Coyote Fly Fishing


When I began studying hypnosis, my "bible" was Maurice Nicoll's lectures on the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, which is based in esoteric Christianity. The focus isn't outward, on what the church teaches you, but inward, on the development of an abstracted, or diamond, body. It is no different in essence from Castaneda's Don Juan teaching the shifting of allegiance to "the abstract." In any case, when this is the path, studying hypnosis and reading good literature are great advantages for someone with my nature. For someone else, the great advantages might be learning to weave rugs or to do accounting.

One of the important things I did was running; another was juggling. Like weaving, they build in conscious connection to muscles involved in patterned movement. Weaving, and probably accounting, involve combining neural connections with a larger concept invisible from the weaver's or accountant's limited perception. My experience of my body when it came to consciousness was good muscle control. He could jump into the air, flip over in slow motion and hit on his feet. I say, "he," because I can't do that today. Everything has its time and function.

For all I know he left for parts unknown as soon as he came alive, leaving me a bitter old man popping saw palmetto and viagra while insisting, "Actually, I was meant to be a roving balladeer, like Woody Guthrie." I lost him as sure as Gilgamesh lost Inkadu. One must press on.



Nicoll's Commentaries are John
Cleese's favorite books ...

Like most people, I live two lives. There is the one connected to other people, the one that I use to navigate in daily commerce, and there is the private, inner life shared with only selected people. The former is a personality, or mask, which accommodates commerce and formal relationships, by which I mean relationships that rest mostly on formalities, or patterned interactions. The latter is something else. The patterns stop, when you want them to stop, and there is an experience of direct knowledge.

(Carlos asked Don Juan if there was any evolutionary advantage in being there all the time, and Don Juan said, "If there was we'd all be there.")

Direct knowledge is what Don Juan referred to as an older state of consciousness, beneath the patterned metaphor, or gloss, through which the world is constantly perceived, and thus, re-created. That sounds mysterious but it isn't really. If you know that your usual thinking is metaphorical, then you logically know that the mind is always separated, in time, from the actual body experience. The body experience goes unconscious and the "higher," filtered experience is conscious. In order to live in society we have to repress certain instinctual urges, and of course a lot of other things we'd never deliberately get rid of get caught in the net.

There are limits to how you are allowed interact in your particular social structure, without censure or, finally, banishment. To move past that situation, in the Hero's Journey myth, is moving past the guardians. You are not protected by the group identity anymore.

The purpose of the journey is to recover what was inadvertently caught in the net, but which is the energy needed for continuing life and health. Coleridge, in "The Ancient Mariner," has the old sailor relate that it was when he looked down at the snakes in the water, which he had feared, "and blessed them unaware," that the albatross fell away from him and sank, like lead, into the sea. The wind returned and the ship could move again. Like the frog bringing the ball from the well, the return of wholeness doesn't come from something beautiful and loving. More accurately, it's like William Burroughs pointed out, that the only way to freedom is through the Duad.

Nicoll talked about a process involving self-observation, non-identifcation, and self-remembering. Once you could observe yourself from an objective viewpoint, you could begin to separate from negative emotion. When I first read this I imagined negative emotion to be something mean and uncaring or whiny and complaining.

The real meaning is much simpler and less involved with being judgmental. A negative emotion is one which is unbalanced. It leaves things out, using selective evidence to present what is apparently true, but which does not have the resonance of completeness.

This is poisonous to relationship at any level, from friendship to governance. This is why there is a dangerous draining away of energy in the entire society when there is leadership which stuffs supportive evidence under a self-serving policy instead of building a policy on a foundation of an objective weighing of all evidence.

It is the separation of the energy into ego and shadow which creates the duality in consciousness. And so the resolution of the duality is the shift to pure objectivity. One sees directly. The state of objectivity is one in which there is a larger consciousness than can be experienced by an isolated half of a duality. The result of this is what Nicoll calls, "Self Remembering." He doesn't talk much about self-remembering, because there isn't much to say, just as in Castaneda's system there isn't much to say about reaching freedom.

In the Persian story of the journey to the Western Lands, it must be in the order of Tamaghis, Ba'dan, Yas Waddah, Wagdas and finally comes the Self Remembering (or freedom, or individuation), and one reaches the twin cities of Ghadis and Nafana. Wagdas is the city of knowledge, and there is no way to the Western lands without passing through Wagdas, and no way out without facing your personal deadly enemy. This is the shadow confrontation. Beyond it, there is an objective perception of oneself as a duality, as twin cities, which remain simultaneously in consciousness.

Obviously, the problem with escaping from the smaller level of patterned consciousness into a larger or expanded state of consciousness is vanity, or, as Don Juan calls it, self-importance. Nicoll begins many lectures by cautioning the student about thinking he or she knows what he (Nicoll) is talking about. You can't know the larger container while in the smaller container. If you knew it already you would be wasting your time trying to learn how to achieve a growth in consciousness. You have a conception of it first, but it is based on what you already know, or your cultural consciousness. That isn't it, but it's where everybody starts out. You have to be a fool, first.

To remind myself of this, my first business card as a hypnotist and bodyworker depicted an anthropomorphic coyote fly fishing in a stream. This was the symbol of the fool, or trickster, trying to catch what is beneath the surface of the moving stream of everyday life. It was part of the mentoring process. The old faith healer who could only say, in english, "I can do this for you," mentored Pierre Clement, who wrote books for therapists, and he taught Dutch who in turn taught me, that you have to be willing to be a fool before you can learn something new. Thus, you embrace being the fool instead of fearing it.

If you can't bear being a fool -- and the ego rebels bitterly against it -- then the containment of the ego can't be breached. We are all fools when we begin something new, and so do it badly and maybe even laughably. And yet there is no way to incorporate the King without the other polarity of the energy field, which is the Fool. It's all one field with two polarities, and so there are twin cities, Ghadis and Nafana, beyond Wagdas. Before leaving Wagdas, what is true is what you have evidence for, and it is true to the extent of your understanding.

Beyond Wagdas nothing is true, therefore, everything is permitted.

Hypnosis as a business is more or less patterned. There are even groups which hand out certificates which practitioners can hang on the wall to prove they have some training. To my knowledge it cannot be licensed by the state because it cannot be defined, and certainly much religious practice relies on some form of hypnosis, so state regulation would be crossing that line. But hypnosis can be used as a business, with a defined process of induction, deepening, convincers, suggestions, etc.

"Your eyelids are glued together, Try to open your eyes." This is a convincer. Under hypnosis the mind is very literal in its thinking. That is the body mind, which is materialized. The suggestions can be overt or covert. They can be used for habit control, irrational fears, performance enhancement, etc. A covert suggestion might be a story which moves past the critical faculties of the conscious mind, but is understood at an unconscious level.

But hypnosis is not contained in that model, and the possibilities for growth are far more powerful than just habit control or overcoming a fear. Those things get taken care of in a larger process of self-discovery, and one which contains both the Trickster and the King in a unified field. For example:

When Milton Erickson couldn't get the concept of alphabetical order as a child, and read the dictionary from front to back every time he wanted to find a work, he was a fool. But when he had developed a vocabulary of beyond the grasp of most people, he could operate with a fine scapel when speaking with someone else. It was a foundation he needed to realize his destiny as the world's greatest medical hypnotist. He always had complete trust and faith in his traveling companion.

Sometimes we are like Erickson, plodding through the dictionary, fools to the outside observer, but beneath the flow, there's always something bigger, just as beneath the flow of the wool through the weaver's fingers, there is a larger design, which can only be seen at first, by the abstract, and then later finds material form ...


Flashfish Darts (©2002 Dan Lee Lyrics)

Lines are stray dogs running through these open hands.

So many fading brown and empty dusty streets. And

I am just one rider, on so many melancholy roads.


In the afternoon the moon appeared in a pale blue sky,

shattered sunlight came dancing on the stream, when like the

ghost of a dream, down beneath the flow the Flashfish darts

and in the pale blue moon above, my dear your echo starts..


Just one rider, under the pale moon of the afternoon,

So many roads to ride one by one.

The black moon is bathing in the Sun.


Just one rider, under the pale moon of the afternoon,

Black trees sing the crazy insect song, till time stands still,

And all the angels come dancing, now and then,

All the angels come dancing,

On the head of just this single pin, the ride begins,

Beneath the flow, the Flashfish darts.

In the pale blue moon above, my dear your echo starts.

Posted: Tue - April 24, 2007 at 03:45 PM