Unveiling the Mysteries of Symbols

If you’ve learned Reiki or Pellowah (beyond level 1), then you’ve undoubtedly come across symbols.

What’s more, you’ve likely been surprised by their power.

But have you ever really stopped to ponder where their power or energy comes from?

Is it all just placebo?

Or is there more to it?

To answer these questions, I'm going to explore both the four different types of symbols (yes, symbols can be born from very different forces) and the four different ways those symbols gain their power.

And if you hang around until the end, I'll even give you two bonus tips for getting more energy and power out of your symbols.

The Four Kinds of Symbols

Most people presume that symbols are pretty well all the same, but in fact there are at least four distinct symbol families. You have those that are:

Discovered
Channelled
Born of archetypal patterns
Invented

Discovered Symbols

Most discovered symbols are found in natural patterns.

Spirals/vortexes.

Lightning bolts.

5-fold geometry (found in starfish, apple cores and many flowers).

They are just a few examples that have found their way into symbology.

And they are all expressions of energy – ways of gathering and releasing it.

Take the spiral.

A spiral concentrates energy when it circles as it flows, and the closer the energy gets to the centre, the faster and stronger it becomes. Think of water spinning down a drain. Or an ice skater whirling faster and faster as they draw their arms in towards their body.

You see this pattern replicated in nature everywhere. Take a tornado, which is really just a giant spiral. It takes diffuse energy spread across kilometres of sky and focuses it into a point of immense power.

And spirals can of course work more slowly with energy. For instance, a sunflower lays down its seeds turn by turn in spirals of glorious mathematical precision (using the exact proportions of the Fibonacci sequence), so that it perfectly winds the most growth into the least space.

So whether we draw energy inwards, or expand it outwards, the spiral is nature's tool for gathering energy around a central point.

As such, when you draw a spiral-based symbol like the Cho Ku Rei, you're not just sketching a pretty shape. You're tracing the very pattern nature uses to concentrate energy.

Of course, energy doesn't only flow and spin. It vibrates – and vibrating energy creates patterns too.

This can be clearly seen with cymatics.

Sprinkle some sand on a metal plate connected to a tone generator. Tune it to a specific frequency, and something curious happens: the sand doesn't scatter randomly. It arranges itself into neat geometric patterns.

And what’s particularly fascinating for healers is that the higher the frequency, the more complex the pattern. At 345Hz, you get a fairly simple four-part shape with a circle in the middle. Up around 6000Hz, you get extremely intricate, mandala-like designs.

Seeing this is revelatory for a couple of reasons:

It shows that higher and lower energy frequencies objectively exist (and are not simply figments of the spiritual practitioner's imagination).

It lets us witness 'scientifically' how many symbols are formed, because when you hit specific energy frequencies, specific geometric patterns are formed.

What’s more, witnessing cymatics experiments helps us make sense of the many books on chakras that talk about the different chakras having a certain number of ‘lotus petals’, where the lower ones only have a few (e.g. the base has 4), while the higher ones have many (e.g. the crown is said to have 1000).

If you hadn’t seen experiments like this, you could easily think that the power of symbols is simply imaginary (or, at best, a kind of placebo). Seeing how cymatics works, however, you understand that there is something more to them. You witness how certain energy frequencies give rise to certain energy patterns.

This gets even more interesting when you understand that you can go from an energy frequency to a symbol (i.e. certain frequencies beget certain symbols), and you can go from a symbol to an energy frequency.

Seers all around the world realised this when they had visions of mandalas and the like. They discovered that if they created a physical representation of these mandalas and got people to focus and meditate on them, then these mandalas would help them tune in to the vibrational frequencies that created them.

In that way, these geometric shapes (symbols) can tune healers into specific energy frequencies, thus expanding the range of energies they can connect to (and use in their healing sessions).

Seen in this light, symbols are like tuning forks. By focusing on them, you tune in to their energy frequency – something you can then use both to change your vibrational state and to heal others.

Channelled Symbols

In healing communities, it's common for symbols to be channelled by psychics, energy workers and the like.

Mikao Usui, the founder of Reiki, is said to have received the Reiki symbols after fasting for several weeks on Mount Kurama.

Or reach back into mythology, and Odin was meant to have been given a gift of the runes after hanging on the World Tree for nine nights.

Of course, it's hard to prove or disprove such things, but we do have plenty of concrete evidence of healers channelling in symbols.

In fact, in my Pellowah Level 2 courses I actually get students to channel their own symbols after a series of preparatory exercises. And these symbols work very well!

Now later on I'll talk about where the power of symbols comes from, but for now it's enough to note that for thousands of years mystics, healers, and clairvoyants have been channelling in symbols. These symbols are then used for healing, meditation, and raising the energy of certain places like temples, shrines, and the like.

Symbols Born from Archetypal Patterns

Have you ever noticed how certain symbols keep showing up everywhere – in every age, on every continent?

The circle. The cross. The spiral. The tree of life.

These appear in cultures that had no contact with each other. You find them carved into 5000-year-old Irish tombs, painted in Tibetan sand mandalas, and woven into Navajo designs.

Different people and places. Same symbols!

So what's going on?

The psychologist Carl Jung hypothesised an answer: the collective unconscious. His idea was that beneath our personal minds lies a deeper, shared layer of the psyche – one we're all born with. And built into that layer are certain primal patterns, which he called ‘archetypes’.

Jung noticed, for instance, that mandala-like designs would appear spontaneously in the dreams and drawings of his patients – people who had never laid eyes on an actual mandala. This led him to believe that somehow the pattern was already in them.

Meditation figure within a circular symbol

Seen this way, an archetypal symbol works like a key cut to fit a lock we're all born with, and when it turns, you’re connected to certain energies that lie within you.

In other words, like with symbols created by energy frequencies (like we saw with cymatics), the archetypal symbols help tune us into energy – just this time, energy lying within us.

The archetypal pattern sits in your deeper mind, waiting. So when you gaze at a mandala or trace a spiral, it resonates with something within you and sets energy humming. You tap into an energy that has been lying dormant within you.

Which is why these archetypal symbols need no explanation. Nobody has to teach you that a circle means wholeness, for some part of you simply senses this the moment you see it.

Invented Symbols

Last of all, we have invented symbols. These are symbols that someone – you guessed it! – invented. They didn’t claim any mystical origin. They never said they were channelled. They simply got out their pen or favourite writing instrument and dreamt something up.

The classic example of such symbols occurs in sigil magic, developed largely by the early 20th-century English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare.

A sigil is a symbol created for a specific purpose, such as attracting money or building confidence, and Spare's method for creating one involved a few steps.

First, he’d get you to write down a statement of intent, for example, "I speak with confidence." Then he’d have you cross out all the repeating letters, before weaving the remaining ones together into a single abstract glyph (i.e. a small drawn symbol, of the kind you'd find etched on a talisman).

That glyph is your sigil (or, for our purposes, symbol), and to make it truly potent, Spare got you to 'charge' it in a heightened state (for instance, deep meditation) before forgetting about it (so that your intent could sink below the conscious mind to do its work).

This, admittedly, is getting pretty fancy, but if you want, you can just draw any image with the intent that it carries a certain meaning or energy. For instance, you could draw a smiley face and decide that it is a symbol for happiness. If you then focus this intention into the smiley face often enough, it may well begin to work as intended.

This type of symbol doesn’t have any innate energetic qualities. There is nothing necessarily special about its geometry that lends it power. It hasn’t been channelled from who knows what energetic realm. Its power simply comes from the intent poured into it.

So it works in more or less the same way as charging crystals does, and in essence, the symbol (like the crystal) becomes a ‘container for intent’.

And this leads us to the first of the four ways symbols gain their power…

Four Ways Symbols Gain Power

We've actually already touched on two ways symbols gain power. The first, as mentioned, is where someone pours their intent into them and they become a receptacle or container for this intent.

The more someone focuses their intent into the symbol, the more power it has.

In spiritual communities, there's the saying: "What you focus on grows." If this is true, then pouring our intent into symbols will work similarly. Think of it like putting wood on a fire, and then continuing to add more and more wood to it until its heat radiates out for metres all around it.

The wood is your intent, and the more of it you add, the stronger the energetic force of that intention radiates out from the ‘fire’, i.e. your symbol.

Now this method works beautifully with one person channelling intent into a symbol, but what if you could have many people? What if you could have thousands of people all around the world over hundreds of years doing the same?

This is the second way symbols gain power, and in this case, the power of that symbol would likely grow manyfold.

Reiki symbols, Pellowah symbols, even something like the cross, have all benefited from this collective intent being poured into them by thousands/millions of practitioners over the years.

So even if they didn't have any innate energy connected to them, they would still grow powerful thanks to all of the collective intent.

And this goes to show that symbols can actually have many layers to the power they express. They can be expressions of an energy frequency (the third way symbols gain power, as we saw with our example of cymatics), but they can also gain additional power both through an individual user’s intent and collective intent.

So this will help explain why the cross in the hands of a believer will be a much more effective symbol than the cross in the hands of an atheist. The cross might carry collective intent from millions of practitioners around the world, but for the atheist, it won't carry any of an individual user's intent.

In a moment I'll draw my grand conclusion from all this, but for now I want to mention the fourth way symbols help practitioners access more power, and that is by acting as focusing tools.

We see this clearly with mandalas and yantras.

‘Mandala’ literally means ‘circle’ in Sanskrit, and they're said to represent the universe and act as a tool to guide a practitioner's mind towards a place of enlightenment and wholeness.

A yantra (an abstract/geometric shape) literally means ‘instrument’, ‘machine’ or ‘apparatus’ in Sanskrit. Yantras are commonly used to invoke the presence of a specific deity, or to focus energy.

In a way, symbols (like mandalas and yantras) can be used like mantras. They help focus the mind on a single point rather than letting it scatter across a thousand different thoughts.

Think of them like a candle flame you can focus on, an anchor for the mind.

And like a magnifying glass that uses sunlight to set a leaf on fire, when you take energy and focus it on the single point, it can become extremely powerful.

Meditating figure within a brushstroke circle

This then leads us to arguably the most powerful symbols: those that tap into all four of these methods of accessing power – something that energetically multiplies their effect.

In other words, if you take a symbol that not only has innate power (i.e., it's an expression of a specific energy frequency, like cymatic symbols), but also one that has both your personal intent and the collective intent of thousands or millions of other people channelled into it, and you then also use it as a focusing tool, you then have a symbol that can help you access immense energy/power.

Think of it like this: innate symbol energy x individual intent x collective intent x focus = big result!

Two Ways to Connect Even More Strongly to Symbols

If you want to connect even more strongly to symbols, then I've got two bonus tips. The first is to draw them with your body as if you're doing Tai Chi.

You can do this by using one or two hands to draw them, stroke by stroke, out in front of you.

Using symbols like this, you’ll often connect to them more strongly, and also feel their energy reverberate through your entire body.

Next, where possible, it's great if you can be attuned to symbols.

This happens in Reiki courses where each student is attuned to the symbols they learn.

In this way, there's a kind of transmission, where a student leverages their teacher's ability to connect to the energy of a symbol.

Imagine the student and teacher to be like two tuning forks. The teacher tunes in to the frequency of the symbol, and this then helps the student tap into it more strongly as they start to resonate on the same frequency.

As a result, they are more connected to the symbol whenever they use it.

Lotus symbol within a brushstroke circle

Conclusion

Ultimately, the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Or in our case, the proof is in the energy symbols radiate. So it matters less where the energy of the symbols comes from than that they help a user tap into it.

The key is simply to use them and see how they go. If they work, then the theory doesn't matter much.

But remember that all symbols are different. So even if one symbol doesn't work for you, that doesn't mean another couldn’t.

So experiment with symbols and have fun. People have been using them across many traditions for thousands of years to great effect, so no matter what you currently think of them, they're definitely worth a shot.