Motohisa Yamakage

When you see this reality in deep introspection through chinkon practice, you will intuitively know the truth of the saying, “this body as it is, is Kami.” There is also the saying: “ancestors and ‘I’ are connected as one.” This means the ancestors and “I” are connected with each other as one body.

“I” am one scene of an endless, continuous life history in the eternal universe. My ancestors who bore me are also the children of Kami ... Therefore, “‘I live” means ‘I’ am living in the flow of this eternity.”

During the period of transition from this world to yukai, the hidden world of subtle energy, the spirit-soul is at its most vulnerable. It can be likened to a delicate butterfly, at the moment of emergence from its chrysalis. Therefore, there are spirits entrusted with the task of protecting the spirit-soul from danger at this time.

In most cases, the spirits of deceased ancestors or friends of the dead come to meet and greet the dead. These spirits in turn receive instruction from higher ranks of spirit so that they may give useful guidance to their dead relatives or friends.

Experiencing “light” is easy, even for beginners, during chinkon. One may experience the inside of the brain filled with dazzling light, or one may feel enveloped by a golden mist. But these are only preliminary states of consciousness. If you keep advancing from there by imagining a small sun or a round moon at the center of your forehead, eventually you will see a sun or moon of such brightness that you will be shocked. This does not appear as part of the realm of fantasy, but as the real experience it is. According to the hidden teaching handed down to the Yamakage family, people will see “mist, smoke, sun, wind, fire, fluorescence, crystal, and a moon.” Sometimes a coal black experience may occur instead of light.

Shinto values nature and life. This is because Shinto originally arose from a sense of gratitude and awe toward great nature. Our ancestors loved nature, from animals and plants to mountains and rivers. This love of nature is intrinsic to the Japanese character, influencing our art forms as well as our spiritual practices, even in a modern, urbanized nation where millions of people have little apparent contact with nature. In this age when human beings are destroying mother earth in the pursuit of material progress, we should reclaim our love for nature and let it inform our daily lives and spiritual practices.

Shinto sees everything in existence as generated by and transformed from the ultimate origin of life; this is expressed in the idea that all forms of life are a child-spirit of the original Kami.

In some shrine buildings, when kannushi of low spiritual levels are serving, one can sense the presence of shady, lower-level spirits. These correspond to the kannushi’s own level of spiritual development. It often happens that only malevolent spirits, not good spirits, gather at places where large sums of money are demanded from visitors. Often, this happens with newly established religious groups. When people go to such places, they experience headaches or nausea.

Thus true chinkon practice takes place in your heart and mind. You should neither become obsessed with external formality, nor boast of your spiritual and psychic power or experience. It is a mistake either to aim at gaining supernatural power or to compare your own abilities with those of others. You must not become trapped in arrogant pride, nor become a slave to the process of spiritual training, nor speak noisily about its benefits. Chinkon should lead us to a state of spiritual calm, where selfish ambitions and desires give way to the realization of the true self, the Kami within each one of us.

Each Kami has its own characteristics, but they are not fixed. Furthermore, the Kami can spread out simultaneously into various places and various existences. This concept can actually be applied to human beings also. In the section on “one spirit, four souls” (Chapter 6), we shall see that the human being is the assembled body of many souls. This assembled body of souls can sometimes be divided. That is why a well-trained spiritual person can send off his own separated soul to a distant location or a different time period to perform long distance healing, precognition, or clairvoyance.

If you truly enter a deep state, then chinkon can also lead you into a realm exactly like the one known as “the realm of mindlessness and thoughtlessness.”

Shinto is not a faith tradition that can be propagated or imposed. Each human community, every human culture, has its own version of Shinto, which is based on accumulated experience, historical memory, and, perhaps most crucially, the local environment. Shinto recognizes and celebrates human diversity, just as it recognizes and celebrates the diversity of nature. For beneath that diversity there is an underlying unity — the union of humanity, earth, and heaven.

These mountains are called spiritual mountains in Japan, and they used to be sacred places to which it was thought the spirits of dead human beings went. These spiritual mountains also became the base for the school of mountain ascetics that has existed since the arrival of Buddhism in Japan. According to Japanese folklore, the spirits of the dead remain for a certain time at the mountain to watch over their descendants and to receive memorial services. After being completely purified, the spirit stays within the mountain, but moves to a higher dimension to become one of the ancestral spirits of that village.

Therefore, it has been widely believed in Japan that ancestral spirits exist in the invisible world, overlapping with physical reality and having intimate connection with people living in this world. In this unseen world, the ancestral spirits continue to work on their own purification.