It is an absolute joy to witness to love and compassion in flight, but some have asked, ”teach me,” and the truth is, that’s not the appropriate order of the matter. The proper order increases awareness of the condition of living, and decreases conceit, this is masagatsu agatsu. Love and compassion radiate brilliantly without obstructions intended via thoughts, words, and deeds.
Yet, what is phenomenal, are insights that develop and adopt ascetic practices as a kind of psychological behavior modification program—dynamic, vivid, fresh, new, and continuously changing; ascetic practice is beyond style. This asceticism bears witness to limitless beings enduring a flowing awareness of endocrine processes in symbiotic relations with neurological processes. There is awareness of what behaviorists call antecedents (e.g., environments), behaviors, and consequences (e.g., reinforcements/punishers).
聖武合気 (shobu aiki) is an ascetic life; it is not common, it is the world of 玄同[REDACTED]. Masaaki Hatsumi wrote, “supernatural power is not a skill or a trick. It exists in your heart, in your sincerity,” (Hatsumi, 1988, p. 37) and “I hope that after the ninja boom is gone with the wind, only humane people who seek the truth of ninjutsu will remain” (p. 67). It is this process of seeking that is the core of the teaching of Gotama Buddha, and it is evidenced in the Ariyaapariesana Sutta, and replied to Brahma, ”open are the doors to the deathless, to those with ears. Let them show their conviction. Perceiving trouble, O Brahma, I did not tell people the refined, sublime Dhamma.” (Thanissaro Bhikkhu Trans., n.d.).
St. Hesychios wrote, ”the <wo|man engaged in spiritual warfare should simultaneously posess humility, perfect attentiveness, the power of rebuttal, and prayer” (Palmer, Sherrard, & Ware Trans., 1979, p. 165; MDL extensions added for accessibility). 稽古 (keiko) and 修行 (shugyo) are ascetic practices. As Saotome Sensei spoke on many occasions, ”all [the] time practicing.” Yet if there is clinging to developing ascetic practices, it will be easily missed! Clinging is anti-ascetic, it is conventional.
I once read that a sword saint and monk that shaved their eyebrows to use his own anxiety to keep him from wandering the homes of conventional life. This in behaviorism is called increasing response cost, and as silly as it sounds, yes, I did this after reading it. Did it work for me? Yes. I stayed in the dojo and practiced continually. Was it odd behavior? Oh yes, very much so. Though I look around and see many odd behaviors today, maybe even more odd to that shaved head being many years ago. Fast forward one hundred years, maybe common behaviors today will be odd. This is how this goes.
There is not just work on this life, there is work on lifetimes, right here at this very moment. The egg is cracked from within before the being emerges, and at the being’s appropriate time. For the astute, being is valenced, and far more complex than the concept of an onion, for there are many onions intersecting, and there are interference patterns of peels to use this analogy. There are many intersections of shells, and for the ascetic practitioner, there is movement between these intersections, and interference patterns. There is freedom to move between worlds, unbound by habit and preference.
Yet there is a recurring theme that threads through them all, in divine grace, regardless of realm, world, or world-system. There is sincerity, there is a search, and it is noble. A bodhisattva does not defend the strong, nor the weak, nor the infirm, for these are merely physical attributes. A bodhisattva defends the noble search, and the noble search is free of style, and free of stereotype. Water can penetrate the toughest steel, a simple block and tackle can move hundreds of tons. Words from one single civilian can deploy the strongest of veterans across thousands of miles. What is a 武道家 (budoka) in light of this? What is 聖武合気 in light of these musings? The sage is a muse, just as it is in dishes of many cuisines.
It is difficult for a body endowed with [redacted] to manifest 合気, and there will be mere copies and clones using strength. If that is done, then even if true 合気 is present, it will be confusing, and worse yet, be seen as inferior, sloppy, and ineffective. That said, then as was shared with many martial artists world wide, “then why did the violent martial artist come over here? then why did the executive kneel? then why is there sudden speaking with respect and suddenly throwing out the crude language? then was weight suddenly lost after years of talk and attempts? then why is there an attempt to right years of wrongs?” This was not the doing of conceit, this was the doing of wisdom sans self; this was the working of insight and tranquility. These are the reason, yet ignorance will say, “I have done it.”
I did not do these things. Life did, and life is spontaneously illuminated. What life is there to join, when joining itself is life. Incomplete|ness> is a quality regardless of Gödel’s discovery of a linguistic route toward a logical proof. There is illumination, there is light, because there is a continued effort to complete, the incomplete. For some incompleted forms, there is awareness of this completion process, and when this occurs, there is completion. This is the refined dhamma, and it is fine in the beginning, in the middle, and in the end. It is for those with a little “dust” in the eyes, and if a being remembers and recall with vivid experience, this phenomena with great clarity, there will be aspects of insight into the true meaning of this expression beyond conventional language’s inability to portray what lies outside of linguistic quantization.
It would appear the the search’s intensity is proportional to awareness’s density, yet what lights the proverbial flame of awareness? It is said to pass from one lamp to the next, and it is indeed so. The sincerity of transmission.