Looking for a Few Good Ninjas!

Gary: Now, Religion in the News…. This week’s item is from World Magazine, November 2000, which quotes an October 9 article in the Wall Street Journal. Here are some excerpts: “An effort is underway to drag the Marine Corps into the New Age movement, complete with Eastern Mysticism, Zen meditation, pop psychology, and the trappings of the new-primitive men’s movement.

“In a front page article in the October 9 Wall Street Journal, reporter Greg Jaffe describes how the Corps is developing a new Marine marshal art. It’s purpose? To teach Marines to be adept at hand-to-hand combat by using techniques of Aikido and Taekwondo, but also to draw on the religious origins of those marshal arts to inculcate inner peace.

“The Corps hired Richard Heckler, a psychologist who runs a karate dojo in California’s Marin County to design the program. For the Marines who took the five-week pilot program this summer, part of the regimen involved meditation as practiced by the Eastern religions. The so-called Ninja Platoon also did exercises in exploring each other’s energy. They studied Mr. Heckler’s writings on warrior values, in which recruits had to reflect that ‘I see myself as the fundamental creative force in my life.’

“They did various self-exploration exercises and shared their feelings in group activities. In the pilot programs, 170 Marines received this training. Now, it has been expanded as 15,000 Marines currently are learning how to be Ninjas. Plans to make it mandatory for all Marines and a new recruiting campaign featuring black belts and the slogan, Marine Martial Arts: You’ll Bow to No One, will soon be released.”

Tom: Dave, Obviously, this is in our “Religion in the News,” because what these Marines are learning is a religion, and it’s Eastern Mysticism. For those who are not familiar with the origins of the martial arts, it really had to do with monks who were unarmed, traveling from place to place…

Dave: Buddhist monks.

Tom: Buddhist monks. And they needed to protect themselves. You know, they only could take getting beaten up so many times before they developed a system to defend themselves, and in the process, they incorporated it into their belief system. Some of it has to do physics, but beyond that, a lot of it has to do with spiritual entities and energy, and that’s…well, the things that were mentioned here in particularly, aikido—that’s what aikido is all about.

Dave: Well, it’s the opposite of what we were talking about in the earlier segment. They’re learning to love themselves now, instead of God. They’re focusing on themselves: “I am the creative force in my life,” they’re to meditate on that. Practice Eastern meditation, which, if everyone out there is not familiar, it’s the opposite of meditation. Meditation in the West has always meant to contemplate, to think deeply about something, to meditate on God’s Word, for example. Arrive at a deeper understanding.

Eastern meditation is the opposite. You don’t think. You tune it out. You reach a relaxed, peaceful state within yourself that supposedly becomes the basis for self-realization, really, is what it is: to realize that I am God. To tap into this infinite potential that I have within me that can only be reached in this way. And actually it puts you in touch with demonic powers.

I don’t know if you want to mention it on the radio, Tom, but you were always saying you remember me, what I’ve said. Well, I remember you telling how you were on the Judo team at Ohio State, and this little Japanese guy, 85 years old, or whatever, took on the whole football team?

Tom: Well, he didn’t take on the football team, but he took on some Judo players who were as large as anybody on the football team, and black belts as well. And he threw them around like there was nothing to it.

Now, if physics were just involved in this, you’d have a problem, because these guys were fast, they were younger, they were stronger. I’ve been to tournaments throughout the country in which they’ve had demonstrations in which one aikido player would take on five or six of the best in the country, and throw them around like there was nothing to it.

When I studied aikido, I saw senseis, or instructors, able to do things that you could not explain on the basis of physics. Just impossible.

Dave: So, you’re saying that they’re going into this meditative state in order to tap into some power…

Tom: Yeah, and energy.

Dave: …and energy, ki or chi, that is not normal. It’s not supernatural. It’s supra-natural.

Tom: Right.

Dave: It comes from the demonic world. Now, if we’ve got some people who are into aikido out there, or whatever, listening to this, they’re not going to be happy with that. But there are things that they do, in other words, that what you said, could not be explained on the basis of physics, the laws of physics.

Tom: Right.

Dave: Fulcrum, and so forth.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Dave: So the military is being trained in this now, and I think that the instructor no doubt knows what he’s doing—of course, for a good purpose, to make the Marines the best, to protect our country. But this is very dangerous.

I remember I’ve interviewed and talked to, as you have, people who were involved in Transcendental Meditation, for example, who were this was purely scientific, had nothing to do with religion. They get into this meditative state, and suddenly they find themselves up on the ceiling out of their bodies looking down at their body, and they see a couple of spirit beings wanting to get into their body, and it frightened them. Some of them went insane. Some of them committed suicide. And Maharishi called it “releasing the stress.” Getting rid of the stress. So this is a dangerous spiritual religious practice, which now is being taught as something purely physical, and it’s a tragedy, really.

Tom: Yeah. Dave, there’s one last aspect of it. It seems to be practical, because, as a martial art it seems to be effective in situations. But these are our soldiers; in effect, our warriors. And Japan had this…I don’t want to make a specific…well, this is not scientific, this analogy, but it seems interesting that the spiritual was very much a part of Japan’s warlike attitude, and it didn’t work…

Dave: In World War II…

Tom: In World War II…

Dave: But of course, they were not expecting this to go up against weapons, modern weapons. But this is for hand-to-hand combat. How much hand-to-hand combat do you get involved in these days, when you just push buttons and meet tanks and airplanes at great range. I don’t know, but anyway, it’s a religious practice, but it is not recognized as such. The instructors would deny it.

So, it can be introduced into the armed forces, but they can’t bring Christianity in, in this way.