I used to wonder if the "mainstream" was really as ignorant about hypnosis as they would have us believe or if it was all just a way of hiding ongoing research they would rather we weren't aware of...

Just the other night I was watching a television special on one of the educational stations. The basic topic was time and how we mentally measure it. They spent an hour discussing the effects of cocaine on mice and people who naturally woke up every morning at 2:00 AM. The last 20 minutes of the show were dedicated to a "Phenomenon" which, according to the program, had just started to interest the Duke University mind labs. They had just recently started to explore how the mind seemed to slow down time when under extreme stress. The head researcher at Duke commented that the problem with doing this kind of research is that we aren't capable of duplicating the experience so many claim to have had.
I felt like getting on the phone and offering to duplicate the phenomenon using hypnosis. 

Time expansion is something most of us are very familiar with and have probably all experimented with from time to time. But again, I couldn't help but wonder why this Ph.D. in charge of a mental research project at the very open minded Duke University, wasn't familiar with it. Then I remembered a study I was hired to assist in once at a major American University where the researcher had received a fairly large grant to study "The various elements of successful suggestion". Basically, the grant provider was interested in finding out if dress, vocal tone or interior decorators had any impact on the effectiveness of a therapist's suggestions. I was hired mainly because of my background in hypnosis, and yet the crew made it very clear that I was never to use the word hypnosis or mention that I was a hypnotist while near the campus. They wanted my know how, provided we never called the "studies on the effects of altered states of consciousness on the viability of suggestions" what it really was, hypnosis.

Most of us remember, not that long ago, when books on hypnosis were still shelved next to psychics and carnival side shows. Anybody who's been at this more than a couple years is sure to remember the frustrations involved in standing alone against the establishment while they adamantly proclaimed that hypnosis was little more than the placebo effect being amplified. Perhaps it wasn't until just recently that mainstream psychology started to notice what was possible using hypnosis. Or was it?

Back on June 5, 1968 Sirhan Bashira Sirhan lunged out of a large crowd and shot Robert Kennedy. The next day, Kennedy died. There could be no question concerning who did it, with what and where, and yet Sirhan Sirhan still sits in jail serving out a sentence that was commuted from death to life. To this day, Sirhan claims he can not remember what happened that night. He claims the entire fiasco has somehow completely fled his memory. Careful studies showed no signs of schizophrenia or other mental incapacity's. In fact, the verdict reflects the prevailing opinion of the day that somewhere in the process, Sirhan had been hypnotized and was following orders while in a dazed "Manchurian Candidate" style stupor. 

Whether or not hypnosis was actually involved in the crime may be questionable, but the fact still remains that it was precisely because of this mental "third party" involvement that Sirhan was not sent to a speedy execution. 
In 1977, William Joseph Bryan, who claimed to be "the world's leading expert" on hypnosis was found dead in a Las Vegas hotel room. Bryan's reputation was well know to law enforcement. It was his help that eventually wrapped up the Boston Strangler case when he was hired to hypnotize the prime suspect, Albert DiSalvo. Two local call girls, who had spent considerable amounts of time with Bryan during the last couple years of his life came forward and admitted that he had repeatedly bragged about being hired to hypnotize Sirhan to have him shoot Kennedy. A very interesting side note here is that when investigators went over Sirhan's unintelligible scribblings in a personal note pad, they found the name "DiSalvo" written over and over. Graphoanalysts claim the writing was unmistakably Sirhan's. When asked about it, Sirhan claims he doesn't remember ever writing it and insists he doesn't even know who DiSalvo is. 

Is it possible that in this well publicized, highly monitored case back in the 60's, the judge made his decision based on a technique nobody believed existed? If that did in fact happen, wouldn't the CIA, FBI and more than a few scientists immediately jump on the research bandwagon once word got out that a man had been "programmed to kill"? And any of us that have worked for any amount of time with hypnosis would immediately realize that it wouldn't take much digging to start uncovering some pretty amazing stuff. So what happened? Did nobody bother to look? Or did they look and then keep their findings quiet? Just how much does the mainstream have to be shaken before it stands up and takes note?

Or could it be that the powers that be already knew far more than they wanted us to realize, and chose, for some reason, to keep it secret? During the 30 or so year span between 1930 and 1960 American culture was saturated by "mind control" movies, documentaries and ad hoc studies. It was during this time that the CIA hired Morse Allen to research unique forms of behavior modification. He was supposed to look into mental manipulation and it's viability in spy work. In one of his reports he points to his success by claiming, in writing, that he was able to get "young CIA secretaries to stay after work...proving to his satisfaction that (with the use of hypnosis) he could make them do whatever he wanted."

It was also during this period that Dr. Martin Orne received heavy CIA funding to do hypnotic research at Harvard. He claimed, among other things, that:
"A (subject) who is able to develop good posthypnotic amnesia will also respond to suggestions to remember events which did not actually occur. On awakening, he will instead recall the suggested events. If anything, this phenomenon is easier to produce than total amnesia, perhaps because it eliminates the subjective feelings of an empty space in memory."

Obviously the research was done, extensively, back in the 50's and 60's. So where are the results? Why has it taken mainstream medicine so many years to even acknowledge that hypnosis exists? 

I've always found a policy of the MWR (Morale, Welfare and Recreation) department of the US Navy, whose job it is to coordinate entertainment and recreation programs for soldiers, very interesting. They list only three kinds of entertainment that are prohibited from being used in government sponsored events. It is illegal (although not always enforced) for on base (or government sponsored) events to include any program that: 1) demeans or puts down the American government; 2) Includes immoral or X rated material, and 3) includes any form of Hypnosis. 
To me it seemed like a very strange policy coming from a government that throughout the 60's, 70's and 80's (while this policy was clearly written on all US Navy entertainment contracts) claimed hypnosis didn't exist.

Of course, we've all heard our share of conspiracy theories. Elvis and JFK are probably laughing at those of us who wonder about such things while sipping Mai Tai's being served by Marilyn Monroe on the balcony of their hidden mansion somewhere off the Canary Islands!? But we're not talking about covering up a murder, or faking a lunar landing here. If information is being held back, we're talking about researchers holding back information that could cure mental illnesses. We're talking about lives being wasted because someone somewhere decided this "wisdom" should be hidden from us commoners. 

But the point I'm trying to make here has nothing to do with picketing embassies or creating militias. I'm not even saying we should try to find out what hidden secrets lie lurking in some underground lab somewhere. Actually, all I'm saying is that if we are to take history as any form of teacher, each of us should accept much more responsibility for the advancement of hypnosis as a science. 
Most of us have come to accept the government as the repository of knowledge, as the regulators of safety, the loving censor of things evil. We grow up being told that freedom guarantees us access to all that has been discovered. We somehow come to believe that if there isn't a stop sign at a street corner, then there's no reason to slow down or look. 

Maybe the government is holding back, maybe they aren't. I guess that judgment call depends on which side of the room you're sitting on. But regardless of the direction you feel the government is taking, I would like to suggest that the time is well overdue for those of us working daily in the trenches to get organized and move forward together. And we couldn't ask for a better time to do it.

The internet affords us an incredible ability to communicate with each other. Personally, I consider it an honor to be a part of what HypnoGenesis is doing. Tom offers us a forum to expose ideas and theories. And it's a great step in the right direction. I feel we should also start emailing each other and discussing concepts, tossing out ideas. Maybe we should propose experiments and compare results. Maybe we could organize research projects being tested around the world, and then agree on a reporting date, and forum, where we can all learn from each others progress?

In the past, the promulgation of knowledge has been entrusted to editors of expensive magazines. Only articles considered "safe" and mainstream enough to not offend the "sages" passed the editorial muster of conservative medical journals. Yes, it did offer a very cautious approach to progress, but anybody who's chosen to be a hypnotist must know how damaging that approach can be.
And then on the flip side of that same coin, the money available for research has traditionally been controlled by another group of conservative organizations. And rightfully so. To most of them, research represented an investment. Discovering a cure for the common cold would guarantee some pharmaceutical company somewhere a pretty penny, provided it could be sold in a pill. 
If, on the other hand, the research showed that some special verbal technique available to any therapist for free created the cure, who stands to make money? Maybe publishing companies that sell the "how to" books therapists would need to buy, but most of the traditional funding sources would consider the progress hypnosis might offer as threatening. Solving ADD cases using hypnosis might make the Ritalin people a bit angry. 

But again, we're in luck. Unlike research on cold viruses or artificial hearts, our research represents a very low overhead venture. All we need is our voice, a location and a subject. And offering free (or low cost) therapy in exchange for willing volunteer subjects can cut our costs down to almost nothing. But again, we're faced with the problem of communication. Somehow all this momentum is lost if we don't create a forum for us to learn from each others progress. Somewhere, also, we need to insert some form of "scientific process" into the mix as well. Those of us willing to experiment, need to understand the concept of doing double blind studies, where we measure two identical groups where the only difference is the variable we are testing. And once we've drawn conclusions, we need to be capable of publishing them in a way that offers structure and information for future research.

It might do us good to study time issues (regression, compression, expansion, etc) and figure out what can be done with them. Self Hypnosis opens a whole floodgate of unexplored possibilities. Criminal Hypnosis has just barely been explored and the anesthetic abilities of hypnosis also create some incredible possibilities. Imagine firemen capable of shutting off pain on themselves, and burn victims at will. Think of the possibilities in delivery rooms and on the operating table if we could fine tune the process to a point that doctors would feel safe hiring hypnotherapists full time as an alternative to drugs. Dealing with the hypothalamus gives us another open door to incredible possibilities. The whys of why we eat all seem to be centered in this same tiny organ that has been shown to be stimulated during hypnosis. If we could somehow control the motivators that trigger the chemical productions that our body interprets as hunger hypnotically, we could revolutionize the industry. It is also within this same, tiny hypothalamus that we find the control center for the bodies autonomic nervous system. That's breathing, heart rate, blood pumping, organ operations and general control of body functions. Imagine finding a way to bridge that tiny gap, and actually being able to regularly duplicate some of the skills the Easterners have been telling us they have been doing for centuries (stopping blood to injured body parts, controlling our digestive track and endorphin production, etc.).  Or how about applying hypnotic techniques to waken subjects? Creating an atmosphere where traditional therapy does, in fact, find a duplicable gate to the inner mind. Cancer, organ restoration, Diabetic mental regulation, headache, asthma or stuttering self therapy. The list is endless...

There's an awful lot of far reaching possibilities for very productive studies, and I for one am excited about being around at just the right time.
Whether or not we'll find the government guys waiting for us when we finally pull ourselves up to the top of the hill is debatable, but what the heck, it makes for good late night speculation.