Hypnosis


My daughter brought me a gift. She noticed that I liked the Dilbert comic strip and so she brought me a book by the strip's creator, Scott Adams: "The Dilbert Principle." In the introduction, Adams writes, "I'm a trained hypnotist .. as a byproduct of this training I learned that people are mindless, irrational, easily manipulated dolts ... it's how our brains are wired. You make up your mind first, and then you rationalize it second. But because of the odd mapping of your perceptions you're convinced beyond a doubt that your decisions are based on reason."

Hypnosis should probably be a required course for anybody living in a democracy, because it teaches you about the power of unconscious suggestion. The first thing I remember learning from the psychologist with whom I first studied Ericksonian hypnosis, was, "Your personal recollection of the past is fiction."

When I first heard this, I tried to argue with it. I didn't argue out loud, with the professor, but I entertained internal doubts about what he was saying. I know now that I had some fear that the hypnotist had secret knowledge by which he could take control of my mind. Now I know that other people can have that picture of me if their exposure to hypnosis has been stage performance. I try to keep a professional demeanor.

I have a handlebar mustache and long, skinny fingers which habitually play with the ends. I never blink and can see into the minds of other people as easily as a cat looking into a goldfish bowl. My motive is complete control, because nothing is so inviting as the prospect of taking total responsibility for somebody else. It brings to mind Dylan's lyrics from "Things Have Changed."

"Think I'll fall in love with the first woman that I meet. Put her in a wheelbarrow and wheel her off down the street."

There may be hypnotists who want to control other people and consolidate their power as masters of the masses, but they either have very little experience or a flat learning curve.

One of the things Adams refers to is that people think they have values, but if these values are examined they will be revealed to be justifications which followed essentially amoral actions. It is the action which comes first, and the justification comes second. The law of cognitive dissonance demands that the actions and values match. So if one child obeys the cultural rules, he or she will justify obeying on the basis that the rules are valuable and must be held in place by denial of desire. Voila! A conservative.

The next child, not being the eldest in the family and thus being freed from such expectations, experiments with breaking the rules. She or he justifies this on the basis that there's no adventure inside the rule book.

"Aunts and cousins, buy the baker's dozens, drives a man to sea or highway robbery." (Geoff Muldaur: I Want to be Sailor)

And of course there are all the children split between the good part of themselves, which follows the rules, and the bad part, which doesn't. And there are the therapists, some of whom are charging three hundred an hour, who deal with the symptoms. These symptoms include an inability to recall one side when the other has dominance, so that you develop an ego and a shadow self in conflict, and of course debilitating cognitive dissonance, because it is not possible to reconcile the ego values and the shadow behaviors.


"What Piggly Wiggly?"

Laws can be corrupt, and if you follow them you will be part of the corruption. Again, once you have performed an action, you will justify it. What would have been immoral before we conspired in it, has now become moral.

Stories, however, are a different system of morality. The story has to connect to a deep, archetypal pattern to be recognized as a story which carries a collective truth. These patterns are not so hard to find; you can find all of them in Shakespeare. If you know the story, or the pattern, you have been pulled into, you know that your character will play his or her role unconsciously, first. Consciousness comes later. It's like the scene in Groundhog Day when Phil finally remembers the puddle, and doesn't step in it that time.

It is only in understanding your own behavior as not personal, but as part of a much larger collective mystery, that you can resolve the duality built into a system based in religious law.

So, the process of becoming conscious is the process of moving from identification with a character to identification with the Playwright, who knows all of the characters. And from this perspective you begin to see that the past from any single character's point of view is hopelessly skewed. Things are remembered which were actually stories told about the past, and may not have happened at all. There are memories which have been blocked off because they have no associative context, and so cannot be retrieved. Then, there is the basic problem that the ego memory tends to edit out shadow memories.

"You are just the story now and the law it falls away.
It cannot keep the timing now, without night and day.
You are just the story now and all the roles you play.
You are all the actors now and all the things they say.

"You're the only cop in town and you're the only priest.
You left what would release you waiting at the feast.
You have to make a choice now rituals or war.
Sacraments don't work when you don't know what they are for."

(Pass the Ammunition, Dan Lee ©2001)


When I wrote "Pass the Ammunition," the line about sacraments don't work if you don't know what they're for bothered me, because it isn't true. The psyche is a pattern reading device and if you do a formal ritual for a specific purpose, then the psyche accepts it as if it actually happened in real time.

Let's say for example that you have tried to be very good, following corrupt laws, and instead you have taken on a shitload of shadow material, discovering the truth of the axiom that he who emulates the angel becomes the beast, or that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, or something similar. The bottom line is that you have discovered that you become what you resist, and that you have resisted your own evil.

What to do? You could get together with some of your friends, who look like you and belong to the same church, and kill a stranger for bringing that evil down on you. What's he gonna do about it? You're many and he's one, you're powerful and he's weak. So you condemn him and kill him, and this takes care of the problem ... for this social season, anyway. There's always another stranger, and if you don't find an African you'll find a Russian, or an Arab, a Persian, a Communist, a Catholic, or even a Frenchman in a pinch, man.

Just put the shadow on and kill them. That's the important thing to remember. One witch who's been poisoning the wells can last the whole season if you stone her with enough righteous indignation.

Sacred time ritual is different. It requires a bit more imagination, and it requires creating the pattern of the unconscious ritual which satisfies the demand for balance between dark and light. So you set up a ritual and crucify an innocent Jew. But this one is magical. He not only wants the shadow so that he can absolve the community of evil, he's magically reborn so you can do the same ritual next season.

Either way you get the same result. It depends on whether you prefer the god of war or the prince of peace, actually, and there's not much more to it than that. It's surprising how many people prefer war because they do not understand the purpose of the rituals.

When I examined my concerns about the line, "sacraments don't work if you don't know what they are for," I began to see that the sacraments have become habituated, and people really don't understand why they do them anymore. They think they have to have enemies and war, and that any other perception is soft headed.

If we are going to have a free society there is no choice but to become conscious of the rituals, so that we are not under the power of old, corrupt, institutions. Our institutions need to reflect our need for consciousness, and teach it, not try harder and harder to make everybody bow to its magic.



"Pay no attention to that
man behind the curtain."

For me, hypnosis is a powerful form of communication, and the message hidden down beneath all of the marketing of it is that it is basically a spiritual practice. If you understand that you have to match your values and actions, then you at least have a chance to realize it's up to you to determine your own values, so that you can make decisions.

And in the recognition of the past being fiction comes the recognition that you can create your own story, with an archetypal base. "The sorcerer is an empty man except for a collection of stories which have a collective application," Don Juan told Carlos.

There was a last verse on "Pass the Ammunition" which didn't get included in the song. It wasn't deliberately left out. Clay put down the guitar track and thought there was one less verse than there was, so we just shortened the song. This is the last verse:

The genius of his mercy is that he's reborn
You can't really kill yourself on a crown of thorns
When you're feeling hatred you will see his evil face
Showing your reflection in a polished mirrored glass.

Posted: Mon - August 21, 2006 at 10:54 AM