“Deaf, Dumb and Blind Kid”
Pete Townshend’s ‘Rock Opera’ “Tommy”, performed by The Who is a story about the journey taken by a boy called Tommy – played in the Movie by Roger Daltrey.
The movie, the songs and the album sleeve – remember those wonderful 12” album sleeves – tell slightly different stories about how the young Tommy came to be traumatized in the first instance resulting in becoming – apparently – deaf, dumb and blind.
“You didn’t hear it, you didn’t see it . . . never tell a soul what you know is the truth”
This is classic. It’s what happens to most people. It’s certainly happened to me.
We get told things, or we overhear things, we see things on screen, or we read things in books.
Usually between the ages of 2 and 12 but sometimes earlier or later.
And it has a profound, really profound, influence on the rest of our lives.
You see, at that time of our lives, you and I are open wide to ‘programming’ – not always as extreme as in the case of Tommy – but it happens.
It happens to almost everyone.
However good and careful their parenting is, most people cannot prevent direct and subliminal messages getting to us.
“Don’t speak to strangers” for example is not much use in later life and unfortunately no-one ever tells us as we grow up when it is OK to start speaking to strangers!
We just suddenly get ‘told’ to speak to groups of people we don’t know, to people we want to influence in some way, to describe to ‘strangers’ what we do – and so on.
But it isn’t our parents who tell us to do this, it’s someone else – someone who our subconscious sees as a ‘stranger’ – and we don’t talk to them, do we!
These ‘programs’ are hardly ever ‘deleted’ from our subconscious or conscious minds except through some form of therapy.
Using Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT) I have helped several people discover how they have unwittingly been programmed in this way and shown them how to remove, or at the very least ignore, these thoughtforms.
All that ‘normal’ childhood programming can be removed, as can the results of more extreme childhood trauma, in a very short space of time. The techniques are really quite simple but as a therapist I have to know which tools to use in which circumstance.
But there are other issues that lie much deeper because in certain ways most people are still “deaf, dumb and blind kids”.
You see, there’s an underlying story to ‘Tommy’ which was explained by Pete Townshend in a documentary I was watching the other day.
And I must admit, I was surprised.
Townshend explained that the story was a metaphor for a spiritual journey. A journey from darkness to enlightenment.
A journey that you and I take, a journey everyone takes – and like Tommy, most people screw up.
In the story, Tommy realises the truth of his existence, but like many others who have done something similar he attempts to ‘convert the masses’ creating a cult, a pseudo religion, aided and abetted, as has happened many times in reality, by people around him who want to exploit his celebrity.
And at the beginning of the story, Tommy wasn’t really deaf, dumb, and blind. He was just doing what he’d been programmed to do.
- He wasn’t hearing
- He wasn’t seeing
- He wasn’t communicating
And in his case the programming was so strong that he wasn’t hearing anything, seeing anything, or communicating anything, and because of this there was a lot of other abuse along the way that embedded the program even further.
There are some interesting lyrics in the section titled ‘Amazing Journey’ that describes a Gandalf/Dumbledore like figure that would guide him to learn ‘all that he should know’.
And Tommy found a channel, a way to express himself – pinball.
He played pinball by feel, by vibration, by intuition, like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars learnt to use the light sabre.
Tommy is an echo of everyone including you and me.
We are on an ‘amazing journey’, and we have our own guides.
Spirit guides – they act like Gandalf, Dumbledore and Yoda – they don’t necessarily tell us what to do or how to do it, but they do show us the way.
If we are listening – if we are seeing – and if we are communicating with ourselves in understanding.
Butt the thing is we’ve been programmed for lifetimes not to do that!
Not to do it ourselves anyway; most people have been programmed to listen, see and communicate through someone else, through some ‘organisation’ that claims to have ‘higher authority’ or access to a higher power.
The fact is that we all have direct access to a higher power – whatever we choose to call it, perhaps ‘the Universe’ ‘Spirit’, ‘Humanity’, ‘God’ and so on and we are being guided by that ‘higher power’.
All the time – not just when we ask.
The whole idea of personal spirituality is dismissed by most people as some sort of ‘mythology’ – it’s dismissed as ‘a load of nonsense’ or something to be scared of because those organisations who have assumed some sort of ‘spiritual authority’ have been marketing that idea for millennia.
Although strangely they are all giving out the same message – there is a higher power.
One of the best descriptions of a higher power is actually ‘humanity’ – humanity collectively, acting and thinking together.
As Neale Donald Walsch says in ‘Conversations With God’ – “There is only one of us”.
But are we listening, hearing and communicating this truth?
Have you found your ‘pinball’?
Your channel for communicating what you hear and see.
If not, or even if you’re already on your way, follow you spirit guide (we all have a few), your intuition, your ‘gut feeling’.
The ‘truth’ isn’t ‘out there’ – it’s within you – just listen, watch, and communicate with others to help them discover it too.
Enjoy the quest.