Cult of Tarot Forum

What do you think of when you hear the word “hypnosis?”

Maybe you think of some film you’ve seen like, The Manchurian Candidate, where it is used to turn people into helpless slaves to the hypnotist’s suggestions.




Or maybe you’ve seen (also probably in a movie) some unfortunate person lured onto a stage and made to behave in silly or embarrassing ways for the entertainment of an audience?

If that’s the extent of your familiarity with hypnotism (it was mine) then you will no doubt find this interview with Cult of Tarot Member, dodalisque, a real eye-opener.

Dodalisque is a licensed hypnotherapist who has spent more time in hypnotic trances with clients than you could swing a pocket-watch on a chain at. (see his brief biography at the end of this interview)

What you will no doubt find really surprising are the many connections and parallels hypnotism and reading tarot share. And with all the emphasis on the conscious and unconscious, it has quite a lot to do with shadow work as well.

I’ll keep this intro short because his answers are so complete and wonderfully generous that we should get right to them. I want to thank dodalisque for agreeing to this Cult of Tarot Interview and for opening up this absolutely fascinating topic for us. And please feel free to post your questions for him at the end.

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To begin with, are there any parallels between hypnosis and tarot reading?

Your tarot card readers at Cult of Tarot may be surprised to learn that, in fact, they are already working as hypnotherapists. A reader typically faces a client across a desk - the mood is quiet and contemplative - both are focused completely on the issues of the client - both are so concentrated on the images on the cards that their surroundings recede into the background - all that can be heard is the voice of the reader. I could be describing a hypnotherapy session. Readers are always advised to phrase their insights in a way that leaves their client with a positive or inspiring message. If this isn't therapy then I don't know what is.

A typical hypnotherapy session looks something like this:




The client decides to go to a hypnotherapist because his life is caught in a loop (2 of Coins); while lying on the hypnotherapist's couch his conscious mind is made quiet and still (4 of Swords); this allows the heart to open (Ace of Cups). If this sounds like meditation, it is. The sensation of entering hypnosis is more or less identical to meditation, minus the gently rhythmical voice of the hypnotist. The constant restless activity of the conscious mind is exhausting , so when that part of us is at rest we feel tremendously energised and a different sort of intelligence awakens.

Is hypnosis older than the tarot?

The gender metaphor that is so familiar to all of us who know the tarot is a very concise and beautiful poetic expression of the mechanism of human consciousness that makes hypnosis possible: "masculine" = conscious mind, "feminine" = unconscious mind. Many assume that this clinical distinction originated with the work of Jung and Freud, but the tarot is proof that the idea has been around in one form or another for centuries, even millennia. The vocabulary used to describe the relationship between the conscious and unconscious is all that has changed. The ancient Egyptians had their "sleep temples" and the ancient Greeks performed initiatory rites known as "mysteries." Even Christian church ritual is meant to encourage us to enter a trance state.

Jung's debt to the tarot is well documented, while Freud himself worked as a hypnotist for several years before deciding to abandon it and create what became known as "psychoanalysis." Freud was not particularly skilled as a hypnotist and did not enjoy its formal aspect, but he borrowed many hypnotic techniques and concepts to create his own system.

In a tarot reading we focus on the cards, but how does hypnosis work?

It works because our unconscious is constantly registering and recording vast quantities of information than we are not consciously aware of. This information determines our behaviour more powerfully than we realise. Our conscious mind, or ego, or human will, likes to think it is running the show, but this is not true. For example, we do not consciously regulate every heartbeat or tell our body how to generate new cells. These are unconscious processes. The body is as much a part of our unconscious as the heart and our higher spiritual centres. In fact the contribution of the conscious mind to our total being is quite puny and insignificant compared to that of the unconscious.

A hypnotist knows how to bypass the conscious mind and talk directly to the unconscious so as to deliberately implant specific information. This short clip showing the stage hypnotist Derren Brown, working with the English actor and comedian Simon Pegg, familiar from the Star Trek and Mission Impossible movie franchises, provides an example of what I mean. At the end of the clip Brown reveals how the trick was done.



We are being constantly bombarded by millions of sensations and the conscious mind is a kind of filter that reduces those sensations to a manageable level and organises them into familiar patterns. The conscious mind, which I always associate with the Emperor (IV) card, is our protector. We would drown in a torrent of phenomena without it. But the Emperor, especially as we get older, tends to do his job too well. The patterns of our life gradually become more manageable, more familiar, more fixed. We get "set in our ways." In hypnotherapy this is known as someone's "conscious set." At this point we need to find a way to trick our way past the Emperor if we are ever to make positive changes to our life.

The clip with Derren Brown seems to have very little to do with making positive changes to someone's life.

And that is why, as much as I enjoy and admire, even envy, the skills of someone like Derren Brown, officially I have to say that I disapprove of stage hypnotists. They propagate the notion that hypnosis is something to be feared, something that can be used to control and humiliate us against our will. Persuading the client's conscious mind to relax its iron grip on our consciousness is already difficult enough.

Exploiting hypnosis for the purposes of entertainment also trivialises something that has the power to do tremendous good and enrich our spiritual life. A knife can be used to stab someone or it can be used to cut up an orange and share it. Hypnosis is a remarkably versatile and valuable tool and it is up to us to decide how best to use it.

The dirty secret to stage hypnosis is that, for whatever reason, about 10% of the population are highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion and can almost instantly go into very deep trance. The trick is to learn how to recognise and invite up on stage only people from the audience who belong to that 10%. Actors are usually among the most susceptible because they are already performers and like to play along. Their sense of self is more fluid than most of us. The trick to onstage mind-reading, and much of card magic, is that ideas have already been surreptitiously implanted into the unconscious of the subject for the mind-reader to "discover." This is what happens in the Derren Brown clip.

What is the difference between stage hypnosis and hypnotherapy?

A hypnotherapist of course does not have the choice of limiting his clients to the 10% who are highly suggestible. The great clinical psychologist and hypnotherapist Milton Erickson claimed that everyone is capable of being hypnotised, but I found that about 10% are extremely difficult to put into trance. Perhaps surprisingly these people tend to have a lower than average IQ. People at the low end of the scale have difficulty concentrating their attention for more than a few seconds. The rest of us, myself included, fit somewhere in the 80% range in the middle. Different personalities require different techniques to get them into trance. Some are born with a greater talent for trance than others. Clients used to be asked to fill out detailed questionnaires to help the hypnotherapist decide which techniques to use, but I found palmistry to be a more accurate and reliable indicator.

But learning to go into trance is a skill that can be learned by almost anyone and improves with practise. As clients get more familiar with trance and learn to better trust the hypnotist, they allow themselves to go deeper each time. After several sessions a client will often begin to go into trance almost as soon as they enter the office. They start to remember what it feels like. Talking someone down into trance is known as the hypnotic induction. These are most effective when they appear to be casual and spontaneous, so that the conscious mind lets down its guard. But the inductions are often carefully scripted and rehearsed by the hypnotherapist to perfect crucial subtle shifts in emphasis and intonation. The unconscious of the client is hyper-sensitive to these details even though their conscious mind is completely unaware that anything out of the ordinary is happening.

Many people take pride in the fact that they consider themselves too "strong-willed" to be hypnotised. But in those cases the small individual human will is fighting against the much stronger mechanisms that govern human consciousness. Simply commanding such clients to deliberately resist commands puts their conscious mind in an impossible double-bind. The only way to disobey a direct order from the hypnotist to become more awake and not to relax for a second is to go into trance. This is the origin of the term "reverse psychology." But there are hundreds of techniques for dissolving conscious and unconscious resistance to hypnosis. Resistant clients are like people who only agree to take swimming lessons on the condition that they are allowed to keep their arms and legs tied together. Reading tarot cards for someone who thinks the whole thing is nonsense can also be an uphill struggle.

So the conscious mind needs to be tricked into becoming quiet?

Anyone who has experimented with meditation, or performed any task that requires intense concentration, will attest to the fact that the conscious mind is full of distracting rubbish. That is one reason why the suit of Swords is the darkest suit in the tarot. More thoughts, less peace. As Sri Chinmoy says: "Consciousness is a table, and thoughts are the flies on the table."

Meditation proper cannot really begin until this restless chattering slows down or stops altogether. This is what in Zen practise is called "emptiness" or "nothingness", and with the help of a good hypnotist it is a lot easier to reach than you would expect. At this point the whole quality, or flavour, of our consciousness changes and we enter into what I am calling a deep "trance" state.

We are not absent. We are still participating in the experience. We remain highly alert inwardly, in fact more alert, not dopey at all. We can be in deep trance with our eyes open, which was how I was taught to meditate. Try it, just allow your eyes to go out of focus and turn your attention inward. The Hanged Man in some Tarot de Marseille decks, like the Dodal, has his eyes crossed and I often wonder if this is what is being referred to. Actually we are all already very familiar with trance states of different types, so this whole hypnosis thing is not as weird as people would have you believe.

A hypnotist is someone with experience of trance who can teach us quickly and easily how to enter deep trance states. It's like going to a piano teacher to get lessons to speed up our progress. There is no substitute for private meditation, just as there is no substitute for developing our own way of playing piano, or making art generally, but some initial guidance can save a lot of time.

What is the value of being in a trance state?

From the point of view of a student of meditation, it allows the heart and soul to come forward. From the point of view of a hypnotherapist, it means that the client becomes highly suggestible. When our conscious mind is quiet we absorb ideas like a sponge. Those ideas then become part of who we are at a deep unconscious level. Hypnosis works within the domain of feelings and convictions. The conscious mind will always argue with new ideas presented to it, but the unconscious is uncritically receptive.

That sounds as though it could be dangerous.

It is. And indeed that is why many are suspicious or fearful of hypnosis. But what people do not realise is that they have already been hypnotised many hundreds of thousands of times throughout their lives without their knowledge or consent. Parents, friends, schools, religions, the media, advertisers, politicians, and society at large have all been pumping us full of ideas about who we are, what we want, and what we are able to accomplish. Most of those ideas are downright harmful, or at best severely limiting. When we gain access to the unconscious we soon realise that our true capacities are infinitely greater. This is the real subject of the movie "The Matrix".

In trance we have the ability to re-write our conditioning, to modify habitual thought patterns and behaviours and to change who we are. The conscious mind, or ego, has a very limited appreciation of our true capacities, but considers itself to be the centre of our consciousness. However, our true identity, or soul, is infinitely larger and more beautiful than the ego.

Hypnotherapy is not something foisted on you without your knowledge, but is 100% a collaborative experience between the hypnotist and client that limits itself to achieving specific goals agreed on beforehand by both. In a sense, hypnotherapy is a means of de-hypnotising ourselves.

How do positive or negative thought patterns become embedded in our unconscious?

Mostly by repetition. This creates neural pathways through the brain, like paths through a forest that get more defined the more we use them. It is easier to follow old paths, no matter how bad they are, than to search for newer better ways through the forest. This is the source of "bad habits" that are difficult to break.

But this mechanism is also responsible for many of our greatest accomplishments. The unconscious might be thought of as the hard-drive of a computer, while the conscious mind is the computer screen. We store highly complex programs on the hard-drive that need to be opened one at a time because they are much too big to all be permanently available on the screen. Learning to walk as a child is a remarkably complex "program" that is learned gradually by painful trial and error. Eventually the learned skill gets stored in our unconscious, where it sits quietly until we need to walk somewhere. After opening the program we no longer need to consciously think about what we are doing. Walking, that extraordinary balancing act, seems to happen by itself.

Learning to read is another example. In adulthood we no longer need to consciously sound out every letter to form words and sentences. Our unconscious takes care of the whole thing at astonishing speed. Driving a car is another familiar example of self-hypnosis. After several weeks or months of conscious repetition the skill becomes automatic, so to speak, to the extent that we often forget how we arrived at our destination. In fact most of our life consists of downloading these programs from our unconscious and allowing them to operate without conscious interference.
In hypnotherapy the learning process is speeded up, but several sessions are sometime necessary to over-write old programs and establish new neural pathways. Complex behavioural issues may take many sessions to correct. There are no miracles involved. The greatest 20th century hypnotist Milton Erickson once said: "You use hypnosis not as a cure but as a means of establishing a favourable climate in which to learn."

So, what exactly is hypnosis?

Many hypnotists believe that hypnosis is a "special state", a unique area of consciousness that we can visit. Others, myself included, prefer to think of all consciousness as a patchwork quilt of trance states of varying intensity. Balancing on a tightrope is a trance state, boredom is a trance state, watching a movie is a trance state, sex is a trance state. Sleep is arguably the deepest trance state. We take these experiences for granted because they are so familiar to us, but if you think about it, there is something wonderful about these shifts in the quality of our consciousness. An ordinary sex trance involves distortion of our time sense, heightened tactile sensitivity, and reduced awareness of our physical surroundings - all symptoms of the kind of trance states normally associated with hypnotism.

Essentially we enter a trance of one sort or another whenever we narrow our attention to concentrate on something. Pulling someone into the present moment by getting them fascinated in an object or image or bodily sensation is the quickest way to put someone in trance. This limits the distractions caused by the continual aimless chattering of the conscious mind, and allows the unconscious to come forward and play a bigger role in our total experience, as we saw above in the three RWS cards.

What distinguishes a hypnotic trance from ordinary everyday trances?

Depth. My explanation is going to be a gross simplification but should give a rough idea of how it works. The conscious mind is like the surface of the ocean but the unconscious is in the silence and depth below the surface. If you wired yourself up to a machine that measured brain waves, the way you spend most of your waking life - probably the way you are right now - would show a predominance of "beta" waves. These would appear on a graph as spiky peaks close together. A light trance, such as when you are daydreaming or deeply immersed in a novel or movie or crossword puzzle, would show a predominance of "alpha" waves, whose peaks would be smoother and more widely spaced. In hypnosis we generally work at the next level down, which is characterised by slow rhythmical "theta" waves. These are the brain wave patterns associated with states like meditation or the creation of art. The next level down is distinguished by "delta" waves, which are linked to very deep meditative states and with sleep.

Interestingly a human baby exhibits mostly "delta" waves before the age of about 2. So they are technically asleep even while they are crawling around and screaming and crying and doing whatever else babies do. This is a very open receptive state, highly conducive to learning. Consequently, many of the most valuable but also some of the most debilitating and tenacious unconscious programs are established during these early years. The very mood of the house in which we grow up is quietly hypnotising us into believing that this is how life as a whole is, and this sets limits on much of what follows.

Even more alarming is the fact that teenagers show a predominance of "alpha" waves until they are around 16 or 17 or even later. "Beta" waves are associated with rational adult consciousness, so it's actually pointless to expect teenagers to be reasonable - their "alpha" wave brain chemistry forbids it. It also means that teenagers are permanently in a receptive suggestible state, so all those cliches about being at an "impressionable age" are literally true. No wonder we are nervous about the friends our children make at this time, and that terrible experiences such as sexual abuse should generate such devastating long term damage. Altering such early negative conditioning can take years of therapy.

How would hypnotherapy approach such issues?

I personally have no medical training or any knowledge of clinical psychology, so I never felt confident in meddling in such matters. When they came up in a session I would always refer my clients to experienced professionals.

As a novice hypnotherapist, nearly half of my clients needed help to quit smoking or lose weight, but I also worked with those suffering from depression or insomnia or learning to tolerate chronic pain. I also helped people to overcome their fear of the dentist's chair, a chess player to improve his game, a javelin thrower to transcend his personal best, and a writer to overcome writer's block. Countless surgeries have been carried out on hypnotised patients when general anesthesia using drugs is not available or advisable. Their eyes may even be open watching the surgery, but they have been prepared to disassociate themselves from localised physical sensation or to imagine the pain is outside themselves, even located in a chair across the room.

Can you tell us about some other hypnotic techniques?

We use visualisation a lot when the client is in trance because, strange as it may seem, the unconscious does not make a solid distinction between fact and fiction - between what we know to be true and what we imagine to be true. The javelin thrower repeatedly imagines his throw going past the marker showing his personal best and this convinces his body, which is part of the unconscious, that it is already capable of achieving that feat. Sports psychologists use hypnotic techniques to improve confidence and performance.

Hypnotherapy frequently exploits the mind/body connection. The placebo effect in medicine is proof that such a thing exists. When the patient fully expects to get well, he will get well. How else do we explain the way a mother's loving embrace will stop a child from feeling pain? Our conscious mind tells us that this should be impossible, but in hypnosis the conscious mind is "put to sleep" so we are not limited by its conditioned expectations of what is possible.

What is the relationship between hypnosis and dreams?

The unconscious cannot express itself in words, but communicates with our conscious mind, often in dreams, using the language of images. I suppose in a tarot reading the cards ARE the dream. When we interpret the images in a way that accurately expresses the message being sent to us from the unconscious, we feel a sort of tingle of recognition. If we fail to recognise and respond to the promptings of dreams, eventually the unconscious is forced to communicate with us in the language of events, such as illnesses or accidents or falling in love.

During a hypnosis session the unconscious is often allowed to take the lead so that we are "dreaming awake", receiving messages in exactly the same way as when we are asleep and dreaming, watching scenarios unfold in vivid detail, complete with textures and smells, seemingly of their own accord. The unconscious is our friend and wants our whole being to prosper.

Words are the domain of the conscious mind, but words are an extremely limited and clumsy means of communication. Just think how impossible it would be to try to describe the taste of a strawberry to someone who had never eaten one. Feelings and emotions can be labelled too but their "taste" is elusive and at root not communicable in words. At best they trigger memories of past feelings. Plato called this "anamnesis", which contains our word "amnesia", and so translates literally as something like "non-forgetting" or "stopping forgetting." Achieving God-realisation, or "self actualisation" as Jung calls it, the union of the male and female aspects of consciousness, the experience featured on the World (XXI) card, is the ultimate act of anamnesis.

What else can hypnosis do?

Hypnosis has countless applications. I always thought it would be fun to train to work with the police to help witnesses recall details of a crime, such as the license plate number of the getaway vehicle. I have even heard of a subject in deep trance imagining himself rubbing the mud off an obscured license plate to read the number! He had been face down on the floor of the bank during the robbery! This could be apocryphal, but I have certainly witnessed some very strange things while working with hypnosis.

The unconscious seems to remember EVERYTHING that ever happened to us in astonishing detail. In deep trance it is relatively easy to take a client back to any moment in their life so that they may re-experience it. Much experimentation has been done with past life regressions, but it was not one of my specialisations.

Can you tell us any trade secrets about how to put someone into hypnosis?

They are not very secret. There are hundreds of books on the topic. But the best hypnotists are artists rather than technicians. Even if I tell you how to do it, to be effective requires talent and practise. Milton Erickson maintained that, "All you need to hypnotise someone is confidence in your own voice".

The most common technique is to hide therapeutic suggestions in repeated key words and phrases that make up the sentences you say to a client in trance. Derren Brown is brilliant at this. You may appear to the client to be relating a joke or an anecdote that has no apparent connection to the client's problems, but this is a trick to slip undetected past the protective wall of the conscious mind. The whole trick of hypnosis is to talk to the unconscious without awakening the suspicions of the conscious mind.

It may surprise you to learn that the unconscious hears sentences as a kind of "word salad", absorbing words and phrases as individual entities separate from the syntactical context in which they appear. For example, when I say something like, "I don't want you to go into hypnosis", if I make an infinitesimal shift of emphasis to the second half of the sentence, the unconscious will hear this as a direct command to "Go into hypnosis."

Shock is a common strategy used for triggering instantaneous trances. When something happens that the conscious mind cannot make sense of it becomes momentarily paralysed and silent, handing responsibility for survival over to instinct. This allows the open unconscious to come to the fore. At such moments the client is highly suggestible. A skilled hypnotist is able to step in at this exact moment and take control, quickly reinforcing and deepening the trance.

If you look at the beginning of the Derren Brown clip you will see the way he takes Simon Pegg's hand and turns it over on the table. This instantly establishes who is running the show but is also something that you would not ever expect a stranger to do at first meeting. Brown is inducing a momentary state of shock. The touching of Pegg's arm or shoulder at odd moments throughout the session may be emphasising certain important words, or it may simply be a way of deepening Pegg's sense of helplessness and convincing him that Brown is exercising a sophisticated form of control. It has been said that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis.

Confusion, paradox, illogical connections, non-sequiturs, grammatically incorrect sentences - these are some of the items in the hypnotist's toolbox, all designed to create an environment in which the conscious mind feels at a loss. Boring the conscious mind into inattention is another method. Conversely, making the conscious mind too busy, overloading it with tasks, such as holding 5 or 6 thoughts simultaneously, is a way of tiring the conscious mind so that it craves relaxation and surrenders its iron grip on our consciousness.

What about the "swinging watch" and "Look into my eyes"?

The swinging watch is a cliche but is still a wonderful way of hypnotising someone. Getting them to follow your fingertip or stare up at a stain on the ceiling works just as well. You are tiring the eyes of the client so that when the hypnotist says, "You are getting sleepy", the client thinks, "Jesus, this guy can read my mind" and so feels simultaneously outmatched and nurtured, like a child with a parent, and consequently more willing to accept suggestions.

"Look into my eyes" is another cliche of hypnosis that works wonderfully well. Unbroken eye contact is physically and psychologically tiring. But apart from that, one of the best ways of putting someone into trance is to be in trance oneself. Musicians understand this. In public hypnotherapists nowadays are reluctant to talk about such things because the profession has struggled long and hard to win the approval of the scientific and medical community, to make hypnosis respectable and take it out of the circus tent. But in private every hypnotherapist I have talked to admits to feeling a sort of telepathic link with their client in trance.

Subtly repeating key words and phrases, weaving them skillfully into an ordinary-seeming sentences can establish "neural pathways" in the brain with remarkable speed and effectiveness. "Post hypnotic" suggestions can be implanted that will be triggered at a much later date by linking them to something like squeezing one's thumb and forefinger together. This kind of thing can be used to overcome, say, a temporary craving for a cigarette long after the hypnosis session is completed.

You talked earlier about ways in which hypnosis can be abused. Does this have political implications?

You bet. Political slogans and propaganda work in exactly the same way as a hypnotist's repeated words and phrases. People gathered together in a group, especially those who are of a like mind and who are only at the rally because they already trust and admire the man on the stage, will unconsciously reinforce each other's trance. Advertising works in the same way. When we are relaxed in front of a TV we are already in a light trance and so quite vulnerable to suggestion. If this was not the case advertisers would not spends millions on ads. A single ad would not have any effect but when we have seen and heard the same thing 50 times we find ourselves reaching for that product on the supermarket shelf without quite knowing why. Ads make connections in our unconscious linking the product - corn plasters, say - to happy emotions like youth, sex, ease and wealth.

I talked earlier about the hypnotist's use of shock. The left-wing political commentator Naomi Kline has written a brilliant book, The Shock Doctrine in which she catalogues examples from the last 40 years, the era of Globalisation, showing the way massive economic reforms advantageous to corporate power, but which are generally disastrous for the bulk of the population, are foisted on countries at the very moment they are suffering from the collective shock of war or natural disaster. Massive development projects that take place all at once rather than being carefully planned and spaced out sensibly over time create the same sense of overwhelming shock and passive helplessness in a community.

Some students of Milton Erickson studied the way he hypnotised clients and formalised his mannerisms into a complete system known as NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). The techniques can be effective even when they are learned and applied mechanically by idiots. I should imagine every trainee advertising executive takes courses in NLP. Milton Erickson would have hated it, but I suppose Einstein wasn't too happy either about his Theory of Relativity being used to make atomic bombs.

Do you have any final comments?

I would like to return to the subject of tarot for a moment. One technique for taking someone down into trance is known as the "yes-response". The hypnotist will make a series of random banal irrefutable observations or vapid truisms - about the weather, the colour of the shirt you are wearing, or about how "life can be hard sometimes", and such like. This sets up a "momentum of agreement", so that when the next statement is more debatable or contains a therapeutic suggestion rather than another banal fact, the client will tend to accept it uncritically. I see many TV ads using this technique nowadays - a list of such disconnected statements followed by the suggestion to "Drink Coke".

Pointing at visual details on the cards seems to me identical to the hypnotist's trick of making "banal irrefutable observations". In this way, while our client is in the mild trance induced by a reading, the reader's interpretations of the images on the cards can carry the same force as verbal therapeutic suggestions made during a hypnosis session. In fact, the cards are a more subtle and effective means of changing someone's habitual ways of thinking than a lecture. No one likes taking direct advice and will resist it, inwardly or outwardly arguing its merits, but an image is irrefutable.

Hypnosis would be a wonderful to learn in high school to improve learning skills and to promote mental and physical health, but I feel even these benefits may limit our appreciation of its true potential. Personally if I ever got back into hypnosis again I would use it primarily to teach people meditation and self-hypnosis to put them in better contact with their unconscious to enable them to enrich their spiritual life. I wish I had discovered it sooner.

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Biography

Dodalisque is 65, a Scorpio, married with 2 daughters, having emigrated to Canada from England when he was 22. He studied meditation with the Indian spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy between 1983 - 2001, but is quick to add that he was his master's worst disciple in the world. A disgrace, really. Even though Sri Chinmoy died in 2007, he still considers himself a devoted follower, but life gradually redirected his spiritual energies toward the possibly less austere disciplines of tarot, palmistry, reiki, and hypnosis. He studied hypnotherapy with a qualified practitioner for two years, which included many hundreds of hours of practical experience of being in hypnotic trance and of hypnotising others. After passing his professional exams he became a member of the IMDHA (International Medical and Dental Hypnotherapy Association), and is entitled to put the letters C.Ht. (Certified Hypnotherapist) after his name. He worked as a full-time hypnotherapist for just 3 years (2006-09), and cites poor financial management and a lifetime habit of laziness as contributing factors to his decision to retire and take up a candy-ass job as a clerk in an antiquarian bookstore.

Recommended reading:

Robin Waterfield, Hidden Depths: the story of hypnosis - the best general introduction to the history and development of hypnosis.

Sidney Rosen (ed.), My Voice Will Go with You: the teaching tales of Milton H. Erickson - a charming introduction to the great genius of 20th century hypnosis.

William O'Hanlon and Michael Martin, Solution-Oriented Hypnosis: an Ericksonian approach - in book form this is a series of transcriptions of recorded workshops providing straightforward advice to novices about how to hypnotise people and what to do with them when they are in hypnosis.

David L. Calof, The Couple Who Became Each Other: stories of healing and transformation from a leading hypnotherapist - remarkable case histories that illustrate some of the more startling applications of hypnosis. Gives an inkling of the unfathomable potential of human consciousness.

I have a question dodalisque. Actually many but for starters, you said,

Different personalities require different techniques to get them into trance. Some are born with a greater talent for trance than others. Clients used to be asked to fill out detailed questionnaires to help the hypnotherapist decide which techniques to use, but I found palmistry to be a more accurate and reliable indicator.

Could you possibly elaborate on that just a bit? How do you use palmistry to evaluate a client's tendencies toward trance induction?

We don't find it strange to think that we can get a feel for someone's character by looking at their face. Online dating sites are built on this premise. But recent brain research has shown that the colossal number of motor and neuron connections to the hands and fingers is 14 times larger than that assigned to the face, including the eyes and mouth. About a third of all brain activity involves the hands. Handwriting analysis is thought to be a reliable gauge to character, or was, before people were given computers and iphones and lost the ability to hold a pen. To a large extent, we ARE our hands.

This model was made to show how our body looks to our own brain. It does have a name but I can't find it on Google at the moment:



I haven't forgotten your question but, in my own ponderous way, I just need to back up a little. There are several systems of palmistry, each with its own vocabulary for discussing how to interpret lines and various types of information visible on the hand. The most popular in our culture is based on the Four Elements, which as metaphors for various aspects of human psychology are very familiar to us from the 4 tarot suits. The palm itself is divided up into quadrants that correspond to earth/air/fire/water. There are four main lines on the hand that are common to just about everyone - life/head/fate/heart - and each of these is also associated respectively with earth/air/fire/water. When you understand the language of the hand it is actually very similar to doing a tarot reading.

The development of palmistry as a respectable science came about by the collecting and analysing of masses of data correlating features on the hand with observable behavior. Isn't that how astrology built up its associations of zodiac signs to different personality types? Both astrology and palmistry are branches of empirical science, though admittedly still in their infancy even after several thousand years of data collection.

Interpreting the lines on the palm is actually a small part of palmistry. There are hundreds of pieces of information that need to be evaluated in a full reading, including fingerprints, palm ridges, nails, the fingers, their size and shape and spacing, and how they lean towards or away from each other, the relative length of the phalanges on each finger, the mounds and the base of each finger, skin texture , the firmness of the flesh, and even hand gestures. The lines on the hand might be thought of as rivers of energy, showing how we apportion energy to different areas of our life.

A real palm reading takes at least a couple of hours and involves a magnifying glass and ink palm prints of both hands. I like to take home the information and sleep on it before I put my reading together. There are so many individual bits of information to correlate, most of it contradictory, since we are all such a unique combination of conflicting qualities that, as in a tarot reading, the conscious mind is not up to the task and we need to rely on the much faster and more subtle intelligence of intuition.

For example, I noticed in my first quick glance that a certain client's fate line on her right hand began, not as usual low down on the hand just above the wrist, but above half way up the palm; she also showed indicators of advanced communication skills (a little finger that stood away from the other fingers); and she had a long clear deep upward-curving heart line suggesting a warm heart. Without even thinking it popped out of my mouth, "You didn't take up teaching until your own kids had left home, did you?"

Isn't that similar to the way our mind works when we are doing a tarot reading? The indicators point to a specific scenario that is the only way to reconcile them all. We might even get a picture in our mind, a sort of misty vision, of the client teaching in front of a class. Our intuition has even worked out that she was teaching young children between the ages of 6 and 8, though it was probably factoring in more than the three indicators mentioned above.

The constant back and forth comparison of both hands is also essential since, by and large, for a right-handed person, the left hand shows what we were born with and the right hand shows what we have done with that. A tiny little Chinese woman who worked nights in the bakery where I worked for 15 years and who ran the place and could do the work of 5 men had a remarkably discrepancy between her two hands. The left hand was a mess - she should have been in a mental asylum or dead - whereas the right hand was a model of balance and health. It turned out she was very sickly as a child but her grandmother was a wizard at acupuncture and had devoted 10 years of intensive treatment, hours every day, to her beloved grand-daughter. She had essentially rewired the entire nervous system.

The lines on the hand are in no way related to the way we habitually fold the hands during our daily occupations. In fact the basic layout of the lines on each individual's hands is established after just 3 months in the womb. This suggests that we come into this life already programmed to be one way or another with specific skills and abilities. Isn't this what DNA research tells us too? Palmistry and DNA analysis have a lot in common.

Having said that, we are not chained to that way of being. If we change our behaviour we will also make observable small changes to the lines on our hands. It's fascinating to takes palm prints every two weeks for a year and then compare them to diary entries for the same period. Losing a job or boyfriend or even buying a new car will initiate microscopic or dramatic changes to the lines. Quite detailed medical issues can be picked up in the lines months or even years before a doctor has examined you. The unconscious knows your body has a problem a long time before it is felt or is outwardly noticeable.

But to answer your original question, some people are highly analytical and stubborn about surrendering conscious control to allow themselves to go into trance. This is the sort of person who is highly anxious and self-conscious and can never be persuaded to get up on a dance floor or let their hair down. A very long straight head line could be one indicator of this type of person, but there are dozens. If the head line droops down at the end to move into the lower quadrant of the palm on the percussion (non-thumb) side of the hand, or even splits into two ("the writer's fork") the client probably has a talent for trance.

The analytical type will tend to resist direct commands from a hypnotist, and you need to be more subtle about planting suggestions and about hypnotising them with a different set of techniques. For those who are more at home in the world of the unconscious, the hypnotherapist will adopt a more forceful personality (more like a stage hypnotist) and give simple direct commands. Between those two extremes there are shades of difference and a quick examination of a few pointers on the hands will give you a snapshot of the kind of person you are talking to.

After a while the whole process becomes quite intuitive. A skilled palmist can glance at a hand the same way you glance at someone's face out of the corner of your eye. I don't make a checklist and consciously decide to adopt one course over another. We do this all the time when we get a feel for someone we have just met. A woman hypnotherapist with a sharp sense of intuition won't even need to worry about palmistry. She will just pick up on body language, or a vibe, and find herself behaving in a certain way to the client and selecting a certain technique without any analysis whatsoever. I don't have that level of sensitivity so a few palmistry pointers help me to get a feel for each client.

Usually once I have checked out someone's thumb and forefinger, and maybe the head line, I don't need to know much more, though there may be unexpected contrary indicators here and there. The thumb is how we grip things, our great evolutionary advantage, so not surprisingly is linked to how we use our willpower. A big powerful long stiff straight thumb indicates someone of the "highly analytical" type, a tough customer. If he also has a longer than average forefinger - the one we point at people to threaten them - this will confirm the diagnosis. The forefinger usually relates to issues around the ego. Some like Trump will overcompensate for a smaller than average forefinger. Hence the bluster. Hilary Clinton has a huge forefinger, so a bit overconfident.



People with long fingers in relation to their overall height and hand size are always detail-oriented. Jewellers and watch-makers all have long fingers. People with short little fingers will be more impatient, less methodical and cautious and more , well, more "suit of Wands". That is what we are born to do and will find easiest, but many choose jobs to which they are not suited at all. I'm amazed how often I find super-sensitive psychic types in high stress jobs in the city, suffering like hell, when they would be much happier and more fulfilled renting deck chairs on a beach somewhere.

I hated those questionnaires that we junior hypnotherapists were encouraged to give to clients to help us decide how best to hypnotise them. The conscious mind fills out questionnaires, and the conscious mind, the ego, is terrible at evaluating one's own true nature. Hands, which are expressions of unconscious wisdom, are a lot smarter and more reliable.

JM, I hope this answers your question. Ask me again if it doesn't. I'm sure I can be brief and to the point if I put my mind to it. Part of the problem is that I don't spend much time thinking nowadays - I grew up all Swords but switched to Cups after I had children - so it takes me a while to figure out what I actually think about these issues myself.

dodalisque wrote: ↑01 Jul 2019, 22:12 JM, I hope this answers your question. Ask me again if it doesn't. I'm sure I can be brief and to the point if I put my mind to it. Part of the problem is that I don't spend much time thinking nowadays - I grew up all Swords but switched to Cups after I had children - so it takes me a while to figure out what I actually think about these issues myself.

Yes this answered my question, and like any thoughtful response, raised more.

In fact, I hope you don't mind, but I would like to copy this response to a new topic about palmistry. I think there are people who would be interested specifically in what you have to say about palmistry, but may not find this wonderful take in this hypnosis thread.

Joan Marie wrote: ↑02 Jul 2019, 07:50 I hope you don't mind, but I would like to copy this response to a new topic about palmistry.

Thanks, JM. That's fine, go ahead.

Excellent interview, I wasn't aware of the depth of hypnotism.

Fascinating interview, thanks so much dodalisque for sharing your insights! (and Joan Marie for these interviews:))

I am a stage hypnotist as well as a tarot card reader. However, I have never combined the two! First time I have heard of the possibility! Mind you, I first learned stage hypnotism at psychic fairs. When I went into the lecture area instead of chattering about palmistry and tarot I decided it would be a great place to learn stage hypnosis. It worked wonderfully well but it was very bad for business since the audience wouldn't come near me for a reading afterwards after seeing people doing all sorts of daft things they shouldn't be doing!

Anyway here is an old clip of me doing stage hypnosis in the lecture area of a psychic fair somewhere in the maritimes of Canada. I think it was Nova Scotia but it was so long ago I can't remember!

mark lewis wrote: ↑26 Oct 2020, 03:14 I am a stage hypnotist as well as a tarot card reader. However, I have never combined the two! First time I have heard of the possibility!

Hi Mark. Thanks for the feedback and the video clip. I'm a Brit too and living in Canada. I suppose we were among the lucky ones who managed to escape. Maybe our accent is a hypnotic asset in North America. I wonder if we'd be as plausible in Bradford. I would have loved to have learned stage hypnotism but I just don't have the personality for it. I checked out your video and some of your things on youtube. I'm going to go looking for a copy of your book, "Lives of a Showman." I should imagine it might be possible on stage to use very large reproductions of randomly chosen cards to hypnotise a roomful of people. Through suggestion you could get the figures on the cards to move or talk perhaps. Conduct conversations with the Empress, that sort of thing. It's what many readers do silently for themselves already.

My biggest inspiration in the tarot world is a guy who lives in New York called Enrique Enriquez, who is almost single-handedly responsible for the recent surge of interest in the old Tarot de Marseille decks. They work a lot better for hypnosis than the Rider-Waite style decks. There's a wonderful full length movie about Enrique called "Tarology". He's also an artist and a stage magician. You might be interested in one of his ebooks "The Invisible Tarot", which teaches how to do readings with an invisible deck. I believe he has published several other books about his ideas for tricks in the field of mentalism. He's a great performer but his approach to tarot has its serious side too, perhaps closer to poetry than divination.

https://www.mevproshop.com/invisible-tarot.html

Wonderful interview, so many thanks dodalisque, and Joan Marie for instigating it. I do have a question. What is your opinion on the use of sound waves to help access different states of consciousness? I'm thinking in particular of Robert Monroe's Hemi-Sync binaural beat, created to synchronize the two hemispheres of the brain to more easily access different trace states, including Focus 10 (mind awake, body asleep), during which extraordinary possibilities present themselves, among them astral travel.

dodalisque wrote: ↑26 Oct 2020, 05:12

mark lewis wrote: ↑26 Oct 2020, 03:14 I am a stage hypnotist as well as a tarot card reader. However, I have never combined the two! First time I have heard of the possibility!

Hi Mark. Thanks for the feedback and the video clip. I'm a Brit too and living in Canada. I suppose we were among the lucky ones who managed to escape. Maybe our accent is a hypnotic asset in North America. I wonder if we'd be as plausible in Bradford. I would have loved to have learned stage hypnotism but I just don't have the personality for it. I checked out your video and some of your things on youtube. I'm going to go looking for a copy of your book, "Lives of a Showman." I should imagine it might be possible on stage to use very large reproductions of randomly chosen cards to hypnotise a roomful of people. Through suggestion you could get the figures on the cards to move or talk perhaps. Conduct conversations with the Empress, that sort of thing. It's what many readers do silently for themselves already.

My biggest inspiration in the tarot world is a guy who lives in New York called Enrique Enriquez, who is almost single-handedly responsible for the recent surge of interest in the old Tarot de Marseille decks. They work a lot better for hypnosis than the Rider-Waite style decks. There's a wonderful full length movie about Enrique called "Tarology". He's also an artist and a stage magician. You might be interested in one of his ebooks "The Invisible Tarot", which teaches how to do readings with an invisible deck. I believe he has published several other books about his ideas for tricks in the field of mentalism. He's a great performer but his approach to tarot has its serious side too, perhaps closer to poetry than divination.

https://www.mevproshop.com/invisible-tarot.html

Yes. I have indeed heard of Enrique Enriquez and have only heard good things about his work. My own approach to the Tarot is somewhat more cynical and down to earth which of course reflects my background somewhat. I did find your comments about palmistry interesting as I do a lot of that myself. In fact I rarely do Tarot without doing the palm first. In fact I confess that I find the Tarot more difficult to do unless I read the palm first. Once I read someone's palm I seem to know all about them and they don't even have to say a word! I am then in a much more powerful position to read the Tarot since I know what their situation is. A psychic fair promoter once mentioned to me that the most powerful kind of reading at a psychic fair is a combination of palmistry and the Tarot. I have found that to be true.

With regard to my book "The Lives of A Showman" which you mention here is the best place to purchase it:
http://marklewisentertainment.com/html/magicians.html

(Within a few days I expect my Tarot book will be up there too!)

Incidentally, at one point I started to write a book on stage hypnosis but got fed up with the whole thing. I may exert myself in the future to finish it. However, here is an excerpt which may surprise you. In fact it surprised ME when the incident happened! Here you are!

"Before I leave this topic I’d like to tell you a story. When I first started my performing career I asked a legendary stage hypnotist for advice. This fellow had retired from the stage and had become a hypnotherapist.

I looked him straight in the eye and asked him straight out, “Are the people on stage really hypnotised? Are they really in some sort of altered state of consciousness or are they just kidding me and themselves?” My guru started to look uncomfortable and become evasive in his answers. However, I persisted and he gave in. He looked shiftily at his receptionist outside in the hallway then closed the door so she wouldn’t hear the conversation. He then looked at me and proceeded in a few sentences to explain the key to stage hypnotism. And it was probably the most profound lesson I had ever heard or will hear on the subject. This is what he said. “Look, I was a pioneer in this field. I was number one for about 30 years. In that 30 years I am quite sure I never hypnotised a single person on stage!”

This was quite a shock to me and although I had pushed for the answer I was nevertheless stunned to receive it. One of the most legendary stage hypnotists of all time had just, in so many words, told me he had been faking it for 30 years! After I recovered I asked him, “Well, in that case, how do you make the people do all those crazy things?” He stared at me and then uttered the key revelation which opened up a new career for me. “You manipulate them, don’t you?” You do, of course “manipulate them” and I’ve been manipulating them ever since."

mark lewis wrote: ↑26 Oct 2020, 19:27 With regard to my book "The Lives of A Showman" which you mention here is the best place to purchase it:
http://marklewisentertainment.com/html/magicians.html

(Within a few days I expect my Tarot book will be up there too!)

Looking forward to that. Enrique is probably as cynical as you are about fortune-telling. He's quite combative about it. One quote I seem to remember is that he thinks "most people in the tarot world secretly wish they owned a pet unicorn." I like Enrique but, dammit, I want to own a pet unicorn too, so I'm a bit split. Are magick and common sense always supposed to be mutually exclusive? He doesn't seem to use the cards for divination at all in the traditional sense. He's sees the deck first of all as a work of art rather than a tool for divination. His readings make visual poems of the images. A client with a piece of poetry in them is much more likely to see their own life more clearly. I think that's the rationale.

mark lewis wrote: ↑26 Oct 2020, 19:43 You do, of course “manipulate them” and I’ve been manipulating them ever since."

Milton Erickson, the great god of modern hypnotherapy, was well aware of the necessity for being tricky when leading a client, but he had great faith in the unconscious to direct proceedings as soon as the client was safely in trance. He would often hypnotise himself before sessions and be surprised at the things that came out of his own mouth. As I said somewhere in the interview, there is a theory that "all hypnotism is self-hypnotism". I think it's a matter of degree. I've been hypnotised myself many, many times and there certainly is a silent inner decision to "give permission" to be manipulated. Soon the experience of limiting your attention and going into a trance state is so pleasurable, so nice to have your chattering mind made quiet, that you simply don't want it to stop. Then you can go down into some really interesting areas of consciousness, way below (or above - it's the same thing) the workings of the daily conscious mind. It was a shock to me how much I started to ENJOY being manipulated and taking instruction. Surely that is the only reason why politics works at all. People love to be directed. Sad but true. So much easier than being free. In meditation you need to decide yourself where you want to go within the silence and what you want to do with it, but it's a lot easier to let a hypnotist make suggestions and give you inner or outer tasks to accomplish.

People who are too anxious to be hypnotised and too determined to be a good subject are sometimes more difficult to hypnotise deeply that the sort of people who are actively determined to resist. Like most volunteers the sort who volunteer to be on stage at a psychic fair are good sports. They want everyone to have a good time and will lie to themselves that they are deeply hypnotised in order to make the party swing. I thought the guy with the long hair in your youtube vid who went into the audience to find his canary was not genuinely hypnotised. He might have thought he was. Hypnotherapists will often give little tests to their clients to make sure they are not faking it too much. For example it's possible to slip in secret suggestions for them to forget certain words or numbers or perform certain tiny physical operations. If they don't subconsciously "hear" the suggestion and neglect to carry out your secret suggestion it means their conscious mind is too close to the surface to allow them to go into deep trance. A hypnotherapist has to be constantly testing the depth of the trance for it to be effective. But I'm probably not saying anything you don't already know. I wish I had the nerve and imagination to do stage hypnotism but my interest has always been more in the direction of altered states and religion.

My philosophy regarding hypnosis is based on the theories expounded in this book:

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780879755768/T ... t-Hypnosis

dodalisque wrote: ↑30 Oct 2020, 20:55

mark lewis wrote: ↑26 Oct 2020, 19:27 With regard to my book "The Lives of A Showman" which you mention here is the best place to purchase it:
http://marklewisentertainment.com/html/magicians.html

(Within a few days I expect my Tarot book will be up there too!)

Looking forward to that. Enrique is probably as cynical as you are about fortune-telling. He's quite combative about it. One quote I seem to remember is that he thinks "most people in the tarot world secretly wish they owned a pet unicorn." I like Enrique but, dammit, I want to own a pet unicorn too, so I'm a bit split. Are magick and common sense always supposed to be mutually exclusive? He doesn't seem to use the cards for divination at all in the traditional sense. He's sees the deck first of all as a work of art rather than a tool for divination. His readings make visual poems of the images. A client with a piece of poetry in them is much more likely to see their own life more clearly. I think that's the rationale.

I didn't realise Enrique was cynical! I haven't read his work but from what I heard I imagined it to be the exact opposite! I am wondering how on earth a work of art and poetry can be used for divination! Oddly enough I never use the expression "fortune telling". It doesn't feel metaphysical enough!

mark lewis wrote: ↑01 Nov 2020, 00:57 I didn't realise Enrique was cynical! I haven't read his work but from what I heard I imagined it to be the exact opposite! I am wondering how on earth a work of art and poetry can be used for divination! Oddly enough I never use the expression "fortune telling". It doesn't feel metaphysical enough!

I would heartily recommend his two books of interviews with a broad spectrum of people in the tarot world: "EN TEREX IT" and "EX ITENT ER". It's a real intellectual workout. He would rather describe tarot in terms of new developments in Cognitive Therapy, Ericksonian hypnosis, and Lacanian semiotics than in terms of fortune-telling. His whole philosophy of looking at cards is encapsulated in the Latin-looking titles of those two books. Of course they spell "enter-exit" and "exit-enter". It took me a couple of weeks to figure that out! We all get locked into false perceptual assumptions and an artist or tarot reader's duty is show us how to dissolve those blocks. The truth is staring at us but we can't see it. We see the reality we expect to see rather than what's there.

He usually uses just 3 cards from the TdM majors for his readings, picking out repeated motifs/colors/facial expression/body positions to allow the 3 cards to "talk" to each other and to create suggestive metaphors. It's completely improvisational, ignoring all of the learned book-meanings of the cards - purely visual rather than epistemological. Once he points out these "eye rhymes" it becomes impossible NOT to see them. His university training is in design. I think that's how he hypnotises us, dragging us into the visuals rather than getting us to look at a swinging watch. It's how Europeans have always read the cards but it's a very new approach for people like me in the English language tradition who learned with the Rider-Waite and associated decks which are hooked up to the esoteric Golden Dawn system of mystical correspondences.

Thanks for the link to that Rowman book about hypnosis. I'm always interested in new ideas about it though my hypnotising days are probably over now. I actually think it should be taught in schools as an introduction to meditation, but I doubt that governments or corporate advertisers would want a populace who knew what tricks were being played on them.

Thanks for letting me know about how Enrique approaches his work. His "cynicism" is particularly interesting although I think it is somewhat different than my own! My approach is less what would some would term "airy-fairy" and more down to earth. It is based on streetwise (hence the title of my book) realisation of the problems that surround us all and the way the Tarot will sometimes guide us through those challenges. To me life is a game of snakes and ladders. I acknowledge the snakes in my readings and try to show my clients how to climb the ladders.

I use a combination of life experience, heightened intuition, imagination, creativity and most important of all the power of the Tarot. I don't use poetry in my readings but I do have lots of little rhymes that can show the clients the way forward. Here is my favourite:

"For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy or there is none
If there be one try to find it
If there be none then never mind it!"

Pen wrote: ↑26 Oct 2020, 08:00 I do have a question. What is your opinion on the use of sound waves to help access different states of consciousness? I'm thinking in particular of Robert Monroe's Hemi-Sync binaural beat, created to synchronize the two hemispheres of the brain to more easily access different trace states, including Focus 10 (mind awake, body asleep), during which extraordinary possibilities present themselves, among them astral travel.

This reply is over a year late. Sorry Pen, I missed your message somehow when you originally posted it. I have hardly any experience of using sound waves to initiate trance states but after following the link in your message I wish I had looked into it more closely. I have always been very interested in language so I suppose I was drawn to the Ericksonian school of hypnosis, which is very much language-based. Music, even metred poetry or eloquent political speeches rely on repetitive rhythms to establish control over an audience. A beat is essentially cyclical and therefore timeless. So I suppose that is how aural signals would be able to take us into trance. A slow rhythm would correlate to slower brain wave patterns that I mentioned in the hypnosis interview. I don't understand the idea of synchronising the two hemispheres of the brain but it sounds like that is what happens during meditation anyway - the union of "male"/left side and "female"/right side. This is how the tarot characterises union too.

Biofeedback machines are another interesting alternative. When we see our brainwave patterns displayed on a screen we learn very quickly what to do "inside", without any instruction from a teacher, in order to change the line, i.e. to make the waves smoother and less agitated. Our eyes can see instantly the changes we are feeling inside. As the waves become slower and smoother on the screen we are simultaneously feeling our trance state deepening. Each level of depth has its own "flavour", which we can learn to recognise and duplicate with greater and greater ease.

The conscious mind feels bored or threatened by the infinite - the cyclical unchanging rhythm - but our unconscious feels right at home and comes forward while the conscious mind recedes into the background. I find when I meditate sometimes, or even when going down into trance with a client, I tend to rock very gently back and forth to set up my own rhythm. I even notice some chess players do this to maintain concentration and banish extraneous thoughts at key moments in a game. One has the sensation of forging ahead deeper into trance, of driving through any distractions the conscious mind tries to put in one's way. As we become more familiar with the feeling of trance we build up a reliable repertoire of our own little tricks and shortcuts for entering deep trances. Putting the hands together to pray is one such trick. It's a physical message to our conscious mind to be quiet, to reinforce our request for inner silence.

I think the aural signals and biofeedback would be wonderful for learning how to meditate, since when you are in trance you take full responsibility for where you want to go and what you want to accomplish. There is no hypnotist present to lead you. Simply being in deep trance is an end in itself and we absorb wisdom in that state which we carry with us back into the physical world. Meditation affects our behaviour in extremely profound and subtle ways. Hypnotherapy is a lot more down-to-earth than that. We usually have a particular goal in mind on the physical plane and rely on a hypnotherapist to instruct us how to get there. But hypnotherapists also trust the client's personal unconscious to provide solutions to complex emotional problems and will often allow the client's experience while in trance to determine the direction of a session.

I personally am not particularly self-motivated and seem better at taking orders than deciding where I want to go and what I want to do when I am in trance. I don't have a lot of imagination and that's a problem if you want to have a satisfying meditation life. Lon Milo Duquette, the great spiritual seeker and authority on ritual magic, believes that silent meditation simply doesn't suit the restless state of consciousness experienced by most people in the western world. He believes that the way we are usually taught to meditate suits the eastern temperament much better. He thinks we in the west would make faster progress if we had the intellectual structure of magical ritual to take us down into trance and provide us with symbolic acts to accomplish - to get our body and intellect more involved in the process. In my case I think I agree with him. My own meditations tend to be rather dull and repetitive. The theatre of ritual magic would probably be a lot more fun and beneficial. But I think I'm too lazy and maybe not brave enough to go very far along any path. There, true confessions.

Many thanks for the deeply considered reply - I've arrived here from your PM alert and a notification - so glad not to have missed it. The theory re. Eastern and Western states of consciousness rings true somehow, but ritual magic is not a path I'd choose for reasons very similar to yours.

I came across the Monroe method via his books, and used it for a while. I found that the Hemi-Sync binaural beat (which seems to resemble a form of white sound whilst remaining low in volume) very calming. I still occasionally play it if I wake up at night with my thoughts chasing their tails and prefer one with a background sound of flowing streams (Streamhaven), which has only minimal spoken direction at the beginning and to bring one back at the end. The best and deepest moment for me is towards the end when all sound stops for a moment - the space and silence seems infinite, one's body and mind suspended. I guessed early on that this must be the Focus 10 state, although at that point was unsure, but came across a book by Frederick Aardema -Focus 10: Mind Awake/Body Asleep. I read this twice in one day (it's fairly short) and woke up that night floating in the void - it was amazing. I could hear myself breathing even though I couldn't feel my body at all. I remained there wondering where to go, then the lovely boy (my whippety dog lying next to me) moved slightly and I came back.

I've had a few spontaneous experiences of leaving the body over the years, always preceded by the seemingly electrical vibrations described by Robert Monroe in his books - I'm glad I'd read about these before they happened, but although I seem to 'travel' the experience always ends too soon.

I seem to have wandered off-topic, so I'll leave it here, except to say that I recently learned about Aphantasia and entered a rabbit hole that changed my whole outlook on the world. I'd assumed that the words 'mind's eye', 'visualization' and 'imagination' (which seem to be an aspect of the Monroe method if one takes the course), were metaphorical rather than literal, only to find that I'm one of the supposed 2% of people who see only darkness when they close their eyes, although happily my dreams are visual and I occasionally see supposedly random images when meditating.