Reiki books can essentially tell you the following: the history of reiki, its major techniques, and the uses of reiki to help with your life.
This short guide will summarise the major points contained in most reiki books, and thereby help you decide if you want to invest in them.
First, what is reiki? In the past, discrimination and prejudice were essential to our survival.
Societies were built on fear, fear of the unknown, and most importantly fear of the people different from them.
This lack of understanding, or imagination as you may choose to call it, caused wars, destruction and misery for millennia.
Many times, these wars were based on religion; in other times and places, on ethnicity, language, and even sexuality.
Some of the victors of these wars went on to establish major religions, empires, and dynasties - the losers were often crushed, and their chances for survival greatly diminished.
All along, human beings - not many, but enough - insisted that we were all caught in a web of reciprocity and mutual brother- and sister-hood, and that we were all bound to each other by a mysterious life energy.
Reiki seeks to understand and use this energy to help lessen the sufferings of others, and to heal their pain and disease.
In conjunction with modern medicine, reiki, which was propagated first by a Japanese Buddhist monk by the name of Makai Usui, is intended to help with the treatment of pain and disease.
Other forms of alternative medicine and healing proudly declare their separateness and distinction from modern medicine, but a serious and creditable reiki school will never make this arbitrary distinction.
Even as violence has swept the globe, especially in the two horrific conflagrations that we know as World War I and World War II, the healing energy that reiki practitioners rely on has been at work.
This is because that energy has always been there - it is the basis of spiritual movements, religious ecstasy and joy, and the reunification of societies.
Now you may ask how all this applies to you, a no-nonsense, Internet-savvy consumer with no time to waste.
Don't worry - we were getting to that.
The reiki energy's ubiquity and omnipresence means that it can be accessed by anyone.
In this spirit, major practitioners of reiki have put forward the revolutionary idea that distance learning of reiki, and indeed learning reiki on one's own, is entirely possible, and is in fact a good idea for those who want to partake of the benefits of reiki but cannot afford the time and money needed to participate in sit-down, face-to-face lessons with an experienced reiki master.
Here is where reiki books become important.
Using the fact that anyone can access the energy that forms the basis of reiki, many practitioners have begun to offer e-books, paper- and hard-back books, and distance learning courses.
If you are curious about reiki but never knew how to find the time to learn it, a reiki book is the way to go.