Tejas, the Fire of Life 95 



But the whole secret is that the Nipponese have 

 never lost touch with Nature. They have kept 

 close to the soul of things, to the heart of the uni- 

 verse, with senses trained to consciousness of the 

 nearness of the spiritual plane, which the Western 

 people have blindly ignored, when not denied, in 

 their head-long pursuit of things material. Ja- 

 pan's own peril is only from those of her people 

 who imitate too closely Western commercial meth- 

 ods, forgetting the traditions of the past, or never 

 themselves trained in them. 



We who have worked so hard and made such 

 tremendous sacrifices of the best things, the real 

 prizes in life, pursuing wrong roads leading to 

 precipices or blind alleys and forming wrong hab- 

 its of thinking and doing, must now go into the 

 silence to find our moral as well as physical equili- 

 brium; to discover the right path leading to ra- 

 tional living and thinking and the forming of nor- 

 mal, harmonious habits. 



It is in the stillness that we give the rhythmic 

 breath of life (ever offering its healing restora- 

 tive power) an opportunity to overcome the an- 

 tagonistic, disordered vibrations in our bodies, 

 and draw into synchronous movement that is, 

 vibration all the rebellious atoms and molecules 

 which have been setting up independent republics, 

 all warring against one another. The state we 

 woo is inward and individual, and not dependent 



