Karma and Reincarnation:
The Key to Spiritual Evolution and Enlightenment
Review by Dr. Aidan Rankin:
Hiroshi Motoyama is a parapsychologist, psychic and healer who is
also a practising Shinto priest. Although understated in the book,
this living connection with Japan's ancient wisdom seems to give Dr
Motoyama's ideas their coherence and clarity, as well as an extra
layer of spiritual strength. Shinto in its true form is itself
understated. It has no founder and no fixed set of dogmas, but has
merely evolved with the people and landscape of Japan. Thus it
venerates the expanses of nature but adapts just as well to an
enclosed urban world. It balances the eternal and the traditional
with the continuous cycles of change within human society and the
natural world. Shinto allows the Japanese to see divine
possibilities in rock formations, streams and mountains. At the same
time, multinational corporations raise shrines to Inari, the god of
the rice harvest who has become the god of business success. There
are no contradictions between these old and new faces of Shinto, for
one follows directly from the other. In the same way, Shinto is
capable of absorbing and adapting external influences, such as
Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism, and subtly integrating them into
its spiritual consciousness. Although it is a distinctively Japanese
spirituality, its kami, or deities and nature spirits, are universal
archetypes.
The influence of Shinto enables Dr Motoyama to draw widely from
Vedantic and Buddhist philosophy, as well as some of the most recent
insights of modern psychology and physics. The result is not the
eclectic, spiritual butterfly quality of some New Age thinking in
the West, but a holistic philosophy with the quiet confidence of an
ancient and continuing tradition. Shinto is therefore the backdrop
to Dr Motoyama's thought, and being an eminently practical path it
enjoins him root his spirituality in lived experience, to address
the challenges affecting real human beings today instead of engaging
in abstract speculations.
Dr Motoyama takes as his starting point the Vedantic concept of the
three-bodied self. This consists of the gross body, which undergoes
the physical processes of birth, death and rebirth; the astral or
subtle body, the repository of thoughts and emotions that acts as
the vehicle for transmigration; and the causal body, a purer
consciousness 'most closely related to the Absolute'. Rather than
focussing on the dissolution of individual consciousness as a goal,
like many Vedantic thinkers, he helps his clients to make sense of
their present lives, emotions and attachments and achieve emotional
equilibrium. Instead of breaking radically with the karmic cycle,
his approach seeks to ease the burden of karma, to overcome negative
patterns and so accumulate wisdom. In its subtlety and its awareness
of complex processes, this method expresses a gentler and often
overlooked side of Vedanta. It is as valid, and valuable, as the
ascetic tradition, indeed they are two sides of the same coin.
This human-centred approach is reflected in an emphasis on the
importance of past lives. These play a crucial role in the spiritual
consultations that Dr Motoyama undertakes with clients. Previous
incarnations are part of the individual's total experience and so
understanding them helps to resolve conflicts and release emotional
blockages in our present lifetimes. The calm and measured approach
that results enables us to rise above negative karma, by casting off
unnecessary and harmful attachments and putting worldly ambitions in
a healthy perspective. Thus past life regression is an extension,
and a transcendence, of the psychotherapeutic process. It reflects a
view of the individual that is holistic in a cosmic sense and takes
a long view of spiritual progress. Our individuality consists of a
delicate balance of 'nature and nurture', genetic inheritance and
environmental influences, but it also contains the accumulated
experience of many lifetimes. This inclusive, indeed universal view
of the human person retains the respect for the individual that is
at the heart of good psychotherapy, whilst reminding us of the
interconnectedness of all life and the karmic thread that runs
through human existence.
Karma and Reincarnation is peppered with examples of past life
regression that intrigue and delight the reader. There is the case
of the boy from Kamakura whose school phobia and other behavioural
problems were related to a previous life in which as a senior clan
chief he met defeat and violent death. Similarly, Ms Y, a devotee of
the Tamamitsu Shinto shrine with which Dr Motoyama is associated,
killed herself in a previous incarnation in which she had been
forbidden to marry beneath her station. Ms Y's clinical depression
took hold when she was twenty-one, the same age as her former self's
suicide. As Dr Motoyama writes:
'The cause of her depression was her attachment to her former love
and to the resulting sorrow. This attachment, the emotions and
thoughts that occurred as a result of her unfulfilled love, remained
in her soul after her physical death. When she reincarnated in this
life and reached the same age, the sorrowful mind manifested and
overtook her.'
For Ms Y, therefore, the usual insights of psychotherapy could never
be more than partially helpful. She is being harmed psychologically
by an entrenched attachment, which is also blocking her spiritual
progress. Through awareness of her past experience, she is able to
neutralise that attachment, to become more integrated as a human
being and evolve as a spiritual being. Dr Motoyama's consultations
thereby fuse the roles of therapist and spiritual adviser. He gains
insights from creative visualisation and a form of shamanic trance
as well as the more conventional methods of the therapist.
Past life therapy remains contentious in the secular West, with its
linear view of history and time and its materialistic view of the
individual. Yet awareness of past lives is increasingly interpreted
as arising from the collective unconscious, or as an aspect of the
'genetic memory' encoded in DNA. As well as individual karma, Dr
Motoyama stresses the importance of family karma and national karma,
collective characteristics or patterns of attachment that can
determine the destiny of human groups, but which can be transformed
by human awareness. An example of the latter might be Japan's
transition from militaristic power to peaceful state with strong
pacifist leanings. Although imposed by military defeat, this
transformation could not have lasted without a change of
consciousness on the part of the Japanese people, collectively and
individually.
In the East, the work of past life therapists can arouse controversy
as well. Mainstream Hindus and Buddhists, for example, doubt or deny
that previous incarnations can be directly remembered. However the
memory of past lives can also be seen in the context of akashic
records. Akasha is the Vedic term for primary substance, the stuff
of the universe, and it can be said to contain a record of every
thought, word and deed, every form of consciousness that has
occurred or will occur in the cosmos.
Hiroshi Motoyama's practice straddles East and West, uniting the
most positive elements of each. He applies the systematic approach
of Western scientific investigation, but gives that science the
spiritual dimension that the West too often overlooks. This restores
to the Western rational tradition the openness to ideas that has
been its greatest strength. At the same time, it rescues
spirituality from ethereal and irrational realms.
Summary:
In the context of Eastern thought, Dr Motoyama
restores to karma its empowering dimension. Far from being mere
fatalism, as it is frequently presented, this ancient law of cause
and effect equips individuals, and human communities, to exercise
rational choice. Dr Motoyama does not refer to Sri Aurobindo, but
his subtle balance of detachment and engagement, human and cosmic,
material and spiritual will be familiar to any student of Integral
Yoga. The ancient Japanese wisdom at the root of his thinking
deserves more positive recognition in the world.
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