I guess my feeling was that I had lots of unanswered questions in my mind. I’ve been brought up mostly in a Christian country and I really liked the teaching of love from Jesus Christ but there were some things about Christianity that just didn’t add up or didn’t seem to be the complete picture of truth. So, I still had unanswered questions and I was seeking for answers. That’s why I was reading a book on Buddhism at the time that I encountered “The Laws of the Sun.” My feeling at the time was like, “Wow, this is it. This makes sense. It doesn’t conflict with Christianity and this is the other missing pieces and this is where we came from and this is why we are born on this Earth and this is how we are supposed to live. Wow. Yeah.” That was my feeling. “I want more.”
Master Okawa’s enlightenment is getting higher and higher and we are receiving new teachings we never knew before. We can’t compare them to something we learned before. It’s something revealed for first time to human kind.
I truly feel that I haven’t completely grasped how great this really is or this being El Cantare, I don’t know if I have completely understood exactly how great this existence is.
I feel there is lack something lacking so I try to do something to deepen my faith or strengthen my faith. So that’s maybe a long process. That keeps me interested and keeps me going. I think my life would be boring without Happy Science.
I would say that Happy Science is, in my opinion, the only place where you can learn the truths about everything, about anything, about your existence. This is the place where you can really learn what’s out there, like what is the greater purpose of life, how God created us, when is He happy when we are evolving, just learning why so many genius people or so many enlightened people were born in this world. It gives you a clear understanding that God never, never left us alone, that He’s always with us. He’s always wanting us to evolve and that’s why he sent all those people. I found that only here I can have a clear idea of how that works.
It also confirmed a lot of my own experiences of just seeing, you know, spirits and things of that nature. But Happy Science brought about a very thorough picture of how the reincarnation process works, and I’m not sure there is really a more thorough explanation then what Happy Science has. (Q: Do you see spirits?) Yeah. (Q: Even now?) Mm-hm. Since I was a little kid. They all talk to you. When you’re a child everybody I think sees them. Or most people do. Usually, it goes away after a while. But for me for some reason it didn’t really go away. I started to differentiate, at some point, which ones were benevolent, which ones were malevolent. Then at some point I started gaining an interest in exorcism as well, which was another thing that attracted me to Happy Science. There’s a lot about exorcism. But I approached it in a Buddhist way, rather than a Christian way, where the Christian view of exorcism is more like, to just expel the spirit. Whereas I think the Buddhist orientation towards exorcism is more to lead it to enlightenment ultimately or lead it to a higher place.
I’ve had many experiences where I’ll be going about my business and I’ll suddenly feel something that is out of the ordinary. I think a lot of the time, that happens to everybody. Most of the time, people will just probably go along with that new way of thinking. But if you’re able to stop and be like, “where is that coming from?”, then that’s usually where I’d be able to isolate the source of it and remove it, and reattune myself back to a normal state.
I felt pretty soon after I became a member. I felt just a deeper sense of inner illumination. That brought a lot of clarity to me in my life. I know there’s certain negative, or malevolence influences that have sort of dissipated. There’s a sense of the Sangha or the spiritual community that I feel always connected to.
I was suffering in love. It was someone I was in love with and they weren’t loving me back. At the same time, in reading “The Laws of the Sun,” Master said, the essence of love is giving. If you’re suffering, it’s because you’re taking love. I couldn’t see how what he was saying was relevant to me because I love this person. I remember this moment when I was trying to find the seed of my suffering since the essence of love is giving and suffering comes from taking love. I thought I was just giving love but then I heard in my mind the words I was saying about this person. I said, “I just want us to be together.” I thought, “I want us to be together.” “I want.” Even if I want you to be happy, that’s still wanting. I’m wanting something, you know? So, in this moment, I had a bit of a rebellious moment. I guess I was sick of suffering too. I thought, “That’s it, I don’t care anymore. I don’t care what she thinks. I’m just going to love her anyway.” And in that moment, I had this experience whereby I felt this incredible weight lift off my shoulders. I felt so light. I just felt like I was suddenly hovering. I could really feel this incredible feeling of love pouring from my heart to this person and I thought, I realized, “I don’t need her to be in my life. It doesn’t matter where she is, what she’s doing, or who’s she with. I just love her.” The feeling of loving her was so joyous. It was actually the feeling of love. The feeling of love for another person is what makes us feel so happy. This was the turning point in my life because I realized I’ll never suffer again.
Self-Reflection is difficult. It’s always so hard for us to look at ourselves. We are always so good at looking at others. Self-Reflection requires discipline. It requires us to sit, really sit, in a quiet space with ourselves but you have to earnestly want it. If you’re not sincere or you’re just “I read love, wisdom, self-reflection, progress, oh yeah.” No. It’s not going to happen. It’s so hard. You can talk all you want about things but until you feel, experience, and put into practice the wisdom of these books, no. It’s a feeling. It’s not words. It’s a feeling. It’s a joy. It’s a way in which you show up in the world. How you speak to others. I see people now, but I can see them. I see a soul. I hear them differently and I can hear in their words where they need help. It’s magic. It’s the way we are. We start to realize who you are as a human being, the love and the joy and the happiness that comes with it. Even though somebody else is behaving in a certain way, it doesn’t take me out of my space. I wasn’t like this all the time. Who I’ve become, the strength of who I’ve become through these teachings is just, incredible. It’s incredible.
I think it even stemmed from my past life as well. As Master Okawa teaches us that we all have past lives, multiple of them, before we are born into this one. Actually practicing Happy Science here constantly, and reflecting, I found that guilt that comes from a Christian past life. I think it’s a guilt that you let Jesus get crucified. That’s what it felt like. “Oh, you let Jesus get crucified. How could you.” We also understand in Happy Science that Jesus is in Heaven. He is in the ninth dimension and he is the guiding light of love and he is doing amazing work now. Where else would you get that information, you know? I found myself not feeling guilty anymore because Jesus is doing his work even today.
What’s really amazing about Happy Science is that it actually changed my perspective on wealth. I thought, “I just need enough to get by, I just need to have a decent job, I just have to be able to pay the rent, pay my bills, eat food and I’ll be fine, I’ll be happy, I’ll be content.” But being here in Happy Science, Master wants us to push even further and actually strive for every member to become rich. Why? Because with more money, you can help more people. That’s a very noble thing. To give money for really wonderful causes, there’s nothing evil about that. Wealth in itself is about how you use it. If you’re going to use it for good, you’re going to help people, you’re going to do amazing things with it. That’s more important. I think more people need to become wealthy.
I have a few goals in my life but I would say whatever it is that I do, I want to be a leader perhaps in the corporate space because to me, that area has particularly perpetuated agnosticism. I just think there is a lot in the business world in which people have not necessarily maintained a steady set of faith. I want to be, A) a corporate leader who is able to shape the business world through the teachings of the Truth because I think that is so necessary to not only drive prosperity for these businesses but also the greater economy. And then, second, I’d say through that I want to be a lecturer of some sort in the future having been able to teach that set of teachings in that business world.
Every time I pray, the Dharma of the Light Mind, it helps me a lot, and I think that’s how I start become more and more close to Happy Science and Master’s teachings. One time, my little brother, he was a newborn, he was sick and the doctor told my mom to give him some medication when he got fever. So, my mom she gave the medication. Twenty, thirty minutes later, he was not responding. And that time, my mom, she called me, and she said, “We need to do something.” And she said, “Well, we should pray.” And I was like “Mom, we should take him to the hospital.” You know, he was not breathing. And then, she was like, “I don’t want to take him right now to the hospital because they are going to do a lot of testing.” We started to pray the Dharma of the Right Mind over and over. She was scared and so was I, but I thought, at that moment, I need to be strong for my mom and I knew that that prayer helps. Every time I breathe in and breathe out, it usually burns my throat because I’m always sick. But I knew that the prayer was good for me. I feel comfortable. I feel connected.
So, at that time, I was like, “If it helps me, it will help my little brother as well.” Then we started praying. We were watching him and we were praying non-stop. After a while he started responding and he started crying a little bit. Then we felt he was getting better. She has faith that he would be better if we did the prayer. So, at that time, I realized that this prayer is very powerful and that we are on the right track. We found a religion that can save us.
The sutras are a way to tune ourselves to specific vibrations of the mind and so that’s why for me, even before I became a Devotee I had already started memorizing The Dharma of the Right Mind sutra. I started reciting that sutra and the “Prayer to the Lord” “Prayer to Guardian and Guiding Spirits” every morning. The power of vocalizing the will of the Lord is very magical. It’s like the ritual aspect of it. It creates this spiritual field. Reciting them, even the ones you don’t recite that often, it’s like a helpful reminder that, you know, there’s these treasures that we’ve been given and it’s up to us to do the work and to scrape away the dirt and find that treasure and be, like, oh this is my treasure, you know. The Lord gave me this treasure so I’m going to cherish it and I’m going to keep it close. The sutras are very powerful, for sure.
When I talk to a lot of people, a lot of my friends in college too, so many people feel empty, like something is missing from their lives, but they don’t know what to believe in because, with the digital age, it’s not something you can type in, what is the true religion? What is the meaning of life, and an answer pops up. I don’t think it works like that. Especially with social media, a lot of the times, people want social approval but religion isn’t something you can gain social approval on social media. I think there is a huge need for religion. Even if people are living happy lives, I feel like, if that part is missing, then you would feel emptiness from time to time like I did. I think Happy Science will definitely embrace individual differences and let people forgive past mistakes, but also overcome those mistakes by uniting the human beings as one humankind.
I truly believe that Master Okawa is Lord El Cantare and has descended in the flesh in this third dimension of reality to unite all of the various religions around the world. You know, people talk about their work and their mission at work and their purpose at work, but that’s okay while we’re here. But I think our true mission is to really save souls while they’re living here, and if we can do that, through bringing others to the Truth, and like I said earlier, I feel, I know that Happy Science is the one true religion that we can bring people together and bring them to the Truth with the goal of saving souls and as many as we can. I feel it to be my primary mission.
Creating this utopia, where the differences in religion, in our cultures, in countries, in nations can be unified and integrated and harmonized. I can resonate with that. I feel it in my heart. I was like, “This is the teaching I’ve been looking for. At times, I was facing doubts in myself. All the other false beliefs I had adopted to believe when I was growing up. What made me hold on to the faith in El Cantare was my inner knowing. However small it was, back then, or over the past two years, it was telling me to not give up. I know this is my mission, I know this is my destiny, and I just keep moving forward.
So, even just watching the movie for the first time I was so touched and so blown away. But to learn the real story of what happened to Master, it takes me to a place that I feel is beyond the most sacred imagination we could have. For instance , we think of Jesus on the cross and resurrecting. To have Master have his own heart stopped, not beating at all, and to completely live through that. It’s beyond imagination. Master is actually living it. I could feel the power of wanting to live your life for others. I’m just trying to understand more and more the depth of Master’s life.
When he came to Toronto, and when I met him, being very close, I felt like he was my Father. Of course, he’s El Cantare, the God of the Earth, but not just that. I felt so connected, very connected as my Father. My mind changed, definitely. I had a sense of responsibility in Mission. My mission became more clear and clear, because now I know that the whole purpose of me being here and what everybody should have as well, which is for love and creating that Utopia on Earth.
