By Richard Bandler

Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ creator Richard Bandler has defined the cutting edge of consciousness for the last 25 years. Philosopher, storyteller, and master of unconscious communication, Richard can grab your hopes and dreams, pull them out of your head and make them dance before your eyes. See below for a spirited discussion of hypnosis, trances, hallucination, and how to use them. From OPEN EXCHANGE MAGAZINE, July-August 1995:

What we're going to do is to play a little bit with our conscious minds and a lot more with our unconscious minds. Years and years and years ago my next door neighbor was an Englishman named Gregory Bateson, and when Gregory Bateson read The Structure of Magic he decided that I should meet Milton H. Erickson from Phoenix, Arizona, who at the time was, probably, the world's greatest hypnotist. He told me that he had sent Jay Haley and John Wheatlan down to figure out what Erickson was doing some years before.

They went down and made tapes of Erickson doing hypnosis and attempted to have them transcribed. This feat was never actually accomplished in those days because the people listening to the tape recorder went deeply into trance. The transcribers proceeded to do something that appeared to be like a Rorschach test. Instead of transcribing the tapes, they wrote about themselves.

I went down to meet Erickson. Milton was quite old but still very, very good. One of the things that has become the foundation of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ was the fact that I saw people do all kinds of things that struck me as amazing. People could control their heart rate, their blood pressure, things about their states of consciousness, recover memories, read books they hadn't seen for 25 years.

I asked a question, "why did they need to go into trance?" So I took a group of people I had been training and put a big brown table in the middle of the room with a lamp in the middle of it. I turned the lamp on, and told them to disappear it. That didn't seem to work very well, but I knew that if I put them into a deep trance, their minds were capable of deleting it.

One of the interesting things that I discovered occurs in deep trance is that when I had one of the people disappear the lamp they still walked around it, even though they didn't see it. There was some part of them that seemed to know it was there. When I asked them why they walked around instead of straight across, they came up with an excuse. This excuse I've come to call a fudge factor and a finnago phenomenon. You will find these to be rampant in all sciences.

I say this as a scientist. I came from studying information sciences and physics. When I started doing the same things with people, the scientists I had worked with decided that I had ruined my career. They referred to this as "getting my hands dirty." That meant I was interacting with humans.

Laser and holographic technologies are very interesting, though optics is a field that suffers from an ego the size of Saturn. It's the only field which ever announced that it knew everything there was to know. They announced that the field was actually closed. They thought they knew everything. It turns out, they were wrong. They discovered a tremendous amount due to the advent of laser technologies.

When you look at an eye chart, they have you look at the only non-naturally occurring phenomenon: letters. You're not going to recognize an E in the forest, nor are you going to discover a Q. All of their equations were geared to two dimensional non-naturally occurring phenomena. By using this, a blind man in Philadelphia came up with a way of building lenses that allow people who are almost entirely blind to see well enough to shave and walk around. They just can't read.

The field of optics changed their beliefs. They had, like many people do about hypnosis, very strange beliefs, yet they operated out of these beliefs for centuries. The advent of NLP™ was the study of how people use their minds to do things. People could do it in a deep trance and some people could do it in the waking state. There are, for example, people called civil engineers who hallucinate for a living. They see a road where there isn't one and measure it!

In the group I had at the time there was a man who could hallucinate anything without going into a trance. He could see a freeway out the back window with cars on it and he would describe what kind of cars they were, and read the license plates. He said, "But I'm not in a trance." For him he wasn't. This is what he did for a living. You need to alter the concept you have of hypnosis, which is based on watching the movie Svengali.

The most important thing, to me, is that you get people to change their beliefs in the beginning. That is the whole game. That's why they come to you.

When I started out working with people they had something called the human potential movement. It was a list of belief systems and ideas that were trying to change the way in which people worked with one another. They had people hugging trees at Esalen. It's a human concentration camp for people in that movement. They have people take their clothes off, get into hot tubs and pretend like they aren't naked. However, if you bring a Polaroid camera you would be surprised at how quickly they don't state their names.

I want people to be in touch with reality. The trick is to get people to focus on the future instead of the past, even if they're flaming schizophrenics. I just had a client who was agoraphobic. She had been an agoraphobic for 22 years during which time she spent over half a million dollars on therapy. The word that jumps right into my mind is "refund."

This woman started out with one little phobia. When she had a panic attack they threw her in an ambulance and it scared the hell out of her. After that, any time she heard a siren, she became frightened. She was unaware that it was the siren that was scaring her so she thought it was the place.

Then she began to become afraid of this part of town and that part of town. Finally she sent me a strange letter about how she was agoraphobic and the only place that she could go was two miles to the northeast. That used to be a haven, but recently it had gone down the tube. Over the years she had also begun hearing sirens go off that hadn't really gone off. This would determine where she could go. She lived in a little town in Michigan, and I was not about to go there to work with her. It's just not my style because I believe that people can do anything they're convinced of.

There's a place in California called Stanford University. They have a laboratory which has been studying hypnosis for years, without doing any. The people in that laboratory came up with the concept of susceptibility which means that some of you are better hypnotic subjects than others and some of you can go deeper. They measure this. They measure it with double blind studies.

They recorded one hypnotic induction in a monotonous voice. They place a tape recorder on a stool, then have a person come in, sit and look at the tape recorder while they play the induction. This actually measures people's ability to be flexible enough to go into trance in spite of the hypnotic induction. They also proved that tone and tempo have absolutely no effect on human communication processes.

When I saw Milton Erickson work, his tonality and tempo had a profound effect on me. The only thing that really made Milton frustrating was that he hypnotized everyone the moment they walked through the door. I can live in a trance, and I have for years. All I wanted to do was find out what he did that allowed him to be successful where other people weren't.

One of the things is that Milton believed that anyone could be hypnotized. He also had a wide range of skills and flexibility that most people didn't. He had great control over his tone and tempo. People walked in and he would say, "Hello, my name is Milton Erickson and I'm color blind and tone deaf," getting you to not pay attention to those things. He would then proceed to tell stories, and inside of these long and arduous stories, you would find that the focus of your attention had drifted away. The wall would disappear, the hum of the air conditioner would be gone, and suddenly you'd be in a deep trance.

I spent a lot of time finding out what Milton did that worked. Milton had something that I don't have, which is a lot of spare time. Milton had had polio, not once, but twice, which I think is an accomplishment. He managed to regain the ability to move some parts of his body and to speak when he had been unable to do those things. Since he was in a wheelchair and had polio it was alright for him to spend three hours inducing a trance. Most of us don't have that much time.

When people come into my office, the first thing I do is change their beliefs about what they're capable of. Even suicidals believe that they want to breathe for the next few minutes. Suicidals will say, "Well, I don't care about living." Answer, "Then hold your breath forever." There is a point where people gasp for air. Something inside them says, "Breathe!"

The Federal Food and Drug Administration has done one nice thing. They have tested every single drug in the United States against placebos. That means that we know more about placebos than anything. I decided to put out a product called "Placebo" because, as a graduate student, I had to find all of the studies that had been conducted using aspirin for headaches versus placebos. I discovered that 7 out of 8 times, the placebo will work as well as aspirin. I wanted to include a booklet that showed all the research and would say, "7 out of 8 times it works as well as aspirin. Take 9, just to be sure."

The Federal Food and Drug Administration decided that I should not put this product on the market, even though they were sugar tablets. They said it would only work if people were deceived. In other words, if you looked at it and said, "There's nothing in there," it wouldn't cure your headache. They actually worked quite well. People would say, "I took nine and it was gone." It isn't deceit that makes it work. It's belief.

Neuro-Linguistic Programmers™ build beliefs that are not true, but functional. I want to start by building some of those. Most clients I see come from people who didn't believe they could be helped. The lady who had not left her house in 22 years had been in therapy the whole time. She went to see a person whom she considered to be a great Neuro-Linguistic Programmer™. This person told her over the phone that they would only need to see her twice. After those two times they told her it would take over two years.

I don't understand how, if you can't get it in the first session, you are going to be able to get it in two years. What are you going to do? Randomly try things? Then how would you know if it will take two years, three years or six months? You either know how to do something or you don't. If you don't, you can try experimenting, but don't say it's going to take two years. She had already spent 10 years with one therapist. 10 years, 5 times a week, at $100 a session. That's a quarter of a million dollars. On top of all that, at the end of those ten years, she was worse than when she started.

Ten years before she'd had a panic attack and the doctors told her she was going to have to have open heart surgery. That's a pretty serious way of working with a panic attack. This doctor must have needed a new house or something. This woman had all the tests done, then she went into her room, closed the door and that's when it got really bad. She decided that she was going to die. She called a friend whose husband was a doctor, and he said, "That's crazy. You're as healthy as a horse." He then tested her and found out there was nothing wrong. As it turned out her first doctor had mis-diagnosed her repeatedly. Her fear stayed, however. From that day forward, it just spread and spread. She had a lot of people work with her.

I told her, "Look, I'm not going to Michigan because I have no reason, but I am in Toronto right now, and since you're in a panic anyway, why don't you just have someone drive you to the airport, put a blindfold on, and stick you on a plane. I'll have someone pick you up at the airport. It can't get any worse, can it?"

She said, "Well, I don't think so, it's just that I'll be frightened on the plane."

I said, "Take a Walkman because I'm going to send you a cassette I want you to listen to for the entire time you're on the plane."

I sent her a cassette and she played it on the plane. When she got off she was in Toronto. When she got to Toronto she walked in, and I asked her, "How frightened are you not going to be for the 3 days while you're here?"

She said, "Huh?" and I asked her just to close her eyes and to forget about her problems because any problem serious enough to have is serious enough to forget for the rest of your life. Surprisingly enough, she never had any more fear, because when she left Toronto I asked her to give it to me.

She looked at me and said, "What?"

I said, "Why don't you give me your fear? Leave it right here." Her hand came out involuntarily and instead of shaking it I grabbed it as if I were taking something from it and said, "Seems like I got it here," and stuck it in my pocket. I then told her to go home without it. She's been home for a month now and she's doing fine. It doesn't make any sense. The important thing is that if she could learn something as stupid as being afraid of the outside of her house she could learn anything, like how to forget about her fears.

Think of all the things you've forgotten about in your life. If you're going to forget about something, why not forget about your limitations. Why forget your car keys, telephone numbers, or addresses, when you can forget all of your limitations and just take a shot at doing totally new things, or old things in a new way. I want you to be able to build beliefs. This may be the first time in your life that you're wrong. Have you been wrong about things in your life? Maybe you're wrong about what you're capable of. Over the years I've discovered that even people with higher education, i.e. psychiatrists, can learn.

There's a law in the US that you can't use hypnosis in the military. My opinion is that boot camp constitutes a pretty long indoctrination. They build in post hypnotic suggestions for you to respond to. Think about the pledge of allegiance. You even get pupil dilation and arm levitation.

I'm going to ask you if you believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. It doesn't actually rise; the earth spins. But you would, without asking verbally, have a belief that it's coming out. When I got up this morning there was light but no sun. At least I know that the sun is out there somewhere. If you didn't have that belief you wouldn't bother to read this, so I know that you have it.

There's constantly some group of people going to a mountain top, because someone convinces them that the world is going to end on a certain day. They always give away or sell everything they have. What would you need money for if the world is going to end? Then they discover that the world hasn't ended yet. When it does, I don't think you'll need to plan for it. I don't think you'll need to sell anything. If the world is going to end, that will be it. It will be over. Unless the world ends, it costs money to go ahead.

Did you know that Einstein did what he called "thought experiments?" He imagined what would happen if he could get on a photon and ride on it. He closed his eyes and imagined he was riding on a photon of light. He looked over to the person riding on the photon next to him. Then he shined an imaginary flashlight on the person next to him. He then called that physics. Those are called thought experiments. With just one idea, Einstein was able to change the future of the entire planet. Therefore it seems plausible to me, that with just one or two ideas, changing your future should be easy.

It's always amazing to me that people teach children phonics. Whoever made it up, did not take it seriously enough. You can't even spell phonics phonetically. They just hated children and worked on increasing low self-esteem as much as they could. The whole time you went to school they only pointed out what was misspelled and not good enough. They actually pointed out all the things that you didn't know and they thought you should. They asked you for dates, and they only marked the ones that you had wrong. They've been doing this to you for all these years.

Your brain has been looking for what's wrong for years. We want to change that. I think that if you notice what works, you can do it more often. If I were to ask you to close your eyes, go inside, and check your body, what would you check for, pleasure or pain? If you go inside, and search for what feels the best, try making it spread. Find out if you can match it on the other side of your body. As you do so, let it spread and double its intensity. Why not start by feeling absolutely wonderful and take off from there. See where you can go.

Do you believe that the sun is going to come up tomorrow? I want you to find out where the answer is, in your mind. Does it come as a picture, does it come as a sound, does it come as both? We are looking for something that you believe in strongly. If it's a picture find out where it is. It won't be in the same place for everybody. You have to have beliefs.

If you don't know where they are, you could be in trouble. When you start showing people ideas and ask, for example, "Do you believe that you can go into a deep trance," you may put your hands where their lack of belief is and then they won't believe it.

If I were to ask you what you're going to have for lunch you may not be as certain about that. The question is, "Where would that picture be?"

In order to be able to tell what you're not sure about and what you're quite certain about, it's a good idea to put them in different places. In fact, most people do. Now, we want to know how big those pictures are. Are they both color? Are they both motion pictures, or are they both a slide? Is there also a voice? If so, where is the voice located?

I want you to go into the place that you have uncertainty and make a picture of yourself being able to go into a deep trance and do absolutely any phenomenon you've ever heard of. Once you have that picture I want you to move it away from yourself until it becomes a small dot in the distance. Then I want you to zip it up to where your strong belief is and to add to it the voice that goes along with the strong belief.

Try it. It'll make a lot of things in life a lot easier.