The Word and the Water

A Japanese researcher named Masaru Emoto took two glasses of water from the same source, taped a word to each, and froze them. To one he gave love and gratitude, thank you, I love you. To the other he gave contempt, you fool, I hate you. Then he photographed the crystals as they formed. The loving water bloomed into radiant six-pointed lattices, snowflake cathedrals of perfect symmetry. The hateful water could not hold a shape at all, only brown collapse and broken, asymmetric fragments. He ran it again with cooked rice sealed in jars, and the loved rice fermented sweetly while the cursed rice turned black and rancid.^footnoteEmoto, M. (2004). The Hidden Messages in Water. Beyond Words Publishing. The work that first put the loving-words and hateful-words crystal photographs in front of millions of readers. The images went around the world, because everyone who has ever spoken in anger and felt a room change already knew, in the body, that this was true. A word is not nothing. A word lands somewhere, and it does something.

The establishment waved it away, the way it waves away anything it cannot yet fit into a model. But when the experiment was finally run under strict blinding, it held. Around two thousand people in Tokyo focused loving intention on water sealed inside an electromagnetically shielded room in California, and a panel of one hundred independent judges, none of whom knew which sample was which, rated the crystals from the targeted water as significantly more beautiful than the controls.^footnoteRadin, D., Hayssen, G., Emoto, M., Kizu, T. (2006). Double-blind test of the effects of distant intention on water crystal formation. Explore, 2(5), 408-411. Roughly 2,000 people directed intention toward shielded water; 100 blinded judges rated the treated-water crystals as significantly more pleasing than the controls, P = .001. Words reached the water across a continent, through steel and through blinding, and changed what it became.

Now go further, because Emoto's only real mistake was the size of his vessel. He poured the water into a glass and set it on a bench, where it had nothing to do. The vessel where this experiment actually runs, where it has been running every second of your life, is the one reading this sentence. You are up to sixty percent water. Your brain is seventy-three percent.^footnoteU.S. Geological Survey, The Water in You, citing Mitchell, H. H. et al. (1945), Journal of Biological Chemistry, 158, 625-637: up to about 60 percent of the adult body is water, the brain and heart about 73 percent, the lungs about 83 percent. You are a standing column of charged saltwater that generates every thought you will ever think, every fear you will ever rehearse, and every reality you will ever perceive. The question was never whether a word can move a glass of water on a shelf. The question is what a word, repeated a thousand times, does to the three pounds of living water that is generating your whole world. That question is not open. It has been answered, cold, in laboratory after laboratory. The word writes.

Emoto put the water on a bench, where it had nothing to do. The vessel where the experiment actually runs is the one reading this sentence.

The case runs in three moves, and each one is settled. Vibration organizes matter. Belief rewrites biology. And between them sits the engine that makes you, a brain that filters reality and physically rewires itself to the words you run through it most. What the culture calls manifestation is not a wish thrown at the sky and hoped over. It is this machinery, running whether you command it or not. Learn to command it.

The Word becomes form

Vibration organizing matter is not mysticism. It is 1787. Ernst Chladni dusted a steel plate with fine sand and drew a bow across its edge, and the sand did the impossible. It fled the parts of the plate that moved and gathered, in seconds, along the lines that stood perfectly still, the nodes of the standing waveStanding waveA vibration pattern in which certain points, the nodes, stay perfectly still while the regions between them oscillate. On a struck plate or a vibrating membrane the still nodal lines form a fixed geometry for each frequency, and that geometry snaps into a new shape the instant the pitch changes.. A single tone became a fixed geometry, a star, a lattice, a mandala, with no hand arranging it. Change the pitch and the figure leapt into a new one. We call them Chladni figuresChladni figuresThe geometric patterns loose powder forms on a vibrating plate, named for Ernst Chladni, who first mapped them in 1787. Each figure is the visible signature of a single frequency: the shape a sound makes when it is allowed to organize matter., and they founded the science of acoustics.^footnoteChladni, E. F. F. (1787). Entdeckungen ueber die Theorie des Klanges (Discoveries in the Theory of Sound), Leipzig. Bowing sand-strewn plates made the standing-wave geometry of a tone visible for the first time and inaugurated the science of acoustics.

Michael Faraday carried it into liquid in 1831. Water on a vibrating surface does not merely slosh, it self-organizes into regular standing-wave lattices, and Faraday found the exact law underneath them.^footnoteFaraday, M. (1831). On a peculiar class of acoustical figures, and on certain forms assumed by groups of particles upon vibrating elastic surfaces. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 121, 299-340. Fluids on a vibrating surface organize into standing-wave patterns, now called Faraday waves. Vibration sculpting water into geometry is exact, lawful physics. A century later the physician Hans Jenny named the whole phenomenon cymaticsCymaticsFrom the Greek kyma, wave: the study of how a single frequency drives loose matter, sand, powder, paste, and fluid, into fixed geometric standing-wave forms that change with the pitch. Coined by Hans Jenny in 1967, built on the physics of Chladni and Faraday. and photographed tones sculpting powders and pastes and water into living geometric forms. This is why I keep a steel plate and a handpan on my bench, and why I have put it on camera more times than I can count. Sound, stripped of the candles and the crystals, is standing-wave physics, and you can watch a single frequency pull dead sand into a living mandala in real time. Vibration is the organizing force. Matter is what obeys it. In the beginning was the Word stops being theology and becomes a description of how form arises.

Now put yourself inside the picture, because you are made of exactly the two things on that plate. You are vibration, an electrochemical oscillation running in every nerve and broadcasting a measurable field. And you are water, the most responsive medium there is. When you speak, you drive a vibration through that water, your own voice resonating in your own chest and skull. Repeat it, and you leave a mark. The most rigorous place in the universe to watch a word become form in a human being is not a frozen crystal on a slide. It is the nervous system, where the mark a word leaves can be measured down to the molecule. So that is where I will take you.

The filter that builds your world

Here is the number that should rearrange how you see your own life. Your senses take in information on the order of eleven million bits every second. Your conscious mind handles a few dozen.^footnoteThe eleven-million-bits figure comes from the sensory physiologist Manfred Zimmermann; the contrast with conscious throughput was made famous by Tor Norretranders in The User Illusion (English edition 1998). The senses gather on the order of eleven million bits per second, and awareness handles only a handful of them. Something throws away more than ninety-nine point nine percent of reality before you ever see it, and whatever it keeps is the entire world you will ever consciously live in. The gate that decides what survives that cut is, in the most literal sense, the author of your reality. And you can program the gate.

That gate has a name. It is the reticular activating systemReticular activating systemThe brain's master arousal and filtering system, running up from the brainstem through the thalamus to the cortex. Moruzzi and Magoun showed in 1949 that stimulating it flips the brain from sleep to full waking. It sets what you are awake to, and it tunes itself to whatever you treat as important., and Moruzzi and Magoun found it in 1949 when they discovered that stimulating a small knot of cells in the brainstem could flip an animal from a sleeping brain to a wide-awake one in an instant.^footnoteMoruzzi, G., Magoun, H. W. (1949). Brain stem reticular formation and activation of the EEG. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1(4), 455-473. Stimulating the brainstem reticular formation switches the cortex from a sleeping pattern into the activated, waking one. It is the brain's master arousal and gating system. It governs what reaches you, and it tunes itself to whatever you have told it matters.

Watch how absolutely it filters. Put a person in a room of overlapping voices and they lock onto one conversation and lose every other, the cocktail party effect, until their own name is spoken across the room and cuts straight through, because the filter is set to it.^footnoteCherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25(5), 975-979. The founding demonstration of selective attention: we follow one stream and discard the rest, except for what we have flagged as important. Show a hundred and ninety-two people a video and tell them to count basketball passes, and nearly half of them will fail to see a person in a full gorilla suit walk into the middle of the frame, turn to the camera, beat its chest, and walk off. Fully visible, and unseen, because they were told to look for something else.^footnoteSimons, D. J., Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059-1074. Of 192 observers, 46 percent never saw the gorilla. What you are not looking for, you do not see. Buy a particular car and the next day you see it on every street. The cars did not multiply. Your filter changed, and the world reorganized itself around the new instruction.^footnoteThe effect is the frequency illusion, named by the linguist Arnold Zwicky in 2005, and it runs on the same drive Peter Wason demonstrated in 1960 (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology): once a belief is held, the mind seeks the evidence that confirms it. You find what you are set to find.

This is manifestation with its mechanism finally bolted on, and it requires nothing supernatural. The aim you hold, the fear you rehearse, the identity you repeat, all of it becomes the filter's standing instruction, and the filter rebuilds the world that reaches you to match it. Decide you are unlucky and your attention will hand you a life of closed doors and quietly bury every open one, and by Friday you will have a mountain of proof that you were right, because you set the very instrument that gathers your proof. Decide you are looking for the opening, and the same street, the same inbox, the same difficult room will deliver a different world. You will always find the evidence. The only question is what you told the instrument to look for. I argued in a companion essay on attention and the future that the quality of your attention helps select which future arrives. This is the nearer and even surer half of it: attention does not only choose your future, it builds your present, second by second, by deciding which reality you are permitted to see.

You will always find the evidence. The only question is what you told the instrument to look for.

The groove in the water

Why repetition, and not one grand declaration? Because the filter is wetware, and wetware takes the shape of its own use. Donald Hebb stated the law in 1949: a connection between neurons that fires repeatedly grows stronger, until firing the first makes firing the next almost inevitable.^footnoteHebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior. Wiley. Repeated co-firing strengthens the connection between neurons. The popular phrasing, neurons that fire together wire together, was coined later by Carla Shatz; the principle is Hebb's. And this is not an abstraction. It is carved into living tissue. London taxi drivers, who spend years memorizing twenty-five thousand streets, grow visibly larger memory centers at the back of the brain, and the longer they drive, the larger that region becomes.^footnoteMaguire, E. A. et al. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. PNAS, 97(8), 4398-4403. Years of intensive navigation physically enlarged the posterior hippocampus, with size tracking experience. Use reshapes the organ. Adults who train for three months to juggle grow new grey matter in the visual brain, real tissue, that you can measure on a scan.^footnoteDraganski, B. et al. (2004). Neuroplasticity: changes in grey matter induced by training. Nature, 427(6972), 311-312. Three months of practice grew measurable grey matter. The brain physically remodels to what you repeatedly do. The brain is not fixed hardware. It is wet clay, and it hardens along the lines you run through it most.

A thought run every day is a channel cut every day, and the water of your attention flows where the channel is deepest, cutting it deeper still. That is the literal neurology of a habit, and the literal neurology of everything you call your default self. The grooves you live inside were cut by repetition, which means they can be recut the same way. You are never stuck. You are always, with every repeated thought, carving.

The brain is wet clay that hardens along the lines you run through it most. A thought run daily is a channel cut daily.

Programming for abundance, or for ruin

So the words you repeat to yourself are not background noise. They are the instruction set you load into the filter and the chisel you drag across the tissue, and the evidence for what they do is specific, measured, and double-edged.

Take the building side first. A few minutes spent writing about a value you genuinely hold, before a stressful event, measurably lowers the cortisol your body floods out under that stress.^footnoteCreswell, J. D. et al. (2005). Affirmation of personal values buffers neuroendocrine and psychological stress responses. Psychological Science, 16(11), 846-851. Affirming a core value before a stressor significantly reduced the cortisol response. The word reached the bloodstream. Put a person in a brain scanner, give them a self-affirmation, and the brain's valuation and reward center lights up, and the strength of that signal predicts who will actually change their behavior over the next month, measured by a motion sensor rather than by anything they claimed.^footnoteFalk, E. B. et al. (2015). Self-affirmation alters the brain's response to health messages and subsequent behavior change. PNAS, 112(7), 1977-1982. Affirmation activated the brain's valuation center, and that activity predicted real, accelerometer-measured behavior change a month later. The word moved the body. Across dozens of controlled studies, deliberate self-talk reliably improves performance.^footnoteHatzigeorgiadis, A. et al. (2011). Self-talk and sport performance: a meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(4), 348-356. Across 32 studies, structured self-talk reliably improved performance. What you say to yourself changes what you can do.

But the word has to be one you can believe, and this is the part the affirmation industry never tells you. Repeat a sentence your own nervous system rejects as a lie, and it does not lift you, it writes the opposite, deeper.^footnoteWood, J. V., Perunovic, W. Q. E., Lee, J. W. (2009). Positive self-statements: power for some, peril for others. Psychological Science, 20(7), 860-866. Repeating I am a lovable person left people with low self-esteem feeling worse: a word the speaker cannot believe rebounds against them. The instruction must be credible to write. The lever is a true word, anchored to who you are actually becoming and aimed at a future you can stand behind, repeated until it is plainly so. I am someone who trains writes cleanly into a life, because tomorrow you can prove it. A grand lie chanted at a mirror only widens the gap it was meant to close. Credible words program. Fantasy backfires.

And bury the subliminal-tape myth while we are here, because it is the cartoon version of all this. Subliminal advertising began as a literal hoax, a man who claimed flashing eat popcorn between film frames lifted sales and later admitted he had invented the numbers. When researchers ran proper blinded tests of subliminal self-help tapes, people improved on whatever they believed the tape was for, no matter what was actually recorded on it.^footnoteGreenwald, A. G. et al. (1991). Double-blind tests of subliminal self-help audiotapes. Psychological Science, 2(2), 119-122. Listeners improved according to the label they expected, not the hidden content. The original subliminal-advertising claim (James Vicary, 1957) was admitted in 1962 to have been fabricated. Programming is not something slipped into you beneath awareness by a hidden voice. It is something you do, out loud, on purpose, by repetition and attention. The conscious, repeated, attended word is the one that writes.

Then the destroying side, and it is not gentle, because the same channel runs in reverse with equal force. Negative words cause real, physical harm. Tell a person an injection will hurt more and it hurts more, and that pain, manufactured by a sentence, is carried by a specific molecule and switched off by the drug that blocks that molecule.^footnoteBenedetti, F. et al. (2006). The biochemical and neuroendocrine bases of the hyperalgesic nocebo effect. Journal of Neuroscience, 26(46), 12014-12022. A negative verbal suggestion produced genuine pain, carried by cholecystokinin and blocked by the drug that blocks it. Words inflict measurable injury through a named pathway. This is the nocebo effectNocebo effectThe mirror of the placebo effect: negative expectation and language producing real, measurable harm, more pain, more nausea, worse outcomes, through identified pathways in the nervous system. Words can wound the body as surely as they can heal it., and its lesson is severe. The endless private commentary of self-contempt, I am stupid, I am sick, I always fail, nobody stays, is not harmless venting. It is a dose, delivered to a body that has the receptors to obey it. With every sentence you repeat about yourself you are either medicating the instrument or poisoning it, and the body does not check whose voice gave the order. It only hears the word.

Every repeated sentence about yourself is a dose, and the body has the receptors for both.

Belief is a pharmacology

The hardest proof that a word reaches all the way into the flesh is the one medicine spent a century trying to subtract out as noise. A placebo, an injection of plain saltwater, makes the brain of a Parkinson's patient release real dopamine, visible on a scan, in amounts that rival the actual drug.^footnotede la Fuente-Fernandez, R. et al. (2001). Expectation and dopamine release: mechanism of the placebo effect in Parkinson's disease. Science, 293(5532), 1164-1166. PET imaging showed a placebo triggered substantial dopamine release in the brain. Expectation alone produced a real neurochemical change. It works even with no deception at all. Patients told to their face, these are inactive sugar pills, nothing in them, still got significantly better, with roughly seventy percent reporting genuine relief, the honest placebo matching the deceptive one.^footnoteKaptchuk, T. J. et al. (2010). Placebos without deception. PLoS ONE, 5(12), e15591, replicated at scale by Lembo et al. (2021), Pain, 162(9), in 262 patients: an open-label placebo, known to be inert, beat no treatment and matched the deceptive placebo, with about 69 percent reporting meaningful improvement. The ritual and the expectation carry the cure. Placebos run on the body's own opioids and its own dopamine, the very same machinery the drugs borrow.^footnoteBenedetti, F. et al. (2022). Thirty years of neuroscientific investigation of placebo and nocebo. Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology, 62, 323-340. Placebos engage the same endogenous pathways, opioids, cannabinoids, dopamine, as active drugs. Expectation is a real pharmacology. Expectation is a pharmacology of the nervous system, and language is how the prescription gets written. Choose, then, with great care, the words you keep repeating over your own body, because it is filling them, faithfully, at its own pharmacy.

Resetting the default

Now the oldest reprogramming technology on earth, and the reason every tradition that ever took the inner life seriously arrived at the same instruction: say the sacred words, out loud, every day.

Begin with what the brain does when you leave it alone, because that is the thing the practice exists to interrupt. The resting brain is not quiet. It runs a specific network, a wandering inner voice that re-runs your grievances, rehearses your arguments, and narrates the small anxious story of you over and over.^footnoteRaichle, M. E. et al. (2001). A default mode of brain function. PNAS, 98(2), 676-682. The default mode network, the brain's resting baseline, is the seat of self-referential thought and mind-wandering, and it quiets when attention turns outward. That network is, almost literally, your default mode of living, the channel the water runs down when nothing redirects it, and experienced practitioners learn to switch it off.^footnoteBrewer, J. A. et al. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. PNAS, 108(50), 20254-20259. Experienced meditators show reduced activity in the core hubs of the default mode network. The inner narrator can be turned down at will. The lever the traditions found, on every continent, with no contact between them, was the recited word.

The default mode networkDefault mode networkThe brain's resting baseline network, most active when you are not focused on a task. It is the home of mind-wandering, rumination, and the constant self-referential narration of the ego. Quieting it, through recitation or meditation, is the measurable act of stepping out of the default self. can be taken offline by sound. When volunteers chant OM aloud in a scanner, the brain's fear centers, the amygdala among them, go quiet, while a matched, meaningless hiss does nothing at all. It is the sacred syllable, not merely the breath, that does the work.^footnoteKalyani, B. G. et al. (2011). Neurohemodynamic correlates of OM chanting. International Journal of Yoga, 4(1), 3-6. Audible OM chanting deactivated the limbic system, the amygdala included, while a matched ssss sound did not. The chant quiets the brain's alarm. Recite the Latin rosary or a Sanskrit mantra and your breathing settles, on its own, to almost exactly six cycles a minute, the precise rhythm that pulls the heart and the circulation into a single coherent wave.^footnoteBernardi, L. et al. (2001). Effect of rosary prayer and yoga mantras on autonomic cardiovascular rhythms. BMJ, 323(7327), 1446-1449. Both the Ave Maria rosary and a yoga mantra slowed breathing to about six per minute, synchronizing the heart and circulation and raising baroreflex sensitivity. Put a Franciscan nun deep in prayer and a Tibetan monk deep in meditation in the same scanner, and the same fingerprint appears in both, the same regions firing, a single state reached through different doors.^footnoteNewberg, A. et al. (2001, 2003). SPECT imaging of Tibetan Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns in verbal prayer found the same increase in frontal, attention-related activity during practice across both traditions. Different faiths, one neural signature. Twelve minutes a day of a repeated mantra sharpens memory and drives more blood into the thinking brain.^footnoteInnes, K. E. et al. (2017), Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 56(3), 899-916; Newberg, A. et al. (2010), 20(2), 517-526. A short daily chanted-mantra practice improved memory and increased cerebral blood flow in older adults. Listening to the recited Quran lowers anxiety across trial after trial.^footnoteGhiasi, A., Keramat, A. (2018). The effect of listening to Holy Quran recitation on anxiety: a systematic review. Iranian Journal of Nursing and Midwifery Research, 23(6), 411-420. Across the literature, hearing Quran recitation consistently reduces anxiety. The recited word calms the body. Tradition after tradition, scan after scan, the same result: the recited word remakes the brain.

This is why it must be sounded, and not skimmed with the eyes. The recitation is three operations at once. It is a vibration driven through the water you are made of, your own cymatic tone. It is a repetition cut daily into the tissue, the groove deepening with every pass. And it is an attention aimed straight at the default narrator until it falls silent. The Quran is meant to be recited aloud, not read. The mantra is sounded. The prayer is said. Run every day, it wears down the old worn channel of the anxious self and lays a new one toward stillness. The traditions called this purification, the dissolving of the lower nature. The scan calls it the silencing of the default network and the rewiring of the brain. They are two languages for one act.

I will say one thing about the figure behind the practice, because it is the deepest part. In every one of these traditions the recited word is not the speaker's own invention but something received, the Name, the revealed verse, the given mantra, and the one who recites it is tuning toward a single Light, never generating it. Take that literally. You are an instrument, a spark of one source, and the work is to become clean enough to carry the signal, never to mistake the instrument for what it carries. Every road here runs toward the same one Almighty under a different name, and the human being is the receiver, not the broadcast.

The default mode of living is a network. Recitation, sounded daily, takes it offline and lays a new track.

You cannot change a person

One hard truth falls out of all of this, and it is the most useful sentence in the essay, so I will state it flatly. You cannot change another person. Not because people cannot change, they can, the brain stays plastic to the last day of life, but because the rewiring is, by its physical nature, self-administered. The groove is cut only by their own repeated attention. The filter is reset only by what they themselves keep looking for. The default narrator is silenced only by the words they themselves recite. You can hand someone the truest sentence ever spoken and it will not write, exactly the way I am lovable would not write for the people who could not yet believe it. No one can run the affirmation, hold the attention, or sound the mantra on another's behalf, any more than you can eat their food and leave them fed.

This is why every serious tradition makes the work first-person and refuses to perform it for you. The holy book is recited by the seeker, not read at him. The mantra is given to be practiced, not chanted over the student like a spell. The prayer must be said, by the one who needs it, in their own breath. The locked door is the gift, not the cruelty: it means no one can program you without your repetition either, that the final authorship of your nervous system can be neglected but never seized. So stop pouring your one life into rewriting people who have not picked up the instrument, and turn that whole force where it can actually write. The only nervous system you have been given the keys to is your own. That is not the small power. It is the entire power, and it is more than enough.

The only nervous system you have the keys to is your own. That is not the small power. It is the whole of it.

The practice

Strip it to a protocol, and a daily practice falls out of the mechanism.

• Choose the instruction, not the fantasy. Write the words you can actually stand behind, anchored to a value you hold and aimed at the self you are becoming, present tense and specific. I am someone who trains, not I have a perfect body. A credible word cuts into the tissue. A word your own mind rejects cuts the opposite way, so never hand yourself a sentence you cannot believe.

• Set the filter before the day floods in. In the first quiet minutes, name plainly what you are looking for, the opening, the next right move, the evidence that your aim is working. You are loading the gate that will spend the next sixteen hours gathering proof. It returns whatever you send it after, so send it on purpose.

• Recite, out loud, every day. Sound the words, do not merely think them. A line, a verse, a mantra, a prayer, ten to twenty minutes. Aloud, because the vibration and the breath are half the operation. Daily, because the channel is cut by repetition. The same words each time, because depth comes from running one groove, not sampling many. This is the part that takes the narrator offline and lays the new track.

• Repetition, times emotion, times attention. The channel cuts fastest when the word is repeated, felt, and fully attended. A bored mumble barely scratches. A word you mean, with your whole attention behind it, cuts deep. Emotion is the chisel, so bring the feeling, not just the syllables.

• Guard the input as fiercely as the output. You are programmed by what you repeat and by what you let be repeated at you. The doomscroll, the contemptuous inner monologue, the company that narrates your smallness back to you, these are nocebo doses run on your instrument by other hands. Curate the signal without mercy. Silence beats a corrosive input every time.

• Prove it with action. The word sets the aim, the act drives it home and feeds the filter the real evidence it then compounds. As I put it in the essay on attention, hold the aim and do the work. Here is its other half: choose the words, and sound them every day.

Two programs run on the same hardware. One is written by accident, by whatever the feed, the crowd, and your worst days happened to repeat at you, and it cuts a groove toward smallness and grievance and a body braced for the worst, and the filter will spend the rest of your life faithfully gathering the evidence that you were right to despair. The other is written on purpose, a true word chosen with care, recited aloud every day, guarded from corrosion, and proven by action, and it cuts a groove toward clarity and health and a world that keeps, somehow, handing you the opening, because you finally told the instrument what to find. Emoto's water on the bench could only hold the message faintly. The water you are made of holds nothing else. Every day, without exception, you are either programming the instrument or letting the room program it for you. Pick up the pen.

Sources

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