So I checked out Soka Gakkai International today. It's an organization with 12 million members worldwide. There are chapters in virtually every major city across 192 countries. I won't give away which chapter I visited, because that would reveal my whereabouts.
Soka Gakkai International promotes Nichiren Buddhism. The overarching goal is to promote world peace through a human revolution. What this means is transforming one human life at a time by improving that person's life condition. Happy, fulfilled people want others around them to be happy and fulfilled. Happy, fulfilled people do not want to destroy.
A couple of things blow my mind about the organization. First, they are fantastically covert, hiding in plain sight. The building I went to was nondescript and unmarked from the outside. And, as it turns out, this is intentional. The leaders of Soka Gakkai International understand that there will be pushback for every movement. So, to minimize this, they deliberately don't proselytize loudly, go door to door, or engage with mainstream media. That's why I had never heard of them until a friend mentioned them.
Second, they do not promote a religion or religious dogma; what they really promote is a philosophy. Because of this, they welcome questions and inquiry into their beliefs. I took advantage of this today by asking one of the local leaders a barrage of questions.
Third, their philosophy aligns perfectly with the personal and spiritual philosophy I've been cultivating over the past year and a half.
Which leads me to wonder: how many of these organizations and belief systems in existence are really using different words to describe the same thing? I've already suspected that Judeo-Christian beliefs have more in common with Eastern religious beliefs than their superficial teachings suggest.
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