Energy, frequency, vibration
What "sound healing" is and why it works
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” - Nikola Tesla
Sounds that hurt and sounds that heal
Most people would agree without hesitation that repeated exposure to very loud sounds (working in a factory or with airplane engines or playing in a loud rock band) or short-term exposure to extremely loud sounds (explosions or gunshots) can cause hearing loss.
I know from personal experience it can be easy to discount the idea that repeated exposure to “bad” sounds can actually result in health problems. And that it’s probably even easier to discount the notion that “good” sounds can help us heal physical issues as psychological or spiritual imbalances.
All of us who grew up in the modern Western world have been brainwashed to some extent by the post-”Enlightenment” scientific model that frames the world in terms of matter and mechanical processes. In this worldview, the human is seen as a biological machine, made up of discrete parts. The Rockefeller allopathic medicine cartel is an extreme outgrowth of this Newtonian-Cartesian perspective.
If one of the parts is malfunctioning, you focus on fixing that part. You can drug it, burn it, cut it out or cut it off; despite some advances of holistic philosophies and “alternative medicine,” modern doctors are trained to treat the symptom, not the patient.
Traditional Western medicine saw the human body as a holistic entity in which all the systems were interconnected.1 At its foundation, traditional Western medicine recognizes the human being as the work of a Creator who designed the body to live in harmony with the world and to have the capacity to heal itself when necessary. Traditional Western medicine sees imbalance or toxic conditions as the root of all disease and understands that healing occurs when we restore balance and harmony to the body (including the emotions, the mind and the spirit).
Sound healing is usually experienced as subtle. But in my experience it is very powerful because it works in alignment with the nature of the Universe, where — as Tesla’s quote suggests — everything is made up of energy vibrating at different frequencies. Some frequencies are harmonic with Nature and with the human body. Some frequencies are inherently dissonant to the body.
Sound healing uses energy, frequency and vibration to bring the body, mind and emotions back into a natural state of balance and harmony — the state where healing naturally occurs.
In The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music, Dane Rudhyar notes that in both the Bible and Hindu cosmology, the material world is created by sound. These scriptures tell us that God literally spoke the world into being. “Metaphysically, Sound refers to the release of a power that, as it were, precipitates the divine Idea into material, objective manifestation,” Rudhyar writes.
Rudhyar describes sound as a carrier-wave (vibration) that can be employed creatively or destructively, depending on intention (energy):
Will and Sound, however, have a neutral character. Traditional occultism and magic stress that behind will stands desire. Behind will is not only desire and biological and psychological needs demanding satisfaction but also ideas seeking realization. Will and Sound are vehicles for concretizing or exteriorizing needs, emotions, ideas, and subjective states of being or consciousness in general. Will and Sound are carrier-waves, bringing what is potential into a condition of actualization and effectual manifestation. Whatever will and Sound carry gives them a specific character, which involves both an implicit purpose and a latent meaning.
In this respect, we could say that any sound that is harmonic with the human being is going to act in a healing nature - provided the energy of intention it carries is congruent with our own intentions.
Obviously there’s an element of belief to this. Modern medicine, working in concert with the mass media has been relentlessly pushing the belief that we are incapable of healing ourselves without allopathic medical intervention since at least the 1930s. We have learned to see ourselves as biological machines that break down easily and often; we have been programmed to believe (including at the unconscious level that largely determines our actions and behavior) that only the priest-mechanics of the medical cult can fix us and keep us running smoothly.
It almost goes without saying that this belief has reached a new crescendo with the Covid psyop. Now we are not only fragile and easily injured or killed by tiny invisible pathogens, we are also inherently diseased and deadly: “Wear a mask to protect others; You must get the jab in order to keep me safe; It’s a pandemic of the Unvaccinated…”
We live in a society that is heavily imbalanced toward the mental realm and I feel it’s important to give the mind reason to believe in paradigms like sound healing — paradigms that are perfectly aligned with Natural Law and congruent with the true nature of the human being but at odds with the indoctrination we’ve received over the course of our lifetimes.
In this series of posts I want to share a couple of key experiences that helped me to align my belief and intention with the fact that good sounds can help us heal. I also want to introduce some concepts that may help you align your beliefs with the power of sound to restore balance, harmony and health to your being.
Vibration: sound healing as positive entrainment
Entrainment happens when two systems vibrating at different frequencies come in contact with each other. The weaker or less coherent oscillating system will begin to align its vibratory frequency to the system with the stronger or more coherent vibratory rate.
You may remember that the phenomenon of entrainment was first publicized by the Dutch scientist Christian Hugyens in the 1600s, when he observed two pendulum clocks aligning their rhythm with one another. “This process is a universal phenomenon that can be observed in physical (e.g., pendulum clocks) and biological systems (e.g., fire flies)."2
One well-known application of this universal principle of resonance is brainwave entrainment.
On a recent podcast, Brainwaves and Retrogrades, I talked with Phoenix about my first experience with brainwave entrainment. I had suffered what was called a psychotic break my senior year at Hillsdale College after ingesting a single tablet of Z-O-L-O-F-T at the end of a three-day drinking binge. (Since my Substack is titled Exactly Where I’m At, I feel contractually obligated to link to the Ween song — Zoloft by Ween on YouTube).
A year later I was student teaching as part of my Master’s degree program at the University of Cincinnati. I was over the hallucinations and the manic depressive episodes but I was still experiencing all sorts of weird and disturbing nervous system anomalies.
I was afraid to go to sleep because just when I was starting to drift into lala-land, it felt like a gunshot would go off at the base of my skull. My heart would start pounding, adrenaline would flood through my system, and I’d be sitting up in bed with severe physical anxiety wondering if I’d ever be OK again.
My mom gave me these Jeffrey Thompson alpha brainwaves CDs and after a few weeks of listening to them, I was able to fall asleep normally again and many of the other symptoms started to dissipate.
After a year of panic attacks, insomnia, and persistent anxiety, the relief I got from the brainwave CDs felt miraculous. Although I certainly didn’t have a clue how central brainwaves and sound healing would become in my life, that was the start of my journey into the world of sound healing.
Brainwave entrainment enables us to relax quickly or achieve other desired mind states by using pulses if sound to entrain the brain to vibrate at beneficial frequencies. (These rhythmic pulses also bring other positive effects to the brain and body; more on that in a future post.)
For a limited time you can get the brainwave entrainment version of my new sound healing record Auric Fields for free. Buy the non-brainwave version here, click on Include a message in the Bandcamp checkout, and write "send me a code” and I’ll email you a free download code. You can also listen to both records and learn more: Auric Fields by Souls Are Stars on Bandcamp.
What about the rest of the body?
While the brain is certainly important, it isn’t the only organ in the body. Eastern medicine has long known that each organ of the body vibrates at a distinct frequency. Western science has fairly recently recognized that everything in the body emits electrical impulses that vibrate at discrete frequencies — our organs, our cells, and even the DNA within the cells. These vibrations, inaudible to the human ear, are now detectable by sensitive imaging technologies.
The principle of entrainment tells us that when two systems in the vibratory universe come into contact they will naturally try to entrain with one another. It also tells us the weaker (less energetic) of the two systems will entrain to the stronger (more energetic) system.
We live in an unprecedented soup of chaotic and dissonant frequencies. I heard someone saying the other day that if a man from the 17th century were to be dropped into a modern city he would be dead within 24 hours — his body would be unable to handle the bombardment of machine noise and inaudible frequencies (such as those from electrical systems and wireless communications).
Our cells emit frequencies but their energy is minuscule compared to the energy of electric lines in the home or the radio waves and EMFs we are swimming in every day.
Is there a way to counteract the negative entrainment of these disharmonic frequencies on the body?
Back before the so-called Enlightenment, any doctor who wasn’t a competent astrologer would be considered a quack because astrology — in the hands of a good practitioner — is very efficient at determining important factors such as humoral imbalance and temperament and the quality of a given moment in time. A chart for the time at which the patient fell ill could point to the humoral imbalance causing the patient’s symptoms, for example.
“Neurobiological foundations of neurologic music therapy: rhythmic entrainment and the motor system” by Michael H. Thaut, Gerald C. McIntosh, and Volker Hoemberg, Frontiers in Psychology, February 18, 2015.