Cluster: Cultural Transfer

Ich lerne Phyllis kennen, bin neugierig, wie sie sich weiterbildet. In Erfurt gab es eine Konferenz zru geschichte von Religionen und zwei Doktoranden wählten Reiki als Thema. Sie hat den Ruf, nur die "Story" ihrer Grossmutter im Blick zu haben und resistent zu sien gegen historische Entdeckungen (die der Story widersprechen).

RV Editing: 04-1
International Association for the History of Religion

Justin Stein was a spokesperson who exemplified his thesis with the case of Reiki.

Video 1 Question 1, Day 1, Berlin, 0316-0438

3:16
And I’m not very.. I don’t have this kind of experience or discernment at this point to decide what is spiritual and what is religious, but I do get that I’m mixed up inside of myself because I was brought up in a Christian athmosphere and so every.. that’s embedded in me so everything that comes to me that feels kind of holy and something I would…
03:44 (cough)
normally think about having an experience in a church becomes religious, but actually it might not be defined as religious. So I found that really interesting because it starts sorting.. making me sort out myself and sort these experiences that I have, so that I can be more comfortable in belonging to what is commonly termed a spiritual movement, that’s what they call Reiki, is a spiritual movement and absolutely not a religion because of the strict definition of religion. So I’m…that was, that was a fascinating process and I feel like it’s still going on inside of me.
4:38

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Video 3 Question 3, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0245

Topic: Insights IAHR Congress - Continuation of Video 1 and Video 2

0:00
Well, one of the things that define a religion is their set of belief systems and doctrine, we call it. And for Reiki I feel we actually have one, but nobody wants to call is that because it’s a very scary word. But… it’s a more simplistic kind of doctrine, like Reiki on, Reiki off and you know practice, that’s how you’re going to achieve any kind of further knowledge and so my grandmother’s little phrases that she used all the time, like «practice, practice, practice!» or «let Reiki teach you». This one has become one of my favorites, because every word for me has an implication, like «let» is about surrendering, let Reiki teach you, so you know, it’s like that posture of letting is more like an open arm-posture than (closes arms) «okay, come on, you know, just try and change me», you know.
1:26
Teaching is a kind of.. like implying that there is.. that there is teaching in everything.
0141-0145 (cough)
That there is something to be learned everywhere… and I feel that this attitude toward life becomes a part of what we might call «Reiki culture». But it also becomes a part of our doctrine in some way, I mean if we want to call it «doctrine»…
0201-0203 (cough)
because.. the posture of being a student is a really beautiful way to approach the world. And this for me is «let Reiki teach you» and then, you know, Reiki is this kind of.. we all, I think, go through stages of about how to define the word Reiki. Sometime it’s really specific, like Reiki are the hand-positions and the percepts or whatever, you know, you’re fighting with at the time
2:45

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Hier wagt sie eine gewagte und vieldeutige Aussage: Doktrinen in Reiki.

Cultural Transfer

RV Editing: 06-1
bring together with Video 1 ff ?
in this video the viewer gets an understanding of Reiki is... (to Phyllis)

Video 4 Question 4, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0302

Topic: Justin Stein's thesis

0:00
Well, the short answer is: I don’t know. The longer answer is that, ähm you know, his paper is on …what happens to an oral tradition when it’s taught through a number of generations and it goes from one culture to another culture and the changes that happen within the practice. Is this… Why are the changes made? And is there a developmental process actually going on? And these kind of questions. And then.. so that’s the general kind of theme of his thesis. And then what he did, was he used Reiki as an example of that and especially the time of Hawayo Takata because she was the person who took Reiki as a Japanese practice, well actually Usui Shiki Ryoho, and then brought it to another culture and then within that (1:16) how did she… let me start again. (1:26) How did she translate not just the language of Reiki but the culture of Reiki? How could she bring the Japanese culture into the practice of Reiki at the times and the moments when it was important for the actual practice to be understood?
1:54 (coughs)
And this part, I think Justin does beautifully.. for the most part. I mean of course I don’t agree with everything that he has surmised or come to, but I do really like his approach, because he really gets that this wasn’t about making Reiki… for instance some people have said “well, she made Reiki more Christian because she was teaching Christians” – but, this just drives me crazy but ähm…He saw that she needed to, for instance, add this precept particularly “honor your parents, teachers and elders» because for a Japanese person this is THE fundamental principal that every child grows up with and this is where you… this is what your life revolves around. And, of course, in our culture that is not necessarily true.. (laughs)
3:02

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Widersprüchlichkeiten zwischen Takatas "Story" und historischem Fakt fangen an sichtbar zu werden.

Cultural transfer

RV Editing: 07-1 Translation of a Japanese practice across cultural barriers and generations, e.g. precepts, will be dontinued in 17-2

Video 4 Question 4, Day 1, Berlin, 0302-0520

3:02
And, you know, be kind… and the others were kind of more repetitive sounding, but for the Japanese they weren’t repetitive, like be kind, be… count your many blessings and so on, they all kind of sound the same, but they weren’t actually the same for the Japanese, because they’re subtlety of the difference of these is much greater understanding than we have in our culture. So I feel like she did a wonderful job of translating not just the language but the culture. And he does a very good job considering how difficult it is to historically go back and rebuild history in this way.
4:00
The other thing I like about Justin’s presentations is that he doesn’t have a Reiki attachment. He doesn’t need to like prove himself that he is like the fountain of all truth in Reiki. And it’s just so refreshing. He’s just doing his job as a scholar trying to get this paper together so that he gets his doctorate degree. And there is no hidden agenda in his papers… that I’ve noticed anyway. And with that I can take in a lot of what he’s saying that can be confrontive
04:42
… in a way that feels like, «well, you know, I just have to sit with it for a while and after a while it will become easy… So this is a small but significant thing for me, because I always heard her say that she had been with Mikao Us…. no! sorry, with Chujiro Hayashi, her teacher for a year and maybe it was a year altogether. But she was in Japan for like 6 ½ months, I think, the first time when she learned Reiki.
5:20

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here she admits that story and history are not always identical.

Video 4 Question 4, Day 1, Berlin, 0520-0711

5:20
Justin said: «Well, you know, I have the the steamship manifest, you know, that shows when she arrived in Japan and when she left… so, you know, this is like physical evidence. So I went «well, hmm … OK». (laughs) And you know, what I find really amazing for me, is that (0544) in telling the Reiki story in… well (0547) in accepting the Reiki story and listening to it from my grandmother all these years and then it obviously, because Reiki has been so profound for me the history has gone into me, into this like profound sacred box or something inside of me. And it’s not to be changed. So when there is pressure to actually shift things a little bit, it takes time, I mean it’s not going to be «well, ok, it was 6 months instead of a year». It’s a very significant thing for me, because it changes the pace of the story for me.
6:36
So there are lots of these little things that Justin presents. Now, they were profound for me, I don’t know how it will be for, you know the other people in the Reiki community. For some people who are maybe a little bit less precious about the history than I am, it will be a relieve, because they’ll say «ok, so this is all based on facts, now I know I am not lying, so now I can tell the story, you know easily with more confidence».
7:11

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Cultural Transfer, Mother's influence

Video 5 Question 5, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0219

Topic: Archive - access?

0:00
ähm. I just spent 5 days in Erfurt at this conference called International Association of the History of Religions (kind of an awkward title for an association) and in this association there was one panel that was brought together about Japanese spiritual movements and Justin Stein, a doctoral student from the Toronto University, presented a paper there, part of dissertation and another women, another doctoral student, Hirano (I don’t know her last name), she also presented a part of her paper and then there were two others, who presented papers that were relevant to the history of Reiki and the influences on Mikao Usui as he grew (0108) to aehm… as he grew to … (0116) develop the practice of Reiki as we know it now.
1:21
So, this follows a whole process that I’ve been involved in in the last two, years, brought on actually by my mother’s death. There are a couple of reasons why: One was because when she was alive, it was very difficult for me to investigate and to go deeply into my grandmothers‘ life and so on because she was very protective of it. And the other part was that when she died, I had to go through, along with my sisters, all of her papers… and deal with them and we are still going through them. So I thought «well if I die, who is going to do this for me?» and the obvious place to start was with these boxes of my grandmother’s things that I had actually never looked into.
2:19

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2. Cluster: Mother's influence.
Ein Vorwurf, der über die Jahre in der Luft war, war dass Phyllis die dokumente von Takata nicht frei zur Verfügung stellte. Sie würden helfen, Widersprüche zwichen "Story" und "Wahrheit" aufzudecken. Was die Reikiwelt nicht wusste ist, dass zum Einen Phyllis' Mutter Einfluss auf Phyllis hatte, bzw. dass die Dokumente in Mutters Besitz waren bis zu deren Tod 2012.

RV Editing: 08-1
she speaks about the archive in Arizona on V050, but THIS is probably better scene.
Naoko Hirano
The first entry may be useful as introduction even in Video 001?
In the 2nd entry mother appears and the difficulty Phyllis has had to open archives prior her death = yes

Video 7 Question 7, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0151

Topic: "Teaching Story" versus historic facts

0:00
…
0:17
ok… this is just an aside, but unfortunately there was actually a panel in Erfurt at this conference about this very thing and I couldn’t go to it because it coincided with Justin’s presentation. It was really maddening…
0:44
So… when.. in 1979 when I travelled with my grandmother, I first heard the story of Reiki, I just thought «… it’s only unbelievable». And.. because you know I had no experience of Reiki, I didn’t even know what Reiki was really, as far as to practice or the energy or anything. And I had to use other people as a kind of test to see whether my grandmother was like really crazy or if she was actually saying something that was a value to people. But people sat and listened to her and they were respectable people and you know, it’s like.. I just finally had to surrender to.. that she was saying things to people that I couldn’t relay to but these other people did, I mean, they were awestruck by this whole thing.
1:51

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Das Spannungsfeld zwischen Takata (der Mutter) und Phyllis zeigt sich. Und dass Phyllis zu Reiki so wie die Jungfrau zum Kinde kam.

RV Editing: 10-1
delete first 44 seconds (kursiv)

Video 7 Question 7, Day 1, Berlin, 0151-0459

1:51
As I grew to have more relationship with Reiki and to start teaching it and to recount the story myself, what I realized was that there was a transmission of energy that was happening through the story, that I had no control over, like it just happened and I wasn’t consciously making it happen, it just happened. So, one of the odd things about the story of course is that (0225) Hayashi.. no, Haw.. ähm.. (0227) Usui’s story and Hayashi’s story pretty much remain the same as my grandmother told it. But when I came to my grandmother I knew like way too much information. So I had to start sorting out which information I actually told in classes, which became a part of the story and then what about me? (0251) Right? …
2:53 coughs
(0257) So, then Paul and I started to do these Masters intensives together in 1993. And when we came to telling the story, I would tell the first part of the story and then he would tell the last part of the story. And so it was interesting to listen to him and see what he left out and what he said and so on. And what we realized was that information does not carry energy as well as story. So we left out the date she was born and we left out you know, all this stuff and just talked about “when she met Reiki”. (0340)
3:42
So then (cough) god.. (0347) so then I had this insight that, (0350) ähm (pauses) (0358) it was not the story of four people but it was a story of Reiki and how it emerged through these people’s lives. Which was a good perspective for me because it really helped me when people started to add birthdays and you know, when people died and all this factual stuff… but it’s not about people. It’s about Reiki. So that helped some people.
4:26
And then…when the memorial stone was found was a really big thing, because that was the first real kind of substantial body of information, and lo and behold, what was on the stone collaborated my grandmother’s story. Well that was like «shuuu» relieve!
4:59

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2. Cluster: Reconciiation.
Phyllis zeigt Wertschätzung gegenüber Petter's Arbeit.

Video 7 Question 7, Day 1, Berlin, 0459-0748

4:59
And what I have done now in… recounting how she actually told the story and the things that I have changed of the story is things like this: she used to say «and he studied for 7 years, and then he went to the US for 7 years and he went so and so for 7 years, you know, he was the in monastery for 7 years». And I realised that the 7 year thing …
05:32-05:35 oh, I should have asked some of the Japanese people.
5:35
But I realized that the 7 year thing is kind of a Japanese way of saying: for a… he did this for a long time… but they have to be kind of more precise or there is something magic about 7 years or I don’t know why… So it’s like not understanding the actual contexts of a lot of her way of tell you the story. These were changed into kind of «facts» just by dropping them. Does that make sense?
6:12
I call this a teaching story, because it is… you know the content of it is to teach the way the Reiki came into the world, the way that the practice emerged, some of the very fundamental principles of working with Reiki as an energy, some of the fundamental lessons of every Reiki student. And it is of course based on historic fact but it is teaching story and that’s where the magic lies. It’s how people… so the story became a part of me and the part of me that tells the story induces a kind of trance-like state in the listeners, and it’s really a fascinating process. And I wouldn’t be able to repeat this with another story, I don’t think or maybe I can now but I certainly when I was a young master I couldn’t have done it. But for those people who actually want to have history, I think it is really important to have some kind of accompanying history that underlies or creates a foundation for the teaching story. I don’t firstly need it but I know that some people do.
7:48

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delete 05:32-05:35

Video 60 Question 13, Day 2, Arizona, 0334-0546

3:34
In Japan, because of the culture.. Japan introduced Buddhism to it’s… brought Buddhism in kind of the year 536 or something. And out of that time many different… sects like SECTS of Buddhism emerged. They basically all practiced Buddhism in the sense that they take the words that… were attributed to Buddha and the methods that he used to attain enlightenment, they have approximately the same identification of enlightenment what the term means, but they take only a small portion of his teaching and one method to get there. And that’s the difference of all these sects. But they all know that they.. their foundation is all the same practice. And I would love Reiki to become that way because it means that there is no competition, there is no right and wrong, just different forms and different methods to get to the same relationship with Reiki, the universal life energy.
5:04
So for instance in Zen meditation, which is Zen Buddhism, which is very… well we have some idea in the western world about Zen meditation, so it’s a very specific kind of meditation. And you basically sit in silence and you’re.. you sit doing chants of mantras and stuff to a certain amount of time and then your process is to have internal processes that bring you to enlightenment to peace within yourself. And it takes many, many years if not a lifetime.
5:46

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2. Cluster: Cultural Transfer

Video 60 Question 13, Day 2, Arizona, 0546-0843

5:46
For another sect of Buddhism, they believe that …. I can’t remember the name of the sect, but it’s a sect that actually created the Japanese written language from Chinese. And this man created a sect of Buddhism and they believe that language and the chanting of language, phrases is a way to enlightenment. So this one sect takes the heart sutra and this is their main chant and they say that if you have the heart sutra on your wall and say it every day then you will, your inner self will automatically become improved. It will be beneficial.

6:45
So here is one sect that says you’re supposed to chant and use language, the other sect doesn’t use language at all. But they don’t fight against each other. They just simply see that perhaps a student of one sect could go to the other because they advance and then they decide “oh, now I need to go and sit in silence” or the other way around. And the point is that they know that their service is to the student and his benefit. And this is the part where we in Reiki are not, we don’t have yet, we don’t serve the student, we decide that our practice needs to be big and important so that we can be big and important. And we are not paying any attention to the confusion and the disarray that this brings into a student. And so not only do they have to put up with that with their own disarray inside of themselves and their own spiritual practice and figuring out what’s going on, but then they have to figure out this whole other mess that is there.

7:59
And for me the mess is an adolescent stage of development, which is where we are. This practice is only a hundred years old, give or take a year or two and… you know we are not there yet. You know, Buddhism is, you know…. In Japan now we could say it’s an 1800-year-practice. So in those 1800 years yeah in 1800 years of practice they figured out a few things, and competition is one of them.
8:43

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2. Cluster: Cultural Transfer

Video 60 Question 13, Day 2, Berlin, 0843-0847

08:43
and maybe they never had competition, I don’t know.
08:47
Andi to add.

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2. Cluster: Cultural Transfer

Left out by Andi, please add from Cannon MVI 5135 the following: 04:54 P: “and maybe they never had competition, I don’t know.” 04:58

Video 64 Question 17, Day 2, Arizona, 0246-0407

2:46
So.. in the sense of people squabbling about “I have the right Reiki” or “I have the only Reiki” or “I have Reiki from… you know, Krishna or whatever” you know all of this is working out the individual’s process and also it adds to this restraining and activating force on this global level what we call the .. what I call the global Reiki community. And Reiki is our reconciling force and I believe that when we are really ready to surrender to that reconciling force and are able to hold the creative dissidence that is happening right now, we are going to get something really great.
3:51
So if we can imagine ourselves in a cauldron just being stirred by the great hand of Reiki…
4:07

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2. Cluster: Cultural Transfer

Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0204

Topic: Takata’s role in the cultural exchange and the resistance she faced

0:00
Many people ask about the reason why Chujiro Hayashi didn’t accept Hawayo Takata as a student in the beginning. And there are some rumours that is was because she was a woman, which I have never actually thought about because
0031/0032 (räusper)
the person who took her to the clinic in the first place was a woman who was a student of Chujiro Hayashi. She was the dietician in the hospital where Hawayo Takata was going to have an operation….
0048-0:56 (räusper, Augenverdreher) So, äh..
I actually have this question and it was kind of unanswered for a few years and then there was some understanding that came to me that in Japan…. during this time there was a lot of confusion and some of that confusion was about nationalistic ideas of Japan’s culture being exported to other countries and in the same way other countries’ cultures being imported into Japan, which was not actually welcomed because for the most part the Japanese considered everyone else on the planet barbarians. One of the things is that of course who they saw in the beginning were sailors and they never bathed and the Japanese bathed almost every day. So just that little physical difference was one thing.
2:04

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2. Cluster: Cultural Transfer

Patrick Lankau's question about achievement of Takata and opposing forces.
reconciliation west/Japan
Cannon MVI 5146 and MVI5147

Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 0204-0224

2:04
The other thing is that the sailors of course being who they were, sailors, and kind of pirates, you know, were not very sensitive to walking on Tatami mat floors with their muddy boots and so on. And the Japanese were like very refined, very sensitive to new ones and the sailors new ones was like “Get me another drink” you know. So they had these very strong ideas about what the rest of the world was like.
2:38
So they didn’t want their refined culture … represented by flower arrangement, tea ceremony, martial arts and those kind of things, they didn’t want them to be taken out into the barbarian world and destroyed, basically. So when I found this out I thought “well maybe that was one of the reasons why he refused her”, I don’t know. Even though she spoke Japanese as her first language, she was fully Japanese in parentage but she was born in Hawaii and was going to go back to Hawaii, that was very clear.
2:24

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2. Cluster: Cultural Transfer

Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 0538-0735

5:38
And then she did other, she studied other things. So I don’t know how long she went somewhere… but she came back on an appointed day and Chujiro Hayashi kind of made a speech, a farewell speech to his students about what his predictions were, about Japan attacking the US and how they would be in war and what, you know, Hawayo Takata could do to save her family and herself and so on. And also he recognized Hawayo Takata as his successor by giving her all of his worldly possessions, that’s a very usual thing to do in Japan for succession. And then he laid down and in a little while stopped breathing and went into transition. This is what Hawayo Takata would say in her story.
6:46
I won’t get into this but I believe that this… she said that this was the most … spiritual moment of my life. And when she said that you just had this feeling of this man, knowing that this was his time to die and knowing that he could actually choose it and that he did it. And I don’t believe it was through a suicide. Maybe some historian researcher will tell me otherwise but even so he still chose this moment. And in Japan that’s a very honourable death.
7:35

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2. Cluster: Cultural Transfer

Hier adressiert sie den Suizid von Hayashi

Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 0735-0858

7:35
So then Hawayo Takata eventually went back to Hawaii and during the war many of the people in Hawaii were put into internment camp or (0745) they were contained in their plantation … (räusper), exuse me. (0754) They were contained in the plantation housing areas. So Hawayo Takata somehow and it is said that she followed Chujiro Hayashi’s instructions, she was able to travel from island to island freely. And she gave Reiki treatments, she taught Reiki, she did a lot of things but that was very, very unusual for a Japanese person, either man or woman, to be able to leave their island of residence and travel freely, that was unheard of. Her family never were put into internment camps and my mother tells stories of taking cookies and treats to her friends who were in the camps. So there were camps in Hawaii. And this some people don’t believe and some people say it didn’t happen but I believe my mother. (laughs) (0856) (räusper)
8:58

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2. Cluster: Cultural Transfer

Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 1148-1300

11:48
I find that this juxtaposition, you know, of here Chujiro Hayashi didn’t really want to teach her Reiki because she was, you know, going to take it to Hawaii and then it ended up that he named her his successor, knowing full well that this would take Reiki out of Japan and perhaps save it in some way. And this for me is a very good example of a Japanese person not worrying about what the social norm was, or what would put him into prison or what was the best for himself. No, he followed the energy of Reiki and said “this is your successor and so it goes out and whatever happens to Reiki will happen”. And actually what happened to Reiki fulfilled Mikao Usui’s dream that Reiki would touch the world.
1301-1302 (lets her hands drop)
13:00

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