0:00
Well…again I… this is totally my theory, it’s not based on facts at all, but a theory and my theory is that in the Japanese tradition there are ways for people to recognize successors and one of the ways that Hawayo Takata was recognized as Chujiro Hayashi’s successor is that she was left with his house.. with everything with all his material possessions, with everything. And it was understood of course, that she could have kicked the Hayashis out of their house and taken it for her own. But she didn’t, she wanted to go back to Hawaii. So she of course allowed the Hayashis to stay in their home and to run the clinic and so on.
1:00
When my grandmother died everything went to my mother. And she, I believe, actually whether she was a Reiki master or not, handed the lineage in some way these inheritance piece to me. And…
1:26
And at that time the phrase was the Grand Master, so the master of masters. Now… I don’t know where this phrase came from. There were a group of my… of masters that my grandmother initiated both in California and in the Chicago area, who were older women, who probably had… knowledge of the Masons or some group like that and so for them… instead of using the word Sensei or another word to indicate an honour in Japanese.. (0222) (burping)… excuse me, (0224) they would call her the Grand Master.
2:30

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

9:38
And oh just to answer the question about different symbols: Well there are no different symbols. The problem again is ignorance and I will use the word ignorance, it’s kind of an ugly word but it carries for me an emotional impact that I actually mean to communicate. It’s about ignorance of the Japanese language. Like 99% of us, including myself, do not read and write Japanese, (1017) so…. (cough)
10:23
99% of us don’t read and write Japanese, (1028) so of course it looks just like a series of lines that means whatever our master says. But in truth it’s actually the written Kanji for Japanese. So there are so many different ways to write the Kanji, so many different styles and so many different… handwriting styles that of course it looks like there are different symbols being given to different people, but it was just simply the way that Hawayo Takata wrote the Kanji in that moment.
11:05

0:00
Well I have no knowledge of this. You know, for me I received the initiation the way that my master taught me. I assume that it was the way that she received it from Chujiro Hayashi.. I don’t believe that… It was not in Hawayo Takata’s nature to make Reiki more palatable to the western mind. She wanted to make it, she wanted to transfer the power of Reiki and its connection to the Japanese culture to the western mind because that was essential to how it worked., not to involve other people and to make it better. You know this is really for me… a huge difference in the… interpretation of her movement.
1:08
So I have no idea I don’t know how Jikiden Reiki is practiced, I don’t care because it’s not my practice. It doesn’t mean that they are the genuine one or the original one. I don’t believe that any of the practices that are practiced today are the genuine one or the real one because it just depends on where you are. Like the association that is in Japan that is supposed to come from Mikao Usui’s one teaching and the association whose mission was to keep that teaching as accurate as possible, then I can say ok if in their practice somehow this didn’t appear then
(0207) (räusper)
it’s an anomaly. But we have no idea why and to speculate on that to fill in the blank is really dangerous. Because I have seen people do that with Hawayo Takata’s practice, and I know a lot about her practice, but say in one class she doesn’t mention this and so you know for that whole thing and that one master who eventually, you know the first degree student, who eventually becomes a master this particular one thing is not in their practice because in the first degree class she happened not to say this.
2:46

6:16
I mean kids are raised in the Japanese culture to respect one another and to learn to work with their… energetic being in a really different way than in France or in the U.S. I mean Americans are just all over the map as we would say colloquially. So we had no boundaries, you know, and we got called on the carpet, we were really lucky actually in.. I say “we” as a huge community going into this that something really terrible didn’t happen, but it didn’t.
7:01
We figured out, in 1990 the Reiki Alliance figured out that they needed to have a code of ethics, because things were getting so bad. And it was not just between students and masters but between masters themselves like people would have gatherings and people would have affairs and then, you know, we ended up having to hide affairs from the spouses of these people who were also acquantancies and good friends of… I mean, it was… as a social wreck… you know then the ethics, the code of ethics started to come in and people started to say “ok, let’s… you know… get some…. you know handle on this you know… let’s be mature about this”.
7:53

2:25
So I’m fascinated (0229) by the times around Mik.. where, when, sorry …. (0234) I’m fascinated by the time and by the culture of Japan when Makao Usui lived, when he was borne, when he grew up and the cultural influences that he had on himself. (0249) (räusper) And I believe… that understanding these were really help researchers understand the context in which a lot of this was placed. And… one of the things that is really too bad, as far as I’m concerned, is that I don’t see the depth of understanding of the Japanese culture in many of the books. They write a book according to their mind, according to the year 2015 in Great Britain or you know 2014 in Denmark or someplace. And…. So what I try to do is to turn that around and to say to my students: “Just know that this is somebody’s theory, this is somebody else’s experience of Reiki. It is not the truth. The only truth that you need to be concerned about is the truth of your own experience. And don’t ever give that up!”
4:04

1:44
Trying to translate Japanese into English or any other language is difficult and what he doesn’t really understand is that of course he can go to a generalized thing but she had full knowledge of Japanese and she had full knowledge of English and so her translation not just included the linguistic translation but included the cultural and the practice translation. So for me it’s like “well why not Reiki Master?”. And I agree with him on the point that in Japan you don’t declare yourself a Reiki Master and you don’t declare yourself a Grand Master. These are done through recognition. And I was not … I didn’t declare myself a Reiki Master nor did I declare myself a lineage bearer or a Grand Master. That was done through the recognition of my grandmother and of my colleagues and of students. So I’m fine with being Phyllis Furumoto and this other part for me really is important. That recognition has a lot to bear. So I agree with him on that point. (0306) … (räusper) And…
3:11
And as an aside to term these politics, for me it’s not politics because we are not talking about social behaviour. We are talking about the manifestation of spiritual practice which has a totally different meaning. So there are….
3:34

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

5:01
So it doesn’t matter how many loaves of bread a Dollar buys in your country, this is not the point. The point is: are you willing to really give yourself? So if you think about other spiritual practices, like
0515 (räuspern)
as an American if I went to Japan and said “Well I didn’t learn to sit seiza” you know when I was a little kid I could only sit seiza for this is with your legs folded up but you know under you… I can only sit seiza for 6 hours so how about you know give me a break and as an American I only have to sit seiza for 6 hours while all the Japanese people have to sit seiza for 12. Well forget it! You know, the Sensei would just look at you and laugh. You know, because that’s not the point, the point is not how much you can actually do or how much you think you can do. The point is how willing are you to discipline yourself and get into that space so you can sit seiza for 24 hours and not blink an eye or perhaps at the end of that 24 hours you just kind of roll over an lie on the floor. They don’t care. They don’t care what happens after the 24 hours let me tell you. The 24 hours that’s important.
6:27

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

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

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

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

2:24
So it seems like that might have been the appropriate or obvious reason why he refused her and why when the surgeon wrote the letter of recommendation, which was very important and is still very important in the Japanese culture today, …. he reconsidered and after consulting the other members of the association, he was willing to take her on as a student. And she became of course the most diligent, the most disciplined and the most passionate of students.
4:09
This happened in 1930s, in the middle of 1930s, so when the war was coming, when the … when Japan got into participating in the world war scene, the global war scene and everybody realized that Japan and the US were obvious enemies. She went back to Japan and after having a dream of her master in white taffeta robes, Kimono, which meant that he had died, she was afraid that he had already died
0450 (räusper)
and she had missed his funeral. So the story goes that she knocked on his door and he said “Oh, you’ve come too early”. So he set her off for more training. She told me that she went to a place that taught her … therapy using hot springs, so how to increase your circulation and heal yourself by soaking in hot springs. But there was a system. So she … I can’t remember what it was now, but it was like first you put the left leg into the hot water and then your right leg and then your left arm, your right arm and… you know, she had this whole system down.
5:38

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

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

0:00
You know titles that are transferred from culture to culture are often very problematic. And it’s the same for this from the Japanese culture into Western culture in English. They referred to me as a Grand Master, it was a term that was coined and has been used in other Japanese art forms, the Grand Master, to say the Sensei, the head Sensei, teacher of teachers so to speak. But it means more than teacher.
0:46
So a master for me has a least five different aspects. There is the initiator, the teacher, the mentor, the student and the tradition keeper. So when people say “I’m a Reiki teacher” my response in my head is to say, “Oh, I see, so you’re not claiming responsibility for being an initiator, for being a mentor, for being a student or for being a tradition keeper”. And for most of the Reiki teachers that I know that’s true actually.
1:28

3:01
So anything out of that should have been renamed and I’m not attached to this at all. I’m just saying to sort it out. This is for me what would have sorted it out much better. I did try actually to find a name for this system to separate it .. not separate it, but to differentiate it from other practices but I couldn’t do it and probably that’s true for them too. So okay. But in Japan this is very common, they change the name a little bit, they use a different character and it changes the name of the practice. So people are very clear about honouring each other and their own practice.
3:52
And one of the things, this is little digression, but one of the things that are sad for me that in Japan what happened because of the way Reiki “returned” to Japan, it returned in a sense of resistance against me and resist… and also in competition. And you know that’s totally for me not the Japanese way. And so people felt like they had to be defensive. But I… they didn’t have to be defensive about me, I mean, I’m not claiming the right way or the best way or the only way. I’m just claiming that I have a way.
4:43

4:43
So I feel sad that the practices coming out of Japan feel like what they have to offer is somehow they have to offer something that is from Japan and therefore it’s more valuable. And what they actually have to offer, that I think is incredibly valuable, is that they come from the original culture. And that their way of being, their way of being with Reiki, no matter what the form is, could demonstrate this incredible cultural heritage that they’re carrying naturally.
5:28
And that I am taking tours now of students back to Japan to try and touch this culture so that they understand more about why this practice and why I’m so strict about some things. Because I see that if I westernize or fall pray to giving students what they want then I’m not being a tradition keeper. And I really feel that this role of tradition keeper is very important in this day and age of computers and 0606 ähm…. and ähm… 0612 …
6:20

6:20
In this day on confusion and fusion, confusion and fusion of different cultures. You know like you go into restaurants now and if it says Asian Fusion you have no idea of what kind of food you gonna get but it’s somebody’s idea of Chinese/Japanese/Thai/Korean whatever, all mixed together, right. And this is very confusing to me, I just want you to know. So fusion sometimes results in confusion. And I believe that one of the gifts of having clear different practices is that students get to choose which practice they can come to, that’s right for them in the moment. I’m not a proponent of putting all the practices together and having one universal practice, that is not going to save the day. What’s going to save the day is for us is to be respectful with each other no matter what.
7:33

3:21
So whether Mikao … Chijuiro Hayashi was a dissonant or was a rebel in Mikao Usui’s day or whether he was his best student or simply a student that went off and founded a clinic, we’ll never know. But found a clinic he did, he met Hawayo Takata and …. in response to Reiki showing him that Hawayo Takata was his successor he also sat in contemplation with the other masters that were in his circle and did something very unique at that time for him by giving the succession and following the energy of Reiki, which led Reiki out of Japan and into Hawaii and then into the rest of the world.
4:27