0:00
In nature there are always activating forces and restraining forces. I think I’ve spoken about this earlier, where a seed in the ground has an activating force, it wants to grow. And when the right conditions come, the right temperature of the soil, the moisture of the soil and so on, it starts pushing its way through the soil, that that push actually gives that plant strength. If it didn’t have the restraining force of the soil, then it would grow weak. And by the time, by the time it comes up through the soil, then it wouldn’t be a strong plant and it wouldn’t mature in its full capacity. So we see this in nature over and over again. It is natural to have restraining and activating forces. And sometimes, you know, you would think that … some people say “oh, this is an activating force but this is a restraining force, and I would say “no, no, that’s an activating force and this is a restraining force”. So it becomes really a personal, subjective judgement about what’s activating and restraining. The point is that it’s something that is coming together and seemingly in conflict.”
1:39-0141
Joyce is here (waving at her)

0:00
And what happens in activating and restraining forces is that there is a reconciling force. And always the reconciling force is something that’s greater than these two positions. Right? Like there’s this physics theory that… I try to remember how to say… which is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And that’s also true about this activating/restraining thing is that the reconciling force, which we might call Reiki, brings something to creation and there is something new that evolves because of this.
0:55
So in our human endeavour we always will have somebody saying “Yea” and somebody saying “Nay” and there will be a reconciling force and then something new will be created. So in the story of Mikao Usui, he had an activating force, what I call a burning question. Now whether or not that question was exactly the question that I say in my class, I don’t know. But he did have a question, he had something that motivated him to go to different countries, to search for an answer and to come back and be disappointed. Which for Japanese people to say disappointed it’s not disappointed like “oh, I didn’t have chocolate ice cream”. No! This was like crushed, you know disappointed.
1:51

1:51
And so what he did was he went inside of himself to keep the search going and the resistance, the restraining force was the outer world not giving him this answer. So he had to go deeper and deeper and deeper inside of himself. And until he was ready …when he was ready, I would say, he went to the mountain, got in touch with the reconciling force and what was new created was the beginning of this practice.
2:28
His moment of energy where he was touched by Reiki, what we now call Reiki, which he didn’t have the word for at that time, I assume….
2:46

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

4:07
We’re preparing and we are also composed for something much greater than we could ever imagine. Not one of us, I believe, can imagine what’s going to happen eventually. And I believe that it doesn’t matter about heart/mind because… in the Japanese language it’s heart/mind, they are connected… Kokoro I believe is the word. And it is because the Japanese know that….. spirit you know like the mind is not the void of spirit. In fact our brain somehow takes in physical input and somehow magically transforms that into a thought. I mean, no one at this point knows really how that’s done, I imagine and kind of hope actually, that we never know.
5:21
Because it means that there is something that’s like a spark that we can’t explain thank God. I mean really thank God. And that that also relates to our heart, our feelings like we meet somebody for the first time and our heart just opens. We meet somebody for the first time and we go “I don’t know”, you know. And it’s not a thinking process but it’s the same thing. We take in, we look at this person and we take in the physical, you know, sensory perceptions and then all of a sudden it’s a feeling and we act on it. So heart/mind and it has to be balanced. So in the martial arts when you’re standing with a sword, ready to kill someone, well actually the military in Japan, when you are standing with a sword, ready to kill somebody you have to have Y E S!! And it has to be the congruency of your heart and your mind saying YES. It has to be complete because otherwise you dishonour the person you are killing because you are not fully present.
6:47

6:47
Presence means having your heart/mind in alignment and being there. 0653 So our western idea….OK?
0700
Our western idea of separating heart/mind is really not beneficial to us. And I believe it is actually why people are so… now… are to traumatized by war, because they don’t go in to the battlefield with YES. They go into the battlefield with their mind saying yes and their heart saying no. And they come out totally damaged because a human being, a soul cannot handle that kind of dissonance. It’s too much.
7:50

0:00
The succession question for me had been one that has been foremost in my mind since 1983. And … of course back then I was so young, that I was gonna live forever, and we didn’t really have to think about it. But I did think about it because my grandmother’s death created so much havoc for all of us and at that time of course we were still in this conversation with Barbara Weber and I thought my grandmother could have been more clear and so on. And at the same time realizing how advantageous it was to have a restraining force, you know, this activating/restraining, it was fabulous. So…
0:57
And then in the late 1980s Paul Mitchell and I started to travel in … to other continents, we came to Europe first. And we often flew on the same airplane. And finally somebody, I’m pretty sure it was a German master said to me “you know, you guys shouldn’t fly on the same plane”. And I just laughed and I said “You got to be kidding me”. And she said “no, actually I’m not. I’m saying to you that you two have a responsibility that you’re not taking care of”. And I thought to myself, well that’s actually true, I guess accidents can happen. And at this point the Reiki community was so fragile that if Paul and I had died in the same time it would have shattered the community. I’m not saying that to feel like … you’re replaceable or anything, I just feel like if I was living responsibly as a leader, you know, I had to take care of that.
2:08

5:22
The activating force is the preservation of this system. The restraining force is about personality. If people were able to think about me not as a personality but as a part of this system that they practice, I am just as essential as the symbols, as the hand positions, as the initiation, as themselves as masters. We don’t understand what the dynamic is but I know that the dynamic is there. 0603 (nods her head) 0605 So …. ähm… Ya! 0611 
6:13

10:47
He has played a significant role of kind of anchor in all these years and has provided either the activating force or the restraining force in our discussions and vice versa. About 10 years ago we got kind of tired of the polarisation that this was creating. So after 2 or 3 years of actually going to counselling together and trying to work out our differences, we came to this conclusion that we were just very different personalities and that we didn’t really want to change each other. His reticence to talking, his way with money, his ideas of what Reiki was and what Reiki wasn’t stimulated me to really research my own ideas and vice versa….
11:51