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This was a shareware hypnosis/self-hypnosis book. In order to make this work, satisfied readers needed to support it. Thousands did support the effort, sending money to pay for something they already had. Unfortunately, their efforts just were not enough to justify keeping the book available that way. For a while, I restricted access to chapters 7 and 8 and appendices A and B from free distribution to encourage people to contribute. It worked out better. Unfortunately, it still hasn't generated enough money to do any updates to the book, which I would very much like to do. So, it is crunch time. I can rewrite the book for regular publication, or I can try a last ditch effort to encourage more online subscriptions.

So, from now on, the only chapters that will be freely available are chapters 1 - 3. These chapters will give you a good example of my writing style and what you might expect in the rest of the book. If you like those three chapters, buy them for $9.00 and I will throw in the rest of the chapters for free. If you don't like those three chapters, well nothing ventured nothing lost.

If you buy and like the rest of the book, please spread the word, and please respect my decision to not freely distribute the book any longer. I would like to make tapes, rewrite the book, expand on the scripts, etc. I won't do that if it isn't economically worthwhile.

Now a plug on my behalf. There is simply no better book, anywhere, than this book for doing self hypnosis and promoting personal change and growth. Don't kid yourself. This really tells you how to do it and thousands of people thought enough of it to send money after they read it. The reason I won't sell the remaining chapters is not because I don't think they are worth a lot more than the $9.00 I am asking. It is because I want people to be able to use it and because I don't want to deal with the occasional gripers. By giving you something that you already decided was worth the money I don't have to deal with any issues of dissatisfaction. In truth, I only recall one person who ever complained and I took great joy in reminding her that she bought something she had already decided was worth the price she paid.

To make this whole process smoother, I have now registered with www.paypal.com. the email address to use is:

tc_spirit@yahoo.com

The underscore between tc and spirit is critical - it is not a hyphen....

Make the $9.00 payment to paypal and then follow up with an email reminder to me in 5 - 7 days and i will send information on getting the missing chapters and appendices by email. I usually get back to people within hours but I do travel from time to time and if you don't hear back in a few days try again til you do.

The current registered user fee is $9.00 US (UPDATED 02/17/03) - a small piece of the price that a printed copy would cost. Even better, you don't have to pay it until you are satisfied. Send the money to me at:

Thomas Cox

4600 Bunn Ave

Richmond, VA 23231

A word to the wise... I am moving inexorably closer to doing a revision of this book for regular publication. At some not too distant time in the future the book will be withdrawn from this site... OOOPS - I got here didn't I?

If YOU are satisfied - please pass on the good feelings by contributing to the book or recommending the book to others. Please note that chapters 7 and 8 and appendices A and B are not to be copied and/or redistributed.

CHAPTER 1

THE INTERNAL DIALOGUE

There is an ever-present dialogue that takes place in all creatures that use language. For healthy, well-adjusted people that dialogue is filled with positive statements about themselves, the people around them and the universe they live in. For others, this internal conversation is filled with negativity. They don't trust themselves, their feelings, other people or life. For these people, life is a daily dose of misery and drudgery. Many of your fellow humans, most notably those in: mental hospitals; prisons; reform schools; and menial, boring, life draining jobs, have internal dialogues that are literally bankrupt of the possibility that is each human being. After you complete the following exercise I will list a few examples that will help to set the record straight as to where you might fall in the continuum between these extremes.

Exercise 1

In a moment, I am going to ask you to stop reading and take a few minutes to consider some of the thoughts that "come" into your head on a regular basis. Try to recall some of the more common things that you "hear" yourself saying about you and the people you come into contact with and the world in general. Keep a pad of paper in front of you and a pencil or pen in your hand. When one of these thoughts pops into the foreground write it down on the pad of paper. When you finish that, turn to the next page of your pad and let the next thought come into the foreground. Do this for fifteen to twenty minutes or until you have about twenty such thoughts listed. If a thought recurs, write it down again. NOW: get a pad and either a pencil or pen; stop reading and do the exercise.

If you finished the exercise you did "good". Pat yourself on the shoulder and, speaking out loud say: "I did the exercise and I'm a good person". If you didn't do the exercise - do the exercise. Let me be clear about that. This is a how-to book. It is not meant to be skimmed at three thousand words a minute. It is not meant to be a text that you want to be able to pass a test with a grade of seventy percent or higher. If you don't USE the book you're not going to get much out of this book. If you don't get anything out of it, you won't become a registered user. If you don't become a registered user I will be SAD. If I am sad the book will get no better than it is now. So make sure that you get more than your money's worth out of it. SO, if you didn't do the exercise go back to the second paragraph, of this chapter, and follow the instructions NOW.

So you should now have 10 -20 thoughts listed on the pages of your pad. Consider what you wrote down. Are they things that promote good feelings about yourself, other people and the world. Do they promote negative feelings about you, other people and the world in which you live. Are you so used to these thoughts that you don't even know the difference? Do you buy into the idea that you are a "bad" or "sick" person who has to be fixed somehow? You may rationalize the negative thoughts on the basis that they are really true. Let me say with virtually no doubt - your negative thoughts about yourself and the world are not objectively true. This is true simply because there are no "truths". More importantly, your negativity toward yourself is untrue because you are an exquisite work of art. Your very existence and the fact that you are reading this book should be grounds for absolute awe about the mystery of life and the part you play in it.

One very easy test of whether a feeling is positive or negative is this: Suppose your best friend came to you and expressed the same thoughts that you have about yourself except that they expressed these thoughts about themself. Would you say: "Oh you're so right. I noticed that about you and I agree wholeheartedly" OR Would you say: "Oh no, that's not true, you are really ...". If the way you would respond to the same self assessment would be to deny it, it is probably negative.

Here is a sample of positive and realistic thoughts:

I am a good looking person.

I like myself

I'm my own best friend

I can do anything I want to do

People are good

Here is a sample of negative and unrealistic thoughts:

I'm: ugly; stupid; bad; incompetent; depressed; neurotic

I'm no good

People are bad

The world is scary

I'm too dumb to: do my job; make it; live alone; live with ...

When I say that the thoughts that you have are negative I am considering the fact that you, like me, probably do not consider yourself to be a perfect person. Let's face it, if you thought you were perfect you wouldn't be reading this book. Chances are that you are not under active consideration for either sainthood or the Nobel peace prize. You have probably: kicked the dog; yelled at your husband/wife and occasionally cheated on your spouse, taxes or school or professional examinations. It is also possible that you have: stolen money; assaulted someone and maybe even killed someone. You may be sitting in your house, at your place of work, commuting to work, sitting in a locked ward at a mental hospital or residing in a maximum security penitentiary.

The thing to really grasp hold of and run with for the rest of your life is this: You probably don't have these negative thoughts because of what you have done. More likely, you have probably done what you have, because you have had these thoughts. These thoughts may have been rattling your cage for decades. These thoughts didn't start because of the things that you have done as an adult. From the time of Adam and Eve there has been a fundamental breach between the possibilities implicit in your being human and the reality of your inability to live up to those possibilities.

Are your "thoughts" about your strengths or your weaknesses. Do your "thoughts" help you to set concrete goals and achieve them or do they encourage you to drift through life without direction. Do you find yourself constantly over-committing to other people and under-committing to your friends and loved ones? Alternatively, are you so over-committed to friends and loved ones that you have lost touch with what you want for yourself? Are your thoughts good friends that you welcome to consciousness or are they like ill- tempered bullies that you try to "make it through the day" without hearing from. Do your "thoughts" coerce you to accept them or do they gently remind you of the complete and total freedom of choice that you have.

PROGRAMMING

Many people will understand the word programming in the way in which I intend to use it. The meaning of the word, as I will use it, in referring to your personality is close to the meaning of the word in terms of computer programming. In the domain of computer programming a program is simply a set of instructions for accomplishing some task. Language is a large and complex program that the child (or adult) acquires to be able to communicate with other similarly programmed language users. We all have programs of various sorts. There is a branch of the philosophy of science known as "operationalism" that makes this clear. Operationalism suggests that we "know" something when we have a clearly defined procedure for "measuring" it in some sense. This procedure is a clearly defined set of instructions for how to derive knowledge about the physical world around us. This procedure is a "program". Consider, for a moment, a procedure for measuring distance.

1) Obtain a standard "ruler" that is longer than the distance to be measured and that has been certified by the National Bureau of Standards

2) Determine the starting and ending point of the distance to be measured.

3) Place the ruler over the starting and ending points of the distance to be measured so that both the starting point and the ending points correspond to interior points of the ruler.

4) Determine the distance by subtracting the smaller number on the ruler that occurs at the starting point from the larger number on the ruler that corresponds with the ending point of the distance to be measured.

5) Repeat the procedures in (3) and (4) above ten times.

6) Take the average of all ten measurements resulting from repeated measurements.

7) The distance is assumed to be the average of all ten measurements.

This procedure, or program, is not really complete. We haven't defined how to take the average of the ten measurements. We haven't been as precise as we would need to be about the ruler. We haven't explained what subtraction is and we haven't been as clear as we could be about how we are going to line the ruler up with the starting and ending points. In some of these cases, we are dependent on other programs. For example, the "average" I intend is the "mean" of the ten measurements which is determined by adding the ten measurements together and dividing by ten. However, this is far from the only possible program for finding the "average" value of the ten measurements. Two other commonly used measures of "central tendency"(another term for average value) are the mode (the most frequently occurring measurement and the median (the observed measurement that is such that as many of your measurements lie above it as below it).

Another consideration is the fact that the distance between two points is not entirely clear. If you are driving across the United States then the distance between San Francisco and New York City is not the straight distance between these points. Instead, there are at least two other possibilities: It is the curvilinear distance between San Francisco and New York City that takes the curvature of the earth into account. Second, it is the number of miles that you will have to drive to get there. There is no straight line route between San Francisco and New York City so the driving distance is considerably more than the straight line distance you would get by laying a ruler on the map and translating inches into miles. This is easy to see if you plan a trip that makes maximal use of the Interstate highway system. In this network of roads it was necessary to hit major cities. In the effort to tie in various cities, considerable lengthy detours sometimes occur. In general, the more programs you have the wider the domain of your influence and control of the world around you. However, there are also programs that prevent you from retrieving some of the programs that you have. I refer to these programs as saboteur- programs. These programs keep you from seeing your real talents and abilities. Even though you have a wealth of programs, this does not mean that you will "feel" good about yourself. You could have every program ever developed by any other human being and still feel neurotic, psychotic or evil. You may be able to speak every language known in human history and you could still "run" the same negative thoughts on yourself except in more than one language. This is an essential point. Your "thoughts" have nothing to do with reality. You could be a saint and still feel like a sinner. Likewise, you can be a sinner and have "thoughts" appropriate to a saint.

Over the years, I have met my share of people who could have used a few more "modesty" programs. People who no matter how they may trample on other people, no matter how many mistakes they make, no matter how many times they commit the same mistakes over and over they still believe that they are the finest human being that has ever lived. They still believe that the way they do things is the best possible way for these things to be done. These people have a user-friendly set of programs that govern their internal dialogue that does not countenance the possibility of their being wrong. Despite monumental errors of judgment and despite frequent failures to achieve what they set out to achieve, such people just continue to persist in doing things in ways that don't work. They are protected from realizing the errors of their ways by the fact that they never see their actions or the consequences of their actions in negative terms.

Some of your programs might govern the use of arithmetic, some geometry and others advanced mathematics. Other programs determine your skills in physics, astronomy, human relations, psychology and business dealings. Your programs, especially the saboteur- programs, more than random circumstances, determine whether you will succeed in any business transaction. When people who are programmed to fail engage in a business deal you can be sure that there will be some aspect of the deal that guarantees failure. This aspect of the deal would be obvious to a person programmed for business success. But it is somehow "overlooked" by the person programmed for failure.

Also, there are many people who can provide the best possible advice to another person but who seem incapable of acting in accordance with this advice for themselves. An accountant whose daily work involves maintaining his/her clients books and business interests may be failing at their own business as an accountant. A psychiatrist, psychologist or social worker may have excellent advice and be successful in counselling married couples while he/she, him/herself may be on their fourth or fifth marriage.

Other programs govern your use of the social amenities. How you: brush your teeth; comb your hair; like your eggs cooked and what your favorite foods are. Some, more interesting programs, determine your: sexual practices; the level of pleasure you derive from your sexual experiences; how sensual you are; what sexual practices are okay; who you can be sexual/sensual with; whether you are straight, gay or bisexual; whether you are turned on by: adults; children; pornography (also what you consider to be pornographic); sexual innuendo; or flirting. Here I take the view that homosexuality (as well as all other forms of sexual behavior) can be re-programmed. The issue is not whether you can re-program your mind but do you want to do that?

It is okay to re-program yourself if you truly are uncomfortable being what you believe you currently are. It is perfectly okay if you are re-programming yourself to be better at being you. If you prefer to be a heterosexual or a bi-sexual, or whatever ____sexual, you prefer to be, than you can use the technology you are going to learn in this book to make such a change.

There is absolutely nothing sacrosanct about your current "programmed" tastes and choices. You don't have to change however. The alternative option is to re-program yourself to be more self- accepting. It is a "racket" of the worst order to constantly criticize yourself for who you currently are. There are some exceptions to this rule. If you are truly imposing on someone else or injuring someone else you should consider whether you can live with integrity by hurting someone else. If you can't live with yourself for the way that you are treating others maybe you should change such behavior - at least that is what I think. Programming yourself to become more accepting of the fact that you are a serial killer is not my idea of rational decision-making.

Another consideration is that there is no worse reason to re- program yourself than to "fit in" better. Notice that I have asserted that even so rigid a position as "being" homosexual can be re-programmed. I say this without making any moral judgment about homosexuality whatsoever. There is nothing magical or mysterious about being "gay". Being gay is simply a set of programs about what turns you on and what doesn't. These programs are no harder to change than the programs that determine whether you are a "smoker" or whether you are "overweight" or whether you are a Republican.

When I refer to your programs, I am not talking about your genetic programming. Some people are genetically programmed to weigh more than the average weight of their fellow human beings. When you are genetically programmed for something, that is hardware. Hardware can be replaced as is the case when a "healthy" gene is introduced into the body on a virus with the hope that it will influence your body to produce healthy cells. Your "verbally" modifiable programming, i.e. your software, can be modified with the help of this book. By re-programming yourself you may have an impact on how your genetic programming is played out. You won't be able to change the fact that you are tall or that you have a large frame and bones, but you can have some influence, through diet and exercise on how much you will weigh. Your diet and exercise choices are re-programmable.

Your programs determine whether you smoke cigarettes, eat chocolates to excess, are overweight, are underweight, eat too many "bad" foods, are addicted to exercise or almost never engage in physical exertion of any sort. Your programs, exclusive of accidental causes, will determine when, where, how and why you will die. Your programs determine if you need to jump out of planes or bungee jump to hit an excitation peak. Your programs determine if you bite your nails, bite your fingers or perpetually tear away at your skin. Your programs determine if you pick scabs or leave them alone to heal. Since your programs determine your lifestyle habits, your programs determine whether you will die of lung cancer, colon cancer, skin cancer, cancer of the bowels, prostate cancer, heart disease, etc.

As you can see, and as John Lilly has suggested, it may well be that your behavior, intellectual and emotional characteristics are little more, or for that matter, little less than the collection of your programs. Clearly, your raw intellectual ability is genetic. But how you use your intelligence (software determined) will have a lot to do with how intelligent you feel and how intelligent others think you are.

It is largely your programming that determines what you think of as your uniqueness. Clearly all human beings who are not on life support, have functioning hearts, lungs, circulatory systems, grey matter, etc. The things that most markedly and seemingly permanently distinguish you, as a human being, from other human beings, is for the most part embedded in your programs. While I believe that it is possible to alter virtually all of your programming that doesn't mean that you can do so easily or that you should do so frivolously.

Heretofore, it has proven difficult, if not impossible for most clinicians to alter another persons sexual orientation. I assert that this is not because this aspect of human behavioral programming cannot be altered. Instead, the sad fact is that most clinicians have used approaches that have failed rather than approaches that have succeeded. Evidence for this is clearly suggested by the fact that nicotine addicted cigarette smokers can be gradually eased away from their cigarette addictions in three to five weeks. At the same time most clinicians have had little or no success with altering the programming that governs sexual object choice in homosexuals even when they have years to work on it. It should be clear that object choice is nowhere near as difficult to deal with as an addiction as nicotine. Despite this, many people falsely believe that sexual object choice is less amenable to re- programming then a serious, life threatening, physical addiction.

FEELINGS

I take a fairly extreme position with regard to "feelings". As such, I neither elevate them to a position of sacredness nor do I inappropriately denigrate them. I understand "biological" feelings quite well. I know how it feels to be hungry (I have fasted for as long as 12 days so I also know the difference between the compulsion to eat and when the body is demanding nutrition.

Similarly, I understand the pain that accompanies cutting ones skin, being hurt in an auto accident, recovering from surgery and stubbing one's toe. I understand what it is like to "feel" oxygen deprivation as a result of having been choked on several occasions, having held my breath underwater or elsewhere and from suffering from a form of lung disease. I understand feeling "horny" as an innate biological tension requiring expression.

I have more difficulty with feelings such as "happiness", "sadness", "satisfaction", "pleasure", ad infinitum. These things appear to be real and I am not saying that I have not "felt" this way. The problem is that these "feelings" are distinctly different from the "feelings" I described in the two paragraphs above. These are what we may think of as socially adapted feelings. Often, "I feel sad" is little more than an expression of what the individual thinks is a legitimate way of either describing how they think they should feel or a way to get the attention/ sympathy/ encouragement/ affection... of the party to whom they are describing the "feeling".

As such, this use of the word "feeling" is distinctly different from the use of the word "feeling" in paragraphs 1 and 2. Unfortunately, few people realize that the "feelings" they usually report experiencing are very much under their control. If you are my lover and you reject me in favor of another I will have some "feelings". Objectively there will be a space in my life that will no longer be occupied by you. However, whether I see this as sad or joyful is entirely up to me. In the best scenario, I too have realized that we were growing apart and I have started to "grow" in directions that haven't included you. Your sudden departure, while discomforting, is far from "saddening". In fact, I may feel relief that I am now completely free to pursue my new interests without concerning myself with how you feel or what you are doing. Most of the "feelings" that we humans bury ourselves in are really just choices we make.

Objective reality, rarely, if ever, dictates a particular "feeling" in response. I suffer from a pain in my back from lifting a heavy object. Do I use this to immobilize myself? Do I use this to entrap others in attempts to improve the way I feel? Do I use this to justify not going out to dinner/ dancing/ bridge night, etc? All of these are ways in which we use "feelings". I might look at the pain and say to myself - "Oooh Boy, you don't want to go lifting any more objects that are that heavy". A pain such as that might convince me to go for a medical exam and that may mean the early diagnosis of a cancerous tumor. Having lifted that heavy object and having interpreted the pain as a warning to see a doctor may just have saved my life.

On the other hand, my response to the pain may have kept me from participating in the Olympics because I didn't perform as well in the Olympic trials as I would have had I chosen to favor what I believed to be an injured back.

Of greater import is that the major avenue open to us in managing how we "feel" is to take complete and total responsibility for how we "feel".. If you don't like what you are feeling -- "change" how you feel.

In my four decades experience with psychotherapy this has got to be the most difficult point to get across to the client. Clients inevitably cannot see how they could possibly feel different in their current situation. There is always a story that "explains" how and why they feel the way they do. Were this true there would be no benefit whatsoever from psychotherapy. The chief benefit is awakening, in the client, the recognition that they are completely in charge of how they feel - i.e, PUSHING THEIR OWN BUTTONS. Once the client accepts this, the major hurdle in psychotherapy has been overcome. That doesn't mean that there is no more room for growth in therapy, it just means that the "CURE" has been accomplished. Now, the task is to build onto and reinforce the "CURE".

Re-programming yourself assumes that the "CURE" has been accomplished and that you accept the notion that you are in charge of your destiny.

RE-PROGRAMMING AS AN ART FORM

Most of us seem to have arrived at our current store of programs in a haphazard, random fashion. In fact, most of our programming is controlled by "meta-programs" that determine what additional programs "we" want to acquire. This is why Joe Criminal acquires new programs such as safe-cracking, mugging, burglary and assault, while Joe Doctor, a neurosurgeon, acquires: office management; brain surgery; medical school professor, ...

While it may be true that there is a certain haphazard and random quality to re-programming it is more likely that we "create" opportunities to acquire new programs. Many people do not believe that any event is purely random. They, instead, see that coincidences can all be explained if you just stretch your imagination a little bit. For any two people who smoke there are probably slightly different "stories" about how they became smokers. Likewise, each person who chooses, heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality arrived at that choice on their own, seemingly unique, path. If you want to make changes in your internal programming you have to accept the fact that there will be a certain amount of haphazard, randomness in your re-programming efforts. What works for you will often prove deficient for the person sitting next to you on the commuter train.

Fortunately, there are some general themes that seem applicable in a wide variety of re-programming efforts. Generally speaking, establishing the desired goal as a positive rather than a negative change works best. Setting up rewards for small changes in behavior works better than seeking gross re-programming changes outright. Recording your starting behavior and monitoring your changing behavior with procedures derived from behavior modification therapies (or management by objectives technology) works better than not having any idea where you started and where you are currently, at any time after you start your re-programming efforts.

An interesting aspect about re-programming is that indirection or mis-direction is often more effective than a frontal assault on a particular behavior. Encouraging sub-behaviors, or related behaviors, that are not as important as the behavior targeted for change but which are not consonant with your undesired behaviors tends to be more effective than directly assaulting a problem by saying you will "never" do such and such again. You will see examples of mis-direction and indirection in some of the scripts in the appendices at the back of the book.

Another important tool in achieving behavioral change is the "enrollment" of other people in your new identity. This can happen in two broad ways. First, and probably most effective, is to identify people in your current life, or people you can become involved with who are supportive of the person that you want to be. Just as "Born-Again Christian's" seem to seek out the company of other "Born-Again Christians" if you are seeking to become a non- smoker it only makes good sense to start having more non-smokers around you.

The second, and more difficult, method is to "enroll" the people who are currently in your life to support the changes that you want to make. Let them know that you intend to stop smoking and ask them to be supportive of you in this effort. If they are smokers, ask them to refuse to give you cigarettes. Also, ask them to encourage you in your efforts and to not speak disparagingly about your efforts to bring about these changes. The more people that you "enroll" in supporting your new sense of identity, the easier it will be to make the changes that you desire.

It is essential, in this context, to note that there is no general sense of reality. Reality is a social construct and things are real to the extent that people ascribe to the view that they are real. Prior to the demonstration that the world was round, most people believed that the world was flat and that if you went too far you would come to the end and fall off. The fact that virtually everybody believed this didn't make it true. BUT, the fact that almost everybody believed this kept them from finding out the truth. As long as they believed that the world was flat they continued to avoid behaving as though it were not. In essence, the reality was that the world was flat not as an objective fact but as a consequence of people's agreement.

Getting in touch with the manner in which you have created a world which you do not like, is the single biggest hurdle you will ever face in life. Once you accept both responsibility and and opportunity for change, change is easy. Welcome to the Path Pilgrim.