Adventures in self-hypnosis, part 1

Just a few days ago, I decided that I would, once again, work on my personal goal of achieving arbitrary hypnotic effects in self-hypnosis. As has been discussed in the forum recently, self-hypnosis has some limitations; mental limitations tend to take longer to dissolve than if one was assisted by a very good hypnotist. Still, it's definitely possible to make progress on your own. Perhaps some of you can get a bit of inspiration from my little story.

The goal

A long time ago, controlled visual hallucinations became a symbol for me: once I was able to do that, I could do absolutely anything with my mind. Since I've been cultivating that belief for quite a while, I'm pretty sure that once I manage to produce something that's definitely visual hallucination, that belief will kick in and instantly destroy all such limitations. That's a bit of a gambit, of course, since it's a little bit tricky to learn how to do visual hallucinations on your own, but I still think that the advantages are in the majority.

So, what was the last thing I did? After reading James Rolph's report about his "hypnosis without trance" concept, I had a flash of inspiration: do what I'd been doing before, namely constructing an avalanche of suggestions and hypnotic effects, but 1) spend more time on each part of it; 2) allow more time for interesting things to happen; 3) be a lot less specific about which effects to go for.

The procedure

I've been able to do arm levitation for ages, so that was the starting point (no induction needed, of course). On the other hand, I'd never really felt that it was a completely involuntary movement, so this time I decided to build it up more strongly. I held the arm up and kept it in that position, then spent several minutes doing nothing but pacing my own experience and suggesting a downward movement that wouldn't end before my mind was ready to make something truly amazing happen. At some point the arm started moving. As usual, I wasn't completely sure how involuntary it really was, so I resisted the movement just so much that it still kept going, and in the second half of the levitation movement it really started feeling like I couldn't control the arm any more.

At that point, the truly amazing thing didn't happen quite yet, but I had a very interesting idea: I wanted to go for a very strong kinaesthetic illusion. I did that by, while keeping my eyes closed, extensively pondering the idea that I might already be experiencing a kinaesthetic illusion, namely that even though my arm felt as if it was in my lap, it might actually be in a completely different position! I got very much into that idea, and while I don't think the arm actually started feeling any different, something else happened. My sense of equilibrium started going completely mad. It felt like I was rapidly swaying left and right, or something like that, though I knew I wasn't, because there was no corresponding feeling of proprioception nor of my skin moving through the air. Something interesting was definitely happening.

I half-heartedly went into trying for visual hallucinations at this point, but at some point I decided to postpone that, and when I opened my eyes, my field of vision was swaying, too, and it kept doing so for a minute. Even if my eyes were actually moving accordingly (I didn't think to check; I only made sure my head wasn't moving), I certainly had no control over the swaying.

All in all, a rather interesting experience, and it has definitely reawakened my motivation for the more experimental side of self-hypnosis.

Tags: self-hypnosis

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Comment by Walt on February 23, 2010 at 5:15pm: My wife made me do it!

That's right, she's been making me have negative hallucinations for 25 years! Before I even tried to do it on my own.

Jan, thanks for helping me see this. Walt

Comment by Jan Krüger on February 23, 2010 at 2:36pm: Well, Walt, I guess great minds think alike, eh?

I have decided to distil a technique from my experience and sell it to you and everyone else here. On my upcoming seminar (by the way, only 30 places left! Book now! This is the last time the seminar will happen and the price will go up by 2000 percent in exactly five minutes), I will outl... kidding. Here it is.

It's sort of an exercise in what I call contemplative thinking: really considering an idea in depth, no matter how weird it is.
For example, this idea: you may be experiencing negative hallucinations right now and you wouldn't know it. You may already be perfectly capable of producing negative hallucinations... you only have to learn to spot them. Once you start noticing these negative hallucinations (and of course you'd only negatively hallucinate whenever it was safe), you have successfully reduced the "problem" from learning negative hallucinations to learning how to influence your existing abilities.

I did this with my arm. I "knew" my arm wasn't actually in a different position but I decided to challenge that knowledge, and basically giving my mind an easy way to make a different feeling happen by telling it that that feeling was plausible.

I will report on further progress, of course, and I'd be outrageously happy if anyone reported something interesting happening with that technique.

Oh, wait, to get anyone to use the technique I need to name it, right? Okay, it's now officially the Backwards Reasoning Technique.

The backwards reasoning technique
This applies mainly to goals in personal mental development.
1. Acknowledge that there is absolutely no way to tell whether you a) haven't achieved your goal yet, or b) have achieved your goal but, for some reason, are incapable of noticing that.
2. Focus on that second possibility. Realise that you can't force your mind to discover something new. Some of the greatest discoveries in history happened completely by accident. Just become curious in which ways you might come to notice that you have achieved your goal, and keep your senses open for anything interesting.
3. Stop looking when your patience runs out.
4. Repeat whenever you feel like it.

Comment by Karl weg on February 23, 2010 at 2:35pm: Oh what a beautiful joint. Now that is very funny, that you always come back to the same point namely where it started. Not to mention another quiet funny topic. What it is that not is there.

I really am not curious about things, but in the end I often wonder. Is there really such a thing as hypnosis?

My constitution is quite good. And I already lived through a lot of stuff. So why not try to become a little bit more funny. Yes. The arm levitation thing I did never achieve, until I wanted to quit smoking. It was a wednesday, I think. So I did a very strange trance session where I tried to do telekinese on my cat and suddenly her tail was shaking all the time. ??? I don't know how this idea came up to me, but it was certainly very strange. Ok. Thats enough with that telekinese stuff I thought...so I went outside the house to smoke a cigarette.

I couldn't!

Well this was my first sensation of a selfinduced arm levitation. My hand was like an indian against cowboys. I faught several times, but never met an opponent like this bigoted hand. Unfortunately I started running all the time and stopping again and running. It was really stressing me out. I never jumped around in the room though. Very strange. Mmmmh. It was not only that my feet were running more and more like in one of these crime thrillers. No I stopped again. And the moment I could start to think again about how nice and sexy this little cigarette could be my hand got really out of control again. Still concentrated on my hand I suddenly ran again.
In the end I was really happy not to give my hand any cigarette, cause it might have thrown all of my cigarettes away and slapped me in my face.

It is kind of funny to watch things happen. I hope hypnothoughts will stay. Love and peace forever: Karl.

I don't know why, but I never liked halucinations. Maybe it's your job that introduces you to this topic....

Cheers

Comment by Walt on February 23, 2010 at 1:39pm: Jan,
I was waiting for my wife to finish an appointment and decided to do a good job of taking care of my pain. I had 45 minutes to stay in trance. At my age I can close my eyes and nobody notices.

After I finished with my pain, I stayed in trance. After some time I felt that my body was jumping all over the room. Beaming from one place to another in a quick jolt. I knew I stayed put as I never left the chair. I think it was a spontaneous hallucination just to keep me entertained.

Sometimes I just go intro trance to see what will happen. Sometimes directed dreaming.

I hope for more control. Can't get negative hallucination as yet.

I want to experience as many effects as possible.

It's fun to play with.

Walt