God and Man ～Guideposts for Spiritual Peace and Awakening
ー Written by Masahisa Goi
Chapter 7④： My Method of Prayer
Love heals everything.
What breaks through all misfortunes are actions that originate from love.
My prayer is a prayer of love. I believe that wisdom is one aspect of love, and is included within love.
However, I would like to add that love is not an emotional attachment.
Emotional attachment (情) was born from love (愛), and is inseparably related to love.
This can be seen in the way the two words are combined in the Japanese word aijou (愛情), which means 'affection' or 'the attachment of love.'
For this reason, even love is considered to be karmic in Buddhism, which teaches that 'love' is a source of illusion.
The love of God, then, is called Mercy in Buddhism.
What I have been writing about as 'love' is not emotional attachment, but is 'Charity' in English (Great Mercy, Benevolence, or Compassion).
However, I do not wish for people to make a clear-cut distinction between the two, thinking that love is good and that emotional attachment is bad.
In this present world, love is inevitably accompanied by emotional attachment just as light is accompanied by shadow.
Human beauty shines in a person who swallows tears while relinquishing an attachment that is hard to sever; and from this the radiance of love grows ever brighter.
On the other hand, if a person can easily sever emotional attachments out of coldheartedness, that is even worse than becoming easily embroiled in emotional attachment.
There is beauty in a deeply loving person taking care not to drown in emotional attachment.
In the movements of such a person, I think, we can perceive the godly way of living in this phenomenal world.
My prayer is a prayer in which I become one with the other person and, enfolding the person in my heart, ascend to the divine world.
To pray is, first of all, to let one's mind be empty.
It is to cast aside for a while the 'self' that has existed until now, letting only God live in one's heart.
One has to set aside all one's own hopes and wishes for a later time.
If one lets only God live in oneself, all of the necessary hopes and wishes will be fulfilled.
The prayers of the small 'self' only make a person shrink smaller and smaller, and they do no good at all.
Instead, think only God. Practice only love.
Love, at times, can be extremely stern.
But this sternness is entirely different from coldheartedness.
Love shows sternness to let the whole come fully alive, and at the same time to truly enliven everything and every occurrence.
Coldheartedness kills everything for the profit of one's own self and one's own groups.
Each person must reflect on his or her own actions, to see whether they came from the sternness of love or the harshness of a cruel heart.
While doing this, one also has to observe what other people do as a reference.
Then, one must fully utilize these reflections and observations as guideposts along one's path.
Coldheartedness disguised as the sternness of love, and emotional attachment mistaken for love: to overcome these two mistaken attitudes, human beings must pray to God and become one with God.
Believing that God has assigned me the role of letting people thoroughly understand such deep human questions, I continue to pray each day, with many people, the prayer of Kuu, or true reality.
To be continued in Chapter 8①
Dios y el Ser Humano (Spanish Edition)
Deus e o Homem (Portuguese Edition)
