7:53
Very early on, like maybe 1982 or 3, somebody came to me and said 0802 “You should tra….. you should trans…no… 0807 you should trademark Reiki. 0809 You should write down the whole system and trademark it, now!”. If I had done that, what would have happened in the future? Where would we have been today? And I just couldn’t see the benefit of doing this. I thought that trademarks were something very different than they are. So in the middle of 1990s I learned through my own experience of having to “fight” a trademark, a registration, that trademarks are simply the business way of saying “This is who I am”
0902 (räusper)
and that you don’t make a lot of money, they do cost a lot of money. And you’re able to … if done with integrity, actually maintain integrity.
9:22
So what I really wanted to do in the mid 1990s, which was by that time too late,
0928 (räusper)
was to have what is called an industry trademark. And so the ones that we might be very familiar with are for cotton, the little symbol for cotton, or wool, which is a woven kind of symbol but these are trademarked by the industry. So all the manufacturers of cotton material can use this trademark. And that’s what we could have done with Reiki. It would have maintained a certain boundary around practices, not controlling practices but being able to identify them. But at that point there was one practice, I didn’t see that the future would hold that there are many and this was a decision that I took, doing my best. I certainly didn’t have any assumptions to make because if I didn’t make them and my big assumption, the critical assumption was that the world was not going to change, (laugh) but it did.
10:45