The final days are spent with the Benefactors and sharing with John Morton in the delightful Asaba Ryokan as the grand finale. The Asaba Ryokan is an upscale Japanese guesthouse nestled in a tranquil environment and complimented by a self-proclaimed “festive atmosphere”. The rooms are stunningly simplistic and the views of the rural Japan countryside are breathtaking. At Asaba you can take advantage of the many things this “ryokan” has to offer, including both indoor and outdoor hot springs, a spa, and incredible shows, including delectably pure Japanese cuisine.

Many have all wished each other Sayonara with tears in their eyes and tidings of joy, happiness, gratefulness and oneness of sharing this time with each other. And for those who are enjoying the last moments of the Japan Tour 2016 we send you love and Light with hopes and wishes of another one to come in the future.

God Bless Japan and All those who participated and especially all those around the world who joined us sharing your loving with us and sending the Light and may you all dream tonight as the Zen of the Mystical Traveler travels with you forever more.

Signing off from Japan. Loving and Light to All, God Bless us All, Love Julie

Day 12 | Touring Photos by David Sand

 
David Sand traveled on with the Benefactors to the Asaba Ryokan and shares here his experience plus after the Japan Tour heads on to a movie premiere of the “Life and Times of John-Roger.”

by David Sand……
A couple of days at the end of the tour for just the “benefactors” (a group that’s donated extra to the J-R Legacy Fund). We take the train to Asaba Ryokan (Japanese-style inn), an idyllic lakeside retreat near Mt. Fuji with hot spring baths, tatami mats and sliding Japanese doors that open on green foliage, rocks and waterfalls, transporting us into a living, 3-D Japanese painting. We stroll around the small riverside town in the afternoon. In the evening we meet for sharing with John and a multi-course traditional Japanese gourmet dinner, dressed in those Japanese bathrobe-kimono thingies (“yukata”) that lend our event the intimacy of a slumber party combined with the playful anonymity of a costume party. The next morning it’s back to Tokyo for some touring and a nighttime sharing with another work-of-art dinner on the top floor of a high-rise building, with dizzying views of endless illuminated skyscrapers, and toylike cars and insect-people far below.

As the Traveler energy seeps in and expands during the Q&A with John, the room quiets, and time seems to slow down while the tiny vehicles and humans below us maintain their fast pace. It’s like we’re in the still center of some kind of spaceship rotating high above the city, maintaining a peaceful poise while the circumference speeds by, enjoying our Japanese delicacies and sharing about rarefied spiritual subjects. On this last evening people talk about the kindness and service-consciousness of the Japanese people and how it’s affected them. I’ve experienced it as a spirit of peace and cooperation that’s followed us throughout the trip. This is a place where each person has a strong connection to the whole, and everyone’s social role, high or low, is respected and carried out with diligence, politeness, dignity, and an awareness of its contribution to all of society. The end result is a calm and consonance that’s in the air, everywhere. It seems like any movement is premeditated with appreciation of how it will affect others, and the earth, and the concord of each element.

When I was ready to leave Japan in 1980 at 23 I realized that I was western, and that I couldn’t avoid expressing who I am as a natural process of expansion, whether or not that outer expression was harmonious or ideal. I would not be able to fit myself to a form, but rather the form was going to come out of me spontaneously, and that process is intrinsic to my culture and my consciousness. Now leaving again 36 years later, I’m leaving a very different Japan—still overflowing with kindness and beauty—but I can also feel the bursting forth of those parts of the Japanese psyche that were repressed to create the outer ideal.

That’s not to say that what’s happening in Japan is in any way more unbalanced than what’s happening in the west, where we’re having our own confrontation with its opposite—unrestrained individualism. But the tension between people’s inner and the outer worlds in Japan is an extra layer of conflict that I’m not equipped to handle over the long haul, so I’ll take a dose of outer chaos if it feels real and honest to me. And at the same time, another part of me is in love with this place, as many people on the tour have expressed. This is a haven for sensitive people. All the rough edges are smoothed. Just being able to get into a taxi or buy a rice ball from someone who cares enough about you to keep their space clean and inviting is enthralling. And the caring is genuine. Even people doing hard physical labor have a refinement about them in their pressed uniforms, and taxi drivers wear white gloves.

Maybe I’ll come back when Japan’s economy is on the rise again and it seems happier and more hopeful. Maybe I’ll come back when it’s all in chaos and the salarymen can’t stand the dullness of daily life anymore and abandon the cities. It’s all a crapshoot down here, and whatever is the outer result of this seesaw of opposites that we ride on this planet, the one guarantee is that if you wait a while you’ll get to enjoy its reversal.

The one thing that’s been constant and without tension has been the spiritual energy; the quiet radiation of the Traveler consciousness through John and through all of us; the placing of Light; the ease and grace of the logistics, even when there are bumps that are reduced to unimportance by our good humor and the steadfastness of our guides; our bodies’ vibration in harmony with the deep green gardens framed by white-and-brown temples; the aura of peace and plenty created by these highly creative and quietly affectionate people. I’m sure that having a Traveler and initiates here is going to affect this place in ways that are profound.

Photos include the ryokan and sharings, our last night in the skyscraper (and those UFO-things in the sky are just reflections of the room lights). Also a post-tour premiere of the movie Mystical Traveler: The Life and Times of Dr. John-Roger, co-directed by John-Roger and Jsu Garcia, shown in Tokyo on the day after the benefactors’ tour ended. My uninformed opinion: Experiencing the arc of the entire life of a Master and Traveler as it transforms the culture in which it’s been placed allows each person who sees it to consciously experience the arc of their own transformation—and the transformation of their culture as well. So I think that, just like our entire journey, that movie affects a far greater field than the theater where it’s shown.

And at the very end of the photos are some cards that I found at a flea market in Tokyo at the beginning of our trip, of 1960’s Japanese movie monsters—in order to pay respect to the unseen, unconscious and un-photographable side of Japan.

In the departure line at the airport somebody coughs directly on the back of my head—something so out of place in the experience of the last two weeks that it’s a wake-up call that I’m emerging from the gentle, euphonious dream of Japan. I turn around and of course the person isn’t Japanese. Sayonara.