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The Mystery of Hypnosis,
by Colin Wilson.
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Wilson begins chapter 25, The Mystery of Hypnosis, by giving account of a criminal case in U.K. in 1991, of a man who hypnotised over a hundred young women and assaulted them sexually, for years, while they had no clue. He then goes into history of hypnosis as known to West, from Svengali on.
" ... French peasants still use this method at market when buying a live hen. Africans probably knew about animal hypnosis long before that; in his book Hypnosis of Men and Animals (1966), Ferenc Volgyesi describes how wild elephants can be tamed by tying them to a tree and waving leafy boughs in front of their eyes until they blink and become docile."
He speaks of Mesmer and his pupil.
" ... With another excellent hypnotic subject named Madeleine, Puységur would give public demonstrations of mind reading; one total skeptic was converted when he himself was able to order Madeleine – mentally – to put her hand in his pocket and take out an object he had placed there. This ability to influence hypnotized subjects telepathically was demonstrated again and again during the nineteenth century; but medicine has continued to dismiss it as a myth.
"Mesmer’s enemies drove him out of Paris and Vienna; he died, discredited and embittered, in 1815. And the medical profession made sure that hypnosis was treated as a fraud throughout the nineteenth century; any doctor who practiced it was likely to be struck off the register. It was only toward the end of the century that Charcot rediscovered it. Charcot had noticed that patients suffering from hysteria behaved as if they were hypnotized. For example, a man who was convinced that his arm was paralyzed would behave exactly as if it was paralyzed, although there was nothing physically wrong with his arm. But he could be cured by being told under hypnosis that his arm was not paralyzed – and the paralysis could also be reinduced by hypnosis. When Charcot announced to the medical profession that hypnosis was simply a form of hysteria, his colleagues believed that he had solved the mystery and ceased to regard hypnosis as a fraud. It took some time before it was recognized that Charcot had inverted the truth and that hysteria is, in fact, a kind of hypnosis. A hysterical patient becomes convinced that he is suffering from some disability and “suggests” himself into it. Freud was one of the many who were impressed by Charcot’s theory of hypnosis; he later made it the basis of his own theory of the unconscious."
Another example, of a hypnosis performance in public in U.S., stinks of colonial racism.
" ... Finally, to convince the audience that they were not listening to the words of spirits, Carpenter summoned a philosophic pig, which discoursed learnedly on Hinduism."
Hudson, who had seen the performance, decided to cure a relative, living several hundred miles away, of rheumatism, using hypnosis. He succeeded.
"Hudson claimed that he went on to cure about five hundred people in the same way. He failed in only two cases and these – oddly enough – were patients who had been told that he intended to try to cure them.
"This, Hudson believed, underlined another peculiarity of the subjective mind: its powers have to work spontaneously, without self-consciousness. As soon as it becomes self-conscious, it freezes up, like the hand of a schoolboy when the teacher looks over his shoulder as he is writing. This also explains why so many “psychics” fail when they are tested by skeptics. It is like trying to make love in a crowded public square."
" ... Some of the most remarkable tests in the history of psychical research were carried out by a professor of geology named William Denton. He would wrap geological and archaeological specimens in thick brown paper packages, shuffle them until he no longer knew which was which, then get his “psychometrists” – his wife and sister-in-law – to describe the contents and history of packages chosen at random. Their accuracy was amazing – for example, a fragment of volcanic lava from Pompeii produced an accurate description of the eruption, while a fragment of tile from a Roman villa produced a description of Roman legions and a man who looked like a retired soldier."
"Hudson’s book became a bestseller and went into edition after edition between 1893 and Hudson’s death in 1903. Why, then, did its remarkable new theory not make a far greater impact? The reason can be summarized in a single word: Freud. The objective and subjective minds obviously correspond roughly to Freud’s ego and id – or conscious and unconscious. But there is a major difference. Freud was a pessimist who saw the unconscious mind as a passive force, a kind of basement full of decaying rubbish that causes disease – or neurosis. The conscious mind is the victim of these unconscious forces, which are basically sexual in nature. Hudson would have been horrified at such a gloomy and negative view of the subjective mind. But because Freud was a “scientist” and Hudson was merely a retired newspaper editor, the latter’s achievement was ignored by psychologists."
Interesting discovery of truth:-
" ... Sartre’s whole philosophy of human existence – he is known as one of the founding figures of existentialism – is based on his mistaken notion that “nausea” is some fundamental truth about human reality – the beautiful woman in hair curlers. Moreover, it is a philosophy that is echoed by some of the most respectable figures in modern literature, from Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus to Graham Greene and Samuel Beckett. It could be said to dominate modern philosophy and modern literature. Yet we can see that it is simply a misunderstanding. “Nausea” is not some glimpse of reality; it is as unimportant as a headache, and in some ways curiously similar. If Sartre had known about the right and left hemispheres, he would have recognized that he was greatly exaggerating the importance of “nausea”. And if we could grasp, once and for all, that “alienation” in left-brain consciousness is not a glimpse of the reality of the human condition, we would experience an enormous and immediate rise in our level of optimism and vitality."
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November 17, 2020 - November 18, 2020 -
December 24, 2020 .
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