And the first of the five agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz says just that : “be impeccable with your word!”.
Because, to paraphrase the quote attributed to Franck Outlaw, your thoughts can be expressed in words, your words can become actions, which transform in habits, on which your character is built. And ultimately your character points to your fate.
So basically, if you can’t refrain from thinking BS, you can at least refrain from voicing it.
And thus stop the process the earliest possible.
This reality, that words have weight, every energy therapeutist, each and every Reiki master knows it.
Words have an energetic power beyond what they express. They have the force of their intentions and the universe hears them.
The French word for “cursing” is “maudire” which comes from “mot dire”, that can be translated by “to say a word”, when past generations knew the power of the word and the gesture.
Yes, I know they also believed in some crazy stuff that tends to undermine their credibility and could have us look at everything they believed in with some suspicion.
But in this case, let’s not.
Thoughts have an energy and the actual speaking of them has more energy still.
Also, in a period when parchment was rare and often limited to monks, giving one’s word was considered enough guarantee.
And today, a lot of professionals have their ethics based on truth or silence: a journalist must assure he’ll tell the truth, a doctor won’t speak about his patients, nor will a lawyer…
And all of us, believing or not in the energetic power of the sound and intention, must limit what we say to this simple axiom: respect your neighbour, and, if possible, do no harm.
In the United States, people praise above all freedom and freedom of expression.
But it seems the spirit of the law has been forgotten by many: freedom of expression has been put in the Constitution to defend a young democracy, and one of its pillar, the right to criticize power.
Freedom of speech, at its core, is a free press, and the right to criticize power and protest.
So when Trump attacks Twitter in the name of this same freedom, to express violent and divisive lies, he violates the spirit of the law, if not the law itself: he is a figure of power, the one whom, people and institution, in this instance Twitter, are entitled to criticize. He justifies his de-facto dictatorship by his individual freedom.
Absolutely twisted.
The words can hurt.
The words can kill.
Trump knows it. He relishes it, this cowardly bullying from the safe space of the White House, now behind a double row of fences.
His words, for example, equating the free press with fake news, again and again, has policemen, geared like Storm Troopers, find it normal to shoot tear gas or rubber bullets towards journalists.
And here, again, the twisted use of the freedom of speech, is directly endangering the free press, one of the true embodiment of the first amendment.
Manipulators know how to twist and eviscerate the true meaning of the words.
In the absence of truth, information becomes propaganda.
In the absence of truth, democracy is under threat, mobs are manipulated, encouraged to hate or violence.
The United States are suffering today from the consequences of too many speeches without reason, conscience or limits: conspiracy theories accepted like gospel, prosperity gospel accepted like truth, “news” channels playing with fear, anger and populism, freedom to troll and bully without enough consequences…