DIY Religion

And here we come to the main problem I have with starting a new blog: making it look shiny. Frankly, I'm not good at this kind of design; I don't have the patience for it.

Still, I'm making this anyway, because there are lots of words in my head that want to get out, and tumblr isn't doing the job.

The other day, a muslim client asked me, "Can I ask about your religious beliefs, if you have any?"

Well.

I'm never sure exactly where to start with that one. I didn't call this blog "Adventures in Shamanism" by accident, or as a joke - I'm quite serious. But that doesn't help me subscribe to any sort of religion; for one, my path is so different from even my close friends who are doing similar things that any sort of organised worship would be ludicrous; I can just imagine us all clustered in the same room, arguing about what to put on the kamidana*, or whether Kali counts as a Bujin spirit**. It's a cats in a bag problem, really.



The thing is, religions are about following the same rituals, reading the same books, and believing in things. Things that your priest tells you about, but you will likely never experience much of. But I'm not much of a ritualist, there is no one holy book for my sort of thing (though there are lots of helpful books), and I tend to only believe things I have experience with.

All right, back up. I was both a scientist and an atheist some years ago, and then I joined the Bujinkan. Which is a martial art, but anyone who's ever researched the better-known Aikido will know that the best arts have their own philosophies and spiritualities. Being a Japanese martial art, the Bujinkan's practically-minded spiritual stuff - which blurs indecipherably with the hidden energy work side of things - is a functional amalgam of bits of Taoist, Shinto and Buddhist thought. We take what's useful and discard the rest.

So here's where it starts: your teacher tells you about kyusho points, which are used for pain and control martially. A quick bit of research will lead you to the idea that these are actually acupressure points, from Traditional Chinese/Japanese Medicine***. So yes, Taoist system of thought: energy meridians, ki flow, using the body and breath to move it around and, eventually, to do things. Then it turns out that both the martial stuff and the moving-ki-around works better when your body and mind are clean and shiny so, okay, you start to meditate.

This is where things get weird, because with a bit (or a lot - it varies) of meditation and cleanup, suddenly you're very shiny indeed, and you start having odd experiences and people calling themselves gods start talking to you, and it turns out there's this other non-meatspace place which we like to call the Void, but which is called a whole lot of other things by people pretty much everywhere.

And then suddenly the bowing-in in front of the kamidana ("kami" being the Japanese word for "god", in a polytheistic sense) and qigong-like exercises we do and our grandmaster's directives about working on yourself and becoming a person with a pure heart and getting closer to the natural world and so on make a lot more sense and you go, okay, this is...sortof a religion. So if my religion is anything, it's The Bujinkan. Except - apart from the aforementioned, it doesn't act like a religion. People of many denominations are welcomed. No one needs to do anything except turn up and learn, and we're happy. All the spiritual stuff is there, but it's hidden, and therefore both private and personalised. For those who need it or are called by it. Our grandmaster is a big fan of "find your own path", probably because that's, as far as I can tell, the only real way of doing things. You're probably not going to get in contact with or do anything interesting reciting prayers every sunday that are poorly translated and defanged, or making bags of herbs of specific colours and the right crystals for more confidence.  

- which is totally allowed, by the way, and might be helpful and comforting and a good way of NLP-ing yourself into feeling better, finding a community of people you like, and a whole host of other things, and given how dangerous and weird and scary the real way is, I'd hesitate to recommend real over that -

So I go off, and I get given far more instructions than I can possibly follow by several major or minor deities from lots of different traditions. And I'm not really just a Taoist, because it feels awkward when you keep bumping into Kali, but nor am I a Hindu because typically Hindus don't chat to Amaterasu, and no one who's not in the Bujinkan gets to chat to T-Sensei (who's dead, and now a Bujin spirit). And I increasingly feel drawn to the earth, and more pagan-flavoured if not actually pagan stuff. I name myself Silas - "man of the forest" - and start learning herbalism (mostly western, because they're easy to get hold of). In addition to my qigong and taoist-flavoured meditations I start doing things like gardening, and going for walks in wild lands, and having a feel around to see whether I can feel or talk to plants and animals and so forth (verdict: I can, but much more practise is needed. Sheesh.) Recently I've been reading a lot of blogs by Witches and Pagans and so forth, because it's nice and grassroots-y and practical, the way I like things. Good for inspiration, though we call things by different names and have different perspectives.

So I'm a - subscriber to the build-your-own-religion model of reality, I suppose. It's odd, it's transformational, it's intensely personal and important to me in a way that reciting bible verses never could be, and it's...

...really hard to give someone a clear or satisfactory answer about. Ah well.

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* a kamidana is a...shinto? buddhist? (probably both) shrine. You light candles , provide sake and rice and salt and a few other bits, and bow in towards it, to honour the Bujin spirits and Bujinkan members past, and sometimes a particular entity will be both.

**gods or spirits who are affiliated with the Bujinkan. They protect its members and drag guide the appropriate ones onto their spiritual path and have a hand in the affairs of the highest-up members. Everyone I've seen who's been really, really good has had a strong connection.

*** Similar, but different. The Japanese tendency to look at something, take what they like, and make a new thing with lots of other stuff they like from other sources shows itself here. TJM is also a lot more underground, so it missed out on a lot of the reform of TCM, which is very textbook-y now and has lost some of the potency because of that. At least in general - individual practitioners might have the connection an the experience and thus be really, really good, but there's a fair few who just look up what the book says and put the needles there.