By Austin C. – Editorial
My fellow cub scouts inquired, “Where’s Michael?” as I told a story in our tent. “Who cares about Michael; that kid has no friends,” I responded and went on with my story.
The next morning the scout leader informed our troop that Michael left our camping trip early because he heard me talking about him while he was standing outside the tent. The following Monday I planned on apologizing to Michael at school only to find that he had switched schools altogether.
I never saw Michael again and I came to learn a truth that Don Miguel Ruiz states in his book The Four Agreements; “The word is the most powerful tool that you have as a human…”
Not only did I realize how much potential my words had to affect other people, I learned a valuable lesson about gossiping. I learned that every time I talked about someone behind their back, they were not the only person being harmed.
When I slander people, I am not dealing with my negative feelings towards them in a healthy way. I am also spreading a negative seed to those around me, thus harming their own emotional health as well as negatively influencing their view of the person being slandered.
Megan R., a student who gave up gossiping this year for Lent, said, “It made life simpler. I didn’t have to focus on what everyone else was doing; I could just work on what I needed to do.”
Through reading books and talking to people like Megan who have also had experience with the power of words, I came to the realization that words are really an external manifestation of what we are going through internally. We subconsciously express our internal condition while we consciously send a message to some external source. The message we send can either be good or evil, and that is entirely dependent upon what is going on inside of ourselves.
Ruiz shows this in his book through a story about a little girl and her loving mother. The mother comes home from work one day completely stressed out with a thumping headache, and her daughter (not realizing this) runs up to her, joyfully dancing around and singing loudly. The noise agitates the mother’s headache and overall bad mood to the point where she snaps at her daughter yelling, “Shut up! You have an ugly voice. Can you just shut up!”
The end of the story also shows the profound effect words can have, because after her mother’s explosion the little girl believed that she had an ugly voice for the rest of her life. She refused to sing and even had problems in everyday conversations.
Masaru Emoto, a Japanese scientist and author of the book The Hidden Messages in Water, puts fact behind theory through his experiments with water. He thought that water may have a major impact on the quality of life (since humans are made up of 70 percent water) and began to take photographs of frozen water crystals under different circumstances to see what would happen. He wrote words or phrases down on pieces of paper, and wrapped the paper around bottles of water with the words facing in towards the water.
“Water exposed to ‘Thank you’ formed beautiful hexagonal crystals, but water exposed to the word ‘Fool’ produced crystals… (that were) malformed and fragmented,” Emoto described in his book. “The lesson that we can learn from this experiment has to do with the power of words. The vibration of good words has a positive effect on our world, whereas the vibration from negative words has the power to destroy.”
While Emoto’s experiment superbly shows the existence of evil words, there is still an even greater evil that comes from the misuse of the word—the lie. In Steven Pinker’s book, The Stuff of Thought, he points out that although the first amendment of the United States’ Constitution protects the freedom of speech, “fraud and libel are not protected, because they subvert the essence of speech that makes it worthy of protection, namely, to seek and share the truth.”
Sadly, even after all my prior experience with the correct use of words, I had to learn the truth about lies the hard way. After about nine months at the Family Foundation School I had the privileges of buddying and shadowing, junior sponsoring, as well as starting on the school’s basketball team. However, although I appeared to be doing quite well, I was living a huge lie.
I was living in a cesspool of negativity and dishonesty (the details of which I won’t get into). My Family Leaders, one who I consider to be like a father to me, pulled me out of class one day and confronted me head on. They flat out asked me if I had been doing the things that I in fact was doing, and I bold-faced lied straight to their faces when I told them “No, I would never.”
Because of the trust they had in me, they believed me (to an extent) and moved on. However, I couldn’t follow suit. The next few days were excruciating—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I couldn’t go on much longer living the lie, and eventually I cracked. I told my Family Leader (the one who was like a father to me) everything, and everything I thought I had was gone in an instant.
I lost all my responsibilities, I got kicked off the basketball team with only three games left in the season, but the most painful was I lost all the trust I had built up. No one could believe a single word that came out of my mouth. While this was hard to go through, it was worth it, because at the end of the whole debacle I finally came to FULLY understand the true power of the word.
