Hypnosis and Trance

If you ask the average person to describe hypnosis and hypnotists usually their response is something along the lines of 'a creepy guy in a white lab coat with his swinging watch and piercing gaze penetrating your soul and invading your mind making you do things against your will.' And, sure, there are people who do that, but they're usually bad at hypnosis. And to me they're not the ones worth worrying about. The ones we should be sceptical of are the ones who use hypnosis unwillingly; mainly parents, politicians, salesmen, and the like. Because we don't realize that they use it just as much as - if not more - than the scary men who do it professionally.

Sick Mind Fraud

But I'm going to shed some light on what hypnosis actually is, how it works, and how to identify it.

(It's not what you think)

A lot of people seem to be very wary and sceptical of trance (I know, an oxymoron, right! Being so fearful of a thing that apparently doesn't exist or is ineffective), but all that trance is, is a temporary cessation of the conscious portion of the mind, the intellectual part. We all go into various states of trance throughout the day, every hour, every minute, and probably every second (depending on who you ask - some people in the NLP community think nothing is hypnosis, and some think everything is hypnosis).

Some people are so adamant in their delusions that they will assert to no end "you can't hypnotize me!"... completely oblivious to the fact that every word he just said was in a trance.

Basically, hypnosis is a state of confusion.

Only the intellectual mind tries (in vain) to stay out of confusion, because its only purpose is to make sense of things. So the artist is always in a trance, and the intellectual is never in a trance... even though he is, he just doesn't realize it, or doesn't want to admit it. Because the one thing an intellectual (especially the elitists) will never admit to is being confused. Obviously failing to realize that the only way to learn is through confusion, specifically by being in an altered state, where the conscious mind gets out of the way, so information can be absorbed into the subconscious, and utilized by the unconscious.

The conscious mind is powerful, but the unconscious is at least 10 times more powerful. You can imagine it as the conscious mind being the so-called 10% of our brains we use, and the unconscious as the other 90%.

I highly recommend watching the movie Lucy to gauge the possibilities of potential brain power, because the unconscious is essentially all-knowing. It has all of our memories stored, everything we've ever experienced, everything we've seen, heard, felt, tasted and smelled. It even stores everything we didn't notice at any given moment in space-time. And all of it is accessible. If only we knew how! So far, though, what we do know is that unlocking brain power cannot be done consciously, because the only way to the unconscious is through the subconscious, in which we first need to distract our conscious portion. The beginning of which is hypnosis and the deeper the trance state the closer we get to the unconscious, and in therapy this is where the most significant and permanent changes are made.

Artist of life. 

She controls her reality by creating and modifying it; the environment is her canvas, and her mind is the brush.

This scene in particular is akin to what certain microbiologists do, wherein they go into profoundly altered states and visually zoom into the microscopic cells to see what they're doing and how they're working in order to understand them. This is what they did before the invention of the microscope. It's similar to when professional golfers "shrink the green" in their mind to hit the ball further, or when basketball players visualize the hoop 5 times bigger than it actually is. All that they're doing is hypnotically telling their neurology to control their micro-muscular movements to be more precise, more focused. This is what muscle memory is. And this is what makes the difference between beginners, amateurs, and professionals.

It is said that the conscious mind can only process 7 plus or minus 2 bits of information at any one time. That is, performance is nearly perfect up to five or six different stimuli but declines as the number of different stimuli is increased. Therefore, people's maximum performance on one-dimensional absolute judgement can be characterized as an information channel capacity with approximately 2 to 3 bits of information, which corresponds to the ability to distinguish between four and eight alternatives. (This is connected to a little known mental condition called Low Latent Inhibition, which is the ability (or inability) to shut out environmental stimuli, and was the dominant characteristic of the woman in the movie Hitman: Agent 47.)

The conscious mind is akin to trying to build a barrier around yourself that is constantly falling down, but still trying to keep it up. Almost like Einstein's definition of insanity.

So, when you think of it that way, you realize just how stupid the conscious/intellectual portion of the mind really is. It's kind of ironic, don't you think? This to me is why IQ tests are probably the most unreliable system to measure any kind of intelligence (save for the fact that it was a test made by Nazi eugenicists). For example, perhaps you can get the highest score on the IQ test and are able regurgitate facts and figures, but are you a happy person? Are you compassionate? Do you know how to love? Can you get a date? Can you make people laugh? Can you succeed at everything you do? Or is verbal diarrhoea the only skill you have worthy of any mention? All these kinds of skills are facets of the subconscious, due to learning in various states of trance. We learn these skills through hypnosis, not by being conscious and intellectual. (The only time a high IQ is actually useful or needed is when one has that low latent inhibition I mentioned above.)

Every one of us is capable of millions (perhaps even billions) of states of consciousness, but the average person does probably less than 10. It should also be noted that happiness (apparently the ultimate goal in life) is a state. It's a state that you can have right now, you don't have to go through your entire life waiting for it, it's right here... and it's also yet another thing that's not exactly a conscious process. And our unconscious knows exactly how to generate this feeling, and all the others. But it's the conscious mind that gets in the way.

Examples of trance

Confusion. Any and all states of confusion are altered states. This is one of most powerful things you as humans are able to do, especially if it is self-induced and you know how to use language effectively.) However, it can be very detrimental if you're in this state of mental passivity and being spoken to by the linguistically-challenged, or people with ill-intentions. (This includes the television and music.) Pretty much any and all questions (about what's being said) can prevent the unwanted effects of hypnosis. So familiarise yourself with the meta model.

Walking into a room and forgetting why you're in there. The best example is walking into the women's wash room if you're a guy. And vice versa.

Staring into space/daydreaming.

That wasn't so evil, was it?

How about another? 

Those incredibly comfortable and relaxing moments right before you fall asleep.

Driving down the highway and missing your exit.

Standing in an elevator and not walking out when the doors open. You know this is your floor because you've been watching the numbers change 3... 2... 1... bing! And yet you still stand there staring out to the place where you should be standing, but you're still in the elevator. Why? Trance, that's why. Usually the watching of the floor numbers induces the trance.

Language - speaking and listening. Everybody can speak, and although not many people actually listen, they still do it, and both are hypnotic states. When listening to a person, it is exceedingly difficult to stay fully aware, alert and conscious because language is so vast and so vague (as explained in The Meta Model), that the only time we ever are conscious while listening is when the speaker is being very specific, but the 3 universals of language (generalization, distortion, deletion) make hypnosis and confusion inevitable, and then combine vague language with hypnosis, and you get miscommunication or suggestions planted into your mind, positive and/or negative. Unfortunately, most of the time it's negative. As stated, every thing we say is said in a state of hypnosis, because we have no idea exactly how we speak. If you asked anyone "how do you speak?" they won't be able to answer. Perhaps they'll try and say something like "well, I just open my mouth, and I exhale", and then you copy that and you're literally just exhaling, because it's not stating exactly how the process of speaking is done. It just a thing that we do. It's unconscious. I recommend learning The Milton Model to recognize the language patterns people unconsciously use on others to induce hypnotic states (and then go back to the meta model to learn how to protect yourself from unwanted suggestions, among other things.)

Reading is also a trance induction. And yes, you've been in a trance while reading this whole thing. Less so than the other things, because its more conscious, but a trance nonetheless.

Certain things with language and reading are some of the ways to block the right hemisphere of the brain using intellectual confusion techniques. I recommend reading The Language of Change by Paul Watzlawick.

Multiplication is also unconscious. So when I ask you what's 5 times 5? You immediately respond 25! And you have no idea how or where it came from, it just popped out of your mouth. That's an altered state!

Handshakes. When you reach out to shake someone's hand and theirs automatically reaches to shake yours... that's also a trance. We can't help but stick our hand out when someone reaches to shake ours first - it just happens. Of course you can train yourself to become more conscious of it, but the natural response is unconscious.

Nail biting and other pacifiers. Nobody consciously chooses to gnaw at their own hand to reduce their nails to a bloody pulp; it's an unconscious way to relieve stress, hence pacifier. Other ones are drumming the fingers against an object, or tapping the foot on the floor, and general fidgeting. None of these things are done with intent awareness. They remind me what Carl Jung said: "People will do anything, no matter how absurd to avoid facing their soul." These actions are not done for the joy of doing them, they're done with the purpose of avoiding some kind of pain/discomfort.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I could go on and on and on... but basically any unconscious behaviour is a state of trance/hypnosis.

The 2013 movie Trance is a pretty accurate show of hypnosis, albeit in a particularly negative light.

If you still believe that hypnosis and the naturally occurring trance states are somehow evil or bad, and wish to stay out of trance, then the best thing you can do is stress out as much as you possibly can, secreting massive amounts of cortisol. As often as you possibly can, because all hypnosis ultimately is is relaxation. And remember, if you think you can't be hypnotized or are incapable of going into altered states of consciousness, then you are probably dead. Or a robot.

Summary

Hypnosis and trance is a perfectly natural phenomenon that happens to everyone all the time, in all places. It is one of the most useful resources we have, and can be used in an unlimited amount of ways. In therapeutic settings the therapist may use a number of hypnotic inductions, usually meditative language for relaxation. From there he or she will begin to do change work with the client. Milton Erickson believed that the induction is just as important as everything else in a session, spending up to hours each time to achieve a suitable trance. But in NLP we're more interested in rapid inductions.

When you find yourself going in to trance, learn how to use positive commands mentally. And also, perhaps more importantly, tell yourself to reject any and all negative suggestions, no matter who it's from, including the people you love the most.