In 2018 I began attending the Pure Land Temple in CherryBlossom Square in Denver. A Rev. Fujii was in attendance. I was very drawn to Mr. 藤井. He was my kind of Japanese. He reminded me a bit of the Assistant Manager of the Yamato location I worked at in Tokyo in 2002.
Rev. Fujii had been ordained initially as a Soto priest. I suspect he wanted to live in America, and the Soto tradition was not amenable to transferring him, so he jumped ship to the Pure Land folks.
At the Denver Pure Land temple, I would attend the services for the Japanese, which were delivered by Rev. Fujii in Japanese. The contrast with the English service is hard to describe. Night and day is not accurate. Oblivion and blinding light might be closer.
In one talk, Rev. Fujii discussed a Buddhist university he knew of which had a machine which could determine what animal you were in a previous life. Naropa University, which is Buddhist, is about an hour away, although he did not name Naropa.
How one scientifically determines the accuracy of such a machine is not for me to know. Suffice it to say, Japanese Buddhist culture has some very, very clever people on an island infrastructure. More importantly, Japan, and Buddhism, have a long history of 改善。
Perfection is often the enemy of progress. The Japanese are not perfectionists. They appreciate the value of just doing what one can, as best as one can, as often as one can, as consistently as one can, etc. Consequently, I have confidence that this machine works fairly well.
A substantial treasure trove of tomes exist of solid scientific evidence of transmigration of the soul. You aren't going to understand this in a sound bite. Those in the news media will not get rich brainwashing you to become smarter. The news media exists because it sells you what you want, not need, to buy. Politics, like fashion, is mainly determined by the people with whom you spend the most time. Reason and logic have very little, if anything to do with determining one's political position.
Recently, I created a praylist, killing the Fortune 500 CEOs. If you were a cockroach in your previous life, you might be extraordinarily successful at survival in corporate America. You won't be particularly adept at understanding the value of what I am trying to explain. A humpback whale might.
Being advised to stay positive by an Apple lackey is like being told by a rapist to relax and enjoy.
I am not here to judge. I am here for the incremental improvement of our existence. Many might judge my judgements to be judgements. You might be right. When I decide to brush my teeth, I must judge whether to pick up my toothbrush or a nail file. On a moral plane, judging Mr. Cook to be a cockroach is no more judgemental. I am trying to be honest, and if I err on the side of being polite, I risk the possibility of the one person onewhere (if more than one place exists) misunderstanding. I risk us all misunderstanding.
I have no doubt there are many good and decent wealthy folks. Richard Branson, whom I greatly admire, might be just one of them. Keeping in mind that the meek will inherit the Earth, and nothing is inheirited from the living, my proposed Christian Jihad to help the meek inherit the Earth might cause many good, godly people to die. I might be one of them. Good people die. They always have. They always will. Progress is life, death, life.
Mr. Fujii died. He was a good man. I miss him terribly. Many people do. When he looked in the mirror, he knew he was good, from an eternal perspective, not a subjective one.
When I speak Japanese, I often envision the wrong hieroglyph as I speak, or, as I chant, the wrong meaning. If you are speaking to me in Japanese, and you have trouble understanding what I am saying, firstly, do your best to ignore the visual hieroglyph you might be receiving from me telepathically, and try to understand the feeling of what I am trying to express. This is one reason for the ５秒 problem I explain elsewhere. Also, if you say something in Japanese, and I don't recognise the word you are using, or I don't understand what you are saying, try to visualise in your own mind the hieroglyphs, and I might be able to better understand.
When chanting Pure Land, the chants are in ancient Japanese. Imagine chanting pre-Shakespearian English. Most Japanese have difficulty understanding the text of these sutras enough to explain the words. Moreover, when I chant, I often envision the wrong meaning.
Unfortunately, for reasons I don't understand, I have a particularly problematic effect on certain people. On one occasion, while chanting at the Denver Pure Land temple, I was downstairs and Rev. Fujii was upstairs in his office. He could hear me chanting and, as I was reading the sutra I was chanting, he could feel my interpretation of the hieroglyphs. He began to laugh hysterically. Another example, a rabbi with whom I often worshipped suffered a severe emotional collapse not long after regularly meeting with me.
Although not much older than me, Mr. Fujii passed a few years later. The extent to which I am responsible for deaths and sufferings is difficult for me to gauge. Either way, if we kill five hundred financially affluent people, and some of them were the wrong ones, how many decent, less financially affluent people have needlessly suffered and how many more will needlessly suffer if we don't start aborting some people past the age of majority?
