Tell The Stories, Pass The Plate

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In reflection it seems a little unpatriotic of me to admire something a real meanie like Saddam Hussein, the now-dead Iraqi dictator, purportedly said. I can't quote what he actually said or verify it. As I vaguely recollect it was along the lines of "Winning or losing a war is not so important. For me, to merely survive is to be victorious."

I like the spirit behind such a statement, but sometime it contradicts my desire to live a life of no blame. But, in all truth, it's almost the sa-me. Surviving at all appears to require a strategy that alleviates the burden of being of such blame that you get hung by the neck until dead.

"Dang me! Dang me!
They oughta take a rope
and hang me!
Hang me from
the highest treeeeeee...
Oh, woman would you weeeeep fo' me?

~ Roger Miller (Extra "eees" mine)

Like Saddam Hussein, one day I won't survive whatever comes along. But, as long as I do survive, even though I-am-is don't got no say so no more, my body will still fight to it's last breath to stay alive. Having your neck broke with a hangman's noose seems like a humane method for murder by the state, but the grisly details that lead to the last moment are remanded to a goon.

I was trying to get high one time down in the sub-tropics, and ate a lily trumpet flower growing right on the streets down there, that was reputed to put one in a state that simulated death. Some said that eating it raw didn't actually kill most people, but sometime it did.

Getting tricked into eating that flower was a sort of manhood test in that social arena. The toxicity of it tested the eater's ability to handle the unexpected psychological reactions the chemicals in the flower evoked. If the eaters reaction to the hypnogogic images caused by the chemicals in such a way that they had a heart attack and died from that, the lily eater failed the test.

I survived. I don't know how. At some point my breathing system went into some sort of paralysis and I passed out. I didn't really react like I was dying as much as the last thought I had was that I couldn't catch my breath. When I regained consciousness I was lying in an alley.

I didn't remember anything that had transpired after I thought I was asphyxiated or remember immediately that I had eaten this weird flower on a dare. In fact, I was as clear-headed and in the present as well as I had been in months. I can't claim anything about that experience except that I survived.

Any memory of what happened in the interim might have been lost before I got up and walked out of that alley into the bright tropical sunshine. I nearly had this sort of memory loss in an escapade I survived in Yosemite National Park. The real miracle of that event was that I was able to keep some of it in long-term memory.

Homo sapiens seem to re-enter the instinctive state when they're in dire straits. It's a place where all of an entity's ability to focus their attention is brought to bear on the living moment in order to keep living. Speculative theories about the unborn future or undead past are tossed out of what's wot like so much baggage.

In a perilous situation like I faced from eating that flower while in a subtropical paradise, to attempting to leap to my death because I was freezing in a freak snow storm, I had no future then. All my past was dead of it's meaning nor did it's absence serve as a savior. All I had of life in the moment before I jumped was a final moment of decision. Simultaneously, I was so completely ignorant of deciding to jump, I never knew it until I launched my half-frozen body into the air.

In the moment I jumped off that 800 foot (244 M) cliff, and gravity caught me in its grasp and pulled me earthward, I knew that immediate moment of life was all the life I'd ever had all along. I can only describe it as a world beyond words.

I've escorted people to this state of being a goodly number of times via hypnosis. Not so much in a clinical manner or for clinical purposes, but more or less for entertainment or because I thought it might provide insight to the subject about what can have being beyond the language box.

Hypnotizing people and inducing them to voluntarily remember being born and taking their first breath can or maybe should only be done in the mood of curiosity and entertainment. To take such a process as a controlled blind study is ridiculous. It depends on the subject and the hypnotist and they're all individually different without choice.

It's an easy gig for me to do this with people I'm already friendly with. I don't have to teach them to trust me. They already do or we probably wouldn't be close acquaintances. This is not much of an interesting thing for me to do as a hypnotist. The subject in a deep trance is having all the fun. For my part it takes lots of patience due to the need for repetition and redundancy.

A lot of what happens in my hypnotic affairs is proving to the subject that they're really and actually in a deep hypnotic trance. Even in my own experience with being in trance it's really difficult to realize it's true. It took a fairly long time for me to realize that I learned how to hypnotize people in my own hypnotic state.

For some reason this doubt that the trance is real is a common occurrence in most subjects. It could happen in the trances I conduct simply because I was trained to repetitively assure my subjects that they really were in trance.

There is a typical reaction to me proving to them in some way that they're in trance that satisfies the reason I was taught to assure them they're in trance rather frequently. That omen arrives in the form of a sigh of relief.

There are times during a hypnotic session that I can detect a subject's hesitation to "go" where I'm suggesting they "go". It's not out-right resistance, but more like a reaction to their being confused. In my opinion, hypnotic subjects really, really wanna do what you ask them to do if it don't cross the line with their ethics or morals. For them to hesitate in confusion about whether to implement my suggestions could be unpleasant. Nobody wants that.

If the session is about reliving one's birth experience I have to get the subject to do a lotta things they know perfectly well they can't do in normal waking consciousness. Otherwise, why would they need to reach for a hypnotic state to get there? That's how I deal with the aforementioned hesitant moments. I reassure them they can do as I suggest because they're in a hypnotic state. Now, git it on. Time's a'wasting! '-)

It's my suspicion that the reason I don't do hypnosis with people very often these days is that I don't have to go there to get people to accept my suggestions or even for them to know they can reach somnambulism in the blink of an eye. Tell the stories, pass the plate.

The place I am is really attempting to get my friends to go to via hypnosis happens before they ever get too close to their actual birth experience. It happens when they regress back through their adult life back into their childhood, and then to the real promised land.

The real promised land (or so I say, but I would, wouldn't I) is the state of being humans occupy and verify before they learn to talk. This information is readily available by a rudimentary reading of practically any professional interested in child psychology, but to a hypnotist it can be a real challenge.

The reason the state of being humans occupy previous to learning speech is that in trance they ARE that speechless tottler, and they can't talk or understand hypnotic suggestions very well. As a matter of fact the hypnotist is treading into the arena of the famous "terrible twos", and any suggestion, legitimate or not, might swiftly be met with a resounding "No!"

There is a way around this and for me it has to be done in advance with the cooperation of the adult before the regression ever begins. It does appear to require a deep, somnambulistic state to institute, but I'm not all that sure about that.

What has to happen is that an invisible adult witness has to be created. Pretty much in the same way a stage hypnotist might convince some rube that when they wake up they will uncontrollably cluck like a chicken when they hear the word "You". I get them to do this in a conversational mode in which I explain exactly why this needs to be in place before we begin the regression.

It's probably unfair of me to not be all that concerned that the people I do this with actually re-experience drawing their first breath. What I want for them is to re-experience the world they lived in before they became dependent on speech to get what they want from the world around them.

I dawdle. I linger there with them. I pounce upon any trace of memores that I can get them caught up in. I want them to be there as long as it's comfortable. Above all, I'm gonna strongly suggest to them they're going to remember everything, but that it will be through the witness we set up early. The witness is instructed to remember what the speechless newborn can't put in words. That way I don't put words in it's witness's mouth.

Some of the people I've done hypnosis with have re-experienced their own birthing process and returned to the never-never-land they hailed from. I ask them lots of questions and tell them lots of times in many different ways how they're gonna remember every aspect of their personal sojourn.

I set up post hypnotic suggestions designed to cause their memores to cough up the goods when they return to waking consciousness, and repeat the suggestion many times before I tell them to co-me ho-me. Most re-me their memores magnificently. '-)

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