Beyond Flames – Peace

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Language: en

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Beyond Flames – Peace

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“Burn the book!”
‚Return to you heart‘

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Of course the people who appreciated your work, they didn’t cause you grief and harm.

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But … Sometimes when people ask me, ‚Why do you think this is so important to talk to Arjava? What injustice is …?‘

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Even people who say, ‚I don’t get it what Phyllis apologized for. Why did she apologize?‘

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I mean, wonderful woman to them, she’s never done anything wrong.

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So when people, outsiders who have maybe nothing to do with Reiki, friends of mine.

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They don’t know.

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I often say to them, ‚Well, this guy, Arjava, is a German and he experienced something very paradoxical, almost like a book burning.‘

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And I’m purposely making this historic reference because that’s how I feel what happened to you and ‚Reiki Fire‘.

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So when it came out, after three days … In German. So the book came out in German. After three days, I got a fax from Phyllis.

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Not very nice. If you want to see it, I have it here.

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My publisher got one. Walter Lübeck, who wrote an introduction to the book, he got one.

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Kind of threatening me and the publisher to take it off the market unless you’re prepared for legal stuff.

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And I’m looking at it and going like, ‚What the hell? What is it?‘ Now we finally have something that we can work with.

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We have the memorial. We have found some people who are in Usui sensei’s direct lineage. This is great, it’s a great beginning!

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All they do is complain and threaten me?

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Then they used to create phone circuits, they called them. So, let’s say, I call you and say,

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‚René, tell everybody, all of your students, they shouldn’t buy this book.‘

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And then they, again, have to call three or four others.

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Snowball systems.

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Yeah, snowball. It went on like this. It was like total book burning in a way.

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One time when Phyllis was asked in person by a friend of mine what to do with my books, she said, ‚Burn them.‘

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That was in Germany. It didn’t go down well because people had a bad reference to that.

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You can’t believe the things that happened. They tried to buy the whole first edition of the ‚Reiki Fire‘.

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And then pressure the publisher into not publishing another one, but the publisher was not playing this game.

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Then I got a letter from Fokke Brink. He said, I broke secret laws, Japanese laws, by publishing the picture of the grave of Usui sensei.

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And then my publisher got a little bit worried with all this.

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It all came after three or four days. So they made me go to a Japanese lawyer

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to get an affidavit whether we actually overlooked something and broke some laws or something.

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The lawyer, he was a real tricky guy, so he said,

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‚These secret Japanese laws are so secret that even the Japanese lawyer doesn’t know them.‘

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(laughter)

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And then they went on like that. My Argentinian publisher, he had his windows broken.

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Incredible. One time I was at a book fair. I think it was either with the ‚Reiki Fire‘ or the next … I think it was ‚Reiki Fire‘.

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I’m sitting at the book fair in Frankfurt at my publisher’s booth. I was to sign books and give a little talk for the readers.

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And then behind me somebody called, ‚Oh, oh my God, how can he?! How dare he?!‘

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Of course I’m not connecting it to myself at all. So I’m just sitting there wondering what this person is raving on about.

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Then I hear one of the secretaries saying, ‚Oh, hello, good morning. I see you have a problem with one of our books.

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Actually, the author is just sitting right behind you. Why don’t you go and talk to him?‘ So I turn around, I look at her.

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She looks like she’s looking the devil straight in the eye and starts running!

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Like sprinting, running through the book fair, running away from me.

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I’m standing there going like, ‚Huh?‘

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You know, we could have just had a nice chat.

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It was incredible. I didn’t expect that at all.

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Yeah …

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Maybe the viewers today, they don’t realize this was a time when the Reiki Alliance, or what one might call Western Reiki,

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because it wasn’t just the Reiki Alliance, it was many more people,

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the Western Reiki was the dominant Reiki in the world. And of course, and I belonged also to that world, I still do.

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At that time, we were all … not just ‚indoctrinated‘, because I don’t think anyone purposely consciously indoctrinated us,

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but we had a mind-set where we believed certain things, and clearly you started, we felt that your publication violated that.

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Yes.

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So, I remember 1997, I was responsible for the newsletter in our association.

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And there was one lady in Scandinavia who wrote an article … Sorry, I wrote an article. I wrote an article.

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And that lady said to me, ‚I should quote the source.‘ And the source was your book. And it was valuable information. And I refused.

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And I know, of course, on the outside, I said, ‚I don’t want to do that. First, I’m not writing a scientific paper. Secondly, if I start quoting

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one source, I need to quote all the sources, not just one.‘

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But that was just excuses. Deep down, I had great reservations to have your name on one of my articles in 1997, probably, or 1998 it was.

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And I hope today I’m the living proof of being a person who not is an evil person just rejecting anything.

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But it was deeply ingrained in me that I needed to be cautious because my teachings, for example, about keeping the symbols sacred,

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– and I uphold that to this day and that includes to me also confidentiality, that’s part of my practice.

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These were ethically high standing, high standards (that) we had self-imposed and we believed in.

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And, my question really is, you came from a Western Reiki. You knew all that. And you must…

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The same. Absolutely the same. But I…

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I liked it when you said, ‚Ah, we were… I was conditioned in a certain way and indoctrinated and … you broke that.‘

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Yes, I broke that and I would do it again every time.

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Thank you for that.

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You need somebody to shake you up when you’re in that slumber, you know? And that happened to be me.

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It’s not because I’m great. I just stumbled into that. I tried to escape so many times. I tried to… say, ‚Okay, I’m getting out.‘

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And we’ll talk more about this in the next few hours.

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But it – whatever ‚it‘ is, life – didn’t let me get out.

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I tried to escape so often! I had it to here, I said, ‚I’m not doing more, I don’t want to have anything else to do with Reiki.‘

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I couldn’t escape. It had me hooked.

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So it was an interesting, really an interesting situation. Suddenly I find myself in conflict on a personal level.

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It was something new for me not to back off, but to just stand up.

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And say, ‚No, I’m not moving. I’m standing here. This is my truth. Now I’m standing here.‘

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Okay, maybe some people found that egoistic. I don’t know, I suppose. But for me it was maybe a childhood …

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working through my childhood issues of not facing, never facing conflict and always escaping.

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So for me it was good on a personal level.

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All the conflict and all the negativity that was coming towards me, for me it was good training to learn just to say,

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‚Okay, you can’t intimidate me. I’m just letting that… letting that pass through. I won’t move.‘

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Well, I think this is an important process for most people and for us in the Reiki community at large.

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Because I think – and being involved in reconciliation, I see that quite often –

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that people tend to wanting harmony and peace almost a little bit too quickly.

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And very often they don’t actually stand up for what they believe is true.

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That even goes so far as admitting that I have been victimized at times.

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I think that the healing is very difficult, reconciliation is very difficult, if a victim doesn’t accept the fact that in that(!) incident

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I was being victimized, there was injustice done to me, my father beat me or did worse.

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And healing very often includes that first step. In fact, I call this the ‚heroism of the victim‘.

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Meaning, to actually allow the … I’m not saying that’s essentially necessary in each case, but consciously allowing the fact

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that at that moment there was great injustice done to me.

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And I feel there was great injustice done to you with the publication of ‚Reiki Fire‘. Immediately, and it went on for a long time.

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Because I met you the first time in 2010 and later I went to see you in Greece in 2012 or 2013, I can’t remember now,

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and even then things were still were going on. So please give us an insight in how much you were victimized

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over the publication of your book.

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Well, I don’t really like the word of being victimized. I don’t feel like a victim. Because when I’m a victim, I can’t get out of that situation.

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I would prefer to seat myself into the driver’s seat. Not be a victim, victim mind is not healthy.

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But maybe for lack of another better word, I know what you mean.

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So I felt of course that some injustice was done to me. I didn’t stop with the ‚Reiki Fire‘, I continued.

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It went on and on and on and on and on and on and on to the point where we had break-ins, where people’s houses were vandalized,

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where all the books that I had written for people, autographed, were stolen out of the house.

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I mean, things where you think, ‚That’s not possible!‘

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It’s amazing! It’s incredible. At some point we got threatening phone calls at home.

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My wife left the house when I was not home because she was afraid. It’s incredible what happened.

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But I think partly it’s for me the learning process to just stand here and not react and say,

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‚Okay, whatever wind there is, we let that pass through. I’m not moving.‘ Like that.

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So there were so many strange instances! You cannot believe that people … And when I … Let’s say I tell it to somebody,

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people won’t believe me. They say, ‚That’s not true.‘

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You told me yesterday when we walked an incident that had to do with the publication you mentioned earlier, the German one …

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An other book.

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… which came a few years later, probably early 2000s. Yeah. So this might be a good moment to recount that particular incident.

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So many strange things happened to me. One time, a colleague from Cologne – and this is very funny

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because my hometown Dusseldorf and Cologne, they’ve been having some kind of a conflict since medieval times.

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So, he patented the title of one of my upcoming books.

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And we didn’t know about it, of course. And then we found out one day before the book was to be distributed to the bookshops.

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And then we had to throw 5,000 books into the garbage.

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I couldn’t believe he just wanted to get back at me for something.

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And then for years he tried to extort money from the publisher. But at the end he didn’t get anything.

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So there were lots of strange things that happened.

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But what I really want to say is that I’ve had enough.

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I’ve had enough of the conflict.

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I had enough of the violence in different ways.

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I’ve had enough of feeling victimized.

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I’ve had enough of this constant friction.

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And I have no grudge to anybody. I just want to leave it behind.

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I’m …

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When I say I’ve had enough it’s like … I’m not … overwhelmed or so. It’s more like I’ve had enough like when you ate a really good meal.

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(laughs)

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And you don’t want to eat anymore. You know? That kind of enough.

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So I don’t feel traumatized or anything by any of that. I came through all of this a better human being.

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More loving, more kind, more in my center, you know? And that’s wonderful. I’m thankful and grateful for that.

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So whatever happened … (gassho) … thank you. It helped me a lot.

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What other people’s part of that story is, that is their problem. They have to deal with that on their own. We all have our own karma,

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our own packages to carry, yeah? And I do my best to carry mine. But this particular one now, I want to leave it behind.

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Reset! We go back to the beginning of our conversation.

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Reset the little button on the electronic gizmos that says, ‚Reset to factory settings.‘

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Then the factory setting is … (points to his heart)

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Your attention is in your heart and you are … (opens his hands)

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present and…

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that’s all I want. Now.

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Thank you to our sponsors! This video depicts a segment of a four-day interview with Frank Arjava Petter.

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For all videos and the list of sponsors visit our website:
www.reiki-conciliation.org

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Translation: AI
Transcript: René Vögtli