The Grammar of Healing

The tool tunes. The person offers. God plays.

By David Wade Pope · Bio-Spiritual Archaeologist · Founder, The Entheos Project · From Book Three, The Entheos Project

One more framework belongs here before the tools, because it answers a question you may already be forming. If prayer changes the brain, and therapy changes the brain, and a magnetic pulse changes the brain, and the twelve steps change the brain, then who is doing the healing? The device? The counselor? The step? You?

Here is the way I have come to understand it, and I call it the Grammar of Healing, because healing has a structure, an order, a grammar, the way language does. Picture an instrument with strings. A guitar, a harp, it does not matter. Every string can carry a note, but a string that is out of tune cannot. You can pluck it all day and it will only sound wrong, no matter how sincerely you pluck it. The string does not need to be plucked harder. It needs to be tuned.

Now think about everything I have shown you. The stuck brain is a set of strings out of tune. The voice that will not stop is a string wound too tight. The path worn into despair is a note the instrument has learned to play by itself. Every tool I have described, the meeting, the counselor, the medication, the pulse, the prayer, the step, is a way of tuning a string. That is what they do. They do not manufacture the music. They bring the instrument back into a condition where the music becomes possible. The medication tunes a string the will could not reach. The trauma work tunes a string that had been snapped tight for forty years. The pulse tunes the string that no amount of plucking would ever have corrected.

Tuning an instrument is not the same as playing it. This is the center of the whole framework. God is the strummer. The tools tune the strings. The person shows up and holds the instrument. The music, the actual healing, the conscious contact, the thing that arrives when the string is finally in tune and finally struck, that is God's to give. This is why I can hold the device and the prayer in the same hand without contradiction. They are doing different jobs. The tool tunes. The person offers. God plays. No tool in this book is the healer. Every tool in this book is a way of getting the instrument ready for the One who is.

This is also why the order matters, why you cannot skip a string. An instrument with one string in tune and five still snapped tight will not make music. You have to tune them in order, the ones you can reach with the ordinary tools first, then the deeper ones, then the deepest, the one that needed the pulse. The Grammar of Healing is just this. Get the instrument in tune, string by string, in order, with the right tool for each string, and then the music that was always meant to come out of you finally can. You were made to resonate. The debris is only what kept you from it.

This teaching names tools by kind. Each tool is a single member of a class, Neuroplastic Therapeutics, among many that exist now and many more on the way. Magnetic stimulation, the pulse here, is cleared for treatment-resistant depression; it is named for depression and never as the work itself.