David Jacobs

This student newspaper has an interesting (if rough) interview with UFO and alien abduction researcher David Jacobs.

Here's Jacobs on the right and wrong ways to hypnotize an alien abductee:

David Jacobs: Let me just say that everybody in hypnosis, in abduction hypnosis, is an amateur. There are no professionals. My colleague Budd Hopkins and I are as close to professionals as you can get, and we're not professionals. We have trained hypnotists and psychologists and psychiatrists how to do hypnosis for abduction, because everybody can do hypnosis. You can do hypnosis. It takes place in the person you are hypnotizing' mind. If they want to be hypnotized, they will, and what you say can be skilled, can be unskilled, but whatever it is, you can still hypnotize. If they want to be.

Interviewer: Right. Is it like they show on TV, with the laying down, and the calm soothing voice, and the pocket watch going back and forth?

David Jacobs: No, that they don't do. But it's usually just relaxation techniques. But the fact is that, people tend to say things that are not true in hypnosis, all the time. And you've got to be very careful. It took me a long time...it didn't take me a long time to learn that, it took me a long time to separate out the wheat from the chaff. There are ways to do that. A competent hypnotist will do things like ask purposefully misleading questions that sound right, but aren't, things that we've never seen in the abduction phenomenon. And ask that question in a leading way, to see if they...

Interviewer: "Oh, so there's a gorilla standing in the corner of the room, what's he doing?"

David Jacobs: Or say something like, well, you know, people have reported that there's always an alien dressed as a gorilla that stands in the middle of the room, in every abduction we see that gorilla. What's he doing?

interviewer: And if the guy says, no, there's no gorilla there, that lends credence to what he is saying?

David Jacobs: Yeah, exactly, if they're suggestive. And if they say, yes, that gorilla is there, everything that they say afterwards, you have to be either disbelief or you have to be super careful with. Because they just said yes to something that was not true. 99.9% of the time, they say no, I don't see any guy in a gorilla suit. Then you ask things like, as you're laying on the table and you look up, can you see where the ceiling meets the walls, at the corner, something like that. And they'll say, no, it's curved, there's no corner. That's a direct misleading question, and I am doing it for a reason. There's a lot of them. There's a million of them that we can ask. If they say something I've never heard before, I put it on the back burner and wait for confirmation...

Dr. Jacobs' site, The International Center for Abduction Research, can be found here.

Franz Bardon

The Franz Bardon Research page is an amazing source of information, and not just on Bardon. Contains (among many other things) papers by Milton Erickson (including his work with Aldous Huxley), as well as excerpts from P.B. Randolph's Magica Sexualis. Very cool!

Here is Bardon's masterwork Initation into Hermetics as a PDF file. What are you waiting for, go read it now!

eta: I've posted more Bardon books here

Archives of American Psychology

Boing Boing
has this link to a fascinating article in the New York Times about the Archives of American Psychology in Akron.

Pictured here: the Skinner Aircrib. Buy one today!

The Human Plank

In passing, we might mention a spectacular demonstration, long a favorite of stage hypnotists, usually referred to as the "human plank" demonstration. In it the subject's body is rendered rigid by means of appropriate suggestions. He is then used to bridge the space between two chairs, and one or more individuals mount and stand on top of the unsupported portion of the body. A variation of this experiment consists in placing a large slab of rock in a similar position and shattering it with the blows of a sledge hammer...A study of the distribution of forces and stresses might well show that it is nowhere near the feat it appears to be. I myself have participated as a subject in the demonstration of this phenomenon, using both autosuggestion and heterosuggestion to bring about the state of rigidity. It was my own experience, much to my surprise, that, when a person of about 200 pounds stood on the epigastic region of my body near the border of the umbilical region, this person appeared to weigh no more than a few pounds. With an accidental shift of a similar weight over the hypograstric region, I found the situation nowhere comparable, although there still was no difficulty in supporting the weight. In private communication, a prestidigitator told me some years ago that the "human plank" demonstration could be performed by nearly anybody with a little training in muscular control and without the help of hypnosis. However, there is always the possibility in such cases that some autosuggestion is playing a part even if unknown to the subject...

from Hypnotism: An Objective Study In Suggestibility by Andre M. Weitzenhoffer, 1953, pg 123-124.

I would submit that hypnosis and suggestion comes into play, not in the muscular catalepsy of the "human plank", but in being convinced to let somebody shatter a large slab of rock on your stomach in the first place. Think about it. If some 200 lb stranger approached you on the street and asked to stand on your stomach you'd call the cops, but if he said, "It's okay, you'll be hypnotized and in front of a tv audience," you'd say "Oh, well, in that case, sure, where do I sign up? Will you give me a video I can show to my friends?" You have already been entranced.

Derren Brown's Magicians' Products

Derren Brown is one of my favorite contemporary magicians. I find him a little more palatable than those other phenoms, David Blaine, and Criss Angel, who are both very talented, but who, nevertheless, can get a little cheesy.

Brown's website contains a not-so exclusive 'Magicians Only' section where, after answering a question, you may purchase a video or Mr. Brown's two books, Pure Effect and Absolute Magic.
Both books are rare and highly collectible (they don't have ISBNs).

I'm not going to tell you the answer to the question (although it's as easy to a magician as a burger is to a chef), but some of you may be interested in ordering his books. I was bidding on one on ebay earlier this year and the auction was shut down, I assume by Brown's lawyers. The links above are those provided by Mr. Brown's site.

F For Fake

The Criterion Collection recently issued an amazing 2-DVD set of Orson Welles' final masterpiece F For Fake.

This is Welles at his finest, exploring the role of filmmaker as charlatan, counterfeiter, and magician. All of Welles' films play with illusion and ambiguity but Orson was at the peak of his powers here.

Also included is the original 9 minute trailer, a masterpiece in its own right.

The ABCs of ESP

Nice article from my hometown paper about Sally Rhine Feather and the Rhine Institute.

I've only met Ms. Feather once, but she seemed like a very nice lady. I have other friends at the Rhine Center, though, and I took part in an ESP experiment there last year. If you're ever in the Triangle I recommend you check it out.

Dr. Theodore X. Barber 1927-2005

Theodore Barber Dies; Was Major Critic of Hypnosis

from the NY Times:

Dr. Barber developed what became careerlong studies of hypnosis in the 1960's, while conducting research at the Medfield Foundation, a private psychiatric research center in Massachusetts.

Earlier, in a series of experiments performed door to door, he and other researchers found that they could induce sleepiness by suggestion alone, without the swinging watches or formal protocols used by hypnotists. Power of suggestion worked effectively on about 20 percent of the people tested, although another 25 percent had no reaction.

The results stimulated Dr. Barber's interest in the hypnotic state, and he examined people who could be easily or deeply hypnotized. In the 1970's, he helped identify a small minority - 2 percent to 4 percent of the population - who were especially responsive, and he then studied the group. With other researchers, he found that the people most susceptible to hypnosis included those who were "gifted fantasizers" or "amnesia prone."

Dr. Barber was 78.

Gurdjieff As Professional Hypnotist

photograph from Gurdjieff: Making A New World by J.G. Bennett Harper & Row, 1973

The Whole Thing In A Nutshell

"Some masters of this art of influencing the public create a mental picture of themselves sending out great volumes of Thought-Waves for a time, and then afterward mentally imparting a rotary motion to the waves, until at last they form a mental whirlpool rushing round and round and always sucking in toward the center. An effort of this kind acts on the mental plane just as a physical whirlpool acts on the physical plane, that is it draws into its power all that comes in contact with its force. This is one of the most powerful forms of Influencing En Masse, and is used with great effect by many of the "strong men" of this age; who have acquainted themselves fully with the secrets of the ancient occultists. Ancient Occultism and Modern Finance seem far apart, but they are really working together to further the interests of some of these powerful minds of the day - and the public is paying the bill.

You will readily see from what has been said that an individual who has cultivated the faculty of concentration and has acquired the art of creating sharp, clear, strong mental images, and who when engaged in an undertaking will so charge his mind with the idea of success, will be bound to become an attracting center. And if such an individual will keep his mental picture ever in his mind, even though it may be in the background of his mind, when he is attending to the details and planning of his affairs - if he will give his mental picture a prominent place in his mental gallery, taking a frequent glance at it, and using his will upon it to create new scenes of actual success, he will create for himself a center of radiating thought that will surely be felt by those coming within its field of influence.

Such a man frequently "sees" people coming to him and his enterprises and falling in line with his plans. He mentally "sees" money flowing in to him, and all of his plans working out right. In short, he mentally imagines each step of his plans a little ahead of the time for their execution and he concentrates forcibly and earnestly upon them. It is astonishing to witness how events, people, circumstances and things seem to move in place in actual life as if urged by some mighty power to serve to materialize the conditions so imaged in the mind of the man But, understood, there has got to be active mental effort behind the imaging. Daydreamers do not materialize thought - they merely dissipate energy. The man who converts thought in activity and material being, throws energy into the task and puts forth his willpower through the picture on the slide. Without the rays of the will there will be no picture projected, no matter how beautifully the imagination has pictured it. Thoughts pictured in mental images and then vitalized by the force of the desire and will tend to objectify themselves into material beings. That is the whole thing in a nutshell. "

from Practical Mental Influence by William Walker Atkinson (emphasis added)

First Induction

This blog is going to be devoted to the far reaches of human psychology. Hypnosis, NLP, ESP, Reichian and Gestalt therapies, mind reading, Hellstromism, even some forms of movement/bodywork, as well as whatever the hell else I feel like including. I promise I will not embed (too many) commands or try to get anyone to buy schlocky seduction tapes or make readers take part in luau/firewalks. I am not qualified for or certified at this (or anything else). I have no agenda.

Now close your eyes....