We know little about the origins of the Ninja, the ‘sons of darkness’: mysterious shadow warriors who kept their grisly secret in the mist-shrouded mountains in Japan’s Iga and Koga provinces around 900 AD, practicing the arts. of stealth and invisibility. . Legends, however, tell of the Ninja warrior’s supposed descent from the tengu, savage demons that were half-man, half-crow and could bend the laws of nature and control the human mind.
Probably closer to the truth, according to Stephen Hayes (the first American to be accepted as a personal student of Masaaki Hatsumi, the thirty-fourth master of Togakure-ryu Ninjutsu) is that these warriors were ex-servicemen 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 integrated systems of mind-body consciousness, based on personal understanding of the order of the universe. [and an] unconventional way of looking at situations and accomplishing things… The original Ninja were mystics, in touch with powers we would today describe as psychic. Their ability to tune into the blueprint of the whole and thus become receptive to subtle input from beyond the usual five senses was strange and terrifying…”
However, his spirituality or mysticism was not based on empty and impractical religious teachings, but on highly advanced combat skills and practical arts of deception and warfare, where warriorship was linked to natural law. Spirituality was not seen as an outward projection onto distant deities, as our religions in the West are, but as a path to inner knowledge, self-mastery, and personal power.
To arrive at his understanding, Ninja developed a complete 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 that every warrior faces on his way to liberation and happiness, as well as the means to overcome these tests. 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 gates that we must all pass through if we want a spiritual life that is authentic and meaningful to who we really are.
In the modern world we are still at war, seeking peace, and our personal freedoms are still restricted by people and institutions that tell us who we are, how to behave, how much power and freedom we can have: labor claims, tax claims. , commuter hours, celebrity fashion… the list is endless. Spiritual warriors know these things as ‘tyrants’. They are not so 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.
INNER TYRANS
In these turbulent modern times, we are at risk from both internal tyrants (ways of being and seeing that we have internalized as we have grown up and become socialized into our culture’s worldview) and external tyrants in the form of terrorists and nations at war who use military force to impose their worldview on ordinary citizens (us) who get caught up 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 true work of the holy human being: living fully the beautiful and finite lives that are given to us. They inevitably lead us to an external tyranny since, if we have not dealt with our own problems, we end up projecting them into the world where we see monsters and chaos all around us that, in our fear, we must oppose and destroy before they destroy. us; or we feel too weak to oppose such madness because this system and habit of war is so much bigger than us.
Magically though, 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 of living 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 realized that we all face four ‘enemies’ of personal freedom. These enemies can be seen as our beliefs about the world, which have been handed down to us by the tyrants around us: the leaders, power elite, and self-appointed experts in our societies who have set up systems and institutions to enforce their worldview. us. We have internalized these worldviews and as long as we believe the world works in a particular way, we can never be free because we never see an alternative.
However, if we face these enemies, we find that they naturally and easily become the 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 doors we go through to resolve them. We are then empowered, clearer about who we are, and 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 four gates model, we are born in the east of the circle that represents our self and our life’s journey. In childhood, we are not even aware of a separate self, so intimately are we still connected to the flow of all things and so deeply a part of the primal and universal consciousness. This stage represents a time of not-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 who we are. Although our socialization will begin at this time, we are less aware of these “mental things” and more aware of our bodies and their physical demands, as anyone who has ever heard a newborn scream to get its needs well known will know. This physicality and passion of the little boy is represented by the element of Fire.
As we grow up, the world moves to ‘hook’ us on its world view and so we progress South, becoming teenagers and young adults, with more and more socialization taking place in the ways of our culture. Although there is no firm age structure or timeline for this journey (and, in fact, some people do not reach all of these stages naturally, instead getting stuck in one or more of them as they progress 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 the ages of 15 and 25. It is at this moment that 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, get our hearts broken, find partners and ‘settle’ to focus on home and career. The spiritual work becomes unconscious, bubbling up 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 fluctuations correspond to the ups and downs and the emotional fluctuations of this time.
Arriving in the West, we realize that we have entered what in the Western world we call the Middle Ages. This is a time for recapitulation of the self on a grand scale, a time when many people re-examine their lives up to this point, the assumptions they have made about the world and the deals 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 wishful thinking and emotionally potent simplification by the mythmaker 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 an acceptable) man or woman, success or failure. This myth, most likely, has never been us, but still we have lived it without having seen it before. Now, from the perspective of a greater life experience, we begin to question who we are. e, even if we are successful, established and wealthy in social terms, if this is enough to satisfy us on a personal and spiritual level We have been hooked for perhaps 20 years by a vision of success defined in consensus or corporate terms, but now We begin to reevaluate who we have been and, with death beginning to blow around our necks, to reconsider our lives and ask ‘Is that all?’ as we look at who we could have been and how we could best spend our remaining days (more ‘face time’ at the office or watching our kids grow up? Climbing the corporate ladder under an angry and ungrateful boss or surfing the Rocky Mountains? for fun?This is a time of consideration and reflection on who we really are and what we want from our lives, offering us the potential to adapt, reinvent, rejuvenate and reemerge into someone new.in reflecting on the past and revisiting the future.Because of this , is characterized by the element of Air, which has the ability to make our past lives disappear and lead us towards a new and 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, which leads us to a deep peace and harmony, where we can look back on life and see our true place in the world, the meaning of our life path and, perhaps, the flow of all things, from a perspective of wisdom and good humor. We are able to 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 happy with ourselves. This fundamental quality of the North is represented by the element of 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 into new lives to come.
Once again, it’s worth noting 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 this, 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 also to embrace the darkness, for it is only in our shadows ( when the light is behind us) that we see ourselves truly reflected, and only then can we direct ourselves and heal our pains so that the world itself can be healed.