❧
"Stars act like we would, better than anybody else we know."
The quote above is mine. It came to mind ready-to-roll. I kept it in the Header at the top of the page for a month or so. It seemed so inappropriate there that place alone caused me to consider it's meaning. Today, I couldn't stand it anymore, so I removed it from it's lofty dominion and put it back here in the cosmic soup.
The Header of this blog is interesting to play around with. For one thing, it's easy to get to in order to play around with it. Not only did I remove the "Stars" quote, I changed other parts in some lame attempt to stop making tossed word salad.
"Tossed word salad" is not my original descriptor. I stole it from one of my most influential mentors, Milton Erickson, now deceased at least a decade. He used that term to describe the confusing speech of one of his patients during his internship to specialize in psychiatry in a mental hospital.
The patient's garbled speech actually represented the state of his confused mind. Erickson created a simile that he called "tossed word salad" to talk back to the patient, instead of employing the usual medical lingo he had previously gotten from the other doctors there at the asylum.
When "Uncle Miltie" (Milton Erickson's follower's nickname for him) started talking jibber jabber right back at him it caught him off guard, Erickson wrote in his memoirs that by using his confrontational method the patient began to realize what he himself must "sound like" to other people.
Erickson merely provided him with a mirror image of himself that allowed him to find his own way back home, and three months later he was released from the asylum on his own recognizance. I found a scratchy video of the old master at work. The patience he displays in helping the subject learn how to enter trance is remarkable:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2228736059638306762#
Finding the video on the internet surprised me. I really hadn't thought to search for whatever might be found in regard to Erickson. Without realizing it in the short time we spent together, he refocused my goals in life. He was so skillful in doing it, it took me twenty-odd years to figure out what had happened.
Watching the video (which takes a real trooper to do) brought back memories of how long it takes for people to learn that it's okay for them to enter trance. They also have to learn how to do it by observing how they can respond to the hypnotist and go even deeper.
It took me a long time to understand what being in a deep, somnambulistic trance is like well enough for me to realize I was really in hypnosis. I had been in deep trance many times when I didn't realize the signs and omens of me being there.
Then, one afternoon at an NLP convention in Virginia Beach, Virginia, a professional hypnotist who operated his own hypnosis school in the same area, demonstrated his technique by hypnotizing the entire audience, including me. He was also very patient and redundant and took about an hour or more to lead us to a really deep place. He somehow addressed us individually find the clues and cues we each personally needed to walk the walk and talk the talk with somnambulism.
Even this professional hypnotist was impressed with himself afterward. He admitted that hypnotizing 200 hypnotists was a inspiring challenge. A person needs a framework for perceiving those clues that they're in deep trance. They have to find their own inner system of personal insights about letting it happen for themselves, because life itself hypnotizes everyone a lot, and it helps to know at least part of the time.
I'm convinced a person has to realize when they're in hypnosis via some imposed framework for recognizing when they're in state or they never will know for sure when it happens in some mundane situation. Once done, however, it gets scary to recognize how often it transpires on it's own terms.
Children can easily be seen staring at some event they're attempting imitate as if they were alone with no one watching. They practically suck the new world in with self-hypnosis. Abandoning the sensory dimension for a dynamic, ongoing exclusive focus is a learned trait. It's also a description of the hypnotic state.
❦
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
