Healthline.com describes the practice of Hypnosis this way: “Hypnosis is a genuine psychological therapy process. It’s often misunderstood and not widely used. However, medical research continues to clarify how and when hypnosis can be used as a therapy tool.”
What exactly is hypnosis? “Hypnosis is a treatment option that may help you cope with and treat different conditions.
To do this, a certified hypnotist or hypnotherapist guides you into a deep state of relaxation (sometimes described as a trance-like state). While you’re in this state, they can make suggestions designed to help you become more open to change or therapeutic improvement.
Trance-like experiences aren’t all that uncommon. If you’ve ever zoned out while watching a movie or daydreaming, then you’ve been in a similar trance-like state. True hypnosis or hypnotherapy doesn’t involve swaying pocket watches, and it isn’t practiced on stage as part of an entertainment act.”
Mass Hypnosis is the polar opposite of the amazing therapeutic tool described above; rather, it is a willful and cynical attempt to influence our behavior subliminally through images and messages – without our permission. For example, the constant bombardment of our psyche with advertising about Food, Drugs, Celebrities, and Clothes are all designed to control our lifestyle and consumption habits.
What the scientific sources fail to tell you is that this therapeutic tool has been used and misused by pastors/preachers, politicians, advertising and marketing strategists, drug manufacturers and virtually anyone who wants to influence your behavior. Guess what? Hypnosis is predicated on the use of suggestions given to your open and receptive unconscious mind by a source you trust and believe; these suggestions are designed to elicit a response from you by way of compliance. Remember that from the beginning of time the preeminent battle has always been for the mind – it begins with parents who very often want you to think as they do, friends who want to manipulate you, and enterprises who want to get your money.
Speaking as a retired practitioner of this powerful therapeutic tool, I can categorically state that its existence, efficacy and availability have been persistently undermined, largely out of ignorance and intolerance. In addition, its credibility is consistently being threatened by the dominant class, big business, big pharma, government and religious organizations complicit with big media who practice and promote Mass Hypnosis.
As children we were denied the pleasure of our daydreaming either by uninformed parents or overzealous teachers who both assumed daydreaming to be inattention. The result of those uninformed assaults on young minds ultimately delayed the development of vital eidetic imagery and imagination, especially in communities of color who were often deprived of other enjoyable diversions. Essentially the mental, psychological and constructive benefits of self-hypnosis and vivid imagining in children were routinely dismissed as distracted and wasteful behavior – a view that has damaged many of our children permanently.
So, for too many people in the Black community the positive benefits of Hypnosis and Meditation have been willfully muted by those factions who exercise control and are determined to maintain the status quo. One of the most powerful factions is the Church. The Gallup poll reports that on any given Sunday in America approximately 40% of Americans say they are in Church; this translates to 134 million souls being subjected to mass hypnosis by some of the world’s greatest Hypnotists – America’s preachers. Ironically, many of those preachers rail against the practice of hypnosis as mind control – as long as they are not the ones in control. Thankfully in this instance, the suggestions that are given to those open and suggestible minds are usually uplifting and motivational for some. Yes! The suggestions given are coercive, but benign, and though they present no harm, it’s still Mass Hypnosis at its very best!
You should know that certain conditions – the mental/emotional and environmental, will more readily facilitate the use and practice of hypnosis with the individual or group. Let’s look at the classic cases of African slavery and the Coronavirus pandemic in order to understand the preconditions for mass hypnosis and its proliferation in American life and culture; a life and culture in which Black people offer themselves as the most available and vulnerable subjects for mass hypnosis.
Just imagine for a moment the mental and emotional state of our ancestors who were forcibly stolen and taken from their homeland – imagine the trauma and stress they experienced, the defiling of our mothers and the emasculation of our fathers; after which they were systematically broken into servitude and separation, exacerbating their anxiety, helplessness and fear. In due course they became susceptible and suggestible to any whim and fancy of Missus and Massa – the programming was set and duplicated by every plantation worth its salt. Mass hypnosis was in play on every plantation that owned slaves – the programming and conditioning exists to this day.
In 2016 the Prince of Darkness emerged in a confused and divided America, mesmerizing and duping a suggestible and susceptible following of angry, frightened and disenchanted citizens – terrified of losing the land they had stolen. They are unwaveringly following this Pied Prince of Darkness as he foments tyranny in his brand of a dystopian America. Mass Hypnosis is the end game, as men who were once religious, honorable and decent, accompany the Prince of Darkness to hell.
I will continue to maintain and teach that the job of the Clinical or Medical Hypnotherapist is not to hypnotize, but to De-Hypnotize or De-Couple Black folks from the imaging, programming, conditioning and suggestions that has disabled and imprisoned them for way too long.
