My last post was about  Oki-sensei’s description of what the natural body, natural mind-heart and natural life-style are for human beings and that yoga is a system of ‘philosophy and practical methods’ that teaches this to us.

In this post, I summarised two lectures from an English booklet ‘Last Lectures by Masahiro Oki’. The lectures are one given in Finland on 28 June 1985 (pages 5-10) and another given in Belgium on 15 July 1985 (pages 33-37). Oki-sensei draws our attention from lofty ideals (as per the last post) to very practical indications which we can apply in our daily life.  He says the following:

Attendees of the lectures suggested many subjects such as love, religion, peace, health, and yoga. He decided to speak how to create peace, because in ‘peace’ all aspects of human beings are included. After the Second World War, he decided to become a peacemaker and joined many so-called peacemakers’ groups. However, he found that there were many paper- or mouth-peacemakers but they were not necessarily peaceful themselves. Then he realised that, if we want to create a peaceful world, each person must be in a peaceful condition, where we need three elements: peaceful body, peaceful mind-heart and peaceful life-style. He concretely indicates as follows:

How to create Peaceful Body

• Keep your muscles flexible.
• Keep your spine stretched.
• Keep your breath deep.
• Keep your blood clean.

Yoga Asana and Pranayama teach these.

How to create Peaceful Mind-heart

Obtain a balanced state in emotions, desires and intellect.

• Emotions and desires come spontaneously, not by thinking. When some thought or feeling comes, don’t deny it. But, think ‘what is the opposite thought or feeling to this one?’  If you think well, you will find there are so many ways of interpretations. Then bring in the opposite thought or feeling to the one which originally occurred to you. Through this practice, your mind will come to feel alright whether this way or that way.   Unbalanced thoughts or feelings come because your ability of adaptation is weak.
• To keep your intellect peaceful, you must distinguish what you understand from what you don’t understand.

How to create Peaceful Life-style

Peaceful Lifestyle means the life-style where we help each other and develop together. This is love. There are two causes for human quarrels: egoism and attachment. How to practise this kind of life-style is as follows:

• You do not need to deny about possessing things, but utilise them as public things, or for both yourself and others.
• Whatever you do, keep its benefits for yourself and others at 50% each. Keep your own joy and other’s joy at 50% each.

Oki-sensei showed us both lofty ideals and practical indications. I think that having these both is one of the beautiful features of Okido Yoga. 

Here is what I picked up from Oki-sensei’s lectures ‘What is yoga?’ (1978.7.28 & 1978.9.29).

Meaning of the word ‘yoga’ 

The word ‘yoga’ means ‘to unite’ or ‘to yoke’ and refers to uniting the Plus Force and Minus Force. The universe functions as plus and minus forces perpetually change, move towards balance and reach stability. This is the law of nature, which is what enables us to live. In order to be saved from suffering (such as illness, distress, unhappiness, calamities, pollution, wars etc.), we have no choice but to follow the law of nature. This means that we are to understand and practise what the natural body for human beings is, what the natural mind-heart* for human beings is and what the natural life-style for human beings is, which together make up the human natural state.

The human natural state is as follows: 

>  Natural Body for human beings: The hara power is enhanced. The hara power is the ability to enhance and strengthen the natural recovery power which we are inherently given.

>  Natural Mind-Heart for human beings: The busshō, the divine nature of human mind-heart, is enhanced. It is the ability to thank everything, interpret everything as joyful and divine, and make friends with everything. Only human beings are inherently given this ability to develop to such a state.

>  Natural Life-style for human beings: We cannot live alone. Human life is social life, where we live in each other’s cooperation, as well as tied down to each other. We have the ability to enhance our adaptability so that we may still feel free in a limited life. Co-existence and co-happiness are integral to the natural life-style for human beings.

Yoga is a system of ‘philosophy and practical methods’ which concretely teaches how our body, mind-heart and life-style are to be, in order to live in the human natural state as described above.

To start this blog, I listened to a couple of Oki-sensei’s lectures given in old days. The scale of his teaching is vast and profound. Despite how long I have been engaged in Okido yoga, it still makes me feel that I cannot concisely sum up what Oki-sensei taught – i.e. what Okido yoga is. It may be naturally so because yoga is not meant to be learned from listening to or reading words, as he himself said repeatedly. However, just as it is necessary to sometimes check the technical content of exercises in order to improve our physical training, I feel that, if I try to describe at my current level what Okido yoga is, this process will improve my understanding of Okido Yoga. 

So, here I am going to share what I grasp currently, while listening to or reading Oki sensei’s words. Your comments will be welcome so that we can learn together.