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That was my first experience with enlightenment.

“So then I got back up [and] we contined to walk, and then we turned around and went back to the house. He thanked me and I thanked him. It was the most exciting experience of my life, to that point, the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me!”

Of course, the enlightenment of which Suenaka spoke is O’Sensei’s enlightenment; the experience of being in the presence of one who has attained that state of higher knowledge and perception to which all earnest budoka aspire. It was Suenaka’s first personal, incontrovertible proof that, in his words, “there was a force, a God-like force, that all humans could achieve that level of energy. I believed in his philosophy then—I said, ‘There’s no doubting such a thing.’”

Although Suenaka related his experience to his father and a few close friends, he generally kept it to himself. He knew there were those in the community who might resent the fact that he, still basically a kid at twenty-years-old, was granted a rare private moment with the Founder. In the weeks to come Suenaka would play the walk on the beach over and over in his mind, pondering the apparent impossibility of what he had experienced, yet finding his doubts time and again swept away by the undeniable reality of the event. Just as the arrival of Koichi Tohei in 1953 marked the end of the first stage of his martial development and the beginning of his aikido education, Suenaka Sensei’s experiences with O’Sensei, culminating in this extraordinary occurrence, marked the end of his days in Hawaii, and set the stage for the next steps in his martial development, which would begin less than a month later, upon his arrival in Japan.