We know little about the origins of the Ninja, the ‘sons of darkness’, mysterious shadow warriors who kept their mysterious mountainous secret shrouded in mist in Japan’s Iga and Koga provinces since around 900 AD, practicing the arts. stealth and invisibility. . The legends, however, speak of the supposed offspring of the Ninja warrior from the tengu, wild demons who were half man and half raven and were capable of bending the laws of nature and controlling the human mind.
Probably closer to the truth, according to Stephen Hayes (the first American to be accepted as Masaaki Hatsumi’s personal student, the thirty-fourth teacher of Togakure-ryu Ninjutsu) is that these warriors were former military men who fled China after the collapse of the T’ang dynasty and settled in Japan. Here they became masters of martial arts, philosophy, and mysticism adapted from the esoteric knowledge of India and Tibet and the spiritual practices of Chinese monks and shamans.
“They exposed systems of integrated mind-body consciousness, based on personal understanding of the order of the universe [and an] An unconventional way of seeing situations and achieving things … The original Ninja were mystics, in contact with powers that today we would describe as psychic. His ability to tune into the blueprint of wholeness and thus become receptive to subtle inputs beyond the usual five senses was strange and terrifying … “
His spirituality or mysticism, however, was not based on empty and impractical religious teachings, but on highly advanced combat skills and practical arts of deception and warfare, where the warrior was bound by natural law. Spirituality was not seen as an external projection onto distant deities, like our religions in the West, but rather as a path to internal knowledge, self-mastery, and personal power.
To reach their understanding, the Ninja developed a comprehensive and holistic map of the human psyche and life cycle, linking the inner and outer worlds, the world of creativity and imagination, and that of time, space, and nature. , to give a complete picture. of life and the challenges each warrior faces on their path to liberation and happiness, as well as the means to overcome these trials. This map revolved around the elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth, and the qualities of Fear, Power, Clarity and Fatigue. The map can be seen as offering four doors that we all must go through if we want a spiritual life that is authentic and has meaning for who we really are.
In the modern world we are still at war, seeking peace, and our personal freedoms are still limited by people and institutions that tell us who we are, how to behave, how much power and freedom we can have: job demands, tax demands. , commuter hours, celebrity fashions … the list is endless. Spiritual warriors know these things as “tyrants.” They are not that different from the demands and dictates of the power-crazed emperors that led to the formation of the remote mountain communities of the Ninja rebels.
INTERNAL BRACES
In these turbulent modern times, we run both the risk of internal tyrants, ways of being and of seeing that we have internalized as we grew up and we have become socialized in the way of seeing the world of our culture, as well as the external tyrants in form of terrorists and nations at war who use military force to impose their worldview on ordinary citizens (us) who get caught in the middle of their petty ideological skirmishes.
Our inner tyrants are fixed patterns of behavior that get in the way of our quest for freedom and divert our attention from the real work of the sacred human being: living fully the finite, beautiful lives that are given to us. They inevitably lead us to external tyranny since, if we have not dealt with our own problems, we end up projecting them onto the world where we see monsters and chaos around us that, in our fear, we must oppose and destroy before they destroy. U.S; or we feel too weak to oppose such madness because this system and habit of warfare is so much bigger than we are.
However, magically, if we deal with the inner tyrants, the outer ones vanish like mist. In this sense, the path of the warrior of the four doors is as relevant today as ever and probably more important than ever.
The warrior’s quest has always been to overcome the impositions of tyranny and find a unique code to live by so that he can harness wisdom and power and find happiness in the material world. In doing so, warriors from many different traditions and cultures have come to realize that we all face four “enemies” of personal freedom. These enemies can be seen as our beliefs about the world, handed down to us by the tyrants around us – the leaders, the power elite, and the self-proclaimed experts in our societies who have established systems and institutions to enforce their worldview. U.S. We have internalized these worldviews and, although we believe that the world works in a particular way, we can never be free because we never see an alternative.
However, if we confront these enemies, we will discover that they naturally and easily transform into allies that can help us achieve the happiness we seek. Therefore, these ‘enemies’ – Fear, Power, Clarity, Fatigue – are not just the challenges we face, they are the means to their resolution, as well as the gateways we go through to resolve them. Then we feel empowered, clearer about who we are and we are able to see the truth of our lives. That, in itself, is freedom, and more freedom always equals more happiness.
THE FOUR DOORS
According to the model of the four doors, we are born in the East of the circle that represents our self and the journey of our life. In childhood we are not even aware of a separate self, so intimately we are still connected to the flow of all things and so deeply as a part of the primary universal consciousness. This stage represents a time of no-self in the sense of a socialized conception of who we are with a unique identity distinct from everything else in the world or any expectation of us to act or be anything but what we are. Although our socialization will begin at this time, we are less aware of these ‘things of the mind’ and more aware of our bodies and their physical demands, as anyone who has heard a newborn cry out for their needs to be met will well know. This physicality and passion of the young child is represented by the Fire element.
As we grow up, the world moves to ‘latch on’ to its worldview and thus we move towards the South, becoming adolescents and young adults, with increasing socialization in the ways of our culture. Although there is no firm timeline or age structure for this journey (and indeed, some people don’t reach all of these stages naturally, and they get stuck in one or more of them as they go through life), this aspect of ourselves is the best. represented as an age period of perhaps 15 to 40 years, with the main action taking place between 15 and 25 years. It is at this moment when we begin to express ourselves as unique individuals in the world, to make a place for ourselves and leave our mark. It is a time of ambition and emotions, when we first fall in love, have our first sexual experiences, our hearts break, we find partners and we “settle down” to focus on home and career. Spiritual work becomes unconscious, bubbling within us while our minds and bodies are occupied with the physical world. Due to the emotional content of this period, it is identified with the Water element, whose ebbs and flows correspond to the ups and downs and the emotional comings and goings of this time.
As we come to the West, we discover that we have entered what in the Western world we call middle age. This is a time for the recapitulation of the self on a grand scale, a time when many people reexamine their lives up to this point, the assumptions they have made about the world, and the agreements they have made with it. It is a moment when, in the words of the philosopher Noam Chomsky, many of us will realize that “the average man does not follow reason but faith and this naive faith [has been founded upon] Necessary illusions and an emotionally powerful oversimplification on the part of the myth maker to keep it on course. “We have been living a lie, in other words, that has been based on the mythology of our culture and its definitions of what makes a ‘real’ (socially acceptable) man or woman, success or failure. This myth, most likely, it has never been us, but we have still lived it without having seen it before.Now, from the perspective of a greater life experience, we begin to question who we are and, even if we are successful, we are settled and we are rich in social terms, if this it is enough to satisfy us on a personal and spiritual level. To begin to re-evaluate who we have been and, with death beginning to blow on our necks, to reconsider our lives and ask ‘Is that all?’ as we look at who we could have been and how we could better spend our remaining days (more ‘expensive time’ at the office or watching our children grow up?). This is a time of consideration and thought about who we really are and what we want of our lives, offering us the potential for adaptation, reinvention, rejuvenation and resurgence in someone new. It is a time in life when the powers of the mind are used more fully and productively, both in reflecting on the past and in reviewing the future, and a deeper sense of a more authentic self.
Finally, we come to the North and, if we have done the necessary work throughout our journey around the wheel, we can experience a true understanding of ourselves, leading to a deep peace and harmony, where we can look back on life and see our true. place in the world, the meaning of the path of our life and, perhaps, the flow of all things, from a perspective of wisdom and good humor. We can take a more spiritual and reflective look at things and experience maturity and roots, where we can be at the service of our community and be happy in ourselves. This grounding quality of the North is represented by the element Earth, which is appropriate because this is also the place of death, where we return to Earth before being reborn in the East as the cycle continues in new lives for come.
Once again, it’s worth emphasizing that these four are only enemies when you haven’t faced them; As soon as you enter into battle with them, you automatically transform them into allies that can help you in your search for balance and internal harmony and, once you achieve it, external success is assured since you are the great dreamer of your world.
The path of all warriors is not to hide within fantasy or seek only the ‘light’ (as is the path of many modern ‘new age’ practices) but to embrace the darkness as well, because it is alone in our shadows (when the light is behind us) that we see ourselves truly reflected, and only then that we can direct ourselves and heal our pains so that the world itself is healed.