Lecture 4:
How the Inner teacher relates to outer teacher
I think for the students in Kyoto it is the most convenient to come to class. They are almost all foreigners but it's the most convenient. For example in Tokyo the students come from places as far away as Nagano, Sendai, Morioka, even Kyushu. So if they come from Yamanashi (which is two hours away) we call them neighbors...
The second level class I am teaching in the Tokyo has about 20 students. (First level has 60 students and more than a hundred people areon the waiting list). Something really scarey happened to one of the students during our class last weekend. There is a man in the class Mr. Ikumori (age 58), who used to do Zen Shiatsu for a long time.
He has completely shifted to Tao Shiatsu and his treatments became very successful. He therefore always expresses how important it is to have faith in Tao Shiatsu, to just follow the Way, and as a result of that, how much benefit there is in giving treatments.
Mr. Ikumori takes a video of every class, edits it down from a whole weekend to two hours and sends it to everyone in the Tokyo class (all done as volunteer work for the students). He had just explained in front of everybody how much the positive result of the treatments were connected to following the devotion to TAO Shiatsu (he really had devoted himself to his patients and also worked incredibly hard, producing a video of each class: So much work!), when all of a sudden, while taking the video,
he fell down. It seemed like he had lost consciousness. When I looked at him to try and treat him, Ki wasn't responding to my image and I knew we needed to call an ambulance. I was afraid that he was going to die in class! Everybody was really scared.
After the incident I went to the hospital and gave him a treatment. He was paralyzed on one side of his body because of apoplexy. After the treatment he started breathing more smoothly and he could move his arm a little bit again.I continued treatments over the next two days and he kept improving. All his fellow students are now taking turns in giving him Shiatsu every day, even though most of them are
professionals, with their own clinic or are leading a busy life with job and family. As an addition to that, every day at one O'clock, all the Tokyo class students are doing the Ki breathing meditation for Mr. Ikumori. So now I'm asking if you would like to help by joining in: At 1 p.m. every day (if you can remember) we do the Ki breathing meditation for Mr. Ikumori's recovery.
And please include, Mrs. Mizuno (age around 60 or 65), who had an accident a while ago and can not come to class until spring. She is a very serious student, who lives in a village near Nagano, where there are a lot of old people, but no doctor. She told us that she is one of the youngest (!) in her village and therefore feels responsible to help the others. That's why she is studying Tao Shiatsu.
It has been a very interesting experience to do this Ki meditation together (Endo sensei continues with a good laugh). Especially when all of a sudden during our lunch break in a restaurant or in the middle of discussing the rotation plan in the hospital we all remembered the meditation and undisturbed by the fact of being in a public space just sat there quietly for 5 minutes... a whole group of people... it must have looked pretty strange to the people around us... Anyway, I hope you can experience the warmth that comes with it and that by giving you can receive a lot.
If a student just falls down and loses consciousness during class, everybody gets so frightened. Since this experience everyone is really confronted with what Tao Shiatsu is for them and how they really want to deal with Tao Shiatsu. Mr. Ikumori is a person who talked to the students about how important the image of the teacher is because he was clearly experiencing it. And since then I stopped hesitating in talking about it. He said that through the video he keeps the image of the teacher giving the treatment instead of him. He says by just following the image something comes from inside.
He treated many patients successfully who had different diseases, (some quite serious like dystrophy or hepatitis C) that weren't being cured in the hospital. After one of the patients was completely cured, all the members of that hospital ward became his patients!! (the whole class breaks out inlaughter...) So he is a really important student who is helping to prove the effectiveness of Tao Shiatsu and who supports his fellow students. (One student asks for how long Mr. Ikumori has been studying Tao Shiatsu and Endo sensei explains that he started Tokyo class last May but Mr. Ikumori used to come to the Osaka class from Tokyo before that.)
As you can see the image and motivation are two major factors in Tao Shiatsu: Is it about yourself or others? If the motivation is for yourself the image will not be continued, right? And how we recognize the object/outside world is through our projection of our image as well as through the reflection of the object:
self/subject - projection - object
object - reflection - self/subject
That's how we recognize the object, through our projection of the image and the reflection of the object. For example to recognize the meridians of the other person, they are reflecting in our heart. Do you understand? We project our image to the object and we recognize it. The image of our teacher is a projection of our INNER teacher. We all have an inner teacher and we project the image of our inner teacher onto our teacher. So if we make a clear image of the teacher it means the INEER techer is cleary working in your heart. It's not outside! Therefore if your inner teacher is positive, the image of the outer teacher is positive. If your inner teacher is negative, your image of the outer teacher becomes negative. This is the relationship between your inner teacher and the image of outer teacher. To work with the image of the teacher means to follow our inner image. By following our inner teacher (which means image of outer teacher) and putting our ego down,under the image - and that's how Ki works.
(Endo sensei answers a student's question about how the inner teacher relates
to the outer teacher): To follow the image is to follow the inner teacher. It's very simple: If you don't follow, you're not following the image, right? If the ki which makes Tao Shiatsu possible is individual, and just created with your knowledge and technique, we don't have to struggle about all this. But the Ki which works in TAO Shiatsu doesn't come from the ego side, knowledge or technique. It comes from the bottom of existence, the bottom of nature. You cannot create it. You receive the Ki, the source of nature through the image. This Ki is universal Ki and can only be recognized or received by following this tradition, because that's the gate for it. Yes, the image of the teacher and the student state attitude of Tao Shiatsu (which has been explained in the five elements' spiritual principles) is the gate of wholeness. (After working with each other on the stomach meridians, Endo senseicontinues:)
So you see, there's no space to feel sorry for yourself (after seeing one student's ki, which was feeling sorry for himself because he couldn't smoothly give up his ego).
On one hand there are so many things to study in Tao Shiatsu (the basic forms, meridians, SST and even more, and of course they need to be practiced). But on the other hand there is the MAIN study of Tao Shiatsu: how to give up your ego and let the universal Ki flow through you.