The inside of a house or apartment after decluttering has much in common with a Shinto shrine... a place where there are no unnecessary things, and our thoughts become clear.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
But in Japan, there's nothing like that, since the temple is made of wood. The divine spirit inside the building is eternal, so the enclosure doesn't have to be.
When I started The Shins, it really was just me, alone, but it was still The Shins. I was totally recording stuff and writing songs as The Shins and all of that. So the beginning inception of the whole thing was some sort of a lie, I guess.
I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.
Your mind, which is yourself, can be likened to a house. The first necessary move then, is to rid that house of all but furnishings essential to success.
Just by my home is an entrance to the sewers they used in the Warsaw uprising. I grew up knowing people died down there. Warsaw was once a battleground; then it became a morgue. It's a city littered with ghosts. And that never left me.
When the yogi starts to meditate, he must leave behind all sensory thoughts and all longings for possessions by quieting the waves of feeling (chitta), and the mental restlessness that arises therefrom, through the application of techniques that reinstate the controlling power of the untrammeled superconsciousness of the soul.
Go to any Shinto temple in Japan and you'll see it: a simple stand from which hang hundreds of wooden postcard-size plaques with a colorful image on one side and, on the other, densely scribbled Japanese characters in black felt-tip pen, pleas to the gods for help or succor.
Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
All of those broken bones in northern Japan, all of those broken lives and those broken homes prompt us to remember what in calmer times we are invariably minded to forget: the most stern and chilling of mantras, which holds, quite simply, that mankind inhabits this earth subject to geological consent - which can be withdrawn at any time.
It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.