Richard Bandler, who has often been called “the best hypnotist in the world,” is fond of saying, “Hypnosis isn’t the exception…. It’s the rule.” The fact is that people—you, me, and everyone—tend to be in one trance or another most of the time. It is more a matter of which trance you are in rather than whether you are in trance. What we think of as “normal consciousness” is just one kind of trance with a particular set of beliefs.
The more neuroscientists examine the way the human mind works, the more they discover that unconscious processes—processes operating below or outside our conscious awareness—are “driving the bus.” The most recent author to address this issue is David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times. In The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (Random House), he presents many of the more recent findings in the form of a parable.
In my opinion, he has made understanding the relationship between neuroscience and behavior much more accessible than it is in most researched-based books, such as Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness), David M. Wegner (The Illusion of Conscious Will), Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Joseph LeDoux (Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are and The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life), and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought). While these books—and a number of others on related subjects—would add to your understanding how the mind works and how it influences behavior, Brooks’s The Social Animal will provide an excellent introduction to just how much of your behavior and mental life are below or outside your conscious awareness.
Most of us, of course, have been brought up in a culture (even if not the same one) that values the rational over the emotional. We like to think that we’re making rational, logical decisions, but most of our decisions are predetermined by previous programming. Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements) uses the term, “domestication,” to refer to the early parental and cultural programming that shapes our lives. Ruiz’s word, domestication, is a synonym for hypnotic suggestion. Early hypnosis creates the core beliefs that shape most of our behavior for most of our lives.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, and—even if it were—there’s no way to eliminate it. Humans would not do well if we weren’t born into a relatively protective culture and raised by parents or other adults interested in our survival. The absence of “domestication” would be worse than the domestication most of us received as children. That does not, however, mean that we have to continue to believe everything we were taught to believe in childhood. If that were the case, we would still be living the way our most ancient ancestors did.
Fortunately, one of the common beliefs instilled early is the belief in a better future. Most people—and you may be one of them—believe not only that current circumstances can be made better, but also that life can, and should be, better for their children. This belief is what provides the motivation for working to make “things” better. This is an example of the hypnosis of domestication doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
When the conscious mind is doing exactly what it is supposed to do, it is helping you select the best available trance for you to be in. One of the impulses behind this article has been a recent example of hypnosis gone wrong. Recently, a minister in Florida acted on his trance-induced belief that burning a Quran would somehow alleviate his fear of Muslims. The burning was followed by a mob of Afghans acting on the trance-induced fear that the Quran had suffered and that killing a number of U.N. workers would help alleviate that suffering. Think how things might have been different if both the minister and the Muslims had believed that the Quran that can be burned is not the Quran….
Buddhists tend to believe that “the path (Do, Tao) that can be deviated from is not the path.” For both the minister (and doubtless for many of those raised in a Christian tradition) and for the Afghan Muslims, that would require substantial reprogramming of original “domesticated” beliefs. Such major shifts have occurred in the past. Copernicus and Galileo instituted a change in beliefs about the Earth from geocentric to heliocentric, first individually and—eventually—culturally. Who is to say that we—you, I, and others who understand the power of hypnosis—can’t do the same for some of culture’s ongoing erroneous beliefs?
But first things first…. When Socrates said that the unexamined life isn’t worth living, he was, I believe, talking about our need to understand how we have been “domesticated” to hold beliefs and behave in ways that do not serve our purposes well. How would your life be different when you change your “geocentric” beliefs for new, “heliocentric” views? How would your life be better by your recognizing the hypnosis in your life and begin (if you haven’t already done so) making conscious choices about what programming you want to follow?
Anxieties, phobias (spiders, snakes, dogs, etc.), and “compulsive” behaviors of all varieties are all trance-induced, and the only way to “uninstall” such programming is by replacing the old trance with a new, improved one. Once you accept the fundamental idea that hypnosis is not the exception; it’s the rule, you know what you need to know to improve those beliefs that aren’t getting you what you want in life. Rather than just patch and repair what’s “broken,” you really can optimize your belief systems and your life. Change yourself, and you change your world. Change your world, and you help change the world for everyone.
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