Mass Hypnosis, Through the looking glass – Part one

When I speak of ego, a lot of people make the assumption that of which I speak is either the Freudian ego complex or the commonly used “Princeton definition” which reads “an inflated feeling of pride in your superiority to others”.

Neither is the case, what I’m speaking of is the structure based transactional mind. The ego in the modern Eckhart Tolle/Robert Anton Wilson/Kaballah sense of the word, specifically that which is other to the “Self”; the Self being the creative force which is infinitely capable within all humans.

I put a human down to a base duality that runs through all reflections of reality and is well described by Winston Shrout in his discussions about commerce. In this instance I will use a different analogy to describe the ego in which I will call it the Reflection, Mirror or Strawman.

The Mirror, is a protection mechanism within which we fall in certain instances. To begin my dissemination of The Mirror I’m going to look at the hypnotic model of the mind. As with all models it provides a very nice perspective for it’s purpose, however may be disregarded for all other psychological matters.

This model was first bought to my attention by a Floridian hypnotherapist called Klein (for anybody looking into Hypnosis and NLP his online course is a brilliant place to begin).

You’ll notice the conscious mind holds in it the values of short term memory, rational, analytical and will power. In the subconscious mind we have the permanent memory, emotions, laziness, habits and the instinct of self preservation. And finally we have the unconscious mind of which we have the automatic bodily functions such as heartbeat, tissue repair, immune response, metabolism, and pretty much any other function you wish to speak of. The hypnotherapist focuses on the first two. You see there is two lines intersecting in the top right.

The one heading into the outer (conscious) circle is an ‘external suggestion’. For a subject to act on it subconsciously, it has to make it’s way past the critical factor. The critical factor is the personal agent to the subconscious mind. Although things like “Give Up Smoking” can be achieved by conscious willpower alone, the subconscious will often place roadblocks in the way, for instance making people believe they are addicted, if the reader has attempted to diet they know the feeling of thinking “Healthy foods are required!” while the critical factor constantly put’s in suggestions like “You want fried chicken!”.

When we hypnotise somebody we remove the critical factor. Whereas before hypnosis the critical factor would take a suggestion “you wish to give up smoking” and not allow the subconscious to operate based on that information due to it’s own doubts such as “your too addicted” and similar, this means although the conscious mind is consciously trying to give up smoking through willpower, the subconscious is still fighting.

When hypnotised the same suggestion does not have to answer to the critical factor, it just seeps straight into the subconscious where automatic response and self preservation can alter the code from which they operate. All of a sudden the subconscious also wishes to give up smoking and as a result it starts finding motivations, replacing habits, altering the influence memories have over our pre-programmed responses and similar.

Along with hypnosis there are numerous ways in which we can run code and bypass the critical factor, for instance NLP (Nuero Linguistic Programming) techniques such as framing, repeating, repeating and asking questions can bypass the critical factor, as can appeals to the subconscious constituent parts.

Appeals to emotion, laziness, habit and fear are very popular within the media. I mentioned the metro in a previous blog post, and how much of the articles appealed to fear. This in itself is a hypnotic effect. When something appeals to emotion, laziness, habit or fear it is directly appealing to the subconscious.

For the first three, the critical factor of the conscious mind is often fairly active when the media do this, (although the current obesity rate and success of the fast food industry is pretty powerful) however fear is most powerful tool available, because fear induces both the self preservation and the emotional responses of the subconscious.

Any suggestion to the conscious mind that is based on invoking “need for self preservation” will automatically move past the conscious minds rationality and critical faculties, and will be analysed directly by the subconscious to make sure it conforms. If it does conform, then the subconscious will begin to twist the rationale of the conscious mind to create conditions in which the action can be taken.

This level of manipulation was very plain during the American elections of 2008, although Obama said very little to appeal to the rational minds of voters, just ambiguous slogans and similar. In the face of that we still saw images of voters lining up at polling stations like zombies, getting tattoos of his head on their arms, speaking of nothing but Obama.

This was because they had performed an act of subconscious manipulation, in the face of fear of another 4 years of terrible leadership which a lot of voters involved in the bipartisan paradigm of left/right politics assumed McCain represented, their subconscious took hold of the emotional message of hope and the fear of the opposite, and changed the rational conscious minds to suit the subconscious fears of the person involved, with retrospect, it is easy to see neither candidate was offering anything remotely resembling change, as both were bred in the same paddock.

And so, within the conscious state of mind fear induces, altering the rational mind to accept that black is white and white is black I leave you for today, I shall continue on this subject tomorrow.

Peace, Love, Empathy

Rich