing yourself. I hope you will transform yourself by interacting with a “foreign substance” from the outside. I hope you will have this kind of courage. This is my heartfelt wish.

In this way, I was forced to separate from Mr. B, my mentor, and stand on my own. There were no academic institutions that would take up my theme of grasping the living world as a whole philosophically, and writings addressing it had not yet appeared in Japan. I thought that I had no choice but to create an academic discipline that would consider life in its totality by myself. In 1988 I published An Invitation to the Study of Life and advocated the necessity of a new discipline called “life studies.” In this book I wrote that every living thing in our world is interconnected. It is a mistake to divide it into humanity and nature. Adopting the perspective that humanity and nature are deeply connected, we must take the first step towards non-anthropocentrism. We must move beyond the conflicts and contradictions that have been created by modern civilization towards a state of harmony and symbiosis between humanity and nature.

At the time I was writing these things, however, I had still not completely left behind the worldview I had maintained in my discussions within the group. Everything in the world is connected, and scientism is the enemy. Division and violence are the enemy, and the world must turn towards harmony and symbiosis. I had not taken even a single step away from this way of thinking. Despite having right in front of me the fact that our group itself had broken up in acrimony without even being able to achieve harmony and symbiosis among its own members, I had not grasped the importance of what this fact signified. Without addressing this issue, I went on contemplating harmony and symbiosis in my head as in the past. I thought only about how to overcome the scientism and modern systems that had destroyed these ideals.

When I was thirty, I had a child. It was a very busy time for me in my career, so I left nearly all of the childrearing to my wife and put in long hours at work. When I got home the baby would be crying and screaming. From evening until late at night I had to take on some aspects of looking after our child. Changing my bad-tempered baby’s diapers; washing dirty diapers in soapy water; rocking my restless infant in my arms to try to get him to sleep: having to do these things irritated me. Anger would boil up within me as I held my baby who could not yet smile and wondered why my time had to be taken up by such things. “Why? Why do I have to waste my time like this? There is so much I have to do. There is so much I have to think about. I can’t be taking care of you like this.”

One night the baby cried so loudly that the feelings I had been bottling up exploded from deep within me. Yelling “Shut up!,” I threw a nearby slipper at him. The slipper narrowly missed his body and bounced off of the wall behind him with a loud bang. I stood there, my body shaking with emotion. An overwhelming “rage” had surged upwards from deep inside my body. It was very close to a “violent impulse.” An impulse to commit violence against something that was taking my time against my will filled my entire body.

When my excitement had subsided, I realized the meaning of what I had just done. I, who had asserted that the living world must be full of harmony and symbiosis and who had thought so long and hard about the ethical principles needed to bring this about, had committed violence against my own infant, an extremely weak being incapable of offering any resistance. The extremely violent impulse to silence this child had come from nowhere else but deep inside my own body. I was dumbfounded.
When I became aware of these violent impulses toward my own infant, my contemplations up until that point seemed meaningless. Everything about myself as someone who had sought harmony and symbiosis inside his own head had been negated. It was a real turning point for me. In that moment, I realized my own errors during the time I had made imaginary enemies of proponents of scientism and sipped the sweet nectar of a closed group.

The enemy was not outside myself. It had built its nest within me. To examine life is to examine the way I myself have been living. I had to examine myself as a living being who, while seeking harmony and symbiosis among living creatures, had committed violence against those closest to him, made no serious attempt to interact with them, and made their lives hard to live.

Since the days of my closed world of sweet nectar, how long had it taken me to become capable of discovering something so obvious? How many people had I made to suffer during this time? I still hurt people today, of course, but I have no doubt that the suffering I caused during that period was much worse.

I wanted enlightenment. I wanted supernatural abilities. I wanted to know the truth. I wanted power. I wanted to stand above other people. And I wanted to be saved from the fear of death.

In the midst of my struggle to pursue these goals, I had mystical experiences, practiced qigong, pushed ahead with my research, and created a community in which I drank sweet nectar along with my comrades. We created an imaginary enemy, scientism, and rushed off down the pleasant path of believing only we were correct. What were the results of this? Wasn’t I, a banal human being full of egoism and desire, all that remained after the community fell apart? Only me, a person who made beautiful pronouncements while being shaken by rage and committing violence against his own child? What did it all mean?

What was needed was neither enlightenment, nor supernatural abilities, nor the truth. What was really needed was the modicum of courage necessary to take a hard look at myself and sincerely examine myself as an ordinary person full of worldly desires and incapable of reaching enlightenment, acquiring supernatural abilities or obtaining the truth. It was the courage to honestly acknowledge myself as a person who cannot escape worldly desires, to view the world from this perspective, and to decide how to live my life. What was really needed was the determination to bring this kind of resolution to my life.

I don’t need enlightenment. I don’t need supernatural abilities. I don’t need mystical experiences. Far from purifying my worldly desires and limitations, on the contrary these things only serve as devices to cleverly divert my attention from the acts of violence, oppression, and evil I commit every day. They only serve to distract me from the things I ought to be addressing.

What is needed is a philosophy of worldly desires through which I, a human being full of contradictions and desires who is incapable of becoming enlightened, reaching the truth, or having faith, can keep my gaze fixed on the distant heavens while wading knee-deep through the mire of worldly concerns, and, guided by the light of their constellations, try to figure out the meaning of my own life as I wallow here and now, and endlessly seek a way to live this life full of filth and pleasure and suffering and reach a final answer to its central question.

How many people have I oppressed, ignoring their entreaties, making their lives difficult, and walking all over them as I pursued my own advancement? How many bad acts have I committed, stealing pleasure and satisfying my desire for power and domination, and how much suffering have I experienced from such acts? How much pride and ecstasy have I wallowed in, and how conceited have I allowed myself to be?

I will not, however, choose the path of repentance and atonement through religious practices in pursuit of enlightenment. I do not choose this path because it is a system that, rather than purify me, would only serve to make the deep-rooted worldly desires that indelibly stain my body more difficult to see. I reject this approach because there is a risk of it functioning as a system that allows people to justify committing mass murder with sarin gas as being ultimately for their victims’ benefit. There is a risk of it functioning as an unseen mechanism by which I could shift responsibility for my own evil onto a theory or system.

The path I choose is one that begins with facing the fact that I am a person whose actual behavior tends to betray the ideals, reasoning and beautiful words that come out of his mouth. It begins by honestly acknowledging that I am a person who cannot ever escape his worldly desires and banality. I want to create a philosophy that takes as its starting point my acceptance of the fact that I have hurt many people in the past and will presumably hurt many more in the future. I want to begin with the fact that I will no doubt continue to commit countless evils and betrayals as my point of departure.

Having acknowledged these facts, however, without ever justifying them, without shrugging off the current state of affairs as inevitable, and without using my own suffering over these failings as a tool of self-defense, I must find a path in which I put my life on the line whenever there is a chance of self-transformation, and by doing so continue endlessly searching for the meaning of life at my own internal pace.

While building a modest network of mutual support with other people who have similar thoughts and feelings, and while struggling to directly receive the messages of the soul sent to me by other people from the depths of their beings, I believe there is a way to fully live out our lives in this muddy world full of pain and pleasure.

While I have not yet glimpsed it, I believe that somewhere this path must exist.

Kiyoshi Ishikawa, “Transcendent Experiences of LSD and the Alchemy of Mercury,” (石川清「LSDの超越体験と水銀の錬金術」『別冊宝島２２９・オウムという悪夢』), 1995, p. 12.

『現代』 August 1995, p. 88.

麻原彰晃『超能力「秘密の開発法」』大和出版, 1986.

Tetsu Nagasawa, “Our Neighbor Shoko Asahara” (永沢哲「わが隣人麻原彰晃」『イマーゴ』), August 1995, p. 213.

麻原彰晃『生死を超える』オウム出版, 1986.

『現代』 August 1995, p. 83.

Shin’ichi Nakazawa, “Nihilism of the ‘guru’” (中沢新一「『尊師』のニヒリズム」『イマーゴ』), August 1995, p. 258.

Shoko Asahara, Mayahana Sutra (麻原彰晃『マハーヤーナ・スートラ』オウム出版), 1988, pp. 193-194.

Shin’ichi Nakazawa, “Nihilism of the ‘guru’,” p. 257.

Vajrayana Sacca 12, September 1995, p. 20.

Vajrayana Sacca 12, September 1995, p. 29.

See Mitsunari Ooizumi, People Who Had Faith in Shoko Asahara (大泉実成『麻原彰晃を信じる人々』洋泉社), 1996, p. 113.

森岡正博『生命学への招待』勁草書房.

気 in Japanese.

煩悩の哲学. Bon’nō (煩悩) is kleśa in Sanskrit, which means earthly desires and disturbing emotions such as greed, a craving for sensual pleasure, and anxiety.

For example, what are we to make of the levitation photograph of Masaharu Naruse, in which he seems to be floating in a relaxed pose a meter above the ground? See Masaharu Naruse, Levitation (成瀬雅春『空中浮揚』出帆新社), 1992.

Mind control through fostering a fear of death and hell is particularly horrifying. See Shoko Egawa, Saviour’s Ambition (江川紹子『救世主の野望』教育史料出版会), 1991 / Shoko Egawa, 2200 Days of Pursuing “Aum Shinrikyo” (江川紹子『「オウム真理教」追跡二二〇〇日』文藝春秋), 1995 / Steven Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control, Park Street Press, 1988 / Tarou Takimoto and Tatsuya Nagaoka eds., Escape from Mind Control (滝本太郎・長岡辰哉編著『マインド・コントロールから逃れて』恒友出版), 1995 / Aum Believer Rescue Network (ed.), Liberation from Mind Control (オウム真理教信徒救済ネットワーク編著『マインドコントロールからの解放』三一書房), 1995.

Takashi Tachibana, “‘Religion and Murder’ in Aum Shinrikyo,” (立花隆「オウム真理教にみる『宗教と殺人』」『週刊文春』) July 20, 1995, p. 158.

p. 156.

Regarding similar thoughts in the minds of Aum’s believers, see Shoko Egawa, A Savior’s Ambition, pp. 223-225.

Philosophical study of life, death, and nature