“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” – John 1:1
It has been said that all that is, is vibration. Vision brought forth the will to create, and through vibration, through sound, will created the world. Then came things and at some point the “I”, the consciousness that we claim and with it the perception of reality.
It is further claimed that we were created in the image of the creator, and indeed, sound is the primary instrument of humans. Using our voice is the one creative act that requires no additional materials or instruments. The sound of the human voice is the most pure expression we have available. Every sound we utter, every word we speak, and even every thought we speak silently with our inner voice or repress in dark corners of our consciousness, is a creative act.
The mystic traditions of all major religions have upheld this truth, from the mantras in yoga to the 99 names for god in Sufism. We also find this reverence in the realms of magick. Spells are conscious acts of affecting reality. Couple intention and belief, and reality is created. Superstition, the underlying belief systems (both meanings of the Latin word religio) are responsible for such magic to work as found, e.g. with Voodoo or Santeria.
Sound and light both travel in waves and maybe there is indeed some relationship that allows for sound to affect light and thus collapse it into specific particles, but one does not have to get into esotericism to see how sound creates our reality.
As humans we are wired to sound early on: the comforting sound of the heartbeat of our mothers in the womb, the sound of our own heartbeat in the silence, or the rhythm that grabs us and makes us want to dance and shake our body ecstatically are all examples.
Words are the next level. They become carriers of sound. Onomatopoeia, the Greek word for words that sound like their meaning is the first stage. Sanskrit, one of the oldest languages we know of, is said to be closest to the language of the gods due to its strong sound-meaning correlation.
It would be interesting to examine the correlation between alienation from reality and mis-sounding words. For example, the English word peace does not sound very peaceful considering the strong “p” sound at the beginning (as in “POW!); while the Sanskrit shaunti has a much softer hum to it. Also, for example, the word sex does not sound quite as emotionally connected as making love, and does not sound as temperamentally sensual as the Italian fatto l’amore.
Words are our key to reality. They allow us to label the “things” we determine to be disparate objects. Their intonations and variations and even re-declarations facilitate the discovery of more and more objects and create meaning in our world. As our reality “grows” and becomes more complex, the number of words has to grow. English, e.g. is said to have approximately one million words (plus another million technical terms) and has been the fastest growing language. It seems that life used to be simpler: a few grunts were sufficient to communicate the reality experienced by our early ancestors. A grunt here and there triggered the necessary responses for food, flight, intercourse.
Words are guided hallucinations. If you read the words “a peach tree on a hill” and close your eyes, you can imagine that hill, that tree, the sky behind it, the clouds, the sun, the blues and greens and oranges, you can see each peach individually if you want. Or even better, if you hear “you are in your favorite place, where you feel comfortable and safe”, your mind can make up its own imagery and you can feel that place that is so special to you, were you know the smells and colors and the feel of something against your skin.
Words allow us to abstract reality, to document it, and to share our understanding of it, our visions and dreams. The German poet Goethe once described a triangle made up of the divine – a tree – a poem of a tree. He said that we could never experience the divine (“God”) directly, but we could do so by beholding a tree. We could also do so, by reading a poem about the tree (if, of course, the artist captured the divine essence he experienced himself when beholding the tree in a way that we can relate to – or in a language we can comprehend).
Through words, labels, we experience reality and further create our own reality through selective perception. The more words we know the more complex our reality can be – or the more neurotic.
Information is something new, words that add to our understanding. Otherwise the message does not contain value, one theory postulates. For the most part, we choose symbols we know as it gives us pleasure to recognize our own grandeur and feel safe for a moment. Thus oftentimes films, popular music, and politicians use words and themes that appeal to masses, full of clichés and stereotypes – highly aggregate archetypical symbols that anyone can relate to.
Art on the other hand startles and changes our world. It still uses collective archetypes, but arranges them in new ways that are startling and thus create transformation in the beholder. Art can be seen as a two-fold process of transformation facilitated through symbolism:
In the process of creating, the artist (A1) connects to a divine idea (DA) through his set of archetypical symbols (SA), and is consequently transformed (A2) with the by-product of an artifact (AF). In energetic terms, this can also be looked at as a travel through the different chakras as the divine idea is manifested further and further on its way traveling down the chakras. The beholder (B1) experiences said artifact (AF) and consequently connects to his own set of archetypes (SB) and thus Goethe’s divine (SD), and is changed forever as a result (B2).
Art and its symbolism have the power to reach into the subconscious. This is used, e.g. in art therapy. Through symbols we can connect to the subconscious and bring forth “hidden” thoughts or express experiences that were too traumatic and can thus not be spoken (e.g. painting and drawing as a means to allow children who were abused to express what happened, or adults who use writing for similar purposes).
Similarly, imagery can reach others on subconscious levels. The suggestions of a hypnotherapist can induce trance, the speeches of a demagogue can mobilize angry mobs, the whispers of a Casanova can seduce a woman, or the suggestions of a trained EMT can help to prolong the life of an accident victim. Active visualizing can help in many situations even by oneself: when cold one can imagine being on the beach in the sunshine and immediately feel warmer; Athletes can envisioning their performance prior; or for motivation we can visualize the goal we have and how great we feel when we reached it, and what it will look like, describe it with many words, multi-sensual and concrete and thus be able to expect a higher rate of success.
Research has shown that the physiological response is practically identical whether something is experienced or imagined. One can most easily relate to that if one ever had a dream where one woke up sweating, gasping for air and with a racing heart. Or imagine screaming “Fire” in a movie theater and everyone beginning to panic as if there was indeed a life-threatening fire. The word “bomb” at any airport will cause even more excitement, but will also land you in prison – so strong is the collective imprinting of this word in this context.
Reality in a way can be seen as a string of various states of consciousness. Different labels and different sensory experiences induce different memory recalls. In a way, we are always dreaming. Most of the time people find themselves in semi-anxious states. Especially in modern times, where the media constantly bombards the senses with bleak imagery, pictures of soldiers, killing, hatred, or with imagery of products that one has not yet bought, and thus one can not yet rest. Not trained to let go of sensory input at times, one could easily become neurotic, as according to Woody Allen’s movies or Seinfeld so many New Yorkers do, as they find themselves inundated with the complexity of metropolitan city life: on the way to work, in traffic, among streets with roaring cars and screeching car horns, street signs, blaring advertisements and screaming billboards. No wonder there is such a high rate of disease in America. According to an article in Harvard’s Mental Medicine Update, approximately 80% of all doctor visits were due to stress related issues.
Many of them could be treated through stress relief and guided hallucination, through hypnosis, through verbal first aid (although that would not allow pharmaceutical companies to sell products). According to Judith Acosta, LCSW, and Judith Simon Prager, PhD, in their book “The Worst is Over – Verbal First Aid to calm, relieve pain, promote healing and save lives” many situations and symptoms that can be treated with Verbal First Aid (see box) are described.
All of these are related to our thinking and all of them can be affected with words and imagery. The dream can be altered and depending on the words and images, the labels, we exchange with one another, the dream changes.
Someone once said that a psychologist is a dreamer who knows he is dreaming. This reminds of the responsibility one bears as to how one uses words – one can use them to hurt or use them for healing.
Our normal “waking” states of consciousness are influenced by our conditioning and also by something much deeper: our imprints. Imprints result from experiences during heightened openness, such as the openness of a child. Children are more pliable and experiences made early on are the foundation for many reactions exhibited as adults. A famous example for an imprint is the duckling that imprints a ping-pong ball as mother, and then later in life attempts to mate with ping-pong balls. While conditioning can be altered more easily (as Pavlov has shown), imprints are practically “hard-wired” into our neurological network and require major stimulation to be able to be altered. One could assess that equally intense imprint vulnerability has to be induced in order to change any earlier imprinting.
A variety of circumstances bring about imprint vulnerability: being part of a crowd or group, e.g. rock concerts or stadiums, rituals and ceremony, drugs, drumming, dance, lovemaking and orgasm, fear and pain, stress, trauma, hypnosis are some of them.
Many early fertility rites can be considered collective imprinting ceremonies (later church ceremonies, football games, and, of course, droning television replaced these). The rituals for Bacchus, the Greek God of wine, were outright orgies, inducing trance in all participants: music and drumming, wine and drugs, dance and wild group sex, a feast of sensual pleasures activating meta-programming neurological circuitry and allowing for collective imprinting in an attempt to manifest desired reality (e.g. a good harvest).
Today, we find many a times that sex and orgasm are taboo topics, especially in the more Puritan American media. There, it is considered more suitable for consumption (in itself an act of killing) to see murder and brutal killing then the body of a naked human. Sex and orgasm are also times of great imprint vulnerability. Words or thoughts held in mind during these moments reach deeper levels of the subconscious and can consequently impact the subconscious to work in favor of the desired results. This is one of the concepts of sex magick, as practiced in a variety of mystic traditions. During and after a sexual encounter, heightened imprint vulnerability exists. Sexual dysfunction e.g. can often be traced to a careless remark made during or after early sexual experiences. “Omni animal triste post coitum” it states in Horace’s epigram. Not just a sad state. It is a particularly sensitive state. That, too, is the reason why trust is such a major part of the sexual encounter – even more so in the world of sexual activity that is combined with fear, pain, or terror – as in sadomasochistic practices and bondage.
Pain and stress are probably the most intense and also most easily effected states of consciousness in which imprint vulnerability is given. In those moments, one typically reverts to prior experiences and relates back to that behavior, e.g. the experience of being left by a spouse, or even the verbal threat or cues to that end, can trigger the sensation of reverting back to moments of being deserted as a child, when one felt afraid and lonely.
He who is afraid of pain is already suffering, some wise man once said. Indeed, research has shown that the responses to imagined and to experienced stress were identical. Both times, the nervous system responded in similar ways. The body’s autonomic nervous system has three components, sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems and also the enteric nervous system, which is less famous. The sympathetic nervous system responds to stress: dilates eye pupils, stops secretion of glands, stimulates sweating, makes medulla secrete epinephrine and non-epinephrine, produces goose bumps and stimulates hair, increases heartbeat, causes ejaculation, decreases digestion, and causes high blood pressure. The parasympathetic is responsible for relaxation: it constricts eye pupils, starts secretion of saliva, increases digestion, causes erection of sex organs, decreases heart rate, encloses bronchioles, and accommodates sight. Similarly, different regions of our brains are responsible for the positive or negative experience of consciousness. The reptilian brain is located in the back. It stands for fight/flight responses, fear, anger, aggression, and pain; the frontal lobes, on the other hand, is were we find Cooperative-Imaginative-Creative-Intuitive-Logical (CICIL) functions. Someone in intense states of stress or pain, e.g. with an anxiety attack, who requires Verbal First Aid, needs to be brought back to thinking in the frontal lobes. As imagination sits in the frontal lobes, it is a good connector, serves as the interface so to speak to a person’s mental state, and allows a trained person to induce desired mental states and related imprinting in another person.
In order to reach someone and manipulate their symbols one needs some level of permission. Even a victim of abuse has on some level agreed to be a victim – not in any way to diminish the incredibly traumatizing experience if permission is not voluntarily given. In the positive sense, this is referred to as establishing rapport. It is essentially establishing a level of trust. For example the words of a trusted physician who takes time to listen and takes a patient seriously are much more likely to have a positive effect on the healing process than seemingly careless utterances of a doctor who takes little time to notice the patient.
One can establish rapport – connect to another human being –, through eye contact, through exchanging names, through tone of voice, body language, touch – the more senses involved, the deeper the relationship. Once rapport is established, the next component of guided hallucination, or verbal first aid and healing can happen: a suggestion is planted – symbols are exchanged – a new reality map is offered connecting through the symbols and imagination in the frontal lobes.
If rapport exists, such suggestions can be amazingly effective: in the case of placebos, for example, a study by Herbert Benson, M.D., showed that placebos worked in as many as 70% of cases rather than just the 30% that is usually agreed upon.
If indeed human beings are most of the time in a dreamlike state and are so easily influenced, it puts enormous responsibility on every word we utter. As we can not always tell what level of imprint vulnerability is given in the person across from us, we must begin to focus and become aware of our words, the imagery we create. We must become conscious of our creativity.
Artists who create the metaphors and stories that make up our collectively created reality, and even more so the media that propagate these stories, have even more responsibility in this regard. Their impact on the masses (you, me, all of us) through the imagery and sounds they create is not to be underestimated. It is not by chance that Hitler wanted for every German household to have a radio. The media is a vessel for mass hypnosis, which can be seen in today’s society (and it is not by chance that the number of people who own practically all media in the U.S. is not particularly large).
In current times the media report daily on terror, fear, hatred, aggression, “war” – whether in foreign lands or right in the neighborhood. But frightened people make good voters and consumers. This adds to the general level of stress and fear that people experience already and it would not be surprising to see yet another increase in self-destructive and auto-aggressive disease.
Consciously creative, aware of the power of their words, equipped with the ability to create metaphors, stories, songs, and visions, and consequently reality, the artist, the mage (black or white), the shaman, the doctor, the counselor, the fireman, the entertainer, the mother, the father, really each one of us can create a better world. A world in which people are not concerned with the residuals of their fear functions in their reptilian brain, but are instead consciously creative all the time, creating metaphors and stories of light, love, progress; creating a new paradigm, a paradigm of love and connectedness.
Then, maybe, one day we will get to turn on the news and hear about the latest accomplishments in science, praise for new artwork, hear about new philosophies or findings in quantum psychology. May these words do their part.