Hypnosis

From The Maze Where Realities Converge - the psychedelic encyclopedia of reality from The Ultimate Comment

Hypnosis involves entering a trance state, a state of consciousness in which the conscious mind is subdued and the critical analytical faculties of normal thought are suspended. This allows direct access to the subconscious.

Hypnosis (Ericksonian hypnosis, to be specific) distracts the conscious mind with certain linguistic patterns. Milton Erickson was a highly skilled hypnotist who never came across a subject he couldn't hypnotise, even people other hypnotherapists had declared to be immune to hypnosis. (On a point of trivia, Aldous Huxley explored altered states of consciousness working with Erickson as described here.) Erickson's patterns were modelled by John Grinder and Richard Bandler and are known as the Milton model.

Every time one person communicates with another, they direct the listener's conscious attention. If I start talking about giraffes, herds of giraffes with their yellow and brown printed fur and their long necks roaming around the savannah, I have focused your attention towards a notion that was dormant in your subconscious. It is this ability of communication to manipulate conscious attention that makes hypnosis possible. Most hypnotists and researchers subscribe to the theory that 'there's no such thing as hypnosis', insofar as there's no special state called a 'hypnotic trance' in which the subject is open to suggestion. Rather, hypnotic phenomena may be understood in terms of ordinary suggestion, 'playing along', imagination, expectation, belief and influence. Now, like Niels Bohr said, the opposite of a great truth is also true, so it follows from 'there's no such thing as hypnosis' that 'everything is hypnosis'. If we accept that hypnosis is the result of ordinary psychological suggestion and influence, then it is quite accurate to say that you've been hypnotized into to believing whatever you believe now.

1 How to hypnotise your friends and subliminally influence people
2 See also
3 Read

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How to hypnotise your friends and subliminally influence people

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Hypnotic Induction

To hypnotise someone, you minimise the sensory input they receive by making them comfortable, being in a quiet place and having them close their eyes, and then you use communicative techniques that divert their attention inwards, towards their own mind. When I talk about using certain patterns of language, part of your mind goes, "What are these patterns?", another part goes, "What does he mean by 'patterns of language'?", another part starts thinking about 'patterns' in the other sense of the word. By using enough of this sort of vague language, one can turn someone's attention inwards and put them into a trance.

Stack the techniques below as densely as possible - ideally using several of them together in each utterance. Speak with calmness and authority. Be confident in your power to hypnotise. Match your voice to the rhythm of your subject's breathing, starting each utterance as they exhale. If all else fails, get two or more people to talk hypnotically at the subject simultaneously. (Basically, get all your your buddies to come around for a hypnosis party. All the cool kids are doin' it.)

Start by talking about your subject's current experience, saying things like, "You can hear the sound of my voice", "You can feel your breathing", "You can hear those cars going by outside" etc. If you see them move or shift, utilize that: "You may notice slight muscle movements around your eyes." Be careful not to say anything that they may not be experiencing; if you say, "You feel the chair against your back" and their back is not against the chair, this will jar them out of trance.

Next, you use these descriptions of the subject's experience to lead them into trance. Say things like, "As you listen to my voice, you go deeper into trance". Hearing your voice is made equivalent to going into trance. The subject knows they are hearing your voice, so you use this 'truism' to lead into a suggestion of trance. A good hypnotic pattern is to say "The more you X, the more you feel Y". Other examples would be, "Each breath relaxes you more", "Let each word you hear take you deeper into trance", "Let your mind wander to the sound of traffic outside".

Then you can lead into conscious-unconscious dissociation and time distortion as described below.

Hypnotic language techniques:

Unspecified referential index. Use words like 'this', 'there', 'people', 'things', 'once' etc. without specifying who, what where or when you're talking about. Bertie Ahern does this a lot.
Universal quantifiers: The words 'everyone', 'everything', 'nowhere' etc
Mind reading: "You want to know what you can do."
Presuppositions using time: "After you have entered trance, you will..." Here it is presupposed that the subject will enter trance, the attention is focused on when they will do so.
Presuppositions using ordinals: "You can allow your shoulders to relax first and then your back, or else the other way around. It doesn't matter which." Here, only the order of the actions is left in question. That the subject will perform the actions is presupposed.
Either/or presuppostions: "You can go understand this consciously or else unconsciously."
Presuppositions using adjectives and adverbs: "It is pleasant to feel X..." or "How pleasant is it to feel X..." This presupposes that they are feeling X.
Unspecified verbs: "This allows you to open up." How it does so is unspecified.
Nominalisations: "Speak with calmness and authority." Use a noun to describe something that doesn't really exist, often by making a noun out of a verb. Abstract nouns in general are good for hypnotic induction.
Value judgements: "It is good to allow yourself to relax." (Note that you never specify who makes these judgements.)
Synesthesia: "Feel the colours pressing against your skin." Cross over the subject's senses, describing one sense in terms of another.
Conversational postulates: "Can you feel yourself becoming more relaxed?" This is a command to become more relaxed, disguised as a question.
Restrictional violation: "The couch allows you to sink into it". Here you endow things with capabilities they don't really have.
False comparatives: "You can learn more easily." (More easily than whom?)
Phonological ambiguity: "Go inside trance-forming the structures of your mind." (The subject thinks, "Did he say, 'Go inside trance. Forming structures of your mind.' or 'Go inside. Transforming structures of your mind.'?")
Syntactic ambiguity: "As you think you are going deep into trance."
Scope ambiguity: "You find new ideas about things, people, places in your mind." (Are the ideas about things, or about things and people, or about things and people and places? Are the things 'in your mind'? Are the people 'in your mind'?)
Run-on sentences: "You feel yourself going into a deep sleep is important to allow your unconscious mind to function."
Time distortion Distort your subject's sense of time by making time equivalent to distance ("Go to a place in the past."), by switching verb tense or using tenses inappropriate to the time you specify ("In the past there were times when you want to have travelled back.")
Seperation of conscious and unconscious minds: Talk about the conscious and unconscious minds as though they were two distinct entities. "Your conscious mind may be noticing the feel of the chair against your back, while your unconscious [note, this is an embedded command: "You're unconscious!"] continues to wander to the sound of my voice. Your conscious mind deals with whatever your paying attention to now, while your unconscious is the storehouse of all your past experiences. Your conscious mind perceives things one at a time, but time doesn't exist to your unconscious." Ideally, you should talk about the consicous and unconscious in different tones of voice, or move your head to a different position to talk about them.

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The handshake induction

How's this for some nextlevel Jedi shit, baby: it's possible to put somebody in a trance instantly by a certain kind of handshake. Milton Erickson's method is described on the wikipedia entry about him. When you pull your hand away after shaking someone's hand, you brush them eversolightly with the thumb, then the little finger, the middle finger, then the thumb again. The person's attention, which was focused on a bogstandard social greeting, all whooshes suddenly towards the unexpected sensations in their right hand. This is a perfect illustration of the nature of hypnosis: simply confuse the subject. Richard Bandler developed his own handshake induction which is described here, illustrated here and maybe applied here (twenty-seven seconds into the video, note the slight fluttering of the fingers).

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Posthypnotic suggestion

Watch your subject closely during the induction. When the swallowing reflex stops, the face and hands become paler, the lips shrink, the muscles relax, the breathing becomes deep and slow and the heart rate slows, you'll know they're in a trance. (If you're not sure, you can test their suggestibility by trying something simple, like getting their hand to rise up.) Now comes the fun part of planting commands and associations in their subconscious. This is much easier than the trance induction. You have a few options as to how to plant the suggestion:

Just repeat the suggestion to them for a few minutes. ("You will stop smoking. You don't need to smoke. You can leave smoking behind you. You will say no to cigarettes...").

Another method is to tell them a metaphorical story relevant to what you're trying to acheive. ("Once upon a time a commenteer encountered General Miaow in a dream and General Miaow gave the commenteer a magical skill...")

You can also use a double bind, where the subject is apparently given a choice, but each option is another form of compliance. ("You can either push the energy out of your body or just allow it to flow by itself" or "The harder you try to stop your hand from rising up, the stronger the invisible force pulls it up.")

Or you can use an embedded command, where the instruction is hidden within a longer sentence (sometimes as a quote). ("A Magical Trumpet Called Bill told me that you will stop smoking.") You should use a subtly different tone of voice for the command part.

It seems that the subconscious cannot process negatives, so you can give a command in the negative, and the subconscious will understand it positively. So you can tell someone, "Don't feel a sense of hope." and they'll feel hope.

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Erisosis

Hypnosis is putting people into a sleep-like state in which they are open to suggestion. It is called after Hypnos, god of sleep. People are also more open to suggestion when they are confused. We at the Ultimate Comment have coined the word Erisosis (after Eris, goddess of confusion) to describe the use of you're confusion to open people up to suggestion.

That sort of stuff. Politicians and salesmen use erisosis sometimes when they reel off loads of technical information at you with unspecified refential indices and universal nouns and ambuiguities, and then slip in a point they want you to believe.

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