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Herman Aihara:
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Herman Aihara opened his public lecture in Singapore by talking about bowls and teapots... He grew up in a part of Japan that is famous for its ceramics and for while, it seemed as if he was not going to stop talking about it.
(As organiser for the event, I got pretty worried. He went on for at least 15 or 20 minutes talking about bowls and teapots. I wondered when he was going to get onto the topic for the evening, which was macrobiotics. I worried that the audience might get restless. I was.)
Perhaps he was testing our..............P A T I E N C E.
For that turned out to be the theme of his talk.
Patience is the key to health, happiness and spiritual freedom, Aihara says. Yet it is the thing that is most lacking in modern society.
“In America, teenagers are carrying pistols,” Herman Aihara notes. “I think the biggest problem today is child violence.
“And parents abandoning their children. Recently, one young mother threw away her kids in a car. The world is changing. What is happening to civilization?
“People are losing patience. When difficulties arise, they have no patience to find out how to overcome their difficulties.
“Because everything is instant. People want instant cures. If anybody is sick, he or she asks the doctor, ‘Please stop my pain. Cure my sickness.’ Instantly. Everything instant. Instant healing.
“The government is advertising lotteries – instant millionaire. The government is educating people to have no patience.
“And nobody wants to become macrobiotic because nobody has the patience to cook in three hours.
Difficulties
“Nobody wants to try the diet cure because they want instant cures. If they have breast cancer, they want to take it out.
“Nobody wants to take time. So I am teaching macrobiotics because people don't want it. When they want it, then I will stop teaching,” Herman Aihara jokes.
“I welcome difficulties. If it is easy, I will finish in 10 years, or 5 years. Then I have to look for something else to do. But I have continued teaching macrobiotics for more than 50 years because it is difficult. Nobody wants.
“If you want to learn instantly, don’t try macrobiotics. Macrobiotics is not that kind of stuff. Macrobiotics is 5,000 years old. Or more.
“We have all learnt Western science and thrown away Eastern wisdom. Macrobiotics tries to get back, to return to Eastern wisdom so that we can change without using guns and pistols!”
Click here to read Part II of this article, where Herman Aihara talks about macrobiotics and freedom.
In 1995, Herman Aihara and his wife Cornelia taught macrobiotics in Singapore at the invitation of the Macrobiotics Society, of which I was the President.