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HAWAYO TAKATA December 24, 1900 - December 11, 1980 Torchbearer |
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Hawayo Takata brought Reiki to the Western world. While there are those now critical of her style and methods, her one greatest achievement is the transplanting of this gentle spiritual Eastern healing modality to the West. It stands as her gift to humanity. Culturally she was well-suited to the task. Born into a Japanese immigrant family living in what was then the U.S. territory of Hawaii, she was raised with one foot in the American version of Western culture and the other foot in the Japanese version of Eastern culture. It was a bi-lingual and bi-cultural gift which would serve the diminutive lady well. As she presented her life story to her students, it, too, was something out of Joseph Campbell's book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Here's a brief summary of her autobiography as told to her students:
Up until 1970, Mrs. Takata had not made any Reiki masters, although scores of people had been trained as practitioners by her. Apparently becoming aware of her advancing years and realizing the torch needed to be passed on, she began training Reiki Masters between 1970 and 1980. The number varies depending on who is telling the story, but apparently she initiated as many as 22 individuals as Reiki Masters during her last decade. In any event, while she claimed the title of Grand Master for herself while she was alive, she did not declare a successor prior to her transition, thus setting the stage for what has become the democratization of Reiki, a process not without controversy. Her legacy is mixed. Certainly those in the Western world who have had the blessing of Reiki in their lives are grateful to Mrs. Takata for bringing Reiki to our society. Yet she has been the recipient of posthumous criticism in three major areas, her claim of Grand Master, her inaccuracies about the history of Reiki, and her high fees. Independent researchers travelling in Japan in the past 10 years have discovered that it is quite unlikely Dr. Usui ever designated a successor or even claimed the title of Grand Master himself. Apparently he did initiate several Reiki Masters, of which Chujiro Hayashi was one, but they were all equals. None was of a higher rank than others. Dr. Usui did set up an organization to carry on the work of Reiki but he did not set up a Grand Master system. It is anyone's guess how Mrs. Takata came to claim to be the Grand Master, given this background which she would have known about. Critics have not been kind about her motives. In any event, her Grand Master claim certainly set the stage for much controversy in the Reiki world today. Her fee structure for Reiki training leaves many in the 21st Century absolutely thunderstruck. She charged $10,000 U.S. to become a Reiki master for those few she selected (this was in the 1970s). First and second degree Reiki training was several hundred U.S. dollars each. The criticism is that she was creating an elite club for the wealthy. Her justification for her fees came from a part of the story of Dr. Usui which she told.
Critics of Mrs. Takata usually have no difficulty with the principle of an exchange, it's the amount of money she demanded that is the difficult point. That no independent research has been able to verify the "beggars' quarters" chapter in Dr. Usui's life story has not helped either and has led to further questioning of Mrs. Takata's motives. Yet it still leaves the question of what sort of person was she really? This is where astrology can answer a few questions about her personality which the posthumous critics have missed. One of Mrs. Takata's sympathetic biographers, Helen J. Haberly (who knew Mrs. Takata personally), provides us with Mrs. Takata's birth data in her book, Reiki, Hawayo Takata's Story. Haberly lists the birth data as sunrise Dec 24, 1900, in Hanamaulu, Hawaii. After only a small amount of fiddling about on my computer, I came up with 6:47 am for sunrise, which would be plus or minus about 10 minutes -- good enough for what we will be doing here. Using that data (December 24, 1900; 6:47 AM Standard time; Hanamaulu, Hawaii; 22N00 159W21), we can construct Mrs. Takata's natal chart. Click here to see it. Elsewhere on this website you can read my take on computer-generated astrological reports, but there are times when they do have a limited use. This is one of them. The Indra Report from Cosmic Patterns' Kepler software is one of the few around which can give a good psychological profile. What sort of person was Mrs. Takata, really? We shall start with this: she was a double Capricorn with Moon in Aquarius. Now read a few excerpts from her natal report in the Indra report:
So we come to the conclusion that Mrs. Takata was very much a human being like all the rest of us, having her strengths, weaknesses, contradictions, and vision as we all do. Before any of us gets too critical about what she did or did not do, let us first look in the mirror and go to work on the person we see there. A zip file with the full report in ASCII format of Mrs. Takata's natal chart is available for free download. It's a fascinating read. Mrs. Takata was quite the lady. |
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