This is season 2, episode 13, conscious self persuasion Beyond Hypnosis and the Waking Sleep. Over the course of the next few episodes, I want to discuss hypnosis and in particular self hypnosis or auto hypnosis, and give you points of view from the mainstream, from science, and also from what we could call the esoteric. I'll also give you Neville's instructions on his recommendations. 

This is kind of an interesting exploration because the phenomenon of hypnosis is an extraordinary one and it's not explained very well, it's not understood very well, and yet we can actually make use of it if we just understand what we're doing. So the topics I'll be covering will be mass hypnosis, individual hypnosis, that is heterohypnosis, hypnosis of one person by another, and auto hypnosis. And then I'll try to dig into the concept itself and give you a better definition. 

We'll find out that there's actually a false dichotomy. And this is some interesting information that Neville brings to the table. He says that the distinction between conscious and subconscious doesn't really exist. Then I'm going to describe a little bit about mental state and the significance of the mental state and the importance of belief and how we usually misconstrue what belief is all about, and how it works. So then I will try to put that information together and give you an interpretation, a clarified understanding of what hypnosis is all about. Finally I’ll conclude with what we can call conscious self persuasion and how we can really actually put that to use for our own benefit. 

I did talk about all this in an earlier episode in the first season of the podcast series, but I want to go back and do this part over because I'm writing a book with all of that material. My thinking has progressed and changed and I've gotten more information, so I want to run that by you in the next few episodes. 

On the topic of mass hypnosis, society at large is characterized from various perspectives as being in a state of hypnotic sleep. Here's A quote from Dr. Rolf Alexander. This was written back in the 50s. He says ‘we spend most of our lives in a state of spontaneous hypnotic sleep’. Then his mentor Gurdjieff was recorded as saying Ouspensky’s book ‘A modern man lives in sleep. In sleep he is born and in sleep he dies.’ Of course, he's referring to the same hypnotic sleep.

Neville himself says, ‘according to the scriptures, we sleep with Adam and wake with Christ.’ That is we sleep collectively. Adam is the symbol of the collective man and weak individually. 

So there we've got diverse viewpoints and there are even pronouncements from the mainstream about the consequences of this waking sleep. The consequences are disastrous. Here's another quote, this one from political commentator Chomsky. ‘The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures’. 

Okay, that was published back in the 80s. Now here's something a little more modern. ‘During a mass psychosis, madness becomes the norm in a society and delutionary beliefs spread like a contagion.’ This is from the episode called Manufacturing of a Mass psychosis Can Sanity Return to an Insane World? From the Academy of Ideas website. 
So in sum, we can say that sleep is the default mental condition. Of course, not physical sleep. They'talking about hypnotic waking sleep. It leaves people open to inculcation in elite-directed belief systems. So for example, social engineering uses fear, overwhelmingly. Thats the favorite emotion to play on to induce mass psychostis to support wars and other absurd political agendas.

How are people made to accept a new program of generalized obedience? Ask yourself the last time this happened. We could review scores of instances of mass propagandizing to destructive events, even when the duplicity of prior campaigns has already come to light. I'm sure you've seen examples where the prior political agenda, where people actually paid with their lives, has now become a joke because it's so absurd on the face of it.

Various power elites have discovered the truisms of mind control. It plays chiefly upon the feelings of debilitation, dependency, fear and isolation. 

It's interesting to try to understand this from various points of view. Gurdjieff, for example, is really unequivocal about it. He says: ‘It must be realized that the sleep in which man exists is not normal, but hypnotic sleep. Man is hypnotized and this hypnotic state is continually maintained and strengthened in him. One would think that there are forces for whom it is useful and profitable to keep man in a hypnotic state and prevent him from seeing the truth and understanding his position.’ 

In another place in the same text, he says there's really no organic reason for humanity to be asleep. So it is possible to awaken, but it must be done individually and there. Neville and Gurdjieff both agree. Awakening is an individual process. From his point of view, it would seem to be a cosmic phenomenon. It has to do with interplanetary space, how planets and cosmic forces are arranged; how the Absolute devolves to the local situation in our solar system... and things like that -- unless he's using the whole description along those lines as some sort of an allegory.

From the political analyst's (Chomsky's) point of view, it has to do simply with the control systems that are put in place through the mass media, run by a certain elite, who do perceive themselves as superior. That's clear from the writings that Chomsky quotes. It's got nothing to do with metaphysics. It's just political control. But from G.’s point of view, they're all on the same level - they're all asleep. 

From Neville's point of view, it's scriptural. It has to do with the Christian mystery, and how God took a decision to lay himself down and die within the human form. That is the sleep that is referred to. 

We'll leave the topic of mass hypnosis right there. Presumably there is some sort of blanket mass phenomenon, whether it's metaphysical in nature or political, or sociological, or even cosmic. 

Next we'll consider individual hypnosis, i.e., hetero hypnosis and auto hypnosis, or self hypnosis. Now, heterhypnosis in clinical settings or even in demonstration settings, like stage hypnosis, supposedly requires an induction technique. You know, the classical setup where they have a swinging pendulum or something similar. To do what? To attenuate the subject's sense of self control, or what is ordinarily understood to be the conscious mind. Somehow the conscious function in the individual is in abeyance under hypnosis. 

Now, apart from relief from neuroses or behavioral changes that are usually sought in these treatments, there's demonstrations of psi phenomena - that is, extraordinary results in telepathy, telekinesis, things that defy the laws of physics. Suggestible subjects can contact room temperature objects and suffer painful burns and blisters. Conversely, firewalkers can tread unharmed on red hot coals. Others exhibit materializations and other psychokinetic feats. So these sorts of paranormal effects are a matter of record. 

And a good source for that is Michael, Talbot, the Holographic Universe. 

Now, what about auto hypnosis? Well here the idea is self suggestion, but still with this mystical accompaniment of the induction technique. Usually that's the way it's presented. So the accepted model, the way this mechanism works, is there's a conscious will that is operating upon the subconscious, one's own subconscious, or that of another. 

Autohypnosis had quite a run in the popular literature back in the 70s and 80s. And some of the authors that are fairly representative of this genre are as follows: Lee Pulos, a Canadian guy, and then Peter Blyth, Leslie Lecron, Melvin Powers, Terry Robb and Maxwell Maltz, who wrote the famous Psycho Cybernetics. The point to realize here, to just take note of, is that hypnosis and auto hypnosis can certainly work. They will produce their effects just as their practitioners advocate. But it's also uncontroversial that the results that they obtain are quite variable. They display a range in terms of the duration of the effect and the real efficacy of the suggestion. 

All right, so we've covered the evidence that comes from the scientific or clinical use of hypnosis. We've talked about the popular genre of auto hypnosis from Lee Polos and Peter Blyth and the rest of the authors that I mentioned. And we also talked about the extraordinary effects that defy the laws of physics that we found in the examples from The Holographic Universe. 

Those are three separate bodies of evidence that really demand an explanation, because,  by and large the clinical practitioners do not acknowledge the stage phenomenon, and neither one of them will acknowledge the extraordinary paranormal phenomenon. So if we look at it objectively, what we really are faced with is a very elusive concept. 

Do we really have a firm grasp of hypnosis? Consider these facts. In one case, the famous CG Jung, when he did use hypnosis, his patient embarrassed him by falling immediately into a trance without any formal induction technique required. That took him totally by surprise. 

According to various reports, the nature of the so called trance states is an entirely open question. 

The dictionary says the subjects lose their volition and yet the practitioners say they retain their volition. 

Studies claiming correlation of states to measure brainwave activity rely on subjective self scoring. So that's not an objective measure. 

Not only that, but there are other therapeutic techniques that purport to access the sub subconscious. And this only serves to further cloud the definition. So here I'll read a quote to you from one of the academic researchers: ‘Active imagination, like hypnosis itself, is difficult to define. In terms of hypnosis, it can be described as an eyes open form of hypnotic dreaming. From a Jungian perspective, active imagination is a therapeutic tool that was created by Jung to discover unconscious fantasies while the patients were awake and “conscious”.’ 

And I'm putting the word ‘conscious’ in quotation marks, so I'll put a link in the show notes to that article. So my conclusion from that is, having done a brief survey of the evidence, the paranormal stuff, the clinical stuff, the demonstration stuff, etc., and even read [an excerpt from the research paper] what we find is no one really knows what this phenomenon is all about. No one can explain it, no one can predict it, and no one has an authoritative model or definition. 

What that tells me is we need new standpoints. So in the next podcast episode, what I want to do is open the doors to Neville's point of view. After all, he did have some very interesting things to say about the subconscious and the conscious. He doesn't align with the conventional view, but if you consider what he says in conjunction with the esoteric viewpoint, that humanity is a picture of vast hypnotic sleep, then we can start to understand the phenomenon of hypnosis. 

So please check in with me next time when I do the next installment in this little mini series which I've entitled Conscious Self Persuasion Beyond Hypnosis and Waking Sleep.