Reiki is of the devil?

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Reiki is of the devil?

Postby klonk on Thu Oct 11, 2018 4:45 am

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/b ... 03224.html

This bishop sees spiritual dangers you can open yourself up to in the course of doing reiki. Interesting. Your thoughts?

My only thoughts about reiki previously were that it seemed a bit silly, but it did not occur to me that it had sinister aspects.
Last edited by klonk on Thu Oct 11, 2018 4:49 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby Steve James on Thu Oct 11, 2018 5:56 am

The Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, and other sects, believe that all Asian practices are potentially "of the devil" or not of God. They focus especially on any practice that requires breathing exercises.They take the term "inspiration" literally as the breathing in of spirit or "spirits." And, the problem is that you don't know which spirits you are allowing to enter your body.

Hey, people find devils everywhere. Ever hear of "demon rum"? :)
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby Trick on Thu Oct 11, 2018 8:07 am

God work in mysterious in ways...........and so seemingly does Satan too.
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby Trick on Thu Oct 11, 2018 8:12 am

On the Wiki it claims Reiki’s founder got inspired by Christianity, or more exactly Jesus laying on hands healing power....So there seem to be at least a little bit Christianity involved in the method
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby Trick on Thu Oct 11, 2018 8:25 am

The Holy See is said to have a secret archive containing religious items collected from around the world going centuries back.......Theres probably one or two Reiki books too
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby KEND on Thu Oct 11, 2018 9:27 am

I learnt Reiki a couple of decades ago, it does resemble laying of the hands. It does involve memorizing symbols, not satanic ones to my knowledge and being 'attuned' . Many people swear by it so please excuse me when I call it 'housewives Qigong' since it does not have the rigor or the depth of a comprehensive Qigong study. If you do energy work you are probably familiar with the concept of 'bad energy', and take precautions against absorbing it, reiki to my knowledge has no such precautions so the practitioners can be sickened by practicing it. For Judaeo Christian religions any eastern practice is the competition so it becomes blasphemy or the like. The eastern religions have demons but to my knowledge no chief honcho like satan
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby Giles on Sun Oct 14, 2018 12:16 pm

One of my activities is the practise of craniosacral therapy, which developed out of osteopathy and retains a strong basis in human anatomy while also using techniques that partly involve very low-force physical manipulations and partly “energy-related” techniques that are sometimes similar to reiki. (Of course, it’s all total woo-woo and nonsense, so don’t worry about it...). A year or two ago while on a flight I met and talked to a Christian guy of the born-again and healing persuasion who firmly believed that healing/treatment methods are only legitimate if a) they are firmly based on classic Western medicine or b) specifically invoke the healing power of Christ, in which case “energy work” is all fine (and indeed the best). Any other healing/treatment methods are automatically of the devil and thus to be strongly condemned and avoided.

In the past I’ve also encountered other ‘fundamentalist’ Christians, usually in smaller sects, who took the same view not only of hands-on healing methods like this but also activities such as meditation, tai chi, yoga etc. Similar to what Steve writes. Their reasoning: any activity or method which makes people more self-reliant, more content, balanced, stronger or healthier through non-Christian mind/body techniques is necessarily of the devil because Man can and may only find strength and solace in God. Anything else will lead Man away from God and into perdition. No further discussion or argument possible there. OK, then have a nice day. :)

As regards ‘energy hygiene’: In many therapeutic contexts, either bodywork and/or psychotherapy, from time to time you will come into contact with ‘negative energies’. In my experience, one important thing here is to take a basic attitude in the therapeutic work that it’s not me as therapist who ‘is doing the work and making changes’. Much better and in the long term more effective to act as a facilitator and ‘holder of the space’ who can sense configurations and maybe initiate or support (positive) changes but more in the sense of letting “it” do the work. Kind of a wu wei approach. If negative stuff arises, this approach also helps in letting the stuff go through or past you, and not get stuck in/on you. Specific protection and purification methods are also useful, but these are much less necessary if you don’t try to ‘carry the weight’ or ‘push the waggon’ yourself.
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby Peacedog on Sun Oct 14, 2018 12:32 pm

Use of a lot of "energy" based systems involves techniques that are normally referred to as deity-fusion practices in esoteric Buddhism. The basic gist here is that you fuse a Buddhist deity into your system. The entity then tunes the energy being used to maximize the intended effect. The Medicine Buddha initiation is one of the more common examples of this.

The advantage is that over time the entity can tune the force being utilized with a specificity that largely exceeds that of most people. Additionally, and this is less discussed, it will progressively disable many of the internal safeties that reduce the amount of stuff that can flow through a practitioner relative to the specific force being utilized. It essentially allows a practitioner to generate power at a level that they haven't developed the personal capacity to work with.

The disadvantage to techniques like this is that the entity gets to express itself through the practitioner in the real world and as such will manipulate the thought patterns and perception of the practitioner. The process of doing this can be rather draining on the practitioner if utilized too frequently. If the practitioner and entity are in agreement this can be a symbiotic relationship.

These practices largely come into the category of mediumistic techniques. At a high level they are pretty universal in most martial arts, qi gong systems, tantric Buddhism and the more shamanistic forms of Taoism.

The trouble comes in that this tends to open the practitioner up to a greater energetic world and without significant training this is a world where the practitioner is frequently not the most powerful being in the swimming pool so to speak.

Some traditions, mainly Taoist out of Maoshan and shamanism in many forms from what I've seen, even go a step further and provide certain gifted lay practitioners with specific training designed to permanently implant deceased lineage masters within the system into the practitioner. The practitioner is usually not informed about this happening. Sometimes this is referred to as "preparing the vessel" in older texts. Jerry Alan Johnson's lineage is one of these. There are others.

So in this regard many of the groups warning about the dangers of this kind of thing most definitely have a point.

Ritual work provides a bit of a buffer to this effect by linking the force in question to a kind of energetic battery in the subtle world. In this regard ritual work tends to result in less mental manipulation.

The internal power model takes a very different approach to the matter and results in the greatest autonomy in a practitioner. But takes significantly longer to master and generally lacks the specificity of the ritual and mediumistic methods.

All of these things are not discussed with lay people for the most part. And this is the reason why I generally have a severe distrust of the monastics out there. The Maoshan Taoists and the Tibetans are particularly bad about this.
Last edited by Peacedog on Sun Oct 14, 2018 12:43 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby edededed on Sun Oct 14, 2018 11:25 pm

Hi Peacedog - I think that the entity-based vs. self-based energetic methods is something that is not discussed much, great description, I learned much.

Have you worked with both? (Your experience in energy systems seems very deep and wide.)

In general, I would guess:
Self-based: baduanjin, yijinjing, Daoist methods (even including astral), taiji/bagua/xingyi?
Entity-based: reiki, Pangushengong, Mopai?

How do the two relate, or do different groups practice both? Is there a need to build both self and connection? I did Yan Xin qigong as a young college student - in some ways, it seemed self-based, but there were some threads of entity-based stuff, too, I think.

And finally - who are the entities? :D
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby Peacedog on Mon Oct 15, 2018 7:26 am

Yes, I've worked with both and seen the advantages/disadvantages of each side.

Those aren't a bad breakdown of systems. Keep in mind most systems at a high level will utilize both. The key is in the training.

When a practitioner has mastered the ability to generate Akasha/Wuji/Void energy, they gain the ability to kick these entities out of their system by dissolving the energetic bond between the two. In theory this is transparent. In practice it takes a dedicated effort to do this and working with the same entity repeatedly makes this a real chore. These "relationships" are not all bad. You just need to make sure that you are getting something out of it that is worth it.


As to your final question, that is the billion dollar question. And no one has a good answer. A Jungian will tell you these are archetypes that are genetically imprinted in a human being, blah, blah, blah. A fundamentalist will tell you they are all demons. A shaman will describe them as spirits and/or gods within their pantheon. A Hermeticist will describe them as spirits associated with the various planets. A New Ager may say they are the disembodied souls of the dead who devoted themselves to the mastery of some great wisdom. A psychiatrist will say this is all pure delusion and the sign of a defective mind.

Who knows what the real answer is.

What I can tell you is that these things seem to have a mind of their own, they generally (but not always) are looking to express themselves in the here and now, and they can be good/bad/indifferent. As such, they appear to be as real as anything else that exists in this world.

Bardon's second book "Practical Evocation" details several hundred of these entities and breaks them down by a planetary arraingement.

For a practitioner to have any hope of maintaining their free will they need to have mastered generating Akasha/Wuji/Void power before getting started on that material. Otherwise it is a battle of will and sooner or later you lose.


Three final thoughts.

One, these creatures will present themselves in accordance to your personal precepts and beliefs. So, if you are a meth snorting biker, then you get meth snorting bike type spirits. Atheists attract nihilistic ones, etc.

Second, they will present information in accordance with your level of knowledge and skill. As such, most information is pretty basic unless you have advanced training in engineering, etc. Also, if you have no experience with something you won't get much and what you do get will come across as very harsh. This is the system telling you to go away. It's kind of like a restaurant playing loud music outside to scare off the bums. So, if you've never deployed and gone to war, then Mars isn't going to have much to offer. If you have never been in charge of a large organization then Jupiter won't do much for you, etc.

Finally, the Buddhist entities are widely considered the safest of the bunch to work with as they are, in theory, bound to encourage and promote your development towards enlightenment. They are also energetically the weakest. The trouble here is that long term interaction with even this category takes you down the Buddhist path along with all of it's issues. I'll save my full criticism of that for later, but will say that if you treat your incarnation in this reality as one giant jail break you are definitely missing the whole point in being here.
Last edited by Peacedog on Mon Oct 15, 2018 7:14 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby yeniseri on Mon Oct 15, 2018 9:06 am

Religion is for who like it but the same people accusing Reiki practitioners as devils are the same one who have a history of abuse (pedophile priests and their enablers) have gotten away with thier devilsh acts and behavious to those they are supposed to protect. WDF is dat about.. cognitive dissonance at worst with the pot calling the kettle black..............
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby Steve James on Mon Oct 15, 2018 10:01 am

It's not cognitive dissonance. "The devil made me do it" is the oldest excuse in the book. Evil spirit or human nature, it's hard to tell the difference.
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby Peacedog on Mon Oct 15, 2018 1:47 pm

As for religion proper, well here is the rub....

Being a sincere member of a mainstream religion provides a kind of passive protection against this kind of manipulation if you don't go looking for these things. This is why all religious faiths suggest leaving this stuff alone.

The mechanism for this is known as an egregore. An egregore is a kind of empowered thought form/subtle battery that exists about one level up from this level of existence in what the New Agers refer to as the astral realm. Whenever someone prays, takes part in a religious ritual, etc. it provides a small charge into the appropriate egregore. Multiple this times millions of people over thousands of years and you have something quite powerful. The egregore itself will subtly manipulate the behavior and perceptions of it's members, but in a much milder way than the entities we previously discussed.

FYI, people who understand branding particularly well intuit this kind of thing subconsciously. As all large brands have egregores associated with them. As do all professions. It is why doctors, engineers, military types, etc. tend to exhibit common behaviors and perceptions of the world. You get the idea.

Likewise, skilled practitioners can actively protect themselves through a variety of means.

And this leads me to non-religious people and atheists in particular. Just because you don't believe in something, like gravity, doesn't mean it can't work you over. The non-religious, non-practitioner and overly intellectual are essentially free range chicken for this kind of manipulation. And this more than anything probably explains why these people report significantly higher levels of mental illness across the board than the moderately religious. The Golden Dawn practitioners refer to this as "demonic obsession" in case you are interested. Drug use, deviant/excessive behavior and a general lack of self control caused by an empty existence lacking meaningful connection to others further increases susceptibility.

The number of people I met in NYC suffering from this kind of problem as a percentage of the general population dwarfed the percentage seen in smaller more socially integrated communities. It was almost expected amongst the over-educated, socially awkward and under committed I met there.

Your great-grandmother and great-grandfather had it figured out. Be moderate in your religion, be involved in your community, reserved in behavior and avoid these things. If you want to be a monk/priest/deacon (i.e. cultivator) that is another situation.

As for the current set of issues involving the Catholic church anytime you get a group of people together you attract the bad as well as the good. Always keep in mind the need to separate the religion from the organization. This does not excuse what happened, and the Tibetan's had similar problems in the not too distant past, but serves as a reminder not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

As one of my teachers once, presciently, said, "It's not that people will believe in nothing that's the problem. It's that they will believe in anything." All of the mass murder stemming from Marxism, utopianism of the 20th century that was used as an excuse to kill and sterilize millions more, belief in "you need to break some eggs to make an omelet", cult worship of mass murdering psychotics like Che, the Malthusian garbage, the idea that the world is somehow dying, Global Warming, theories about over population et al stem from this mechanism.

Be moderate in your beliefs, connected to your community, involved with your family, focus on building physical things in the real world for a living, avoid looking for the hoogedy-boogedy and you will largely avoid these problems. Even in my end of things, the people who go looking for this stuff are cracked.
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby Trick on Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:23 am

Some interesting reading there, Peacedog
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Re: Reiki is of the devil?

Postby Peacedog on Tue Oct 16, 2018 7:20 am

Trick,

Thank you.

FYI, the nearest conventional term for egregore is "group think", which leaves out a lot of the more poignant aspects of the phenomena. Read "The True Believer: The Nature of Mass Movements" by Eric Hoffer while keeping this concept in mind and a whole lot of things will begin to click. A slightly longer explanation of the role of the egregore can be found in John Michael Greer's book "Inside a Magical Lodge." That book gives instructions for how to build group workings and an esoteric organization from the ground up. It made much of what I saw in Asian monasteries make sense.

Please keep in mind the whole topic largely annoys me at this point. Just to get to where I am now, I find the fact that I had to spend the money I did, travel to the places I went, spend years of my life, and deal with the imbeciles involved ridiculous.

The reality is almost anyone can become a high end "enlightened" practitioner with about 2-3 years worth of, mostly, full time work when given access to the right methodology/technology. The fact that it takes most of us substantially longer is obscene.

Once someone "gets" how all of the meditative/yogic stuff works, barring their adherence to an ideology, it all becomes very mechanical. And that allows you to break down a variety of things very quickly. As a functional tool it allows you to master complete skill sets in about 1/5th the time it takes the general population. So that 10000 hour number drops down to about 2000 hours.

If you look at someone who mastered multiple skill sets in one lifetime, dig deep enough and you'll generally find a practitioner.

Also bear in mind that I've been dealing with all of this for decades, have developed my own opinions on things and can be a little cranky at times.
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