Reigenkai

　

Human beings have two dimensions: a tangible material body and an intangible spiritual life, so existence has no meaning if we have a bias toward the material body alone. And of course we cannot exist by virtue of the invisible and impalpable spirit alone.

Further, human beings have two genders that, while having opposing characteristics, allow the advance of humanity by coming together in harmony. If there were only men or only women, humanity would disappear from the earth within a century.

Equidistant from the Earth’s equator are the north and south poles standing at opposite sides from one another. In humans we have the Occidentals of Europe and the Western Hemisphere, and the Orientals of Asia, people with opposite natures and tendencies.

The Western approach is to examine and analyze tangible matter down to its smallest components. While the Eastern approach is to conceive of things spiritually in a more comprehensive and inward manner, and probing toward their deepest interior and ultimate source. Even though both Occidentals and Orientals are humans living on the same Earth, they have these diametrically opposed approaches.

Take for example rice and barley, which grow and are harvested in the opposite seasons. As the same goes for the East and the West. The last two or three hundred years have been a period of activity and advancement, of completion and harvest, for the West, where advances in science and technology have soared, areas that the white race is best at, and the material science culture has flourished by virtue of that, while modern society has materially and outwardly achieved unprecedented, exponential progress.

On the other hand, the East’s spiritual science culture has advanced lethargically with little progress to show. It actually has regressed and degenerated, with the ironic consequence of harm to humanity by material culture, which attained such a high level for humanity. 

In direct proportion to its degree of advancement, this materialistic science civilization creates contradictions, antagonism, and contentions wherever one looks, so that now world crises become increasingly grave and humanity’s hour of destruction grows ever nearer. It‘s as if we are driving the finest automobile drunk and asleep at the wheel. We are just asking for trouble.

Therefore, our urgent task now, must be to quickly correct this imbalance between spiritual and material cultures. We need to create a new ideal culture with bias toward neither the material nor the spiritual, but one that is built upon harmony between the two.

A clock pendulum sustains its movement by swinging equally between left and right, and the movement of waves on the ocean is equally above and below the horizon. Despite the existence of natural laws governing all things, today humanity has forgotten the principle by which a pendulum moves in one direction to a certain point, returns to the center, and then moves in the opposite direction. They think things always proceed in the same direction.

About 700 years ago, the Mongol Genghis Khan conquered as much as 70 percent of the Earth. It was because the pendulum had swung toward the Orient and Asians, and after reaching the limit it moved in the opposite direction, toward the Occident and Westerners, and its movement to date has resulted in today’s material culture.

Under natural law the pendulum will again swing back. But despite the impending return, people assume the pendulum will keep moving in the same direction. In this way, people delude themselves and suffer illusions. There is a natural limit, even to the progress of Western material science culture. Natural law dictates that next we will gradually move into an era of Eastern spiritual science culture.

When both spiritual and material cultures harmonize and become one, we will realize for the first time, the ideal world of peace that humanity has sought in vain. We have now arrived at this juncture of major change, and this heavy responsibility has been imposed on the Asian peoples of the East, especially the Japanese.

Once today’s Asians address the situation by awakening to their own inherent role and going with the flow of the times, today’s material culture that has realized such spectacular progress will finally become a culture that truly benefits humanity. If we are biased toward either the material or the spiritual, the culture that should benefit humanity will become the weapon that destroys it.

To achieve this change, our supreme leaders must awaken and lead the people. Among all of humanity that vital role falls especially to the people of the East. Among Asians, that critical role has been imposed on the Japanese in particular.