#135 Your Word Reputation—Making Your Words Matter

“The second most deadly instrument of destruction is the dynamite gun; the first is the human tongue. The gun merely kills; the tongue kills reputations and, ofttimes, ruins characters. Each gun works alone; each loaded tongue has a hundred accomplices. The havoc of the gun is visible at once. The full evil of the tongue lives through all the years; even the eye of Omniscience might grow tired in tracing it to its finality.  The crimes of the tongue are words of unkindness, of anger, of malice, of envy, of bitterness, of harsh criticism, gossip, lying and scandal. Theft and murder are awful crimes, yet in any single year the aggregate sorrow, pain and suffering they cause in a nation is microscopic when compared with the sorrows that come from the crimes of the tongue. Place in one of the scale-pans of Justice the evils resulting from the acts of criminals, and in the other the grief and tears and suffering resulting from the crimes of respectability, and you will start back in amazement as you see the scale you thought the heavier shoot high in air.    At the hands of thieves or murderers few of us suffer, even indirectly. But from the careless tongue of a friend, the cruel tongue of an enemy, who is free? No human being can live a life so true, so fair, so pure as to be beyond the reach of malice, or immune from the poisonous emanations of envy. The insidious attacks against one's reputation, the loathsome innuendoes, slurs, half-lies by which jealous mediocrity seeks to ruin its superiors, are like those insect parasites that kill the heart and life of a mighty oak. So cowardly is the method, so stealthy the shooting of the poisoned thorns, so insignificant the separate acts in their seeming, that one is not on guard against them. It is easier to dodge an elephant than a microbe.”  William George Jordan, Kingship of self control "Be impeccable with your word, because the word is not just a sound or a written symbol. The word is force; it is power you have to express and communicate, to think, and thereby to create the events in your life. ... All the magic you possess is based on your word. Your word is pure magic, and misuse of your word is black magic. ... Being impeccable with your word is the correct use of your energy; it means to use your energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself. If you make an agreement with yourself to be impeccable with your word, just with that intention, the truth will manifest through you and clean all the emotional poison that exists within you. ... Mostly we use the word to spread our personal poison –– to express anger, jealousy, envy, hate. The word is pure magic – the most powerful gift we have as humans – and we use it against ourselves. ... We misuse the word so often that that is how we perpetuate the dream of hell." –Don Miguel Ruiz, from The Four Agreements, quoted in M. Catherine Thomas' The God Seed. Thomas concluded with this: "Let us make the decision to be our word, and that what we say we mean, and that what we say we do, because we said it, and that's who we are."