The User's Manual for the Brain Volume I

by Bob G Bodenhamer

  Medically speaking, hypnotic trance occurs during the theta level of sleep when our brain neuro-transmitter chemical acetylcholine dominates instead of norepinephrine.

  Medically speaking, hypnotic trance occurs during the theta level of sleep when our brain neurotransmitter chemical acetylcholine dominates instead of norepinephrine. When this happens, we tend to pay more attention to internal information in stored patterns in the brain such as memories, instead of sensory input from the environment. Many people typically report that their visual images are more vivid, and that they have a decreasing ability to direct their attention, as most people typically report when they are dreaming.

  More recent research about how to take charge of one’s dreaming and how to induce lucid dreaming, as well as anthropological studies of cultures who put a lot of emphasis on dreams, suggests that the subjective sense of having less ability to direct attention may simply indicate the lack of training, not some innate trait. Obviously people can misuse and abuse every powerful model, insight, and technology (human or mechanical). Yet the abuse of an item does not, in and of itself, argue against a proper use of it.

  Having defined hypnosis as a trance experience, we should make a disclaimer that almost all of what we see on television and in the movies about hypnosis does not present it accurately at all. Sure, it makes for a great story. And it can scare the hell out of people about someone “controlling their mind,” or making them do things against their will. But none of that represents anything real about hypnosis. It stands on a par with the starship Enterprise going beyond the speed of light, warp-1 through warp-9. Pure science fiction!

  We cannot make people do anything with hypnosis that violates their morals or values.

  We can say the same for “stage hypnosis”—entertainment, pure and simple. Further, there exist all kinds of tricks that facilitate that kind of mental and visual sleight of hand which create illusions and misperceptions. The truth about what the hypnotic state can and cannot do boils down to this: we cannot make people do anything with hypnosis that violates their morals or values. It just does not work that way! In recent years, scientific experiments on hypnosis have sought to discover the limits of suggestions and hypnotic “control.” The results have indicated that hypnosis just does not work in a way that overpowers human consciousness. Milton Erickson once commented that if we could control people through hypnosis a lot fewer sick and neurotic people would exist! You can’t make them do things against their will—not even get better! Hypnotism merely enables us to focus on something important to the exclusion of the unimportant.

  What can this phenomenon of “hypnosis” do? What value does it have? Primarily we can use various trance states to enable us to activate our innate powers and forces of mind and body. Because the experience can facilitate greater mental concentration (in fact, this chiefly characterizes the hypnotic state), we can use this high level of inward focus and concentration to activate our resources. Hypnosis simply describes an intense meditative state wherein our entire mind focuses on one thing. It functions as a state wherein a person can say, “This one thing I do…” We see this exemplified when an athlete “psyches” themselves before an event.

  Using our innate potential, we can access healing forces within the body, slow our breathing and heart rates, slow our bleeding, reduce pain, and many other things that normally (in our normal waking state) we cannot do. There exists nothing mystical, magical, or occult about this. It simply describes one of the ways we humans exist as “wonderfully and marvelously made.”

  So “hypnosis” refers to a natural process of consciousness that occurs everyday to everybody. Whenever consciousness ceases to see-hear-and-feel what exists immediately present in our external environment, we have “tranced” (transitioned) out and gone somewhere else, into some internal, trance-like state. We may be “thinking deeply,” concentrating on something important, just relaxing our mind, meditating, praying, “not thinking of anything in particular,” daydreaming, etc. We may have gone inside our mind to create a vision of what we want to accomplish sometime in the future.

  The fact that we seldom label such states as “hypnotic” only serves to blind us to the regularity and commonality of this experience. It also blinds us to how easily and quickly we go in and out of altered states.

  A healthy and enhancing use of hypnosis empowers one to feel more in control of oneself, not less.

  The disinformation of the erroneous paradigm says that in hypnosis someone else “controls” your mind. No! Nothing could stand as further from the truth. In fact, the opposite occurs. Many who first experience the trance state discount it as not hypnosis for this very reason. “But I remember everything that I thought and felt.” “I felt so focused and so much in control of my experiencing.” A healthy and enhancing use of hypnosis empowers one to feel more in control of oneself, not less.

  In hypnosis, you can always resist. You can resist as much as you can in the waking state. You can resist the induction. You can also resist any specific instructions or suggestions that don’t fit for you. In fact, people always ultimately discover that when something does not fit, it causes them to break state and “come out.”

  This popping out of state, this breaking of state, also explains why most everyday communication that involves a hypnotic nature is of a very poor quality to it. It poorly paces or matches the individual’s reality and so poorly maintains the hypnotic state. This describes precisely what a good hypnotist learns to do. In the everyday hypnotic communication that occurs, the recipients of our words receive a mixture of words that fit and those that don’t. When we continually mismatch their inner reality of values, beliefs, morals, etc., they pop out of that state.

  Hypnosis opens us up to new learnings and new formulations.

  The hypnotic state works powerfully to llow us to manage consciousness as it enables us to access more receptive and suggestible states. What value does this serve? By accessing a comfortable and relaxed state and moving into a more responsive state to ideas and suggestions, it opens us up to new learnings and new formulations. We feel more highly responsive and open to the ideas that we want to run our programs. It enables us to get beyond our own defenses, barriers, and limitations! This then allows us to program in the ideas, affirmations and even beliefs that we want installed. We like thinking of it as merely another change-tool for renewing the mind so that we can transform “personality.”

  Dr. Ernest Rossi (1988) wrote,

  “The hypnotized person remains the same person. Their behavior is altered by the trance state, but even so, that altered behavior derives from the life experiences of the patient and not from the therapist. At the most the therapist can influence only the manner of self-expression.

  “The induction and maintenance of a trance serve to provide a special psychological state in which patients can re-associate and reorganize their inner psychological complexities and utilize their own capacities in a manner in accord with their own experiential life. Hypnosis does not change people nor does it alter their past experiential life. It serves to permit them to learn more about themselves and to express themselves more adequately.” (pp. 14-15)

  So the meaning of “hypnosis” refers to a “sleep-like state” of an intense and strong inward focus created primarily by trance inducing words. These words send us inward so that we go on a TDS (trans-derivational search) for meaning. Thus the power of words ultimately (and only) arises from our attribution of meaning to them. We do this by “going inward” to our internal “library of references” that we have built up over the years in our “memory” files where we code our understandings, values, beliefs, etc. All of this simply describes one of the powers within personality—the power to attribute meaning to things and to have an internal world—also a sign of “spirit” in our personality.

  10.3 The Conscious/Unconscious Mind

  Much of NLP, and especially Time-Line processes, requires that we have a working knowledge about our “pa
rts” and that part of mind that we call “the unconscious mind.” (Again, remember, this merely offers us a way to talk about processes and phenomena—a “map,” not the “territory”!)

  Sometimes we use the term “parts” to refer to unwanted and uncontrollable behaviors and the neurology that produces these behaviors. Such “part(s)” result largely from Significant Emotional Experience(s) of Pain—(SEEP). How does this relate to “the unconscious mind?” Before proceeding, we want to provide a discussion of this and how it relates to the “trance” process. Again, don’t treat these concepts (conscious, unconscious, trance, hypnosis) as “things” or as literal. We use them accommodatively because we have found them useful—just as we find talking about the sun “rising” and “setting” as useful. We know better than that! We have moved out of the Middle Ages—we don’t buy the Ptolemaic Model of the Universe—and yet we still talk about the sun rising and setting. We do so accommodatively. From our perspective “on the planet” the terms work. So with these other terms.

  The dictionary defines conscious as “having awareness of one’s own existence and environment.” This conforms to our use of the word. We use consciousness to refer to our awareness of internal or external stimulus. Roughly two million bits of information per second come into the human nervous system. To maintain sanity, our mind filters out most of this stimuli. Miller (1956) discovered that we typically can only handle seven plus or minus two bits of information at a time.

  To illustrate how we delete most information, notice that a moment ago you had deleted your awareness of your big toe, front teeth, etc. This shows a distinction between what we can consciously maintain awareness of and how much more lies in our unconscious mind.

  Imagine your whole mind as a room. The part you experience as “conscious” represents a flashlight shining in this dark room. As you shine on things in that room, you see and bring awareness of its contents—so with our conscious awareness. We see, at any moment in time, only a small part of what we know. We describe our consciousness as that natural neurological process whereby we can see, hear, and know and therefore choose. Obviously, the words consciousness and unconsciousness only exist as metaphors. We cannot locate them in the brain. These words enable us to talk about brain functions, not actual substances. “The ‘map’ is not the ‘territory’”—never!

  Consciousness in NLP describes our level of awareness that we code in the rep system. An item in memory represents itself in a combination of pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, smells and words. Such representations move into consciousness when a signal or stimulus crosses our awareness threshold. When an external or internal stimulus stimulates a memory, the memory moves into consciousness through some modality. The interaction between the intensity of the external stimulus and the internal neurological state determines whether or not a representation becomes conscious. We therefore assume that our primary rep system will have the strongest signal. Our consciousness will therefore represent itself essentially in our primary rep system (see Dilts, 1983).

  Unconscious behavior arises from stimuli within a particular representational system low in intensity.

  Unconscious behavior arises from stimuli within a particular rep system low in intensity. This representation will occur in one of our lesser developed rep systems. The person will not have awareness of the stimulus. In this way, much (if not most) of our behavior operates at unconscious levels. We breathe, move, remember, reason, etc., unconsciously. Usually, we only have awareness of the content of an idea, not all of the internal processes that make it possible. It works similarly to the output of a TV or computer monitor—we only see and notice the external end-results, not the processes.

  We may have to process new information repeatedly in consciousness in order for this new learning to become automatic, part of us. In learning to drive an automobile, we consciously work the switch, gas pedal, break, steering wheel, etc., until we can drive without thinking(!). The new learning comes to feel as “second nature,” “intuitive” (an “in”-knowing), or “unconscious.” In NLP, we describe this as moving the learning from the primary rep system to a non-primary system. The behavior “fires off” whenever we need to drive a car. We don’t have to run the “driving a car” program with our conscious minds. We can take consciousness and go somewhere else! Our response, at that point, operates automatically. It runs from an unconscious level. Amazing, don’t you think? Do you drive by maintaining an image of how to drive the car while driving? No. Your “program” for driving lies in some unconscious part of your “mind.” (And someone says this just evolved? We don’t think so.)

  Our unconscious (part of the) mind references that vast amount of information not in awareness. As neurologists have probed the human brain with electrodes, people experience no feelings of pain because we have no pain receptors there. A patient can stay awake during such probing. In probing the brain, people have reported recalling events that happened early in their lives. A person may recall memories as a child. In describing these memories, they may even adopt a child’s voice. They had stored these memories in some unconscious part of their brain and the probing activates the memory and brings it to consciousness.

  Such experiments inform us that our mind records so much of what happens, and records our emotional response as well. Neuro-scientists and cognitive scientists speculate that the brain especially records those events that we make while in an intense emotional state.

  In using the term unconscious, we mean “not conscious.” Whether we can or cannot develop consciousness of it—that describes another issue. Some facets of brain functioning seem to completely lie outside of our ability to access. Other facets we can access—if we seek to and learn skills for accessing.

  In NLP we look upon the unconscious facet of “mind” as a gift and therefore a friend, not a foe.

  Sigmund Freud used this term and loaded it with many false ideas. He treated and labeled the unconscious “the id.” For Freud, this “id” contained our sexual desires and primitive drives for aggression, competition, violence, etc. He also believed that these drives operated apart from our control (not a very enhancing belief!). As he gave the term such meanings, he left a stigma on the idea of the unconscious—as something to fear, dread, and avoid. Not so with NLP. We look upon the unconscious facet of “mind” as a gift and therefore a friend, not a foe. We would more accurately describe this phenomenon as “other-than-conscious”, signifying

  simply that which we do not now have awareness about.

  Given this, the majority of our experiences lie outside of conscious awareness. The conscious part (the content) of our communication is but a fraction of the total message. When we try to communicate exclusively through conscious processes, we reduce our ability to communicate. In this other-than-conscious model of mind, we view our conscious mind as a gift from the unconscious. So as a gift of the unconscious, the conscious mind works best when it has the full resources of the unconscious mind.

  We have found that many times a client will give a quick response when asked, “What do you want?” Then, after further exploration, the client discovers that they really did not want that. They wanted it in their conscious mind (perhaps they thought that they “should” want it), but later, as they get in touch with some of their less conscious values and beliefs, they discover some of their more authentic wants. In this, their unconscious mind provides them more truth (about themselves) than their conscious mind.

  This shouldn’t surprise us. After all, our unconscious mind takes care of us. We certainly don’t run our heart, lungs, kidneys, glands, immune system, etc., consciously. Creation has given us two nervous systems—a central nervous system and the autonomic nervous system, and the function of the autonomic nervous system is to keep us breathing, sleeping, waking, moving, thinking, etc. And a therapist will seek to accomplish various changes to create long-term and lasting change at these unconscious levels.

  10.4 Altered States And Trance


  Given that our unconscious mind contains vast reservoirs of knowledge and experiences, we need to learn how to tap into this reservoir. Regrettably, many people let this reservoir go largely untapped. Though most of our behavior functions unconsciously, we just let it run—thinking (erroneously) we can’t effect it. This shows up in how we language ourselves. We do something and then regret having done it. So we say, “I couldn’t help myself. It just came out! I felt as if something else controlled me.” All too often when we do that, we use it as an excuse—an excuse to not really deal with the problem. By not knowing its source, its true nature, and how to get to its origin––we seem to have no way to effectively deal with it.

  10.4.0.39 OK, OK, Give Us The Patterns!

  Trance is an altered state, as a state of mind-and-emotions (relaxed, safe, open, comfortable, receptive, expectant, etc.) that enables us to function effectively and directly at the unconscious level.

  How specifically does NLP and Time-Line processes provide tools for uncovering these unconscious parts? By utilizing trance as an altered state, as a state of mind-and-emotions (relaxed, safe, open, comfortable, receptive, expectant, etc.) that enables us to function effectively and directly at the unconscious level. It gives us access to that part of our mind for storing and coding our habitual patterns—it refers to nothing more than that, nothing mysterious, occult, demonic.