What is Hypnosis?

What is Hypnosis?

I used to have a long and drawn out explanation of how hypnosis, trance, and the mind all worked, but it was pointed out to me that only hypnotists care about stuff like that so I decided change it for something more useful.

Hypnosis is the purposeful induction of a trance state, by whatever means is successful.

While this is quite simple, it still doesn't say much.

The key to all this is understanding the state that we call "trance".

Trance has many names and descriptions that people use; everything from "zoning out", to "a profound mental state".

The way I explain trance is very simple:

Try to read one paragraph while writing another one, at the same time.

When you realize you can't do it, you are ready to accept that the reason you can't do it is because for all the great problem solving and logical rational things your analytical mind can do, it can only do things one at a time.

(For those who confuse being able to jump back and forth between tasks as being able to do both at once, ask yourself if you ever get bothered by being interrupted while trying to doing something important. Then ask yourself why it bothers you. :)

The problem with this is that we have a survival need to do more than one thing at a time.

We need to be able to look out for threats while we are doing just about anything else

So how do we do it? The answer is Trance.

Trance is our natural ability to automatically react to outside input without conscious thought.

It is like a mental "babysitter" mode, that allows us to automatically react to outside input when the rest of our mind is focused elsewhere.

An example of this I like to use is when you learned how to ride a bicycle.

When you first started, you tried to pay attention to what your feet were doing, what your hands were doing, and where you were going, all at the same time.

Because of what we learned above, there was only one result: Crash.

It wasn't until we learned how to automatically react to what our feet felt on the pedals, and what our hands felt on the handle bars, that we were able to just pay attention to where we were going, and crash...turned into...zoom.

Trance is how we are able to multi-task, by automatically reacting to outside input.

Hypnosis just takes advantage of this by realizing that the input that we automatically react to, can be in the form of a suggestion.

Hypnosis takes these natural trance states of ours and makes them stronger, more profound, or "deeper" as we like to say.

When these trance states are deepened, the level of acceptance to suggestion that we automatically react to is increased and broadened.

It is important to understand that there is a large part of our mind that is specifically geared to not let others control us without our permission.

This part of our mind is always active.

It is why we cannot be made to do things that are against our moral or virtue character without creating a alarm that will bring us out of trance to deal with it.

It is also why we are stubborn and obstinate as a species.

An example of letting others control us with our permission would be a job. We do what others tell us in exchange for some benefit (they pay us). If the benefit stops.. we no longer comply.

We will comply as long as there is no reason not to.

If, as part of the job, they told us to steal, or cheat, or lie, we would immediately stop complying and address the issue.

The same is true when we are in deeper trance.

So that's it. That's what trance is, what hypnosis is, and why we can be hypnotized.

For more information, check out the E-book "The Nature of Trance" that is available for download here. It breaks down the entire hypnosis/trance mechanism in a simple and easy to understand manner, as well as explaining why overly analytical types have problems entering trance and how to help them overcome it.

Also included is a hypnosis technique that uses the principles presented in this book, that shows how to hypnotize a willing subject in less than 2 minutes.