Tenrikyo-Ofudesaki - Testing our common truths of our world - ("Sekai nami" / "Sekai no ri")
If only there is sincerity in the core of your mind.
This universe is the body of God.
Ponder this in all matters.
All human beings are things lent by God.
With what thought are you using them?
This year, I shall begin marvelous things.
I shall do things you have never known before.
Until now you have understood everything in an ordinary way.
From now on, you will understand from your innermost heart.
This time, I begin the single-hearted salvation
after having tested it on Myself.
This salvation is not brought about by prayers,
or by exorcism, or by calling on oracles.
At this place, I shall teach everything.
Be single-hearted with God, and from your innermost heart...
In the poems above our original parent provided us with some examples of common truths of the world as they were popularly embraced in a particular time, place and level of spiritual maturity that Miki Nakayama once subscribed to and which after Her awakening were found to lie outside of the way that She prepared for us all equally to follow Her Model and quickly awaken, if we sincerely want to do so, to single-hearted salvation through the knowledge and understanding of the true origin of our mind.
Testing the truths of our world is actually easier than we might imagine; it perhaps seems difficult to do because we are not used to doing it but with practice it becomes very easy and even automatic; which is to say understood. To test the truths of our world we need only bring them to mind as "I think or believe this or that" and then calm and settle our mind to see what remains. In my own case, I tend to walk with my head down talking to myself in an internal dialog about what I like and don't like. The views expressed by my internal dialog, my self-centered imagination, are preprogramed accumulations of ideas and points of view that I have embraced over time and hold as truths of my world. Those points of view seem to be true to me when I am thinking about them however when I pick my head up and look at the world clearly they are no longer there. They are reasonably then temporary truths of my world. Their existence depends upon my thinking them. When not brought to mind, the original consciousness that was illuminating and witnessing those temporary truths of the world remains and when pondered is found to be there in all matters; nothing can be known without that original consciousness. Test it for yourself in your own mind and see for yourself if it is so. Why might I want to make this test on going and settled as automatic? Well, some of the truths of my world drain the joy from my life and if not identified as temporary creations of my self-centered imagination can, in some cases, be believed by me to be absolutely true. Such absolutely true beliefs created in the self-centered imaginations are of course also found to be causally involved in draining the joy from the lives of others as well as from my own self.
Which is not to say that we are intended to go about our daily life without using our imagination. We are however hastened to be able to tell the difference between the original truth of God's conscious mind as it resides as the "heart" and "core" of our mind and common, temporary truths of the world created in our self-centered imaginations. Concerning those temporary truths we are encouraged and shown how to compare them with the intention of the original mind making us able to distinguish how those temporary truths serve in the creation of a world of joyous life for all equally or not.