More Hypnosis excerpts for your education and enjoyment..
New at Lermanet.com:
http://www.lermanet.com/exit/future-hypnosis.htm
Is Hypnosis Dangerous? -
Is It Disguised? -
Have You Consented?
Selected excerpts and commentary from Chapter 8 (pp. 211 - 237)
of the book:
THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN MIND
BY GEORGE H. ESTABROOKS
AND NANCY E. GROSS
Copyright 1961, by George H. Estabrooks
[...]
Is hypnosis dangerous? It can be. Under certain circumstances it is
dangerous in the extreme. It has even been known to lead to murder.
Not too long ago, an amateur hypnotist in Denmark was sentenced to
life imprisonment for inducing a hypnotic subject to kill. Given the
right combination of hypnotist and subject, hypnosis can be a lethal
weapon. But, as we pointed out earlier, this statement can be made
with equal validity about any number of other things. Hitler's words
on the radio led the German people to unleash war on the world. The
number of juvenile hoodlums whose crimes have been triggered by horror
movies and and horror comics is legion.
Given the right combination of
speaker and listener, writer and reader, actor and audience, any one
of the media of mass communication can be a killer.
[...]
But it will also be alert to the very deep dangers that can develop
from our human suggestibility and it will be especially alert in times
like ours, when techniques of mental manipulation are so easily
available to so many untrained people, and then
these techniques can
be used to manipulate not merely the individual, but the mass. A free
society cannot restrict the freedom of its citizens to attempt to
influence one another. But it must protect itself against the perils
implicit in this freedom by training its citizens to recognize the
ways in which they are daily influenced and manipulated, and by
training them to use their thinking, conscious minds to evaluate all
the material with which they are daily bombarded, Only a people who
refuse to refuse to permit themselves to sink into intellectual
lethargy and conformity, only a people who question and think, who
subject their own opinions and the opinions of others to careful
scrutiny, and who are at the same time learn to control and master the
human impulses that make hypnotic subjects responsive to suggestions
of theft and assault and ordinary men and women responsive to
suggestions of prejudice, intolerance, and war, can be sure that
hypnosis - disguised or direct - will not undermine their freedom and
rob them of their very lives.
[...]
Van Pelt's prediction - no mental illness by A.D. 2000 - is far too
sanguine. It is unlikely we will have conquered this scourge
completely by then. In A.D. 2000, even if medicine has conquered the
organic psychoses, we will still have the senile psychoses; we will
not be able to eliminate them until we have learned how to make the
aging process benign in every single case. The population of A.D. 2000
will still have its quota of mental and emotional disturbances wise
causes lie primarily in the individual's life experience.
Author's note about this comment from the last paragraph:
"Van Pelt's prediction - no mental illness by A.D. 2000"
From the scientology-lies website - see what current chairman of the
board, David Miscavige coincidentally stated about Scientology's plan
for psychiatry, in the year 2000:
But if you really want to eliminate those problems all you have to do
is work for the objectives that we, as members of the IAS, have set
for the year 2000: Objective One - place Scientology at the absolute
forefront of Society. Objective Two - eliminate psychiatry in all its
forms. Let's get rid of psychiatry, and let's bring Scientology to
every man, woman and child on this planet."
continues here,
emphasis mine..
http://www.lermanet.com/exit/future-hypnosis.htm