Trance Research

Trance Analysis

2005-01-01T04:26:00.000-08:00

In 1995 I wrote a book entitled Trance: from magic to technology. In that book I described a model for trance which included specially defined type of trances termed meditation, hypnotic, addictive, and charismatic. This model was empirically derived from my personal experiences with meditation and hypnosis. I have been meditating since 1965 and have practiced some form of hypnosis since 1960.

Since my book was published I have had thousands of responses - letters, email and telephone calls - and some of these contacts have resulted in clients who have come to me for sessions of what I call trance analysis. Trance analysis is based entirely on my model for trance, and it may be interesting for you to learn what my model is and how to use this model for trance analysis.

Many therapists use hypnosis in order to lead clients into more robust approaches to life. While such usage may not be an overt and declared hypnotic session, therapists who are effective do use techniques such as positive reframing, embedded commands and pacing and leading clients to explore new options. Many such techniques are more fully described elsewhere. Which I am describing here is a consultative technique to empower clients to manage their own trances. Part of the consultative technique is instructive, but a more important aspect is to help clients recognize trances that they are - because of the trance - not aware of. Thus, consultations are very individual applications of the trance model.

The model was developed over several years of deep self-analysis and inquiry along with subtle experimentation while in trance. Basically, the model says that any repetition of a cognitive loop causes a type of dissociation, and that this dissociation necessarily brings with it a disabling of one or more cognitive functions. It is the order and kind of cognitive functions which are disabled which characterizes various forms of trance, including meditation, hypnosis, addiction and charisma.

Now what is a cognitive loop? Cognitive loops are repeating sequences of thought objects. A thought object can be a word, a thought, a sound, a feeling, even a physical movement. There are many examples of cognitive loops. Drumming and chanting are two examples, so is marching. Music is quite often a complex mix of cognitive loops. Mantra meditation and most other forms of meditation also use cognitive loops. Watching television forms a cognitive loop. Pacing is a cognitive loop. Yes-sets form cognitive loops.

According to the model, cognitive loops when repeated over a period of time cause dissociation, a splitting of consciousness. It is during this split of consciousness that some cognitive functions become disabled.

What are cognitive functions? Critical judgment is one of the first cognitive functions to become disabled in most dissociated conditions. Short term memory is another cognitive function which fails. Other cognitive functions can result in increased visualization, inner involvement, literalism, awareness, and an inability to discriminate realities. Some cognitive functions are interconnected so that when one cognitive function fails, other cognitive functions will also begin to fail.

The types of trance - according to the model - are derived from the content of the loop as well as location of the objects of the loop. A meditation type of trance has the loop objects entirely inside. A hypnotic type trance has the loop objects partly outside. An addictive type trance has both a meditation trance on which is built an hypnotic form. It is the hypnotic form which contains the addictive substance, but it is the meditative trance which makes it compulsive. A charismatic type of trance has further complex loop forms which use all three previous forms.

Problems with trance - indeed, we are refering to trance pathologies -mostly occur when more than one trance has been created without being aware of the process of creation or having the handle to terminate the trance. This leads to compulsive thoughts, behaviors, and delusions of many sorts. Multiple and complex forms of trance leads to addictions of all sorts and manifests in sociopathologies of all kinds. Analyzing and unraveling the trances and their creating loops is one goal of trance analysis. A second and important goal is to help clients gain personal control over their trances.

Understanding the model for trance gives therapists a big advantage in being more able to work more precisely with trance and its effects. A precise model brings the benefit of being able to engineer a trance if needed.

Most of my clients do not need to be induced into a trance. Rather, they need the tools to break trances which have been deliberately, sometimes maliciously, or inadvertently induced by television, by spouses or family members. I have had several email consultations with persons who have complained of hypnotherapists abusing them. While such clients may have their own psychological problems, I have found that teaching them how to recognize, control and break trance serves them much better than leading them into yet another trance.

What is practical about the model is that if you recognize that a client is showing any disabled cognitive function, then you can assume correctly that the client is in a trance and that there is an underlying cognitive loop. You might not know what that loop is, if you are attempting to break a trance created by someone else, or you might be the one who has created that loop if you are the hypnotherapist. Interpreting such loops as being the cause of a trance which disables specific cognitive functions helps clients to manage their own trances.

I have found that most real cures for whatever ails a client always involves empowering the client to recognize and break the causal cognitive loops and sometimes to construct new and more worthwhile cognitive loops.

Developing and testing the trance model with myself, with my clients and with psychotherapists who have used the model with their clients, has shown me that the model exhibits a great deal of practicality and promise.

I am very interested in working with serious minded people who wish to use trance theory in scientific or in personal research. I invite you to contact me personally with your questions and proposals.

The Influence of Trance in Democracy

2005-01-01T04:16:00.000-08:00

How can advertising, trance, false memory and the ideals of democracy be mutually reconciled? This question occurred to me just as I finished reading The Death of Discourse by Collins & Skover, and was giving a synopsis of the book to a colleague. I thought, for me, Collins & Skover raised more questions than answers. Their point of view is from a legal and cultural view of First Amendment issues. Collins & Skover are concerned with freedom of speech and the change in its meaning from Madison's time to the contemporary age. They echo the fears expressed in Huxley's 1946 nightmare Brave New World. Part of their view is that our self-indulgent electronic culture has replaced the 18th century Madisonian discourse of ideas paradigm with communication for the sake of private pleasure.

In my own book, Trance: from magic to technology, I raised similar questions from another point of view. My view was more psychological and only incidentally legal and cultural. My view is that there is a simple way to understand the mechanism of involvement with electronic images and their effect on the construction of personal memory which ultimately affects meaningful communication, political discourse and decision-making.

Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister said: 'Simplify and repeat. Simplify and repeat.' He knew what worked as a propaganda and indoctrination strategy. As a strategy that simple formula still works today. It is used extensively as a de facto model of modern advertising and is undeniably a controlling paradigm of our political life. But when trance is used to advance greed or violence, or to promote the uncritical acceptance of lies and deceptions, then trance becomes the means of enchantment of the most evil sort. And we have seen it before.

In my book I proposed a simple model for trance because I was interested in modeling meditation. I would like to repeat it here because it not only applies to a variety of religious or spiritual practices including meditation and ritual, but it also provides a model for the creation of false memory, addiction, cult behavior, compulsions of all sorts as well as indoctrination of political belief or propaganda.

What is a trance? And what does it mean to be in a trance?

As I define it, the specific dissociation of awareness which results from any sustained cognitive object (thought) loop is a trance. A trance always results in the disabling of some cognitive functions, and it is some subset of these disabled cognitive functions which most people intuitively associate with the word trance. One of my aims is to show how the implications of this model enhances our understanding of the profound changes in our culture due to electronic media.

Trance always results in the temporary disabling of some cognitive functions for energy conservation reasons. Trance enables a type of dissociated cognitive multiprocessing, but naturally does so always at the expense of other cognitive functions.

The disabling of a cognitive function can have both positive as well as negative effects. The mind in a trance is easily able to integrate multiple cognitive functions or processes, but it does so at the expense of explicit and detailed control over the subprocesses.

In some cases, the disabling of a cognitive function has a negative effect, such as becoming insensitive to and unaware of physical or emotional pain. One potential side-effect of a disabled cognitive function is that you are unaware of verbal suggestions that are given to you by electronic media. That is, critical judgment is suspended and you uncritically and without awareness accept the images, experiences and verbal suggestions from electronic media as though coming from a trusted part of your own self.

There may or may not be subjective awareness when you are in a trance. You are not usually aware that you are in a trance, but you continue to believe that your subjective awareness is somehow functioning normally. Often times, the only way to tell you have been in a trance is when you are startled back to your ordinary awareness. When, for example, you are sedulously involved in following a particularly exciting sports play on television, interruptions become particularly vexing and may deliver a shock as painful as a punch. From a trance theory point of view, this shock results from the collapse of the trance. If you knew that you were in a trance, this discomfortable sensation might readily be explained.

Television, movies and computer video are media which always induce a hypnotic trance. The trance generating loop occurs by reason of our cognitive processes which organize the synthetic images into sense. You are tempted and enticed to let go of your normally critical cognitive faculties and to accept uncritically the images, sounds, voices and experiences that are represented by the synthetic reality. As a reward for this suspension of critical belief, you gain a certain vicarious pleasure or sense that you have experienced an exciting, entertaining or rewarding time. The trance generating loop of television, movies and so on, is this synthetic stimulus-pleasure reward response loop.

The two most important cognitive functions that become disabled due to trance are volition and critical judgment. When these two cognitive abilities become disabled, we can no longer decide what is good for us nor do we care. We then tend to uncritically accept suggestions from others, whether these others exist in reality or are merely synthetic images on a television or movie screen. Related to critical judgment is our sense of determining what is real. When our ability to distinguish the reality of an experience is suspended we more readily fantasize, have more constructive visualizations and begin to believe that the synthetic images are actually real.

How easy is it to create such a trance? Remarkably easy. All that is necessary is to simplify and repeat, simplify and repeat. Eventually, little by little, day by day, more and more people will accept whatever suggestions are offered by the electronic media, whether these suggestions relate to attitudes, images, brands, political, economic, moral or ethical beliefs. The primary reason that this happens is due to the subtle but powerful effects of the induced and unterminated trance.

A third important cognitive function which is usually disabled by trance is short-term memory. The faultless memory of experiences helps us to make judgments. When you have had a pleasant experience, your memory serves you by retaining images of that experience. Accessing those images guide you in making future decisions. One problem with memory is that the content of memory is not always real. That is, your memory does not by itself distinguish between what really happened in the past and what was only a synthetic image originating from electronic media sources. This becomes especially important in long-term memory. The reason is that our physical human memories were not designed with the idea that such modern and exotic devices as movies and television would provide our memories with synthetic experiences. From the point of view of physical human memory, all memories are real, none are synthetic.

While you may be able to distinguish between real and synthetic memories in the short term, as a memory fades more into the past, the distinction between real and synthetic becomes blurred. You may have never traveled to South America, Europe or Japan, but can you imagine what it looks like? Is there an experience connected with that image? And what is the feeling connected to that experience? And what is the attitude connected to that feeling? And does that attitude influence your political judgments about a place you've never been to?

Ronald Reagan once recounted an experience to reporters which purportedly really occurred. An inquisitive reporter attempted to uncover the background of this experience and found that the source of it didn't exist. The source was a movie that the president had seen some decades previously. Although the experience was in the president's memory, his memory could not distinguish reality from synthetic.

This problem is not limited to the president. When trance disables aspects of memory recall it becomes impossible to distinguish whether an event really occurred or was merely a synthetic experience from a movie or a television synthetic event.

Do the images shown on television news have a basis in reality, or are they synthetic? When you remember images from the last war in a place you have never visited, does your memory indicate to you that you actually experienced it? Does the fear, shock and awe feel real to you? Or is the memory tagged with an indicator that says to you the image is synthetic and not real? What happened to your ability to think critically?

Modern computer based graphic tools can insert images or parts of images from one digital video into another and blend them together. Even shadows and reflected light can be computationally created so that a viewer cannot know that the composite video shows a synthetic reality which never existed. Yet, this synthetic reality can represent experiences and provoke profound emotions and generate attitudes all of which you remember as a false memory you nonetheless believe.

When a synthetic reality is perceived on television or at a movie in which the viewer is in a trance and the synthetic reality is composed of an emotionally intense story, additional cognitive demands are made on our emotional integrating abilities. These demands further reduce or disable critical judgment cognitive abilities among others. When, for example, people are in a state of terror, attention is narrowed and perceptions are altered. Peripheral detail, context, and time sense fall away, while attention is strongly focused on central detail in the immediate present. When the focus of attention is extremely narrow, cognitive thought objects repeat and a trance is created. When a trance is created, certain cognitive functions are disabled and these may produce profound perceptual distortion, including insensitivity to pain, depersonalization, time slowing and amnesia. Greed, deception and violence flourishes in such a mental atmosphere.

Because of the prevalence and intensity of synthetic images in our culture, synthetic imagery may be at this point in our cultural time in a strong competitive position with our ordinary reality. Some people already have a real problem in distinguishing between ordinary reality and synthetic reality. They would argue that the synthetic reality is as real as ordinary reality because the emotions and memories are equivalently real. As synthetic reality becomes more sophisticated and impinges upon more senses in a more complete way, and as trance is more fully understood and abused, it will no longer be possible for most people to distinguish between ordinary and synthetic realities. Among children who grow up with more television hours than hours with real people, this may already be the case.

The issue of a 'false memory' thus becomes easy to understand as a natural result of trance and the synthetic reality of electronic media..

What effect does trance have on democracy? How can a person in a trance, with critical judgment and other cognitive functions virtually disabled and with a plethora of delusions based on false memories be expected to make rational decisions or reasoned judgments affecting vital social, economic, legislative or political issues? Indeed, the normal television viewer in a trance is unable to concentrate on the issues, and becomes nothing more than a disenfranchised slave to the rulers.

Adolph Hitler once said, "What luck for the rulers that men cannot think."

For a democracy to work and the enchantment to end, men must be able to think critically. In thinking critically, love, truth, compassion and forgiveness can also thrive and those rulers whose god is greed, arrogance, deception and violence can never survive.

More Information

2004-11-26T09:27:00.000-08:00

If you want more information about trance and the trance model, first go to
the Trance Institute (trance.edu)
as there are a lot of papers to read.

If you are interested in becomming a member of the Trance Research Foundation,
then check out
www.tranceresearch.org
and becomming a member is the easiest way to get a copy of my book
Trance: from magic to technology

And ... anytime you have questions, just email me.