Tenrikyo-Ofudesaki - Sure Guides - Teach Repeatedly In a Variety of Ways

Though the truth of this world's beginning was taught in a variety of ways, each way being appropriate for the time, place and level of maturity of the audience, still nobody was able to understand.

By now we should be aware of the fact "things unknown since this world began" refers to the true origin of the mind and that subject is not, that I know of, a part of any worldly common curriculum or common familial education.

We know that the people who were directed to read these Poems were in direct contact with, Miki Nakayama, who was certainly the master teacher of this path and we know that every effort was made to engage with them in their own language and dialect. Even employing idioms in common use in the region to make the instructions more easily accessible.

The problem is that the true origin of the mind cannot be understood as an idea and our usual way of understanding something is to start with a familiar idea and expand upon it by gradually, step by step accumulating an understanding . Unfortunately, for understanding the true origin of the mind, that approach just doesn't work. The imagination cannot imagine its own original source. So rather than accumulating true ideas we are tasked with removing the accumulated ideas to reveal their original source and cause.

No problem, just turn the imagination off and see what remains. That, it turns out is a big problem. Though some of the ideas that we have stored in our imagination as truths of our world are a pain and we wouldn't mind dumping them; there are others that we hold very dearly and do not want to be without even for a second and that is why, though we are taught repeatedly, we still don't understand the true origin of our mind. The cure or solution then is "truly sincerely" settling our imagination so that only the true original consciousness remains. It is actually easy to do but our imagination tells us otherwise and we are used to believing truths that our imagination provides us; the state of our imagination becoming the state of our world. If we believe that it is too difficult to complete the work of settling our imagination, then it is. We are for that reason hastened to positively confirm our high spirited sincere commitment to the quick completion of the "Service" or work of returning our mind to its original pristine condition.

Section IVa Sure Guides