The philosophy which underlies muga underlies also ‘living as already dead.’ In this state a man eliminates all self-watchfulness and thus all fear and circumspection. He becomes as the dead, who have passed beyond the necessity of taking thought about the proper course of action. The dead are no longer returning on; they are free. Therefore to say, ‘I will live as one already dead’ means a supreme release from conflict. It means, ‘My energy and attention are free to pass directly to the fulfillment of my purpose. My observer-self with all its burden of fears is no longer between me and my goal. With it have gone the sense of tenseness and strain and the tendency toward depression that troubled my earlier strivings. Now all things are possible to me.’
In Western phraseology, the Japanese in the practice of muga and of ‘living as one already dead’ eliminate the conscience. What they call ‘the observing-self,’ ‘the interfering self,’ is a censor judging one’s acts. It points up vividly the difference between Western and Eastern psychology that when we speak of a conscienceless American we mean a man who no longer feels the sense of sin which should accompany wrongdoing, but that when a Japanese uses the equivalent phrase he means a man who is no longer tense and hindered. The American means a bad man; the Japanese means a good man, a trained man, a man able to use his abilities to the utmost. He means a man who can perform the most difficult and devoted deeds of unselfishness. The great American sanction for good behavior is guilt; a man who because of a calloused conscience can no longer feel this has become antisocial. The Japanese diagram the problem differently. According to their philosophy man in his inmost soul is good. If his impulse can be directly embodied in his deed, he acts virtuously and easily. Therefore he undergoes, in ‘expertness,’ self-training to eliminate the self-censorship of shame (haji). Only then is his ‘sixth sense’ free or hindrance. It is his supreme release from self-consciousness and conflict.
This Japanese philosophy of self-discipline is abracadabra only so long as it is separated from their individual life experiences in Japanese culture. We have already seen how heavily this shame (haji) which they assign to ‘the observing self’ weighs upon the Japanese, but the true meaning of their philosophy in their psychic economy is still obscure without a description of Japanese child-rearing. In any culture traditional moral sanctions are transmitted to each new generation, not merely in words, but in all the elders’ attitudes toward their children, and an outsider can hardly understand any nation’s major stakes in life without studying the way children are brought up there. Japanese child-rearing makes clearer many of their national assumptions about life which we have so far described only at the adult level.