The Power of Thought Forms

     An idea is powerful, grand, subtle, boring, comforting, fascinating, repellant, upsetting, difficult to get hold of. These animistic terms are also used when describing our relations with other people. They treat ideas as alive and indicate that we to some degree experience them that way.

     We enter into relationships with ideas. We treat them as tools and they empower us in our lives.  We give them energy and they motivate us, but with this comes the possibility of “losing ourselves” in them. And then we identify with them, experience them as part of us, and lose track of who we are. We “fall under their spell.” It is a kind of entrancement.

     Ideas we hold can often mean more than we initially know until we enter into them more deeply. We learn what we did not previously know as we unpack them, tease out their implications, and find that they hold surprises.  Again, like people.

     One of the intentions of meditation techniques is to teach us we are not our ideas. Meditation teaches us to see ideas come and go.  But ideas can still grab hold of us as soon as we give them attention, particularly if it is emotional attention. We become the idea rather than observing it.

     This is why scientists praise those who can distance themselves from their scientific ideas, the better to evaluate how well they describe what they claim to.  It is a lesson we all should take to heart. When we fail to do this, we become the vehicles through which those ideas manifest in the world, on the idea’s terms rather than ours. They are not our tools, we are theirs.
Ideas empower or disempower us, depending on our relationship to them. And if we are disempowered, what is empowered?  The reality behind the idea, the focused mental energy that constitutes it.

     Writing these words reminds me of a passage by Malidoma Somé:

When power comes out of its hiddenness, it shrinks the person who brought it into the open and turns that person into a servant.  The only way that overt power can remain visible is by being fed, and he who knows how to make power visible end up trapped into keeping that power visible….
Whoever creates that kind of visible power must then stay in the service to that which he creates. . . .  To display power is to become servile to it in a way that is extremely disempowering.  This is because the service is fueled by the terror of losing the fantasy of having power. (62-3)

     Now let me shift our perspective to a wider stage: human history. History is interpreted today mostly in secular, materialistic terms.  The alternative view, a minority one, sees history as the working out of a divine plan or will. But there is a third possibility that arises from taking the thought-form idea as seriously outside magickal workings as we do inside.

     For thousands of years, dominant human societies have been based on ideas of hierarchy, subordination, and obedience.  They have been given religious reality (as in Catholicism), economic reality (as in feudalism and slavery), political reality (as in despotism and absolutism), and interpersonal reality (as in hierarchical family structures). The modern liberal world of science, markets, and democracy grew within that world. Yet it won a degree of independence from it through the power of its ideas about human rights, equality, and freedom—particularly when brought to the  “new world,” where disease had wiped out most of the original inhabitants but where, in North America in particular, the types of domination so prevalent in Europe had never taken hold.  Perhaps this weakened the hold of these hierarchical ways of thought that, in time, enabled other ideas to grow.

     Whatever the cause, liberal ideas began a transformation of humanity, a transformation as dramatic as when the first agricultural hierarchies triumphed over the more egalitarian hunting and gathering societies of our evolutionary heritage. For the first time in millennia, the world of hierarchy, domination, and universal subordination was put on the defensive. And as liberal institutions of science, the market, and democracy transformed their world, liberal ideas were validated and spread from two places relatively secure against the old powers: the US and Great Britain. An alternative thought-form universe was created.

     The old thought-forms of domination, hierarchy, and obedience did not disappear.  They sought to manifest wherever they could, inaugurating a profound struggle in the West between what we might simply call freedom and slavery.

     In the US, these thought forms’ most powerful stronghold was the antebellum South. The South’s leaders increasingly turned their back on the Declaration of Independence because they knew it to be fundamentally hostile to slavery.  For them, domination trumped equality. They lost a war, but still maintained a way of life reflecting the old values, reinforced by a form of religion that supported slavery and rigid hierarchy, both secular and divine.

~ Gus diZerega