Today I would like to discuss with you some knowledge taught in various wisdom schools and the deeper teachings of many world religions. It deals with the power of creation and the ability to direct manifestation in the world and within the body. My interest is primarily on how this can affect the health of the body on subtle but powerful levels. The basic key understanding to begin with is that the body – that is your or my body – is a reflection and extension of our consciousness. This is a pretty heady concept, but one that is showing up a truth illustrated in the research in many different fields of scientific study. At this point in time no one knows how the cells of our body know how to differentiate into all the different parts that make up the body. Every organ is made up of different cells, yet every one of these cells has the exact same genetic blueprint – the same set of genes. How does a liver cell know how to be a liver cell and not a lung cell or a heart cell?
Even stranger, how does a stem cell, a baby cell that has no identity, know to turn into a liver cell if it winds up in the liver, but turn into a heart cell when it winds up in the heart? Stem cells that form in our bone marrow are constantly released into the blood stream and serve as the replacement building block cells to repair and replace damaged cells in every organ in our body. The point is there are strange forces at work every second of every day in our body that we have no understanding of how it all works. Spiritual disciplines all over the world have been harnessing these mysterious forces for thousands of years to promote healing and health… as well as to promote other worldly manifestations. One of the most frequently used techniques is the use of sound. Most every religion has the traditional use of sound chants as part of their religious observances – Gregorian chants, Hindu spiritual chants, American Indian chants, Muslim calls to prayer, Jewish Kabalistic chants, and so on. The simple purpose of chanting is to bring the chanter closer to God. Singing spiritual liturgies and chanting the names of God, focus the chanter’s attention on God. One of the most profound understandings of the spiritual wisdom schools is that “Where your attention is, you are.” If you want to experience God, you must immerse your attention into the presence of God in the now moment. Chanting and singing do this. They open up our right brain global awareness and take us out of our more ego and fear driven left-brain. The balance between the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system and the parasympathetic (relax and heal) nervous system shifts towards the parasympathetic. This very directly will shift the body into a more healing mode. There are now piles of studies showing the health benefits of spending time each day in this parasympathetic dominant mode achieved through such disciplines as chanting, or other meditation methods.
Less widely known is how being in these states affects the world around you. Many interesting studies have been performed showing how a small group of adept spiritual meditators functioning in the context of society at large can positively change social outcomes without any seeming direct or indirect connection to those outcomes. One such study conducted by Maharishi University demonstrated how getting a certain percentage of meditators to practice daily meditation in a high crime urban environment (Washington DC) for one month were able to significantly decrease crime rates in the area without actually doing anything other than meditating. This ability to alter social outcomes through openhearted connection to life has been used by spiritual adepts for thousands of years. Similar techniques have been used forever to effect physical healings of illnesses. Within Christian culture, no one doubts Jesus’ ability to heal, but they doubt their own ability to heal – even though Jesus specifically said everyone could do this. The big picture here is that the ability to focus attention and raise tone through the use of sound in order to achieve specific real world results has been around for thousands of years.
In some places the very development of language was specifically to exploit this potential. One of the earliest languages – Sanskrit, is actually built out of tones representing various aspects of God. The same is true for the letters of the Hebrew and Greek languages. These God oriented tones seem historically to have been vowel sounds. Consonants interrupt the flow of the vowel tone to ground the sound flow to the physical world. The harder the consonant the more physical the “word” becomes. For this reason most spiritual practices stick to just vowel sounds to raise awareness to a more spiritual level or mix in soft consonants to help bridge the aspirant’s awareness to the spiritual. It is interesting to note that linguistically the mix of vowel sounds to consonants drifts more toward hard consonants as the lives of the cultures become harder. Tropical cultures with gatherer lifestyles favor mostly vowel and soft consonants like India and Polynesian/Hawaiian cultures while more northern hunter cultures with harder lifestyles develop more hard consonants and guttural stops in the language. This may be due to a shift towards more left-brain fight or flight lifestyles. One current belief about how sound and the consciousness it induces affects health is through the release of tiny neurotransmitters that control the activation of specific portions of the genes both in the nucleus of the cells and out in the cytoplasm of the cells – the epigenetic material. Different sounds are observed changing cell membrane potentials and permeability, thus altering what and how the cells function. Different sounds alter immune function – probably through the effects of the same neurotransmitter activity. This is part of the study of the relatively new field of psychoneuroimmunology. This is the study of how consciousness controls brain chemistry and immune function. The science of this whole area is still in its infancy in the western medical world. But this field has thousands of years worth of research buried in the hidden disciplines and mystery schools found in every religion. You don’t have to be a spiritual adept to begin to tap this huge arena of healing support for yourself. You can start with the time-tested technique of trial and error. You are all familiar with the vowel sounds a, e, i, o, u. Try them out. Get in a relaxed position and set a clear intention to help resolve some area of tension in your body and begin to chant one of the vowel sounds for about ten minutes – see what happens. Try different sounds – do they feel different? Do they do different things? You can’t hurt yourself if your intention is one of goodwill toward the area of tension. At worst nothing will happen. At best you might have a profound spiritual experience.
As I pointed out, these practices have been a part of every religion for thousands of years. I just thought it might be nice to bring them out of the closet and into the open where we can all benefit from them.