Word Magic Part 1
Shaping Experience and Destiny Through Everyday Language
What a beautiful world. What a terrible world. That’s a quote from a meme I saw recently and thought, how true.
Why does life often feel so uphill? Some years or even decades seem like as slog or a struggle, as if living in Groundhog Day. Yes, there are beautiful moments, but there are many terrible moments, too. For example, I am recently emerging into the light after a four-year dark night of the soul expedition, a second such experience in my life. During this same season, I have welcomed two new grandsons into the world, which have been indescribably beautiful moments. Pardon my “Jay-ma” brag moment.
Dark nights are different than normal periods of sadness, confusion, or upheaval. Compare being forced to swim across a raging river (typical difficult and scary life challenges) to getting lost at sea during an endless storm. In the river scenario, you always have a shoreline to give hope, bearings, and a sense of mental safety. You also have a reasonable plan of action to get yourself to the other side. In an ocean, there is nothing to give you bearings or to keep your eyes on. You don’t know where you are, or when (or if), you are going to land safely. The only way to get through is to surrender to the storm and hope you survive.
And always amid the ups and downs of life—the rivers and seas—there is the special background noise reminding us of the scarcity and fear, primarily the fear surrounding survival in a world that feels like most people are set up to fail (which they are, keep reading). Everything appears to be set up in such a way that most people must work hard enough to barely stay ahead of a debt cascade that is always bearing down on them. For many, the work is all there is. There’s no time or money to enjoy leisure, or to focus on personal growth and development. Any surplus of either commodity is used on bare necessities. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, most of us stay stuck in the middle somewhere, never making our way to self-actualization, or reaching our highest potential.
How many of us stop to ponder, why would a “good God” design such a system of struggle and failure? Does it suggest that God is not actually good, or is there another perspective?
Enter Magic
When I was a young child, I pretended a lot. Pretending (or “make-believe-ing”) is child’s work and can’t really be differentiated from their reality. The etymology of pretend (pre-tend): "to profess, put forward as a statement or assertion, to direct one's efforts…to lay claim.” Similarly, the etymology of a pretender is: “one who intends…one who puts forth a claim.” Just reading those definitions puts a different spin on pretending! It brings about visions of children having just entered this realm from the other side, remembering themselves as master magicians, holding wands, calling forth great creative acts with powerful intentions. That is, until the adults come in and declare, none of it is real, stop acting silly. 🥲
In my pretend world as a child, I did believe in magic—the ability to create whatever I could dream up—playmates, new worlds, miracles, and happily ever afters. I think most children do. A young child hasn’t been properly “domesticated” (a concept from The Four Agreements) out of their awareness of divine Source connection and into the disempowered system slave programming yet. So for them, magic is absolutely real.
A famous person once said, “The kingdom (or reign) of heaven belongs to such as these,” meaning the children, or those with childlike faith who believe anything and everything is possible. It is indeed an upside-down world, where the children are the way showers, miracle workers, and magicians, while the “mature,” educated, trained, and indoctrinated among us are the disempowered disbelievers! Fear of, disbelief in, and disdain for magic is part of the strategy of the organized, mind-control powers of this world. If they can keep the masses from believing in our magic powers within a magical universe, we have no real power to escape tyranny.
Perhaps the children can remind us of the way back into our place as sovereign beings who have the power to create our realities. In actuality, we are always creating our realities, whether unconsciously for toil and suffering, or consciously for bliss and abundance. Maybe if my reality isn’t what I want, it’s only because I have been creating it through disempowerment programming and limiting beliefs imposed on me without my awareness.
I’ll admit, when this concept was introduced to me about three years ago, it sounded offensive. Just the suggestion that I was somehow responsible for bringing on and maintaining much of the toil, pain, and struggle in my life made me feel indignant and very resistant to the idea. How (and why) would I ever contribute to my own disempowerment, lack, and suffering? Ludicrous, I thought! I only want the best for myself and I would never vie for my own captivity!
But then the Universe (or my Higher Self) began to show me how negative was my inner talk, and how many limiting beliefs I had that were sabotaging my desires and dreams, while shaping my outer experience. I began to work on changing inner and outer focus and talk, which is actually making a big difference in my lived experience, but also takes a lot of intentional effort!
Your Word is Your Wand
“In the beginning was the word…” (John 1:1)
“The Lord merely spoke, and the heavens were created. He breathed the word, and all the stars were born” (Ps 33:6-7).
In my past conservative Christian worldview, it seemed like such a far-off concept that a supreme Creator Being could sit on his-her throne somewhere up in the heavens throwing out words and commands, and viola! Stars, planets, moon, earth, oceans, humans, animals, plants, minerals…no problem. Name and conceptualize whatever it is the Creator wants and poof, there it appears on the canvas of the time-space continuum. Words, it seemed, were powerful for God, but for us created humans, they are merely a benign form of communication, right? Incidentally, I hope you don’t get tripped up on Bible quotes, especially in a post about magic. 🧐😇🪄 I now regard the Bible as a largely symbolic or metaphorical, non-literal text, which can be used to understand the inner human mystical or experiential journey. Though I’m referring to a few nostalgic scriptures, I no longer believe a Bible is necessary for the human journey. We can learn everything through inner experience. In short, you are, and I am, the living word of God (for fun, see if you can find that verse in the Bible).
As time went by, I began to learn about how thoughts become words become things. If you pay close attention, you will see that this is a foundational principle of this realm. Some call it the law of attraction. It seems that we really do live in a magical universe where thoughts and words are a first cause, the spiritual seeds of creation, and the source of life. Creating is not just God’s work. Every day, we are in the act of creating our reality through our thoughts and words, even though most of us are completely unconscious of it.
“Life and death are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21).
Spoken words were the Transcendent nature of God’s tools of creation throughout the beginning of this Story, and they still create and shape reality today through the Immanent nature of God (the nature of God who is here and now, living in and through us). To awaken to the fact that words—spoken through WE the vessels—carry magical powers to shape our lives and destinies, holds inestimable personal responsibility. But it also offers unlimited opportunity. This knowledge can be empowering or disempowering, dependent upon the state of consciousness, spiritual development, and practiced skill of the co-creator.
In her 1928 book, Your Word is Your Wand, Florence Scovel Shinn said, “Man’s word is his wand filled with magic and power! Jesus emphasized the power of the word; ‘By thy words thou shalt be justified and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.’ So man has power to change an unhappy condition by waving over it the wand of his word. In the place of sorrow appears joy, in the place of sickness appears health, in the place of lack appears plenty.”
Here are some of the magic, creative power of words:
1. Power of Intent: words are carriers of energy and intention, and can manifest into reality. Many people use affirmations, or very intentional repeated positive statements, to alter their reality.
2. Influence of Sound and Vibration: When words are spoken out loud, they transform into sound, frequency, and vibration, which are some of the fundamental building blocks of matter. In her recent work with the memory and interactive qualities of water, Veda Austin has demonstrated that many words repeatedly imprint the same pattern in frozen water, a phenomenon she has termed, hydroglyphs. Dr. Emoto has demonstrated repeatedly that spoken words impact the patterning in water, including water in the human body toward coherence and healing. Much work has also been done in the field of cymatics to demonstrate the impact of sound vibration on water and sand. Also here). I currently use sound healing therapy with tuning forks to improve people’s health, vitality, and feelings of well being.
3. Symbolism and Metaphor: Collective, cultural, or religious symbols and metaphors of language affect the psyche with magic-like influences. Religions are rife with symbolic imagery that elicits powerful effects on followers, such as the crucifixion, the parting of the Red Sea, and the Kaaba (black stone) in Mecca. Ancient languages relied on symbols for conveying meaning, as well as many indigenous cultures today. Metaphors such as the saying, “an ocean of love,” or “cold as stone,” or “you’re on thin ice,” convey meaning infused with emotion and powerful influence to cast spells.
4. Subconscious programming (more on this in part 2).
5. Rituals and Incantations (prayers, chants, affirmations).
The idea is that words are not benign. By using certain words in a certain way—words that the collective ascribe meaning and power to—we elicit an influence on the hearer. Also is the matter of vibrational frequency as noted above. Words become associated with a vibrational quality that also impacts our energy fields.
I have learned from linguistic experts that the English language was created to be particularly rich in word magic. Websters defines word magic as: “magic involving the use of words in a manner determined by a belief that the very act of uttering a word summons or directly affects the person or thing that the word refers to.”
You might be feeling skeptical about the possibility that your everyday words and language invoke magic spells on the listeners. That is exactly how the creators and beneficiaries of the world’s fear-based slave system want you feel. They want you to dismiss and disbelieve the possibility of the power of words so they can keep benefitting from your ignore-ance. They would like us to continue using detrimental magic spells every day against ourselves and others, while believing that magic is make believe or only used by a few marginal Satanists in hidden societies.
Words that we broadcast into the ether, consciously or not, are at the root of our pleasure or our suffering, our fear or our courage. This is why waking up out of the program is so important! As long as you are programmed to not perceive the ways you are contributing to your daily experience of suffering through words and thoughts, you are unconsciously consenting to remain in a contrived, fear-based model of reality.
But there is much light and hope through awareness and changing a few habits! Join me next week in part 2 to explore answers to the following:
When did we begin using word magic?
What’s so problematic about the English language?
What are examples of word magic in everyday language?
Are subliminal messages effective?
What is the difference between black and white magic?
How do we take back our magic powers?
Bonus: Can trees help us develop magic skills?
See you later this week with part 2!
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