S10 #07 - Jiyū shūkyō—a free-religious, integral spirituality from within the Unitarian tradition - A thought for the day

The full text of this podcast can be found in the transcript of this edition or at the following link:

https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2025/07/jiyu-shukyoa-free-religious-integral.html

Please feel free to post any comments you have about this episode there.

The liturgy of the Sunday Morning service of Mindful Meditation, Music, and Mucic, and the "Principles of Living " mentioned in this podcast can be downloaded as pdfs at the following links:

https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/morning-service/

https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Cambridge-Unitarians-Principles-of-Living-2024.pages.pdf

The Cambridge Unitarian Church's Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation can be found at this link:

https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/morning-service/
 
Opening Music, "New Heaven", written by Andrew J. Brown and played by Chris Ingham (piano), Paul Higgs (trumpet), Russ Morgan (drums) and Andrew J. Brown (double bass) 

Thanks for listening. Just a reminder that the texts of all these podcasts are available on my blog. You'll also find there a brief biography, info about my career as a musician, & some photography. Feel free to drop by & say hello. Email: caute.brown[at]gmail.com

Transcript

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church
as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation

—o0o—

As most of you know, for the first half of my life I was a professional jazz and rock bass player. Like most musicians, to supplement my income from live work and the occasional recording session, I had to teach, and, indeed, for many years I was the jazz and rock bass tutor at Anglia Ruskin University, and also one of the techniques columnists for Guitarist, then Bassist magazines.

Anyway, following the example of one of my great jazz bass player heroes, Chuck Israels, every new academic year I would ask my new students: “Who is your favourite musician?” Although not always, but, alas, too often, and increasingly over the years, my question was followed with an uncomfortable silence out of which nothing came for a long time, except, perhaps, some kind of throat-clearing, and a bit of uncomfortable shuffling around. Eventually, if I was lucky, there would follow a claim along the lines of,  “Well, I like everything really.” 

This truly puzzled me because when I was first learning my instrument, there were a number of specific musicians whose bass playing so thrilled me that I simply had to learn how to play like them. [For those interested in such things, among electric bass players the key ones were: Paul McCartney, Hugh Hopper, Jack Bruce, Charlie Haden, Chuck Israels, Eugene Wright, Percy Heath and Paul Chambers.]

So, like Israels, at the start of every new academic year, I would find a number of such students in my classroom, and so it became really important for me to figure out what on earth was going on here. Well, despite the obvious negative surface aspects of this state of affairs, Israels helped me to appreciate that most of the students I was teaching were basically motivated by something very worthwhile indeed, namely, the “idea of the potential pleasures of performing with and for other people”, the associated “rewards of attention and shared activity” and, of course, with the desire to experience a certain kind of musical freedom and openness through improvisation. As Israels notes, these are, indeed, “worthwhile values and have served as a part of the motivation of many artists.” However, he goes on to say, and this is the vital point I wish to bring before you today: 

“. . . this is a broad image which is insufficiently concrete to serve as a focus for attainment. There is no clear place to begin, and the mentor is reduced to helping the applicant to find something to love. Get a model. Find a prototype. Without this, there is no image and no passion” (An Unpopular Perspective on Jazz Education).

And it was this that led me to the powerful realisation that, perhaps my most important initial role as a teacher was not to teach my students how to play the bass, but simply to help them find a clear place to begin, by identifying a player whose playing was able to ignite their passion, and inspire them to become, themselves, a bass player.

Now, after 25 years of being a minister, I have to say that I find exactly the same situation at play in the world of liberal and free-religion. Generally, though not always, when I ask people meeting in these circles, “Who is your exemplary model of a free-religionist?” — in other words, who is it that ignited their passion and inspired them to become, themselves, a free-religionist — more often than not my question is followed by silence or, perhaps, the most general of responses imaginable.

Drawing on my experience as a music teacher I fully realise, of course, that the person to whom I am talking has been motivated by the idea of the potential pleasures of being with and for other liberal, free-religious people, with the “rewards of attention and shared activity” and, of course, with the desire to experience a certain kind of religious and spiritual freedom and openness through the practise of jiyū shūkyō, i.e. the dynamic, creative, inquiring, free and liberative religion and spirituality, on offer here. These are clearly worthwhile values and have served as a part of the motivation of many people who have joined free-religious communities But, to repeat, verbatim, Israels’ earlier point: 

“. . . this is a broad image which is insufficiently concrete to serve as a focus for attainment. There is no clear place to begin, and the mentor is reduced to helping the applicant to find something to love. Get a model. Find a prototype. Without this, there is no image and no passion.”

As I found in my role as a music teacher, I have come to realise that as a free-religious minister, perhaps my most important initial role as a teacher is not to teach people key free-religious principles, but simply to help them find a clear place to begin, by identifying a free-religious exemplar, prototype or model whose way of being-in-the-world could truly ignite their own passion and inspire them to become, themselves, a committed, practising, liberal, free-religionist.

And, this brings me to Imaoka Shin’ichirō, because in my 35 years of active involvement in local, national and, occasionally, international Unitarian and Unitarian-adjacent circles — 25 of which have been as your minister — Imaoka Shin’ichirō is the ONLY fully rounded, modern exemplar of a free-religious, integral spirituality that I have come across.But, naturally, this claim raises the question of what I mean by an integral spirituality?

Firstly, it is that jiyū shūkyō’s perspective is holistic because it affirms that spirituality must address the full spectrum of human development: physical, emotional, cognitive, moral, and spiritual. A key point here is that it doesn’t isolate spiritual practice from the rest of life — there is no absolute distinction to be made between what we call the secular, and what we call the sacred.

Secondly, jiyū shūkyō recognises and affirms multiple lines of development. This is because it knows humans grow along different developmental lines, such as cognition, emotions, ethics and relationships, and it also knows that spiritual maturity involves growth along all these lines, and not just along the lines of, say, belief or mystical experience.

Thirdly, jiyū shūkyō recognises multiple states and stages of consciousness. It takes serious account of our different states, such as waking, dreaming, meditative, mystical, and developmental stages of consciousness that move us from the egocentric to the ethnocentric, to worldcentric to cosmocentric.

Fourthly, jiyū shūkyō takes seriously all four quadrants found in the work of the transpersonal psychology of Ken Wilbur. Namely; interior-individual (personal experience, thoughts, feelings); exterior-individual (body, behaviour, brain science); interior-collective (culture, shared meaning); exterior-collective (institutions, systems).

Fifthly, jiyū shūkyō takes seriously interreligious and post-religious openness. In other words, even as integral spirituality honours traditional religious practices and insights, it also remains radically open to post-religious or non-religious expressions of spiritual life. By doing this, it’s also helped to avoid any kind of reductionism (dismissing all religion simply as illusion) or, on the other hand, absolutism (only one tradition is true).

Sixthly, jiyū shūkyō is developmentally informed because it understands spirituality as something that evolves and matures over time, and that beliefs and practices can easily change as one deepens in awareness and understanding.

And lastly — at least lastly in my hugely compressed list here — jiyū shūkyō takes seriously what is called “shadow work.” This is because it is a religious path which knows how important it is to work through one’s emotional wounds, ego defences, and unconscious patterns of behaviour and thinking.

So, to repeat, I know of no other modern, Unitarian — or Unitarian adjacent — figure who offers us a clear image of in what consists an integral spirituality, that is integrally related (pun intended) to our own historical faith community, and this is why I am making such efforts translate his work into English, and to make it easily available to you, and of course, to the international Unitarian and wider, liberal, free-religious community. 

I hope you can see this is exactly the same kind of thing I used to do for my bass-students all those years ago and my hope here, in the context of this free-religious community, is that Imaoka-sensei’s life and writings can provide a whole new generation of potential liberal, free-religionists (or jiyū shūkyōjin) with a clear place to begin, That is to say, an image and a passion that can help them to become, slowly but surely, genuine, impassioned, liberal, free-religionists themselves. 

And the best and simplest place to begin to do this is, of course, by consciously adopting yourselves his basic Principles of Living, those which our own community has made its own.

My Principles of Living — Revised Again (Tentative) [1981]
Imaoka Shin’ichirō (1881-1988) 

1. I place trust/have faith in myself [私は自己を信ずる]. I am aware of my own autonomous selfhood [主体性], creativity [創造性] and sociality [社会性], and feel the worth of living [生きがい] through them. Autonomous selfhood, creativity and sociality can also be expressed as personality [人格], divinity [神性], and Buddha-nature [仏性].
2. I place trust/have faith in others [私は他者を信ずる]. Others are neighbours who possess their own selves as others. By affirming myself, I inevitably place trust/have faith in others.
3. I place trust/have faith in the cooperative community [私は共同社会を信ずる]. Neither self nor others exist in isolation or self-sufficiency; instead, they inevitably [必然的に] establish a mutual interdependency [相互依存], solidarity [連帯性], and a cooperative community [共同社会].
4. I place trust/have faith in the trinity of self, others, and cooperative community [私は自己・他者・共同社会の三位一体を信ずる]. The self, others, and the cooperative community, while each possessing unique individualities, unite into one [帰一する]. Therefore, there is no precedence or superiority among them; each always presupposes the other two.
5. I place trust/have faith in the universal/cosmic cooperative community [私は宇宙的共同社会を信ずる]. The trinity of self, others, and the cooperative community further unites with heaven and earth and all things, to form a universal/cosmic cooperative community.
6. I place trust/have faith in the church/kyōkai [私は教会を信ずる]. The church/kyōkai is a microcosm of the universal/cosmic cooperative community. I can only be myself by being a member of the church/kyōkai.

Addendum: I interpret the above faith as jiyū shūkyō and, as a free-religionist [自由宗教人 jiyū shūkyōjin], together with my companions, I belong to the Tokyo Kiitsu Kyōkai [the Returning-to-One Gahering], the Japan Free Religion Association [日本自由宗教連盟], and the International Association for Religious Freedom. However, jiyū shūkyō is neither opposed to established religions nor does it seek to integrate them. Instead, it aims to grasp and realise the essence and ideals, not only of various religions, but also all human activities. Therefore, these principles are nothing other than the attitude of life I always wish constantly to maintain.