6:27
So we’re again talking about a spiritual practice. We have to get above social norms and social judgements and social understandings about how much dignity a person can have. So for instance, like I have a couple of stories: So there is this master who’s been teaching in Mexico. She is from Chile and there is a woman who comes to her 1st degree class and she recognizes her as a woman that sells lemons on the street corner by her place where she teaches Reiki. And she says “what are you doing here?” and she said “well I want to take 1st degree Reiki”. And she said “oh, okay, well…” and she said “I have the money, I have the money” the woman this lemonseller says. So she said “okay”, so she taught her 1st degree, everything is fine. So a year or two later she you know keeps coming back and finally the lemonseller says to her “I want to take 2nd degree now. I have the money saved”. And she said… and inside this Reiki Master said to herself “I can’t accept it, this is like a half a years’ lemons you know sold, I can’t accept this”. And so she calls me on the phone. And I said “who are you to steal this woman’s dignity? She knows exactly what she is doing! She knows exactly what she saved this money for! And you in your middle-class complacency are going to steal her dignity and say ‘you can’t do it because you’re too poor’. Like that is totally crazy!” And she said “okay, so there’s one more thing” So I said “okay, so what?” She said “Well she’s illiterate” and I said “So?” She said “Well, she’ll never learn the symbols”. I said “Are you crazy? This woman was smart enough to be able to sell lemons and save US$ 500, are you kidding me?” like, I mean, you know the wonderful thing about Reiki that brings us as Masters to these places where we confront our own believe systems about people, about what’s intelligence, about you know… significance of social standing, I mean, all these different things.
9:25
9;25
And we get to laugh at ourselves and say “ridiculous!”. So she didn’t laugh at herself then, but a few months later she did and she said “you know, this woman is practicing, she’s doing great work, now what do I do if she wants to be a master?” And I said “Well, don’t even go there, I mean, go there when it happens and count yourself lucky that you have such a dedicated student”.
10;00
You know, I love the story because it so identifies a lot of my own prejudices and my own believe systems that I had from the very beginning and a lot of these were broken when I, the first time I went to Russia because not only did I go to Russia .. I was really broke at the time, I hardly… I didn’t have any money to pay my employees in my office and here I was spending, you know, a thousand Dollars to go to this country and maybe not come back with any money because of course Russia had no money, that was my believe system and that they wouldn’t…if they did have that they wouldn’t pay for Reiki…
10;48