The Language of Suggestion

A treasured Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum documents the performance of a man named Tchatcha-em-ankh at the court of King Khufu.

It took place almost 6000 years ago.   The assertion of the reporter was that Tchatcha "knoweth how to make a lion follow him as if led by a rope."

That may have marked one of the world's earliest demonstrations of what is now called "hypnotism".   Tchatcha really could have been leading that lion by a rope, and the reporter or whoever he was interviewing really could have been hypnotically induced not to see it.

They really could have, although we are not about to try persuading you to believe any of that.   If you feel like believing it, you will.   But it is quite difficult to believe in the reality of anything you regard as pure fantasy, or to dismiss as pure fantasy anything you believe to be real.   Life need not be difficult; one of the purposes of this program is to suggest easy ways as peaceful alternatives to the effortful ways of sly or forceful persuasion, whether you are trying to gain dominion over yourself or someone else.

There is evidence to suggest that many citizens of ancient Egypt knew how to by-pass quite natural resistance to perceptual change and that they had become quite skillful users of metaphor, analogy, symbolization, indirection, and others of the implements of suggestion, or communication-in-depth.

You may have heard people speak of the "power" of suggestion.   Its power resides in the fact that when you confront someone who speaks only the Language of Suggestion you will find it easier and more positively productive than in any other.   "Someone-who-speaks-only-the-Language of Suggestion" refers to your subconscious mind or anyone else's.   The so-called "power" of suggestion derives not from the forcefulness of its impact, but from the appropriateness of its use.

We spoke just now of the "implements" of suggestion.   A more conventional cliche would have been to speak of "the tools of suggestion."   But to impose such a limitation would be misleading.   Every implement-animate or inanimate, concrete or abstract-can and will function as a toy, as a tool, or as a weapon, depending solely on the subconscious intentions of its user.

People who have gained dominion over themselves find it fairly easy to determine their own subconscious intentions and even to better them.   Please don't ask us which kinds of intentions it is best to have.   It depends on the surrounding (horological as well as spatial) circumstances.   For that reason we do not deal in value judgements for anyone but ourselves, on a here-and-now basis, and those we impose on no one other than ourselves.

To resume: the ancient Egyptians, at least some of them, knew how to by-pass busily rationalizing conscious minds, including their own, so as to get communication successfully under way between their and other people's sub-conscious minds.

Our conscious minds can be likened to guardians of the access routes to our subconscious minds.   They tend, however, to be fussily mundane, barking at everything that moves, and as a result to act very much like over-zealous keepers instead of servants and protectors of our subconscious minds, as though those strangely non-Aristotelian entities should be kept from public view.   By and large, our conscious minds - you know, the rational ones that obediently think along Aristotelian lines - refuse to listen to the babblings of the subconscious mind.   All those symbols and images and things, and everything in some fantastic kind of code!   Sometimes, however, the things that our conscious minds keep pretending not to hear or to understand are things that they simply don't want to deal with - to think about, contemplate, or even to remember.

That points to another of the purposes of this program: to help users learn how to induce their conscious minds to stand aside and stop interrupting - to shut up for a while.   It's done hypnotically, that is, by tossing that mundane mentality (some people call it the left hemisphere) a mundane bone of some kind to chew on while you and your subconscious mind engage in a period of open-minded, open-hearted, highly creative communication.

Because of all the evidence that at least some of the ancient Egyptians were pretty conversant with their subconscious minds, we have invented an ancient Egyptian named "Kurian" to serve as your counselor.   With your permission, he will help you learn how to by-pass some of your own resistance to perceptual change.

One thing the ancient Egyptians didn't know was the word "Hypnotism", because it was not coined until 1841 by England's Dr. James Braid.   Dr. Braid was a brilliant pioneer in the effort really to understand the forces behind human behavior.   He preferred that to the practice of fantasizing theories and then trying with might and main to make everyone believe them.

He came up with the word "Hypnotism" because "Hypnos" was the name the Greeks had given to their mythological God of Sleep, and Dr. Braid mistakenly thought, at first, that anyone who is in a trance is necessarily asleep and that anyone who is awake can't possibly be in a trance.

Neither of those statements is true, as Dr. Braid soon realized, but by then the word was out and into our language to stay, which he said he regretted.   He didn't need to.   There's not a thing wrong with the name so long as you keep in mind that words like hypnosis, hypnotic, and hypnotism have nothing to do with sleep.   A person in a trance can act wide awake or sound asleep at will, but is neither awake nor asleep - is just acting "as though".   Sleep, in fact, is one of the ways out of a trance.   If no other route is provided, that is the one a hypnotized person will take, quite naturally.

There are those - some of them pretty famous in the worlds of media, medicine, and meditation (but you should not let impressiveness influence you; it's just a part of play-acting) - who believe and say that there is no such thing as not being in a trance, that we are either in one or the other of our various trance states - of consciousness - or dead.   They say (Plato among them, and others since as well as before his day) that each of us is governed by his or her ideas about what's what - when, where, why, and how - as he or she sees, feels, smells, tastes, hears, or even extrapolates it from previously gathered, possibly inaccurate data, depending on what state of consciousness he or she happens to be in.

There also are those who say that no one ever hypnotizes anyone but himself or herself - that all hypnosis is auto-hypnosis.   They say that what a so-called hypnotist does is to direct and encourage auto-hypnotic entrancement by the other party while also auto-hypnotically going into a corresponding (not identical, just corresponding) trance.

We might also note that one needn't know that he is putting himself or someone else into a trance in order to be doing so.   He can be totally ignorant of any of the techniques involved.   All he has to be doing is using them.   And no one needs to know that entrancement has occurred for it to have done so.

That brings to mind a frequently-asked question: Is hypnotism safe?   Is it good or bad?   We have already said that we do not deal in value judgements for others, so you will have to decide for yourself.   We can, however, supply you with some comparative data to serve as the basis for your deliberations:

1. Hypnotism is as unsafe and bad as oxygen, which supports combustion and thus contributes to devastating fires resulting in tragic consequences.
2. Hypnotism is as safe and good as oxygen, without which life as we experience it could not be sustained.

A better question might be: "Is it safe not to know anything about hypnotism?"

Toward the end of the twentieth century (A.D.) it was being demonstrated almost routinely that through the use of hypnosis - or autohypnosis, whichever - a person can stanch a flow of blood, arrest a feeling of pain, erase an appetite, diagnose an ailment or injury, learn a new routine, develop a new skill, strenghten, weaken, or otherwise alter a belief or mood, face the past or the future with equanimity, achieve effortless self-government, can, in a nutshell, feel like bounding out of bed every morning, morning after morning.