「インテグラル理論の最高の入門書である『万物の歴史』（Brief History of Everything）の新装版です。
この作品は、ケン・ウィルバー（Ken Wilber）が『進化の構造』（Sex, Ecology, Spirituality）の要約版として執筆したものですが、全体が対話形式でまとめられており、初心者にも非常に解りやすい内容となっています。」
The Third Turning occurred with the half brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu, and is generally called the Yogachara school, sometimes referred to as the “Mind-Only” school (which agreed with Nagarjuna that ultimate Reality was Emptiness, but so was ultimate Mind). This teaching became a central foundation of the great Tantra and Vajrayana (Diamond Path) teachings, which particularly flourished in such places as the extraordinary Nalanda University in India from the 8th to the 11th century CE, and continued unabated in Tibetan Buddhist schools—and, indeed, many Buddhists consider Tantra and Vajrayana to be a “Fourth Turning of the Wheel.” (If we do so, which makes sense to me, then what I am actually talking about would be a “Fifth Turning,” so please keep that in mind. But whether we acknowledge these Turnings or not doesn’t affect the main points of this book, which is what a genuinely inclusive, comprehensive spirituality would begin to look like—this is our main issue.) But with regard to the Turnings, those who acknowledged them maintained that each of them tended to “transcend and include” the previous ones, all of them agreeing with many of the Buddha’s original points, and then adding new teachings of their own.
Buddhism is thus used to updating its own major teachings with new and profound additions. But it has been some 1,500 years since the Third Turning; and even the great Tantric schools, which (as noted) flourished from the 8th to the 11th centuries CE, are now close to a thousand years old. The time, again, is more than ripe for a new fundamental addition, a new Turning of the Wheel of Dharma. Many teachers have been saying the same thing for a number of years now; this is one version, a version that has already demonstrated its usefulness and versatility.
One of the leading experts in mind control, Dr. Lifton addressed the issue of doomsday cults such as Aum Shinrikyo.
「Aum and its leader, Shōkō Asahara, were possessed by visions of the end of the world that are probably as old as death itself. Asahara also held in common with many present-day Christian prophets of biblical world-ending events a belief that Armageddon would be connected to those most secular of “end-time” agents, nuclear warheads or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
But his cult went a step further. It undertook serious efforts to acquire and produce these weapons as part of a self-assigned project of making Armageddon happen. For the first time in history, end-time religious fanaticism allied itself with weapons capable of destroying the world and a group embarked on the mad project of doing just that. Fortunately, much went wrong. After all, it is not so easy to destroy the world. But we have a lot to learn from the attempt.」」
In 1981, at age twenty-six, during his troubled Tokyo days, he joined Agonshū, one of the most successful of Japan’s “new religions.” Although he was later to disparage Agonshū and even claim that it had been spiritually harmful to him during his three years of membership, there is every evidence that he derived from it many of his subsequent religious principles. Indeed, he found there a powerful guru model, sixty-year-old Seiyū Kiriyama, a highly charismatic figure.
From Kiriyama and Agonshū, Asahara also drew upon a variety of ideas and practices that would become important in Aum: expressions of esoteric Buddhism, mystical forms of yoga, and forms of self-purification aimed at freeing oneself from bad karma. He was also much influenced by Agonshū’s use of American New Age elements from the human-potential movement, individual psychology, and applied neurology. It was here as well that he first encountered the writings of Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French astrologer and physician who predicted the end of the world with the coming of the year 2000. Asahara, who was to radically alter, supplement, and totalize these influences, soon became a fledgling guru, acquiring a few disciples by the time he left Agonshū.
In the original report of the vision, the god who manifested himself was nameless, but in later versions of it Asahara identified the god as Shiva, the Hindu deity who by then had become his ultimate spiritual authority (or his guru, as he sometimes put it). It was somewhat odd for Asahara to invoke a Hindu god in the creation of an essentially Buddhist group, even if the esoteric Buddhism he drew upon stayed close to its Hindu roots. His choice of Shiva (as opposed to Vishnu or Brahma, the other great Hindu gods) probably had two important determinants. First, Shiva is specifically identified as the god of yoga. Second, while all Hindu gods have destructive as well as beneficent tendencies, Shiva is specifically associated with salvation through world destruction.
イギリスの宗教学者イアン・リーダーさんの「Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyo 」では、この疑問について、オウムの在家信徒から聞いた話として、「仏教はヒンドゥー教の環境の中から生まれたので、仏教の開祖ブッダとシヴァ神は縁があるのであり、また、オウムはヒンドゥーのヨーガやマントラを取り入れており、オウムが仏教団体としてシヴァ神を拝むのは、なんら矛盾しないのだ。シヴァ仏教と呼んでもらいたい。」と紹介しています。
【メッセージ内容】
Many of you may think English learning is just a tool for your entrance exams or to advance your career.
英語学習を入試やキャリアのツールに過ぎないと思うかもしれません。
But, in point of fact, it may be much much more than you have ever imagined.
でもきっとそれは想像してるよりずっと素晴らしいものだと思います。
I'd say that it's all about recognizing the ongoing narrative that's inside yourself that makes the life you're leading truly yours,
大事なのは、自分の個性の根源となる、絶え間なく変化する内なるストーリーであり、
and how important it is to know that your various memories and feelings actually enable you to express yourself freely in English.
またさまざまな記憶や感覚が英語で気持ちを伝える原動力だと知ることなんです。
Without them, you wouldn't be able to have a distinct personality that sets you apart from others, or express yourself in English.
それなしには他人と自分の違いをつくる個性をとらえ、英語で伝える事は難しくなります。
So, why not take joy in who you are and what you do, and how you feel about things in your own life in order to enjoy being yourself through the English language?
自分らしさ、行動、そして感想を楽しみ、英語を通して自分であることを味わってみませんか？
This book is all about knowing how great it is to take joy in who you are, and what you learn by expressing yourself in the English language.
英語で思いを表現し、自分らしさと学びを味わう素晴らしさを本書でとことん追求します！
No matter where you are in your journey, there are ways to teach yourself English and free yourself through it.
英語を学び、自分を解き放つことは、どこに居ようとできるんです。
You're the lead on the stage of your life.
英語学習の主人公はあくまで自分自身なんです！
Once I was asked that question by the English cineast, Mr. Basil Wright, and I replied to him in a letter: “I cannot believe in Western sincerity because it is invisible, but in feudal times we believed that sincerity resided in our entrails, and if we needed to show our sincerity, we had to cut our bellies and take out our visible sincerity. And it was also the symbol of the will of the soldier, the samurai; everybody knew that this was the most painful way to die. And the reason they preferred to die in the most excruciating manner was that it proved the courage of the samurai. This method of suicide was a Japanese invention and foreigners could not copy it!”
Once I was asked that question by the English cineast, Mr. Basil Wright, and I replied to him in a letter: “I cannot believe in Western sincerity because it is invisible, but in feudal times we believed that sincerity resided in our entrails, and if we needed to show our sincerity, we had to cut our bellies and take out our visible sincerity. And it was also the symbol of the will of the soldier, the samurai; everybody knew that this was the most painful way to die. And the reason they preferred to die in the most excruciating manner was that it proved the courage of the samurai. This method of suicide was a Japanese invention and foreigners could not copy it!”
But sometime, sometime during such a peaceful life [Mishima had spoken of his married life]—we got the two children—still the old memory comes to my mind.
It is the memory of during the war, and I remember one scene which happened during the war, when I was working at the airplane factory.
One motion picture was shown there for the entertainment of the working students, which was based on the novel of Mr. Yokomitsu. And it was maybe Maytime of 1945, the very last of the war, and all students—I was twenties—couldn’t believe that we could be survived after the war. And I remember one scene of the film. There was a street, a street scene of Ginza, before the war, a lot of neon signs, beautiful neon signs; it was glittering and we believed we couldn’t see all in my life, we can never see it all in my life. But, as you know, we see it actually right now, in the Ginza street, there are more and more neon signs on it. But sometimes, when the memory during the war comes back to my mind, some confusion happens in my mind. That neon sign on the screen during the war, and the actual neon sign on the Ginza street, I cannot distinguish which is illusion.
It might be our . . . my basic subject and my basic romantic idea of literature. It is death memory . . . and the problem of illusion.
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