Session 659

Personal Reality, Session 659

Natural hypnosis is the acquiescence of the unconscious to conscious belief.  In periods of concentrated focus, with all distraction cut out, the desired ideas are then implanted (in formal hypnosis).  The same processes occur in normal life, however; areas of primary concentration then regulate your experience both biologically and mentally, and generate similar conditions.

Let us give a simple example, using a positive belief instilled in childhood.  An individual is told that he is comely, well-proportioned, and possesses a likeable personality.  The idea takes hold.  The person acts in line with this belief in all ways; but also a variety of subsidiary beliefs grow up about the main one.

The belief in personal worth draws about it the belief in the personal value of others, for they show their best faces to our fortunate friend.  His life constantly reinforces this concept, and while he is peripherally aware that some people are “nicer” than others, his main intimate experience allows him to see the best in others and in himself.  This becomes one of the strong frameworks through which he views existence.

Data or stimuli that does not agree is a side issue, not personally applicable but present, he realizes, as fact for others.  He will not need to prove himself, so it will be easier for him to accept contemporaries with fairness.

There may be areas in which he realizes he is not adequate, yet because of his belief in his basic worth he will be able to accept these lacks as a part of himself without feeling threatened by them.  He will be able to try to improve his condition without knocking himself down at the same time.

Now: In those terms he may or may not be as attractive, feature by feature, as some other individuals who believe, in fact, that they are unattractive.  The belief in his own comeliness is so important that others will react to him in the same fashion.  An individual can have great native beauty, for example, but this beauty is not apparent to others, or to the individual.  The person does not believe that he or she possesses it, and mars the actual physical features so that the comeliness becomes literally invisible.

Your beliefs, then, are like hypnotic focuses.  You reinforce them constantly through the normal inner talking in which you all indulge.

This inner communication acts like the constant repetition of a hypnotist.  In this case, however, you are your own hypnotist.  Few people will have simply one main area of concentration.  Usually several are involved, but these represent the ways in which you are using your energy.  The individual who takes it for granted that he is worthwhile does not need to belabor the point.  His ensuing experiences come naturally to him.  In many areas of your own life, those in which you are satisfied, you need make no effort.  Your conscious thoughts and concentrations bring about results with which you are pleased.  It is only in those compartments of your life that confound you that you suddenly begin to wonder what is happening – but here also, natural hypnosis is at work just as easily and naturally, and your conscious ideas are automatically coming to physical fruition.  So it is in these areas that you must realize that you are the hypnotist.

The unconscious accepts those orders given to it by the conscious mind.

In each person’s experience, there are areas with which he or she is pleased.  When you find yourself dissatisfied, however, question the orders you are giving in that particular arena of experience.  The results do not seem, now, to follow your conscious desires.  But you will find that they do follow your conscious beliefs, which may be quite different.

You may desire health, but believe implicitly in your state of poor health.  You may desire spiritual understanding, while thinking that you are spiritually unworthy and opaque.  When you set your longing against a present belief there is always conflict.  Your belief will generate the proper feelings and imaginative endeavors characteristic of it.  If you want to be healthy and continually contrast what you want with the present conviction in your poor health, then the belief itself, set up against the desire, will cause added difficulties.  In such a case you seem to want the impossible.  Desire and belief are not united but apart.

In formal hypnosis you make an agreement with the hypnotist: For a while you will accept his ideas about reality instead of your own.  If he tells you that there is a pink elephant in front of you, then you will see it and believe it is there, and act accordingly to the suggestion given.  If you ae a good subject and your hypnotist a good practitioner, then blisters can arise on your skin if he tells you that you have been burned.

You can perform physical feats that you would consider impossible otherwise – all of this because you willingly suspend certain beliefs and allow yourself to accept others for the moment.  Unfortunately, because of the pattern considered necessary, it is thought that the conscious mind is lulled and its activity suspended.  Quite the contrary.  It is focused, intensified, narrowed to a specific area, and all other stimuli are cut out.

This intensity of conscious concentration cuts down barriers and allows the messages to go directly to the unconscious, where they are acted upon.  The hypnotist, however, is important in that he acts as a direct representative of authority.

In your terms, beliefs are accepted initially from the parents – this, as mentioned earlier, having to do with mammalian experience.  (See the 619^th session in Chapter Four.)  The hypnotist then acts as a parent substitute.  In cases of therapy, an individual is already frightened, and because of the beliefs in your civilization he looks not to himself but to an authority figure for help.

Even in primitive societies, witch doctors and other natural therapists have understood that the point of power is in the present, and they have utilized natural hypnosis as a method of helping other individuals to concentrate their own energy.  All of the gestures, dances, and other procedures are shock treatments, startling the subject out of habitual reactions so that he or she is forced to focus upon the present moment.  The resulting disorientation simply shakes current beliefs and dislodges set frameworks.  The hypnotist, or witch doctor, or therapist, then immediately inserts the beliefs he thinks the subject needs.

Within this context, subsidiary groupings will be included that involve the therapist’s own ideas.  In your society regression is often involved; the patient will remember and relive a traumatic experience from the past.  This will then appear to be the cause of the present difficulty.  If hypnotist and subject both accept this, then at that level there will be progress.

If the cultural concepts include voodoo or witchcraft, then the therapeutic situation will be seen in that context, and a curse uncovered; which, using the power point of the present, the doctor will then reverse.

Quite without the context of formal hypnosis, however, the same issues apply.  With the greatest understanding and compassion, let me mention that Western medicine is in its way one of the most uncivilized hypnotic devices.  The most educated Western doctors will look with utter dismay and horror at the thought of a chicken being sacrificed in a primitive witch doctor’s hut, and yet will consider it quite scientific and inevitable that a woman sacrifice two breasts to cancer.  The doctors will simply see no other way out, and unfortunately neither will the patient.

A modern Western physician – granted, with the greatest discomfiture – will inform his patient that he is about to die, impressing upon him that his situation is hopeless, and yet will react with scorn and loathing when he reads that a voodoo practitioner has put a curse upon some innocent victim.

In your time, medical men, again with great superiority, look at primitive cultures and harshly judge the villagers they think are held in the sway of witch doctors or voodooism; and yet through advertisement and organization, your doctors impress upon each individual in your culture that you must have a physical examination every six months or you will get cancer; that you must have medical insurance because you will become ill.

In many instances, therefore, modern physicians are inadequate witch doctors who have forgotten their craft – hypnotists who no longer believe in the power of healing, and whose suggestions bring about other diseases which are diagnosed in advance.

You are told what to look for; you are as cursed – far more – as any native in a tiny village, only you lose breasts, appendixes, and other portions of your anatomy.  The doctors follow their own ideas, of course, and in that system they see themselves as completely justified – as humane.

In the medical field, as in no other, you are faced directly with the full impact of your beliefs, for doctors are not the healthiest, but the least healthy.  They fall prey to the beliefs to which they so heartily subscribe.  Their concentration is upon disease, not health.

Your doctors are also the victims of their own belief system, in other words.

They constantly surround themselves with negative suggestions.  When disease is seen as an invader, forced upon the integrity of the self for no reason, then the individual seems powerless and the conscious mind an adjunct.  The patient is sometimes compelled to sacrifice one organ after another to his beliefs, and to the doctor’s.

Luckily you have other “underground” beliefs, in chiropractic, health foods, and even quacks.  These all provide some other framework in which problems can be solved in matters of health.  At least in these cases damaging drugs are not given, and the integrity of the body is not further maligned.

Chiropractors, again, are hypnotists.  Unfortunately they are trying to gain respectability in medical terms, and are therefore emphasizing the “scientific” aspects of their work, and playing down the intuitive elements and natural healing.  The “quacks” end up with those who are hopeless, who realize the ineffectiveness of other belief systems, find them wanting, and have no place to go.  Some of the “quacks” may be unscrupulous and dishonest, yet many of them possess an intuitive understanding, and can work “cures” through the instant alteration of belief.  The medical profession is fond of saying that such individuals prevent patients from seeking proper treatment.  The fact is that such patients no longer believe in the doctors’ system of belief, and so could not be helped by them.

To a medical man all of this will seem like the sheerest heresy, because disease will always be seen as an objective thing in the body, to be objectively treated and removed.  But a man who feels “that he has no heart” will not be saved by the most sophisticated heart transplant, unless first that belief is changed.

In other areas, an individual who thinks that he is poor will lose or misuse, or badly invest, any amount of money, whether he works hard for it or is given it.  A person who has hypnotized himself into a state of loneliness will be desolate although surrounded by a hundred friends and admirers.

What does all of this mean to you in your daily life, and how can you utilize natural hypnosis to better your experience?

In those areas in which you are dissatisfied, you feel that you are powerless, or that your will is paralyzed, or that conditions continue despite what you think of as your intent.  Yet if you pay attention to your own quite conscious thoughts, you will find that you are concentrating upon precisely those negative aspects that so appall you.  You are hypnotizing yourself quite effectively and so reinforcing the situation.  You may say, horrified, “What can I do?  I am hypnotizing myself into an overweight condition (or my loneliness, or my poor health).”  Yet in other facets of your life you may be hypnotizing yourself into wealth, accomplishment, satisfaction – and here you do not complain.  The same issues are involved.  The same principles are operating.  In those positive life situations you are certain of your initiative.  There is no doubt.  Your beliefs become reality.

Now:  In the unsatisfactory aspects, you must understand this: there is also no doubt.  You are utterly convinced that you are sick, or poor, or lonely, or spiritually opaque, or unhappy.

The results, then as easily and effortlessly follow.  Natural hypnosis, in the terms given here, operates as well in one case as in the other.

What should you do, then?  First of all, you must realize that you are the hypnotist.  You must seize the initiative here as you have in other positive aspects of your life.  Whatever the superficial reasons for your beliefs, you must say:

For a certain amount of time I will momentarily suspend what I believe in this area, and willfully accept the belief I want.  I will pretend that I am under hypnosis, with myself as hypnotists and subject.  For that time desire and belief will be one.  There will be no conflict because I do this willingly.  For this period I will completely alter my old beliefs.  Even though I sit quietly, in my mind I will act as if the belief I want were mine completely.

At this point do not think of the future, but only of the present.  If you are overweight, insert the weight that you think is ideal for you while you are following this exercise.  Imagine that you are healthy if you have the belief that you are not.  If you are lonely, believe that you are filled with the feeling of companionship instead.  Realize that you are exerting your initiative to imagine such situations.  Here there can be no comparison with your normal situation.  Use visual data, or words – whatever is natural to you.  And again, no more than ten minutes is required.

If you do this faithfully, within a month you will find the new conditions materializing in your experience.  Your neurological structure will respond automatically.  The unconscious will be aroused, bringing its great powers to bear, bringing you the new results.  Do not try to overdo this, to go through the entire day worrying about beliefs, for example.  This can only cause you to contrast what you have with what you want.  Forget the exercise when it is completed.  You will find yourself with impulses that arrive in line with these newly inserted beliefs, and then it is up to you to act on these and not ignore them.

The initiative must be yours.  You will never know unless you try the exercise.  Now if you are in poor health, and have a physician, you had better continue going to him, because you still rely on that system of belief – but use these exercises as supplements to build up your own sense of inner health, and to protect you against any negative suggestions given by your doctor.  Utilize the belief in physicians since you have it.