About the ‘spiritual’ healing arts

Hello Carlos, I felt I could ask you this… My sister and I recently went to a reiki session, mostly out of curiosity. For me, the session went as expected (I saw a lot of colours, and then I felt asleep), but my sister saw a lot of crazy things, not bad, but strange things. She doesn’t know exactly if she was dreaming or not. Coming home afterwards and looking more in depth on the internet, we found lots of scary articles about this practice, saying that it is evil, demonic, etc. and this raised some questions: is it bad, is it good? What do you think?

Hello, nice to hear from you.

There is really nothing to be scared off, other than starting to understand that life itself is a very strange thing – a wonderfully beautiful strange thing.

As long as we stay with basic human activities like security and comfort (most of what we do in our lives is based on security and comfort) then we only deal with happiness and unhappiness; we only deal with: ‘I want this because it makes me feel good’ and ‘I don’t want that because it makes me feel bad’. Life is not easy, but at least we are dealing with things that are more or less familiar to us. But when we start to look inside instead of only looking outside of ourselves, we tap into a lot of things we don’t have a clue about. The human brain, the universe, the whole of life is something we have VERY little knowledge of. Modern science is barely tapping into its most superficial levels (although I don’t think they will all agree with me).

Coming to your question, from my understanding, there is nothing evil or demonic about reiki, other than an enormous amount of wrong information and wrong beliefs. Not only in reiki, but in most of the so called ‘spiritual’ healing arts. What you call strange is nothing but a lack of understanding of some universal laws. What is not strange? I am writing this note seated beside a pot where there is a beet (sfecla) in some water and now the beet starts to have these weird, green and red things (what we call leaves :)) coming out of it! How strange!

 Isn’t it strange that there is something liquid we call water? Isn’t it strange that we have hairs coming out of our head? Isn’t it strange that human beings come out of the vagina of a woman? Isn’t it strange that we breathe something we cannot see? What is not strange? There are all these billions and billions of strange things we see every day but exactly because we see then every day they stop being strange. Nothing that happens is outside of the laws of the universe, except that we know very little about these laws.

Reiki, when rightly used, can be a wonderful tool for healing and, as a side effect, it may open up the mind to the reality that what we see is only an infinitesimal part of what actually is around.

Wrongly used, like many other things, it can create the opposite. The whole issue about evil or demonic can be understood if you imagine a person with an IPhone 5 going to a small town somewhere in Africa where people have never seen even a TV. When they meet the person with the IPhone, he will be a very unique and special person, and he will probably have quite a bit of power over those people. But then, what the person does or does not with that power is up to him or her. If the person is very needy and insecure, then he may use that power for his own benefit, without considering what is good for the people in the town. Then one day, a young boy or girl from the town decides to move into a bigger city and his family recommend him to stay away from anybody with an IPhone 5 because they are demonic people…. I think you can get my point. The IPhone or reiki or nuclear power or whatever have nothing demonic in themselves. It is how they are used and for what and by who that makes the difference.

The mistake, which is usually widely spread is the belief that there is something spiritual about reiki, or about any of these healing arts. Or, to put it more precisely, the belief that reiki, or any of those arts, are spiritual while other things are not. Reiki, for example, is dealing with the life force, but this life force is everywhere and in everything. When you are brushing your teeth you are using life force, so, if reiki is spiritual,  brushing your teeth is also spiritual. And yes, for me brushing my teeth, or writing this letter, or doing my job, or talking to my wife or dealing with the life force are all spiritual activities. The fact that we don’t see it this way does not make it less spiritual, but to call one thing spiritual and other things not is where the confusion starts…

I hope this helps.

This is a very general thought based on your letter. If you have some more specific questions about this subject or if there’s something you don’t understand about what I’ve written, please don’t hesitate to ask me. If I can, I will be happy to answer you.