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Eldon's Blog What If
Eldon's Blog What If
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In the last issue I suggested that it is our beliefs, beliefs taken aboard by and large as a result of hypnotic suggestion, that directly limits our experience. I want to stretch this idea some this week by suggesting that what we think is our direct experience of ourselves may indeed be a confabulation. What do I mean by that? Imagine that you had been hypnotized and given a few post hypnotic suggestions. Let's say that one such suggestion was for aphasia (the loss or impairment of the power to use or comprehend words). As such, the hypnotist informed you that when you awoke you would not remember the number 6. (Now we actually do things of this nature to demonstrate hypnosis). So, you are told that until the hypnotist does something like snap their fingers, you will not know of the number six. Now, when you're awakened from hypnosis the post hypnotic suggestion is still in place. The hypnotist asks you to count to ten and you do so skipping the number six. The hypnotists shows you a dinner bill for 65.05 and you are prepared to pay 5.05. To you, there is no number six. Now suppose you were born on June 6th of 1966, how old are you? Let's take this a step further. Suppose the post hypnotic suggestion included something like this, "You will be able to watch television and listen to the radio but you will not consciously acknowledge the promptings from them that urge you to do something; you will do this and when I ask why, you will make up a reason for acting in such a way but you will not be aware that you are making up this reason." Okay, now you see a TV commercial that informs you to buy ABC Magic Cold Remedy because you will get a cold. You buy the remedy and when I ask why, you inform me that it is preventative, just in case you get a cold. You get the cold, of course, and later use your remedy. Now does any of this sound familiar. Are you aware that studies have shown that people do just this sort of thing. For example, when exposed to a subliminal prime, a negative word matched with the picture of a person, when you are asked to rate this person on a positive scale, you will not only rate them negatively but you will have a reason for doing so despite the fact that you are totally unaware of the subliminal stimuli. This kind of research has led many serious researchers to believe that we all have "confabulators" just for making sense of some of the things we do and believe. There are many areas of our lives where we fail to be "aware" of ourselves. Studies have shown that projecting subliminal cues that represent the characteristics of a significant other onto a target person leads to the transference of feelings about the significant other to the target person. One really interesting study showed that men on a somewhat dangerous bridge, when approached with a questionnaire by a pretty researcher who left them her phone number in case they wanted to know about the study she was conducting, were much more likely to phone and request a date than men who were relaxing on a park bench. Apparently, the risk, the danger, the level of arousal that resulted from this risk, was transferred to the female researcher causing her to appear more attractive and all of this decision stuff was again, outside of conscious awareness. In the words of researcher Jonathan Miller, "Human beings owe a surprisingly large proportion of their cognitive and behavioral capacities to the existence of an 'automatic self' of which they have no conscious knowledge and over which they have little voluntary control." I am particularly fond of the adage, "To thy own self be true." One of the reasons this is true for me is the pure fact that knowing oneself is truly a journey--an exploration--and one which demands that we risk being wrong about everything we think we know or believe. I spent last week in New York City talking about mind programming and its hypnotic effects. Becoming "dehypnotized" may just take a little more effort than the snap of someone's fingers. It is incumbent upon each of us to become aware of all the ways we are managed, manipulated and even ushered into a sort of hive consciousness if we truly wish to know who we are and why we are here. Thanks for the read, Eldon |
