How false narratives promote subtle forms of racism and xenophobia.

Many years ago I attended a reiki course when I was living in South Africa. The two instructors started the course with the narration of origins of reiki in Japan and how it found its way to the West. The reiki masters explained the miracles of The Christ (healing of the sick) as examples of the use of the “Universal Energy” (“qi”). Gradually reiki found acceptance in the Western world (read as the Christian world). For it to gain acceptance in the West the reiki masters had to package it in a way that was palatable to the West. Everyone in the class accepted this without question, even though it was so blatantly untrue. Here was a attempt to universalise an idea that was essentially eastern, by throwing away everything eastern about and recasting it a something that had always existed in the West. After all The Christ had used it centuries ago. To heal the sick.

Now, please note the point is not whether reiki is a pseudoscience or no. I am simply saying the everyone in the class bought the story of Jesus having used reiki to heal the sick. I am not talking about The Christ. He was simply used, to make an essentially Eastern idea palatable to the West.

A few classes/sessions later the two instructors, while explaining how people misinterpret reiki, spoke about how reiki is effective irrespective of one’s religious practices, dietary preferences or health condition. And then they went on to make fun of how in India, reiki practitioners insist that students stop smoking or adopt a vegetarian diet to realise the full potential of reiki. There was much chuckling at this and the class moved on to other topics.

So here we are. The West was ready to buy something completely different from their conception of the world simply because it was sold as something The Christ had practiced, however illogical it may be, yet unwilling to buy the scepticism of some practitioners who justifiably claimed that reiki would not be of much help to your health if you continued smoking and continued a non-vegitarian diet. So, you make fun of reiki practitioners in India when they state that giving up on smoking, drinking, non-vegitarian diet is essential to realise reiki’s full potential. I doesn’t matter that all of these have now been established as detrimental to health. Most people in India, despite their dietary preferences believe, intrinsically that all these are not good for their health and would find is completely logical, the claim, by an reiki practitioner or otherwise that they will have to give these up to realise their full potential.