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 619th 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.
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