Reiki Cairns Teaching Usui Shiki Ryoho, the gentle folk healing art of Reiki

Eckhart Tolle Quote:

“Deal with the past on the level of the present. The more attention you give to the past, the more you energize it, and the more likely you are to make a ‘self’ out of it. Don’t misunderstand: Attention is essential, but not to the past as past. Give attention to the present; give attention to your behaviour, to your reactions, moods, thoughts, emotions, fears, and desires as they occur in the present. There’s the past in you. If you can be present enough to watch all those things, not critically or analytically but non-judgementally, then you are dealing with the past and dissolving it through the power of your presence. You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You find yourself by coming into the present.”

This is a very real and practical approach. It combines “feeling the feeling” - not denying that something happened - with staying out of judgment about right and wrong, and with staying in the present.

It’s all too common that past trauma is re-created over and over again, by getting enmeshed in the emotion and pain, and then being carried away in it. That process takes us back into unconsciousness. It’s not wrong, but it reinforces victimhood and reopens old wounds.

Healing comes when we no longer identify with that past trauma, it isn’t who we are. It’s OK to feel that we had no choice in that story of the past, but by being conscious, which means being in the now, we get to choose how the story ends.

Theres an old saying that to get the choicest fruit you have to go out on the limb.

People are so very interesting. Some people want the easy “truth”,  a story from an authority figure that makes their choice the right or true one. It is then so easy to fall back on “But my teacher taught me that … (fill in the blank) ”.

Some don’t really care what the facts are, they already have a story that they have accepted as the “truth” and will disregard all other data.

Neither way works if you are seeking Truth.

It is human nature to cling to fondly held beliefs, to a sense of safety, to the comfort of the accepted beliefs of the community or the culture in which we are engaged. However this is can be easily become another prison for our minds, one that limits our perspectives and understandings. It’s just the way things are.

The courage to question everything, even those things seemingly least open to question, to see with new eyes,  is the nature of seeking Truth.

Sometimes you have to go out on the limb.

The thread of several previous posts has been an interpretation of the Reiki precepts as a path to “being in the now”. That doesn’t make the traditional way of interpreting them in a minded way any less valid. It’s not a “this or that” situation, it’s both.

To a mind engaged in a linear timeline, where the fearful or painful experiences of the past are dark clouds projected into the future, the concept of “now” is  a nonsense. The past creates the future in that world view.

The traditional interpretation is the one that has a practical application in that setting. Only with the healing of the pain and fears the mind holds regarding events past is there a possibility for a different world view that includes the freedom of different choices held in the now moment. That’s just the way it is.

And of course there are other ways to use the precepts, as a mantra or a mindfulness verse for instance. The precepts are all of these things, and all at the same time.

An insight into the Reiki precepts as ways to “being in the now” doesn’t seem exactly earth shaking. What use is that information, unless it can be a lived experience. That’s exactly the point. The “now” is not just for special or spiritual people. Anyone who follows those simple ways in the precepts, with or without the Reiki practice, is creating the mental environment where the now can be experienced.

Theres a difference between being in the now and thinking we are in the now. It’s the difference that Tolle refers to when he talks about “entering the forest with your mind”. “You will think you are present, but you are not really”.

Alan Watts tells the story of people during the second world war that heard the whistle of the bomb coming. They knew there was no escape, it was all over. There was nothing they could do and they simply let go of doing anything. The bomb hit, failed to explode and these people found they were alive in a different world, the now. They actually believed that there was something wrong with them, that they had a “mental condition”.

Every single human being has actually known the experience of living in the now, lived it effortlessly until they “unlearned” it around the age of six years. That’s the age at which time we develop and stabilise the facility we call “ego mind”. Those five precepts are a path to undoing what developing the ego mind took away.

It’s a paradox of life that we lose this capability in becoming an individual, to experience and possess the world as a self, and then at some point, we realise a longing for what was lost and begin a spiritual journey “home”.

So how does “being here now” play out in relation to the precepts? It means they truly make sense of “Reiki” in terms of a spiritual practice. It shows the precepts to be a master key to the Reiki practice and its ultimate healing outcome, the healing of the separated ego mind.

Each precept is a key to the lived experience of the now. In the now, there is no future to worry over, no past to anger about. Honour and gratitude are given naturally. What is more honest than being present, being here now? “Now” is the end of the source of all of humankind’s mental suffering.

Each precept is then an invitation to step out of ego based stories of past and future, to step into the natural state of existence that we are all born into, the heaven of our religions, our natural state of spiritual connection with all that is, into the very fabric of mystic order.

This is what “the secret method of inviting happiness …effective against all kinds of illness” relates to.

“Being in the now” is not fantasy, every child knows this way of being. What clearer context is there than this for the biblical quote “Unless you become as little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven”? The now is that “kingdom”. We’ve simply forgotten how to “be” there.

The Reiki practice was given form by a Japanese man of great spiritual insight enabling humankind with a way to remember. What the ego mind has made of that practice is something else, but that’s precisely the nature of what it does. Illusions are its tools of trade.

Undoing the ego mind is what the practice appears tailor made to do. The physical body follows where the mind leads. Simple as that.