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

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.

I get lost in detail just as easily as anyone else, get hooked on perceived differences. For many years I have heard opinions over which version of the Reiki precepts was “more correct”, which was the “right” order, and so on. I consciously made an effort to not buy into it, simply accepting the version that was the tradition in my form of practice.

What has always piqued my curiosity however, is the phrase that accompanies the precepts, “the secret method of inviting happiness”. Pulling the words and phrases apart, finding meanings and insights through that process, and applying those insights is a perfectly good and useful methodology. Even so, none of that process felt like it was even close to a “secret method”.

It wasn’t until creating a “precepts workshop” that the “secret” emerged, like a 3D stereoscopic image that appears to be random dots one minute and a 3D image the next. I was studying different translations of Usui”s memorial stone, on which the precepts and the secret method reference are inscribed. The source was the same for each translation, but the wording was distinctly different.

Translation is an art. It is the translators job to change the form of the original, but to retain its meaning. What I realised was that I had been hooked on perceived differences in the English language words, and the meanings I was giving to them. In the instant that I let go of needing the words to be the same, and reached for the original meaning behind them, understanding dawned.

The secret method was not a secret, has never been a secret, but it may as well be so for our inability to perceive it. The teachings of mystics and sages over the ages is known to all. “Be here now!”  Each phrase of the precepts is a lesson in being in the now, a path to that experience.

I came across this small story (which I have paraphrased) in a Gregg Braden book, “The Spontaneous Healing of Belief”. He asked a buddhist abbot in a monastery this question. “When we see your prayers, what are you really doing? When we see you tone and chant for 14 and 16 hours a day … when we see the bells, the bowls, the gongs, the chimes, the mudras, and the mantras on the outside, what is happening to you on the inside?”

The abbot’s reply was  “You have never seen our prayers, because a prayer cannot be seen. What you have seen is what we do to create the feeling in our bodies. Feeling is the prayer.” (my italics)

I was reminded of what people see and interpret when I place my hands on someone during a hands on reiki treatment. Every time a feeling of peace and a stillness of mind takes place “inside” me, within my body. The abbots words resonated within me, and they morphed form in my mind.

“You have never seen the healing, because healing cannot be seen. What you see is what I do to create the feeling in my body. The feeling is healing.”