The Use Of Sound For Healing & Enlightenment

Sound healing has been practiced in cultures worldwide for thousands of years. When most people think of sound, they are actually thinking of a range of vibrational frequencies, and more specifically most are thinking of the frequency between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second, that human ears can normally perceive.
For the purpose of this article, and in according with our new scientific understanding, you should stop thinking about sound as being the equivalent to what the normal human ear can perceive. In fact, you should simply think of sound as vibration as measured in cycles per second. When you think of sound in this way, it is clear that there is more sound out there than simply what humans can hear!

Our “scientific” understanding of how sound can influence the human body is based on physics, and this understanding has improved dramatically over the past 400 years. Major breakthroughs in this field actually began in 1665 with the great physicist Christian Huygens (known as the father of theoretical physics), when he discovered the concept of “entrainment”. By observing pendulums Huygens noted the tendency of two objects vibrating at different speeds to vibrate together when brought close together.

The principles of entrainment theory have become essential to many scientific fields such as chemistry, neurology, biology, pharmacology, medicine, and astronomy, to name just a few. One of the most exciting uses of entrainment is the field of psychology, especially in the area where the studies of brain states, meditation, metaphysical experience, sound and healing merge together. It turns out the Shaman was right all along!

If everything that exists is vibrating, then everything around you at this moment, including you, is making a sound, then the physical body can be thought of as a finely tuned orchestra, with each organ playing its own special role in the symphony. In physics, the state at which any object naturally wants to vibrate is called resonance. And if everything has a naturally health vibration, including you, there is the possibility that the body can be returned to a state of perfect resonance (using sonic entrainment therapy) whenever disharmony develops.

This insight alone is amazing enough, but our understanding of sound now goes far deeper. Those who study brain states have learned that the frequency 7.8 (an alpha state known as the Schumann Resonance) is associated with deep meditation and metaphysical experience, and that Shamanic practitioners in indigenous tribal cultures often reach a delta brain. These insights opened many new questions about what is going in the human brain.

Practitioners began working with the ability of sound to produce different brain states in the 1960's, and they quickly came upon another important discovery: when two frequencies occur next to each other, if they are slightly off by a difference of 4-5 cycles per second, human brain waves will have a tendency to entrain to the difference between the two. In effect, they were able to induce a state of deep consciousness and balance the two hemispheres of the brain through a very sophisticated use of sound. Furthermore, they discovered that the experience of the individual in this brain state varied widely depending on the intention they carried with them.

The ramifications of that are tremendous. If human consciousness can be induced to experience these altered states, then sonic entrainment therapy might literally hold the key to what might be called universal enlightenment! How fascinating that many instruments used in traditional religious rituals (Tibetan tingsha bells are one example) produce two vibrations that are off by 4-5 cycles per second.