TRANSPERSONAL HYPNOSIS Gateway to Body, Mind, and Spirit Edited by Eric D. Leskowitz, M.D. OCR by Shiva2012 CRC Press Boca Raton London New York Washington, D.C. Introduction The last years of the 20th century in America are witnessing an amazing outgrowth of interest in altered states of consciousness and spirituality. Top­ ics that would normally be discussed sub rosa, if at all, have penetrated professional circles in disciplines as widespread as medicine (holistic med­ icine and spiritual healing), physics (quantum approaches to consciousness and the holographic view of the mind) and ecology (deep ecology and the Gaia hypothesis of Earth as a conscious being). And in the nonprofessional mainstream of America, even the mass media have become involved with this new world view. In books (with recent bestsellers including The Celestine Prophecy, Embraced by the Light, Conversations with God, and Caring for the Soul), in movies (from “Ghost" and "Defending Your Life" to "Phenomenon" and "Contact"), on television ("The X-Files" and its clones), and in music (the whole genre of New Age music designed to induce specific changes in awareness), there is a burgeoning interest in what has loosely become known as New Age spirituality. Despite the welter of apparently unrelated topics that often coalesce under this title, it is possible to discern some overriding patterns that can help us make sense of this jumbled spectrum of ideas. One metaphor I find particularly useful in understanding this array of phenomena involves com­ paring the human mind to a radio. Our brain receives thoughts, rather than creates them. Imagine further that we in the West have traditionally been taught that our mental radios can receive only one station, called normal waking consciousness (this station is also called the beta state by EEG re­ searchers). More recently, a second frequency or station has been acknowl­ edged as important by our scientists, the alpha state that enhances relaxation. But most currently, various psycho-technologies are providing each hu­ man being with the means to tune in to an entire spectrum or frequency band of consciousness, not just the one or two stations we have become accustomed to. In the past 30 years, America's collective radio dials have been shaken loose from their fixed positions by the various chemical and herbal means discovered and rediscovered from the 1960s onward. Our current proliferation of holistic therapies and psychological schools promises to teach each person to use his mental radio to its fullest potential, tuning into information at the physical, psychological, emotional, conceptual, and spiritual levels. One of the most important techniques for shifting one's radio tuner is a process of attentional focus which underlies so many of these New Age (and classical) spiritual techniques that it can even be called the final common denominator of altered states of consciousness. I am referring to the tech­ nique of hypnosis. Hypnosis has long been misunderstood by the general public because of a Hollywood-instigated focus on its use as a form of involuntary mind control. But hypnosis is now taking its rightful place at the forefront of the new medical system known as mind/body medicine. Research has now validated many of the somewhat amazing claims of hypnotherapists, and the emerging field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) relies quite extensively on hypnosis to provide cues and suggestions to a patient's unconscious mind. National Institutes of Health studies are finally beginning to unravel the mind/body mechanisms which underly hypnosis. Surprisingly, though, the field of clinical hypnosis has become staid in its own way, even though it is perceived by conventional medicine as an innovative and unconventional technique. By focusing on the mind/body aspects of PNI, mainstream hypnosis has lost touch with its transformative and transpersonal potential. Partially due to fear of losing its hard-earned mainstream credibility, organized hypnosis has not fully embraced the man­ ifold spiritual applications of hypnosis. Yet my experiences in giving numer­ ous lectures and workshops on transpersonal topics over the past nine years, coupled with an active hospital-based practice in mind/body medicine fo­ cused on pain management, have convinced me that there is an increasing interest in these formerly taboo or "off-the-wall" topics. This more "mainstream" form of medical hypnosis represents only one small portion of what hypnosis enables a participant to experience. For these medical uses still involve the participant in his or her normal self-concept; entering a state of deep relaxation and using mental images to create sug­ gestions for physical health does not require a new view of what it means to possess human awareness. It is a relief to find a classical FM station to supplement the Top 40's AM station that used to be the listener's mainstay, but there is still much more out there. The entire shortwave spectrum is still undiscovered by users of traditional medical hypnosis. However, there is another cluster of hypnotherapeutic strategies which does demand a radical rethinking of what we are about. These are the tech­ niques that bring us to an awareness of our transpersonal nature. That part of us that remains even after we have accounted for our physical body, our thoughts and emotions, our personalities and our memories — this is the transpersonal self, the spiritual realm, the shortwave band. Mysticism has long been the province of religious disciplines, but we now see psychologists and physicians becoming interested in spiritual topics such as out-of-body experiences, past life therapy, soul retrieval, clairvoyant diagnosis. These are the abilities and experiences that stem from our transpersonal nature, and they are the subject of this book. I have tried to bring together spokespersons for some of the most intriguing, if controversial, applications of transpersonal hypnotherapeutic techniques, to provide the reader with an overview of these sorts of transpersonal applications of hypnosis. This spiritual dimension is not only an issue for clinicians as it pervades everyday life in fascinating ways. This omnipresence explains the current fascination. Even the process of editing this book illustrates the perplexing yet enticing nature of spiritual awareness, in a way that is worthy of mention. The initial phase of organizing this book was marked by a burst of the sort of exuberant creative energy that gets authors hooked on their craft. The outline and several chapter drafts came together so effortlessly that I assumed this project was destined to succeed, until I then encountered a series of striking setbacks. My answering machine broke down and did not save key messages, the computer disk storing the book's contents got mys­ teriously reconfigured into an arcane and inaccessible format (apparently induced by the nearby office air ionizer that somehow spared all the other disks in the stack). I even spent some time in the hospital recovering from an unlikely infection that seemed to symbolize my frustrations. At that point I decided to practice what I was preaching and seek help from a friend who knew how to access information from the nether reaches of that metaphor­ ical radio band. In other words, I had a psychic consultation. In a modified self-hypnotic trance, a colleague of mine was able to "receive" information from her so- called spirit guides, via a process that is described more fully in Chapter 13 of this book. I was told that the book project had gotten bogged down because it had become tainted with my own "ego" energy; I was now per­ ceiving the book as my personal creation and my ticket to fame. The initial burst of energy and progress was marked by a more selfless attitude, and so was readily supported by the universe as the project proceeded effort­ lessly. But the more my ego intervened, the more my work on the book project sputtered. Further, according to this psychic friend, the major pur­ pose of the book had already been accomplished, even though it hadn't yet been published. I was told that my job had really been to accumulate ideas about transpersonal hypnosis and place these ideas on the information grid which encompasses the earth (much like the noosphere in de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man), so that other people could access this information telepathically in the dream state. My initial reaction to this information was to laugh in disbelief. It took me several months to digest this information, and to expand my belief system to encompass these possibilities. But then a new phase of the book's growth began when I started to acknowledge consciously that my collaborators and I were jointly performing a service to other students of consciousness. We were making important information more readily accessible to them, wheth­ er in the published hardcopy form that my ego preferred, or in the intangible realm of the alleged mental Internet that we all supposedly study from during our dream journeys. From that point on, things fell into place: the text was readily assembled and a recalcitrant publisher was replaced with a cooperative one. This change in my own perspective, from ego-centered to (relatively) selfless, is a shift from what I am calling the personal to the transpersonal viewpoint. This shift is accompanied by a growing sense of equanimity, compassion, and purpose, and it is marked by a decrease in fear. This dis­ tinction between personal and transpersonal levels of being will be high­ lighted by the various techniques discussed in this book and will hopefully leave the reader with a greater appreciation for man's spiritual complexity and depth. Man's nature is seen as multidimensional, encompassing the entire range of radio frequencies, both personal and transpersonal.