> So, if one were to place two quarters(coins) on a table in
>such a way that they look identical and had the subject look at one
>and then had the subject look at the other, then hypnotism would be
>run off the case?

Type 2 Induction:
Excitation Overwhelms the Analyzer

Emotion Inductions

The necessary condition...is...some kind of consciousness which an emerging idea meets with no resistance from other—in which, so to speak, the field is clear for the comer. We know that a state of this kind can be brought about not only by hypnotism but also by emotional shock (fright, anger, etc.) and by exhausting factors (sleeplessness, hunger, and so on).
Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria, pp. 258-9

Emotional Shocks

Brainwashing researchers have analyzed the types of emotional shocks and their power to devastate. Shocks are most likely to make a person suggestible—and to break him— when they are:

# intense
# repeated
# unpredictable
# uncontrollable
# linked to pressure
# incomprehensible
# humiliating

Overstimulation of the cortex results in an involuntary cortical response of protective inhibition. It is a curious paradox of the human suggestibility spectrum that we are most susceptible to suggestion when external stimulation is minimal, or when it is maximal. Sensory deprivation can cause trance. Its opposite, sensory overload, also can cause trance. Sensory overload results in overexcitation. Excitation is the opposite of inhibition. Excitation is a condition in which the rate of neuron firing speeds up. Too much input (stress) causes too much excitation which, in turn, may cause a natural, protective shutdown effect. Shutdown equals inhibition. Inhibition, when it is caused by a protective shutdown, is Pavlov’s Type 2 induction.

Beecher proved that the more stressed a person is, the more effective a pretend pill, placebo, will be at curing whatever he imagines ails him. The more upset, excited, disturbed, or stressed you are, the more suggestible you become. Any degree of cortex shutdown results in an equivalent amount of inhibition (lowered consciousness, trance).

The stressful, overwhelming input can arrive via any sense: seeing, hearing, touching.... In 1960, CIA researcher Ewen Cameron jotted down plans to report his research on Type 2 input-overload inductions: “Also in paper, make reference to input-overload in terms of 1) sound 2) light 3) pain 4) verbal stimulation.” (Weinstein, 1988, p. 220).

Overwhelming Noise

Loud, rhythmic noise, such as prolonged, loud, drum beating—or sitting close to an unshielded dot matrix printer at work—can be inductive. When my dot-matrix printer goes into action, if I stay seated nearby, I will fall into a deep sleep within a few minutes.

Das demonstrated that response to loud, repetitive noise can predict hypnotizability. His better subjects could not keep their eyes open when exposed to that type of noise.

Loud noise is Type 1 in that it shuts out other sensory input. It is Type 2 in that it overwhelms, simultaneously denying varied auditory intake and overstimulating the nerve cells. That triggers the protective mechanism of inhibition. The cells turn themselves off. The subject goes into trance, and then on down to delta sleep.

Confusion

Another thing that overwhelms the analyzer is inability to make sense of incoming data: confusion. A confusion induction is a Type 1 (sensory deprivation) because it deprives the brain of meaning. It is also Type 2 (overloading) if you try to make sense of it, and cannot, but keep trying until you become overwhelmed by the confusion. So, if something does not make sense, avoid the assumption that the fault is a lack of intellect on your part. Your feeling that it does not make sense may be absolutely correct! The confusing statement may be for the purpose of induction rather than communication.

This morning I saw an advertisement on TV: a jumble of highly emotional, vivid, incoherent images. At the very last moment, in small letters in the center of the otherwise blank screen (an eerily clear and calm impression after the preceding intense, chaotic images) one word appeared, a brand name. The brain, if set suddenly adrift in a sea of nonsense, will clutch hard to the first sensible thing that comes along after the chaos. That brand name was the first image that was allowed to make sense.

I saw another Type 2 confusion TV advertisement on Super Bowl Sunday. It began with chaotic, meaningless Type 2 Induction: Excitation Overwhelms the Analyzer 331 images jumbled one upon another. Suddenly, out of the confusion, a bag of corn chips moved slowly, centrally out from a distant view on the screen “toward” me, its brand name clearly visible.

M . H . Erickson often did confusion inductions. “In all my techniques, almost all, there is a confusion.” (Erickson, et al., 1976, p. 85) Sometimes, he caused confusion by using induction patter that was full of contradictions, plays on words, or a profusion of negatives. Sometimes, he did totally illogical and incomprehensible acts in an ordinarily predictable and regular setting.

For example, one day, the doctor took the hand of a woman he was meeting for the first time, as if to “shake” it. He ordered her to count backwards from 20 to 1. While she counted, he played games with her hand, putting light (seemingly random) pressures on various parts of it with his fingers. All this time, he stared at the wall behind her head, instead of looking at her face, as if he were looking right through her. He released her hand so slowly and gradually that, when he finally did let go of it, she was unsure of just when he actually had stopped touching it. Her hand, after his release, stayed outstretched, in a cataleptic condition.

Every element of Erickson’s induction process had been done with the intention to confuse her, to dislodge her reality orientation, and to overwhelm her conscious mind. Seeing that catatonic hand, Erickson asked her, “Do you think you are awake?” That question further attacked her conscious orientation.

Other techniques that inhibit consciousness by creating confusion are:

# Rapid-fire statements.
# New demands given before any previous one can possibly be completed.
# Jumping from idea to idea in an illogical manner.
# Giving obviously mistaken instructions.
# Changing instructions, then refusing to admit that they were changed.


Emotion Inductions

We laid hands upon her, ministered inner healing to her, and she wept and cried before the Lord. She was totally set free from the grief of her father’s death.
- Herald of Hope, Summer 1995, p. 2

Television advertising may begin with a shock, confusion, sensory deprivation, or relaxation induction. Advertising inserted into sports, drama, or news programming is most effective because viewers already are feeling excitement because of the preceding programming. Emotion is inductive. It creates suggestibility. “Intense emotion opens up the corridor to the subconscious because the conscious mind is inhibited by emotion,” Charles Tebbetts told his hypnotherapy class.

Panic will do it. “...terror and pain produce a state analogous to hypnosis.” (Gindes, p. 49) Rage will also do it. Brainwashers strive for it. Some religious inductions intensify emotion. Plain old life is the most common source of shock and suffering inductions. Crying causes hyperventilation which is inductive. (Tears also remove stress chemicals from your system.) Emotion lowers consciousness. Frank Laubach, a Christian mystic, described how pain had made him feel nearer to God:

This week a new, and to me marvelous experience, has come out of my loneliness. I have been so desperately lonesome that it was unbearable save by talking with God...something broke within me...How infinitely richer this direct first hand grasping of God Himself is, than the old method which I used and recommended for years, the reading of endless devotional books...how was this new closeness achieved? Ah, I know now that it was by cutting the very heart of my heart and by suffering. Somebody was telling me this week that nobody can make a violin speak the last depths of human longing until that soul has been made tender by some great anguish. I do not say it is the only way to the heart of God, but I must witness that it has opened an inner shrine for me which I never entered before. (Laubach, Practicing His Presence, pp. 9-10)

When a person is deeply touched emotionally, he is in a state of abreaction. “Suggestibility can be enhanced, temporarily at least, by repeated abreaction.” (Sargant, Battle for the Mind, p. 76) People who share deep emotional experiences, again and again, bond. A client also may become more and more suggestible to whomever is coaching these experiences. Emotion can thus be a tool to heal deep wounds.

A church newsletter spoke of the healing of a lesbian:

She began weeping before the Lord, which released the Lord’s healing power into many of her traumatic childhood experiences. She was going between weeping and laughing for a long period of time as the inner healing continued...She came back for several times of ministry...a number of pains of the past being released...They never came back. Praise the Lord! ( Herald of Hope, Summer 1995, p. 2)

Expression of positive emotion can also heal:

I prayed for the Lord to give him deep holy laughter for the hurts, and after about thirty minutes of laughter (sometimes mixed with crying), the bitterness, the unforgiveness, and the physical pain in his body were gone. (Ibid.)

For a rape victim:

As we ministered to her, she laughed and cried deeply about this great trauma in her life. The laughter and crying released the bitterness, the unforgiveness, the fears, and shame within. Dorothy was at long last free from the pain and shame of that terrible experience. (Ibid.)

Fear

Cheryl was an extremely susceptible hypnotic subject. Her husband, when angry, would yell so loudly at her that she became rigid with shock (cataleptic). Then he would give her instructions. He had intuitively learned to use a fear induction on Cheryl, then tell her what he wanted her to do. Estabrooks wrote that “...emotional shock...gives us the phenomena of hypnotism and vice versa.” ( Hypnotism, p. 110)

It has been known for many years by researchers in the field of hypnosis that terror, especially when created by physical torture, is brutally effective in enhancing the power and control of the hypnotic trance. The subject’s suggestibility increases, and he becomes more compliant... (Bain, The Mind-control of Candy Jones, p. 201)

Any excitement or trauma (sudden fright, fear, terror, threats) makes you more suggestible. Fear (or any intense emotion) causes cortex overstimulation which results in Pavlovian inhibition. Inhibition equals induction. So, fear is inductive. The greater the fear, the deeper the potential trance. “Our own attitude as physicians causes us to avoid in principle hypnosis by intimidation, by shouting at the patient, frightening him...” (Schilder and Kauders, p. 84) Not all operators, however, have those moral principles:

If a subject is to be hypnotized and is quite frightened, the operator can take advantage of the fear for easy induction. The frightened person is already in hypnosis or on the verge of it. (LeCron, Techniques of Hypnotherapy)

What Stephen King really does to readers and film viewers is provide the rush of trance induction by using fear. Excitement often peaks right before the commercial break in television programming. The product sells better that way because the viewers are in a suggestible state.

Fear, or lust, or any other path to lowered consciousness, can be addictive. Look at the grim faces in a gambling parlor. They hope. They lose. They suffer. But they take pride in their boldness, in the size of their suffering, the amount of their loss. Sometimes, they even win. Winning is a powerful emotional rush, a positive reinforcement that brings them back to those seductive machines and gaming tables to lose again, and again, because winning programs the brain more powerfully than losing. Human beings are designed to try, try again—if given a little encouragement. As a result, more and more gambling casinos are built, more and more lotteries established.

Sex Inductions

Last, but certainly not least, in the Type 2 category, is induction by sexual excitation and orgasm. Sargant’s book, The Mind Possessed, devotes a chapter to the topic of sex inductions:

During the sexual act, especially if it ends in mutual orgasm, both partners achieve an intense... state of temporary brain excitement, which leads on to a state of sudden temporary nervous collapse and transient brain inhibition ....creating greatly increased suggestibility... (Sargant, p. 87)

A married couple, during their honeymoon, quarreled fiercely. While his new wife was in a state of absolute rage, her husband shouted, “I’m sorry I married you!” Eighteen years later, she was still married to him, but she still felt deeply insecure because of his long-ago statement. A marriage counselor, whom the husband had asked for help, told him to say “I’m glad I married you” during her next orgasm (a comparable time of great emotion). The treatment worked.

Because erotic excitation and orgasm greatly increase suggestibility, ideally, the sex act results in imprinting a mutual sense of responsibility for, and bonding to, the partner—as well as freeing him from accumulated tensions. Like any other induction system, however, this one is easily distorted and abused.

About the Tension Induction and Hyperalert Trances

There is some public recognition that “sleep, sleep, sleep” suggestions can result in trance. There is no public recognition that “Alert! Worry! Earthquake! Hurricane! Fire! Fear! Evil! Satanic! Rape! Murder! Starvation!” suggestions can also result in lowered consciousness and heightened suggestibility. Though seldom mentioned in the research journals,1 tension induction and the hyperalert trance are, in practice, often used. A basic propaganda rule is that the more upset people are, the more gullible they become. Any emotional state lowers consciousness and causes temporary cortex inhibition—a condition of greater suggestibility.

Mind Blanking

Mind-blanking or thought- stopping was, and is, a common induction technique. This method creates sensory deprivation and bores the subject into lowered consciousness.

...concentrate the subject’s mind upon some one unimportant thought to the exclusion of all others. This thought must, indeed, be so unimportant that when it is the only thought entertained the mind is almost absolutely passive. (Cook, p. 78 )

The “sound of one hand clapping” is an unimportant thought which is also confusing (another inductive technique.) The image stops thought because it is illogical and paradoxical. Therefore, it causes a sensory deprivation.

A similar thought-stopper is the statement: “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” (Yes, it does. A deer browsing nearby would hear it fall. Plants broken under the weight of the fallen tree would “hear” it. The temptation in that thought is to imagine that the universe only exists if “I” perceive it. That is arrogant, self-centered, and false.)

I heard a radio deejay asking rapid-fire questions of callers: “If you had to choose one: no nose or an extra nose in the middle of your forehead—-which would you choose?” “If you were cold in bed, would you rather put on another blanket or turn up the heat?” “Don’t stop to think, just answer.” That is a paradox style of induction. It sidelines the analytical, thinking conscious mind.

Yoga instructions are inductive. None are openly called “hypnotic,” but all lead to trance. Richard Hittleman’s Guide to Yoga Meditation used a thought-stopping induction. The TV guru told readers that thinking was a bad thing and that they should avoid thinking as much as possible, because many thoughts “include useless concern, false anxiety and foolish daydreaming.” (p. 43) Thought stopping is an effective induction technique, so Hittleman’s suggestions, if taken literally, could propel a susceptible person into a state of near constant trance (vigilambulism).

Nielsen seduced Palle into hypno-robot condition partly by using the lure of pride. Hittleman used similar grandiose language to describe trance. He said that a person with no consciously recognized trance experience was “sleeping.” His term for a person who was beginning to experience sessions of lowered consciousness was “awakened” or “enlightened.” He said that this enlightened person can

...transcend his ordinary mind...You have a great responsibility not only to yourself, but to your fellow man to advance your development as far as possible... (Hittleman, pp. 63-65)

Trance can, and does, “transcend” ordinary mind. It can put you more in touch with the truth, or less. Beware of pride in trance, because pride can be the root of evil, the tool of the deceiver.

Hittleman warned that “Usually there is a great inner struggle as one treads the winding path between the states of ‘wakening’ and ‘enlightenment.” (Ibid., p. 66) That “struggle” may be your conscious mind trying to keep you grounded in reality. Similarly, Nielsen urged Palle, repeatedly, to overcome his “resistance.” Nielsen trained Palle to stay in a prolonged trance. Hittleman also urged the reader to stay in trance by an act of will: “...whenever you feel that it has deserted you, simply will it back.” (Ibid., pp. 68-69)

Two other advocates of Eastern-style induction instructed:

...sit down, be quiet, watch your mind, bring it to one-pointedness, bring it back when it strays— which it most certainly will within the first ten seconds—over and over again. (Goleman & Thurman, MindScience, p. 106)

Thought-stopping inductions can be nonverbal. They can be part of any religious context. The Montanists were a Christian sect; about 200 AD they held forefinger to nose during prayer and that centered focus soon lowered consciousness. Residents of certain Greek Orthodox convents of the Onphalopsychists on Mt. Athos achieved trance by staring at their navals. In 1666, Brother Lawrence, an humble French monk, wrote similar instructions to develop a sustained trance:

Let it be your business to keep your mind in the presence of the Lord. If your mind sometimes wanders or withdraws from the Lord, do not be upset or disquieted...The will must bring the mind back...Become accustomed to recalling your mind to the Lord often. As you do this more and more you will find it easy to keep your mind calm in times of prayer and to recall it when it wanders. (Brother Lawrence, Practicing His Presence, p. 82)

The psalmist recorded the most simple, and powerful, instruction in this category: “Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 6:10)

Trance is a door to the spiritual realm for those persons with genetic capacity to experience it in that manner. Trance is the mind channel that opens us to that which is transcendent and holy. However, trance can also open us to that which is corrupting, degrading, and unholy. May we have the grace of God to discern the difference between various trance situations and trance contents. May God protect us from all unholy, corrupting, or abusive trance relationships.

Eyes Have a Role in Induction

Eye Focus—Staring into your own eyes in a mirror is inductive. Staring into somebody else’s eyes when they are close to you can be inductive also. In fact, staring at anything has inductive potential. Staring causes sensory deprivation, and thus it tends to lower consciousness. It is normal for your eyes to shift freely around, looking at various objects. Eye movement prevents eyestrain. If you stare fixedly at a close object for even as little as five or ten seconds, your eyes will start to tire. Hypnotists call the point you stare at, the “target.”

Staring at a target causes eye fatigue, which can lead to eye closure, which can lead to “sleep.” The target can be a candle, an unshaded electric light, an object swinging on the end of a chain, somebody else’s eyes, or your own eyes seen in a mirror.

Eyes become even more fatigued if the target is above eye level. Rolling your eyes upward correlates with, and may actually generate, increased alpha. So when trance inducers ask you to stare at a fixed point, the target is probably above normal eye level, causing eyestrain. Or it may be close to your eyes, which causes discomfort in focusing, another type of strain.

There are many common applications of that principle. Eye fixation is the intuitive function of symbols— national flags, religious symbols, organizational icons. And those symbols are usually displayed above eye level. Eye fixation has real psychological impact in the intensity and focus of a ceremonial setting. “I pledge allegiance to the flag...”

Eye Closure—A hypnotist usually maneuvers for, or asks for, eye closure early in the induction. Eye muscles are the smallest muscles in your body, and the most easily tired. After a brief period of upward staring, a subject tends to close his eyes if the operator suggests that they are “tired” and “strained.” They are! But accepting that suggestion further decreases sensory input. And imagining that the operator has already been able to make magical things happen in you (“tired, strained” eyes), also deepens trance.

Eye closure instantly, significantly reduces sensory intake, because sight is the dominant human sense. Any time you close your eyes, alpha brain waves immediately increase. If the room is quiet, and you sit or lie quietly, auditory and tactile input is reduced. The less meaningful the input you are receiving, the more focused and suggestible your mind will be to whatever is coming through.

Any time somebody tells you to close your eyes and pay close attention to his words, he is, intuitively or consciously, striving to lower your consciousness. Any time you close your eyes and visualize something, you are entering a more suggestible hypnoidal state. Any time somebody tells you to close your eyes and then spends a period of time directing you to visualize a series of things or do a series of acts with your mind or body, he is conditioning you for deeper trance and greater suggestibility. The outcome may help you, or it may harm you. You must be able to discern the difference.

Obedience Conditioning

“Will you help me?” my young daughter asked.

“Okay,” I agreed.

She began to read instructions to me out of a book:
“First raise your head,” she requested. (I did.) “Now lower it. Now turn it to the right. Now turn it to the left. Now stick out your tongue.” (I continued to obey, through various commands, letting her be the operator pulling my puppet strings. “Fine,” she encouraged me. “Now open your mouth. Now close your mouth. Now clap your hands. Now close your eyes.”

I was now sitting quietly with my eyes still obediently closed.

“SLAVE!” she chortled triumphantly at me.1

A hypnotic induction is often a long series of suggestions which the hypnotist wants the subject to obey. To achieve induction and deepening, it does not matter what the suggestions are, as long as the subject is kept busy obeying. A subject who is busy obeying does not slip out of trance and start thinking for himself.

A popular sales training system teaches salesmen that, if they can cause a client to obey any two suggestions, he becomes likely to obey a third one, too. That is the force of habit. Human beings are tremendously fast learners. Even two times can be the beginning of a habit that is difficult to shake. Or even once. “Pretend” inductions, abstract conditioning, and disciplined conditioning are all types of obedience inductions.

(...)

Massage, and Mesmeric “Passes”

Charles Tebbetts told his hypnotherapy students that massage is also inductive. The old-time mesmerizers sometimes did not even touch the subject, stroking only the air just outside the subject’s body. Esdaile described his procedure:

Desire the patient to lie down, and compose himself to sleep, taking care, if you wish to operate, that he does not know your intention; this object may be gained by saying it is only a trial; for fear and expectation are destructive to the physical impression required.... make the room dark, enjoin quiet, and then shutting your patient’s eyes, begin to pass both your hands, in the shape of claws, slowly, within an inch of the surface, from the back of the head to the pit of the stomach....Repeat this process steadily for a quarter of an hour, breathing gently on the head and eyes all the time. (Esdaile, pp. 145-146)

Esdaile had only just begun. After half an hour, he began to add verbal suggestions of sleep to the passes. He kept this up for as long as eight hours straight, as long as it took to get the subject to a coma depth trance. Esdaile was an English surgeon in India. He had no anesthetic but trance, so he had to induce profound depths. He performed the most challenging operations of his time on those mesmerized patients. After Esdaile started the induction process, his assistants continued it. That freed the doctor to operate on a patient who was already in a catatonic coma.

The stroking of a beloved’s body induces lowered consciousness. Massage in general—even a good back rub—tends to be inductive. Schilder and Kauders pointed out the common ground between the erotic and the inductive:

Gentle speech, shouted rebukes, manhandling, are not only devices in the technique of hypnosis, but also in that of erotic seduction, “fixation,” stroking— certain [induction] techniques even make very extensive use of stroking the body—are common both to hypnosis and to the erotic. (Schilder and Kauders, p. 35)

(...)

Discipline Conditioning

Discipline Conditioning—If you act like somebody is your boss, and do everything he says, pretty soon you develop the habit of not thinking for yourself in that person’s presence any more. Boot camp runs on this principle. Let me add, however, that a pattern of doing the opposite of what you are told is equally unthinking and robotic. Inability to accept instruction is even more handicapping than becoming somebody’s robot. The best mental condition is a condition of free choice: choosing to do it his way, or your way, based on your reasoned analysis of each situation. It takes time and effort, however, to analyze a situation. Under conditions of haste or stress, unthinking obedience is more efficient. Under conditioning regimens, it is also more rewarded.

Parents, teachers, and military trainers traditionally lean on discipline conditioning. The longer the process of giving and taking orders continues, the more likely the subject is to put his own brain on a sidetrack and let the chief do all the thinking. Trained military rank-and-file are said to be good hypnotic subjects because of their obedience training.

Dr. Cook told student hypnotists to choose a prospective subject, then

...lead him gradually to submission. Incidentally tell him of your hypnotic knowledge...Then dare him to let you hypnotize him. It is best to commence on some young man about sixteen years of age, who is accustomed to working under a hard boss for little pay. He is accustomed to obedience... (Cook, p. 132)

So, a sensory deprivation induction can result from accepting repeated coaxing—or orders—to be passive, submissive, obedient. That series of instructions conditions the subject to accept ever more demanding suggestions. Hypnotists have a specific name for the inductive/deepening effect of giving a series of commands: pyramiding of suggestions.

...pyramiding of suggestions serves to increase the depth of hypnosis, for as each suggestion is obeyed, the subject inevitably falls deeper into the state...If a subject will obey simple suggestions, he will obey difficult ones. (Gindes, p. 165)

R.W. White further explained how the pyramiding of suggestions works:

...the urgent character of his words, their power to keep the subject attentive in spite of his drowsiness, lies...in the fact that they consist of requests, commands, and suggestions...By the measures which he takes to exclude distraction, and especially by his words, the operator tries to maintain a state of mono-motivation, a focal press of dominance, and the subject is given little alternative except to continue the deference which made him susceptible in the first place or else to display a resistive autonomy which under the circumstances could hardly be distinguished from aggression. (quoted in Moss, p. 143)

If being “good” can make you overly accepting of authority, is it ever good to be “bad”? YES! Curtis MacDougall told a relevant story in his book, Hoaxes (New York, Macmillan, 1940):

A coin about the size of a fifty-cent piece was passed around a class of forty-eight boys from fourteen to seventeen years of age with instructions to examine it carefully. At the end of the class period the instructor asked each boy to draw a picture of the coin, indicating the position of the hole in it. Although there was no hole, all but four of the forty-eight indicated one, some even drawing two holes. Of the four only one, the bad
boy of the class unaccustomed to obeying orders, was positive that there was no hole. (MacDougall, Curtis D. Hoaxes. N.Y.: Macmillan, 1940)

One day, the fate of the nation might depend on the ability of citizens to recognize that there really is no hole in that coin! Society needs to cherish and protect the right to existence (and to free speech) of its “bad boys” who are insusceptible to illusion and who can sound the alarm: “THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!”

The Church of Scientology...does not give credit to hypnotism...
explaining that their processes are the really valid ones while hypnosis
is outdated...[but] their methods are clearly hypnotic ones....yoga comes
close to being an Eastern way of using what in the West is called
hypnosis...all regimented techniques such as Silva Mind Control, EST,
etc., have the phenomena of hypnosis at their roots...although most
would fervently deny this. Why? It is very simply good business to try
to come up with something which seems different, if you are trying to
sell it to a purchasing public.

McGill, J. of Hypnotism, March 1990, pp. 30-31


In 1945, fewer than 200 U.S. professionals used
hypnosis. By 1971, 20,000 dentists, physicians, and psychologists
were using it professionally.1 Mental health personnel,
advertisers, spiritual advisors, motivation specialists,
sports psychologists, people programmers, educators,
meditation leaders, dream-group leaders, and group leaders
of every sort now use more and more sophisticated mindinfluencing
technologies. Now, millions of people expertly
induce trance and direct the trance experience of others—
often for profit (and power).

Human society is now polarizing into division between
the influencers and the influenced, the programmers
and the programmed, those in the know and those out of it. 2
The trend is toward division into subjects and operators—
at worst, into hypnotic predators and hypnotic prey. (The
prey may unconsciously long to move up and become predators.)
There has been an associated revolution in attitude
toward trance. In 1971, LeCron wrote, “Where it was not at
all unusual twenty years ago to have a patient refuse hypnotic
treatment, now this is a very rare occurrence...”
(LeCron, The Complete Guide to Hypnosis, p. 223) In 1997,
most persons enter inductive settings with even greater
abandon.

How did that happen? It happened because the technologies
of trance induction and trance management
have become ever more sophisticated, more effective, and
more widely disseminated to possible “agents.” (The names
for hypnotist are as legion as the names for hypnosis). It
happened because public information about trance has become
tightly restricted to only positive, good-marketing
statements. The truth is that trance can help. The myth is
that trance absolutely cannot be harmful.
It is self-defense to understand how your mind
works. Awareness of your suggestibility can help you resist
manipulations that you might otherwise uncritically
accept. Induction and suggestion technologies (induction
to lower consciousness, suggestion to take advantage of
that state) are now very sophisticated. Those technologically
expert mind manipulations are directed at a largely ignorant
public.

1. LeCron, The Complete Guide to Hypnosis, 1971, p. 1.

2. In Kuhn and Russo’s 1958 anthology, Modern Hypnosis, I noticed that
25% of the authors (all expert hypnotists) had been, or were presently,
employed in either Labor Relations or Personnel Management for various
huge corporations (usually as department head). I had not realized that
hypnotists would be concentrated in that field. On second thought, however,
it makes sense. An expert at disguised induction could have great
potential in either Labor Relations or Management.