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

5:19
And it’s really a fascinating process for me. And that’s the same with any kind of mastery in like martial art or flower arrangements, I’m using Japanese based things because we can kind of relate to them in our lifetime sometimes. But these people take on the practice, so that their flower arrangement or their tea ceremony or their demonstration of their art, you know with another person as the martial art, becomes luminescent, it becomes more than just flowers in a pot or tea in a cup.
6:16
I believe that Reiki mastership is about us being able to join with this universal life energy called Reiki and become not just a channel for it and not just have the ability to open somebody else’s channel (they are terrible words but they are not accurate, but ok, that’s what I have). But we need to be able to actually bring forth Reiki energy in a way that becomes luminescent, that becomes greater than who we are as people. And the one act that we have to practice this melding is the initiation, because the initiation is just a series of, you know motions that we do with our body, but what makes it different, what makes…I mean you know, if somebody else who wasn’t initiated, didn’t know Reiki at all, did the same thing, would the result be the same? Well, I don’t know, I have not had this experiment, so I don’t know.
7:32

7:32
My guess is “no”, because this masterful part of who we are as human beings, is recognized by our student, and that is why masters have to have students, because without the student recognizing the master, seeing this luminescence in you and saying “okay, I’m willing to be a student, I surrendered everything to you. Because when students sit in that chair with their eyes closed, they are totally vulnerable. You could take a sword and cut off their head. Seriously. But you could do that energetically as well and they would never know it until a few days later. But they trust us to be trustworthy and they trust us to connect with that masterful part of ourselves and share that with them.
8:34
And for me that’s why the initiation is the Master Symbol, if there is one. And I feel that this proving you’re a master because you have the right symbol is ridiculous. I look at the way they live their life, I look at the way they live Reiki, I look at their understanding, you know, of live principals and of the principals of Reiki and I think, well, you know, is this person on the path of mastery? Well, at some level we all are, all human being are on the path of mastery, but as Reiki masters we have declared ourselves, we put ourselves in the spotlight, mainly so that we don’t have a place to hide. You know, it’s kind of an interesting process….
9:38

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

11:05
They are trying to get ähm.. like a traceable same image, but you are not gonna do it, because it’s handwriting. And the other thing is that she didn’t give the written Kanji to all of her masters, and she didn’t need to because…ähm.. it wasn’t necessary. It is not necessary for me to know the Kanji, I don’t use it in the practice and you can look it up on the internet now. (1140) So……(is there any other thing I would like to say?)…
11:51
So I just would like to take people back to the real, what I would say would be the authentic understanding of mastery, what the step really means to all us because I know that the people who are concerned about the master symbol, actually, most of them that I have met, live and are dedicated to their practice of Reiki and it is unfortunate that their focus of their mastery is on this Kanji and not on the way that they live.
12:38-1244 (René mumbles)

0:00 … (ooo5) (Renés voice)
Well this idea of the master symbol didn’t come from Hawayo Takata’s students. It came after she died, a few years after she died when there were many, many masters who already had a couple of generations away from (0030) (René: yea) Hawayo Takata. So this didn’t come from this circle, (0034) I’m really …. (René: this circle you mean the 22 Masters) Yeah!
0:41
So I don’t want to report on an understanding that the circle had of the differences of how she wrote it. I mean, they kept to the practice, for the most part (0056) the way that she impar… you know, the way she, (hicup) excuse me…. (räusper)
1:03
They practiced and taught the way that she gave them the system. (0107) (hicup, turns her eyes up) ..So…
1:14
I never… in all my years of, you know, talking with them I never heard anybody question what she did because at the very beginning it was clear that it was Kanji and that there were several different ways to write the Kanji just like in Reiki there is a book that my mother produced called inevitably “the grey book” because it has a grey cover and the Kanji on that is a very, very old Kanji, it’s almost Chinese, it’s so old. And the Kanji written today would have many less strokes and would almost not be recognizable.
2:02

2:02
So there are lots of different Kanji fonds or ways to write the Kanji and then on top of that there’s handwriting. So that’s all I’m saying is that to try to make it a symbol where it absolutely has to be, one line has to be this long and the other line has to be this long and it has to be … you can’t do it because it’s not possible, it’s …..
2:30
You have to know the Japanese language. My … my test of whether my Kanji is correct if somebody could read Japanese would be able to read what I wrote, and that’s not likely. I can to an approximate but my guess is that even my Kanji the way that I draw it isn’t really natural because I have no knowledge of the Japanese written language.
3:02