4.1: Operating the Creature You Inhabit

When you tell yourself to raise your hand it goes up, but when you tell yourself to calm down, become sexually aroused, or to salivate, you may not get the desired response. This is because consciousness is a property of the Central Nervous System, which operates your skeletal muscles, so you can raise your hand at will, but your emotions and other biological reactions are controlled by your Autonomic Nervous System, which is not subject to direct conscious control.

There is, however, an indirect method by which you can exert conscious influence on your biological responses: Instead of willing the response, aim your attention to the stimulus that elicits the intended response. For example if you want to salivate, instead of telling yourself to salivate, imagine licking a sour but juicy lemon.

For those who engage in regular physical exercise, observe the temporary effects on strength and stamina of recalling in detail a situation that makes you angry. Some people find that evoking a cringe (see below) produces a similar increase in heart rate and physical energy, but with a different flavor of discomfort.

Of primary interest for our purposes is the subjective reality of a craving. For many individuals merely thinking about the incentive or, perversely, trying not to think about it produces an urge to use it. However, you have the ability to influence your immediate motivational state by purposely thinking certain thoughts. For example, thinking in detail about the penalties of relapse can decrease the urge to use the incentive. With practice, you can enhance your ability to intentionally influence your motivational state [trance] in real-time.

Thought Experiment: Evoking a cringe. Take a few moments to relive a time when you embarrassed yourself. You will find that the more detail you can conjure up the greater the cringe effect.

If you were able to experience the cringe, then you successfully initiated trance formation – that is, you willfully aimed your attention to a particular stimulus – in this case, an embarrassing moment ─ in order to produce the intended state change.

Because this is an early exercise and I wanted to make it easy, I used cringe imagery rather than efficacy enhancing imagery, which would have been more useful for our purposes. Special exercises designed to strengthen your ability to focus and use your imagination are included in this kit precisely because there is so much resistance to efficacy enhancing imagery. Some people intentionally suppress efficacy enhancing imagery because they were trained to be modest or to avoid the sin of pride, but there are more universal impediments to positive self-suggestion:

• Asymmetry of Positive and Negative Imagery: Because it is more dramatic and threatening, negative, efficacy deflating imagery is more salient than positive, efficacy enhancing imagery. Moreover, stimuli that promote self-direction are less salient than stimuli that would promote relapse – especially during high-risk situations.

• Bias Against Self-Suggestion: Paradoxically, it is easier to accept suggestion from a hypnotist – who may know nothing about you or your situation ─ than it is to accept your own suggestion. Giving suggestions to yourself seems forced and inauthentic, a consequence of the tacit premise that there is an authentic you and pretending to be better than you are would simple be an attempt to deny the ugly truth. In fact there is no authentic you. The version of you before a lapse when you are experiencing positive outcome expectancies is different than a later version who regrets the relapse. In fact there are infinite versions of you, and whichever version is dominant at the moment feels like the only one possible. Suggestions, whether developed by you or an external agent, are creative fictions designed to evoke the intended subjective reality so that you can perform as intended in real-time.
Suggestion
Hypnosis is a powerful method to deliver suggestion and thereby change an individual’s subjective reality. Most people believe that as a result of the hypnotic induction a mindless subject is compelled to obey the suggestion of the hypnotist, which results in a profound misunderstanding of both hypnosis and self-determination. The belief that the hypnotist is in control is not surprising, because stage demonstrations of hypnosis often include a challenge – for example: "Your leg is getting heavier and heavier/you can try to lift your leg/ but it will be so heavy/ that you won't be able to do it.”

This sounds like a battle of wills between the hypnotist and the subject, but it is not. In fact the phenomenon is produced completely by the subject, and is an intra-personal rather than an inter-personal phenomenon. After you have read the explanation you can experience this classic hypnotic suggestion by downloading the Heavy Shoe file.

As you will see, the script is full of lies, such as "your shoe is made of lead." In fact your shoe is not made of lead. Clinicians will often use scripts such as this because they show how suggestion can influence actual experience and behavior, and the demonstration is dramatic and easy to produce in the office setting. The experience and behavior is nonsensical because the hypnotist suggests a reality that is objectively false. Acting as though an objectively false suggestion were true ─ e.g., your shoe is made of lead ─ produces behavior that would appear silly to an observer, which is why stage hypnosis often produces laughter from the audience who are not asked to buy into the false suggestion.

But some things are neither true nor false. Are you a hero or a loser? There is no objective answer to that question. Concepts like that exist only within your subjective reality. But how you perform in real-time depends to a large extent upon your subjective reality at that moment ─ the heroic version of you would react differently than your loser persona.

Your subjective reality is a creative fiction that you are continually inventing. To be sure, your overt behavior has become part of world history [and so can never be undone], but the trance that gave rise to it was purely subjective and did not exist until you created it. So why not create a subjective reality that is beneficial to you and consistent with what you stand for instead of creating self-sabotaging fictions?

Suggestion, the use of imagination to influence subjective reality, can be used therapeutically to change the predictable patterns of mood disorders, addictive disorders, as well as a wide range of relationship problems. This capability requires a good imagination and the ability to focus attention. Like other talents some individuals are more gifted than others, but everyone improves with practice. The Heavy Shoe audio is a stimulus with which to practice; its purpose is to strengthen your ability to intentionally influence your subjective reality in real-time.

4.0: Hypnosis and Ordinary Trances

The hypnotic state clients experience in my office as a result of a formal trance induction is just one of the many different trances they experience throughout their day. There is nothing unusual about hypnosis, everything we experience is trance. You can evoke one kind of trance by listening to one of the induction audio files in this kit [see Appendix A: Trance Formation Audio Files], but you don’t need a formal induction to change your state. Consider the following thought experiment:

Thought Experiment: The Emergency ─ Imagine that you just got a message that someone in your family had been seriously hurt in an automobile accident and you must get to the emergency room right away. Your biological state would change immediately and you would run or drive there as fast as you could, heart pounding, thoughts racing, experiencing great distress. When you got there and discovered the report was untrue, you would experience relief, a very different trance. Objectively, the report was never true, yet it had a great impact on your state of mind and body. State-dependent phenomena ─ including motivation, perceptual bias and response probability distribution ─ are determined by the subjective reality that existed only in your mind, not by what was objectively true.

In the example above the information that evoked the stressful state was objectively false, and so the trance was not valid. But some kinds of information are neither objectively true nor false, so the trances they evoke are neither valid nor invalid. Pathogenic structures emerge when the individual considers such information to be important [e.g., “others find me unattractive,” “I don’t have what it takes to succeed.”]

Barry, the 31 year-old engineer who views himself as socially awkward is at a party with co-workers, when his supervisor makes a joke at his expense. Barry would love to respond with a clever comeback, but he expects to be inarticulate. Will there be a witty exchange or an awkward silence?

The appraisal: “I’m a loser,” or the expectation: “I will perform well” exist only in Barry’s mind not in the objective world, but his subjective reality has a great influence on how he performs in the real world. Appreciating Barry’s tendency to freeze up in such situations, one coworker expects an embarrassing pause and another expects him to say something stupid. But these expectations exist only in their minds. Objective reality is determined by how Barry actually performs.

When he is in the right state of mind Barry can be very funny and quick witted. Whether or not he can use this talent in this stressful situation depends to a large extent on his subjective reality at the time. His retort is more likely to be clever if he is in a confident trance than if he is in his “I’m a nerd” trance. He wants to bring on the clever version of himself and enjoy a social victory for a change, but he expects to be weak and intimidated as usual.

So there is a conflict between Barry’s intentions ─ to be cool and clever ─ and his expectations of humiliation. Will his expectations or his intentions determine his subjective reality at the critical moment? Which will be the effective stimulus when Barry is faced with his crisis?

Expectations have the advantage ─ both Barry and his friends believe them to be objectively true. From our dispassionate perspective we can see they are merely creative fictions which are neither true nor false. As a dispassionate observer I can see that Barry himself is the source of an artificial limitation that diminishes his fun, increases his misery, and prevents him from establishing an intimate partnership. My task as his therapist is to help him create a subjective reality that is at least as valid as the one he currently holds, but that evokes more self-serving trances.

At first Barry resisted change because being someone different than he really is would be inauthentic. My first task is to challenge his tacit premise that there is a real Barry. In fact I have met many versions, including the clever Barry and the intimidated Barry. Intentional Trance Formation refers to the method of transforming a less resourceful version into one that is more resourceful. The ambitious objective of this section is to enable you to intentionally influence your subjective reality and hence you capability to cope with real-time challenges.

3.3: The Enlightened Path

Is light a particle or a wave?

Is the electron here or not here?

Am I the most important thing in the universe or am I merely dust and ashes?

Oddly, the best answer to each of these questions is that both of the incompatible alternatives are true at the same time! Because we do not have access to objective truth, our understanding of reality is riddled with paradox. Accepting the paradoxes is the Middle Way. This enlightened path is not available to the young, for it requires a mature perspective. Indeed, enlightenment is not a state of bliss; it refers to the ability to cope with the paradoxes of life.
The Watercourse Way [the Tao]
Water follows the path of least resistance. When building an irrigation system, it is wise to take into account the principles of hydrodynamics. Just as the flow of water is influenced by lawful principles such as gravity, the course of your biography is influenced by lawful principles such as the PIG.

It is not the water's fault that it is influenced by gravity, nor is it your fault that you are influenced by the PIG. You are, however, responsible for taking factors such as the PIG into account in order to produce the outcomes you choose. Knowledge of the bio-psycho-social principles that influence your real-time behavior makes possible responsible action. You are not responsible for having this impulse control problem, but you are responsible for overcoming it and following a more advantageous path.

You have now examined two ways to accomplish this, and soon you will have to design a particular plan for yourself, a plan to which you will have to adhere, despite the crises you are bound to encounter. Should you follow a rigid path impeccably or a flexible path where errors are opportunities for growth?

The Middle Way contains elements of both the Impeccable Path and the OPEN Path. You must honor all commitments without exception, but you must only commit to process, not outcome. You can accept responsibility for what you do, but it would be imprudent to accept responsibility for the outcomes you cannot control. So be careful about committing to improving your life, or to repairing relationships, because you have less control over such things than you think. Instead make commitments about process, such as keeping a log or reviewing your plans every day.

In a sense the Middle Way is an opportunity to apply the scientific method to practical problems. Our understanding of reality will always be imperfect, so we must always be open to disconfirming information and be willing to reconsider our assumptions on the basis of new observations. The scientific method not only allows for failure to confirm a hypothesis, it welcomes such observations as the path to growth and improved understanding.

At the abstract level the scientific method is flexible; at the execution level it is rigid. A good scientist adheres, without exception, to good scientific process ─ you can be confident that [s]he followed the procedures exactly as described in the research documentation.

When executing your treatment plan, you must follow your commitments exactly as described and without exception! Be mindful of this responsibility when you compose your plan. Don’t look for or accept loopholes!

When you view high-risk situations as a contest between your will and the pull of local incentives, you can get a sense of the Psyche by observing how it responds to such provocations. On the Enlightened Path, whatever happens is nature's way of teaching you the lessons of cause-and-effect. Never let neurotic self-evaluations demoralize you and motivate you to abandon the effort. Following this path requires that you rigidly hold yourself to the commitments you make, and have a forgiving attitude toward yourself and a readiness to accept what nature teaches you so that you can modify your plan accordingly. The truth wants to set you free!