0:00
After Hawayo Takata died in December of 1980 the master community was slowly informed about this.. about her death by my mother. And what I mean by slowly is that at first she didn’t call anyone, I don’t know for how many months. And then she was starting to go through my grandmother’s papers and compiled a list of people, because some of the masters who my grandmother had initiated she was not acquainted with and didn’t know. Others she knew from the conversations with my grandmother and because they came to visit my grandmother, in Iowa.
0:59
As the masters began to be informed, many of them called me and recognized me over the phone in the sense that they said “well you’re your grandmothers successor, now what are you going to do?”. And it was a questions that I couldn’t really answer.
1:19
So 1981 passed by very rapidly because of course I stayed with my family through X-mas 1980 and then into 1981 (0133) (cough) ähm
01:42

7:31
Everyone there basically acknowledged me as a spiritual lineage, as my grandmother’s successor. And.. I remember the daughter of Virginia Samdahl was there and we had a talk. And she said “Well Barbara Weber is my master and I have great affection for her and great loyalty to her, but you carry something different and I can acknowledge you as a spiritual lineage”… well actually that … that wasn’t really coin, so I have to say “I can acknowledge you as your grandmother’s successor but I also acknowledge Barbara Weber as my Reiki master”. So in some way she was the first one that articulated this difference between – what I would call – the initiation lineage and the spiritual lineage, although that wasn’t actually named as such at that point…. Yeah, I think that’s true…
8:44
The next year when we met, there were more masters that had been initiated by me by this time and other masters that had been initiated by some of the other masters of Hawayo Takata and… a few masters initiated by Barbara Weber…. It was there that we didn’t really mean to come together and find a name for this group but it just arose out of kind of an organic process. And I think that that’s true that in… if you have a group of people that meet with a certain aim, then you end up naming yourself. So this group founded the Reiki Alliance.
9:39

9:39
And we talked a lot about the nature of Reiki, about the nature of the practice, about the things we wanted to preserve, about the things that we…excuse me…. that for us were not included in the practice and so on. We had really wonderful sharings and ….these two meetings were very important for me as … I felt…. recognized by people in a way that was very different. So some people who were familiar with being a devotee of a guru, an Indian guru, they wanted to wash my feet and kiss my feet, which I just… was really hard for me. Other people wanted me to get dressed up, have really nice fingernails and so on, which I didn’t ..(laugh).. and other people wanted me somehow to be holy or wise or, I don’t know why but I was just myself. And at that point I was a pretty naïve… ja, pretty naïve person, in a lot of different ways.
11:09
After the Reiki Alliance was formed that year, then the next year…. then the next year we decided to go to California. And I have no idea why I did this, but I end up….ended up renting a couple of big houses up on Donnner’s path in California near Lake Tahoe and that’s where we had the masters’ meeting. And it was out of that meeting that a little book was borne. People wanted to preserve the oral tradition but somehow be able to give their students something for the class. So I totally opposed writing this or putting this book together. So at one point one of the masters, who was very clever actually, came to me and said: “Well, if there was such a book, what would it be like?” I can remember her question to this day. And I said: “Well it would be very small, like pamphlet thing, it could have the story of Reiki in it, the pictures of the lineage and the precepts and maybe something else and it would not be for sale at the open market, it would just sold by the Reiki Alliance as a Reiki Alliance Publication”. So that’s how this little, what we call the “Blue Book” got formed and eventually Paul Mitchell was the one that put it together.
12:57

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

00:00-00:13 Well, my real answer is, «I don’t know.» But I’ll back that up by saying other things (René: you don’t need to mention her name…) No, no, its fine.
00:20
This is a question that has arose again, interestingly enough, in the last few months, about Wanja Twan, for instance, who… because… I know that she recognizes me as my grand-mother’s successor but she is a very stro.. and she is a very strong master. She has influenced her teaching according to what she remembers Hawayo Takata teaching. But also her own very strong personality which is Scandinavian
00:57
which has again a whole other color. I find the Scandinavians to be really interesting people. Very esoteric and very … esoteric isn’t really quite the right word… Well, I’ll come up with word… but anyway. So, what Wanja has done is that she’s declared her successor as her daughter Anneli. And this has caused some confusion in the Reiki community, for instance, in the UK where Wanja has a very strong following. And as does Anneli now. And the students are getting confused about whether or not they acknowledge me as lineage bearer
01:55-02:00 (cough)
So, some of the masters and students of Wanja do not recognize me as the successor of this practice. They recognize Wanja in some way as their initiating master and as the person who carries the lineage of that practice. They don’t acknowledge a spiritual lineage. And Wanja does. So, even though Wanja is very subtle about her recognition of me, on some level, she doesn’t communicate that to her students. And so this creates a schism or can create a schism within the UK community because people don’t understand o’… the students don’t understand why the spiritual lineage is important.
03:06

03:06
So, it’s an interesting paradox, that Wanja… I feel really recognized by Wanja as my grand-mother’s successor. But I also see how strong her initiation-lineage is. So, for me, I… there are two things that I carry: I carry my initiation-lineage as a Reiki Master and then I carry the spiritual lineage as the successor to my grand-mother, Hawayo Takata. The two lineages for me are the same. But for Paul Mitchell – for instance – they are not the same: his spiritual lineage comes to me and my successor. His initiation lineage goes from Hawayo Takata to him and then to his masters.
03:57
So in Beth Gray… the issue with Beth is that she … I don’t know whether she was initiated by my grandmother, I know that she was recognized by my grandmother as a master, I believe that John Gray initiated her as a master. And I have kept this kind of «secret» for many… well, since 1980. And.. I believe it created confusion in her. Because she wasn’t clear about her own lineage and so she couldn’t be clear about the lineage that she passed on. She was also very careful about the people that she initiated as masters.
04:53
I don’t know how many master she she did initiate, maybe 3. One gal who was in Queen… no, one gal who was in New South Wales has died. She was a young woman, she was like 40 something and she died very suddenly; (0513) I should know her name, because I’ve met her, several times.
05:20 Barbara McGregor  (René interrupts with a name proposal)
05:29

05:29
Barbara McGregor and then there is another woman who was from Sydney area that she initiated. And Barbara McGregor in my viewpoint, sort of took took Beth’s tendency to dramatize and sort of expanded that. So, a lot of her material anyway when I first was in Australia in the early 1990ies then that Beth was the first occidental Reiki Master. Well I don’t even know what that means.  She certainly wasn’t the first “white” Reiki Master, for sure. She definitely wasn’t the first Master, so, I don’t really know what that means.
06:26
And then they sort of put titles on her to make her to make her special. The really sad part for me about that is that Beth Gray was an incredibly special person. She didn’t need a title, y’know, to indicate her specialness. This is the part that really bother me a bit. Because people would ask me, «well, what does that mean and is this true?» and it put me in a place, of either lying or being evasive, which I am not very good at. Or trying to explain this very strange claim that really meant nothing to me.
07:09
Because I didn’t know what they were using “occidental” as. Y’know. So…  The woman in Sydney and her partner came very often to visited Beth. And it was kind of sad for me because her reluctance her reluctance to initiate Masters in Australia, which may have been wise, actually, forced all of her very loyal students out to be initiated by masters they didn’t care about. They were masters who had been initiated for maybe 2 months as a Master and just wanted to, y’known, reproduce themselves or whatever. And they had no relationship with the Master that initiated them. They were really Beth Gray’s students and continued to be Beth Gray’s students
08:07

08:07
and continued that teaching without her blessing as a master. And there is something about that that was really sad for me. So, our… our and I will say “Our” consciously, our understanding of recognition of mastery and lineage was so slim at the time that we were doing all this that I have to say, that we were really lucky we didn’t get into more of a muddle. (0841) And that now it feels like
08:45-08:47 (coughing in the background)
on some level because I don’t know anything about real lineage I can kind of invent what I want to about lineage and its OK but I also feel like it also is very inclusive… for instance … there are masters that I have initiated who don’t practice the system I do, their form is very, very different, so I don’t recognize them as Usui Shiki Ryoho Masters. At the same time there are other Masters who started out definitely not in this form of practice but have come through taking the intensives from Paul and I, but also through their own willingness to just connect with the energy of this practice
09:34
that they become practitioners though they were initiated into another practice of Reiki before which is fine for me. Some of them don’… can’t trace their lineage because they wer… they went to some kind of a music festival and in the middle of the music festival somebody said, «I’m going to initiate you as a Reiki Master.» and they do. And they don’t even know their name. But y’know, somehow they… that initiation was sincere enough that they actually followed the path of mastery and ended on my doorstep. And I said, «Well, Okaay..if you want to do this and are committed and you are sincere, then why not?»
10:18

10:18
So, there is a really large mix of form and essence. And for me there is…  it’s important for us to have a common practice, which is the form, and there is also this important factor to recognize that all Masters are equal in the oneness of Reiki. And that we can change form to suit our incongruity of our own practice
10:58
So, when I’ve read about Japanese Buddhist practice, I think there is like 12 main sects,  S E C T S and you can sit in a Zen temple for 20 years and then all of a sudden decide, «no, I need to go out in the world» and then «oh, I see I need go sit in this other sect for a while and do… and explore Buddhism through that way.»  There doesn’t seem to be any animosity … or (1138)  ähm… what’s the word (1143)  … competition. It just is so. It’s like you follow the path of Buddhism, you can follow the path of Buddhism in these different expressions. That’s how I would like to think about Reiki.
11:58

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

0:00
0006 (räusper)
As a part of this system, there is a lineage and this lineage is like our ancestry and to just deny it or to say it doesn’t exist anymore is a lie. So in this system, there will be a lineage. What that lineage looks like, I don’t know. Is it one person that will succeed me? Is it a group of people that will try and do the work together? If so, then we really need a lot of work before I die. Is it possible for me to step back into a not so public role? Of course, I need to take care of myself, I feel that if I’m predominant, then… in visualness, then other masters will not have the opportunity to step into that place.
1:21

1:21
And no one really knows what’s going to happen with this and … for me …. the question is: Is it possible to have a spiritual practice without some kind of a still point for the spiritual practice, a lineage, an ancestry? And I think this is a question that is really open to discussion. I know that I fulfil a role that lots of people don’t see … don’t see, period! It’s on an energetic level, it has nothing to do with how important I am or how … or what my personality is. If, as I said, if everyone stopped recognizing me as the lineage bearer, as a Grand Master, then I wouldn’t be it anymore and I would be… but I would still be a Reiki master. And I would still continue my life as a Reiki master. What I have done is for… is in service to the community and in service to the system that we practice.
2:45

2:45
I believe that if one of the elements is missing from this practice, like spiritual lineage, then it changes the dynamic of the nine elements and then the system breaks down. I’ve seen that over and over again in the practices that have happened in people meaning well. For instance …. Sometimes masters have gone into countries where they feel that they can’t charge money or very little money for 1st degree and that happened in Russia and luckily for the timing and everything for Russia I appeared at the right time and asked the masters candidates then to pay their US$ 10’000. And because they did that, they also together devised a program over three years to bring the 1st degree and the 2nd degree … commitment, monetary commitment to the same level as everywhere else in the world. And that was an amazing situation and it does make a difference.
4:14

4:14
What happened with the masters as well, these new masters, is that they made up the difference. So if they paid US$ 50 for 1st degree, then they went back to their initiating masters of 1st degree and gave them US$ 100, so that they would have had a US$ 150 commitment, the same as everyone else. And every one of them reported a difference. They didn’t know why, they didn’t expect it, many of them thought it would just be an exchange of money, but it wasn’t. It was something different. So it’s a phenomena that I have no idea about, I just know that there’s some energetic that we actually cannot perceive and that we are not able to articulate. So if there was no spiritual lineage in this practice, I believe that the practice would disintegrate. And….. so there needs to be somebody.
5:22

5:22
The activating force is the preservation of this system. The restraining force is about personality. If people were able to think about me not as a personality but as a part of this system that they practice, I am just as essential as the symbols, as the hand positions, as the initiation, as themselves as masters. We don’t understand what the dynamic is but I know that the dynamic is there. 0603 (nods her head) 0605 So …. ähm… Ya! 0611 
6:13

0:00
So, if people, if the masters cannot raise their thought process and their understanding to a higher expression, then …. then the system will just dissolve, like an adobe brick dissolves back into dirt. It’s … it will be disbursed into humanity, people will practice it in their own way for, you know, another two or three generations and my guess is, it will just dissipate and maybe will remain as kind of a memory and become just a part of human…..
0:52
… maybe we could say evolution, human evolution, that people still put their hands on themselves and remember why.
1:06

1:06
I mean, anything, anything really is possible. I don’t feel like I’m …. being …. I don’t feel like I’m being pessimistic about this, but realistic. I just see that so many Reiki masters, including myself on not rare occasions do dissolve into my personality. I get petty and I get judgemental and I get clinging and I get attached to my own ideas. And, you know, in order for this to work in a systematic way, you know … systemic way, where the master body holds this energy of lineage, we all need to rise to a much, much higher level of consciousness than we are now. You know, right now we are not even at consciousness. We have no idea about the responsibility, nor the energetic understanding of what we do in initiations. I mean, people have their theories but we really don’t understand it, we really don’t know it.
2:22

2:22
We have no idea what are…. human relationship is. We’re students and with each other, we…. we separate from each other because of petty judgements and misunderstandings that we don’t have the courage enough to just go and say “hey, you know, what about this?” I mean if people would come to me and just say “Phyllis, you know, I heard this story. What’s your side of it?” I would be so relieved. They wouldn’t need to agree with me or even need to understand me, just that I was asked for my own perspective would be such a relief. Because this is all done, mostly, and about 95% through assumption of who I am. And I find that really appalling. If I have
0316 (räusper)
something that’s going on with me, then I always ask the person directly.
3:28

3:28
I have been assumed to have had judgements through the comments of students of the system, but they do not represent me, they represent themselves. And I’m here to help hold the still point for them to come to and often times they are not there yet. And that’s okay.
4:00
Realistically speaking I feel that the community has a job to do
0407 after I’m dy…. 0408
after I die
0410 (räusper)
or I step back so far that they need to recognize another spiritual lineage bearer. And in that recognition I can see that there will be
0427 (räusper)
the possibility that Reiki will do it’s job and advance the view of people to recognize that person where the energy is going, to where the energy is going, because I feel that that’s what needs to happen, Yah….
5:02-5:16 (silence)
Yo! 5:17

8:18
So I offer this to all of you who just don’t like me, which I totally understand. You know you don’t need to like me, you don’t even need to love me and you don’t need to recognize me. You just have to allow that I’m a human being who has a path and this path ended up to have this absolute … encouragement of lineage bearer. And I’ve done my best and I know that maybe I’ve could have done better if I’d have been a different person, but I wasn’t a different person. And I am lucky to have a family that is my … that has become my anchor in my relative world and at the same time have people around me to support me being my absolute best. So that’s a little pun a play on words, in English “absolute best”.
9:25