What is the jiyū shūkyō approach to studying my jiyū shūkyō?
Since creating my jiyū shūkyō will be a long and winding process, it’s unwise to treat it like a project. It’s best maintained or supervised as a life area. Success in this endeavor isn’t measured by finishing or reaching an end point but by maintaining a certain standard. In this case, my standard for my jiyū shūkyō could be something like a portion of my mission statement: “I’m engaged every day in a pursuit of wisdom, meaning, and beauty.”
Specifically, success in my jiyū shūkyō area includes the following:
- maintenance of contemplative practices like seiza and walking
- maintenance of mindful reading, journaling, and studying through my talahardin
- maintenance of practices through communities and others
- maintenance of creative practices involving walking, writing, and photography
These all involve maintaining habits, routines, and reviews.
But how do I study in a way that makes me feel that I’m not constricted, that I’m allowed to flow and follow my curiosities, while maintaining a measure of focus?
In the creation of my jiyū shūkyō, I need to let go of this desire for blueprints. Spirituality and answers to how to live are best left unblueprinted. I should have faith that this process will result to something. As long as I follow my curiosities and authenticity, I will eventually focus.
Some ideas on how to study:
- Use my purpose statement, my vision statement, and my mission statement to be selective in what I read.
- I should implement a menu.
- I could categorize the subjects of my studies into bigger fields of inquiry.
Map of Content
My jiyū shūkyō (自由宗教) consists of the following fields of inquiry:
- western liberal religion
- eastern liberal religion
- filipino spirituality
- creative expressions such as walking, writing, and photography
Unprocessed
Let my curiosities dictate each day’s study. Trust in this long process. The talahardin is the intermediate packet. As long as you follow your curiosities, something will eventually happen.
Let go of this need to be efficient in your studies.
As long as you are being selective of what you read and letting go of diving into subject matter that will distract you (FOCUS AND AUTHENTICITY applied in my everyday studies), you’ll be good.
The documentation of the spiritual journey is the key. And that is why Thoreau journaled. But how did he arranged these together? And when did he knew he can start arranging?
It is one thing to say you want to reintegrate and another to really practice faith. You have to practice faith even in your work. Faith that the words will come at the right time. That words will come despite the meanderings.
In a way, my project is similar to Andrew but my way of expression shall be more poetic, using juxtaposition and creative writing.
From Andrew’s email on how he studies
after school (around 18)
what I read was basically decided by chance/fate in that I’d simply buy any books that jumped out at me from the shelves of the various second-hand bookshops that I would often visit. Some I loved and kept, some I didn’t, and passed on.
After a few years I got a better sense of what was interesting me and so began to look for those things more actively. However, it was always unsystematic and wholly intuitive.
during that time I became particularly interested in the philosophies of:
- Dietrich Bonhoeffe,
- Leo Tolstoy,
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- and also Japanese, Chinese and Indian religion/philosophy in general.
The last subject area is what got me particularly interested in Tai Chi.
Along the way (and again by chance/fate), I ended up sharing a house in London with a professional philosopher called Martin Joughin who was at the time translating Gilles Deleuze’s “Expressionism in philosophy” an annotated translation of “Spinoza et le problème de l’expression” (NY: Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990.
He could see that I would benefit from a bit more structure to my thinking and so he made me read carefully, and then talk about at length:
- Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Essays”,
- Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”,
- Spinoza’s “Ethics”
- and the Books of Isaiah and Ecclesiastes.
As a wild card to help me deal with texts that were hateful and abhorrent, he made me read Hitler’s horrific “Mein Kampf”. I’m so glad that he forced me to do this because the experience helped me get used to dealing with ideas that, although I despised and wholly rejected them, I still needed to know about and take seriously because others took them seriously
it was Martin’s way of offering me a version of Sun Tzu’s famous advice to “know thine enemy.”
it prepared me well for the moment when I began to train for the ministry and study theology at Oxford. There I had no choice but to dig deep into single books and authors, not all of which I would have chosen to read if I had been left to myself.
Key texts that I read in some real depth during my three years at Oxford were:
- The Gospels of Matthew and John
- The Books of Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, 1 & 2 Kings and Genesis (chapters 1-11).
- Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue”
- Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics” and the “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals”
- Samuel Clarke’s “Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God: and Other Writings”
- Spinoza’s “Ethics” (again!)
- John Calvin’s “Institutes of Religion”
- Paul Tillich’s “Systematic Theology”
- Karl Barth’s “Dogmatics” (well, large chunks of it)
- John Macquarrie’s “Principles of Christian Theology” (it’s thanks to him that I began to become interested in Heidegger)
- F. H. Bradley’s “Appearance and Reality”
- Bernard Bosanquet’s “What Religion Is”
- Lucretius’ “De Rerum Natura”
- John Locke’s “Reasonableness of Christianity” and “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.”
On leaving Oxford I then spent the next ten years concentrating mostly on reading Spinoza, Ernst Bloch, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger.
It was in connection with the latter thinker that I was drawn more and more into a study of the Kyoto School of philosophers and to a discovery of Henry Bugbee who, as I think you know, met with Heidegger.
A hugely important discovery for me during this time was the work of Paul Wienpahl and I still consider his short essay “An Unorthodox Lecture” to be one of the most important things I have ever read.
Almost as important — because it tied up so many of the loose threads of my earlier scatter-gun reading was discovering James C. Edwards’ “The Plain Sense of Things: Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism.”
2008
By c. 2008 these texts — and particularly the last two — helped gift me with a reasonable sense of what was my own philosophical/spiritual centre of gravity.
But it was only on discovering Imaoka-sensei’s work that I found a practical, and relatively simple way that could draw all the things I’d been reading and thinking about for decades into something simple and comprehensible enough to people
I didn’t choose a path so much as a path emerged by me allowing interest/chance at first to play the greatest role.
there was a period when I was being very systematic about studying once a) I knew what interested me and b) when I was forced to by my Oxford tutors and the demands of needing to take a final exam in theology!
And today? Well, I remain completely committed to the idea of going primarily with the flow of what is happening, butnow, thanks to the strong sense of gravity/orientation/way-of-organising-my-consequent-thinking-and-study that has been gifted to me by Imaoka-sensei, I mostly only put my efforts into properly exploring those chance encounters (or is it encounters with the aforementioned Greek/Roman/Shinto/Anitist “gods” of this!) that truly resonate with me.
I do still continue to pay reasonably close attention to, and even now and then explore more deeply, the kinds of thinking that I do not naturally resonate with. I do this because I realise that were I ever to forget that not everybody thinks like me — or that my way of thinking is the only way — then I will have betrayed everything that has become important to me.
Things like this make me see better and better the wisdom found in Leszek Kołakowski’s short piece, “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist.” I think I am this kind of person … and I think Imaoka-sensei was as well.
In the end, it’s all about how to become the kind of cosmic human Imaoka-sensei was trying to become. Studying is part of that … but equally important is Seiza — and whether that is the quiet-sitting we do together on a Thursday and Saturday, or the Seiza that is walking and taking photographs.