Article

SPIRITUALITY

EAST and WEST
© Ly de Angeles

Ki and Anima

These are two terms for the same thing: the vital principle of the thing we call life; the source of creative action; the soul/energy within all things. It can as easily be called imramma, chi, chaiah, prana.

It is within everything, including all that we can perceive, test, measure, monitor, imagine . . . and everything we cannot, but that are here anyway (despite how clever we think we are).

Kami and the Deithe

Shinto

Shinto, "the way of the gods", is the original religion of Japan. Starting about 500 BCE (or earlier) it was a mix of nature worship, fertility cults (groups that pray for more crops), fortune telling, hero worship, and shamanism (magic). Its name came from the Chinese words "Shin Tao" (The Way of the Gods) in the 8th Century C.E. Followers of Shinto revere the spirits of nature and every mountain, river, tree or other natural formation is animated by a god, goddess or spirit. These gods and spirits are the "kami".
Kami, first of all, refers to the gods of heaven, earth, and the underworld, but kami also are all those things that have divinity in them to some degree: the spirits of ancestors, living human beings, particular regions or villages, animals, plants, landscape - in fact, most of creation; anything that might be considered wondrous, magnificent, or affecting human life and the Torii was a gate created to access the realms of these spirits.
The understanding that everything, from poetry, story, music, sculpture, gardening and study, to the way of weapons and warfare, is an art-form that honours the kami and the wonder that is life, is to also honour the Labyrinth on our shrine and the journey it represents.
Iaido, for us, realises an active meditation coupled with a traditional martial art in which all of the above are considerations and we deeply thank those who have aided us with our training, and the kami that led you to us.

There are different ways of naming the gods/spirits of two people: tribally, ancestrally, collectively (but not indiscriminately). Over the years many of us have studied a plethora of mythologies, religious ideologies, magical and mystical traditions, because they're interesting (we study and explore other things as well but that's not valid here) but most of us in the school in Byron Bay are 'Celts' (please note the rabbit-ears, because, in truth, the term Celt is a blanket term used to describe many people of many tribes and clans that dwell/t outside of the limits of written history) and even though many of us are mongrels, with other wonderful blood-lines mixed in, the strongest strain is 'Celtic'.

The thing we honour are our differences. Those differences are not separatist or elitist.

We do not live in the lands of our ancestors but a dog can be born in a stable and that doesn't make it a horse! We learn as much about the spiritual traditions and cultures of the indigenous people of the land in which we do live to not presume upon their custodial rights and to be certain to do nothing, either culturally or magically, that will interfere in the pattern that is the Dreamtime. Respect for the differences in the relationship to the pantheons of others has been horribly and disgustingly ignored by Christianity (until fairly recently, and now it's too late) who have been as responsible for the genocide of every indigenous people - their cultures, their spiritual understandings, their natural relationships to the land, their lineage, their arts, their language, their sexuality, their relationships to their elders, the survival of their children, their capacity for self-determination and, most enduringly, their self respect.

The British Empire is a 'Roman' thing, and as the integrity of the tribes and the clans was [almost] destroyed ("By way of a hostile sword." Bede); the unique flamboyance of the majority being replaced by a uniform drabness broken only by the unconscious fighting spirit still obvious at the World Cup. The ways of magic, however, are still here, as are the tribes and the clans.

Ancestry (life, the universe and everything)

If you take such theories as the big bang into account (and it's as viable theory as anything else if you feel the necessity to consider anything as having a beginning) then 'we' must, logically, have been there, in the ancestral sense, as nothing comes from nothing, even if it is merely as the energetic principle that matter embraces. The same applies if you throw away the entire illusion of a beginning and consider the concept of a continuum and consider that possibly we don't know everything [consciously]. We're the off-spring of that immortality. We may individually be sun and moon and sea and stone and person and rat and mountain lion and reto-virus, but we're still bloody-well related! And everything is unique within that relativity ("divided for love's sake on the chance of union").Our ancestors (even into the far-flung memory of a trillion billion light years from now, into both 'past' and 'future') are the gods. They're not myth and legend and religion but they can be represented within them, just as simply as one or other might have passed you on the street today.If that sounds irreverent to anyone reading this then you'd be mistaken. In the truest sense of the word - it is awesome!

East and West?

East meets West in our dojo. The traditions of Celtic and European magic and spirituality, Shinto and other indigenous philosophies and understandings of magic and spirituality, are so similar as to be indistinguishable in very many ways and through the tradition of Iaido we honour the gods, spirits, teachers and ancestors who have kept the sacred traditions and the way of the Sword alive despite what can be (and has been) great adversity.

Most of the practitioners of Iaido at the Byron Bay honbu are of European or Celtic descent and many of us have a profound understanding of the eradication - by invading hegemonies - of our indigenous ways of living (including the warrior arts) and to work within a living tradition is an honour and a privilege; to recognise the similarities, and extol the uniquenesses that exists between all people, the highest goal.

Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain in England. Note the similarity to the Torii

The stone Torii (shrine gate) in Yamagata City's Toriigaoka district was designated as an
important Cultural Asset for being Japan's oldest torii dedicated to the Shinto "kami".