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

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