Yasuhiko kimura biography of mahatma

The more evolved we are in consciousness the further is the horizon of our exploration and the greater is our competency for exploration. I hold that the exploration of this vast physical-metaphysical uni-multiverse, and the concomitant evolution in and of consciousness, is the purpose of our cosmic existence. We are cosmic explorers and we should never forget this glorious assignment.

On the road of integrity, you will find yourself often alone, but never lonely. On the road of mediocrity, you will find yourself never alone, but often lonely. The world, more than ever, awaits you who choose to travel the road least traveled, ready to travel alone but always with arms open in joy. Therefore, toku is integrity, and toku is also power because through toku your vision, action, and result become coherent and consistent.

Success in life and business requires power to make your vision realized through action. Success thus requires integrity in the sense of toku. Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness. Utility the test of virtue. Thomas Jefferson whose thought was profoundly influenced by Benedict de Spinoza via John Locke and other British philosophers who were influenced by Spinoza.

The virtue is to be in integrity with the conatus, the evolutionary power within, and the evolutionary will or desire to preserve and realize oneself. Therefore, the virtue of Lao Tzu, Spinoza, and Jefferson is the virtue of integrity and authenticity. Integrity means being true to your principle, your word, and yourself, and total integrity involves a total accord between these three levels of being true.

Men and women of integrity who have the power to sustain their commitment through to the end and achieve their objectives, sometime against all odds, are those in whom their principle, commitment, and self are all in accord. For we can sustain our commitment only when it is one that is in accord with our authentic self and with our deepest values and principles.

Therefore, unless it is an authentic expression of our self and unless it is consistent with our principles, our commitment is bound to be inauthentic. Yasuhiko Genku Kimura is a philosopher, independent scholar, former ordained Zen Buddhist priest, consultant and advisor to leaders in business, science, and cultural organizations.

Over a quarter century he has developed and delivered hundreds of innovative, custom-made individual and corporate transformational programs. He is recognized for his ability to integrate advanced Western scientific thought with the intuitive wisdom of Eastern philosophic traditions to bring about profound change in the way in which people be and think.

Kimura assists thought leaders to evolve beyond the paradigm-bound being and thinking that often inhibits development and success. He aims to provoke real breakthrough-thinking in others through his Zen-inspired Socratic method, awakening the latent creative potential in individuals and organizations, and thereby creating a path for people to transform their creative vision into effective action.

Kimura is author of eight published books and well over one hundred essays and papers in fields ranging from metaphysics, spirituality, ethics, science, consciousness studies, and systems theory to futurism, business, leadership, communication, strategic thinking, and organizational development. Kimura lectured and gave courses and workshops on wide-ranging subjects throughout the United States and around the world, including Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Brazil, and Argentina.

From to , Mr. Zen is a phonetic rendering of the Sanskrit word, dhyana, which was translated into Tibetan as bsam-gtan , a basis for representational thinking. And most of what we call meditation is just representational thinking. When it comes to the experiential side of what is called meditation, the word used is yoga. This word means to harness, and is taken from agriculture.

You have to yoke two bullocks together in order to plow. The implication is that you want to bridge the division into something lower and something higher that has occurred intrapsychically and is. YK: When we use language it is normally to describe or represent, as in exoteric Buddhism or Hinduism. It seems that in rDzogs-chen, language is used for a different purpose.

HG: Yes, this touches upon the role of the mantras , in particular the seed mantras that are luminous phenomes and sememes. The seed will grow. In Hinduism, one has dealt with it. In Buddhism, nobody has done anything so far, possibly because it contravenes logical reductionism. I have discussed this in my article Sound, Color and Self Organization.

YK: You use gnoseme. This is the meaning unit. HG: Yes, it has meaning and a certain shape. YK: What is the etymological meaning of the term mantra? It protects language from doing that. To the uninitiated it is just noise. It has nothing to do with what is commonly called secret. What was meant by secret even in the middle ages was to have experienced , not to be concealed.

Charles Dickens makes fun of that. This is precisely what most Lamas try to do. Tradition has become rote memory. HG: Yes, in other words, Being speaks, and with speaking, also comes a kind of promise. This promise is technically know as lung. Nowadays it has been ritualized and the text to be studied is read out at top speed. After all, you must.

The speed of the bullet train in Japan is nothing in comparison with the speed at which the lung is read. YK: Our conversation has led to a further question. Your have used a number of terminologies from modern science and from your lat friend, Dr. Erich Jantsch. Can we apply the rDzogs-chen thinking to the evolution of science? HG: That depends on how you interpret the word evolution.

YK: This way of looking at the universe is much more fun than the Newtonian or the Darwinian way. HG: Yes, it is a play, not a game. And we must always remember the everpresent experiencer as being a healthy mind in a healthy body. This contrasts sharply with the idea of a game reflecting a tired mind in a tired body. YK: Actually it may be that evolution is literally like a play.

Children learn by playing, and when we are playing we learn. HG: True, Darwin saw many valid things, but he was tied down by the materialistic side of the 19th century.

Yasuhiko kimura biography of mahatma

The one-sided application of his principle of natural selection only too often leads tot he image of the blind evolution producing all kinds of nonsense. Evolution in the domain of the living is a learning process, and as such is open, not only in respect to its products, but also to the rules of the game it develops. In the words of Erich Jantsch, the result of this openness is the self-transcendence of evolution of evolutionary mechanisms and principles themselves.

The material side has, of course, done much, and without it we would not have all the amenities we have now. But we also have to take into account that things may go wrong. These frustrating events usually happen on the weekend; the computer breaks down, or the power fails. You referred in our previous conversations to some of the terms I use, which I have taken from Erich Jantsch, who was far ahead of his time, such as dissipative structure and others pertaining to modern systems philosophy.

The term coined by Ilya Prigogine, dissipative structures, exhibit two types of behavior: near their equilibrium, order is destroyed as it is in isolated systems , but far from equilibrium, order is maintained or emerges beyond instability thresholds. Dissipative structures develop entropy, although it does not accumulate in the system, but is part of the continuous energy exchange with the environment.

The other point is that of the self-organization, which with reference to dissipative structures is that of the self-organization, which with reference to dissipative structures is illustrated by the so-called Belousov- Zhabotinsky reaction. In modern thinking, evolution and chaos play a tremendous role, such that whatever is is in a way an emergent phenomenon.

The question may be asked, from where does the observed phenomenon emerge? The answer is, out of the openness that is being as such, no thing, nothing. HG: If you use the word plenum, you will get into the other difficulty, because of our deeply ingrained dualistic way of thinking. With such a statement, we are already in our closure. There is a paradox: there is a something where there is nothing.

YK: Yes. That is the reason I use the term quantum vacuum-plenum, which is a complementarity holding the contradiction. In the Gnostic system, the idea of the anthropos played a significant role. I think the best presentation of the anthropocosmos is in the book Gnosis by Kurt Rudolph. We are always reminded that we cannot but employ mythopoeic language.

YK: So translating a word like sunyata in a superficial manner does not capture the experience. HG: There is a problem with faulty translations. When I translate, I always go to the original texts themselves, and I trust I know something of my own mother tongue and need not refer to what others have said. The German language, like the Russian language, can still create new words by striving for an understanding, and translation means translation, and not transposition of one word for another.

In English it is not so easy. How is the Japanese? YK: To create new words in Japanese is relatively easy. We can create new words by combining different kanji characters. HG: Once you understand, you will notice the difference. One point to note is that in Buddhism there is ignorance, but not sin. However, what is usually translated as ignorance is not what we usually understand by it.

The other word is bhranti , going astray. HG: Yes, this right way to go in Japanese is the shingon , to be true to your word, to have integrity. YK: Interesting. Shingon , as you know, is the translation of mantra in Japanese. HG: But you have to look at the deeper meaning of mantra. HG: It certainly is not the egological thing. The Tibetans use bdag , bdag-nyid , and bdag-nyid chen-po.

YK: So when you are not true to your Self, you go astray. YK: If samsara is going astray, what is nirvana? HG: Maybe it is reversing the trend of going astray, but not going into an end state. This illusive experiential term has been interpreted in various ways. It is like a flame going out, you cannot retrieve it. HG: I would be reluctant to make a precise statement.

The trend is always there. These words are not so much a definition as a descriptor, and this opens up many now perspectives. YK: Nirvana may be said to be a state that is not samsara. HG: The poet has access to the world to which ordinary people have none. Your mind is closed. In The Republic , poets have no place. YK: Without an enlightened leader, the ideology of The Republic may lead to fascism.

Or is this a valid division? HG: Kant was too much of a rationalist. In his Critique of Pure Reason , he denied that noumena as objects of pure reason are objects of knowledge, because reason gives knowledge only of sensible intuition phenomena. Negatively speaking, noumena are objects of which no sensible intuition, and hence no knowledge.

Positively speaking, they soul and God are conceived of as objects of intellectual intuition, a mode of knowledge humans do not have, according to Kant. HG: I do not think that we can speak of equivalents. The Pali form for the Sanskrit samvritti was sammuta by general consent. YK: You nave in the past referred to triadic patterning inn the Buddhist tradition.

In the Hegelian philosophy, we also find a triadic patterning of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Can this be compared with the Eastern triadic pattern? HG: I do not think so. Furthermore, thesis and antithesis do not result in or give synthesis. Hegel himself was a bit conceited. He considered that which he said to be the last word, and he saw himself as a performer when he lectured.

He was certainly influential, but he was tied down to the western tradition with its overemphasis on rationality. HG: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling had a mind of great depth and range, capable of original insights as well as choosing those of others, such as neo-Platonism, Spinoza, Kant, Fichete, Hegel, and others. Many of his ideas reemerged in Schopenhauer, the theologian Tillich, and existentialism.

Schelling rejected quantitative, mechanical science, and stressed life as organic an purposeful. For him, reality or objectivity predominates over ideality or subjectivity in nature. It runs from matter via light, electricity, and chemistry to the organism, the most spiritual phase of the potency of nature. Subjectivity predominates in the ideal.

Running from morality and science to art, the most natural phase of spirit. The full manifestation of the Absolute, the universe, is a perfect organism and a work of art. HG: There are two meanings of the word enlightenment. The most vitally held in the Western world is the emphasis on reason, and when we talk about the Age of Enlightenment or Reason, this refers predominantly to the intellectual mood of the 18th century.

In the Western world it was a challenge to the assumptions that had prevailed throughout the middle ages. It was characterized by a distrust of traditional authority, respect for human dignity, and the conviction that reason would illuminate mankind and lead to perpetual social, political and scientific progress. It had, however, its greatest flowering in France, foremost amongst them, Voltaire.

These philosophers of the Enlightenment were not so much philosophers but popularizers of the 17th century doctrines, particularly the rationalism of Descartes and Spinoza, and the empiricism of Bacon and Locke. In the Oriental context, what is meant by enlightenment leads to the fulfillment of the human quest for perfect understanding.

It is here that the Westerner usually gets into trouble. The traditional rationalistic translation and the undoubted success of the rational approach has had carried with it a kind of dominance psychology, that is , the concept that one has to tell the Oriental how he has to think. Dominance psychology is an attitude in which you influence a person to the extent that it becomes indistinguishable from brainwashing.

This is the reason why so many mistranslations of Oriental texts flood the market, because they are done from the Western perspective, and not from what the Easterner actually had to say. Lastly, the Aristotelian concepts in which our Western languages are steeped do not apply to most non-European languages. HG: Yes, and in many cases they continue doing so.

For example, take a Chinese grammar course and you will never learn Chinese. HG: Returning to the so-called enlightenment, we should not forget that it is an awakening. It implies light, but not in the sense of switching it on. Rather, the light shines out from you and you preserve it. For this reason, Heidegger said that we are luminous beings.

YK: Had Heidegger studied Eastern philosophy? HG: No.