I went to this interesting hypnosis show several years back. Part of the show was that the participants on stage looked out into the crowd and thought they saw that everybody was naked.
It was pretty funny.
There’s also the old gag, in movies and skits, where some guy gets hypnotized, and then the hypnotist suddenly dies. The poor guy spends the rest of his life in some kind of trance, clucking like a chicken.
This is more true than most people know.
We are hypnotized as children, and then we spend the rest of our lives under that hypnotic spell.
Most don’t even know it. Some lucky ones realize that one of the most important things in life is to de-hypnotize yourself as much as possible.
We may not cluck like a chicken every time somebody says “banana,” but we suddenly get nervous or anxious at the idea of speaking in public.
What’s the difference?
Just like Pavlov’s dogs, we’ve been trained to respond to certain external stimuli based on pre-programmed responses.
In a regular stage show, these are created on purpose, to get a laugh.
But in real life, they are created by accident, and can have terrible consequences if gone unchecked.
How do you know if you’re hypnotized? If you have a certain emotional or even physiological response to a certain external stimuli, is it you, or does every single person on the planet have the same response? Is it biological, or mental?
Everybody will die when bitten by a rattlesnake. But not everybody gets nervous when they speak in public.
Nobody can last long without water, but plenty of people can last their whole lives without alcohol or cigarettes. Others would go mad without them for only a couple days.
Which is real, and which is imaginary?
Which is outside, in the world, and which is inside your head?
Who put it there?
Who can remove it?
Who’s the REAL hypnotist?