Tag Archives: Hypnosis

The Crow Massacre

Once upon a time there was a group of crows. They were numerous, and had been established in their community for quite a while. They had a fairly well developed relationship with the surrounding farmers. They would refrain from picking the crops while they were growing, and hunt for food elsewhere. The when harvest time came, they were allowed to pick up all they could eat so long as they didn’t interfere with the harvesting process.

In turn for their cooperation, the farmers agreed not to shoot the crows for sport while they were getting close to harvest time. Crows are very easily hypnotized, and when the season is getting close to harvest time, there is something in the air that transfixed the crows. They begin to gather in mass hordes just outside the crops and wait for the harvest. This makes them easy targets for farmers with shotguns.

Once in early fall, before this rule had been established, several farmers, decided after a night of heavy drinking to have some fun with the waiting crows. They loaded up their shotguns and went out one night, and had a contest to see who could kill the most crows.

What happened after was disastrous. Very few people recalled exactly what had happened, but they all agreed that it was so horrible they should never repeat it. After several rounds of negotiations, they agreed that the crows would be protected during their hypnotic waiting for the harvest, and they would restrain themselves during their furious scavenging after the harvest.

This went on for several generations. The crows would hunt for squirrels and small rodents, and they could steer clear of the farmer’s crops. Then the weeks leading up to the harvest, the crows would slowly gather and watch, transfixed as the farmers prepared their instruments of harvest. The farmers learned to regard the gathering crows with a detached disinterest, not unlike a stronger predator barely acknowledging a lesser animal, waiting in the background for scraps.

Then one day disaster struck. There was a solar eclipse, which sent down a strange combination of solar radiation, and the strange feeling of night during the day. And few people know that the feeling of night during the day is one thing that can send the crows from a lazy feeling of desire into a ravenous blood lust for flesh.

Which is exactly what happened. Nobody knows why, but the solar eclipse was not predicted by any meteorologist, nor written about the much relied upon farmers almanac. It came completely without warning. It didn’t help matters that the frequency of the accompanying solar radiation was similar to that of the brainwave frequency of the crows.

What happened next was unimaginable. Crows swept down upon the harvesting farmers as one, instinctively plucking out there eyes, creating immediate and deadly fear and panic. With the farmers suddenly running around in a chaotic frenzy, the crows began plucking at their throats with almost surgical precision, ripping open carotid artery after carotid artery. Soon all fields were running with the blood of the slowly dying blind farmers.

When all the farmers were dead, the crows turned on each other. Before long, crows and farmer alike lay in the yet to be harvested fields, dead.

It took several days for the neighboring communities to realize there was a problem, as they weren’t expecting any harvested corn or wheat for some time. By the time a delivery truck happened through the community, the site was completely void of life.

No one has ever been to those fields since.

Intuition and Congruence – Two Powerful Gifts From Evolution

I was reading this really interesting book the other day, The Red Queen, by Matt Ridley. A fascinating study of human sexuality through the lens of evolution. One of the various topics was the reasons behind the growth of the human brain. When compared to all other mammals, humans have the largest brain. The question is why? What was the driving force behind the massive growth of the human thinking machine?

Many arguments that are usually given can also be used for other primates, and their brains are nowhere near the size of ours. Most scientists believe it is a combination of many factors to say the least. One of the most prominent is sexual selection within a species.

Imagine a group of cave people, fifty girls, and fifty guys. For the guys, they want to have sex with as many girls as possible. (Obviously). For the girls, they need to be extremely selective with who they choose to have sex with, because the consequences could be disastrous if they choose the wrong guy. Their offspring will not only carry his DNA, but his cooperation will have a direct impact on that offspring to survive.

So how do they manage this? The men try their hardest to convince the women that they are upstanding men capable of providing for the family. One way to do this is to simply pretend to be. They only need to pretend long enough and good enough to get into her cave-panties for the couple minutes it will take to get his cave-men rocks off. Then off to the next cave girl.

So an arm’s race of sorts developed over time. In men, the ability to deceive. In women, the ability to detect deception. Of course, men would pass on their skills of deception to their offspring, be they girls or boys. And women would also pass on their skills of deception detection onto their offspring, be they boys or girls.

So as man evolved, there was a contest, in both men and women, between skills of deception, and skills to detect deception. As mankind grew, this required a bigger and bigger brain.

The reason for this is congruity. In order to detect deception, you must be able to detect incongruity. This requires massive attention to subtle clues of body language, facial expression, and voice tone. Too much for the conscious mind to handle. Many believe the unconscious mind was developed to detect deception without having to spend too much conscious bandwidth, so to speak.

So we developed an “intuition” to tell when somebody is lying or not. Our subconscious minds developed the ability to quickly scan somebody’s body language, facial expressions, and voice tone, and then deliver a gut reaction, or a “feeling” to our conscious minds. And those that have learned to pay attention to this “feeling” or “gut reaction” can spot a liar a mile away.

Conversely, those that can present a very congruent image can be some of the best salespeople and manipulators around. Of course, the best way to be a great salesperson is to really believe in what you are selling. There’s a reason that many companies require their salespeople to actually own and use the product they are selling.

Of course, when you are presenting yourself, either to a potential lover or to a potential boss, it is essential that you believe in yourself. If you have any self-doubts, you will be dead before you even open your mouth.

The moral of this essay is twofold. One, take some time to get in tune with your intuition. It can serve you well against making bad decisions. It is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and is there for a reason. Use it, respect it, and listen to it.

Secondly, in order to present a believable image to the world, you must believe in yourself. Self-confidence and self-esteem stem from a belief that you are a good and worthy person with something of real value to offer the world. Don’t sell yourself short.

Believe in yourself, and trust your intuition, and you will go a long way.

Why Turtles Will Someday Rule The World

Once upon a time there was a small community of turtles. They had existed relatively peacefully over the years, surrounded by various other communities of various other animals. Sometimes there had been some interactions between communities, of different levels. Although on the surface the reasons for such interactions were humanitarian, the underlying reason was always the same.

Competition for resources.

They would always meet under the pretense of exploring the outlying regions, which neither of the communities had the ability to do alone, and they were always worried about what they would discover. On the one hand, they worried that they would discover a magnificent resource, which would lead to ultimate war and destruction.

On the other hand, they were worried that they would discover something much greater than they were, something that would think they were a mere resource, to be used and discarded. And of course that would also lead to the ultimate destruction of them all.

Either way they ventured out into the unknown each time with a great deal of trepidation. And each time they returned empty handed. Until this time.

This time they found something so incredibly powerful they couldn’t help but to question their own existence. They couldn’t help but to question the reason for their small communities on the bottom of the ocean.

The other day I was eating a tuna fish sandwich, when suddenly I realized I had forgotten to set the timer on the washing machine. I don’t usually do that, which is strange because I don’t even have a washing machine, let alone a timer. And sometime when I forget to do things that I don’t normally remember how I was wondering about this, it kind of makes me step back and think about the reason for all of this.

Anyways, back to our story.

So they found this magnificent resource, and instead of fighting for, they decided to see if they could share it. And they tried valiantly for thousands of years before they realized that it was just no use at all. And that’s when they came to the startling revelation that they didn’t really need to get along, and that by warring over resources, they were actually improving their species.

Which of course leads to another point about this story.

Turtles almost never forget. Which is why they will someday rule the world.

How To Change Your History and Change Your Future

Have you ever done something that you later regretted, or at the very least wish you would have done things differently? Ok, stupid question. We all have. I usually do stuff on a daily basis that I later regret, or at least wish I had done differently. Said thank you a little bit more loudly, smiled at some cute girl you see instead of just making passive eye contact, said something to that rude person that cut in front of you in line at the supermarket. I’m sure you can think of many things like this, maybe not so important things, but things that maybe you wish you could have done differently. 20/20 hindsight, and all that.

Well, luckily there is a process from NLP that can help you to reprogram your daily life on a regular basis to slowly change how you habitually and automatically behave in certain situations. This is perfect if you are aware of some kind of situation you’d rather behave differently than you normally do, but you usually don’t think about it until it’s too late.

For example, let’s say there is a girl you see at the supermarket that you stop by on your way home from work. You don’t know much about her except hat you think she is cute, and you might want to get to know her a little bit better. So you wish you could think of some clever thing to say, not a super mack pick up line, just a comment about something to peak her interest a little bit.

But every time you see her, you are either busy, or there are people around, or you just can’t think of anything to say in the moment. Then twenty minutes later, after you get home, you think of saying something about some button or something she had pinned on her uniform. Let’s say she had a “get out the vote” button, and you thought about mentioning that you volunteered for a local politicians campaign recently. Of course it’s to late, and next time you see her, she may or may not be wearing that button.

What you do is re-imagine the interaction, re-imagine your experience from that particular day. Only don’t remember it the way it happened, remember it the way you would like it to have happened. Something simple like “Oh you think voting is important? I do to. I actually volunteered for Mr. X’s campaign last spring.” That’s it. It’s important to only remember your part of the changed memory, because you can’t control other people reactions.

Do this a few times until the “re-recorded” memory seems as real as the real memory. What this does is program your subconscious with what you want to happen, rather than what actually happened. Your brain is like a computer, and you can program it like a computer. Only with your brain, you have to program it with images and feelings, (since your brain can’t really speak Fortran or C++).

What this does is give your brain the directive to say something interesting based on the environment when you see that girl, instead of just passively paying our money and collecting your receipt.

This may take a few tries, but when you do this on a regular basis, you will see some profound changes in your daily life. And the strange thing is, they will come almost naturally. You’ll have to really pay attention to notice them.

Rewriting your daily history is a great and powerful way to reprogram your automatic behavior so you can experience more pleasure in life and give more pleasure to others. And when you can do that, you’re doing pretty good.

Powering Flowers can lead to Startling Realizations

Once there was a lady that owned a flower shop. She had opened the flower shop several years ago, and after the inevitable rough start up times that many small business face, she started to eke out a profit. Within a year she had realized one of her life long dreams. Ever since she was a little girl, she had dreamed of owning a small flower shop. Buying the flowers from the distributors, arranging them, selling them to people knowing that they would in turn give them to others to increase pleasure and happiness. This was probably her greatest reward, knowing that she was supplying people with something that they used to make others feel good.

After a few years, she started to notice that her sales, and her customer base were fairly consistent. After the first couple of years where moved out of the red and started to make a profit, her profits slowly increased every year, until recently. In the past three or four years, her profits had been almost exactly the same. She started seeing the same customers come into her shop, and she noticed she was selling the same arrangements to the same people during the same times of year.

Even valentines day she noticed the same people come in, that she usually only saw once per year, and by a dozen roses or some other traditional arrangement. Her original satisfaction that she had enjoyed when she started to make money was starting to grow into a complacency that she hadn’t expected. It wasn’t long before she saw her dream turn into another routine that she did on a daily basis. Gone were the times when she was able to generate good feelings as she headed into she shop every morning. More and more often, she would wake up sometimes with a feeling of just another day at work.

She started to notice this attitude among her customers as well. She wasn’t sure if it was she that was affecting them, or they affecting her. It was like everybody was trapped in a routine that they couldn’t’ escape from. Pretty soon the flowers themselves stopped looking so pretty, and began to take on a mundane everyday part of the background feeling to them.

She didn’t’ really notice this, as things like this usually sneak up on you slowly, and before you know it, something that was exciting is suddenly normal and you feel like you’ve always been doing this. You don’t really want to stop, because you’ve been doing it for so long, and it seems that the only that is really keeping you going is inertial. It’s like you are in some kind of a daze, doing the same things over and over again without any real feeling to them.

Then something terrible happened. Her neighbor’s daughter was hit by a car. She was rushed to the hospital and into surgery for three hours. After a long horrible wait, the doctors said she would be fine. It was close though. Her parents were obviously relieved. The flower shop lady decided to visit this little girl in the hospital, as she always exchanged a few words with her on the way to work.

What she saw in the hospital shocked her beyond belief. She had never been in a hospital. She was lucky enough to never have been sick, and although she was happily married, she didn’t have any children. What she saw was the abundance of flowers in the hospital. And she saw looks of happiness on people’s face that she had never seen before in her flower shop. When she visited the little girls room, she couldn’t help but to burst into tears at what happened. The little girls room was filled with flowers bought for the little girl by all of the neighbors. All from the lady’s flower shop. She didn’t notice this at first, but when she walked in, the little girl, who was still recovering from a painful three-hour surgery, beamed at her.

“Look at all your flowers! Did you know you had so many pretty flowers?”

And she did know, and she did notice. And she never forgot.

Design Your Own Trance For Love and Romance

I was talking to a friend of mine the other who had a rather interesting experience recently. He was telling about this stage hypnosis seminar that he went to. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a life stage hypnotist, but they can be pretty funny. People can do some funny things when under some kind of hypnotic trance. There was one guy who, every time the hypnotists said his name, he would automatically look out over the audience and see everybody without any clothes on. The audience got a kick out of that. There were other things like counting to ten and forgetting all the odd numbers, thinking their feet were glued to the floor, and thinking that they were professional singers. One of the most interesting things was at the end, when all the people that volunteered were given their post hypnotic suggestion as a thank you for volunteering. The hypnotist said:

From now on, every night you will have a full, restful sleep. You will fall asleep quickly and easily, and wake up refreshed and feeling positive and happy. You will always have wonderful dreams that will satisfy your every fantasy, even those you are too shy to share with your closest friend.

Because everybody saw how readily they took all the other suggestions, like clucking like a chicken and having joints made out of wood, everybody assumed, correctly, that they would take the above suggestion as well. And I imagine that suddenly everybody was thinking the same thing that I was at that time:

“Dang, I wish I would have volunteered!”

Of course, had the hypnotist told everybody what a wonderful post hypnotic suggestion he was going to give, and what a wonderful experience it was going to be, then everybody would have volunteered. Instead of relaxing and watching the show, people would have been wishing it were them up there. Because the hypnotist obviously knew what he was doing, he created the allusion that volunteering was scary and dangerous. So when people were watching the show, they could all think, “I’m sure glad that’s not me!” Of course this turned into, “I wish that were me!” at the end.

Of course, that’s how risk usually works. If you knew you were going to be successful going into something, it wouldn’t be risky, and everybody would be doing it. What separates the winners from the not so much winners, (or however you want to categorize ourselves) is that people that take measured risks, generally have a better life. Sure, sometimes they get embarrassed, or lose a few dollars, or look foolish in front of others, but they always seem to bounce back and learn from the experience. And the times that they do succeed, the rewards are enormous. It seems that people that make a habit of taking measured risks only need one or two successful outcomes to keep their belief in themselves up.

I was playing golf with a guy once who didn’t keep score. I asked him why not, and he said that if he kept score it would only frustrate him. I asked him what he looks forward to, if it wasn’t a good score, and he said the pleasure of hitting a good shot. He said the combination of the physical feeling of a nice swing, combined with the visual result of the ball landing on the green was a wonderful experience, and that he didn’t need to write down a number to record it. The experience was enough. I was surprised when he said he only made one or two shots like that during one round of golf, which judging by his skill level, was easily over a hundred shots per round. I asked him if all the other not-so-great shots frustrated him, and he said that going into each shot, he only focused on a potential good outcome. If he didn’t get one, he would immediately start thinking about the next shot, and forget the ball his just hit over the fence or into the water. I thought that was a pretty good strategy. He seemed to enjoy playing golf more than most people I’ve played with.

My friend said that one of the most interesting things about the seminar is that it is held in Bangkok, Thailand. The instructor always has this particular course (once a year or so) in an exotic location. The reason for this, my friend explained, was that even if you are not up on stage forgetting all the numbers between one and ten, most people are walking around in a hypnotic trance of some sort. If you are ever focusing on something to the exclusion of other things around you, you are in trance. It is unavoidable. The secret is to make sure your trances are positive and life affirming, like the golfer who only focused on positive outcomes. If you walk around thinking about your ball going in the lake, or that girl rejecting your advances, or that business venture you are thinking of failing, you won’t be very happy. On the other hand, if you focus on a good green landing, or a smile and a phone number, or a successful business, and keep these thoughts in your head despite what happens, you’ll do pretty good.

What is a Meta For?

This morning I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about metaphor, and how it effects our language. We were arguing over the level of metaphor that exists in everyday English, he was saying that it is really only sporadically used in poetry and music. I argued that it is actually more widespread than that. For example, the whole slew of sci fi movies that came out in the fifties and sixties were really metaphors about impending nuclear destruction.

Which brings up another point. If a metaphor exists, meaning that it can be structurally determined to be a metaphor but it was not created as a metaphor, is it still a metaphor? In the example above, all those sci fi movies are looked at in retrospect as metaphors for the U.S. Soviet conflict, with the evil aliens representing the imminent destruction of nuclear weapons. But what if some of the film makers didn’t have the desire to convey any message of the necessity of global peace and harmony? What if they just wanted to tell a good story about evil aliens that you could watch on a Friday afternoon? Would it still be considered a metaphor?

There are some that believe that language itself is a metaphor for reality itself. Reality itself is completely out our reach. Our eyes can only perceive a small percentage of bandwidth that is electromagnetic radiation. Our ears can only hear a sliver of the sound waves out bouncing around. And several experiments have shown that tactile sensations around our body are dependent on the area of skin under investigation.

In this model, language itself is just a shared approximation of what we think we are experiencing. That fact that so many people agree on the same thing says nothing about the accuracy of what they agree upon. We all can agree on the color red, but it is only read to our particular set of sensing organs. Two different objects that both appear red to us might appear totally different to creatures with differently evolved sensing organs.

I participated in a seminar once. In the seminar we were all told to think of a duck. A simple noun that we all knew. Four letters. No chance of somebody mistaking the word for dog, or rhino or antidisestablishmentarianism. But guess what? When we shared our answers, we all had a different duck on our minds. One guy even thought of a rubber duck, and some other guy thought of the Aflac duck.

So if the seminar speaker hadn’t had us share all of our ducks, and she’d kept talking about ducks, we would have followed her as long as our ducks fit into her story. The guy that thought of the rubber duck would have been lost if she said to imagine our ducks flying.

Now that I think of it, metaphors are a lot more prevalent in our everyday conversations and thoughts that I’d imagined. Perhaps the best way to leverage this simple realization is to appreciate he breadth and beauty of language for what it is. An expression of that which cannot be expressed, because that which is being expressed is inextricably connected to the expresser. As the expresser changes his experience of his expression, he changes that of which he is expressing.

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Dropping Frogs Can Lead to Changing Beliefs

I was reading an article in the paper the other day about a small town in the midwest that experienced a very strange phenomenon. One fine during the summer, or perhaps the spring, it started raining frogs. It happened in the fifties, and it was a small town, so there is absolutely no evidence that this actually took place. Some say it was a hoax. Others think it was due to an extremely unlikely confluence of meteorological events pulled the frogs out of a lake them through some strange quirk of air pressure and deposited them on the unsuspecting town inhabitants. Others claim that it was mass hypnosis. Mass hypnosis is a strange thing when you think about it, because there have been many documented accounts of mass hypnosis. Some of them easy to understand, some unexplainable like the falling frogs.

I was reminded of this story when I recently saw a movie where a guy fell in love with a prosthetic doll. At first people thought he was completely nuts, but then slowly, as they realized he had deeper problems, decided that the best course of action would be to help the poor guy. At first he was the but of jokes behind his back. I’m sure you can imagine the jokes that would circulate should you show up at a party with a fake person and in all seriousness claim her as your girlfriend. One of the most fascinating things about the movie was how the townspeople slowly started to get sucked into his reality. Because he believed so completely that this rubber doll was a real person that he had real conversations, (and even a couple of arguments with,) the townspeople slowly started becoming involved in his obvious break from reality.

This is an example of when you have a really strong, congruent frame of reality. If you walk through life holding a strong set of beliefs in your head, others will believe them as well if the beliefs held tightly enough. It matters not if they are true or not. The key is when you choose a belief, to make sure to choose helpful ones, and act one hundred percent that they are actually true. When you do that, people will only follow your lead. Imagine some people in the world that have really strong beliefs, and act on them. Suppose you could have a strong belief that you are incredibly attractive to the opposite sex? Suppose that you held a belief that money is easy to come by? Suppose you were to hold a belief that you were able to learn new things easily and quickly? How easy would your life be then? What other beliefs can you come up with that once you believe them, others will as well? How easily can you imagine your life when you switch out old beliefs, and switch in new ones that support you and what you want to create better things in life?

So as the movie went on, the main character decided, most likely subconsciously, that he learned what he needed from his relationship with girlfriend, and imagined a deadly disease for her. So she could die, and clear the way for him to start to build relationships with real people. I think there are several important lessons in this movie, not the least of which is how powerful your mind is to create the life that you want, by almost any means necessary. Even enlisting the help of the entire town in some incredible group self induced hypnosis. That is pretty powerful stuff.

And as far as group hypnosis, sometimes called ‘mass hysteria,’ there are different kinds. Their are the organic kinds, like the raining frogs, and certain episodes of dancing hysteria, and laughing hysteria. Then there is created mass hysteria, although the creation of mass hysteria is not always the intent, as what happened in the famous Orson Wells “War of The Worlds” incident, where everybody thought we were under attack by Martians. Personally, I’d prefer some falling frogs. Unless of course they were Martians disguised as falling frogs.

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