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The Mechanics of Magick: Hypnosis — Part Two: From Suggestion to the Unconscious · The Occult Rejects

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What's going to happen
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: than what? Welcome back to the occult rejects. In part one,
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: we followed hypnosis back into the old world that produced it,
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: exorcistic healing, paracelsia, medicine, animal magnetism, the back cat, the
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Franklin Commission, pis of gurs, magnetic somnambalism, a farious subjects
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: centered trance, James Braid's nervous sleep, and James Estale's mesmeric surgery.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: In Bengal. We watched the old occult forces begin as
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: invisible fluid, lose its authority as physics, and survive as
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: something stranger. Attention, expectation, crisis, altered awareness, pain control, and
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: the body's ability to obey meaning. That was the first transformation.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Hypnosis began as a theory about a hitting current moving
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: through nature, then slowly became a problem inside this subject.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: The old question was what invisible force passes from one
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: body into another? But by the middle of the nineteenth
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: century that question had already begun to change. The force
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: was no longer safety outside the person. The mystery was
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: moving inward. What kind of mind can sent a magnetic sleep?
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: What kind of body can tremble under an idea? What
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: kind of subject can respond to command, forget what happened,
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: and return to ordinary consciousness as if another part of
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: the self had briefly taken the stage. Part two begins
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: after that shift. Now hypnosis enters the clinic, the lecture hole,
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: the asylum, the seance room, to psychological laboratory, the psychoanalytic
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: consulting room, and the modern occult revival. The language changes again.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Animal magnetism becomes hysteria, suggestion, automatism, disassociation, idiomotor action, unconscious process,
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: subliminal self, symbolic speech, occult will, auto suggestion, and trained imagination.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: The hidden force does not disappear. It is translated into
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: the hidden mind. This is where hypnosis becomes one of
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: the great birthplaces of modern psychology. Not by proving mesmer rite,
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: and not by proving every spiritualist or occultist right, but
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: by forcing the modern world to confront a problem it
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: did not want to face. The conscious self is not
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: the whole person. A person can act without feeling like
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: the author. A body can speak through symptoms, a hand
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: can move without the liberal command. A voice can emerge
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: from trans a memory can vanish and still remain active.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: A suggestion can become a sensation, a diagnosis can become identity,
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: a role can become experienced. Ritual can teach the nervous
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: system what its own signals mean. This is why hypnosis
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: matters so deeply for the mechanics of magic. The subject
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: is not just the patient in a chair. The subject
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: is also the medium, the initiate, divisionary, the automatic writer,
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: the possessed, the ecstatic, the convert, the penitent, the stage volunteer,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: the occult practitioner, and the person walking through ordinary life
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: under the influence of words they have repeated so long
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: they now mistake them for themselves. Hypnosis magnifies a human
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: condition that exists everywhere. We are suggestible creatures living inside
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: worlds that are constantly suggesting. By the late nineteenth century,
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: hypnosis was no longer only the property of magnetizers, traveling operators,
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: occult healers, or medical outsiders. It began moving into the
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: center of European medicine and psychology, especially in France. But
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: once it enters the clinic, the argument does not become simpler,
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: it becomes more explosive. The great question is no longer
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: only whether animal magnetism exists, that theory has already been wounded.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: The new question is what hypnosis actually means. Is it
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: a pathological state? Is it a nervous disease. Is it
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: a symptom of hysteria? Is it a normal human capacity?
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: Is it produced by suggestion? Is a performance shaped by expectation?
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: Or is it a doorway into the divided structure of
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: the human mind. The figure who dominates the first side
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: of this debate is Jean Martin Charcote, one of the
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: most famous neurologists of the nineteenth century. Charcot worked at
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: the Salpitaire in Paris, a massive hospital associated with poor women, epileptics,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: psychiatric patients, hysterical patients, and those who have been pushed
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: to the margins of medical and social life. Under Charcote,
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: the Salpitaire became more than a hospital. It became a
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: stage of modern neurology. Students, physicians, writers, intellectuals, and absord
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: ers gathered to watch nervous illness displayed, classified, interpreted, photographed,
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: and transformed into scientific spectacle. That word spectacle has to
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: be handled carefully. It does not mean charcoal was simply
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: a fraud, and it does not mean the women he
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: studied were merely pretending. That would be too simple and
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: too cruel. It means the setting itself mattered. The hospital,
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: lecture hall, the famous physician, the crowd of medical students,
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: the expectation of symptoms, the repeated demonstrations, the diagnostic categories,
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: the photographs, the gestures, the poses, the authority of the clinician,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: and the vulnerability of the patients all shaped what was seen.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: The Salpretaire was a medical institution, but it also had
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: the structure of a theater. The patient's body became the
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: place where nervous disorder was made visible. Charcot believed hypnosis
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: was connected to hysteria. In his model, hypnotic states were
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: not treated as ordinary capacities available to almost anyone. These
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: were signs of a pathological nervous system. Hypnosis belonged to
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: the hysterical body. The hypnotized patient passed through stages, displayed symptoms,
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: and became evidence that hysteria had laws patterns in neurological reality.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: This was important because Charcote wanted hysteria to be taken
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: seriously as a condition of the nervous system, not dismissed
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: as simple fraud. Or female weakness. In that sense, his
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: work had a serious medical purpose. He was trying to
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: show that symptoms without obvious physical lesions could still be real.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: But the danger is that Charcote's clinical authority may have
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: helped produce the very forms he believed he was discovering.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: A patient in Salpitaire did not enter a neutral space.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: She entered a world where certain behaviors were recognized, expected, named, demonstrated,
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: and rewarded with medical attention. The doctor was a syndrome.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: The patient's body learned the language of that syndrome. A
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: gesture became a symptom, a posture became a sign. A
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: convulsion became part of a stage sequence. The clinic did
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: not merely observe hysteria. It may also have trained hysteria
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: into a recognizable shape. This is one of the most
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: important lessons hypnosis gives us about authority. Suggestion does not
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: always look like a hypnotist saying your arm is getting heavy.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: Sometimes suggestions hide inside institutions. It hides inside diagnosises, expectation, reputation,
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: repeated examination, the gaze of experts, and the desire of
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: a patient to become legible to the person who holds power.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: A hospital can suggest, a classroom can suggest, a church
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: can suggest, a lodge room can suggest. A courtroom can
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: do the same, and a political rally can do the same.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: The voice of authority does not have to use the
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: word hypnosis in order to shape what body is amads
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: are ready to do. That is why Sharkop belongs in
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: the mechanics of magic. He shows us that a clinical
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: setting can function like a ritual setting without intending to
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: be one. There is a special space, There is an
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: officiating authority, There are observers. There is a language of
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: invisible causes. There are signs that body are expected to manifest.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: There are categories into which suffering must fit. There is
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: a drama of revelation. The patient is not possessed by
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: a demon, and charcot is not performing in exorcism, but
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: the structure is recognizable. Hidden disorder is brought to visibility
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: through the body under the gaze of authority. The salpetrara
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: also complicates the idea of truth. A symptom can be
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: real and still be shaped by the setting in which
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: it appears. A patient can sincerely suffer and still perform
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: that suffering. According to a cultural script, a bodily event
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: can be genuine and still be influenced by expectation. This
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: is where a lazy skepticism fails again. It is not
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: enough to say they were faking. It is also not
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: enough to say the symptoms were purely neurological facts untouched
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: by the room. Human beings are more complicated than either answer.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: The body can be honest and theatrical at the same time.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: Charcote's model made hypnosis respectable in one sense because of
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: broad hypnosis into elite medicine, but it also imprisoned hypnosis
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: inside pathology. If hypnosis is a symptom of hysteria, then
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: hypnotizability marks disease or nervous weakness. The hypnotic subject becomes
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: a patient, and the patient becomes a specimen. Medical authority
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: remains at the center. The doctor intupets, the patient displays,
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: the subject's altered state becomes evidence of disorder. That interpretation
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: would not go unchallenged. The strongest challenge came from the
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: Nancy School, associated especially with Ambrose Auguste labeled in Hippolyte Bernheim,
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: where Charcote hypnosis to hysteria and pathology. The Nancy School
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: argued that hypnosis should be understood primarily through suggestion. This
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: was a radical shift. Hypnosis was not a rare neurological
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: condition found mainly in hysterical patients. It was an intensified
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: form over normal human capacity. Human beings are suggestible. They
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: respond to words, expectations, habits, authority, repetition, imitation, and belief.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: Hypnosis does not create that responsiveness from nothing. It reveals
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: and heightens it. This is one of the great turning
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: points in the whole story. If Charcote is right, hypnosis
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: belongs mostly to the clinic and the abnormal nervous system.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: If Nancy is right, hypnosis belongs to ordinary human life.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: That makes the subject far more dangerous. Suggestion is no
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: longer locked inside the hospital. It is in education, religion, politics, advertising, initiation,
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: military training, salesmanship, family systems, medicine, entertainment, and every place
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: where one human being learns how to feel, think, desire, fear, obey,
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: or believe through the influence of another. It is an education. Religion, politics, advertising, initiation,
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: military training, salesmanship, family systems, medicine, entertainment, and every place
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: where one human being learns how to feel, think, desire, fear, obey,
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: or believe through the influence of another. Bernheim's emphasis on
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: suggestion begins to strip hypnosis of its exotic shell. The
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: hypnotic subject is not necessarily a freak of pathology. The
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: hypnotic subject is an amplified example of something everyone does.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: People accept meanings from authority. They feel symptoms more intensely
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: when they are named. They relax when they are reassured.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: They panic when danger is suggested. They internalized roles, They
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: obey scripts. They become what the surrounding world repeatedly tells
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: them they are. Hypnosis makes that process visible because it
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: compresses and intensifies what ordinary life spreads out over time.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: This is where the episode becomes more unsettling than the
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: Mesmer story. Mesmer's magnetic fluid can be dismissed as a
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: failed theory, Charcote's hysterical stages can be critiqued as products
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: of a particular institution. But suggestion is harder to dismiss
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: because suggestion is everywhere. A doctor's prognosis can heal a harm,
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: A priest's blessing can calm or terrify. A teacher's judgment
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: can become a student's identity. A ritual title can change
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: a person's sense of self. A political slogan can organize fear.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: A repeated advertisement can manufacture desire. A family story can
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: become destiny. A culture can hypnotize without ever using the
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: word hypnosis. The Nancy School also changes how we understand ritual.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: If suggestion is a normal human force, then ritual does
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: not need to rely on a supernatural mechanism in order
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: to affect the body and mind. The arrangement itself can
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: be powerful. The robe, the room, the lighting, the timing,
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: the voice, the sacred name, the instruction, the expectation, the group,
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: the vow, the silence, the ordeal, the permission to feel something,
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: and the interpretation given afterward. A ritual can tell the
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: nervous system what is happening. It can make fear meaningful, pain, sacred, trembling, expected,
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: silence charged, and memory reorganized around the event. Again, this
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: does not mean old ritual is just suggestion, that phrase
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: is too small. Suggestion is not nothing. Suggestion is one
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: of the ways meaning moves through human beings. If a
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: right changes the way a person feels pain, carries grieve,
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: understands guilt, relates to fear, or experiences identity, then dismissing
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: it as just suggestion misses the point. Suggestion is one
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: of the mechanisms by which symbol becomes flesh. The real
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: question is not whether suggestion is involved. The real question
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: is what the suggestion serves, who controls it, and whether
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: the person remains free inside it. The conflict between Charcote
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: and Nancy also gives us a deeper methodological problem that
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: still follows psychology today, the line between discovery and production.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Are clinicians merely observing what is already there? Or are
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: they helping create the form it takes. When a patient
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: shows a symptom, is that symptom a raal natural fact
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: or has it been shaped by expectation, culture, diagnosis and
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: pride demonstrations. When a hypnotic subject responds to a suggestion,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: are they entering a special state, performing a role, or
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: obeying authority following expectation or experiencing a real alteration in agency?
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: The answer may not be one thing. Human beings often
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: live in the overlap. Hypnosis research still inherits this old fight.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Some theories emphasize an altered state, some emphasize role, expectation
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: and social cognition. Some emphasized association some emphasize response expectancy,
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: some emphasize attention and executive control. The field has never
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: fully escaped the argument between Charcote and Nancy, because the
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: phenomenon itself sits across the boundary. Hypnosis is bodily in social, private, in, theatrical, involuntary,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: and cooperative, real and shaped, experienced and interpreted. This is
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: why the nineteenth century debate matters so much. For a
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: cult history, a cult practice also lives inside that overlap.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: The spirit. Manifestation may be sincere and still shaped by expectation.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: A trance may be real as experienced and still culturally trained.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: An initiation may genuinely alter identity and still do so
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: through role, ordeal, symbol, and suggestion. A healing right may
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: relieve suffering without proving the literal theory attached to it.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: A magical operation may transform the operator psychologically, even when
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: the metaphysical explanation remains contested. Charcote and Nancy give us
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: two different warnings. The body can be staged by authority,
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: and the ordinary human mind is more suggestible than it
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: wants to admit. The Nancy school especially prepares the way
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: for modern psychology because it makes suggestions central. Once suggestion
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: becomes central, hypnosis is no longer merely an odd medical curiosity.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: It becomes a window into how people become themselves. The
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: subject does not only respond to the hypnotists during a
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: formal induction. The subject has always been responding to parents, priests, doctors, teachers, lovers, enemies, symbols, punishments, promises, threats,
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: and stories. Hypnosis becomes a magnifying glass for the ordinary
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: formation of identity. This is where the modern self begins
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: to crack. A purely rational model of the person says
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: that we believe because we evaluate evidence, act because we choose,
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: remember because we retrieve stored facts, and feel because the
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: body reports what is objectively happening. Hypnosis disrupts that fantasy.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: A person can feel pain because attention has intensified it.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: A symptom can appear because an idea has been impressed
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: on the body. A command can outlast a moment it
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: was spoken. A role can become experienced, a suggestion can
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: become sensation. A person can act and still feel that
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: the action did not fully come from the conscious will.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: A person can act and still feel that the action
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: did not fully come from conscious will. This is the
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: doay to Pierre Janet. If Charco gives us the medical
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: theater of hysteria and Nancy gives us suggestion as a
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: general human force, Jana gives us the divided mind in
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: a more systematic psychological form. He studies automatism, dissociation, fixed ideas, trauma,
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: narrow consciousness, and the strange ways mental processes can split
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: away from ordinary awareness. With john A hypnosis becomes more
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: than treatment or spectacle. It becomes a method for investigating
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: the hidden architecture of the self. The old magnetic fluid
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: has almost disappeared. What remains is far more dangerous to
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: the modern ego. The mind is not one thing. This
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: self is not transparent. The body can obey meanings the
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: conscious person does not fully understand. Actions can emerge without
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: the feeling of authorship. Memories can hide and return in
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: distorted form. Voices, gestures, symptoms, and movements can rise from
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: below the surface. The next stage of the hypnosis story
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: is not about a force moving through the universe. It
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: is about the human being discovering that the universe inside
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: the skull is divided. Pierre Jane is one of the
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: most important figures in this entire history because he gives
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: the divided mind a more precise psychological language. By the
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: time Jane enters the story, hypnosis has already passed through
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: several transformations. Mesmer's magnetic fluid had been attacked. Pisegura has
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: revealed magnetic somnambalism. Faria has shifted attention toward the subject's
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: own receptivity. Braid has reframed the phenomenon through fixation and
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: nervous sleep. Truck Coote has placed hypnosis inside the medical
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: theater of hysteria. The Nancy School has argued that suggestion
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: is not a rare disease state, but a normal human
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: force intensified under certain conditions. Jane inherits all of this
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: and turns the question inward with greater discipline. He asks
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: what happens when consciousness is narrowed, when mental life splits,
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: when certain ideas become fixed outside ordinary control, and when
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: actions emerge without the person feeling fully responsible for them.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: Jane's importance is that he does not treat the mind
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: as a simple unity. It sees that human experience can divide.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: A person may have one layer of ordinary awareness and
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: another layer where memory, emotion, sensation, and action continue to
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: operate without being fully integrated into the conscious self. In hysteria, trauma, trance,
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: and automatic behavior, Janet saw evidence that the mind could
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: fragment or split into systems. A person might lose access
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: to a memory, but the memory could still act as
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: symptom might appear in the body without the person consciously
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: choosing it. A hand might move, a voice might speak,
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: a paralysis might arise, a fear might return, or repeated
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: action might unfold as if it belonged to someone else.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: For Janee, hypnosis became one method for studying this divided structure.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: The keyword here is automatism. Automatism means action or mental
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: activity that appears to happen without ordinary conscious authorship. The
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: person is involved, but not the clean, deliberate way we
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: like to imagine. The handwrights, the body trembles, the voice answers,
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: the arm rises, the symptom repeats. The person may say
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: I did not mean to do that, or it happened
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: by itself, or I watched myself do it, or I
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: do not remember. This is where hypnosis becomes far more
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: than a strange medical trick, becomes a doorway into the
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: question of agency. Who is acting when the conscious self
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: does not feel like the actor. That question cuts directly
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: into occultism. The possessed person, the medium, the oracle, the
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: automatic writer, the entranced healer, the inspired poet, the prophet,
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: and the hypnotized subject all disturb the ordinary boundary between
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: self and other. In one tradition, the voice comes from
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: a spirit in another, from a god in another, from
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: a demon in another, from the subconscious in another, from
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: disassociated memory in another, from suggestion. Janey does not settle
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: every metaphysical question, but he gives psychology a way to
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: study the experience without immediately reducing it to fraud. A
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: person can sincerely experience in action as not fully their own.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: That sincerity does not automatically prove a spirit is present,
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: but neither does it mean nothing happen. Something happened at
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: the level of agency. This is where Jena becomes essential
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: for the mechanics of magic. Many ritual systems work by
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: deliberately changing the feeling of authorship. The practitioner invokes a
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: god form, takes on a sacred name, speaks in a
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: ritual voice, channels an ancestor, writes under inspiration, allows the
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: body to move in dance or possession, or enters a
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: visionary state where images arrive without ordinary effort. These practices
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: may be interpreted spiritually, magically, psychologically, or theatrically, but they
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: all involve a loosening of the everyday eagles claim to
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: be the only speaker in the room. Johney helps us
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: understand that the self is not always a single commander.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: Times it is an assembly of processes, and some of
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: those processes can act from below the surface. Jane's work
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: also gives us a more careful way to talk about
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: trauma and traumatic experience. Memory, sensation, fear, and meaning do
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: not always integrate smoothly. A person may not remember in
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: a clean narrative form, but the body may still react.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: A smell, a sound, a posture, a word, or a
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: situation may trigger fear without the person immediately understanding why.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: Johna's language of dissociation and fixed ideas helps explain how
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: experience can become split off and then return through symptoms, automaticisms,
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: emotional storms, or bodily disturbances. This matters because hypnosis has
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: often been used to approach Hitten material, but that history
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: is dangerous. Hypnosis can uncover, but it can also suggest
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: It can reveal distress, but it can also shape the
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: form that distress takes. That ethical problem will become much
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: sharper later when we deal with false memory, forensic hypnosis,
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: recovered memory controversies, and the modern misuse of trance. For now,
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: Janey helps us see that the unconscious did not enter
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: modern psychology only through dreams. It entered through trance, hysteria,
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: automatic action, somnambalism, suggestion, and the body strange ability to
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: act out what consciousness cannot fully say. The unconscious was
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: not discovered as an abstract theory floating above life. It
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: was forced into view by symptoms, gestures, voices, amnesia, paralysis,
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: automatic writing, and altered states. The surface self kept cracking,
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: and psychology had to invent a language for what came
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: through the cracks. This brings us to another crucial nineteenth
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: century bridge, the ediomotor effect. The idiomotor effect refers to small,
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: often unconscious, bodily movements shaped by ideas, expectations, or suggestions.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: A person may not deliberately tend to move, yet the
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: body moves. The movement feels automatic because it does not
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: pass through the ordinary feeling of conscious decision. This idea
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: became central for explaining phenomenons such as dowsing, rods, pendulums,
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: table turning, plant chets, Luigi boards, and automatic writing. It
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: does not necessarily mean everyone involved is lying. It means
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: the body can enact an expectation without the conscious self
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: experiencing the movement as chosen. That is devastatingly important for
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: a cult history. When someone holds a pendulum and asks
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: a question, the pendulum may swing. When people place their
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: hands on a plant chet, it may glide across the board.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: When a dowser holds rods, the rods may dip. When
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: a spiritual sits at a table, the table may tilt, tap,
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: or move. In many cases, the participants may genuinely feel
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: that they are not causing the movement. The experience of
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: involuntariness is real, but the movement can still arise from
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: subtle muscular action shaped by expectations, attention, and suggestion. The
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: body answers the idea before the conscious mind claims responsibility.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: This is not a boring debunking point. It is a
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: mechanics of magic's point. The idiomotor effect shows that thought
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: is not sealed inside the skull. An idea can pass
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: into muscle. Expectation can become movement. Symbolic attention can become
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: bodily action. The hand can write before the person knows
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: what it is writing. A finger can twitch, the rod
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: can dip, the plant check can move. The body can
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: become an instrument for meaning that consciousness does not experience
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: as deliberate commands. Whether one interprets the result as spirit
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: contact on conscious process, symbolic projection, or ritual technology depends
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: on the worldview around the event, but the mechanism itself
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: shows the same frightening truth we have been following since Mesmer.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: Meaning can move flesh. This is where Michel Uzenchell, Role,
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: Michael Faraday, and William Benjamin Carpenter become important. Charrol investigated
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: pendulum movements and showed how expectation could produce unconscious motion.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Faraday studied table turning and argued that the movement could
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: come from the participant's own unconscious muscular pressure rather than
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: from external forces. Carpenter developed the idea of unconscious cerebration
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: in idiomotor action, giving a scientific vocabulary to movements produced
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: without deliberate intention. These figures are often brought in as
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: skeptics against spiritualism, and that is fair, but their importance
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: is larger than debunking. They helped show that the human
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: body could act under the influence of an idea without
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: the person feeling like they had consciously acted. This matters
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: because spiritualism rises in the nineteenth century inside the same
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: atmosphere as hypnosis, somnambulism, dissociation, and automatic action. The seance
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: room and the hypnotic chamber are not identical, but they
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: belong to the same historical neighborhood. Both are darkened or
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: charged spaces where expectation is heightened. Both involve a special
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: operator or medium. Both involve altered attention. Both involve a
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: group waiting for signs. Both give bodily events a larger meaning.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: A tap is not only a tap. A movement is
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: not only a movement. A written sentence is not only
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: a sentence. It may become evidence of the dead, the subconscious,
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: the spirit world, the dissociate itself, or the hidden intelligence
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: of the body. Spiritualism gives this history one of its
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: most powerful images, the medium who speaks or writes from
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: beyond ordinary consciousness. The medium may enter trance, speak in
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: another voice, produce messages describe visions or allow the hand
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: to write automatically. To believers, this may be communication from
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: the dead, from guides, from spirits, from invisible intelligences. To skeptics,
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: it may be fraud, expectation, unconscious production, idiomotor action, or dissociation.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: To psychologists, it becomes evidence that the mind can produce speech, image,
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: and action outside ordinary conscious control. Again, the same phenomenon
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: sits at a crossroads of interpretation. Automatic writing is especially
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: important because it turns the hand into a borderland. The
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: writer may feel that the words are arriving rather than
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: being composed. The hand may move quickly, strangely, or with
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: a sense of otherness. The written voice may not feel
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: like the ordinary self. In spiritual circles, this could be
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: interpreted as dictation from spirits. In psychological terms, it could
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: be understood through automatism, dissociation, suggestion, or unconscious association. In
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: a cult practice, automatic writing could become a method of
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: receiving messages, exploring the astral, communicating with inner intelligences, or
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: bypassing the censoring mind. In all cases, the central question
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: remains what is speaking when the conscious ego steps aside.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: This is why we have to avoid two weak answers.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: The first week answer is to say it is all spirits,
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: as if every automatic action proves external intelligence. The second
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: weak answer is to say it is all fake, as
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: if unconscious production is meaningless. The stronger answer is that
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: automatic phenomena reveal a real instability. In human authorship, people
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: can produce words, images, movements, and symptoms that feel as
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: if they come from somewhere else. That somewhere else may
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: be interpreted differently by different systems, but the experience of
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: divided agency is real enough to demand explanation. This is
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: also where hypnosis, spiritualism, psychical research, and other recult practice
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: begin feeding into the later artistic and magical avant garde.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: Automatic writing will not remain only in seance rooms. It
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: will influence psychology, surrealism, magical practice, and later occult methods
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: of bypassing rational control. The idea that they hand can
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: reveal hidden material becomes one of the major techniques for
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: exploding or the unconscious. Whether the hidden materials called spirit, dream, desire, trauma, genius,
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: or subconscious process depends on the error, but the method
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: has the same basic structure. Relax ordinary control, create a
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: charged frame, allow something to emerge, then interpret what happens.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: Frederick W. H. Mariers and William James belong at this
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: threshold because they both refused to treat ordinary waking consciousness
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: as the full measure of the person. Mayer's idea of
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: the subliminal self gave psychical research and early psychology a
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: language from mental activity below the surface of ordinary awareness. James,
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: in his work on religious experience, trance, mediumship, habit will
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: and the stream of consciousness helped to widen the psychological
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: field beyond the narrow borders of rational waking identity. They
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: did not solve the problem, and they did not give
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: one final explanation from mediumship or trance, but they gave
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: serious attention to the margins of consciousness understood that the
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: human mind might be larger, stranger, and more layered than
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: an everyday ego admits for ritual magic. This is where
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: danger empower meet automatic methods can reveal buried associations, surprising images,
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: emotional truths, and symbolic material the conscious mind did not plan,
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: but they can also become self deception, fantasy, inflation, obsession,
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: or manipulation by an authority figure who tells the practitioner
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: what the material must mean. Once a person believes and
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: an automatic message comes from a spirit, a god, a
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: dead relative and ascended master, or a secret order, the
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: interpretation can gain enormous power. The message may guide, heal, distort, command, frighten,
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: or trap. The technique is never separate from the authority
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: that frames it. This is why Jane and the idiomotor
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: theorists belong together. In this episode, Jane shows us the
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: mental life can split and that action can emerge from
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: dissociated or subconscious process. The idiomotor effect shows us that
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: an idea can move the body without deliberate intention. Spiritualism
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: shows us how movements and voices can become religious events.
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: Automatic writing shows us how the hand could become a
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: ritual instrument for hidden material. Myers and James show us
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: that the margins of consciousness, when not merely sides showed territory,
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: but a serious problem for psychology, religion, and philosophy. Together
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: they make one thing clear. The unconscious is not only
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: a private depth. It is something that can become visible
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: through the body. By this point, the old measmeric fluid
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: is almost gone, but the story has become far stranger.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: We no longer need a cosmic magnetic substance to explain
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: why people shake, speak, move, forget, remember, or write in
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: altered states. The human mind and body are already strange enough.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: The subject can divide, the hand can move under an idea,
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: the voice can speak from a role, the body can
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: stage a symptom. The self can experience its own actions
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: as foreign. This is not less mysterious than animal magnetism.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: In some ways, it is more frightening, because the invisible
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: force is no longer out there in the universe. It
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: is inside the structure of the person. This prepares the
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: way for Freud, but it also corrects the lazy version
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: of the story where Freud simply invents the unconscious in isolation.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: Freud comes after a long century of magnetizers, somnambulists, hysterical patients,
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: spiritualist mediums, automatic writers, hypnotists, psychical researchers, and psychologists who
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: already expose the instability of conscious control. The unconscious was
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: not born in one man's consulting room. It was assembled
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: from trance, symptom, dream memory, movement, and speech. Freud enters
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: the story as a major inheritor of the hypnotic problem,
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: not its creator. Before we get to him, we should
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: pause on what has now been revealed. Hypnosis began with
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: the supposed fluid moving through bodies. It has now become
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: a problem of suggestion divided away faris automatic action and
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: hidden authorship. The old occult question was what invisible force
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: is acting on the person. The new psychological question becomes
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: what part of the person is acting invisibly. That is
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: the turn. The ghost moves inward. The spirit becomes the subconscious,
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: The possessed body becomes the divided self. The planchet becomes
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: the hand of unconscious process. And once that happens, modern
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: psychology has to admit that the conscious ego is not
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: the only voice in the room. Sigmund Freud enters this
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: history through the cracked surface hypnosis had already opened. He
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: does not invent the unconscious out of nothing, and he
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: does not own the whole story. By the time Freud
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: begins working, the hypnotic problem had already passed through. Mesmer's
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: animal magnetism, p segures somnambulism, Faria's subject centered receptivity, Braid's
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: nervous sleep, Charcote's medical theater of hysteria, The Nancy School's
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: theory of suggestion, Johanna's dissociation, spiritualist trance, automatic writing, Mayer's
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: subliminal self, James' margins of consciousness in the idiomotor body.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: Freud inherits a world where the conscious self is already wounded.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: The human being has already been shown to speak, move, remember, forget,
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: and suffer from places outside ordinary waking command. That is
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: the correct way to place Freud in this episode. He
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: is not the origin, he is the inheritor. Hypnosis gave
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: him one of the largest problems of modern psychology. Symptoms
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: can have hidden meaning, memories can be inaccessible, but active
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: speech can reveal what the conscious person does not yet understand,
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: and the body can carry conflicts the person cannot directly say.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: Freud will eventually come away from hypnosis as his central method,
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: but he never moves away from the wound hypnosis opened.
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: The conscious ego is not master in its own house.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: That idea does not begin with psychoanalysis alone. It comes
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: out of the whole strange nineteenth century world of trance, suggestion, hysteria, dissociation,
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: psychical research, automatic action, and the hypnotized body. Freud's contact
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: with charcoal matters because Charcot showed him that hysterical symptoms
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: could be taken seriously. They were not simply lies, They
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: were not simply moral weakness. They were not merely theatrical nonsense.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: A paralysis without an obvious bodily lesion could still be
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: real as a symptom. A convulsion, a loss of sensation,
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: a strange pain, a bodily inhibition, or a dramatic nervous
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: event might carry psychological meaning even when the ordinary anatomy
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: could not fully explain it. Charcote made hysteria visible as
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: a medical problem, and Freud learned from that. But Freud
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: also inherited Charcot's difficulty when a symptom is staged before authority,
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: how much of it belongs to the hidden disorder and
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: how much belongs to the setting that teaches the body
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: how to speak. Freud also encountered the Nancy school, and
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: that encounter mattered just as much. Bernheim and Libel made
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: suggestions central they treated hypnosis not as a rare pathological
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: condition belonging only to asteria, but as a human responsiveness
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: intensified under certain conditions. Freud learned that words could produce, relieve, shape,
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: and reorganize symptoms. This is a devastating fact for any
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: simple model of the body. If a suggestion can create
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: a sensation or remove one, then symptoms are not only
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: mechanical events. They are tied to meaning, expectation, memory, and relationship.
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: This is where hypnosis becomes a bridge to psychoanalysis. Under hypnosis,
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: patients sometimes seemed able to recall forgotten events, express buried emotion,
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: or connect symptoms to earlier experiences. The hypnotic state appeared
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: to loosen the gate around memory. In speech, the doctor
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: could ask, the patient could answer, and material that ordinary
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: consciousness resisted might emerge. That was the promise to offer
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: a direct passage into the hidden layers of the mind.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: But the promise had a problem. Hypnosis depended on suggestibility, authority,
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: and unequal responsiveness. That everyone could be hypnotized deeply. Some
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: patients resisted, some responded briefly and then relapsed. Some material
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: that emerged under hypnosis might be shaped by the doctor's expectations.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: The subject's memory could be vivid without being reliable. The
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: doctor's authority could become part of the symptom's script. Freud
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: gradually became dissatisfied with hypnosis not because the hidden mind
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: stopped mattering, but because the method itself was unstable. It
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: was too dependent on the hypnotic relationship to an even
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: between patients, and too vulnerable to suggestion. This is why
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: Freud's movement away from hypnosis is not a rejection of
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: the hypnotic inheritance, It is a transformation of it. The
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: old hypnotic command becomes the slower pressure of free association.
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: The dramatic trance gives way to speech and the can
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: resulting room. Instead of putting the patient into magnetic sleep,
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: Freud asked the patient to speak, to follow the thread,
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: to say what comes to notice resistance, to allow forbiddter
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: material to appear through slips, dreams, symptoms, jokes, memories, and associations.
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: The setting changes, but the deeper question remains the same.
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: What is speaking through the person that the person does
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: not yet consciously know. Brewer's famous patient, known as Anna Oh,
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: became central to the mythology of psychoanalysis because her treatment
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: helped give shape to the idea that talking itself could
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: become therapeutic. The phrase talking cure belongs to this atmosphere.
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: This symptom was not treated only as a broken piece
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: of machinery. It could be approached as a symbolic expression,
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: a nott of memory and emotion, or a bodily language.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: Under altered conditions or through intense speech, the hidden story
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: behind the symptom might be brought toward awareness. The body's
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: mystery could become narrative. This is one of the strongest
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: bridges between hypnosis and ritual. Many ritual systems also transform
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: suffering by giving it a story and a speech form. Confession, lamentation, prayer, invocation, naming, oath, testimony,
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: and initiation all force inward pressure into symbolic expression. A
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: thing suffered silently becomes speakable and nameless. Fear receives a name.
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: A private torment becomes part of a larger drama. The
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: symptom is not merely removed, it is interpreted. Freud's clinical
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: world is not in occult temple, but it inherits the
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: same ancient human pattern. The hidden wound must be brought
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: into language before it can be transformed. The difference is
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: that Freud relocates the drama inside psychic conflict. Where the
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: exorcists may see a demon, Freud sees repression, where the
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: magnetizer may see blocked fluid, Freud seeds hidden memory, desire, fear,
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: or conflict. Where the spiritualists may see a communicating spirit,
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: Freud may see wish, fantasy, mourning, or unconscious process. Again,
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: the explanation changes, but the structural problem remains. Something hidden
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: acts through the person, Something not fully conscious enters speech, symptom, dream,
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: and body. This is why psychoanalysis preserves so much of
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: the older occult atmosphere, even while presenting itself a modern
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: psychological discipline. There is a hidden world. There are disguised messages,
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: There are symbols that require interpretation. There are forbidden desires.
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: There are forces beneath the surface. There are dreams that
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: speak in images. There are slips of the tongue that
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: revealed concealed meanings. There are symptoms that carry secret histories.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: The analyst does not call these spirits or astral forces,
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: but the interpretive posture is familiar. The visible surface is
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: not the whole truth. The real meaning lies beneath that
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: resemblance should not be overstated, but it should not be ignored.
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: Psychoanalysis is not ceremonial magic. Freud is not a magician
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: in the literal sense, but psychoanalysis and occultism. Both belong
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: to a modern crisis of hidden interiority. Both assume that
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: ordinary consciousness is not transparent to itself. Both assume that
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: symbols matter. Both assume that what is repressed, concealed, denied,
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: or forgotten can return in disguised form. Both assume that
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: the human being is haunted by meanings it does not
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: fully command. The difference is the map. The occultist maps
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: the hidden through spirits, correspondences, astroplanes, divine names, or magical will.
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: Freud maps it through unconscious desire, repression, dream work, symptom formation,
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: and transference. Transference is especially important because it shows that
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: the therapeutic relationship itself becomes charged. The patient does not
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: relate to the analyst as a neutral technician. Both feelings, fears, desires, expectations,
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: and authority patterns attach themselves to the analysts. The room
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: becomes emotionally magnetic, even when nobody believes in magnetic fluid.
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: This is one of the great ironies of the whole story.
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: Mesmer's fluid disappears, but the human relationship remains charged. The
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: patient still brings hope, fear, obedience, resistance, dependency, desire, suspicion
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: and longing into the space. The operator changes costume, but
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: the field of influence remains. That is why the analyst's
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: room can be understood as another descendant of the magnetic chamber.
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: It is quieter than Mesmer's backuet. There are no rods,
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: no glass harmonica, no convulsive crowd, no spectacular crisis staged
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: for observers. But the structure of hidden influence is still
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: there in refined form. There is a special room. There
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: is a trained interpreter. There is a method. There is
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: a theory of unseen causes. There are symptoms that must
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: be translated. There is speech that reveals more than the
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: speaker intends. There is a hidden life beneath ordinary consciousness.
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: There is a possibility of transformation through guided attention and interpretation.
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: Freud's departure from hypnosis also sharpened one of the central
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: ethical problems of the entire field. If a subject under
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: hypnosis can produce materials shaped by the operator's expectation, then
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: the healer must be careful not to manufacture the very
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: truth he claims to uncover. It will return later on
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: recovered memory controversies, forensic hypnosis, past life regression, alien abduction narratives,
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: cultic confession, and coercive interrogation. The hidden mind is real
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: enough as a problem, but that does not mean every
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: technique for accessing it produces truth. A vivid image is
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: not proof. A recovered scene is not automatically memory. A
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: confession under pressure is not necessarily fact. The road in
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: word can reveal, but it can also create. This is
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: where Freud's movement from hypnosis to free association can be
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: read as both progress and inheritance. He no longer wants
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: to command the patient into a trance and extract hidden material.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: He wants the patient's own speech to lead the way,
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: but the authority of the analyst remains. Interpretation remains powerful.
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: To patient's words still enter a framework built by the doctor.
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: The risk of suggestion does not vanish, it becomes more subtle.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: Psychoanalysis carries hypnosis inside itself as an unresolved ancestor for
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: the mechanics of magic. This matters because a cult practice
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: faces the same danger. When a practitioner enters trance, receives
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: a vision, writes automatically, hears an inner voice, remembers a
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: buried scene, or interprets a dream, The material does not
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: interpret itself. Someone gives it meaning. The practitioner, the teacher, order, therapist, guru, priests,
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: or community may decide whether the image is of spirit,
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: a trauma, memory, a past life, a divine calling, a demon,
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: an initiation, a warning, or a fantasy. The act of
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: interpretation can heal or harm. It can liberate or trap.
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: It can give the person language, or can place them
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: under another authority. Freud's real importance here is that he
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: helps move the hidden force decisively into the interior. The
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: old question was what outside power is acting on the person?
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: Mesmer answered with fluid. The exorcist answered with demon. The
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: spiritualists answered with the dead. Freud answers with the unconscious process.
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: The haunting is no longer necessarily from outside. The haunting
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: may be memory, desire, repression, guilt, fantasy, grief, childhood conflict,
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: or the return of what the conscious self refuses to know.
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: This is why the unconscious becomes one of the great
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: modern replacements for the spirit world. It does not simply
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: abolish haunting, it internalizes it. The ghost moves into the psyche.
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: The hidden chamber is no longer only the seance room,
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: the temple, the graveyard, or the astraplane. It is the
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: mind itself that is a profound transformation. Modern people may
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: stop believing in demons and still feel possessed by compulsions.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: They may stop believing in ancestral spirits and still be
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: ruled by inherited family patterns. They may stop believing in
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: curses and still live under internalized commands. They may stop
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: believing in fate and still repeat the same destructive script.
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: Hypnosis is one of the roads that makes that transformation possible.
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: It shows that a command can outlast the moment it
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: is given. It shows the body can act out an idea.
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: It shows that memory can hide and return. It shows
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: that the self can divide. It shows that a person
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: can speak from somewhere other than the conscious surface. Freud
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: takes those problems and builds a vast psychological mythology around them.
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: Whether one accepts every Freudian claim or not, the historical
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: movement is undeniable. Hypnosis helped open the door through which
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: the unconscious entered modern thought. By the time we reach Freud,
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: the original theory of animal magnetism has been transferred almost
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: beyond recognition. The magnetic fluid has lost its authority, The
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: back cat has become an historical symbol. The somnambulus has
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: become a psychological problem. The hysterical symptom has become a text.
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: Suggestion has become a force of ordinary human life. Automatism
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: has revealed action without conscious authorship. Spiritualism has turned trans
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: speech into a battle over spirits and subconscious process. Psychoanalysis
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: now turns hidden influence into inner conflict. That is the
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: great movement of Part two so far. Hypnosis begins as
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: an occult medicine of invisible force and becomes one of
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: the foundations for the divided modern self. The scientific story
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: is not merely a victory over superstition. It is a
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: long act of translation. The demon becomes conflict, the fluid
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: becomes suggestion, the spirit voice becomes unconscious speech. The automatic
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: hand becomes psychological process. The trances chamber becomes the consulting room.
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: The magician, the priest, the magnetizer, the physician, and the
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: analysts all stand around the same disturbing fact. Human beings
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: are not fully transparent to themselves. And once the unconscious
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: becomes part of modern culture, the occult world does not disappear.
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: It answers back. Occultists begin absorbing the new psychology, fighting it,
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: translating it, and using it. Some insist that psychology has
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: merely renamed older magical truths. Others accept suggestion, subconscious process,
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: and symbol as tools for magical practice. New thought turns
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: suggestion into self transformation. Ceremonial magic begins to look like
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: disciplined work with attention and imagination. Automatic art becomes a
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: doorway into hidden desire. The esoteric mind and the psychological
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: unconscious begin circling one another. Science may have stripped measurements,
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: flow it away, but occultism does not leave the field.
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: It returns through will, imagination, fascination, astrolite, auto suggestion, symbolism, trance,
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: and the trained magical mind. The occult science that became
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: psychology also becomes psychology, reabsorbed by occultism. Once hypnosis enter psychology,
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: the occult world does not simply abandon it. That is
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: one of the mistakes people make when they tell the
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: history too quickly. The act as if the Franklin Commission
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: debunked a Mesmer braid, renamed the trance Freud found the unconscious,
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: and occultism quietly left the room. It did not. Occultists
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: remained deeply interested in magnetism, trans suggestion, will, imagination, fascination, automatism.
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: Some rejected the new psychological explanations as shallow reductions, others
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: absorbed them. Some preserved the older language as astral force
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: and personal magnetism, while others began translating magical practice into
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: the newer language of subconscious process, repression, symbol dream, fantasy,
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: and suggestion. Hypnosis became a bridge between two vocabularies, the
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: esoteric language of hidden force and the psychological language of
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: hidden process. That bridge is one of the most important
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: features of modern occultism. In the nineteenth century, ceremonial magic
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: could still speak largely in the language of spirits, angels, demons, planets,
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: divine names, correspondences, extra powers, sacred geometry, ritual purity, and
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: the authority of inherited Grimore's Those things do not disappear.
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: But if the mesmerism, hypnotism, spiritualism, hysteria, psychical research, and psychoanalysis,
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: the occultist is forced to confront a new possibility. What
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: if the magical operation is not only an operation on spirits,
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: but also an operation on intention, imagination, desire, memory, and
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: the unconscious. What if the ritual chamber is also a
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: laboratory of the self. What if the god, demon, angel,
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: or spirit appears through a mind that is far more
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: divided and suggestible than the old rational ego wants to admit.
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: Elvis Levi belongs at the beginning of this occult return
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: because his magic is built around will, imagination, symbol, astrolite,
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: and fascination. Levi is not a clinical hypnotist in the
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: modern sense, and we should not force him into that role.
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: His importance is different. He represents an occult mind, writing
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: after mesmerism in a culture where a magnetism, electricity, trance,
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: and hidden force had already changed the imagination of magic.
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: Levi's magician is not merely someone who repeats old ceremonies.
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: The magician is a trained operator of will and image.
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: He works through concentration, symbolic command, disciplined imagination, and what
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: Levi calls the astrolite, the great esoteric medium through which forms, desires,
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: and influences are impressed. Whether one accepts Levi's metaphysics or not,
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: the psychological structure is impossible to miss. The magician must
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: learn to hold an image, charge a symbol, resist fascination,
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: direct attention and imposed form on the chaos of inner
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: and outer impressions. Levi's world is filled with symbolic force.
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: The pentagram, the taro, the wand the circle, The name,
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: the gesture, the gaze, and the ceremonial image are not decorations.
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: They are instruments for organizing consciousness. The magician does not
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: merely believe in the symbol. He enters into a relationship
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: with it until it begins to act on perception, emotion,
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: and will. This is where Levi overlaps with hypnosis without
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: becoming reducible to hypnosis. A hypnotic induction may use voice, relaxation, fixation, suggestion,
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: and imagery. A magical operation may use incense, names, candles, robes, signs,
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: planetary timing, invocations, sigils, and consecrated tools. The outer forms differ,
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: but both depend on the management of attention and the
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: intensification of meaning. In both cases, the ordinary scattered mind
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: is narrowed and loaded. Something is made central, something is repeat,
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: something is believed, imagined, performed and embodied. The occultists may
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: call that astral force. The psychologists may call it suggestion, absorption, projection, expectancy,
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: or dissociation. Those are not the same explanation, but they
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: both point toward the same human vulnerability. Consciousness can be
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: organized by image. Levi is also important because he understands
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: fascination as a danger. The same power that allows the
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: magician to shape inner vision can also enslave the imagination.
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: A person can be captured by an image, a fear,
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: a desire, a symbol, an authority, or a fantasy. This
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: is one of the places where o cultism becomes psychologically serious.
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: The magical imagination is not harmless. It can liberate, but
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: it can also possess. It can reveal, but it can
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: also deceive. It can focus the will, but it can
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: also become obsession. Hypnosis gives psychology one vocabulary for the vulnerability.
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: Levi gives occultism another. Pappis depending name for Rod and
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: Kus brings the story even closer to medicine and hypnotic culture.
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: He was not only an occult writer and martinist, he
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: was medically trained and active in the French world. Where hypnotism, suggestion,
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: nervous illness, magnetism, psychical research, and occult revival overlap with pappus.
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: We are not dealing with a clean separation between the
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: ceremonial ocultist and the medieval hypnotist. We are dealing with
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: the figure shaped by both currents. He belongs to the
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: late nineteenth century atmosphere where Charcote, Bernheim, Lobel Jane, spiritualism, magnetism, occultism,
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: and early psychology all press against one another. Pappis matters
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: because he prevents us from telling a childish story where
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: science stands on one side and superstition on the other.
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: The real history is more tangled. Doctors borrowed ritual authority.
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: Occultists borrowed medical language, psychologists studied trance, spiritually produced automatic writing,
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: hypnotists argued with priests, skeptics, mediums, physicians, and magical theorists.
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: Peppist stands in that tangle. He shows that occultists were
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: not merely reacting from the outside. Some of them were
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: trying to integrate hypnotism, nervous force, suggestion, and psychic life
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: into a larger esoteric philosophy. This is why the late
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: nineteenth century occult revival is so psychologically fertile. The occultists
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: of this period is no longer only the collector of
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: Grimer's or the ceremonial conjurer of spirits. He is also
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: reading about magnetism, hysteria, somnambulism, suggestion, nervous disease, to association,
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: to subconscious and the hidden architecture of the mind. The
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: esoteric body and the nervous body begin to overlap, the
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: astrobody and the subconscious mind begin to compete as explanations.
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: A magical operation could be interpreted as contact with invisible worlds,
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: but also as a discipline manipulation of attention, emotion, imagination,
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: and suggestibility. That ambiguity becomes one of the defining features
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: of modern occultism. This ambiguity does not weaken the occult revival,
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: it gives it another modern power. The ritual is no
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: longer only a petition to an external being. It is
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: also a deliberate arrangement of consciousness. The initiation is no
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: longer only a sacramental passage through symbolic grades. It is
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: also a psychological reorganization of identity. Division is no longer
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: only a message from the heavens. It is also a
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: manifestation of the imaginal depths. The spirit is no longer
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: only an external intelligence. It may also be a complex,
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: an archetype, a disassociated formation, a symbolic mask, or a
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: hidden fragment of the self. Different occultists answer that question differently,
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: but after hypnosis and psychology, the question cannot be avoided.
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: Alista Crowley should enter this history with precision. He is
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: not the central figure in the development of hypnosis, and
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: making him one would before. His importance is that he
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: belongs to the early twentieth century world of scientific occultism,
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: cyclical research, yoga, ceremonial magic, trance, visionary work, and disciplined
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: experimentation with consciousness. Crowley's famous formula of scientific illuminism, the
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: method of science, and the aim of religion places him
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: directly inside the modern struggle over a cult experience. He
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: wanted magical work, recorded, tested, repeated, analyzed, and judged by
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: its effects on the practitioner. That does not make Croley
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: a psychologist in the clinical sense, but it does make
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: his work relevant to hypnosis. Ceremonial magic uses many of
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: the same human levers that hypnosis makes visible posture, breath, voice, gaze, repetition, robes, names, signs, incense,
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: charged atmosphere, expectation, symbolic identification, ordeal, and authority. Croley's magical
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: system places enormous emphasis on training the will, controlling the imagination,
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: concentrating the mind, and producing altered states through method. When
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: we talk about hypnosis as a discipline of attention and responsiveness,
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: Croley's magic belongs near the conversation because it is one
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: of the modern occult systems most aggressively concerned with practice
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: as experiment. Crowley also complicates the simple divide between belief
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: and skepticism. He could write in mythic, prophetic, and visionary language,
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: but he also insisted on the magical record that double
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: character is part of modern occultism. The magician does not
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: merely ask do spirits exist? He also asks what happens
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: when the operation is performed? What changes in consciousness, dream, desire, will,
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: perception and behavior? What repeats, what fails? What is fantasy?
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: What is effect? And what is transformation? Hypnosis belongs in
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: that same laboratory of the self. It gives a cult
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: practice a psychological mirror without automatically explaining every esoteric claim.
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: This is where ritual and hypnosis come very close, not
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: because they are identical, but because both depend on prepared consciousness.
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: A magical ritual does not only rely on the words
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: printed in the book. It relies on the trained body,
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: the repeated gesture, the emotional charge, the symbolic environment, the
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: operator's expectation, the rhythm of performance, the silence before and after,
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: and the meaning assigned to every movement. A hypnotic suggestion
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: does not work as bare language floating in empty space,
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: works inside a relationship, a setting, a tone, a preparation,
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: and a narrowed field of attention. Both show that the
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: human mind is not charged by words alone, but by
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: words placed inside an atmosphere. Dion Fortune gives us an
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: even more direct psychological bridge. Writing under her birth name
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: Violet Firth, she produced The Machinery of the Mind, a
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: work that deals explicitly with consciousness, instinct, repression, symbolism, dreams, hypnosis, suggestion,
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: and autosuggestion. Fortune later became one of the major figures
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: in twentieth century occultism, but her early psychological writing matters
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: because it shows how deeply psychoanalytic and suggestive language had
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: entered esoteric thought. She is not simply defending old magic
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: against modern psychology. She is learning from psychology and bringing
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: it into occultism. Fortune is especially useful because she understands
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: that magical imagination is something that must be trained, guarded,
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: and interpreted. The occultist deals with images, fantasies, inner voices,
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: symbolic forms, fears, desires, emotional complexes, and powerful experiences that
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: feel larger than the ordinary self. Without psychological discipline, those
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: forces can become delusion, obsession, inflation, dependency, or self deception.
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: With discipline, they can become ritual material. Fortune helps modern
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: occultism because come less naive about the inner life. She
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: recognizes that the subconscious is not only a mystical treasure house.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: It is also a region of repression, distortion, instinct, compensation,
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: and symbolic disguise. This is one of the most important
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: moves in this episode. By the twentieth century, the occultists
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: can no longer ignore psychology. The magician who works with visions, spirits, dreams, invocations, scrying, pathworking,
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: and symbols has to ask whether the experience comes from outside, inside,
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: or some borderland between the two. Fortune does not solve
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: that question completely, and maybe it cannot be solved cleanly,
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: but she gives occultism a more mature language for asking it. Hypnosis, suggestion,
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: and auto suggestion become part of the occult toolkit, but
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: also part of its warning system. Fortune also allows us
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: to speak responsibly about psychic attack, obsession, and magical influence
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: without turning the episode into superstition. When an occultists that
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: a person is under psychic influence, a modern psychologist may
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: hear anxiety, projection, coercive relationship, trauma response, dissociation, or obsessional thought.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: But the deeper problem is shared. Human beings can be
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: invaded by ideas. A fear can lodge in the body.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: An authority figure can colonize the inner voice. A symbol
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: can become threatening. A repeated suggestion can become self fulfilling.
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: Whether one calls that psychic attack or psychological influence, the
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: practical danger is real enough the mind can be occupied.
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: Austin Osmond Spear takes us into another branch of the
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: same territory, automatism, desire, image, and the creative unconscious. Spare's
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: automatic drawing and sigil methods belong besides Yannut's automatism, spiritualist
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: automatic writing, and later surrealist experiments. Spare was not simply
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: trying to make strange drawings without thinking. His work explored
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: how images could arise from beneath the liberate control, how
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: desire could be compressed into symbolic form, and how the
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: rational mind could be bypassed in magical practice. In automatic writing,
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: the hand becomes a gait for hidden material. This returns
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: us directly to the idiomotor and automatic phenomena we already
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: discussed In hypnosis, a subject may experience in action as involuntary.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: In automatic writing, the hand may feel as if another
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: agency directs it. In Spar's automatic drawing, image making emerges
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: before conscious censorship fully organizes it. In each case, ordinary
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: authorship is loosened. The conscious ego does not vanish, but
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: it stops acting like the only source of meaning. The
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: body produces signs. The hand becomes a messenger from somewhere
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: underneath deliberate thought. Spare's Surgel work also gives us one
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: of the clearest occult parallels to autosuggestion and unconscious implantation.
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: A desire is written, abstracted, disguised, condensed, and transformed into
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: a symbol. That symbol is then charged and released from
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: ordinary conscious fixation so that it can operate below the surface.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: Whether one interprets that magically or psychologically, the structure is
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: close to the larger history of hypnosis and intention is narrowed, intensified, symbolized,
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: and passed into a deeper layer of the mind. The
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: conscious statement is not left as plain language, it is
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: transformed into magic, and the image is treated as a
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: living vehicle. This is why Spare belongs in a hypnosis episode,
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: even though he is not part of the clinical hypnosis tradition.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: He shows how modernicle practice absorbs the psychological discovery of
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: the hidden mind. The goal is not merely to command
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: spirits in the older ceremonial sense. The goal is to
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: bypass resistance, evade conscious censorship, and communicate with the deeper
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: machinery of desire. In that sense, sigil magic becomes a
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: kind of a cult auto suggestion. It works through condensation, attention,
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: emotional charge, and forgetting. The magician plants a command in
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: a symbolic form and then removes it from ordinary conscious interference. Again,
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: we have to avoid flattening the whole thing. The magician
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: plants a command in symbolic form and then removes it
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: from ordinary conscious interference. Again, we have to avoid flattening
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: the whole thing. Not every sigil is hypnosis, not every
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: magical operation is auto suggestion. Not every vision is dissociation,
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: not every spirit is a complex. Those reductions are too crude.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: The better argument is that hypnosis gives us a test
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: of vocabulary for understanding some of the processes. Modern occultism
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: uses deliberately narrowed attention, symbolic saturation, suggestion, absorption, emotional arousal, dissociation,
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: and the reorganization of agency. Occultism may interpret the experience
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: through spirits, gods, ancestors, astrolite or magical will. Psychology may
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: interpret it through unconscious process, expectancy, projection, and embodiment. The
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: overlapp does not erase the difference. It gives us a map.
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: This is the mature position the episode needs. The occult
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: revival did not simply cling to dead superstition after psychology arrived.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: It absorbed psychology, resisted psychology, translated psychology, and sometimes anticipated
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: psychological questions in symbolic form. Levi gives us will in
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: astral imagination. Pappus gives us the overlap of medicine, magnetism,
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: and occult philosophy. Crowley gives us discipline ritual as experiment.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: Fortune gives us the subconscious as both magical instrument and
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: psychological danger. Spere gives us automatism, image, and desire condensed
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: into sisile. Together, they show that hypnosis did not leave
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: occultism behind. It returned to occultism as a new understanding
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: of how the mind can be worked. By this point,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: the story has traveled far from Mesmer's back cat, but
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: the original question has not disappeared. Mesmer asked how one
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: body could influence another through an invisible force. Modern occultism
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: asks how well symbol, imagination, and suggestion can alter consciousness
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: and reality. Psychology asks how attention, expectation, trauma, memory, desire,
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: and unconscious process shape experience. These are not identical questions,
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: but they are related. They circle the same wound in
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: the modern self. We are not as free, unified, or
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: transparent as we like to think. The occultists understood that
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: symbols could seize the body. The hypnotists understood that suggestion
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: could organize sensation. The psychologists understood that hidden processes could
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: speak through symptoms and actions. The spiritualists understood that the
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: voice from the threshold could feel like another intelligence. The
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: modern magician stands at the crossroads of all of them.
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: He works with images, knowing that images are dangerous. He
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: works with names, knowing that names can command. He works
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: with trans knowing that trans can reveal and deceive. He
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: works with the subconscious, knowing that the subconscious is not
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: merely a servant, but a wilderness. That is why this
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: section belongs near the end of part two. By now,
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: hypnosis has become more than a medical curiosity. It has
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: become part of the occult understanding of the self. The
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: old magnetizer becomes their ritual operator. The hypnotic suggestion becomes
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: the magical affirmation. The somnambulist becomes the medium, the sere,
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: the visionary, or the dissociated subject. The automatic hand becomes
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: the artist's hand, the spirit's hand, or the unconscious hand.
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: The divided mind becomes the magical mind. But there is
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: still one major transformation before part two can close. The
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: hypnotist begins outside the subject as mesmer, the operator, the healer,
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: the doctor, the magnetizer, the priestly figure who directs the force,
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: but a new thought, auto suggestion and the culture of
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: mental self mastery. The operator starts to move inside. The
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: subject learns to suggest to himself. The voice of influence
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: becomes the inner voice, the magnetic healer becomes the mental healer,
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: the ritual command becomes affirmation, the invisible fluid becomes thought force,
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: and hypnosis becomes part of the modern dream that the
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: mind can remake the body, the self, and destiny. The
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: next transformation in hypnosis happens when the operator begins to
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: move inside the subject. Up to this point, most of
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: the story has involved one person acting upon another or
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: at least guiding another. The exorcist commanding the demon, Mesmer
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: directing the magnetic fluid, Pisegur inducing somnambulism, Braid focusing the
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: subject's gaze, Charcote staging the hysterical patient, Bernheim using suggestion,
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: Jahanne's studying automatism, Freud listening for hidden meaning behind the symptom,
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: and the occult teacher treating the imagination through ritual. But
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: in the world of mind cure, new thought, autos suggestion,
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: and occult self manastery, the structure changes. The subject begins
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: to become its its own operator. The voice of influence
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: is no longer only external, It becomes internalized. The magnetizer
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: becomes the voice in the head. The ritual command becomes affirmation,
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: the hypnotic suggestion becomes self suggestion. The invisible fluid becomes
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: thought force. This shift is one of the most important
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: bridges between hypnosis and modern self help, but also between
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: hypnosis and modern occultism. In the older mesmeric model, the
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: patient depends on the magnetizer. In new thought and auto suggestion,
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: the person begins to treat their own mind as the
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: side of operation. The question is no longer only what
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: can the healer do to me? It becomes what can
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: I impress upon myself? Once suggestion becomes self suggestion, hypnosis
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: leaves the parlor, the hospital, and the operator's chair. It
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: becomes a daily discipline. It becomes a way of speaking
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: to oneself, training belief, shaping expectation, and attempting to remake
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: the body through repeated mental command. The American mind cure
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: movement is one of the major places where this happens.
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: Its roots are tangled in mesmerism, religious healing, Protestant metaphysics,
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: folk healing, spiritual experimentation, and the nineteenth century American hunger
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: for practical salvation. The central figure here is Phineas Parkhurst Quimby,
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: who began in the world of mesmerism and magnetic healing,
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: but gradually moved toward a theory in which mistaken belief, fear,
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: and mental error were treated as causes of illness. Quimby
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: is not important because his medical claims should be accepted uncritically.
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: He is important because he shows Mesmerism mutating into an
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: American religion of mind over matter. In Quimby's world, the
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: old magnetic current begins to become something closer to thought itself.
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: Disease is not simply obstruction in an invisible fluid. It
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: is increasingly understood as false belief, fear, or ever lodged
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: in the mind. Healing becomes a correction of consciousness. The
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: healer does not merely transmit power, he changes the patience
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: understan The cure is not only an energetic adjustment, but
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: a reinterpretation of reality. The sick person suffers because they
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: believe wrongly, fear wrongly, or have accepted a false mental picture.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: The healer's job is to replace that picture with truth, confidence,
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: spiritual understanding, or a more powerful idea that doctrine has
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: to be handled honestly. On one hand, Quimby and the
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: mind cure tradition recognize something real. Fear, expectation, despair, stress,
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: belief and emotional interpretation can affect bodily experience. A person's
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: suffering is never completely separate from the meaning surrounding it.
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: On the other hand, mind cure can become cruel when
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: it turns illness into personal failure, as if the sick
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: person merely thought, incorrectly, lacked faith, or secretly caused their
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: own suffering. That danger follows new thought, positive thinking, manifestation,
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: culture in some forms of spiritual healing, all the way
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: into the present. The insight is but the moral shortcut
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: is brutal. Belief can affect the body, but the body
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: is not only belief. This is why Quimby belongs in
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: the hypnosis episode, but must be used carefully. He shows
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: how the mesmeric inheritance becomes americanized, the mysterious fluid becomes
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: mental influence, the magnetic healer becomes the metaphysical healer, The
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: crisis becomes correction, the body becomes a field of thought.
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: The patient's illness becomes a story that can be rewritten.
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: That is not modern, That is not modern clinical hypnot
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: That is not modern clinical hypnosis, but it is a
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: direct descendant of the same problem. Words belief, authority, and
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: expectation acting on the body. New thought grows out of
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: the soil and expands it into a whole spiritual culture.
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: It makes his mind cure Christian metaphysics, mental healing, affirmation,
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: positive thinking, spiritual law, and the belief that thought has
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: creative power. The basic formula becomes familiar with the mind
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: holds life begins to express with. The person repeatedly believes, expects, affirms, fears,
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: or imagines becomes part of the world they inhabit. In
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: its strongest form, new thought treats mind not as a
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: passive observer of reality, but as a force that shapes reality.
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: The old magnetic fluid is now thought force. The subtle
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: current is now consciousness. The ritual operator is now the
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: disciplined self. This is where hypnosis and magic come close again,
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: not because they are identical, but because both begin to
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: revolve around the deliberate and pressing of an idea, a spell,
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: an affirmation, a prayer, a mantra, a charm, a sigil,
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: a hypnotic suggestion, and a new thought formula can all
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: work through repetition, emotional charge, imagination, and belief. They belong
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: to different traditions and can carry different metaphysical explanations, but
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: structurally they share a family resemblance. Each tries to make
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: a phrase enter the body. Each tries to turn a
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: thought into habit, sensation, confidence, action, or change. The key
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: question is always what level of claim is being made.
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: If we say repeated phrases can shape attention, expectation, mood, confidence,
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: and behavior, we are on strong ground. If we say
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: thought alone can cure all disease, attract all events, or
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: override material reality, we have stepped into dangerous fantasy. The
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: mechanics of magic has to live in that honest middle.
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: Words are powerful, but they are not omnipotent. Suggestion is real,
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: but it is not God. Belief affects the body, but
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: it does not erase biology, poverty, trauma, infection, genetics, injury,
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: or circumstance. The serious path is neither debunking nor blind belief.
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: It is precision. Emil Qui gives this tradition one of
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: its simplest and most influential forms. Qui was not an
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: occultist in the same way Levia Pappus were occultists, but
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: he belongs here because he turns suggestion into a method
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: ordinary people could practice on themselves. His famous formula, usually
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: rendered in English as every day, in every way, I
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: am getting better and better may sound almost too plain
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: for an occult episode, but that plainness is exactly why
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: it matters. Qui strips the dramatic mystery away and gives
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: the subject a repeated phrase. The formula is not surrounded
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: by a baquette, rods, incense, sacred names, or a commanding magnetizer.
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: It is daily repetition. It is self impression. It is
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: the hypnotic principle domesticated into habit. Qui's method helps us
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: understand the difference between conscious effort and suggestion. He argued
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: that imagination often overpowers will when the two are in conflict.
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: A person can consciously command themselves to be calm, but
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: if imagination is full of disaster, the body may obey
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: the disaster. A person can force themselves to say they
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: will not fail, but if the inner picture is failed,
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: dread and humiliation, the nervous system may follow that picture
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: more strongly than the verbal command. This is one reason
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: suggestion works best when it is not experienced as violent
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: self coercion. It works through repetition, ease, rhythm, expectation, and
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: the gradual training of imagination. This idea matters enormously for ritual.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: Many people think magical will is brute force commands hard enough,
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: focus hard enough, dominate the mind hard enough, and reality
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: or the psyche will obey. But Queen points sort of
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: subtle a problem. If the imagination is secretly rehearsing failure, terror, guilt, punishment,
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: or unworthiness, the conscious command may be weak. The deep
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: picture rules the surface word. Ritual tries to solve this
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: by engaging the imagination directly. It does not merely say
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: be changed. It shows the change. It dresses it in color, symbol, sound, scent, gesture, myth,
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: and bodily experience. It gives the imagination a new world
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: to inhabit. That is one of the strongest occult uses
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: of auto suggestion. Magical affirmation is not only a positive sentence,
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: It becomes more powerful when embedded in symbol. The phrase
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: is carried by candlelight, breath, posture, consecrated space, planetary timing, image, deity, form, incense, sound,
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: and repetition. The occultist does not simply tell the mind something.
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: He surrounds the mind with the world in which that
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: thing feels true. In that sense, ritual is auto suggestion
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: made architectural. It builds a chamber around the suggestion so
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: the body can believe it. William Walker Atkinson develops this
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: current into a broader, occult and new thought system of
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: mental training. Atkinson wrote under his own name and through
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: several pseudonyms associated with new thought, yoga, hermeticism, personal magnetism,
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: mental science, concentration, willpower, and occult psychology. His work belongs
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: to the world where nineteenth century magnetism turns into twentieth
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: century self mastery. The magnetizer is no longer ownly a
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: healer standing before a patient. The modern person becomes a
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: magnetizer of himself and potentially a person who can influence
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: others through confidence, thought, presence, suggestion, and trained will Atkins's
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: language of personal magnetism is historically revealing. It keeps the
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: old mesmeric word, but changes its meaning. Magnetism becomes charisma, influence, confidence, persuasion, intensity,
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: and directed mental force. The magnetic person is not necessarily
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: one who transmits a literal fluid. He is one who
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: can affect the atmosphere around him. He can hold attention,
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: he can impress others. He can speak with force, He
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: can project certainty. He can resist unwanted influence. He can
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: train the mind to concentrate in the personality to command
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: the old the cold fluid becomes the modern psychology of presence.
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: This is where the history begins to touch advertising, salesmanship, politics, cult, leadership,
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: and influencer culture. Once personal magnetism becomes a practical art art,
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: the ethical question becomes unavoidable. Are you training yourself to heal, focus, teach,
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: and strengthen or are you training yourself to manipulate, dominate, sell, recruit, seduce,
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: or control. The same skills can be used in different
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: moral directions. Confidence can reassure or deceive. Repetition can educate
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: or indoctrinate. A charged voice can calm or command. A
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: symbol can liberate or trap. A leader can awaken a
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: person's will or replace it with dependency. Atkinson in the
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: broader new thought world therefore give this episode one of
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: its most important modern warnings. Suggestion does not remain in
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: the clinic. It becomes culture, the language of thought for us. Success, confidence, prosperity,
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: magnetic personality, and mental command flows into self help, business culture,
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: political performance, a cult, practice, motivational speech, and eventually the
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: whole machinery of modern persuasion. The old operator with the
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: watch has become a thousand voices, the preacher, the salesman,
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: the influencer, the guru, the therapist, the advertiser, the political leader,
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: the lifestyle coach, and the inner voice repeating the slogans
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: of the culture back to itself. This is also why
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: Theosophy's suspicion of hypnotism matters. Helena Bolvotsky and later theosophical
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: writers often treated hypnotism with caution or outright alarm. They
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: distinguished in various ways between mesmerism, occult influence, spiritual development,
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: and hypnotism as a potentially coercive or spiritually dangerous practice.
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: The details of theosophical doctrine are not the main issue here.
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: What matters is the warning. Theosophy preserves the occult fear
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: that one person can invade the interior life of another,
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: weaken the will, create dependency, or open the subject to
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: lower influences. Modern psychology may not use that vocabulary. It
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: may not speak of lower estral forces psychic vampirism, obsession,
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: or occult contamination in the theosophical sense, but the ethical
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: concern does not disappear. Hypnosis creates vulnerability. Suggestion can be abused,
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: Authority can bypass critical judgment. A subject can become dependent
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: on the operator. A person can be trained to distrust
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: their own perception and rely on the interpretation of the hypnotist, guru, therapist, teacher,
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: or guru. The theosophical fear and the modern ethical concern
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: are not identical, but they point toward the same danger.
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: Influence becomes dark when it weakens agency. This theosophical suspicion
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: also shows that occultists were not all naive enthusiasts for hypnosis,
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: some sort as a lower art and manipulation of the
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: personality rather than true spiritual development. That critique is worth preserving.
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: In many esoteric systems, genuine initiation is supposed to strengthen
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: the will, clarify consciousness, and align the person with higher principles.
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: Hypnotic domination, by contrast, may produce passivity, dependence, fascination, or obedience.
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: From this perspective, the problem is not that hypnosis has
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: no power. The problem is that it has power at
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: the wrong level. It may change behavior without wisdom. It
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: may induce trance without liberation. It may create compliance without awakening.
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: That distinction is crucial altered states are not automatically spiritual attainment.
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: Trance is not initiation by itself. Suggestibility is not wisdom.
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: A person can be deeply responsive and still be confused.
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: A person can have visions and still be manipulated. A
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: person can receive messages and still be trapped in a fantasy.
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: A person can repeat affirmations and still avoid the real work.
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: The occult path at its best is not merely about
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: entering unusual states. It is about integration, discernment, ethics, and transformation.
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: Hypnosis can assist certain processes, but it can also imitate
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: transformation while leaving the deeper structure untouched. This is why
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: new thought and auto suggestion are both powerful and dangerous.
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: They reveal that the inner voice can be trained, but
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: they can also turn the inner voice into a tyrant.
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: A person may begin with healing phrases and end in
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: self blame. They may believe that every misfortune reveels defective thought.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: They may treat suffering as evidence of spiritual failure. They
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: may refuse medical care because they believe mind alone should
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: cure the body. They may become trapped in endless self programming,
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: repeating formulas not to awaken but to silence fear. The
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: same technique that can support healing can also become a
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: cage for the mechanics of magic. The lesson is not
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: to reject autosuggestion. The lesson is to understand it cleanly.
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: Repetition matters, internal speech matters, imagination matters. The nervous system
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: learns from repeated meaning. A person who tells themselves they
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: are doomed rehearses doom. A person who repeatedly enters a
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: ritual of confidence may train the body to a expect strength.
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: A person who visualizes calm in a safe, structured way
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: may reduce arousal. A person who repeats a sacred name
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: with devotion may organize attention and emotion around the name.
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: These things are real as practices, but they do not
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: make the practitioner omnipotent. They make the practitioner trainable. That
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: word trainable is important. Hypnosis, auto suggestion, ritual prayer, and
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 1: magical practice all reveal that the human being can be
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: trained by repeated inner and outer forms. The body learns,
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: the breath learns, the imagination learns, the attention learns, the
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: emotional system learns, the voice learns, the posture learns, the
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: nervous system begins to associate certain words, images, sounds, smells,
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: and gestures with certain states. This is one reason ritual
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: repetition is so powerful. It builds pathways. It teaches the
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: person how to enter a state again and again until
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: the state becomes accessible. In that sense, auto suggestion is
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: not separate from ritual, is one of ritual's internal engines.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: A ritual without suggestion would be almost impossible. The moment
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: the practitioner says this space is sacred, a suggestion has
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: been made. The moment the candle is lit and treated
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: as a sign of presence, a suggestion has been made.
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: The moment the robe is worn, the name is spoken,
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: the circle is cast, the breath is slowed, the posture
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: is assumed, and the intention is declared. The nervous system
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: is being taught how to interpret the event. The ritual says,
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: this is not ordinary time, this is not ordinary space.
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: You are not merely your ordinary self. Something is being done. Order.
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: Suggestion also helps explain why magical names and initiatory titles matter.
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: When a person receives or chooses a magical name, they
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: are not only receiving a label. They are receiving a
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: repeated suggestion about identity. Every time the name is used,
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: it calls forth role, a vow, a myth, a desired self,
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: a hidden self, or a direction of becoming. In psychological terms,
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: it is identity rehearsal, and in occult terms, it is
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: magical naming. In ritual terms, it is the old self
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: being displaced by another form. The name enters the flesh
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: through repetition. This is the point where the external and
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: internal operator become hard to separate. At first, someone else
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: tells the subject what to feel, see, remember, or become. Later,
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: the subject learns to do that internally, But most internal
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: voices began outside. Parents, priests, teachers, doctors, hypnotists, lovers, enemies, books, advertisements, rituals, initiators,
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: and cultures all plant phrases inside us. We call them
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: our thoughts only after we have repeated them long enough.
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: That is one of the darkest implications of auto suggestion.
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: The voice inside the subject is not always original. Sometimes
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: it is the voice of authority that has been swallowed.
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: This is where the episode turns toward a deeper occult psychology.
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: To practice magic seriously is not only to make suggestion
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: to oneself. It is also to examine which suggestions are
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: already living inside you. What commands have you inherited? What
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: curses were spoken over you by family, religion, class, school, trauma,
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: or culture. What names were you given before you could
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: choose your own. What images of failure or sin or
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: unworthiness have been repeated until they feel like truth? What
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: inner voices do you mistake for your own when it
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: is actually an old authority still speaking through you. In
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: that sense, self hypnosis and magical practice can become acts
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: of exorcism, but not in the simplistic sense of casing
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: out a demon with a dramatic command. They become the
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: work of identifying the suggestions that already possess the person.
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: The internalized command must be named, The inherited image must
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: be challenged, The false identity must be ritually broken. A
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: new symbol, phrase, posture, breath, and story must be installed.
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: The magician becomes not only the one who suggests, but
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: the one who removes suggestion. The spell is not always added.
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: Sometimes this spell is broken. This springs Part two toward
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: its closing. Insight. Hypnosis begins as the claim that one
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: person can influence another through invisible fluid, but across the
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That claim transforms. The fluid
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: becomes imagination, suggestion, nervous sleep, dissociation, unconscious process, automatism, subliminal self,
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: auto suggestion, thought force, personal magnetism, and magical self training.
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: The power moves from the universe to the operator, from
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: the operator to the subject, from the subject's surface mind
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: to the divided unconscious, and finally into the inner voice
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: that repeats, commands, heals, harms, and shapes identity. By the
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: end of this movement, the hypnotist is no longer only
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: mesmer standing over the patient. The hypnotist is also a doctor,
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: the analyst, the medium, the occult teacher, the new thought healer,
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: the stage performer, the advertiser, the guru, the state, the family,
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: the culture, and the private voice inside the skull that
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: is the true horror and usefulness of the subject. Hypnosis
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: is not merely something that happens when our formal induction begins.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: It is a concentrated form of a larger human condition.
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: We are suggestible creatures living inside worlds that are constantly suggesting.
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: Part two ends with the old magnetic fluid gone, but
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: the danger is not gone. At all the fluid failed
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: as physics, but the phenomenon survived the psychology. The demon
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: became dissociation. The spirit voice became automatic speech. The magnetic
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: crisis became nervous response. The occult force became suggestion. The
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: possessed body became the divided self. The spell became an
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: inner command. The unconscious became the new hidden chamber. Once
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: the twentieth century inherits hypnosis, it does not leave it alone.
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: Medicine will test Itology will measure it. Stage performers will
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: sell it. Therapists will use it, Courts will fear it.
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: Neuroscientists will scan it, pain researchers will study it. Gut
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: specialists will adapt it. Memory researchers will warn about it.
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: Intelligence agencies will ask whether it can be weaponized. The
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: question will no longer be whether Mesmer's fluid was real.
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: The question will be how far suggestion can reach. When science, medicine, entertainment, law,
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: and state power all try to take possession of the trance,
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: the fluid dies, the trance remains, and once they hiddenforce
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: moves inward. The modern self begins to split open. And
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: that's the end of Part two. Hope you'll all enjoyed,
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: and until the next one, everybody be well.