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The Hypnotic State of Mankind
Jack Elias addresses the interesting question of what hypnosis
is. He concludes that hypnosis is that fixated hardened state of the thinking mind which dominates our living and our experience.
Our self-improvement agendas are our efforts to try to improve this fixated state of mind in order to find happiness. Elias
contends that happiness already exists in a pure and spontaneous state shining within. We are already hypnotized by our fixating
thinking mind. Being fully alive means being free from our cultural trances. People are already in trance. Problems are the
fruit born of their trances. Freedom from trances means being present, at ease, free of fear, whole and peaceful, humble and
compassionate, recovering the mystery and sacredness of life. The discursive thinking mind with which we identify our normal
sense of self is an on-going hypnotic process.
Who you think you are is your deepest trance state.
Jack Elias
If who we think we are is a mistake, then our whole process
of strategizing about our lives is a mishap with varying degrees of painful and pleasurable consequences. When you are fully
involved in being who you are, you don’t waste time keeping track of who you are; it isn’t necessary if there
is no shame or threat to ward off.
Elias describes the need to free ourselves from a
…destructive process of perceiving, thinking
and acting that can be viewed as a worldwide epidemic infection that is pernicious because, unlike other diseases which we
strive to isolate and cure, inherent to this infection, this fever, is the characteristic that it causes us to identify with
it as our very own true self…a fragmented, biased way of perceiving and thinking…a destructive hypnotic trance
that causes us to experience each other as strangers, as different, as threats.
Elias sees this hypnotic trance of the true enemy of mankind.
He considers this egoic-minding process
…to be the one source of all disease and
strife on earth – the Great Killer and Destroyer next to which such subordinates as AIDS, cancer and heart disease pale.
Indeed, they would not exist except for having been birthed by the egoic process.
Spiritual Psychotherapy offers the tools to break the trance state in which we find ourselves
locked up unknowingly.
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