Let’s Ride the Flow of Eternal Life (4)

(Continued from last time)

★On How to Guide People

Now I’d like to explain a little about how to guide people. Let me see, it may be easy to understand if you think of it from the position of a parent trying to teach a child to ride a bicycle.

For example, when a child is trying to learn to ride a bicycle, even if you watch over them feeling, “Poor thing,” or “That looks dangerous,” if the parent keeps holding the handlebars with them and controlling it forever, or keeps pushing from behind, that child can never ride the bicycle by their own strength, right?

It’s the same.

What you need now is the independence of the soul, not a stronger dependence on others.

If there are religious leaders or spiritual leaders on Earth who still guide in that way, that way of guiding no longer suits the age to come.

Behind such ways of guiding, thoughts like wanting to attract attention or wanting to stand above people are often mixed in without the person realizing it.

Even if it’s a well-known figure everyone knows.

So people who think of making others rely on them, or that others can’t get better unless they go through them, can’t be called true leaders.

And the way of thinking that “the world can’t be saved except by my religion” is also a little different from the way true leaders will be in the age to come.

Because true leaders guide people so that each can truly achieve the independence of the soul through their own way of living.

Especially where humans guide humans, ways of guiding that make people rely on or depend on you may have been one thing up to the 20th century, but now that we’ve entered the 21st century, they have become an image of leaders from the past that doesn’t work at all.

So we don’t say, like the spiritual leaders of Earth’s past, “Believe in the gods and buddhas,” or “Take refuge in the gods and buddhas.”

We say it like this: “Live with everyone’s life lively and vibrant, showing ‘the light of life.’ The essence of your life is divine from the beginning. The way to live manifesting it is this and this,” right?

When you say “God” or “Buddha,” the fixed ideas of humans tend to go toward “O almighty God who art in heaven…,” and people tend to think in a way that depends on others: “I want to be saved, I’ll be saved, I’ll have them save me.”

Besides, disputes like those between rival schools have arisen again and again over the names of gods and buddhas.

What’s important is that every person is a divine existence, living eternal life.

And to manifest that eternity of life in yourself.

As long as you don’t stray from that foundation, any school at all is fine.

Once you understand that the essence of life, the great source of life, is the same, then believers of any school of religion, spiritualists, and holders of any spiritual philosophy can all join hands and cooperate, without calling one another right wing or left wing, and everyone can work “getting along together” for peace on Earth. (In Japanese, right wing is “uyoku,” left wing is “sayoku,” and getting along together is “nakayoku.”)

So, simply put, as long as everyone returns to the essence of life and lives from it, we can overcome our differences in thought, repair the state of Earth, which is like a sinking ship (bail out the excess water), and continue our voyage into the future. (Continued next time)