People have been shown to be able to do amazing things under hypnosis. They haven’t yet done anything that seems outside the realm of public reason entirely, but they do accomplish things that they personally believe themselves unable or unwilling to do.

People fear their personal imagination would be exploited, so it’s easier to just go with the accepted norm? Actually, they fear separation from the pack. We have no instinct that understands exploitation. Any idea of exploitation is a learned thought rather than instinct. But the reason why people who think they are weak show great strength under hypnosis? Any takers?

Their personal imagination is in control, and not the social? Exactly, you have it. When in an intense state of focus (which is what hypnosis is, it’s not sleep) they unplug from the social imagination. But they also unplug from their social persona, who they imagine themselves to be, and are for a time absorbed in visualizing the behavior the hypnosis suggested was possible. This is why creative visualization can work but very often doesn’t seem to.

Didn’t hypnosis come from meditation? It does trace its roots back to older mystical practices, more or less meditation or other states of trance induction. Any trance inducing activity that you engage in with a clear intention, an idea of what its purpose is, acts like visualization. The activity involved just heightens how much what you are imagining registers in your memory. So since what you experience is mostly imagination, why do we imagine things we don’t want to experience? In part, it does involve dealing with what our senses tell us, but that is a limited part.

Either we think we will never experience it, or we are afraid we will and want to be prepared? Actually, it has nothing to do with paranoia. Paranoid ideation is a learned behavior.

We have a need to not only process our own sensations, but to process our “life sense.” Our instincts tell us that our wellbeing includes that information being displayed by other human beings and other living things in the world in general. We identify with beings that are not literally ourselves even if we don’t do it consciously. We all have the innate capacity to be one with everything as some describe it. We are all potential Buddha. The Buddha just woke up to that insight.

We practice empathy? We do and reflexively. We are also all potential sociopaths and psychopaths. Most people don’t have a conscious grip on their imagination. It isn’t their personal imagination running away with them. It’s the mass imagination, and it’s the mass imagination that commercials exploit as well as politicians.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~