0:00
I think the biggest and most profound revelation that I’ve had sofar in my time in Erfurt and listening to all these scholars talk about very detailed and sometimes very esoteric aspects of religion and of spirituality is that as my grandmother said, Reiki is not a religion and I’ve been confused about that in myself a lot and I realized that part of that confusion is that I was confused about what is spirituality and what is religion and weren’t they the same.
0:54
So it turns out that historically after the war or after World War II, during the age of what they call «modernization» (laugh) which is an interesting term… this.. the concept of spirituality and religion started to divide and they started to become two things, which is really interesting for me. So that was just something to be with that I was not quite settled with this concept that they are divided. I mean one can contain, religion can contain spirituality but somehow spirituality can not contain religion and it’s an interesting weave, anyway that was the impression that I got.
1:50
So… and then that spirituality now is defined as a process of reforming your personality through.. stimulus that is brought to you by activities or believe systems or interaction with other people that touch your spirit or your soul. And.. so.. I find that to really describe my experience of practicing Reiki.
2:30
And I don’t.. and what is interesting for me is that I read in Wikipedia that what happens is that because of this modernization process that’s happening in religion that people often describe religious experience as a spiritual experience and actually for scholars they are not the same. So, we are, you know, we are kind of mixing ourselves up.. and.. by my saying for instance «oh, that was a truly religious experience», where a scholar might say «well, actually it wasn’t, it was a spiritual experience».
3:16

3:16
And I’m not very.. I don’t have this kind of experience or discernment at this point to decide what is spiritual and what is religious, but I do get that I’m mixed up inside of myself because I was brought up in a Christian athmosphere and so every.. that’s embedded in me so everything that comes to me that feels kind of holy and something I would…
03:44 (cough)
normally think about having an experience in a church becomes religious, but actually it might not be defined as religious. So I found that really interesting because it starts sorting.. making me sort out myself and sort these experiences that I have, so that I can be more comfortable in belonging to what is commonly termed a spiritual movement, that’s what they call Reiki, is a spiritual movement and absolutely not a religion because of the strict definition of religion. So I’m…that was, that was a fascinating process and I feel like it’s still going on inside of me.
4:38

0:00
Well, so here is a very mundane example of this: so if you have a religion you actually keep record of your parishioners and I never thought about that as being something that would be one of the factors in defining religion. But it is, because you know all churches have their membership roles and they have their families and you know you can go back generations. But in Reiki, you know in the beginning, I tried to keep track of all my students and you know, send them newsletters and so on. I spent a lot of energy trying to keep track of them. But they just kind of faded into the woods, so to speak. And now with the technology it’s so wonderful, because they can actually find me, if they want to. And it doesn’t matter if I move three times since the last time I saw them, they can go on Facebook and find me, which has been fantastic and that’s happened.
1:12
So.. one of the things that I wouldn’t want to do is to have to compile a role, like a list of all the people who practice Reiki. I mean, it would be kind of fun, probably, but it wouldn’t be something that I would want to spend a lot of energy on. So, that’s one thing. The other thing is that in religion what happens is that you end up having.. a set of believes or views of how life works and then that brings you to creating a morality and a state of ethics that you in theory live by. And one of the things about Reiki is that we do that, sort of, but that’s very loosely done and it’s mostly very individual. And so, you and I for instance, could have.. have had many of the same experiences, like the profound experience of giving someone a treatment and having your hands disappear into the other person and … or sending a distant treatment and actually having a conversation with someone or knowing that you’ve gone to their house, and… so you kind of look around and you go «wow, how did I do that?».
2:44

2:44
So these profound experiences lead us to understanding the world in a different way, because I was very practical, I mean it’s a nice word/way to put it, where whatever I saw, whatever I could feel was reality and everything else was not real. And now what I see is that there is this reality that I was so attached to and then there is the next reality that I experience, but I actually can’t touch and then there is a whole, huge universe out there that is what I call the mystery….
3:25 (cough)
And the mystery is what holds us to our path. So it isn’t a God and somebody said «well, it’s the energy», but it isn’t really the energy for me, I realize now in talking to you. It’s this …. thing that draws all human beings and that is to go to the mystery, to the place of the unknown. But I actually feel like mystery is a more descriptive word because I feel like «unknown» implies that we can actually know it and the mystery implies that we will never have the capacity to know everything. And this for me is really important because we human beings tend to feel like we could know everything.
4:20

0:00
Well, one of the things that define a religion is their set of belief systems and doctrine, we call it. And for Reiki I feel we actually have one, but nobody wants to call is that because it’s a very scary word. But… it’s a more simplistic kind of doctrine, like Reiki on, Reiki off and you know practice, that’s how you’re going to achieve any kind of further knowledge and so my grandmother’s little phrases that she used all the time, like «practice, practice, practice!» or «let Reiki teach you». This one has become one of my favorites, because every word for me has an implication, like «let» is about surrendering, let Reiki teach you, so you know, it’s like that posture of letting is more like an open arm-posture than (closes arms) «okay, come on, you know, just try and change me», you know.
1:26
Teaching is a kind of.. like implying that there is.. that there is teaching in everything.
0141-0145 (cough)
That there is something to be learned everywhere… and I feel that this attitude toward life becomes a part of what we might call «Reiki culture». But it also becomes a part of our doctrine in some way, I mean if we want to call it «doctrine»…
0201-0203 (cough)
because.. the posture of being a student is a really beautiful way to approach the world. And this for me is «let Reiki teach you» and then, you know, Reiki is this kind of.. we all, I think, go through stages of about how to define the word Reiki. Sometime it’s really specific, like Reiki are the hand-positions and the percepts or whatever, you know, you’re fighting with at the time
2:45

2:45
And Reiki is also this energetic, so when you start to experience being led by an energetic field and understand that, you know, this Reiki is what has organized our world into these interlocking systems, inter-nested systems, and that we are part of that system, allows us to again find our placement and find our understanding of how being a part of a system is actually a more powerful place than trying to control the system, which was a part of the religious doctrine that we’ve all adopted in one degree or another.
3:35
So for me these two things that… I think that it’s not … so for me the value of the two different kinds of doctrine are that the doctrine of Reiki leads us into more of a natural flow and natural understanding of the order of the universe and religions often take us out of that order. And then we’re into this constant battle with what we know in our ancient being and what we want to do and then what we’re told to do is right and it’s just… it’s this age old dilemma… which I don’t like very much. So…
4:26
I take the good parts of religion because I think that when I do into places like a cathedral I just feel that the energy of all the sincere people who have been in that cathedral and received the connection with God… allows me to open to that place in myself and therefore allows me to contact the mystery, easily and.. more easy than if I were, say, you know, in a café in the middle of a busy city. So this space that we come into and who we are in these spaces become much more relevant to understanding our own spirituality…. Yah..
5:25