• Numerous religions
with differing teachings are based on revelations.
The following are just some of the many religions founded by
people who claimed that they had received revelations:
Revelations from divine sources are assumed to be The Truth.
Logically, therefore, all the religions based on revelations should
have identical teachings. However, even just the few religious groups
listed above all have different teachings. So, what do we assume from
that?
There are only two logical possibilities. Either, all except
one of these religions is based on "false" revelations,
or all of these religions are based on "false" revelations. By
"false", I mean that the founder either suffered from delusions and
genuinely believed he or she had received revelations, or the founder
lied.
Logically, it is possible that one of the hundreds of
different religions founded on the basis of revelations is correct, but
which one?
The reason we are supposed to need information revealed by
divine sources in the first place is that human wisdom is considered
inferior, and incapable of discovering spiritual truths. So, how can
human wisdom manage to determine which, if any, of the religions based
on revelations is the correct one?
Perhaps, when you read the above list of religious groups,
you recognized one or two that you immediately dismissed as being
cults. Please bear in mind, however, that most of the above groups have
thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of dedicated members, most of whom
have as much intelligence and integrity as you or I. For whatever
reason, these people have come to believe that the teachings of their
religion are based on higher wisdom than their own, and have therefore
switched off their own powers of evaluation and left themselves wide
open to believing whatever they are told.
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• Details concerning
the revelations are inconsistent.
Over recent months, there have been a series of posts on the
After Mahikari... blog in which former members have been
attempting to unravel the true story, if there is one, behind the
content and circumstances of the revelation that is regarded as the
genesis of the various Mahikari organizations.
I have summarized the main points below, but if you wish to
follow through our on-going attempts at unravelling this web, you can
see the original posts (some in English and some in Japanese) and
comments at one
(English), two
(Japanese), three
(English), four
(English), and five
(Japanese).
The story goes like this:
On February 27, 1959, Yoshikazu Okada awoke after five days
of being in an unconscious state with high fever and received a
revelation from God. In the often-quoted last paragraph of this
revelation, God said to Okada:
The time of Heaven has come. Rise. Your name shall be
Kotama. Raise your
hand. The world shall enter severe times.
We are told Okada was rather perplexed by this revelation,
and wondered if he was being tricked by a fox or badger spirit, so he
did nothing for about a week. Then, as he was walking down the street,
he saw a stray dog which was obviously sick. He decided to test out
"raising the hand" on the dog, rather than risking being laughed at by
a person. Much to his surprise, the dog appeared to be cured by this
process, and got up and walked away. Okada then had sufficient
confidence to raise the hand (give okiyome, or True Light) to human
recipients.
Like all good myths, this story does have variations, but as
far as I can tell the above is, or was, its most common form. This is
the story I remember from years ago when I first received kenshu, but
since then information has been exposed that clearly indicates that at
least the part about the dog must be false.
Sukyo Mahikari used to claim that, prior to this revelation,
Okada was an "ordinary" man who was not involved in any religion. The
above story bolstered this claim by implying that Okada was hesitant to
give okiyome and needed to test it out on the dog. In fact, we now know
that Okada was a member, then staff member, of Sekai Kyusei Kyo
(another "new" Japanese religion) between about 1947 and 1957. This
group practices Jorei, in which practitioners use the hands to radiate
a purifying or healing spiritual energy in much the same way as
Mahikari members give okiyome. Okada already knew how to do this and,
presumably, thought that it worked...he had no need to test it out on a
dog.
Even before we were aware of that deception, we should have
noticed that there was something wrong with the logic of this story.
How did Okada know what God meant by "raise the hand"? If this was a
new technique revealed to Okada by God (which is what we are encouraged
to think), how did he know what to do with his hand? How did he know
this was supposed to heal or purify people?
One possibility is that the content of that revelation has
been edited. There is a different version of the circumstances
surrounding this revelation, and a different version of the content of
the revelation, in Gotaidanshu, which is a collection of
interviews with Okada. In an interview in February 1974, Okada said:
It was February 27, 1959, I think. I was worshiping God
at my own house when I heard a loud voice say, "Thy name shall be
Kotama. The world shall enter severe times."
In the interview, Okada then talks of other things, then
gets back to the revelation subject and continues:
.........I was then told to "Raise the hand and cure
people of diseases".
From the above quote, it seems that the "Raise the hand"
part was not originally where it is now, and the "cure people of
diseases" part has now been omitted. (This would make a farce of Sukyo
Mahikari's claim that these are the words of God.)
One possibility is that the entire "Raise the hand and cure
people of diseases" part was included in this "revelation" at some
stage, and may have all been deleted later to protect Mahikari from
legal liability related to practicing medicine without a license. Then,
perhaps just the "raise the hand" part of it was put back in?
Interestingly, for whatever reason, the 1973 Japanese edition of
Goseigen (the book of revelations) does not include either the
"raise the hand" part nor the "cure people of diseases" part.
The circumstances of the revelation are a little unclear
here but, you'll notice that there is no mention of five days of high
fever, and no mention of the dog story. This is supposed to be THE most
important moment in the history of Sukyo Mahikari. One would think
Okada would remember the circumstances accurately, if the revelation in
fact happened.
If we look again at the text of that supposed revelation,
you'll notice the words, Your name shall be Kotama. This gives
the impression that God gave Okada this "special" holy name, and
moreover that this name was given to him as part of this particular
revelation, which Okada claimed to have received on Feb. 27, 1959.
However, according to Mahikari-related information contributed to
online Japanese discussion groups, Okada was already using the name
Kotama when he was a Sekai Kyusei Kyo staff member. (He was dismissed
from SKK staff 6 years prior to the date given for this revelation.)
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• Convincing religious
delusions can have physiological causes.
There is some doubt about whether or not Okada actually
received (or thought he received) revelations himself, or whether he
copied his teachings from other sources (including from revelations
that other people claimed to have received).
For example, many of the concepts in Sukyo Mahikari
teachings can be found in Sekai
Kyusei Kyo and Makoto no Michi.
A number of Nobuo
Shioya's teachings appear almost verbatim in Okada's teachings.
Okada had direct links with all of these. There are even some close
parallels with basic tenets of the Bah·'Ì Faith, as
indicated by the first few paragraphs here.
However, Sukyo Mahikari asserts that Okada did receive
revelations from God, and tells various stories to support this claim.
The most frequently told story concerns the first revelation that
appears in Goseigen, and which is regarded as the genesis of the
various Mahikari organizations.
It is claimed that this most important revelation was
received when Okada woke after five days of being in an unconscious
state with high fever. I suppose an illness of that severity could well
have caused Okada to think he had received a revelation.
Perhaps he had one of those visions people often report after
near-death experiences, or perhaps the revelation was a product of
delirium.
However, we are told that subsequent revelations were
received under different circumstances. At those times, we are told,
God would wake Okada in the middle of the night, and he would get out
of bed, go to his desk, and write revelations extremely quickly using
what Okada described as a type of automatic writing.
One possible explanation is that Okada may have suffered
from temporal lobe epilepsy. This is a physiological condition that
causes religious visions. According to a BBC program summary entitled God
on the Brain, these visions are completely convincing to the person
experiencing them.
At this stage, we have no way of knowing if there was a
physiological cause which made Okada genuinely believe that God talked
to him, but I think we should keep this possibility in mind. The other
possibility, of course, is that he simply copied teachings from other
sources, made up the rest, and lied about receiving revelations. Or,
was Okada the one religious founder, out of the many who claimed to
receive revelations, who did receive genuine revelations (if there is
such a thing)?
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