I’ve recently finished reading Monsters and Magical Sticks by Steven Heller, which has some intriguing ideas in it about psychology, hypnotism, and the way that our brains work. (The editing is a little patchy, like some other New Falcon titles that I’ve read in the past, e.g. Christopher Hyatt books, so there are some really annoying punctuation and grammar goofs…although some of those are I’m sure intentional, as Heller warns at the beginning that he’s going to screw with your head.) A couple of interesting thoughts:

a) The subtitle is “There is no such thing as hypnosis”, which is a phrase that Heller repeats throughout the book. I wasn’t sure what he meant by this until I hit this passage:

“It is my belief that all presenting problems and symptoms are really metaphors that contain a story about what the problem really is. It is, therefore, the responsibility of the therapist to create metaphors that contain a story that contains the (possible) solutions. The metaphor is the message…Hypnosis is, in and of itself, a metaphor inside a metaphor…”

This hit home while watching Maybe Logic, the RAW documentary, in which Wilson hammered on the Reality Tunnel concept for a while, which is really just a specific repackaging of Korzybski’s phrase “the map is not the territory” — we perceive what is real, but between the moment of raw perception to the time that the signals reach our conscious brain (if they do), there are layers and layers of unconscious systems wrapping and simplifying the “inputs” to meet our preconceived frameworks of how the world should work; in other words, when the perception finally registers in consciousness, it is packaged as a metaphor. Hypnosis therefore is a way of bypassing consciousness, and using metaphor to explore and rearrange those subsystems, but it is in itself a metaphor, since it’s just another belief system (albeit one that seems fairly consistent).

Two other quotes related to this:

The first is Wilson, from an essay in Email to the Universe:

“All words transmitted as sonic or visual signals — sound waves or light waves — rapidly become photons, electrons, neurotransmitters, hormones, colloidal reactions, reflex arcs, conditioned or imprinted “frames”, physiological responses, etc. as they impact upon the total synergetic organism.”

The second from the wikipedia article on Erickson:

“Erickson believed that the unconscious mind was always listening, and that, whether or not the patient was in trance, suggestions could be made which would have a hypnotic influence, as long as those suggestions found some resonance at the unconscious level. The patient can be aware of this, or she can be completely oblivious that something is happening.”

b) Another set of ideas worth mentioning are from his presentation of systems. Essentially at any given moment, we have a primary input system, and a primary output system.

The “input” system is active at the interface between the unconscious and conscious (which, to be clear, are not directly equivalent to Freud/Jung’s concepts), and is primarily visual, auditory or kinesthetic. If it’s visual, you are thinking in (creating, or retrieving) pictures; when you imagine something or attempt to retrieve a memory, your eyes will tend to look upwards (to the left for retrieval, or to the right for imagination). If it’s auditory, you are thinking in words and sounds - an inner voice may be active, you may be hearing conversation as it happened, or as you imagine it to happen, you may be hearing music, etc etc; typically when retrieving memories in this system, you look down and to the left. If it’s kinesthetic, you are thinking in feelings; perhaps you are deeply feeling physical sensations, perhaps you are feeling emotion, perhaps you are remembering feeling one of the above. Retrieving memories kinesthetically, you typically look down and to the right, and often memories or thoughts in this system will cause sympathetic physical feedback, e.g. in the posture, facial expression, etc.

The “output” system is about how your conscious thoughts are expressed to the outside world. This can be relatively literal: e.g. if you’re drawing, typically you’re in your visual output system; if you’re singing or making music, your output system is auditory; dancing or gesturing, you’re utilizing your kinesthetic output system. But less obviously it expresses itself in how you verbalize your thoughts. If your primary conscious system currently is visual, you’ll describe how things look (”the beach was beautiful, the golden sand against the deep blue of the ocean”,) and use language like “I see” and “look”. If it’s kinesthetic, you will describe how things feel (”the beach was beautiful, the clear air and the warmth of the sun on my skin”,) talk about sensations, and use language like “I feel”, “get a grip”, etc. Finally, if it’s auditory, you will be talking about how things sound (”the beach was beautiful, the crash of the waves was so relaxing”,) be very wordy in your descriptions, and use language like “that sounds like”, “I hear you”, etc.

Typically (Heller says) a well adjusted person will be using all of the systems every day, as the situation demands, but not unoften people will encounter a problem in one of the systems and either avoid using it, or get stuck in it. These are pretty fundamental to Heller’s methods, his primary applications being gaining rapport with his clients (he’s a working hypnotherapist), and deciding how to present the metaphors needed to explore the unconscious processes.

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