I remember one time, when I was a young boy, someone said something mean to me. All at once I became conscious of my reaction.

I wondered, “How could mere words hurt so much?” After all, no one hit me with a rock.

Already a searching soul, I was standing back and looking at the awesome effect of words. I saw how my ego was built out of them.

I remember that I would sometimes ask myself a question, and words would come back from within my mind. I thought, “This is ridiculous! Here I am, asking myself a question, and this part of me that sounds like me, but isn’t me, comes up with an answer.”

I saw that I still didn’t know the real answer, even though it pretended to be me giving me the answer. You too have this language spirit, a descendant of the spirit of doubt that was present when Paradise was lost.

It has been passing from mothers to children ever since the fall of the first man and woman.

Whenever you indulge in any sin, the spirit of that sin gets inside you. When Adam partook of the fruit of pride, the sin xviii that was on the outside made a home in him.

It has operated from its new home in all of us ever since. Even in your own not-so-original traumas, you will find the same phenomenon going on.

Whatever is present in the trauma scene effects a change in your nature, and your changed nature henceforth answers slavishly to those people, places and things that excited the change, until you find the truth that sets you free

The trauma of original sin is the trauma of language. Language, women, food, and later on other fascinations began to affect man more than the God of his conscience.

Remember how Adam received his instruction concerning the danger of reaching away from understanding, toward knowledge, toward pride? What caused him to doubt and fall?

Wasn’t it, in part, the spirit of language, spoken through a guileful woman?

Adam listened to the words of his wife instead of the wordless language of his own heart.

To this day, deceitful people have sway over our souls. Look within and behold this tug-of-war between listening to what we know deep down and the seduction of language.

"Faith cometh by the word, and the Word by hearing."

Somehow, instead of believing in ourselves, we allow ourselves to be affected by the words of others.

We simply can’t stop compulsively believing the lies and confusion emanating from others until we are redeemed from the tyranny of language. That is the redemption that faith alone can vouchsafe us.

The scriptures say something very interesting about this: “Faith cometh by the word, and the word by hearing.” Perhaps because faith was lost by the word, it must somehow be returned through the word.

Those who rule this world are powerful manipulators of the human condition. Their power depends on your reacting to their words.

They would be powerless if you failed to react to them. It is your own resentment, your pathetic struggle against their words, that feeds their power.

To free yourself from this involvement, the first thing you must do is realize what the problem is. Until you do, you cannot be saved.

Discover now how to separate your consciousness from language. Have you ever experienced saying a word, and as you repeated it, it began to sound like a strange, unintelligible noise?

Let’s take any word, like “potato.” If you close your eyes and stand back from saying the word “potato,” soon it will sound like a silly noise. As you become separated from the earthly association, the word is seen to be what it is—just noise.

As you stand back from language, you will feel stupid, as though you know nothing at all—you will have given up involvement with knowledge (words) and discovered the first humbling truth—that you don’t know anything, and that nothing you can ever learn by rote is worth anything.

Quite often you will feel dumb and stupid because, in truth, your whole sense of worth has been derived from being involved with the deceitful spirit of language. Your sense of who you are is bound up in words.

You think in words, you speak in words, you make decisions through words, and that “conscience” talks back to you in words—the false conscience, that is. You are totally involved with language; words direct your whole life.