NLP Training Materials by R. Bandler: Shamanic States, Part 2

Read Part 1 here.

Because of the variety of things I could do, psychiatrists could never be completely sure whether I truly believed in the Indian healer, or in the involvement of some God, or something else—because they tell me the devil doesn’t exist. And I reply, “How do you know? Maybe he does.”

Once, I was hired to work with a little girl who said an angel would come and talk to her. Her parents were very strict religious people and thought this was blasphemy. At first, they tried to get the church to make her stop talking about it, but the girl continued. Then they sent her to a psychiatrist, who was a church member, and he went so far as to decide to hospitalize her. One of her schoolteachers thought this was madness and suggested to the family that they try a last resort—me. I’m not the first person people turn to, but… when I arrived, the girl told me she had spoken with an angel. I said, “Okay—where?”

It seems to me you can always start asking “why” and try to convince someone that their experiences aren’t real, missing what’s truly important. So when I asked her, “Where?” she went downstairs, opened the bathroom door, moved a towel aside, and there was the angel—a Christmas tree ornament. The girl pulled a little spring on the back, and the angel spoke. It said, “God loves you.” The angel was creepy—its eyes were on the back of its spinning head. It was like voodoo, but why was it hidden in the bathroom?

These people thought it was all madness—the neighbors had given the angel to the girl, and she hid it because she liked it, but her parents didn’t approve of such things. Apparently, in their religion, you can only worship certain images—not this one. Apparently, Christmas was also absent.

I always have trouble with Christians because they all have so many different rules and other things. They all believe there’s only one God, but worship three at once instead of one. They have so many oddities—there’s only one God, and the rest are angels; for example, the devil is an angel, right? The story in the Bible goes like this: the devil argued with God about clothing—about who was the most beautiful. Jehovah claimed he was the most beautiful, and Satan said, “No, you know I’m the most beautiful,” and God cursed him, supposedly for dressing better.

When I hear stories like this, I realize you can draw two conclusions from them. The first is deeply religious, which makes people have beliefs, which makes them connect with their deity or deities, and this helps them live better and get healed. You can’t deny what happens in Lourdes: the place is filled with people—I can’t understand how that dirty water can help, and I wouldn’t touch it unless I was really, really sick—but it’s full of crutches and wheelchairs.

In Mexico, they did something quite interesting—they combined the old god with the new one; so Guadalupe became a saint. The church said it wasn’t going to get rid of the old goddess, and would consider her a saint, thus making her part of the Catholic Church—they just merged everything. But it’s not a goddess anymore, it’s a saint—and it’s not the Virgin Mary, but something similar.

So there are people who worship the Virgin Mary, and there are people who mix in Santa Ria, something like voodoo healing, and Christianity. There’s everything there—a whole city full of people doing surgery with telekinesis, and the effectiveness of Western medicine is constantly declining, and there are documents confirming this. However, this doesn’t match my experience. I saw an acupuncturist in the Philippines who ran electricity through various objects. I saw him set paper on fire. He just put his hands together, threw a newspaper on the floor, said “whoof,” and it caught fire. I even tried to repeat it—wouldn’t that be great for a consultant? You bring someone your papers, and as soon as they try to write something nasty about them, you go “whoof” and set them on fire. You know, for me, that would be pretty fun, but that guy used it mainly for healing. He even said that as he grew up, he mastered a certain kind of yoga where he learned to absorb electricity into himself and control it.

After showing a film about this guy, made by British documentarians, to all the medical students at a school in Arizona (they invited me to give a lecture), I started talking about how there are far more things in the universe than they noticed; and if they tried to experiment outside their own boundaries, maybe they wouldn’t get the shopping mall they’re saving up for in three years, but they’d discover new ways to treat patients they currently have no idea what to do with. As far as I know, giving people advice and placebos is absolutely harmless.

By the way—in the UK, they’ve started using placebos again. I’m proud of you, guys—in the US, they still don’t do this. They consider placebos dangerous… I wanted to produce a product called Placebo. I wanted to give people empty gelatin capsules and a booklet you’d read; you look at the indications—headache—it says, “In 9 out of 10 cases, placebo works like aspirin, so take 11 to be sure it works.” They told me that placebos only work because people are deceived, but that’s not true. Placebos help because people believe.

My theory is a bit simpler, because I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my life. I’ve traveled to very strange places. But I noticed one thing—even as a physicist, I accepted it, and took it as the basis of the philosophy on which everything I do is built—I believe that everything is alive in its own way. A gold bar knows when it needs to melt. It knows how to react to fire. Studying chemistry, you realize it’s very consistent: certain elements interact only in certain environments and for a certain time; put the same elements in a different environment, and they won’t interact. As long as you’re within Earth’s atmosphere and the temperature isn’t below liquid nitrogen, because when the temperature changes, all the laws change too.

In science, it’s believed that everything works according to certain laws. For example, when water is pumped, by calculating the pressure from the pump and the volume of water, you can say how far the water jet will go. This is true until the pump’s temperature equals that of liquid hydrogen—in that case, nothing is pumped because it’s frozen. Of course, if you heat the water enough, it will come out as steam. But if you also change the environment so that the gravitational background is zero—everything changes. And axioms become non-axioms. I have another idea—there are some strange things about how some people can grow plants and others can’t. But why are there so few experiments about this? Here’s one experiment that shows what I think about science.

A scientist takes two tiny trees and connects one of them to galvanic equipment that measures skin response. He brings the second tree into the room, several people come in, greet the trees, and one of these people grabs the tree not connected to the equipment, breaks it, throws it on the floor, and stomps it into pieces. While this is happening, the other tree starts to tremble. The equipment readings go off the charts, giving us the mysterious conclusion—the tree knew the other was being destroyed. Another scientist wrote an article saying this wasn’t very scientific. Maybe the tree was reacting to the person’s aggression, not to what was happening to the other tree—maybe it could understand the person. For me, the fact that someone found the experiment unserious isn’t an argument. While all these guys argue, destroy trees, and measure the other’s reaction, there’s something truly interesting. Different people came in and out of the room; after 10-15 people, the tree calmed down, thinking, “Whew, the killer is gone.” At that moment, the tree killer comes in, and before he even gets close, the galvanic equipment readings go off the charts.

Now they start drawing conclusions, but for me, it all comes down to the fact that the tree isn’t just alive—it’s much more alive than these scientists notice. For me, to say a person has a problem—you can look at it like a mechanical device, and that’s what I tried to get people to do in neuro-linguistic programming, so you could extract the faulty part and fix it. Still, I think it’s something that requires a person to invest a huge amount of energy, sometimes a lifetime. People’s fears are always present. I’ve seen people reason about this logically, I’ve seen it religiously, I’ve seen those who were healed—I’ve even done it myself several times. Once, I set up a tent for Christian services, gathered people there, brought in a mentally challenged person, worked with him a bit, and cast out demons. Now, whether there was really a demon or not doesn’t interest me much, because it doesn’t change anything.

My first experience with demons happened when I wasn’t part of the Catholic Church, but a group of pagans who were pretty wild. At the time, I was interested in whether demons existed or not. I wasn’t even taking any drugs, because these people wanted everyone to be clean. They sat everyone down and started singing, there were little candles everywhere, dim light, a big table. They brought out a guy—I don’t know why they decided he was possessed, he looked normal, but people started talking about a demon, and suddenly the guy changed, like you’re watching a werewolf movie—he changed. His face changed, his voice, he started writhing. The pagans performed some ritual, and one of them approached the possessed guy, grabbed his forehead, saying, “I cast the demon out of you,” and threw something on the floor. Then everyone started jumping on something crawling on the floor; at first, I thought, “God, I’m in some kind of trance—I see this.” Then people started stomping it into the ground, I saw splashes of dirt and thought it must be some magic trick. Then I studied magic for three years and could do almost the same thing. I even wrote a book about magic with a guy, so I can figure out all the tricks those guys doing psychic surgery use: they have hiding places where they stash a fake thumb, many of them “cut off” a thumb. They take a fake thumb and fill it with chicken guts. Then they do all their tricks and let out blood, but it’s chicken blood. Once, I saw one of these guys in Denver, he put on a big show and demonstrated psychic surgery. I stood backstage and analyzed what was happening, and soon realized it was chicken blood. So, either the guy had chicken blood or he suffered from a very rare disease that causes bleeding—that explains it all.

Whether that’s true or not—for me, it’s all comparable to a huge placebo. And I think that’s good. But it’s completely different from cases where people perform rituals with two goals. Now, as for the definition of magic—there are different types; there’s sympathetic magic—it’s like touching one piano string, and others start vibrating, creating harmony. When you play guitar, you can feel the harmony; when you play one string, you can hear how it changes the sound of others. Because things don’t have to touch to influence each other—otherwise, you wouldn’t hear me now. Since sound waves travel—if I create a certain sound resonance, it will affect you.

When I was learning hypnosis, I learned a lot about how to control my voice; at that time, I got interested in these guys—I went up to the Himalayas—actually, I lied—I got help getting there. I’m terribly lazy. I’m the kind of person for whom it’s too hard to get there by Land Rover. I hired a military guy with a helicopter to get there, we flew, and the last stretch you had to walk with an oxygen mask, which I wore the whole flight, and everything would have been fine if not for the fact that you had to go back down. So we went back, got in a Land Rover, and drove to where this guy lived—he lived in a huge cave. He was truly an unusual person, and he told me through a translator, “Listen, if you stay and become my follower for 20 years”—this man practiced meditation and was a master at using various substances to balance chakras, he healed people, I read about him and others who did the same a hundred years ago in some old books. I just wanted to know what these substances were and how they affected the chakras, and I had no intention of staying there for 20 years and eating rice. I didn’t want to study meditation, because I think if you do meditation, you don’t need 20 years, you can find a way to speed up the process of entering an altered state if you know what you want to achieve.

Transcendental meditation seems very uninteresting to me—you just sit and wait for something to happen. Just wait for something to happen? They just come in and give you a secret mantra; most often it’s a color—I’m not really supposed to tell you this, but I’m not very good at keeping secrets. Then you just repeat this color over and over. Unfortunately, when they told me the color, it was an Indian word and I couldn’t picture it, and since the person teaching me wasn’t Indian, he didn’t know what it meant either. Someone told him the word, someone else told that person, it went so far that I had to unravel the chain, trying to find out what this dumb mantra meant, since I sat for hours repeating the word—until I forgot how it sounded. So was I supposed to look for someone who knew the meaning? But that guy told me, “You have to remember your mantra,” and I said, “Okay, except that this word means absolutely nothing to me.” When you repeat a meaningless word over and over, it’s supposed to bring you enlightenment, but that guy didn’t get to finish telling me about all this—that’s the problem with all second-rate gurus.

It’s like once I was on a plane, and the guy next to me was reading a book about turning frogs into princesses. I had just sat down, and he was already reading this book. I said, “Oh, a fairy tale.” And he replied, “No, no, it’s really a wonderful thing.” I took the book and started reading him a part about treating phobias, changing the emphasis. I noticed it sounded like you could get rid of fear, and he looked at me and said, “You know, I’ve been a psychotherapist for 25 years, people don’t get rid of fears that quickly.” I said, “Okay—so the book isn’t about that—do you have any fears?” The guy said he was afraid of spiders. I suggested we try something—we did a few things, and after, when he thought about spiders, he wasn’t afraid anymore. But he said, “Yeah, but there aren’t any spiders here,” and I said, “Yeah, but three minutes ago, just thinking about them terrified you, and now you think about them and you’re not scared—what changed?” He replied, “Nothing—I’m sure if I see a spider, I’ll be scared again,” but I’m sure he won’t be. I’m convinced that whatever was living in him that caused the fear is gone now.

Whether we talk about this as neurons or as elementary particles, or demons—whether we talk about teaching—it’s all just concepts. Simply put, if you look inside an atom or a particle in physics, you can find something inside nothing, and quite a lot of it. A lot of nothing doesn’t change the fact that the universe itself seems organized. So for me, it doesn’t make much difference whether you use a magical, scientific, or any other approach. The scientific method, called the hypothesis, is based on the fact that it’s possible to reproduce processes in laboratory conditions, that it’s objective and the people involved don’t affect it. But there hasn’t been an example proving that this is the case.

For example, behaviorists did experiments with rats—they claim rats don’t think. Anyone who says that has never been a child in a city. Rats not only think, they plan like an army. They even have building plans—they’re very smart animals. By the way, everyone who has dogs—supposedly, dogs don’t think either. Imagine how they say “ruff” in their sleep—isn’t that rapid eye movement? My dog’s eyes move back and forth, he says “ruff,” and if I pet him—“ruff.” Sometimes in the middle of the night, I like to pat his paw, and soon the dog—“ruff.” The dog is playing a joke on me, he always waits for me to roll over and puts a toy—a squeaker—under me, which squeaks and wakes me up. He thinks it’s hilarious. And they say dogs don’t have a sense of humor? Of course they do! It’s just a dog’s sense of humor. Those people in Hawaii—John Lilly and others—spent many years trying to teach dolphins to speak English. There are things I found funny. One assumption is that they think dolphins are smarter than people; so a dolphin can learn English, but people can’t learn dolphin language. Actually, since dolphins constantly send and receive sonar images, we could send them messages through sonar, and maybe we’d develop similar abilities—I don’t rule it out.

I met a boy who was blind from birth—actually, he was only twelve—he had an amazing ability, and I was asked to observe him for a while so other blind people could learn about it. They’d bring this boy into a room, he’d clap his hands several times, and could tell where and what furniture was in the room, how many people and where they were. If everyone moved and rearranged things, he’d clap again, and in his mind, based on the sounds, a picture would form, and he could describe it to you. He could tell you what people were wearing, that two people were here and one there, there’s a chair here and a table over there, one low, one high, and all quite accurately. I asked him, “How do you do that?” He replied, “I’ve done it since birth, I just started doing it. I started with small rooms where I knew how things were arranged, then I moved them and listened.” The whole point was that this boy believed he could learn, and he practiced a lot.

If we started to research and look at things, instead of making them into science. If we started to look at everything as mechanisms, to start using our brains in new ways. Studying meditation, I found that the best meditations, and most of them, are united by two things. First, to create a mechanism that stops the internal dialogue—to make yourself shut up. I think it doesn’t matter much what mantra you use, it’s important to create a mechanism to control your internal dialogue. Of course, if you don’t talk to yourself, you don’t need it. I doubt that everything is aimed at making people do the same thing. On the other hand, everything is aimed at focusing your consciousness on something different from the normal state.

I’d like to start this morning with a small exercise, because the goal of our sessions is to experiment with your brain and mind. You don’t have to believe all the descriptions. On the other hand, sympathetic magic concerns similar objects. So, to make a tree react, you need to bring a similar tree. They did experiments with yogurt, splitting it in two, eating one part, and the other immediately started reacting, sending electrical signals and spreading them far, to know where the other half was. They separated them with metal walls, and they still knew. Thus proving that yogurt knows yogurt. Millions of dollars were spent on these studies—I think you’ll be glad to know it was American taxpayers’ money, not British. That’s not to say the British don’t spend money on silly things—you guys spent a million dollars building a huge furnace! And I know you can’t figure out what to do with it now. I looked at it, and nothing but a circus came to mind. I have an idea—why not move Parliament there? Just a thought—they’re the ones who wanted it so much.

Different from sympathetic magic is the idea of voodoo dolls. In movies, they show a little doll made of a person, a lock of their hair is attached, then they take a needle and stick it in the knee, and the person’s knee starts to hurt. I think practitioners of sympathetic magic would love to show what they do in movies. During the first ten years I practiced hypnosis, people constantly came up to me and asked about the movie “Svengali.” “Under hypnosis, will I do things I wouldn’t normally do?” I’d look at them and say, “Are you doing anything right now that you don’t want to do?” They’d say, “What?” I’d say, “Are you doing anything against your will right now?” They’d say, “What do you mean?” I’d explain, “Do you feel things you don’t want to feel, do you act in ways you don’t want to act, do you do things you don’t want to do? That’s a conscious way of thinking! You don’t need ‘Svengali’ for that; just enough social pressure.”

They tell you, “We’re going skiing,” you say, “I’ve never skied.” And they say, “You’ll love it, it’s easy and a lot of fun, they’ll take you to the top of a snowy mountain, put a couple of sticks on your feet, wax them so they slide better, then give you a lesson, which is, if you go too fast, just bring your toes together and you’ll stop, trust us, you’ll stop.” Then they take you to the top of the hill and push you off, and the next thing you know, you’re lying in the snow. Then you have to get up, which is really hard. I personally decided it’s not something I want to do. But the pressure on me was incredible, because everyone else wanted to. All this time, I was doing things I didn’t want to do, just because others wanted to. I didn’t need to be hypnotized by Svengali, nothing like that was needed, because it’s a conscious activity.