To Become Able to Use Your Consciousness Freely

★ The proper use of consciousness, seen in the growth of the Japan men’s national team at the FIFA World Cup

They lost yesterday’s match, but people everywhere were saying that the Japan men’s national team at the FIFA World Cup was being freed from the spell—or rather, the fixation—of having to play “our own football,” and could already use, or was just about to be using, tactics freely depending on the opponent.

This is a story you can apply and make use of not only in football, but throughout life—in forming your character and on the path of the evolution of consciousness.

For example, what Keisuke Honda said was very suggestive and interesting.

“What’s clearly different compared with 2014 is that we’ve changed from ‘it all starts with us’ to ‘it all starts with the opponent’—maybe our way of thinking about the essence of football, our values, have changed.”

“It’s like rock-paper-scissors. If you know they’re going to throw scissors, why would you insist on throwing paper? That’s all there is to it.”

If we apply these words of his to life, they mean: “If you free yourself from your own fixed patterns and habits of thought and become free, you can freely use the thoughts, words, deeds, and behavior that suit the time, place, and people, and bring about great harmony in each moment.” You can even free yourself from attachment to good thoughts and step up to a state of mind in which you can take part in a greater work.

Concretely, this means deepening your understanding of attachments that can be mistaken for convictions—”I have to do it this way,” “It must be like this,” “This is how it should be.”

When you look at thoughts of that kind in the context of your relationships with people, if you step back from your own consciousness a hundred or a thousand steps, you can look at yourself with a relaxed heart and say, “There’s no need to be so stubborn about that, is there?”

★Ask yourself how flexibly you apply your own patterns and preferences in life

Then, when you actually find yourself in such a situation, try practicing not being stubborn.

You may find that things go surprisingly smoothly…

When it comes to how you live and how you speak and act, if you try to fit others into your own patterns and molds and insist, “It must be like this,” the other person will get fed up and think, “What a difficult person.” Sometimes you end up throwing away a golden opportunity—just when the connection of time, place, and people has come together and things could move forward—and letting it slip right through your fingers.

This is the state of “having come out of the form” in the saying we mentioned before: “Enter through the form, and come out of the form.”

Anyone who, while young, firmly masters the basics (the truths) of life will be able, once they go out into the real world where it must be put into practice, to live an original life that can respond to any words and deeds of others and to events of every kind.

In practice, there are many adults who had no chance to learn the basics of life when they were young, so it’s common to see even older people become flustered when faced with the unexpected.

But it is never too late in life.

That, we’ll say loud and clear.

In anything at all, time always waits for people who have the will to do it.

If you make a wholehearted resolution—”I want to become this kind of person; I will become this kind of person”—and move forward with courage, then looking over a long span of five years, ten years, or more, you will surely have become that person.

These days many people are used to getting results right away, so when things don’t go as they wish immediately, their hearts sometimes drift away. But life isn’t something you reset like a game, and as long as you work at it patiently, taking your time, you will surely become the person you want to be.

If you think we’re lying, try it.

But patiently.

Then take a look at yourself ten years from now.

You will surely have become that person.

As long as you keep working at it in earnest.