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Finding True Magic
Category:
Health/Wellness
Publisher: Five Wisdoms Publications
ISBN-10: 0965521001
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 300
Copyright: Jan 1 1996
A synthesis of Eastern & Western perspectives on Mind/Body Healing and personal growth joining meditation and hypnotherapy techniques.
Finding True Magic is used as a training text for a Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP Certification Program at the Institute for Therapeutic Learning. As the subtitle indicates, this book and the Hypnotherapy training are appropriate for lay people to foster personal growth as well as for therapists and healers intent on developing therapeutic skills. In fact, about 50% of the student body who take the training do so strictly for personal development and healing.
This book explores the possibilities of recognizing and freeing ourselves from a destructive process of perceiving, thinking, and acting that can be viewed as a worldwide epidemic infection that is pernicious because, unlike other diseases which we strive to isolate and cure, inherent to this infection, this fever, is the characteristic that it causes us to identify with it as our very own true self.
We speak of it lovingly as our ego, our sense of limited and fearful separate selfhood. I prefer to call it 'egoic-minding', because it is a process, not a thing. It is a fragmented, biased way of perceiving and thinking that can be viewed as a destructive hypnotic trance that causes us to experience each other as strangers, as different, as threats. The delirium of this feverish trance causes us to do violence to each other and to our world, never recognizing "it," egoic thought processes, life-alienating thought processes, as the true enemy.
I believe this 'egoic-minding' process to be the one source of all disease and strife on earth - the Great Killer and Destroyer next to which such subordinates as AIDS, cancer , and heart disease pale. Indeed, they would not exist except for having been birthed by the egoic process.
Through a synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophical and psychological insights and techniques, Finding True Magic explores understandings and processes that disperse this feverish trance, heal the trauma it causes, and wake us up to the Sacred Magic of our True Selves.
It is time that we recognize that essential insights and dynamics of healing communication need to be directly available and understood by all, without necessarily the need for a long term and expensive professional intermediary. The model of that professional relationship is starting to change because of the financial burdens it places on our medical system. But finances aside, it should change simply because there is a better way to approach healing. It relies on the Inherent Goodness of our Shared Being which can be accessed surprisingly easily in the space between egoic thoughts. Most of us don't experience that space in the normal course of thinking. Most of us may be surprised to be told such a thing, given our experience of the seemingly impenetrable stream of thoughts. But this space is the very Space of Silence, the Silence of God, that we all may have experienced on occasion through prayer or in a tender moment of love or awe. We generally haven't been taught, and haven't known that this Silent Presence is always so close and available. The new emerging Mind/Body therapeutic techniques, such as presented here, derive transformative power when they help us to tap into this Willing Presence of Grace.
It has been my experience from teaching the Finding True Magic training since 1988, that such concepts and approaches are virtually unheard of, or understood only in a very limited way, amongst a majority of therapists and lay people alike. In my opinion, this is not because the ideas are so esoteric, but because our basic educational system and societal support systems have become so degraded. For example, at the heart of healing work, as presented here, is a simple process of self-inquiry. We seem to have lost a sense of how important self inquiry, contemplation, is. Thus, it's not surprising that we have forgotten how to do self-inquiry effectively, and comprehensively, and, therefore, we don't teach it to our children.
This can be the case for highly educated therapists, as well. As a result, in the Institute's trainings, this general lack of familiarity with self-inquiry and the accessability of Silence "levels the playing field" between lay people and professionals. Ph.D. and MA. trained therapists are challenged in the same way lay people are challenged. They don't have an edge, in spite of their training.
Quite frankly, in the beginning, I feared the presence of highly educated professionals in my classes. My fantasy was that they would be bored and critical of short-comings in the material. Over the years their response has totally contradicted my fearful fantasies. They have consistently claimed that the material presented in Finding True Magic, and the training course and tapes, has opened their eyes and revolutionized their therapy work.
It is also not uncommon for "lay people" to more easily comprehend the material than a professional, because they are not burdened with prejudicial preconceptions about models and processes of healing. Everyone becomes truly equal - just folks - in the challenge of learning these approaches to healing communication.
If you find the ideas here intriguing and want to explore them further, there are several options open to you. At the back of this book is an order form explaining how to receive a free brochure about attending a live training, and about how to order tapes for independent study.
Excerpt
Not being who we "think" we are is the root of our dilemmas. (Or, more accurately, believing we are who we think we are, and not noticing that we are not, is the root.) We are selectively attending* to our ideas about ourselves in order to make choices* which define and determine our lives. If the root idea of who we are is a mistake, our whole process of strategizing about our lives is a "mishap" with varying degrees of painful and pleasurable consequences.
The most profound aspects of the hypnotic trance of self, or, more accurately, the bundle of trances of self, are established in our childhood prior to the time of the organic development of a discriminating perspective. As children, we had to accept the overwhelming vividness and prestige, good and/or bad, of the stimulus and messages impacting on us as "truth." Learning to identify our sensory functions and our bodily delineation could happen quite naturally, but the healthy extension of that process of mind/body coordination in interpersonal relationships is very rare. The degree to which those relationships were unhealthy, i.e. shaming, confusing, or threatening, determined how profoundly we developed the trance of false, hypnotic self - the fixed idea of a defined self, rather than the felt sense of well-being of an on-going self that doesn't need to keep track of itself with ideas. When you're fully involved in being who you are, you don't waste time keeping track of who you are; it isn't necessary if there is no shame or threat to ward off.
The hypnotic self is a powerful set of trance phenomena. Growing up is to be in the cultural and familial hypnotist's arena 24 hours a day! And everyone is hypnotizing you -- telling you what everything means; telling you what you are, and what your actions mean regarding your worthiness to be with repetition and emotional force.*
Children learn by modeling; they are master pantomimes. Thus begins the process of self hypnosis (self talk in adult terms). Have you ever had the opportunity to eavesdrop on a young child playing with their toys as they repeat the judgments of others about themselves in an innocent sing song voice? We all began to master these hypnosis skills very early.
We develop the veils of perception - we no longer see a tree, or hear a bird, or taste a hamburger, or experience ourselves simply and directly without a running commentary going on inside. The stimulus of a tree, or a bird, or a hamburger, or the spontaneous movement of our organic being, triggers what seems to be an on-going, instantaneous, uninterrupted barrage of associations, judgments, and memories, filling our mind with sights, sounds, and sensations referenced to the past and projected into the future with such force and speed that, not only do we not notice we haven't really seen the tree, but we don't notice that we've been distracted from seeing the tree and anesthetized to the pain of having our relationship to the tree cut off. How many of us are so habitually numbed to the pain of being cut off in relationship to our world that the notion that "to not really see a tree, is painful," seems a strange idea?
Distraction by association, forgetfulness, spontaneous anesthesia, positive hallucination (seeing something that isn't there), negative hallucination (not seeing something that is there), time distortion and time displacement, spontaneous regression - these are all qualities listed as indicating hypnosis of significant depth in the traditional notions of hypnosis, and yet in these examples, they have transpired in ordinary waking consciousness.
Let's examine the signs and qualities of hypnotic depth from the traditional stand point, and then explore how they blend into what is traditionally considered the non-hypnotic or "conscious" state.
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