On Connection

★People Live Within Connections

People are, by nature, living beings that maintain their lives by being connected with all sorts of beings, aren’t they?

There’s no one who lives with no connection to anything or anyone, producing by themselves every element needed to maintain their life.

To take an extreme example, even someone who says they don’t want to depend on anyone and lives shut away deep in the mountains doesn’t live in complete self-sufficiency, having built their own civilization and culture without depending in any way on Earth’s civilization and culture or on the air, the water, and the land.

Everyone lives thanks to someone, or to something other than humans.

In that sense, though it isn’t directly related to today’s talk, you could say the Japanese expression “okagesama de,” “thanks to you and to everything,” is a very beautiful phrase.

People, animals, plants, water, air, minerals, stars… everyone lives within all kinds of connections, influencing and being influenced by one another.

Some of those connections are visible and some are not, but if all those various connections didn’t exist, people couldn’t live for even a moment.

And yet the thoughts of many of Earth’s people easily forget that fact and often mistakenly believe they live by their own strength alone.

★People Who Live Forgetting Their Connections

Why do so many people easily forget something so obvious?

There are people who aren’t good with others and spend their time at home, supported by their families.

There are people who flee the city to live leisurely in the countryside, trying to live as if the noisy world had nothing to do with them.

There are people who, in their dealings with all sorts of people, can’t hold a heart of gratitude toward anything or anyone and immediately want to complain about whatever they dislike.

Most common of all are people for whom the love of those close to them and their everyday health are so taken for granted that they can’t feel gratitude toward the people around them or toward their own physical bodies.

When Earth faces a moment of crisis, what would such people do if there were no one to make electricity, to put up and extend utility poles and power lines, or to maintain them?

What would they do if telephones, the internet, and television all became unusable and all communication were cut off?

How do they plan to live if the water supply stopped and there was no water for daily life?

What would you do if it became impossible to produce, harvest, distribute, sell, or buy all kinds of ingredients and food?

If clothes stopped appearing in stores and even cloth to make your own stopped circulating, could you wear the same clothes all your life without complaint?

What if the roads were destroyed by a great earthquake and there was no one to repair them?

After the place you live is caught in a great tsunami or a great tornado, how would you clean up the town if there were no heavy machinery?

If there were no longer anyone to collect garbage, burn it or bury it, sort it or recycle it, how would you dispose of your garbage?

If the energy to run private cars and public transportation became unavailable and the means of getting around went back to what they were centuries ago, could you keep from complaining?

Whatever kind of home it may be, if you have a home where you can live with the people you love, and the happiness of living together supporting one another, however modestly, why not honestly express it and convey it in words and actions?

And even for people who think, “I have no one,” it is an undeniable fact that they can surely live thanks to someone or something.

★How to Live This Age Without Regret

Who can say for certain that today’s ordinary life will continue tomorrow?

You are living in a turbulent age like never before in Earth’s history, when you can’t know what will happen even a moment ahead, and yet you live that time unawares. Sometimes we watch with frustration, thinking it’s a very wasteful way to live.

Everything is a process moving toward perfect completion, so there’s really no need for regret. But since each person’s fixations may later lead them to blame and judge themselves, let me say this: rather than regretting after something happens, it’s much better to treasure the present.

That is exactly why what everyone must do right now, immediately, is treasure the present, cherish everything you interact with, and carry out thoughts and actions of love and gratitude with your whole life.

Burn your life and live each day burning completely.

Use up today’s energy today.

And so keep your consciousness always clear, fresh, and bright.

If you burn your life out fully and don’t leave it half-burned, no fatigue will carry over to tomorrow.

It’s good to keep yourself always empty.

Then when you wake up the next morning, you will be filled with new life energy again, you will vividly feel your connection with every being, and a state of complete gratitude will open up, in which nothing but heartfelt gratitude comes out toward everything that keeps you alive.

When you look with the eye of the heart from that opened state, you will come to understand that even people who say or do things inconvenient for your emotions had volunteered for that role in order to polish and raise you up.

What that means is that the hearts of the other person’s Guardian Spirit and your own are reflected in your consciousness, so regardless of the likes and dislikes of karmic thoughts, you can understand such deeper truths as clearly as if you held them in your hand.

Once you get that far, however the world may change, you won’t get caught by the process or by dissatisfaction and complaints, so you can rest easy.

Human thoughts until now have been busy seeking connections or rejecting them according to selfish emotions, but one thing can be said clearly: everyone is living within connection with everything.

Mend the frays in those connections.

The best way to do that is to harmonize your relationship with yourself.

In other words, you could say it’s achieving peace in your inner world first.

Then the harmony of the inner world is reflected in the outer world, and your relationships with every connection come into harmony.

And for that, deep breathing really is best.

As long as you keep breathing deeply, both your spiritual cells and your physical cells are always renewing themselves, and old things are sublimated.

If you just live that way, anyone can achieve ascension with little hardship.