Hypnosis the Great Pretender

Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that our leg won’t move, or pretend that our arm is rigged or that our hand is floating toward our face or that our eyelids are locked.

Hypnosis is the use, application and manipulation of our capacity to pretend, to imagine, to create reality. That manipulation is caused by directing the imagination.

That’s it really, it’s all pretending. It’s all imagination.

Hardly surprising really when most of the way we perceive and respond to the world is pure pretence, sorry, imagination, sorry subconsciously. A phobia isn’t triggered by what is happening, neither is a panic attack or an anxiety state which are all the same body wearing a different coat. The phobic reaction is triggered by what we believe, what we imagine to come next.

Okay so in the hypnotic world simple procedures like pretending are wrapped up in all sorts of ‘models’ and dogma. Metaphor is just pretending one thing is another. Hallucination, I don’t believe it helps to say negative or positive as they are the same coin looked at from different sides. All hallucination is Pretending with a capital ‘P’ and big exclamation at the end! It is still just make believe.

Meta Models, Embedded Belief Systems, or my favourite Emotional Patterns, are all just other ways of describing an imagined reality, or rather pretending.

On my Hypnotist radio show last Sunday, in the chat room was a guy for whom hypnosis was difficult so he just played along, imagined, pretended he was hypnotised. Then a remarkable thing happened, the hypnosis became ‘real’. At least he believed it was real, and that’s what makes most of our stuff real, that belief. Which of course is just another word for pretending.

I like the way my good friend Reg Blackwood from New Zealand puts it.

“Hypnosis happens when you focus so well and imagine something so vividly that it becomes real to you.”

In that quote the hypnosis could be transposed with the word belief and ‘imagine’ could just as easily become pretend.

The thing with the subconscious or the Mind is that unlike the Brain – which has to work by logic being a physically limited machine, albeit a biological one – the Mind like stuff simple.

When I’m using my preferred induction, a slight variation on Elman’s eye closure, I’ve noticed that saying, “Pretend your eyes are closed,” Get’s a much faster and higher success than just saying imagine.

So a hypnotised person is without doubt the greatest of all pretenders whether that be pretending they’re Rudolf Nureyev or someone who doesn’t smoke. If they are doing it intently and focused enough then for them that pretending becomes their reality.

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Scriptnosis, Hypnosis Painting by Numbers

Hypnosis is an art. If it were a science then I am sure it would be taught in medical schools and universities.

The ‘research’ on the subject over the years would have brought about a definitive ‘truth’ as to how and why it works and you would be able to walk out on stage, do the script for it, and hypnotise the whole audience.

A dream of every stage hypnotist would be to bang them all under, wake them up a couple of hours later and tell them what a wonderful show they had just watched.

The truth is that like any art the result relies entirely on the skill of the artist in manipulating the medium to create the desired result. It also means that it requires a certain natural aptitude to apply it successfully and to create great works.

Anyone can paint. Even Chimpanzees can hold a brush and spatter some oil, acrylic or pigment suffused water on to a canvas or piece of paper. It isn’t hard to grasp the basics but does being able to do something mean you are doing it well?

I suppose you can say that hypnosis is different in as much as the medium you are manipulating has got its own ‘mind’ and can choose how it wants to go. If you are just scribbling by giving some advice down the pub sure. But that is just subconscious graffiti.

A true master would want to prepare, plan, and then when the basics are in place to allow the medium to flow whilst deciding where that flow should go. The true artist is then free to follow both their own preparation and more importantly to follow the ebb and flow of the feedback from their imagination and what that is causing in their emotions.

Most great paintings under xray show several different versions and ideas being applied on the way to the final result.

That’s something you won’t find in cold science. The flexibility to create on the fly.

Hypnosis is an art, it requires, at least in my book, a huge degree of flexibility and creativity and if you use a script written by someone who neither knows you or the person you are dealing with.

Then what you will end up with is nothing more than a Scriptnotist, not a Hypnotist.

And let’s face it, you won’t see a painting by numbers hanging in the Louvré.

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The Hypnotist Radio show

This week we interview Hugh Lennon the only Hypnotist we know to turn a dog into a swinging watch!

Hugh’s long stage career of nearly half a century started with lunch – with a lion!

From there it’s gone all over the world and he tells us he’s only ever used a single induction, although Hypnodog has tried out several dozen!

On the rest of the show….

Celebrity co-host Reg Blackwood will be presenting the weekly Reg’s Rant, I will be answering the BIG question and running the live “Sleep with Strangers” phone in which will win someone a signed copy of my new book, “How to Make Friends With Yourself and Influence People” available from Amazon, and the lovely Jane will be moderating the chat room on

Please add this show to your favourites and rate us! On Blogtalk Radio and on iTunes Podcasts …
Go On… You Know You Want To!

How to protect yourself from Political Persuasion NLP and Hypnosis.

NLP is Hypnosis when it works and unproven psychobabbling rubbish when it doesn’t. And if you live in Britain you are going to see and hear a lot of it over the next few months as we head towards that great British display of massive apathy which we call The Election.

It’s true, everyone who has to ‘speak’ is paying out huge chunks of the wages you pay them, to people like me, to learn how to use presupposition, visual anchors, embedded commands, Ericksonian language patterns and of course body language, to persuade and influence you to stand at a polling booth and choose them in favour of all the other people who apart from wearing a different colour tie or scarf are saying exactly the same thing with the same intent.

The thing is thanks to largely erratic training and the inevitable lack of finesse the vast majority of them end up sounding like a babbling-bush idiot and looking like something between a badly sown glove puppet and a Windmill. The scary thing is of course that it does actually work if you don’t know what you are looking or listening for.

Last night I sat and watched our PM – that’s prime minister, or president in everything but name for our friends in the sad position of not having any tradition older than the average pine tree. I watched Mr Brown on the news last night with his head poised at an angle that made him look like someone had removed a couple of vertebra, this apparently makes you look honest, as does the head
forward eyes up stance so favoured when you are an adulterating publicity seeking princess trying to convince people you are the personification of an angel.

Next we see the moment silence followed by the classic “Because” move. If you give a reason following the word “Because” it adds weight to your argument because people like to think you’re telling them everything. It doesn’t matter what comes after that magic word “I think you should do as I tell you Because it works that way.” Is an argument politicians use all the time if you really listen.

Actually politicians usually believe the above anyway so their impersonation of the spring loaded nodding dog you see on the parcel shelves of cars driven by people with the sense of humour of a slug, is being backed by Self Belief and Intent. A rare and powerful combination.

Next we watch the body. Mostly, and in the case of Mr Brown definitely, politicians are not oil paintings. Not of the Mona Lisa variety anyway, think more birds eye view of a badly executed pothole repair. It comes from all those years of stress as they toil to stop their erstwhile employers realising that they out number the occupants
of Whitehall Palace 500,000 to one and that they actually have a legal right to say ‘stop it’. All those years give the political visage the stickiness of a superglue sandwich and the flexibility of Michael Jackson’s death mask. Once they begin to smile or frown the chosen expression just stays there for hours.

Until of course they learn NLP and modelling, the safe face of suggestion and hypnosis. Then they realise that if you move something the eyes are attracted to the gesture and away from the face, especially away from the eye of the speaker where the true point of wanting to be in one of the highest paid jobs in the country can be detected. Then the focus is directed away from the obvious rubbish they are saying by the subconscious sign language which is, according to some of the experts, 90% of the communication mechanics between humans.

That is of course unless you are on radio, the telephone, txt’ing or typing and frantically misspelling in an InterWeb chatroom or on FaceSpace where our body language is replaced Neuro Linguistically by the use of embedded commands such as placing the call to action word ‘Now’ after a question, i.e., “When is Now a good time to give up all hope and enter the domain of despair you’ll live in for the next five years after voting for me?” And of course in writing and speaking by adding the dread exclamation mark to everything *!*. And I do mean Everything!

Actually the world communicates more now with video as the technology catches up with the fact that the human eyes are quite important. Most communication nowadays, especially in the UK if you are 16 and have thumbs more dexterous than Nijinski’s toes, is done without the ability to see the protagonists body. However most experts will tell
you that doesn’t matter, if you make the gestures anyway the listener will be able to detect them through the subconscious recognition of vocal tone changes in your voice. Which actually is probably true. It certainly works if you smile, people can and do ‘hear’ that for sure.

So how did this all come to the point where you should know how to protect yourself from it? There was a time of course when a great orator was simply that. Good at talking. Usually because they believed in what they were saying. They then said stuff in a certain way, moved their head and body just so. Clenched their fist or beat their chest. Or did nothing physically but changed the tone of their voice and spoke with absolute focus.

Back in the seventies, when I was watching the like of Robert Halpern on stage in Glasgow and the Amazing Kreskin on television and fuelling my own burning ambitions in hypnosis and total world domination, there was a movement of events which led to the idea that if you do and say what I do and say you become as good as me at what I do. Which may or many’nt be true. You’ll certainly not become better at what You do but that’s a different story.

This led to the phenomenon of people learning to be speakers and presenters rather than just believing in something and telling people about it with passion. At that time in the Americas, of which some States are United, NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming was developed, discovered or just plain invented by a linguist and a mathematician in California who were both very good at subconscious communication and suggestion. The force behind the ‘copy me become me’ school of thought was born. Or at least was wonderfully commercialised and corperatised so that the word Hypnosis didn’t come into the equation.

And this is what led to almost all speakers, especially of the trained variety, all looking like a cross between Ghandi, Hitler and Mother Teresa and sounding like the overly polite southern state psychiatrist which most of the really serious language patterns are based on, a guy called Erickson.

The thing that makes all this work of course is belief. No, not yours in their argument, what makes it actually work is their belief that doing this stuff means they are in control of your desires and decisions. Believe something strongly enough and you can rave and wave all over the place and regardless of any logic a vast amount of people can and will follow you. And like it or not if you don’t know what to look or listen for you too will be affected to some degree.
Sometimes even more so if you think you are critically analysing their drivel.

So, what do you do to protect yourself from the persuasion invasion already beginning to turn our tellies and papers into a mesmerising cock fight. Yes they are using the power that your inability of being unable to look away from the car accident gives them. So, how do you stop your mental process being directed and changed without your
knowledge?

Firstly don’t watch. Close your eyes or turn around. Body language is great when people can see it and pretty useless otherwise. Secondly listen for the words ‘Now” or any word that signals they are talking to You, You and Your are the obvious ones. And of course don’t forget the reason words like Because. I’d bet a pound to a penny that whatever comes before that word is dubious and after the word is a lie.

Thirdly move to an island in the south Pacific until after the
elections returning with the honest statement that no one can blame you because you weren’t even at the scene of the incident.

Fourthly? Vote for the raving loony party who are usually too poor or too crazy to use this stuff and who promise that when they get in they are taking everyone on holiday to the Bahamas for two weeks on the falling over fluids. Which for me is more believable than what the other lot will have you believe.

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Can we cure M.E.?

I read today that a woman in Britain was set free from the murder charge with which she had been given after assisting her daughter to commit suicide after suffering from ME from the age of 14 until she died at the age of 31.

I’m not interested in the morals of the case. People decide to do stuff and if the persons involved all know what they are doing and are not innocent or incompetent or just too plain stupid to make decisions then I figure it’s their life, their choice

What does interest me about this case is ME or Myalgic
Encephalopathy/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome or basically just feeling sick and tired with no apparent reason.

Now I have personally never dealt professionally with ME. Although I suspect I may have under a different label. Its symptoms which vary considerably to the point where there really are no specific ones and being labeled with the condition is what’s left after the medical diagnosticians fail to reveal anything and everything else. So in medical terms it stands for ‘No Idea’.

I have however read about similar states in very old books. In many books written before 1939 when the ME tag was added so that it could be filed more neatly, conditions of the spirit and body which seem unerringly similar to the dread ME were around. Everything from being possessed by a lazy spirit, through Ague and Morbidity right through to Hysteria. Yet, except for the possession theory, they all agreed that the root cause of the malaise was emotional or of the spirit!

Now don’t get me wrong here. If you have ME it is very real. Just because something is said to be all in the mind doesn’t mean that it does not affect the body, that would be stupid. The smallest emotion affects the body. That’s its job. Otherwise fear wouldn’t make you run away or freeze and amusement wouldn’t result in aching ribs and crying. And trust me I do know what it feels like to be consistently uncomfortable in some way and tired for most of the rest of the time. having a neuromuscular condition myself. So I empathise. What I am doing however is wondering about the cause and of course, the possible remedy of what is a totally debilitating condition.

On the UK ME association site – there’s an association for just about everything now isn’t there? On that site -
http://www.meassociation.org.uk/ – in the section marked
Complementary treatments the only mention of anything dealing with the mind is that of the ‘Lightening Process’ a combination of NLP, Hypnotherapy and Life Coaching.

Sad really because I have no doubt that even if hypnosis can’t get rid of the thing itself it can undoubtedly help to combat the effects at an emotional level which could make the difference between life being so unbearable that it stops being an option and getting enough from your existence that you at least enjoy more than you suffer.

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Google Masturbation

And now – this being the first of the Weekly Wednesday Wisdoms – to set the format for my meanderings I will have a look around the InterWeb for something Silly, unbelievable, disgustingly cute, terribly bad or just sodding amazing.

Something designed to fill your head with Dopamine
and make you smile. And just for the look of the thing I shall apply the eye of the Hypnotist to whatever we may find. . . if you have any suggestions where I should go then leave them below if there is a space for comments or go to TheHypnotist.co.uk and drop some graffiti off there.

Now this may or may not make you smile but it certainly made my grin chin appear. I Googled the name Jonathan Chase and pressed ‘I’m feeling lucky!’ and it went right to My site!

That’s it. I can retire now.

Now I am more ‘important’ than a Gay Actor, a Photographer and a General.

It’s hard. Well it would be wouldn’t it? This is Google Masturbation after all. Being number 1 on Google’s ‘lucky’ search is like having a penis extension without the cost of buying a Bugatti Veyron or a Range Rover.

It means you is ‘Da man’, or it means that everyone who shares your name hasn’t got as good a search engine optimisation programme as you.

Either way it made my day.

See you next week.

Smiles
JonC

“How do you ‘install’, when you and I are thousands of miles apart?” Miles

Intent.

The thing is that the live recorded class was conducted over the telephone and the INTENT was to install the concepts in the students minds.

Which on the second call Q&A you’ll hear Reg from New Zealand, say quite happily amazed that it was already being installed in his.

As NewZealand is just about as far away as you can get from my English Rviera home without getting very cold and being attacked by penguins… I KNOW I can install it because I have.

If however the question is one of technique then no worries, it’s in the course.

Basically it boils down to timed repetition and INTENT!

I was asked a question on my Ask-Jon Teleseminar last night about my Hypnotic Symbolism™ method. So I thought I’d show you rather than go through a long winded explanation.

This video was shot at a 1 day Original Hypnosis Introduction. I’d spoken to Kate for about 2 minutes that morning but not about working with her. She had never been hypnotised before and there was no ‘set up’ apart from a polite hello and her telling me what she wanted to do.

During the post hypnosis I compounded that she would feel ‘normal’ and suggested that it had been a very successful session.

It appears that in the middle I ‘woke’ her up which of course is wrong. She’s hypnotised the whole time until I ‘officially’ terminate the process. We tested her right away.

This technique has been used for loads of behaviour change and has been called the Silver Bullet approach. Using this, especially combined with SUD scale (Wolpe, 1969), I don’t have to even know what their presenting situation is, and they don’t have to know either.

This is the simplest of all the approaches I have developed.

Enjoy.

Go to the Svengali System website and register and tell you how you get your live recorded audio class, e-book copy of “How To Make Friends With Yourself and Influence People” and even how yo can help us sell the thing and earn enough so that other people buy this for you!

In the old days. 21 Audios, 5 Action Workbooks, a 200+ page Ebook manual, 21 downloadable MP3 files for iTunes, iPhone or Blackberry in a nice Big Box would have a similar carbon footprint of a medium sized SUV four wheel drive jeep. It would take three weeks to print, wrap and pack and take anywhere from three days to three months to deliver.

Now thanks to the gloriously almost instant technology afforded by the InterWeb we can deliver said package to You in moments – or at the very worst in a couple of hours – so that You can Get The Best from this Life Enhancing Training where, when and how You Choose.

Presenting the on line Mind Installation Classes of Jonathan Chase’s Svengali System the Easy way to Make friends with Yourself and Influence people.

Available from 10th January from Svengalisystem.com

You can change your mind and live Happily Ever After. Use Dopamine and grease your mental wheels by enjoying yourself. Inspirational? I hope so, let me know, leave a comment.

Rock star Peter Buck used automatism as a defence in court. In court he has been found not guilty of assault on airline cabin crew and to be suffering from “non-insane automatism”, basically his mind is not in control of his body – although clearly something was.

In the UK the law considers hypnosis to be a form of induced “sleep” [1952 Hypnotism Act]. If that’s true then if someone commits a crime under hypnosis does that mean that they are also in a state of non-insane automatism?

The Svengali in me is wondering if it would then be possible to persuade someone to do something and both of us could claim neither was in control?

One thing is for sure. If his actions had been decided to be caused by alcohol or drugs or medicine [legal drugs such as anti-depressants which have been known to cause violent mood swings ] neither the Brewery, dealer or Doctor would be held responsible.

I look forward to your comments on this one.

I was reading a marketing blog today a friend pointed me to, when I came across this wonderful description of what you get when you grow up, talking about 5 year old Austin…
“You don’t get an evolved, new mature being. You get Austin with fifteen blankets over his head.” Johnny B. Truant

Keep this in mind next time you are suggesting anything to anyone hypnotised or not and talk as if you talking to a bright kid with scuffed knees and loads of kids-smarts. The subconscious is not stupid and does make choices even if it doesn’t reason.

Of course that means when using persuasion and influence the trick is forgetting all the grown up clever stuff and remembering what it was like when you made friends faster than an ice cream disappearing and the whole world was dead simple.

Thinking of people this way is a great way of getting rid of the jitters when talking to someone your adult self says is ‘superior’. And it’s a fabulous way of not having to think up complex intellectual arguments or even harder metaphors or stories. Just keep the language simple and you’ll get through those blankets a hell of a lot easier!

Smiles
Jonathan Chase