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

02:50
And it was really interesting, because… just a few months before I was invited on this trip I had my 30th birthday. And I thought “Oh, wow, I’m 30 years old, I’m so old.. I mean.. I surely might live to be 60 and if I do, I cant be a ski-bum for 30 more years”, you know, because this is not what’s happening. So, I thought to myself “well, what kind of job would I like?”. I thought “well, I don’t even know a job that I would take” because it was really important for me after working in the mental health field that people were treated as individuals, not as a diagnosis. So it was the early days of psychotropic drugs and when people came in and they were diagnosed as schizophrenic, they got these certain drugs and it was a certain amount of dosage. Even though for some it made them totally sleep all day an all night and for others it was.. it made them really weird, you know, much weirder than they were schizophrenic. (laugh)
4:09
So I didn’t like this and I really wanted to be able to assist people in realising their individual authenticity. And little did I know that Reiki would be that gift. But… I certainly did not know it at the time I took the trip. And… so once I kind of got through that, which was interesting, it took me… I think over a year, because I went on the trip with my grandmother, which is a whole series of stories, and then… she got sick in Puoerto Rico after a month. So I ended up at home in Iowa with her and my mother for 3 more moths, which was my kind of picture of hell at the time. 0509- (cough)..
5:15