The Courage to Be Myself, Chapter 4 of How to Live in a Post-Religious Age: Terrorism, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Life

Chapter 4 of How to Live in a Post-Religious Age
: Terrorism, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Life

Neither Aum nor Ozaki in his later period created a place where people could pluralistically give each other the courage needed to think about themselves and the world with their own eyes and mind, and to live their own lives. Is this not the reason they both met with disaster?

How can we, in the midst of our solitude, give each other this courage?
I want to find this kind of path.

Here there are two books dealing with Aum I should mention: Shinji Miyadai’s Live in the Endless Everyday and Osamu Hashimoto’s Religion Isn’t Anything To Be Afraid of! Both are worthy of note as books written in response to the Aum incident, and both are works I feel personally compelled to cite in the context of this discussion.

Miyadai makes two assertions. One is that the Aum incident was brought about by the “wandering conscience” found in a modern Japan in which morality has been dismantled. The other is that it was an incident caused by people who could not adapt to the “endless everyday” that has been readily apparent since the 1980s rashly attempting to destroy it.

His conclusion is that we must acquire the wisdom to “slowly” adapt to and live within this “endless everyday.”

Let me begin with an explanation of “wandering conscience.” Miyadai says that it is a mistake to think of the high-ranking Aum members who released sarin gas as extremely evil people. We must instead examine the paradoxical notion that these devotees “released sarin because they were conscientious […] they released sarin because they were elites who were thinking about society.” There has never been a monotheistic ethics in Japanese society, and morality has instead been regulated by the reciprocal gaze of the community. This morality as seen by the community, however, has broken down through the intense urbanization and increased emphasis on information found in recent years.

As a result, in a modern Japan in which ethics and morality have disintegrated, the stronger the orientation towards a conscience that “wants to do good things” the more urgent the vague sense of not knowing what is good becomes and the stronger the desire for a “clear truth” grows. When a figure who definitively provides standards of good and evil, such as Aum founder Asahara, appears, people with a wandering conscience obtain standards of good and evil from his words, and, while they may have some minor misgivings, do the “right thing” and release sarin gas.

The “endless everyday” is a way of understanding society that became prominent in the second half of the 1980s. People who are not wealthy will never become wealthy, and people who are not attractive to the opposite sex will never become attractive. This is a society in which there is only the ceaseless repetition of this kind of “endless everyday.” People born from around 1955 to 1965, and in particular men born during this period, were unable to adapt to this kind of society. They were a generation who grew up with a certain image of how society would be and their own bright futures, and in the 1980s they were betrayed by reality. They sought an “unpolished diamond” not in society but within themselves, and yearned for “the day of salvation of a future that would surely come.” These people who attempted to create and execute their own armageddon were the embodiment of the ills of a generation unable to adapt to the “endless everyday.”

In contrast to this, there were young women who saw the “endless everyday” society for what it was and chose to live as they pleased within this endless everyday existence. This approach would later be inherited by the young girls who sold their used underwear, gym outfits, and school uniforms in the 1990s. Miyadai says that this has now begun to spread to the young men who dye their hair and pierce their ears.

In this way Miyadai looks at Japanese society in terms of these two categories of people who have not been able adapt to the endless everyday and people who have. He then arrives at the following conclusion.

What we need is the “wisdom to live in the endless everyday.” The “wisdom to live with an aimless conscience in the midst of the endless everyday without knowing what is good.” To the “ethical” reader who condemns me as “immoral” or “unethical,” I would say that it is people without wisdom like you who cause “fake fathers” to appear and sarin gas to be released.

This wisdom is the wisdom to “live slowly” as some young women do in an everyday that goes on forever without trying to seek a “bright future.” This is a state of “not engaging in any particularly ‘passionate romance’ or becoming devoted to ‘religion.’ That is not to say, however, that it is a form of shying away from communication because of a psychological complex or desperately searching to find their true self.” In this way they melt into the urban landscape as fragments of it.

After quoting a young female Aum member who said, “I wanted to engage in spiritual training and become as white and pure as this devotee’s outfit,” Miyadai writes as follows.

Miyadai is saying two things here. The first is “let’s just live our lives slowly in this endless everyday without looking for some kind of shining self.” The second is “rather than trying to ‘purify’ our selves that can never become completely pure, let’s instead begin by honestly accepting these selves that cannot be completely purified.”

I share Miyadai’s feelings when it comes to the latter assertion. As I emphasized in Chapter Two, I think we must first honestly accept and embrace the evil and worldly desires we human beings inevitably possess as aspects of our selves, and then investigate how we ought to live as individuals carrying this evil and these worldly desires. I therefore believe this second assertion is correct.

I cannot, however, accept Miyadai’s first assertion. I cannot accept it because the people who took part in the Aum incident had been driven so far into a corner that their minds could never be changed by inducements from an intellectual such as “let’s live the endless everyday slowly.” If these were people who could make suitable compromises with their surrounding and live slowly, why did they give away all of their possessions for Aum, leave home, and become devotees? Did they not indeed enter Aum because this was impossible for them?

Those who left their homes to join Aum, or those at risk of doing so, were those who, when they tried to adapt to our actual society, were unable to choose to live “slowly” in spite of various trial-and-error attempts, and left society behind in order to seek absolute truth and the meaning of life.

In other words, this prescription of Miyadai’s will not reach those who enter Aum looking for absolute truth and the meaning of life.

Miyadai’s prescription functions only as a stamp of approval for people who live their lives however is easiest but feel somehow guilty about it, a reassurance that “it’s ok to live like that. There’s nothing you need to feel bad about.” It can never reach people who attempt to reconsider and reject the idea of “living however is easiest” itself. Miyadai’s words will never reach the hearts and minds of people who, while attempting to find the meaning of life in religion, stand uncertain at its threshold. They are not words that will be understood and resonate in the minds of people who joined Aum or might have joined Aum.

Miyadai’s assertion that we should “live the endless everyday slowly” does not move me at all.

I can say without any flattery or irony that as social analysis I think this book of Miyadai’s is very well done, but its message doesn’t resonate with me. Nowhere in this text can I find a message for someone like me who might indeed have joined Aum. Perhaps people who have been badly mistaken like me will eventually just grow old and disappear. Even after I am dead, however, surely many others will be born with the same sort of psychological characteristics I now possess.

2. Approaches Outside of Religion

Osamu Hashimoto’s Religion Isn’t Anything To Be Afraid of doggedly pursues the questions “What is religion?” and “Who are the Japanese people?” while engaging in an analysis of the Aum incident. The intuitive insights scattered throughout this book are superb. I had not read it when I wrote the first chapter of this book, “How to Live in a Post-Religious Age,” and submitted it to a journal for publication. Coming across it later I was surprised to find that Hashimoto had emphasized many of the same things I was asserting.

Hashimoto says that what Japanese people need today is to think about things for themselves and to endure the loneliness this brings. This is precisely what I argued in Chapter One.

He says that we are troubled by questions like “Is it really OK for me to just go on like this?” and “Will I never be anything more?”, the answers to which never seem to appear. Since we cannot find the answers to these questions no matter how much we think about them, we start to wonder, “Isn’t there someone somewhere who can come up with an answer for me? Doesn’t this kind of easy answer exist?” And then by hastily looking for this answer in someone else’s words or in some kind of doctrine we move closer to religion.

As we draw closer to religion in this way, we are conscious of the fact that we are unable to understand “faith.” We come to believe that it is because we cannot understand faith that we are unable to find the answers to our questions.

But to constantly think about things with your own mind is to endure the loneliness of facing the world alone. This is very difficult and painful.

Hashimoto is saying that we have no choice but to think about things with our own minds and endure the loneliness this brings. I said the same thing in Chapter One.

No matter how determined we are to think with our own minds and endure this loneliness, however, because human beings are weak creatures we often succumb to our own weakness and cling to other people. The problem of what to do in this kind of situation remains. One possible approach is to say that this is an obstacle the person in question has to overcome on their own, and the rest of us ought to leave them well enough alone. But I think that some sort of support may indeed be necessary. This must be mutual support, however, not the kind of “I will heal you” support that Yutaka Ozaki tried and failed to provide.

While Hashimoto takes the position that religion is fundamentally a relic of the past, he suggests that the possibility of religion providing this kind of support remains.

It may well be correct to say that religion is “love that calls out to people.” And I’m sure there are indeed cases in which religion can offer encouragement. But I don’t think a voice that encourages people to think about things with their own minds “will inevitably become a religion.” There must be another way to encourage this. There must be an approach in which people without any faith whatsoever can encourage each other and think about things on their own. That this will inevitably lead to religion is Hashimoto’s pessimistic belief.

Mutual encouragement is always at risk of transforming, before anyone realizes it, into a community of shifted responsibility in which individuals merely drink the nectar by having someone else do their thinking for them. That is why what I am looking for is an approach in which people encourage each other to think with their own minds while guarding against this risk to the greatest extent possible. This is precisely what I have been attempting throughout this book.

In the Aum incident, as Shinji Miyadai points out, there is the paradox that people who were “overflowing with conscience” and wanted to do good released sarin gas in an act of indiscriminate terrorism in order to accomplish their good deeds. I think one of the causes that led to such a thing occurring was indeed people who had lost the ability to think about standards of right and wrong with their own minds simply doing Asahara’s bidding. On this point Miyadai’s analysis is correct.

I also think, however, that a “dynamism of blindfolding oneself” may have been at work as a causal factor behind this paradox. In the past I have referred to this blindfolding mechanism that lies submerged within our minds and our society as the “Ubasute problem,” but I think the same sort of thing is happening here as well.

It is said that among those who entered Aum, there were many people who became devotees in order to pursue questions like “What is the truth?” “What is right?” and “What is the meaning of life?” As Takashi Tachibana has also speculated, it is reasonable to think that this kind of motivation was strong among the high-ranking members who took part in the incident directly, and that it had been further strengthened by mystical experiences.

Here let us imagine someone earnestly seeking truth, what is right, and the meaning of life. They become a devotee in a religious group that says it will provide answers to these questions. There they are taught a worldview in which such and such is the correct truth, the law of the universe, and the way to live. They buy into this worldview, start studying, undertake spiritual practices, and try to begin a new way of life. In most cases, this kind of worldview demands an ascetic lifestyle, compels obedience to certain commandments, and has as its aim the creation of an ideal person.

But there is a problem that weighs constantly on the devotee who takes this kind of path and seeks to deepen their faith: there is an intractable disparity between their “self as it actually exists here and now” and their “self as it ought to be according to religion.” This is something that occurs in every religion. For example, not only in Aum, but in many variants of Buddhism as well, the taking of a life is doctrinally forbidden. You must not indiscriminately kill living creatures such as animals or insects. Because it forbade even the killing of kitchen cockroaches, the sinks of Aum are said to have been swarming with them. But even as they discipline themselves toward becoming the “self I ought to be,” there is nothing the devotee can do about the “here and now” self who kills mosquitos or other pests, eats meat, and drinks alcohol. They are faced with this gap between the ideal and the actual.

Because the control and surveillance of the senior members is very strict, the regular devotees at the bottom of a religious organization’s hierarchy take this disparity to be the fault of their own inadequacies and continue to harshly discipline themselves and train hard in order to attain their ideal self. When they reach the upper levels of the hierarchy, however, there are now few people controlling them, and the scrutiny they are under weakens. When this happens, basically there is nothing for them to do but obey the precepts of their religion through their own self-restraint and self-control.

Having reached these upper levels, once again they are confronted by the disparity between their “self as it actually exists here and now” and their “self as it ought to be according to religion.” No matter how high their rank has become, they still have not attained complete enlightenment. Worldly passions and desires are still buried inside them. But since they are bathed in the adoring gaze of lower ranking members who see them as a great person of advanced religious practice, it will not do for them to let themselves behave badly.

At the point where control from above is loosened, the devotee faces the inescapable struggle against their self directly. If they are extremely strong-willed, they will continue to pursue a thorough dialogue with their self, and through interacting with a god or transcendental entity may head unswervingly down a path toward some sort of overcoming of their self that exists here and now. There are presumably other ways, too, of proceeding without dodging the issue.

But here there is also another path to take. This is the path of inventing some kind of mechanism that allows you to “not have to see” your “self that exists here and now” and erecting it around yourself. To give a simpler example, in the distant past Japanese Buddhist sects forbade their monks from drinking alcohol, because to do so was against the tenets of their religion. Being human, however, there were times when even the devout wanted a drink. What was “invented” in this case was a habit of calling alcohol “wisdom water [prajñā-water]” and drinking it on the sly. They drank it while telling themselves, “It isn’t against the rules because it’s ‘wisdom water.’” At first they might have been reluctant, but with time they got used to it and came to think nothing of it. At some point even the awareness that what they were doing was forbidden presumably faded away. The technique of renaming alcohol “wisdom water” seems to have functioned as a mechanism that allowed them to “not have to see” the fact that they were drinking alcohol. Aum, too, did the same sort of thing. For example, its tenets forbade the killing of living creatures. But as became clear in the investigation following the sarin gas incident, its members had in fact cruelly murdered many people who had gotten in the way of their organization. It seems that at some point they began to refer to murder as “powa” in their own cant. In Aum’s teachings, “powa” means shifting one’s consciousness from a lower world to a higher world, but it also came to refer to the completely different activity of killing people. Here, too, a mechanism of changing the way of referring to something was operating. By calling murder “powa” they escaped seeing the reality that what they were doing was murder and thus something that violated both morality and the law. When this tendency was carried to an extreme, the result was Aum members saying things like “Isn’t it great they got ‘powa-ed’?” while committing acts of indiscriminate killing, as was seen during the sarin gas incident.

In organizations such as Aum that emphasize autonomous religious practice at the level of the individual, mechanisms of “not having to see” are also needed among ordinary devotees. For example, in many cases they harbored a strong desire for their own beings to become pure, or “white.” Through religious practice they hoped to bleach their dirty selves, which had been sullied by the pollution of reality, and attain a “true self” that was completely pure. And they wanted to reach this state as quickly as possible.

But it is impossible for ordinary people to become completely pure overnight. No matter how much religious practice they accumulate, desire, vice, envy, confusing thoughts, lust for power, the taking of lives, and violations of their religion’s commandments surely continue to swirl within them. While seeming to have departed from their bodies, in fact these things remain stubbornly alive deep inside them, welling up from within when any sort of opening presents itself.

When this polluted self appears, these people directly face the disparity between their “self as it actually exists here and now” and their “self as it ought to be according to religion.” Here what they really ought to do is carefully examine themselves through introspection and deepen their contemplation. When the desire to quickly become pure is too strong, however, they become frustrated with their self that is still stuck at this early stage. Here the kind of blindfolding structure we have been discussing starts to function. They banish the fact that desire, vice, and a lust for power exist within them from their field of view. Even though these things are right in front of their eyes, they pretend they don’t exist. Even though they are plain to see, they act as if they were invisible.

One mechanism employed to this end is the spreading of depictions that “such things actually do not exist.” Aum’s publications targeting ordinary believers and outsiders are full of images of devotees living lives full of smiles and happiness. There is no desire, wickedness, or betrayal. There is only smiling and contentment. This is what is portrayed. As these publications are intended as bait to lure in people who are outside of the organization, it is perhaps natural that they would not include anything negative. Additionally, however, I think this perception of the current situation as being inundated with happiness is also one sought by the devotees themselves in the deepest part of their psyches. I think this sort of depiction is desired by devotees as a reinforcing mechanism that allows them to “not have to see” the desires, depression, and wickedness inside themselves.

Another mechanism involves attributing something unfavorable that has occurred within a religious organization to the work of those outside the organization. When a large number of people fall ill within the organization, or something emerges to greatly impede its operations, rather than thinking of this as “reaping what they have sown,” they blame everything on an external conspiracy. By doing so they avoid having to see it as their own problem. Aum was indeed inundated with various conspiracy theories, including that of the Freemasons. The structure of attempting to explain problems whose causes lay within themselves as being the result of external conspiracies also functioned as a mechanism of “not having to see” their own sullied or impure aspects. This was further bolstered by their being in a space of religious practice closed off from the outside world. They avoided having to see various things by wrapping themselves in a membrane that filtered the information they received.

By deploying these sorts of mechanisms in layers around themselves, it becomes possible for people to banish the “self as it actually exists here and now” from sight and superimpose on themselves an image of the “self as it ought to be according to religion.” Ultimately people who take these sorts of measures end up becoming unable to see what they are actually doing in the real world. They become unable to see the social significance of what their own bodies are doing. They become only capable of explaining themselves through a self-justifying way of thinking that sees everything they have done as rational and correct. Their logic is that since they have become the “self I am supposed to be,” there must not be anything wrong with what they have done.

When someone manages to avoid having to see “the self I don’t want to look at” in this way, in what sort of psychological state do they end up? The answer is easy. They experience their self as if it had truly been reborn. The things they had been worrying about in the past seem like illusions. Their worries have been dispelled. Now “there are no worries at all.” This is presumably a very refreshing, pleasant world full of joy; they must feel as though they had shed their confused past self and obtained a new one. There may be some who mistakenly take this to be “enlightenment.” Such is their relief when this burden is removed from their shoulders. This must be a truly pleasant state, and once you have tasted it you must never want to let it go. Seeing only the self you want to see, not having to see the self you don’t want to see, and a community that will allow you to go on doing this. If such a place existed, wouldn’t everyone want to live there?

When people enter a state of not having to see the self they don’t want to see, they truly cannot see the significance of what their bodies are doing. They don’t realize that when they kill someone in a nation governed by the rule of law they are committing murder. They end up falling into the reasoning that “the self I ought to be” has only done “good things,” so what could be amiss? In the case of the sarin gas incident the perpetrators had some reservations about what they were doing so I don’t think it had reached this level of completeness, but the foundations of their way of thinking must have been something like what I have just described. I think this kind of underlying structure can also be seen in Miyadai’s “wandering conscience” paradox.

Incidentally, doesn’t the problem I have just described also exist here on this side of society where we ourselves live? Isn’t our understanding that this was the pitfall that a special community like Aum fell into a blindfolding structure that conceals a similar problem on our side of this society? I cannot help but think that this is the case.

A few years ago, I attended a symposium on global environmental issues. I had been conducting research on environmental ethics, so I was on stage as a panelist. Various factors that had led to the global environmental crisis were introduced. The political, military and economic colonial domination of the countries of the South by the countries of the North formed the backdrop. On top of this, developed countries had spilled the polluted materials that accompanied their industrialization beyond the areas where their own citizens lived. These harmful substances had diffused, passing through the Earth’s complex network of substance circulation, and the damage they caused had spread to every corner of the globe. The global environmental crisis is a crisis that has already gone beyond national borders. Every individual must therefore employ for themselves an imagination that goes beyond the interests of the area in which they live. For this reason, too, it is necessary to establish an environmental ethics in which the Earth belongs to all of humanity, including the people of future generations.

At the time I had some doubts about this “environmental ethics” way of thinking, and I wasn’t able to completely go along with this line of argument. When we say these things, how are we supposed to deal with the desires of the people living here and now? I had these kinds of doubts. So I put up my hand and said the following. “We who are living right now, whatever we may say, want to live in comfort and pleasure. Isn’t that true of the majority of us? What is the point of preaching an ethics of living simply to such people?”

A famous university professor responded to my comment. “I understand what you are trying to say. But being pessimistic like that won’t change the situation. There must be something we can do here and now. Starting right now, even if it’s only a little at a time, can’t we start doing things like working to reduce the energy we use and throwing away less garbage? Isn’t it this kind of accumulation of small things that is important?”
I had no reply to this. All I could do was back down. I thought that what he had said was indeed correct. The rest of the discussion, too, then moved on in the direction of his remarks.

After the symposium had ended, I was waiting for the bus. The professor who had responded to me in the discussion session approached me and we chatted for a bit. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “Wow,” I thought, “this professor smokes even though he’s an ecologist.” The bus came. The people who had been waiting walked toward the boarding area. The professor and I also took a step forward. I will never forget what he did next. He dropped the lit cigarette at his feet, stubbed it out with the bottom of his shoe, and pushed it through a hole in the sewer grate. In that instant I was frozen, unable to move. I could only stare at everything he was doing and then at the opening in the sewer grate that is normally used to drain rainwater. What had he been saying just now at the symposium? Hadn’t he said we should start right away by throwing away less garbage, and gradually, even if only a little at a time, accumulate positive changes? Saying this, hadn’t he received heartfelt agreement from everyone in attendance? How could this same man have just kicked his cigarette butt into a sewer grate right in front of my eyes as though it were the most natural thing in the world? What sort of person was this? What had I just seen?

When it comes right down to it, he was someone who never noticed the significance of what he had done. That is all I can think. He never noticed the enormous contradiction between his assertion that we should save energy, reduce garbage, and accumulate these sorts of actions a little bit at a time and his actual conduct of tossing his cigarette butt into the sewer. He may even have been completely unaware of the fact that had tossed his butt away after finishing a cigarette. He may have had no awareness whatsoever of what his own body was doing. As he was unconsciously flicking his butt into the gutter, in his mind he may well have been absorbed in formulating an action plan to solve an environmental problem.
This is just my supposition, but since he was constantly telling other people that we have to protect the environment, the existence of a self that did the opposite must have been inconvenient for him. In such situations, rather than more bothersome options such as not smoking outside or carrying around an ashtray, he presumably chose the easier option of eliminating all awareness of his own actions when he did such things. He thereby managed to avoid having to see that he was littering the street with his own cigarette butts. The existence of this littering self was erased from his world. It must have made things very easy for him. This way he could devote all of his energy to solving environmental problems.

What, I would like to ask, is the difference between people who commit acts of indiscriminate terrorism and say, “Isn’t it great they got ‘powa-ed’?” and this professor? When it comes to this kind of structure, aren’t they the same?

I suspect that I myself, and you who are reading this book, are also caught up in the same kind of structure without knowing it. I can see no reason to think we are exceptions.

This is a very important point, so let us examine it a bit more deeply.
Take, for example, what is referred to as the “women’s movement” or “feminism,” a movement that addresses true equality, fairness, and symbiosis between men and women in society, and seeks to effect social change. There are very few people who would say they oppose equality between men and women. But when you look at what is actually happening in our society you see things like gender discrimination in wages, sexual harassment in the workplace, and terrible employment discrimination. There is nobody who is unaware of this difference between what is proclaimed and the actual situation.

Feminists are doing things to try to close this gap. They point out what is wrong with the social structures that give rise to discrimination, protest against the unfairness of preconceptions that say, “This is how women should be,” and blow the whistle on actual discrimination and sexual violence. Over and over again, they call out the fact that this gap between men and women not only exists in cases that are easy to see, such as employment discrimination and rape, but is constantly being reinforced by the words, attitudes, and customs of men found in our daily lives and in our workplaces. They have asserted that the structure of society as a whole won’t change unless we make changes in the current state of affairs at the level of this sort of subtle, everyday behavior.

I think these women’s way of thinking is very persuasive. The subtle problematic behaviors that men unconsciously engage in towards women in daily life are, from the male side, the most difficult to see. Just like the professor I mentioned earlier was unable to see the significance of dropping cigarette butts in the street, what women find unpleasant about men and society in their daily lives, what makes them frustrated and angry, is very difficult for men to see.

There is a male professor who is always proclaiming the need for true equality between men and women. He is a self-described ally of feminists. He believes that all discrimination in society should be eradicated, and that we must ensure that women have the same rights as men in all cases. When he hears there has been sexual harassment he gets as angry as if it had happened to him. This professor interacts with female university students in his classes and talks to them about feminism.

“Men and women must be equal, so I want you to have the self-confidence to speak up and give your own opinions,” he says. “You mustn’t go on putting up with these problems in silence, because one step at a time you women can change society by asserting yourselves. I want you to think this way even in this class. Up until now the male students have taken part in our discussions enthusiastically, and the female students have not said very much at all. But I’m sure there must be many things you want to say. Aren’t there? If so, it’s OK to start expressing yourself.”
Then the class begins. Because of what the professor said, the female students talk much more than usual. Male and female students speak one after the other, and the professor adds comments and criticisms to what they have said. As this continues, however, the amount of talking being done by the female students decreases noticeably. The professor doesn’t know why this is happening.

What the professor couldn’t see was what the “body language” of his facial expressions and gestures was communicating when his female students were talking. At first his female students were enticed to speak more, but they couldn’t help sensing with their entire bodies the unvoiced “discomfort” that was evident in his expression and response when they made their own assertions. That is why they found it increasingly difficult to speak and eventually stopped talking altogether.

The professor is completely unable to see that his body language is sending his female students exactly the opposite message of his verbal assertions.

Insofar as he too is unaware of the significance of what his own body is actually doing, this professor is the same as the one who tossed his cigarette butt into the drain.

Instances of this sort of thing can presumably be found all around us if we look for them. Women, too, can sometimes become unable to see something important because of their self-consciousness that they are feminists. This can be seen in cases such as those in which a woman shifts the blame for an unhappy state of affairs arising from her own personal traits onto the structure of male domination. There are cases in which even feminism functions as a mechanism to avoid having to see something. This is thus a problem for both men and women, for you and I, for each one of us living in this time and place.

Feminism teaches us that the history of humanity up to this point has been a history of the domination of women by men on various levels. Of course, as women too can be said to have supported this domination from the other side, in this sense they are complicit in this state of affairs, but their supporting this domination was the result of there being no other way for them to survive or enjoy a certain standard of living.

Within modern societies that have become quite wealthy, women have begun to voice a desire to change these sorts of male-dominated social structures. Since contemporary society rejects inequality based on sex as a concept, it cannot ignore the calls of these women. Men, too, must support equality and fairness between men and women on a conceptual level. As everyone knows about the unfair treatment to which women are subjected in Japanese society, displaying an understanding of the feminism that calls for reform in this society gives one the air of a liberal intellectual. As feminist discourse has become more common in the mass media, the number of male scholars who include feminism in their area of study has increased.

When a man first encounters feminism, he presumably understands it as follows. “Up until now society has operated with men dominating women, but from now on we must change this society into one in which men and women maintain relationships of true equality. Feminism is seeking this kind of society and working towards creating it.”

This assertion in quotation marks is indeed what feminism has said. Broadly speaking it is not mistaken. Men are therefore correct to understand this sort of thing to be the central claim of feminism.
What is important, however, is that this assertion in quotation marks is not all there is to feminism. Only half of what feminism asserts is expressed in this statement.

Why is this the case? Because the assertion feminism wants to make is the kind of assertion that can only be partially expressed in the form of a statement in quotation marks.

So what is the other half of what feminism asserts that remains hidden behind this statement? It is asking you who have understood what is stated in quotation marks how you are going to actually transform your relationships with the women around you from this moment onward. This is what is most difficult to communicate to men. The reason it is so difficult is that this is the message men are most reluctant to face. That is why it is difficult to get it across to them.

Some of the male intellectuals and scholars who don’t want to face this message actively display an understanding of feminist thought, study it, and attempt to engage in discourse on it. By doing so they expect that they can together delude themselves into believing that the proposition contained in quotation marks above is all that feminism is asking. The more a man wants to avoid facing feminism’s other message, the more he tries to demonstrate his understanding of its “propositional content.” We must not lose sight of the paradox that arises here.

Let me say it again. The more a man wants to avoid changing his actual behavior starting right now, the more he supports and tries to understand the “discourse” of feminism.

Men who are always proclaiming in front of others, “Just as feminism says, up until now men have dominated women, but going forward we must create a society in which men and women can co-exist equally,” do you really understand the meaning of what you are saying? Feminism does not only assert that we must understand this kind of “proposition.” What feminism wants more than anything is to ask how you who have accepted this “proposition” are going to change your relationships with the women around you from this moment onward. Feminism’s query is pointed at you and no one else. Can you truly stand face to face with it? Are you really prepared to change the way you are, starting right now? This is what the movement called “feminism” is truly asking.

The sense of distrust and irritation shown by women towards men who display an understanding of feminism comes from their having encountered, over and over again, men who, while they may understand the “propositions” of feminism, make no changes in their actual behavior or attitude. This is not equivalent to having adopted feminism.

As you have probably noticed, when I say “you” or “men,” I mean men who are reading this book right now. And I mean me, the man who is writing it, too. To encounter feminism is to get “caught up” in feminism. To get caught up and tossed around, and to be conscious of yourself being tossed around. Having simply “understood” does not mean you have encountered feminism. Displaying an understanding of feminism precisely because you don’t want to change is an awful attitude to take.

In the sense that it brings this subterfuge to the fore, feminism is truly great. (So far I have given one example involving a scholar throwing away his cigarette butts and another involving a self-described “feminist” man. I suspect that among the women reading this there will be many who feel that the disingenuous attitude adopted by men towards women is not so simple. I think they are right. These two examples made a particularly strong impression on me, but for women in particular they may be no more than the sort of thing they see every day. I plan to address this kind of gap between the sexes in my next book.)

This sort of thing is not limited to feminism and environmentalism. Indeed, I think the same thing confronts us when we consider the Aum incident.

To the critics who look at the thoughts and actions of Aum devotees and make various critiques of them from a secure and lofty perch, I want to shout at the top of my voice, “Do you understand the real issue the Aum incident is pointing out to us?” Its essence is not questions such as whether Aum is really a religion, or what we should think about the relationship between religion and evil. The fundamental question posed by the Aum incident is this: “How are you, someone who has come face to face with Aum, going to live in this society starting right now?”

The question Aum puts to us is not “What is Aum?” What it asks us is “Who are you who have witnessed Aum, and how are you going to live from now on?”

A large segment of devotees, unable to find meaning in living within this dirty society, joined Aum seeking “absolute truth,” their “true self,” and the “meaning of life.” As a result of looking for such answers, some of the leaders themselves carried out acts of indiscriminate terrorism.

“We leading devotees of Aum chose a way of life in which we pursued absolute truth, our true selves, and the meaning of life. And we failed. This failure was exposed to you in its entirety. So now we would like to ask you. What exactly is it that you are seeking as you live within this thoroughly sullied society? What is it that you think is the truth, what is it that you think is your true self, in what do you find the meaning of life as you live your lives day in and day out? This is what we want you to tell us. Rather than criticize us from on high, we want you to show us your own view of the truth, your own view of life, your own way of living. If you have never considered such questions, take the Aum incident as an opportunity to do so and tell us even a little bit about the way of living and direction you are going to take going forward as you contemplate your own life and death from now on. We failed. But now we are turning to you and asking you this with our entire beings. We want to say it one more time. All of you who have said this or that about Aum, how are you going to live your own lives in this post-religious era? What is the meaning of life to you? We want you to look at this directly and raise your voices on it.”

I think this is the fundamental question that Aum is putting to us. And this book is my earnest response.

Thus far I have been considering this question while taking the Aum incident, feminism, and ecology as my subject matter. I think I can also add bioethics to this, because the structures of “not having to see” I have been discussing, and the structures in which the behavior of those who are thinking about these problems themselves is being called into question, can also be seen in the difficult problems of the present era concerning brain death, organ transplantation, and abortion. When it comes to organ transplantation, there are discourse structures that conceal the desires of those who receive transplants, and concerning abortion and contraception, too, the discussion should immediately come back to what is to be done in regard to sexual intercourse from now on.

I therefore think it is necessary to simultaneously consider at least these four topics of bioethics, environmental ethics, new religions, and feminism. This is why I have often mentioned these four topics in the process of formulating “life studies.”

Why have “blindfolding structures” that allow us to avoid seeing what we don’t want to see come into being? At their foundation there is presumably an intractable natural inclination to not see what we don’t want to see. To go on looking at what we don’t want to see is indeed painful. It is easier if we don’t have to look. A mentality of wanting to take the easier path exists in each of us.

In addition, blindfolding structures also emerge when the estrangement between the “self as it actually exists here and now” and the “ideal self as it ought to exist” becomes too severe. I am doing everything I can to become my ideal self, but no matter how hard I try I never reach my goal. The gap between this ideal self and my actual self as it exists now is very painful. In such cases, it is not surprising that a subconscious desire to not see what actually exists emerges.

I think we are in fact bound by many blindfolding structures. We are no doubt tied up in many layers of blindfolding structures of which we are unaware. I myself have for many years been bound by a blindfolding structure that caused me to ignore the voices of feminism. I am therefore not only talking about other people.

When someone is bound by a blindfolding structure, they become unable to see what their true self is like. The ecologist who threw his cigarette butts on the ground had clearly lost sight of what his true self was. If we want to pursue our true selves, we must therefore make a continuous effort to bring blindfolding structures into view and confront them. We must constantly endeavor to keep our eyes open to them while deceiving our inclination to become comfortable.

Your “true self” is not obtained by closing your eyes and making yourself “completely white.” Your “true self” is something that emerges each time you engage in the process of opening your eyes and looking unflinchingly at what you don’t want to see.

There is a way of thinking in which my “true self” is something that shines like a star somewhere far above my head, a destination I will reach after lengthy religious training or devotion, but this view is mistaken. Instead, in the midst of the process of looking at my self that exists right now in a form I don’t want to see while enduring the suffering this causes, my “true self” arises each time I do this as the unified whole of the self I discover there and the self that is engaged in looking at it.

But discovering the blindfolding structures by which I am blinkered and removing them through my own efforts alone is an extremely difficult task. The shape of my own self is the most difficult thing for me to see. This can best be seen by looking through another person’s eyes. But a complete stranger won’t pay attention to me or engage with me. It is only the small number of people to whom I am important who will engage with me and teach me about the self I do not want to see. Or the small number of people who hate me and want to somehow bring me down. These are the only sorts of people who will thrust the blindfolding structures by which I am blinkered in front of my face and make me see them.

Encountering the blindfolding structures in which I am blinkered is therefore something that happens in the course of my engaging in deep, intense interactions with other people. In some cases I may have them shoved violently in my face by another person, and in other cases I may engage with another person and in doing so discover them by myself. In Chapter Two I said that when something foreign intrudes from the outside it can give you an opportunity to open your eyes, and this is precisely what I meant. When I engage in a foreign and unpleasant interaction with another person, I encounter what blindfolds me.

First, it is something discovered in the course of the personal, everyday movements of my body or my normal, routine ways of thinking. It is in these sorts of ordinary, subtle workings of my body and mind that traces of what binds me most deeply appear. In order to face what is binding me, it is therefore necessary to carefully examine and bring to light, one by one, the most personal aspects of how I act, what I think, and what words I use. What are the things I am doing or saying that run counter to, or bear no relation to, my own consciousness? I must acknowledge each of them in turn.

Second, discovering a blindfolding structure is very painful. Discovering it is painful, facing it directly is painful, and overcoming it is painful. It can be so painful I might think it would be better to go back to how things were before. This is the aspect of my self I want to avoid seeing the most, so having it revealed is inevitably going to be painful. We must understand this point clearly. Facing this kind of thing directly is difficult for everyone. If we forget this we will end up back where we started.

We must also be aware that discovering these structures takes time. They are not so easy to find. I am attempting to reverse my own efforts at concealment and uncover something I myself have been hiding, so it will certainly take time. It may take a very long time to get from having a vague notion of what I have been concealing from myself to being able to clearly acknowledge it. After I discover it, it may take an even longer time before I am able to work up the resolve to attempt to overcome it by myself. What is important is to be forgiving with myself about the fact that this takes time. I discover these things slowly, and I change slowly. This is fine, because it is wanting to do something right away, to reach enlightenment quickly, that gives rise to these kinds of blindfolding structures. We must go at our own pace, and we must be forgiving of each other in this regard.

Third, after I have discovered a blindfolding structure and come face to face with the true figure of my self, I have no choice but to transform my self. I must decide for myself how to deal with the “figure of my self I don’t want to see” that becomes visible when the blindfolding structure is removed. Choosing not to see, too, is indeed one way of dealing with this situation. But if I believe that after having seen this true figure there is no going back to the way things were before, only one option remains. I must change the structure of my self so that the “self I don’t want to see” doesn’t end up getting hidden in the world below my consciousness. This may involve transforming the “self I don’t want to see” into something else through some kind of effort, or transforming myself so that I can continue to look directly at the “self I don’t want to see” and engage in dialogue with it. In either case, I must change my self in a deep sense.

Changing my self in this way inevitably requires interacting with other people. Seeing what I don’t want to see and changing a self that does not want to change is arduous and difficult to endure. To bear such a burden and press forward on my own is an extraordinarily difficult task. I therefore want to have a small number of important people who can support me, even if only for a moment, when I feel I am about to be crushed under the weight of this burden. I also want to hear inspiring and encouraging words from other people far away who are carrying the same sort of burden and attempting to walk the same sort of path. I don’t want a healing community of the kind Yutaka Ozaki tried to build. Instead, what I want is voices of encouragement from far away and love from close by. And I too will keep on hurling my message with all of my strength to anonymous others who are struggling against themselves far away.

What is needed right now is therefore the “courage” to set out down this sort of path.

To go on living in this world people must bear burdens they cannot carry on their own. There are times when we feel as though this weight is going to crush us as we struggle to stand on our own two feet. At such times we wish for someone who could share our burden or carry it for us.

But it is impossible for someone to take on the burden another person is carrying directly. That burden must be carried by that other person themselves until the very end. In this sense I think that people are completely isolated or cut off from one another.

But when you who are carrying this kind of burden are struggling to deal with it on your own, there are things I can do to assist you in your struggle from the sidelines. Without shouldering your burden for you directly, I can stand beside you and support you as you carry it yourself.

Of course, the situation in which you support someone nearby with whom you have a close relationship is different from that in which you support someone far away whom you don’t know. Acknowledging these differences is very important.

Assistance provided in such a way that I take responsibility for your life is only possible in the case of the small number of other people I encounter in an inevitable way.

In the case of other people, I cannot and must not support them in a way in which I take responsibility for their lives. If I take on other people beyond my capacity, I will only end up destroying myself.

But I am not saying that we should coldly ignore these other people. Instead, I want to look for a way to encourage them and give them strength from a distance. Surely there must be a way of connecting people in which the words and voice I send out can reach a suffering person unknown to me and provide even a small amount of support to lighten the load that person is carrying, just like when the words of someone I don’t know reach me and save me.

The meaning of life cannot be made clear by science. But taking the path of faith is also impossible. Swinging back and forth between science and religion, some of us are unable to belong to either, but neither are we able to bury ourselves in this society as it exists and spend our days just enjoying ourselves. Isn’t it important to create a network of mutual support for those of us who find ourselves in this situation so that we can better seek the meaning of our own lives using our own eyes, minds, bodies and words?

To think exhaustively using your own eyes and mind means that in the end you must confront your own “solitude” by yourself. To confront your own solitude is extremely painful. It might be reasonable for you to cling to answers given by someone else. But at such times I hope you have the courage to hold out to the very end, think things through with your own eyes and mind, and continue pursuing the answer.

We are all inevitably burdened with worldly desires and evil. What stands in the way of seeking the meaning of life are these unavoidable worldly desires that permeate our bodies and the weakness that makes it impossible to look directly at them. This is true of everyone. Unless they are born a saint, everyone suffers from these problems. So I hope you will take just a little bit of courage and look directly at your own fallibility, worldly desires, and evil. I hope you become able to see these things and begin by accepting the existence of your self just as it is. I hope that you take this as your starting point.

Sometimes when I am in a world I think is fine just as it is, a foreign entity from the outside invades this world and tries to destroy it. This invader may be an enemy who intrudes on my world with ill intent, or an ally who does so out of love. When something comes to destroy your world from the outside, you should face it directly, and in the process of this confrontation you should try scrutinizing and relativizing yourself and your world from an external perspective. This too should be undertaken using your own eyes and mind. I want you to have this kind of courage. The result of this may be that the invader retreats, or it may be that you collapse. Whatever the outcome, I want you to make this kind of attempt. This may amount to confronting the “father” in your mind and killing him, but isn’t it worth doing nonetheless? For those of you who grew up in a family without a father who was a strong presence, isn’t your “father killing” still unfinished? I hope by engaging in such efforts you can find your self.

When a charismatic figure appears, it is very easy to create a healing community of shifted responsibility centered on this figure in which this figure is expected to provide the ultimate answers. But this stops everyone else from thinking, and makes whatever comes out of this community, good or bad, the responsibility of this charismatic leader. It also binds those who take part in it in layer upon layer of blindfolding structures. It does indeed feel good to be inside such a community and continue drinking its sweet nectar. But is feeling good really what you are looking for? Is feeling good the most important thing in life? I want you to have the courage to reexamine the pleasure in which you are immersed and think about how this pleasure is created.

When you have noticed a blindfolding structure in which you are bound, and somewhere inside yourself realized that you have to change, how wonderful would it be to have the courage to resolve to try, at your own pace, to actually make this change. When people are obtaining pleasure or have vested interests they generally don’t try to change. How great it would be to have the courage to transform, little by little and with tears in your eyes, this self that feels as though it is shackled to a tremendous weight.

I cannot sustain this kind of courage on my own. I always lose heart. While trying to change, before I know it, I have slipped back to where I started. Having courage is painful and tiring, and sometimes I become so desperate I want to give up my attempt. There are even times when, in reaction to all of the efforts I have made so far, I intentionally do the very thing I should have avoided most. No matter how far I go, my own weakness will not disappear. I cannot overcome this self who is incapable of holding on to his courage. That is who I am.

So when I am at risk of giving up, I want you to encourage me and bolster my strength so that I can somehow manage to hold on to my courage. With this kind of network of people urging each other to have courage from a suitable and modest distance, even I may be able to confront my self. I may be able to maintain the courage to face myself just the slightest bit longer than usual. And I may be able to offer words of encouragement to others.

This is what I wanted to say in this book. It is a message for you, and also words of encouragement for me, its author.

I have said that a network is needed. But this network itself must not be closed off from what is outside it. A network of mutual encouragement in the pursuit of the meaning of life with one’s own eyes and mind must not be closed off from people or communities that do not live this way. Instead of these people who share the same goal narcissistically licking each other’s wounds, it is essential that each one of them constantly engage in communication and meaningful confrontation with people outside of this network.

People who attempt to think with their own eyes and mind must not close themselves off from others. They must maintain as much contact as possible with people who choose to live differently. They must constantly try to engage in the state of “non-understanding” (neither side being able to understand the other at all) that will inevitably arise between themselves and these people who live in other ways. It is important not to run away from the “impossibility of understanding.” Through the “impossibility of understanding,” they must go on trying to discover both their own true self and the true self of the people with whom they are interacting.

Of course, it is a desire to understand another person that gives rise to communication. Supported by a desire for love and understanding, I set out into the sea of communication. As a result, through dialogue and collision with other people, what had been impossible to understand becomes comprehensible. When this happens, it is a tremendous achievement.

Afterwards, however, I must further open myself up to a new impossibility of understanding. In this way I am always opening myself up to the “impossibility of understanding” and “mystery.”

What I need in order to continue looking for my “true self” is not “understanding” but “mystery.” To live an impossibility of understanding; this is to open oneself up to “mystery” and strive to receive the “voice of the soul” that mystery sends. To put it another way, I think this is the meaning of eros. What Aum was lacking was this kind of eros.

I said that when we encounter a foreign substance from the outside, or become aware of a blindfolding structure, it becomes necessary for us to transform ourselves. But if I change myself in this most fundamental place, won’t I lose the part of myself that is most distinctly me? Won’t this lead to a breakdown of self-identity? Won’t I jump into a completely different me? These sorts of doubts may well arise.

In order to continue being a me who seeks the meaning of life and his true self, I must go on changing my current self. What is needed for me now, therefore, is the courage to continue being me, and the courage to go on changing myself toward this end.

To continue being me is to turn toward the world and other people and change myself, while protecting what is most important to me.

I continue to change at my own pace and rhythm while protecting what is most important to me. While confronting solitude, suffering and struggling to find the meaning of life, and ceaselessly posing the question “What is my true self?” I will live this short life to the fullest.

In this process of transformation, I need people to give me strength, sometimes from so close they are inside me, sometimes from as far away as a distant planet, at times intensely and at times with moderation. To be me, I need you. I want a you with whom I can exchange, from a distance at which we will never carry each other’s weight, messages of the soul, and together with whom I can engage in mutual support of each other’s solitude and courage.

And when you are about to fall into the dark nebula of your own solitude, I want to be able to throw you a slender thread from far away. If I do so you may be able to gather together threads from several people, including me, and climb out of this abyss of despair.

I am searching for an approach in which, within a nebula in which no bearings can be taken, each of us continues to climb toward their own self.

At the same time, however, I have tried to encourage you to run at your own pace.

Running at your own pace means taking a long view and moving forward as a whole while taking appropriate breaks and steps backward to avoid exceeding your limits and running yourself into the ground. I want you to clearly understand this. If you continue running beyond your limits, you will either exhaust yourself and collapse, or, tormented by the gap between your “self as it is now” and your “self as it ought to be,” cover yourself in blindfolding structures as you run.

Run at your own pace. Don’t dwell on “not getting results” and blame this on other people or yourself.

Human beings, after all, cannot change overnight. In the midst of trying over and over again, suddenly you transform. When the time to change comes, it happens smoothly and naturally. Until then you must wait with perseverance.

There is nothing to be done about the frustration we feel that the time to change has not yet arrived. When we succumb to this frustration and the desire to change quickly, before we know it we have fallen into a blindfolding structure that allows us to avoid seeing our “self that does not change.”

I have no idea what comes next, so I will stop writing here. What happens now is directly connected to how I live my life from this point onward, and to how you, the reader who has made it to the end of this book, choose to live your own life starting now.

Afterword

This book ends here, but I’m sure there are still countless questions swirling in your head.

For example, I’ve said that you should think things through right to the end with your own eyes and mind, but there are many people in this world who cannot bear this kind of burden and want to have someone else give them an answer or to resolve their problems by clinging to another person. What should these people do? Am I forcing them to think things through right to the end with their own eyes and mind?

To begin with, I would respond as follows.

I am not trying to force or coerce those who want to choose such options to think things through with their own eyes and mind. I don’t have any answers when it comes to what they ought to do. This book of mine cannot provide them with any kind of active guidance. This is the limit of this book. It is a boundary within which I must remain. Instead, as I said in Chapter Four, I will continue to engage in communication with these people.

Have I tried to force someone else to do something, or preached some kind of norm, anywhere in this book? Haven’t I only talked about my own decision to live my life a certain way, and imagined the sort of person I think might respond to this message?

Here is something else readers may have doubts about.

In this book I have said that there needs to be a network through which people who are looking for the “meaning of life” and their “true self” in solitude can support each other from afar. But what this network would be like in concrete terms is not clear. People who agree with my message may be left wondering what exactly they are supposed to do.

This is another question to which at the moment I have no answer. I frankly confess this. While I am certain this is the right direction, I don’t know what concrete steps should be taken. I would therefore like to know what sorts of things you who have read this book all the way to the end are thinking. I would like us to think together about what might be possible when it comes to this kind of network. I cannot carry you directly. There must be some way to pluralistically distribute this load or burden so that we can support each other. The formation of this network involves neither creating cultural centers, holding regular get-togethers, forming fan clubs, establishing secret societies, nor, needless to say, founding an academic society or giving lectures. The kind of network I am talking about has nothing to do with “people gathering at a certain place.” Instead, what is really needed is a way of connecting people so that the messages of their souls are carried to those who are truly seeking them through something like the mesh of a net.

There are times when words transmitted by someone I don’t know at all give me existential support. These might be the words of an anonymous person living in a distant place or of someone who lived more than a hundred years ago. Can we not lace together, in the manner of simultaneous occurrences, a way of connecting of this sort? I would like to offer a name for this kind of movement of words: “Life studies.”

I am currently publishing a series of essays entitled “An Introduction to Contemporary Life Studies” in the journal Buddhism. I had been planning to revise these extensively and publish them as a “life studies” series. As it turns out, I decided to write How to Live in a Post-Religious Age, and I’ve come to think of this book as the first title in this “life studies” series. I would thus like to consider this book “Life Studies - Volume One.” It is full of the fundamental ideas of life studies. In the succeeding volumes I hope to take these ideas to the next level.

Early in the summer of 1995, Mr. Hiroshi Nakajima from Hōzōkan asked me to write a two-thousand word essay on the topic of Aum for a special volume of the journal Buddhism. My manuscript grew quite long and was eventually published under the title “How to Live in a Post-Religious Age” in Buddhism Special Volume No. 8 (January, 1996). What was supposed to be a two-thousand word essay turned into a forty-two-thousand word manuscript, something that I’m afraid caused considerable difficulty for Mr. Nakajima. Chapter One of this book is a revised version of this essay. Section Seven of the essay, in particular, was completely rewritten.

I had many valuable experiences during the time I was writing this book.
Most valuable among them was being able to pull a trauma that been lying deep at the bottom of my mind up into my consciousness and actually experience this dramatic process with my whole being.

From April when Mr. Murai was killed until August when I decided to write this book, I had been trying my best to forget about Aum. I wanted to keep it out of my mind because this incident was an incomparably harsh reminder of various events in my twenties that I had buried deep in my mind and hoped never to think of again. During this period, the part of me that didn’t want to remember these things was fiercely battling with another part of me that wanted to recall and resolve them.

In August I was laid up with an illness, and when my body began to recover, the battle finally ended. In the process of getting over this physical illness, I came to realize that I was allowed to forgive the illness of my mind as it was, which I had long been suppressing in a deep layer of my consciousness. As the veil of my mind slid up, I was able to see everything I had to write next.

It took four months for me to pull the reason I had to write about Aum out of the depths of my mind. This fact was a fresh shock for me. Having engaged in this work, I am now able to clearly see why I must construct “life studies.” This book will be a turning point for me.

December 1995, Kyoto.

Twenty-four years have passed since the first edition of this book was published. The founder and twelve leaders of Aum have been executed and are no longer in this world. This book came out when the memory of the sarin subway attacks was fresh and was widely read. With the passage of time, however, people’s interest in the Aum incident has faded, and it has gradually disappeared from bookstore shelves.

People seem to have been reminded of this incident when the executions took place in July of 2018. Special programs were aired on television, and news coverage from the original incident was played over and over again. Hearing an expert on a TV program say something to the effect of, “In the end we weren’t able to get to the bottom of what the Aum incident was,” I thought to myself, “That’s wrong.” There had been a steady accumulation of accounts of the trials, writings by former members, interviews of those involved, and academic research based on these materials. And there was this book of mine, which can be considered a kind of “first person” research. Copies of this text, however, had become quite hard to find.

Later on, I became acquainted with Michiyo Toshiro, an editor at Hōzōkan, and she agreed to reissue a complete edition of this book. For this reissue, I wrote a new “Foreword to the Complete Edition” and this “Afterword―2019.” In places I have made revisions to the wording of the original text, but the gist of its content remains unchanged. The publication of this complete edition has made it available to readers who are too young to have been aware of the incident at the time. No doubt there will be new discoveries. The questions of what the Aum incident was and who we are as people who must live in this era are sure to reemerge with fresh urgency.

It is also possible to consider Aum within the context of global “terrorism,” because the starting point of other terrorists who engage in mass murder in the name of religion must also be the search for “the meaning of life.” This book can perhaps also be read as a clue to understanding these actors from the inside who have been lumped together as “religious terrorists.” Michel Wieviorka, for example, said the following in a discussion with Satoshi Ukai. “Frustrated in their search for the meaning of life, young people head to Syria on a journey of initiation. […] they participate in jihad to find meaning in their lives. What is important is that when they lose sight of their identity and attempt to construct a new identity they seek meaning in an extreme form, and this leads to terrorism.” The pattern of behavior of young people who entered Aum looking for the meaning of life is perhaps being repeated in many places around the world. It is even possible that the Aum incident was not a specifically Japanese event but rather something that occurred inevitably as part of a larger global trend at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. This is suggested by many incidents involving cult groups with apocalyptic ideology that have occurred around the world.

After the publication of the first edition of this book, two books of interviews by Haruki Murakami were published and received a lot of attention: Underground and At the Appointed Place.

In the first volume, Underground, Murakami and his team conduct interviews with victims of the sarin subway attack and their family members, and their efforts produce a valuable work that succeeds in creating a true-to-life portrait of these victims who tend to remain hidden in the shadow of the incident. Murakami challenges the dichotomy that the world of Aum is evil and a transgressor while the world on our side is righteous and a victim. In truth both worlds are very similar. Murakami says, “Is this not, in a sense, a shadowy region within ourselves (an underground) we avoid looking at directly and, consciously or unconsciously, expel from the phase of reality?” There is something in this stance of trying to find fundamental commonalities between Aum’s world and our society that resonates with this book, How to Live in a Post-Religious Age.

The second volume, At the Appointed Place, presents interviews with former and current believers in Aum. Apart from one (Hidetoshi Takahashi), they were not leaders of Aum, and in this sense the text is a unique resource. Murakami points out that elite scientists joined Aum because they wanted to use their expertise “for a more deeply meaningful purpose” and writes that within our social system they “could not help having profound doubts about the meaning of their own existence being pointlessly ground down.”

While I agree with Murakami’s analysis in many respects, it seems to have a major limitation. His perspective is always that of an onlooker, and lacks the pressing sense that he himself could very well have ended up in Aum. Moreover, in these two volumes the thoughts of Aum’s leaders who carried out the attacks are not elucidated, and what was going on in their minds remains a blank spot.

The study of Aum then continued, resulting in works such as Robert J. Lifton’s Destroying the World to Save It and Hiromi Shimada’s Aum: How Did Religion Create Terrorism? These are essential reading to understand the incident as a whole. What is not cultivated even in these scholarly texts, however, is an inherent understanding of the question of “the meaning of life.”

Here I would like to take a closer look at the 2008 manuscript written by Aum leader Ken’ichi Hirose I mentioned in the “Foreword to the English Edition.” (This text can be downloaded from Kenji Kawashima’s website).

When he was a high school student, Hirose became aware that someday everything in the universe would become nothing, and came to view the world with a deep sense of “emptiness.” He then became interested in “the meaning of life.” He tried reading philosophical and religious books, but was unable to accept either approach; at its core philosophy seemed to depend on the personal intuitions of philosophers, and he did not know “how to determine the truth or falsity” of religious doctrines. After learning about an incident involving the refusal of blood transfusions by Jehovah’s Witnesses his “distrust of new religions” became firmly established. While seeking “the meaning of life,” Hirose thus initially harbored an antipathy toward religion.

A month after reading one of Asahara’s writings he had found in a bookstore, an “explosive sound” reverberated within his body when he was sleeping. Hirose then experienced the following.

Hirose had a mysterious experience that seems somehow similar to my own that I describe in Chapter Two of this book. He noticed that Asahara’s book had precisely described his own mystical experience, and became convinced that what Asahara said was the truth. Through his mystical experience Hirose came to accept Aum’s doctrinal system and decided to become a follower of Asahara.

Through having a mystical experience, Hirose set out on the road to religious belief. Many readers will presumably wonder how Hirose, possessing a scientific, rational intellect and harboring a distrust of new religions, could have become a devotee of a cult religion thanks to a single mystical experience.

The impact of yoga-type mystical experiences, however, is tremendous. This can be seen by looking at my own mystical experience presented in this book. The force of vividly perceiving within your own body phenomena that cannot be explained by today’s natural science, even to the point of seeing light, is overwhelming. It is indeed having a scientific, rational intellect that keeps you fixated on this intense experience you cannot dismiss as an illusion, wondering what on Earth it could be.

In Chapter Two I discuss how I myself, someone who was supposed to have a scientific and rational intellect, easily accepted the mysterious experiences I “witnessed” when I entered a closed qigong community. In this regard Hirose and I are the same. But Hirose ran straight into the arms of faith in Asahara. I headed down the same path, but at some point found myself unable to continue. Where did this difference come from? Or was it simply the product of chance? I still don’t know. When scholars discuss Aum it is easy for the matter of mystical experiences to be given little weight. But it must not be disregarded. The question of mystical experiences is both crucial and complex, and requires further consideration.

In Section Six of Chapter Two, I write as follows. “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.” “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.” If there are any readers who are wrestling with how to understand their own mystical experiences, I urge them to calmly consider these passages.

Hirose came to believe that Asahara was shouldering the “bad karma” he had accrued in his place and was purifying him. Asahara appeared to Hirose as a “god of salvation.” Asahara furthermore began to preach that killing people who had accumulated bad karma in this world would allow them to be reborn in a higher world (the doctrine of “powa”). As a result, Hirose says that when he was ordered to deploy the sarin by Murai, “To me at the time, this instruction only seemed to be the salvation of people who had been born into the world of suffering.” In this way, according to the logic of Aum, the mass murders using sarin were a project of salvation to allow people who had accumulated bad karma in this world to be reborn in a higher world. This is Aum’s answer to the question, “Why did you kill indiscriminately using sarin?”

Hirose concludes his manuscript with the following passage. It is important so I quote it at length.

Hirose declares that he has completely rejected Aum and is in a state of non-belief. Nevertheless, this does not mean he rejects the significance of religion. He takes this stance because religion has the function of elevating people’s character, and because the existence of the transcendental cannot be refuted by science. Regarding mystical experiences, Hirose concludes they are illusions caused by transmitters in the brain and do not have the particular meaning attributed to them by Aum’s doctrines.

Hirose may thus seem to have returned to the worldview he had held as a high school student before learning of Aum: a state in which he seeks “the meaning of life” but finds it in neither religion nor philosophy. Nor, of course, can natural science provide an answer. This is close to the position from which I began writing this book. I wish I could have talked with Hirose while he was alive. I wish I could have discussed “the meaning of life” with him after he had returned to a state without religion or belief.

The question of how to live in a post-religious age was also addressed in the 19th century by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” grappled with the question of how human beings were to live without God, and proposed ideas such as “eternal recurrence” and “amor fati.” He suffered a mental breakdown and died, however, before fully developing these concepts. This book is also a project to further develop the philosophical horizon opened up by Nietzsche in the present era.

When considering how to live in a “post-religious age,” however, progress cannot be made by people without religion thinking only among themselves. To consider how to live in a “post-religious age,” we must break down the wall between what is inside and what is outside of religion and engage in a discussion of the wisdom in the religious dimension and view of humanity that religion has built up over millennia. The publication of the first edition of this book did in fact provide me with many opportunities to interact with religious people. Their attitude toward this book was warm, and I learned much from them. I realized that the border between religious and non-religious perspectives is not so clear, and the grey zone between them is wide.

For example, in this book I talk about religion in terms of the dichotomy between “religious people who are capable of having faith” and “I who cannot have faith,” but I received the criticism that this dichotomy itself should be reconsidered. After all, there are many religious behaviors that do not involve clear “faith.” Can the feeling that makes you put your hands together when you see the sunrise or the act of making a wish at a shrine be called “faith”? Is there not a grey area of things that are difficult to categorize as either “faith” or “not faith”? Can’t the Japanese word “shinjin,” meaning something like “piety,” be positioned in this kind of grey zone? These points were made to me, and I had to admit they were valid.

I have also come to have doubts about this dichotomy from a philosophical perspective.

I then assert that I am incapable of this kind of “faith.” But here I have committed an error: I too have things I “cannot put my life on the line and doubt with my entire body and soul.” For example, I believe that the students I teach at my university are flesh and blood human beings and not well-built robots. Logically speaking, there is in fact a non-zero chance that they are high-quality robots. Nevertheless, I cannot put my life on the line and doubt with my entire body and soul that they are genuine human beings. The same can be said of propositions such as the sun will definitely rise tomorrow and the world will continue to exist after I have died. Logically it is possible to doubt them, but I cannot put my life on the line and doubt them with my entire body and soul. In other words, I can be said to have “faith” that they are true.

If so, I who cannot believe in religion do indeed have “faith” in something, and the schema of opposition between I who cannot have “faith” and religious people who are capable of “faith” falls apart. This is a philosophical problem that is not resolved in this book.

In abstract terms, it amounts to something like this. A person can doubt any individual proposition. Nevertheless, no one can doubt all propositions while actually living in the world, because it is impossible to actually live in the world without accepting as obvious truths several fundamental things that allow your life to take shape. Unless I accept propositions such as the family members I love are not robots, the sun will rise tomorrow, and the world will continue to exist after I die, I cannot sanely live my life. However, the content of the set of fundamental things that cannot be doubted is not objectively fixed; it differs depending on the person. For some people the content of this set includes God, for others it does not. Nevertheless, the structure that allows this set to take shape itself is universal. This can be called the “structure of conviction” or the “structure of obviousness.” This has been a major issue in philosophy from the skepticism of Descartes to the question of certainty in Wittgenstein and Husserl’s phenomenology. Since this issue cannot be pursued any further in this “Afterword,” I will stop here by promising to address it more thoroughly in a future work.

As I noted in my Afterword to the first edition, this book was the first volume of my “life studies” series. Life studies is a research methodology that requires “never detaching oneself from what is being investigated.” Without losing sight of the fact that I myself am involved in the subject of study and in some sense can be considered the “person in question,” I make this “being the person in question” itself the subject of my inquiry. A confessional method of trying to examine how I myself actually exist in relation to the subject in question is employed, and I then call on the reader to examine themselves in the same manner. Life studies proposes this kind of communication undertaken while maintaining a moderate distance as a new method of study. In this book I tried to implement this method in practice, albeit in an awkward manner. This text can also be positioned as a “life studies manifesto.”

This life studies method in which the person who studies is included in what is studied cannot be the kind of academic inquiry pursued in universities. This is the case because the model for academic inquiry is science, and one of its starting assumptions is that the person who studies is cleanly separated from what is studied. As a result, for the time being, life studies must be conducted outside of academic inquiry.

Following this book, I published Painless Civilization, in which I critique contemporary society from within, in 2003 and Confessions of a Frigid Man, in which I analyze male sexuality, in 2005. Painless Civilization philosophically deepened the message of this book and has become my most important work. In Confessions of a Frigid Man I further developed my method of confession and tried to illustrate my own sexuality and connect it to the problem of the meaning of life. These three books comprise my life studies trilogy. In these works, the concrete method of life studies has been gradually elucidated. Readers of this book who take an interest in the methodology of life studies are encouraged to read the two other volumes. (English translations of both can be freely downloaded online). I intend these three texts to conclude my efforts to write about life studies with substantive content, and going forward I would like to shift my focus to the methodology of life studies itself. In doing so, I plan to clarify the strengths and weaknesses of life studies that have been revealed by my experiments thus far (and are also clearly evident in this book.)

I have also been pursuing academic research on the philosophy of life in parallel to life studies. Here I try to logically elucidate what life is and what it means to live while pushing myself as the subject of this inquiry into the background. I am also writing a trilogy on this “philosophy of life.” The first volume is Manga Introduction to Philosophy. This work sketches out an overview of the philosophy of life in the form of a comic book (manga). The second volume is The Philosophy of Birth Affirmation (provisional title, not yet published), and in it I plan to construct a philosophy of life system centered on the key term “birth affirmation.” The third volume is “Philosophy of life” (provisional title, not yet published), in which I plan to provide a summary of the history of the philosophy of life and the logic of life. These trilogies on the “philosophy of life” and “life studies” are the two pillars of the methodological endeavor in which I am engaged to open up new horizons of knowledge. How To Live in a Post-Religious Age was the first step in this journey.

In this book, I often speak about “the meaning of life.” Today a “philosophy of the meaning of life” subdiscipline has begun to take shape around the world within the field of analytic philosophy. The topic of “the meaning of life” nearly disappeared from academic philosophy after the wave of existentialism dissipated, but it was revived once again at the start of the twenty-first century. The International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life has been held since 2018, and I am a member of its Steering Committee. My own “philosophy of the meaning of life” can be said to have started with this book.

I would like to thank the many people who helped me to write this book. I would like to send my heartfelt respect to Mr. B, who appears in the main text, and my heartfelt love to my son. I am deeply grateful to Hōzōkan for agreeing to publish this complete edition. I would also like to express my profound gratitude to the editors of the first edition, Hiroshi Nakajima and Mie Hayashi, and to Robert Chapeskie for his beautiful translation.

宮台真司『終わりなき日常を生きろ』筑摩書房, 1995. 橋本治『宗教なんかこわくない！』マドラ出版, 1995.

pp. 4445.

p. 62.

p. 100.

p. 113.

まったり生きる.

p. 165.

p. 170.

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, p. 159.

p. 88.

p. 125.

p. 284.

Ubasute was an ancient practice of abandoning elderly people in the wilderness (see my Invitation to the Study of Life [『生命学への招待』勁草書房], 1988).

“‘Religion and Murder’ as Seen in Aum” (「オウム真理教に見る『宗教と殺人』」『週刊文春』), July 20, 1995.

Aum Press(ed.), Aum Is Now (『オウム真理教は現在』オウム出版), 1995, p. 39.

Mitsunari Ōizumi also emphasizes this pleasure (Kentarō Takekuma, Armageddon and Me [竹熊健太郎『私とハルマゲドン』太田出版], 1995, Ōizumi’s statement on p. 49). Aum senior member Hisako Ishi’s memoirs also repeatedly describe the pleasure she felt in religious practice (Shoko Asahara, Mahāyāna Sutras (麻原彰晃『マハーヤーナ・スートラ』オウム出版), 1988.

See my Reconsidering the View of Life (『生命観を問いなおす』ちくま新書), 1994.

Regarding social welfare, the reformation of policy and social systems is needed. See Masahiro Morioka (ed.) A Study of Interdependence (森岡正博編著『「ささえあい」の人間学』法藏館), 1994.

『仏教』.

『週刊読書人』 March 4, 2016, p. 1. Translated from the original Japanese.

村上春樹『アンダーグラウンド』講談社文庫1997, 『約束された場所で』文春文庫1998. An English translation combining both volumes was published in 2000 (Underground, translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel, The Harvill Press/Vintage International).

Page 744 of the Japanese edition, translated here by Robert Chapeskie. The same passage is found on p. 229 of the English edition of this text cited above.

Page 324 of the Japanese edition, translated here by Robert Chapeskie. This passage could not be located in the English edition.

Metropolitan Books, 1999.

島田裕巳『オウム―なぜ宗教はテロリズムを生んだのか』トランスビュー, 2001.

p. 3.

p. 7.

p. 13.

pp. 14–15.

pp. 107-108.

p. 109.

p. 21.

p. 35.

pp. 57–58.

信心.

p. 58.

森岡正博『無痛文明論』トランスビュー, 2003.

森岡正博『感じない男』ちくま文庫, 2005.

森岡正博・寺田にゃんこふ『まんが哲学入門』講談社現代新書, 2013.

Philosophical study of life, death, and nature