Words

“In the beginning the word was with God and the word was God …”

Why should the Christian bible begin like this? Are words important? Is the children’s saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,” really true? Do certain words have power? If so, what sort of power?

Words are the chief form of communication between human beings, whether it is the spoken or the written word. Indeed, other forms of communication, which I think were widely used by the initiated in ancient times, have fallen into disuse, so that words are virtually the only official form of communication today. Why do I say official? What possible ‘unofficial’ forms of communication are there? What about music and painting? Does not a piece of music become a favourite because it “speaks” to us in some special, hidden way? Great painting communicates emotions and feelings that have nothing whatever to do with the pigments used to paint the picture. In ancient times, it is clear that the great Neolithic structures such as Cargnac in France or Stonehenge and Avebury, in England were not merely used for predicting eclipses or as religious centres. I think they were built on special lines of earthly force, called Ley Lines and they were used for transmitting telepathic communication from the initiates in one place, to those in another. I think the Ley Lines were chosen with great care for certain of them aid telepathy more than others.

Feelings! They are the key to all communication. Whatever form communication takes, it evokes a response from the listener, reader or observer. It might be boredom, excitement, joy, love, annoyance, interest, anticipation, the list is endless. The thing is, all these are feelings and our feelings are aroused by many forms of communication, of which words are only one. That does not make words unimportant however, for they are almost the only way in which we communicate our thoughts to one another. You might say, “The fact that words evoke emotional responses means that of course they have power,” and of course you would be right. However, that is not the power I am thinking of.

The writers of Genesis were not the first, nor the last to imply that certain words had great power. Esoteric teachers of all backgrounds have always taught that and consequently those words are a closely guarded secret. Can that be true? I think so and in order to understand why, we need to examine what happens when we speak. As I said earlier, words express thoughts, so one thing that happens when we speak is that thought waves are sent out. The second is sound is created. This means that sound waves move through the air as well. This is how we hear the words of course but we don’t just hear the sound waves, we also feel them as we do the thought waves. The reason music evokes emotional responses is because of the way in which it creates sound waves that either attract or repel us. Words do the same, although, because they are in such common use we think less about the feelings being evoked. We know though, that the same word can have totally different effects depending upon the way it is said. As the old song puts it, “It ain’t what you say it’s the way that you say it.”

Thought waves are much more subtle, but because of this, their effects can be more insidious. We absorb their vibrations subconsciously and whilst our individual minds are normally strong enough to ignore their calls to action, that is not true of everyone and I believe many is the act committed on the instigation of another’s thoughts, without the individual being aware why he or she acted like they did. However, in the instance we are discussing it is sufficient to recognise that every word uttered or written is preceded by a thought. Therefore, we feel the vibration of spoken words in two ways, with our ears, as the sound waves vibrate the air and with our minds, as the thought waves are picked up by that ultra-sensitive instrument. It is for this reason that esoteric teachers have always claimed the spoken word to be the more powerful.

It is interesting to examine also the effect the structure of a language can have on its speakers’ brains. I have read that many scientists believe the reason the Japanese are so good at exploiting other people’s inventions but poor at inventing things themselves, is due to their language. The language contains far more vowels than do European languages, for instance, and it seems that because of this, certain areas of the brain remain undeveloped and they include areas that are used in the inventive process. If speaking a certain language can affect the brain in such a way, it is not surely stretching credulity too far to suggest that words can have other powerful properties.

I believe that such ‘power words’ are such, not because of what they might mean, if indeed they mean anything at all, but due to the sound made in pronouncing them. The way the sound produced vibrates the air, also impacts upon the ultra-sensitivity of the mind and because the mind is part of the eternal us, the spirit, rather than part of the physical body, like the brain, the word possesses what appear to be magical properties. We call something magic because we cannot understand it or how it works. We do the same with unaccountable occurrences or anything that seems to defy the rules we have invented as a result of our imperfect examination and understanding of the natural world and its laws. We call them miracles! Nothing can defy natural law, it is all encompassing and its laws cannot be ignored without serious consequences, but there are also many natural laws about which humanity has not the slightest idea. Magic and miracle tend to be dismissive words, meant to indicate that what has happened is pure chance and the likelihood of it happening again is remote. Nothing happens by chance. As Alexander Pope so perceptively observes in his “Essay on Man,” “All chance is direction which we cannot see.”

I do believe that certain words, pronounced in a particular way, do have great power and because of this should be used with enormous discretion. Most of these words have been lost from the vocabulary with the onset of materialism and the relegation of our inner selves to be mere bystanders in our physical lives. I think it is likely that the word “God,” in its original Hebrew, is one such power word. Hence it’s use in the opening sentence of the bible. It translates into English as Jehovah but I believe there are few if any people around today who know how to pronounce it in its form as a power word. If there are any, then they do well to keep their knowledge to themselves because this world of ours is in enough trouble due to the misuse of power, without adding to it.