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Hypnosis Works

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When I interviewed at the Hypnosis Motivation Institute, I felt like I had come home. After years of having my compassion treated as a threat by abusive managers, it was welcomed as an asset to be celebrated.

The program is a significant investment. Everybody thinks that as a software developer I should be rich, but after a tumultuous divorce, several brief stints of unemployment, and nearly $30,000 spent producing and marketing my message of healing, the $10,000 tuition was nearly a third of my net worth.

So while I enjoyed the first month of classes, I was still nervous about whether this was finally going to give me the avenue that I was seeking.

I am drawn frequently into healing experiences, most often on the floor when I am dancing. Those environments also produce hostility though, most often from men whose sexual aggression is rejected by women that are relieved to find their prayers for kindness answered in my presence.

As I explained it to HMI’s education director, I was seeking a modality that would allow me to bring people into that space of healing in a controlled fashion. He understood, affirming that “hypnosis is a framework on which you can build many kinds of practice.”

I found confirmation this Saturday under surprising circumstances.

I went in to get a hair cut before yoga, and found myself stranded on the bench at Supercuts as stylist after stylist took a break. I was called to the chair by a younger woman, dressed severely, her long, dark mop of hair punctuated by a blue splash over the right eye.

After she had gotten started, she asked what I had done with the beginning of my day. I related that I had been working on hypnotherapy classes. She followed up with “What’s that all about?”

While we were given scripted responses in the first series of classes, they weren’t possible in the context (sitting shrouded in a sheet). So I began to ad-lib, stating that hypnosis enabled the client to access the full capabilities of their mind when trying to modify behaviors.

She broke in “But what if someone doesn’t want to confront the past?”

“Well, they don’t have to; you can choose to move forward. Hypnosis establishes a state of relaxation and clarity that allows you to remember what it is like to feel well and in control. When you go back to life, you can then clearly perceive what is pleasant and unpleasant, no longer obscured by the anxieties and stress of your habitual life.”

She was skeptical, and concluded the conversation with a dismissive comment.

But as she continued her craft, trimming the right side of my head, I had this sudden thought “She’s really open to me right now.” Extending my focus toward her heart, I took it gently and poured love into it.

She didn’t react. But ten minutes later, she pulled out the steamed towel and began to clean the nape of my neck with a gratitude that penetrated deeply into the skin. After thanking her, I walked toward the register and one of her elder peers called out, “Thank you!”

And I realized that just knowledge of the theory of hypnosis had brought me the means I was looking for, even before mastery of the techniques of therapeutic practice.

I’m on the right path.

Through

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As of Sunday morning, the 101 was still closed in Montecito, so I resolved to head down to Westwood for the Ecstatic Dance LA celebration. After lunch, rather than heading up to the Getty Center, I was inspired to visit the Armand Hammer Museum.

It was deja vu all over again as – just as when I visited with my sons during Kevin’s attendance at UCLA – most of the museum was closed for their annual rotation. Apart from the standing collection (mostly French and American oils from the 19th century), they had four environmental experiences.

The most profound is Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Saydnaya. Saydnaya is the death prison established by the regime of the Syria dictator Bashar al Assad. During the course of the civil war, more than 13,000 people have been destroyed there.

The guards at the prison maintained control through a strict regimen of silence. Any significant noise was punished by beatings – even the screams of those beaten were punished with further abuse. As a result, every sound was impressed upon the victims. Through acoustic forensics, interviews with those released have reconstructed the organization and operations of the prison.

The installation is simple: at the entrance, two large speakers that first demonstrate the effects of a 19 decibel drop in sound – reflecting the drop in the volume of the prisoner’s speaking when the prison stopped serving any investigative purpose and became simply a death camp. The recording starts with a loud siren, and drops through a series of declarations of annihilation (including the extinction of frog species in the Amazon). When the volume is inaudible, the recording continues with the testimony of a prison survivor describing the use of silence as an instrument of torture. Finally, the artist and acoustic specialist describe their methods.

The entry is dim, as the main installation is set off by a large partition. Walking around the partition, we are confronted with a number of overhead projectors, each bearing a ray tracing of the acoustic reconstruction. Two smaller text projectors add testimony of the investigation to the setting.

I entered during a lull in the recording, and stood in the center of the room, amidst the projectors, trying to feel my way into the situation. It was distant until I turned around to look behind me, and found that my shadow had fallen across the ray tracing on the partition. The pain washed through me then, and I turned my back to the young female docent as I allowed it to penetrate. When I finally left, I made the mistake of asking her “Do they have a PTSD therapy program for you after you spend all day in here?” Her face nearly cracked with grief. I don’t think that she understood before that moment.

I went down to the Peet’s Coffee on the corner and resolved to soak in the sun and listen to music. Brahm’s First Piano Concerto seemed appropriate, but the street traffic was noisy. After finishing my coffee and scone, I thought to head back into the Hammer atrium where I’d be able to focus on the music. As I stepped into the quiet, I had the sudden inspiration that I should do my listening in Hamdan’s exhibit.

The first movement of the concerto is an elegy to Robert Schumann, Brahm’s unstable contemporary who committed suicide at a young age, leaving a wife and young children. Much as the exhibition’s recording, it opens with crashing orchestral chords that evoke the trauma of receiving news of a tragic loss. After extended orchestral development, the piano solo enters with an echo of those chords. It was at that point that I paused the recording before walking up the stairs.

As I settled on the floor in the back of the projection space and resumed the concerto, the exhibition recording started, blaring loudly over the music. Again, the trauma and sorrow washed over me.

This was the process, then: holding onto the pattern of the music as the noise and words stepped over it. The stronger chords exerted themselves even through the loudest sections, but Brahm’s meditation has passages of delicate arpeggios and simple, haunting melodies that even hushed voices would occlude.

The thought that I projected was only this:

If they won’t let you speak, then hear this; share it.

To not be forgotten. To receive evidence that love transmutes sorrow into beauty. And, as the first movement ends with it’s playful re-iteration of the opening themes, to hope that children would come to restore joy where greed and fear have made a wasteland of the human heart.

Finally, the Right Channel

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When I went up after the session to talk to the facilitator, she enthused:

You project a great deal of healing energy.

I told her that I brought that forward from a past life, and that it came with connections to many others that I was sorting through.

When I was a post-doc in Livermore, Robert Silverberg wrote a series of science fiction novels. On the cover of one, a young man wore a helmet that in the story allowed him to directly relate to all of the information stored in the great library. He experienced the lives of all the great personalities, seeing through them the experiences of the lesser.

When my girlfriend asked me how I looked without a beard, I spontaneously took her into my den, pulled the book off the shelf, and testified “Like this.” I don’t know from where the artist drew inspiration, but it looked exactly like me.

Many years later, when I put up my first web site at http://www.everdeepening.org, I had a dream in which an opponent to my efforts indicated that I was plugging the internet into my mind. It’s why I don’t mind that my readership is so low. It was true also of the time I spent playing Runescape. I was connecting psychically to the community of online gamers, just as here I make a connection to the community of online intellectuals.

All of my writing – my books, my web-site, and my three blogs – have been an effort to explain how I organize my personality to serve as a locus for healing energy. It’s not something that I project; rather, I am transparent to it. I offer it without conditions to those that need it.

More than that, the interaction is an introduction that allows them to pursue an independent journey with the source of the energy.

Early in my experience of LA Ecstatic Dance, Ataseia would invite the participants (usually less than thirty) to articulate an intention for the dance. Most people had specific needs, but a number of one-time participants came in looking for “meaning” or “hope.” I felt myself drawn to that need, and felt the door opening in me. In turn, during closing circle, they would incline toward me to testify with some version of “I received what I was seeking.”

The problem with social media is the one identified by Barack Obama in his turn on Letterman’s “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.” Social media environments such as Facebook and Google seek to provide you more of what you like, rather than forcing you to confront alternative views of the world. This has allowed propagandists to create cesspools of fear that trap audiences in dependency.

Fear is a powerful motivator – it harnesses our most primitive survival instincts. Worse, it is the default mode of the infant brain, a mode prevents development of social skills in those that do not receive consistent, loving reassurance.

My writing here has been a bipolar oscillation between posts that explain the reasons we should hope and posts that attempt to undermine the logic of fear-mongers. Both messages require time to process that few possess, and once presented rapidly become “dated.” People looking for answers want variety: they want to read what’s new, not immerse themselves in what is eternal. It is only in the wordless experience of dance that I have been able to confront them with the presence of the eternal.

I have offered several times here that the Holy Spirit was the original world-wide web, and a far better version because it only propagates ideas that serve the purposes of love. I have written and written in the hope that the internet would serve a similar purpose. Now I realize that it cannot. What it does is encyst the poisons that once percolated in the Holy Spirit.

Revelation 12 and 13 explain that Jesus’s incarnation was accompanied with an effort by the angels to cast selfishness out of heaven, where it now rages through humanity on earth. Revelation 20 describes the return of Jesus to cast that spirit out of humanity. It is described as a war, but it is a spiritual war, not a war of physical destruction. Using the strength of his will, Christ simply forces evil out of human nature.

If I have served Christ in any way during this life, it has been as a tool for evolving the methods to accomplish that aim. Manipulators have had less and less purchase on me, and over the last year, I have stopped reasoning with them and simply started projecting:

You don’t belong here any more.

The spiritual and intellectual shields that allow me to enforce that judgment are all in the public domain. They are written here for those that wish to experience them. It is not my job to promote them against the resistance of those that would corrupt them. That leads to death.

That’s been done already.

No, my job right now is to project strength into the final resource for the oppressed, the only resource to those abandoned by a system that finds no profit in their survival. I must focus on psychic projection of the truths held in the Holy Spirit, and thereby expand the domain of its influence.

Blessings on you all. May God send angels to walk at your shoulder, to take you by the elbow when you face difficult decisions, and to fill with hope the holes in your soul made by the messages of fear that steal joy from you.

I’m going to find a way to spend every day offering healing to people that to this point has only been accepted on the dance floor.

Its Her Time

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The wave was presaged for me in my college years. Meeting with friends, I had to ask what this t-shirt slogan meant:

A woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle.

Growing up, I noticed at church gatherings that while all the men stood up to strut, the women went around quietly in the background and actually got things done. This was what they were allowed. Then in the seventies something snapped. That t-shirt was preceded by bra burnings.

The era of gender turmoil could be abusive. My college dormie warned me that if I didn’t hold the door open for his mother, she would call me rude, and if I did she’d call me condescending.

In Genesis, it is said that a man will go live with his woman because they “become one flesh.” When I came into my spirituality in my 40s, I began to realize how much of what goes on in the business world has to do with the woman at home. They build their men up in spiritual armor and send him out in the world to rape and pillage. They don’t see it that way – they see it as protecting their man. But when their man needs protection because he rapes and pillages, that distinction is moot.

Among the counsel that I received when I was going through my divorce, two things stood out. The first was to be warned that ethically I was way outside of the norm, and the court system would have no clue how to respond to me. The second was that I had married somebody from a culture that was far less sophisticated than ours, and that I should be more selective in the future.

Unfortunately, that was followed by a dream in which an elder showed up to announce that I was a “nation of one.”

Understanding that the cabal of homemakers wants a peer to negotiate with, I’ve spent most of the last twenty years studying feminine virtue, trying to figure out how to call it out of hiding. In his song “Winterwood,” Don McLean gave voice to my inspiration:

No time can pass your sight unseen,
No moment steals away unfound.
A lifetime lived in such a dream,
Floats like a feather to the ground.

A woman has the power to guide her man around conflict, not push him into it.

And of course the feminist would complain that women have their own gifts to express. That’s true, and I become frustrated when the dynamic among people is dominated by sex. Talent doesn’t reveal itself in those circumstances.

If this has been confusing, well, that’s how gender politics has been in America for the last forty years. Everybody has to figure out their own path.

I have been as frustrated as anyone else. A friend at work yesterday counseled me to look at Japanese or French women – ladies that “grant their men their space.” I affirmed that capacity, but observed that it was an outgrowth of their need to submit to male-dominated societies. When I was in my teens, my  mother told me that I should find a Geisha to marry. There is an attraction there.

The other path is the Muslim or Orthodox path, where women veil themselves and lead a separate existence. I’ve seen amazing beauty in such woman, but they are often brittle.

The American experiment is chaotic and often ugly, but it’s worth supporting. If I’m ever going to be in a relationship again, it will be with a woman that has chosen to exit the game, allowed men to celebrate her without possessing her, and come back looking to figure out how to join her virtues to a man’s.

Reflections of Love

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Between the fires and being sick, I missed a whole month of Dance Tribe up in Santa Barbara. Something was developing there – one of the women had taken to saying that we needed to “take the energy shared here and bring it into the world that needs it so much.”

At the end of dance, I am pretty extended. Specific messages tend to bounce away. I took it as something just nice to say, but when I last heard it, I realized that she might have been speaking to me. Pausing therefore to reflect, I recognized this paradox: if I bring energy into that room, it’s because I am reaching out into the world while we dance. Powers ancient and new, distant and near, reflect upon and affirm our engagement.

If we raise a special energy, it’s because the world is in the room with us.

But that’s nothing new – that’s been going on for me in many venues for many years.

What is new is this: stepping out of the darkened corridor into the sunshine, and feeling this joyful glow descend upon me. It’s like a friend offering a warm embrace. I reach up and brush the sky with its welcoming.

There is a panicked impatience in that engagement. We haven’t had any rain to speak of in Southern California. The ecosystem is drying out, burning up and blowing away.

As I walked down to the beach this morning, those perceptions crystalized around the Fall. Love always hopes, and to protect Adam and Eve, God hid his knowledge of what was to come. So I read his words in Eden not as those of a taciturn school master, but of a parent seeking children lost in the jungle.

Adam? Eve? Where are you?

Followed by the admonition:

You will die.

Death is the veil that separates us from love, so I do not read the second as a punishment. It is a simple statement of fact. Without understanding, when Adam and Eve covered themselves – when they made the choice to hide from God, who is love perfected – they were choosing to take refuge in death.

This great weight settled on me then – the weight of sorrow that so much of humanity rejects God, and so rejects love. The paradox is that we cannot dispel God’s love. Even if we seek it in other relationships, we are just asking God’s love to come through the door of our choosing. No, the only way to reject love is to reject ourselves. It is to surrender ourselves to death.

And this is what tears at me now: to walk around the world and see all these people dead to themselves.

Man does not live by bread alone. We cannot reject love without rejecting ourselves, for to be a self is to be loved unconditionally. It is to be seen by God.

And I realize now that this is what confuses the hell out of women. I walk around and offer “Here. You’ve lost this part of your self.” It’s always the part that they surrendered when they lost faith in love, and in finding it returned they resolve that I must be the love for them.

No. I’m just relaying the message that God never stopped loving you.

This has been playing itself out in a little triangle, and I realize that I don’t know any longer how to receive love in the fashion of the world. The compromises and barriers confuse the hell out of me.

The crescendo came tonight while watching Amelie. The denoument is incredibly tender. Love ambushes the poor girl, and she has sufficient faith to submit.

Does that remain in me?

I laid on the floor and wept.

Resolution of Love

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To be loved is to receive power. If you are loved, you should feel stronger every day.

Don’t fall in love.

To fall into love is to surrender to mutual emptiness.

Awaken to love.

Awaken to new perspectives. Awaken to new feelings. Awaken to new possibilities.

Eyes open, clear-headed, self-controlled.

But most importantly:

Awaken to JOY!

A Christmas Carroll

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For those of you weary of my ranting like Lear, a recommended holiday treat: Lewis Carroll’s marvelous satire on blind ambition and subscribers to half-baked promises.

The Hunting of the Snark

Presented in its entirety here.

What can I say about a poem whose tragic victim is introduced with:

He would answer to “Hi!” or to any loud cry,
Such as “Fry me!” or “Fritter my wig!”
To “What-you-may-call-um!” or “What-was-his-name!”
But especially “Thing-um-a-jig!”

Oh, tonic of confusion, a blessing you are to my mind!

Goddesses

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I woke up in the wee hours yesterday morning to the sound of gusting wind, crystallizing my plans for the day. The coastal arteries (US 101 and the Amtrak line) run on the seaward edge of Montecito. The tongues of the Thomas Fire had been licking its edges for the last week, and some of the fire team had predicted that if the winds ramped back up to 60 mph gust, the fire would burn all the way to the coast.

Not wanting to go three weeks without dancing, I resolved to reverse course and spend the day down in Westwood, where Ecstatic Dance was beginning its year-end celebration at 3 PM.

The day built through sublime moments. I always enjoy services at the University Catholic Center – the minds and hearts of college students are receptive. They were on holiday break, of course, but behind the fount a toddler delivered a joyous sermon of discovery throughout the mass.

At the Getty Center, a difficult moment: standing before four of Boticelli’s renderings of the Crucifixion, the woman next to me caught sight of my Love Returns logo and thought “Who is this man?” The passionate grief of that experience threatened to submerge me.

But the signature for the day was proclaimed by Ataseia at Ecstatic Dance. For the yoga warm-up, the foam puzzle mat had been set up in the middle of the floor. As the room filled up, Ataseia began to encourage us to join him there. Seeing people with rolled-up mats standing against the walls, he became more direct. “Really, people, I don’t need all this space for myself!” I was stretching my hamstrings, but heard feet padding onto the foam. Ataseia, famously gay, proclaimed, “Here come my goddesses!”

I haven’t been down to Ecstatic Dance LA since the Trump election. In that era, the ladies were young and timorous, and the crowd was smaller.

The dance was packed yesterday, which forced me into some restraint. That may have had some influence, but…something else was at work in the community.

As is typically for these events, the ladies outnumbered the men about three to one. They didn’t seem to care. They flaunted their sensuality for each other. When a man floated by, the ladies flirted, but didn’t get catty about it.

I didn’t recognize the change until about the midpoint of the celebration. When the energy begins to spin a little into the dirty, I’ll stop and raise my palm to the ceiling, focusing and projecting good will into the celebration. After a longish spell of such, I opened my eyes to start dancing again, and found a woman standing shoulder-to-shoulder with me, eyes closed in concentration.

That was novel.

So I went back into that space and enjoyed the feeling of sharing it with her. We danced a little together, and then floated off. She found another woman and starting dancing side-by-side with her.

The boys did get wild on occasion. For most of the celebration, the women held the center of the floor, but as I made my way through, my friend Adam confronted me. We began winding it up, leaping and lunging around each other, and the floor cleared a little. I was tired at that point, and didn’t last long, but by the time I wandered off, he had absorbed a couple of other men. When they were four, I couldn’t resist, and rushed back into the scrum. The floor opened up, a circle about fifteen feet across, and we went into Jedi mode, spinning and lunging, avoiding collision and injury only because we were one body. The ladies turned toward us, swaying, some coupled with arms around waists, smiling.

I was reduced to crawling across the floor to collapse on the pads in front of the altar.

Most important to me, however, was that the first meditative connection wasn’t the only time I found a woman creating space for me during the dance. Again and again I found myself connecting with a lady who just decided to hold her space while I moved through it.

The last experience was at the very end. A statuesque woman, showing a dancer’s tone and outrageous orange hair, confronted me solemnly from ten feet away. I had skipped past her several times, and she made it clear that she was ready to engage, slowly raising her hands above her head.

We began without contact, simply clearing the ether. Goddess or not, all woman I encounter have wounded hearts, and I ended up with my right palm hovering over the top of her breastbone. My left hand gently activated the upper three chakras. Her eyes were closed in concentration, but as I lowered them, they opened with a gentle smile.

I stepped in and whispered “Yes, you are beautiful. Believe in yourself.”

Dropping to my right knee reverentially, my palms hovered over her feet, and then my fingertips pressed into the floor, grounding her into the earth. Looking up to see how she was responding, I was rewarded by the most regal of attitudes.

I stood and we embraced. I felt her looking into my heart sympathetically, and I allowed myself to collapse against her. Eventually we knelt on the floor, ears pressed together, one arm over and one arm under; then switching to the other side. As we melted together, her forearms and palms glided slowly and tenderly over the perspiration on my back.

For the first time in my life I felt that in the presence of a woman neither she nor I had anything to prove. I was something infinitely precious. To be molded by her was a joy.

The Clock is Ticking!

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Women have a biological clock: menopause, the point beyond which they cannot have children.

This is my version:

For about a decade, whenever I entertain romantic aspirations, I gravitate toward a vision of lying on the couch with my head in her lap while she strokes my hair.

I’m 57 1/2, ladies! Will I have to settle for a scalp massage?