10:18
So, there is a really large mix of form and essence. And for me there is…  it’s important for us to have a common practice, which is the form, and there is also this important factor to recognize that all Masters are equal in the oneness of Reiki. And that we can change form to suit our incongruity of our own practice
10:58
So, when I’ve read about Japanese Buddhist practice, I think there is like 12 main sects,  S E C T S and you can sit in a Zen temple for 20 years and then all of a sudden decide, «no, I need to go out in the world» and then «oh, I see I need go sit in this other sect for a while and do… and explore Buddhism through that way.»  There doesn’t seem to be any animosity … or (1138)  ähm… what’s the word (1143)  … competition. It just is so. It’s like you follow the path of Buddhism, you can follow the path of Buddhism in these different expressions. That’s how I would like to think about Reiki.
11:58

0:00
Well, for me the Master Symbol came up when people… when people began to initiate masters who were not Hawayo Takata (if that makes sense). And then they wanted to validate or prove that they were masters. So how could they do this? And a natural answer to this question is: Do you have the right symbol? But for me there is no Master Symbol.
0:43
What is called the Master Symbol, number one: It is not a symbol, it’s a phrase in Japanese. So you know there are two ways to look at this: All language is symbol. So we can say “Father, Son and Holy Ghost” and it’s a symbol, I mean it has more meaning than just the words themselves in Christianity and it has become a holy phrase that evokes, if a priest says these words, a certain kind of energy, which I myself have experienced. So when people say this phrase in Japanese, it’s a phrase that comes from.… it’s like a holy phrase in Buddhism, so it’s not a symbol like the second degree symbols, it’s a phrase, it’s a part of the initiation and that’s it.
1:56

1:56
So, gee, it was too bad that they latched on to this and called that the Master Symbol because it was a misnomer because nobody understood that it was part of the Japanese language and that it was a part of a very common part of Buddhist writing, sacred writing. So it’s not only for Reiki, it’s not.. it’s to.. evoke a certain connection to energy, just like this phrase that we are very much… well lot of us are very familiar with: “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost”… and if there were a symbol for masters, for me it would be the initiation itself, because mastery in any trade or in any human endeavour has to do with the human being becoming….(let me just put this correctly or accurately in my view point)…
3:18
It is when a human being…becomes a part of a creative, transformational process, that’s mastery. So, for instance, when you have somebody paint a picture and they are a student or they are what is called the craftsman, somebody who copies the master paintings, but they are copying, right, and they are very good copiers, but they are craftsmen, they are not master painters, because the master painter puts him or herself into that painting so that it becomes greater than the painting itself. The Mona Lisa is just a picture of a not so beautiful woman, as far as I am concerned. I mean and she has got this kind of funny smile… ok.. so you know people love to interpret these you know enigmatic smiles. And I look at this painting and I think, well big deal. The big deal though that you get when you stand in front of the Mona Lisa, which I’ve done, is that somehow she is luminescent, she is energetically dimensional and that doesn’t happen unless the artist somehow transfers this energetic presence of himself or maybe of humanity or maybe I don’t know what, into the painting. So the painting becomes more than just, you know, colour on canvass.
5:19

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

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

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