The Reiki symbols were experienced by only four students of Master Usui. They were introduced in maybe 1923 and taught to the three naval officers and one of Usui‟s surviving students. They do not turn up in the connection rituals, of course, because Usui had been teaching his system since at least 1915; his system was established, up and running, without them. So the symbols are a bit of an afterthought, introduced jointly by him and his senior student, Eguchi, for the benefit of a few of his students who could not get to grips with the more traditional meditation approach that Usui used with his Buddhist and Shinto students.
So with Usui you were not attuned to the symbols in order to be connected to Reiki. You were connected to Reiki using Reiju, which doesn‟t use symbols. You were not attuned to the symbols by Usui at all. His students were simply given them and they were used to represent different energies/states. These few students would have to have learned to become the energies using symbols rather than using meditations or chanting, it would have still been a long process, and the energies would have been worked individually, not mixed together. I have been using Reiju in my Reiki courses for over a decade and they work brilliantly. Despite the fact that one is not 'attuned to the symbols' by this process, I have found that symbols given to such students work in the same way as if they had been 'attuned' to them, as we do in the Western tradition. In fact, they even work at First Degree level using 'plain' Reiju, with no meditation and no symbols entering into the process.
It seems that the widely held Western view that the symbols are useless unless you are specifically attuned to them is now incorrect. If you are attuned to Reiki then the symbols represent the energy in much the same way that the Kotodama represent the energy, but Reiki is the energy, not the symbols. You can use symbols to direct the energy, you can use chanting to direct the energy, and you can use intent to direct the energy. I believe that once you are connected to the energy then *any* symbol will push the energy in a particular direction. But in Usui's system, you use the energies once you have become thoroughly familiar with them. That was the first stage. You would spend months meditating on each energy in turn, experiencing it, becoming‟ it, and then you might work with it when treating others. There were no shortcuts. The chanting of the symbols are training wheels, and the symbols themselves are training wheels: they connect you to an energy that would have been thoroughly familiar to you already, through your meditations, through your long chanting of the symbols, through again and again experiencing the characteristic energies of each individual symbol. And with time and experience, you could dispense with the "training wheel‟, to work with the energies direct. You could dispense with symbols and you could dispense with the chanting and meditations if through long practice you "become the energies and the energies become you".
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ALWAYS REMEMBER - YOU ARE REIKI!