Welcome to		The Hypnosis Web Page and Home of Pushing Your Own Buttons

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 2

WHERE DOES THE INTERNAL DIALOGUE COME FROM

Freud felt that most of your personality structure was in place by the age of two years. Most psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and counselling professionals would agree that the overwhelming majority of personality characteristics are in place by the age of five. If you think about it for a moment, it will be easy to see that most of your beliefs about yourself, people and the world are either in agreement with your "PARENTS" or are reactions to your "PARENTS" beliefs about themselves, you and the world.

I use "PARENTS" rather than "parents" because I want to stress that it is not the usual notion of biological parent that I have in mind. The nuclear family, the American ideal for the last fifty to a hundred years has been a colossal failure. Divorce runs rampant throughout the land. Fathers, mothers and children are torn apart as a result of divorce, disability and death. The notion of two parents, one of whom works while the other nurtures the children and strives to make a safe and pleasant home environment has completely fallen apart. In it's place are single parent households where this lone parent works full time, maybe even has two jobs. Instead of providing nurturing and being deeply involved in their child's growth and development, these single parents often have to delegate child-rearing to someone else. Often, that someone else is little more than a television set that keeps the children occupied and distracted (more about distraction later).

When I use the term "PARENTS" it is meant to refer to the people who played a significant role in rearing you from infancy until now. However, the time before you were five years old appears to be significant. The Law of Primacy (see appendix) appears to be a good rule of thumb in explaining why early childhood experiences seem to have such a dramatic effect on your life. Your "PARENTS" might have been your biological parents. They may have been your adoptive parents. They may have been your foster parents. They may have been day-care personnel, orphanage workers, neighbors, relatives or friends of the family. They may even be characters in movies, on television and soap operas. Many readers of this book will have no recollection of who these people were. In fact, it really doesn't matter who they were. The reality is, that you carry them around in your head and you hear them in your head. They are coming through in all your thoughts. If you are in your forties it is quite likely that television and movie characters played some role in your life as "PARENTS".

While it is probably true that many of your programs are acquired during the first five years of your life, this is not the only period during which you acquire new programs. You acquire new programs throughout the course of your life. Some of you constantly increase the rapidity with which you acquire new programs while others of you seem to continually slow down the acquisition of new programs. In reality, you are all, constantly re-programming yourselves. The distinction here, is that most of us are opening yourselves to being re-programmed with the same banal programs, day after day after day.

If you watch several television soap operas for a period of a month or so you will see the same exact themes being played out: infidelity, self-absorption, deceit, dishonesty, and hiding oneself from other people. Despite the fact that none of this behavior 63;1;2;4;6;8;9;15cever gets people what they want, not for very long anyway, the characters on one soap are essentially carbon copies of the characters on every other soap opera. In fact, the characters on soap operas today are the carbon copies of the characters on soap operas twenty and thirty years ago. Little ever changes.

The distressing thing is that the lives of the people who watch soap operas (and even those who eschew soap operas) are distressingly like the lives of the soap opera characters. They lack intimacy and openness in their lives. They lack any enduring social values. They lack direction and purposefulness and this goes on day after day after day. Perhaps even worse, it is as though most of us were engaged in rehearsing for our "real lives" which we expect to arrive sometime after our deaths. THIS IS NOT A REHEARSAL.

These people are constantly re-programming themselves with the same banalities. Instead of re-programming themselves with new information, they are merely reinforcing their old programs. Though they have the capacity to acquire brand new programs each and every day, they simply don't do this. From the standpoint of someone who doesn't realize that you are constantly re-programming yourself it looks like these people are no longer learning. They are learning. They just aren't learning anything new. There may actually be a time when the brain shuts itself down to re- programming. It may be that Alzheimer's disease, coma and massive brain injury are examples of the brain shutting down. On the other hand, it may be the way that you treat people that determines whether they acquire new programming or continue to re-program their futures to be like their past.

When a person goes into a coma instead of increasing the stimulation that they experience we tend to leave them alone. It would seem to be a lot better strategy to increase the level of stimulation. Leave a radio or television on, have news reports, have lights that change in color and intensity, stimulate the taste receptors, massage the person and introduce interesting odors to the environment. Hook them up to a machine that will exercise them automatically. It is far more likely that a coma victim treated in this manner will come around then it is that a coma victim left in a quiet room with the same sounds, odors and sensations, hour after hour will spontaneously awaken.

In fact, considering the fact that most coma patients are plugged in to a variety of machines it is probably the case that their usual stimulation is so painful that they are impeded from "waking" rather than encouraged to "waken". I have long believed and practiced the notion that there is much to be learned during sleep. While the brain slows down to replenish itself, sleep is also an excellent time to be re-programming oneself and acquiring new information. The tapes that you will make, with the assistance of this book are only one of many ways that you can use the time that you normally reserve for sleeping to be acquiring new knowledge, skills and attitudes.

BIO-MACHINES AND YOU

The amazing thing is that most of your "PARENTS" would be surprised to discover that they had any effect on you at all. The sad truth is that most of your programming was completely unintentional. Nobody would go out of their way to program an expensive machine to self-destruct. A machine, by the way, is exactly what you are. A most ingenious machine, to be sure, but a machine nonetheless.

Most machines are constructed to address a specific purpose. Wood saws are built to cut wood. But they may also be used to cut plastic, polyethylene foam, plastic and maybe even metal. You could balance a saw between two supports and use it as a shelf. You could bend the saw back and place an object on it and use it as a catapult. If the saw was small enough you could even use it to stir sugar and cream into your coffee. With the exception of cutting wood, the raison D'etre for it's construction, the saw is being "misused". If you doubt this for a moment, borrow a wood saw from a friend, neighbor or relative who really reveres their tools. Use this "wood saw" to cut a rubber tire or use it to mix concrete and return it without cleaning it up so that there will be no question about how you used it. You'll get a fast lesson in the appropriate use of tools. Of course, you will never get to borrow tools from this person again.

Galileo engaged in thought experiments. He reasoned thusly: If a heavier object falls faster than a light object than when you "glue" together a heavy and a light object they should: 1) Fall to earth faster because the combined object is heavier and 2) Fall to earth more slowly because the lighter object would act as a drag on the heavier object. Without ever tossing objects off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Galileo "knew" what was going to happen because there was no other way the actual experiment could go. Rather than experiencing the reaction of your friend, relative or neighbor perhaps you can try a "thought experiment" of your own.

If you are not into tools, ask a relative, friend or neighbor if you can borrow their silverware. Then, when you have gotten their permission, tell them that you intend to use one of their steak knives to cut branches from your tree. If not silverware, try borrowing their crystal punch bowl to use to catch the oil from your car's engine when doing an oil change. Another possibility is to ask a friend if you could borrow her wedding dress to sponge up the water from an overflowed toilet.

All the above are examples of devising or creating new uses for a machine/tool. Whether it is a simple lever, a saw or a human being there is hardware and there is software. The hardware represents the original "intended" purposes and the limitations of use. These limitations are often intended limitations rather than actual physical limitations. In the last few years, many insurance companies have had to pay out on claims for people who have inappropriately used ladders as diving boards. These people didn't intend to dive off the ladders but their inappropriate use of these ladders had the same effect.

A ball of cookie dough can be extruded (stretched out) to form a longer, thinner cylinder of dough from which cookies may be cut. In the extrusion process, the primary function of the dough is not changed - it is there to be made into cookies (chocolate chips are my favorites}. Human beings on the other hand are extremely poor candidates for extrusion. Cookie dough can be extruded to many times it's original length without altering it's ability to be used to make cookies. On the other hand, the primary function of a human being is completely destroyed with only very minor stretching. Stretch a human being to be 50% taller and all you have is a dead human being. Use a steak knife to cut tree branches and you have a dull steak knife. Use a crystal bowl to collect the oil drained from your car and it's owner will probably never use it for punch again.

The meaning I attribute to all of this is that there are inherent limitations in all machines. Accordingly, you might consider the differences between machines. One important distinction to make when using machines is their adaptability. Some machines are quite adaptable in terms of their physical characteristics. A saw has many unintended, but equally plausible uses. Not all of these uses will preserve the intended function of the saw. For example, a saw will work for a while as a stirrer for molten steel. However, sooner or later, the saw will melt and will no longer be able to be used as a saw.

The first level of machines were simple but useful machines or tools. The lever and wheel have been around for thousands of years. Though they are quite simple, they have been incorporated into thousands of other, more intricate and useful machines. One hundred years ago, there were far fewer tools available at a hardware store. In fact, there was a profession known as tool and die making, the members of which were skilled at making tools. Usually tool and die makers would design and build a tool to do one simple task and when they completed that task they would either throw out the tool, store it for future use or salvage parts of it for use in some other tool-building project. The important thing is that such tools were usually intended to be used only for one task.

To further explain what tool and die makers do, suppose I want to join two pieces of wood at a 90 degree angle. One way to do this is to just put the two pieces together at what looks like a 90 degree angle. Another possibility is to use a protractor to measure the angle. Suppose I am going to join just two pieces of wood together and it makes very little difference how they are joined together. Instead of being joined at a ninety degree angle, let's assume that they can be connected at ninety degrees, give or take forty-five degrees. With such a great latitude, joining them by sight may be an acceptable approach. If I am going to join a small number of pieces of wood, say five joined pieces, and they absolutely have to be close to a right angle (ninety degrees, give or take one degree), i.e. they cannot be at less than eighty-nine degrees nor at more than ninety-one degrees, I might use a protractor (a device for measuring angles). But if I am going to join 1,000 pieces of wood to form 500 joints I will be far better off if I make a tool to help me accomplish this.

How might I make such a tool? One way would be to take two pieces of steel and join them in a 90 degree angle using a very accurate protractor. Then I could just slide two pieces of wood into the frame, make sure that they lay against the metal arms of my tool and that they meet at the intended joint in such a way that they have maximal contact on the intended adjoining surfaces. I won't have to use the protractor ever again and instead of taking thirty to forty seconds to measure and adjust each pair, it will probably only take me four or five seconds to slide the wood into place. If I have to make 500 joints this will save me somewhere between twelve minutes and two hours. If it takes less than twelve minutes to build my tool then I will save time by investing in tool building. When I'm done with my project I will have to decide whether to store the tool I have made, dismantle it, or throw it away. Another possibility is that I will be able to modify it for use in another way - perhaps simultaneously joining three pieces of wood together.

Next let's consider a food processor. A food processor performs a variety of functions in cutting, shredding, dicing, blending and mixing. A food processor replaces many kitchen tools that aren't so versatile. How does it do this? A food processor has many different attachments that allow it to function as many different primary tools. Slip in a cutting blade and the processor will cut fruits and vegetables. Slip in another blade and it will make a tossed salad. Can you use a food processor to mix concrete? Yes, you can mix concrete, but it certainly isn't what it was intended for and you certainly should not use gravel in the mix.

In the garage or tool room, take an electric drill as your tool. By using different types of drill bits you can use the drill for many different purposes. With a wood drill bit the tool is intended for drilling holes in wood. With a metal drill bit it becomes a tool to cut holes in metal. Substitute a concrete drill bit and it becomes an excellent tool for cutting holes in concrete. Substitute a Phillip's head or regular screwdriver bit and it becomes a powerful screwdriver. Can you use a drill to mix a martini? Certainly, but it is not at all how it was intended to be used and you will probably raise some eyebrows at the next cocktail party that you host.

Both the food processor and the electric drill represent a higher order of tools than the tool I created for joining the two pieces of wood. Whereas the joining apparatus was complete, in and of itself, and would have to be modified to do a different task, the electric drill and the food processor were designed to serve a variety of functions with substitute mechanical devices to round out their range of applicability. The use of the electric drill as a power screwdriver was not one of the original intended uses. Even before the current availability of power screwdrivers many people realized that a drill could be used this way. In both of these classes of machines, the drill and the food processor, it is usually necessary to change the hardware to change the range of applicability of the machines.

Another class of machines is those that use both hardware and "software" to change the range of applicability. The computer is the best example of this type of machine today but the old "Player Pianos" that used holes in paper to control the music played is one that older readers will recall.

In their earliest days, computers were hardware bound. The simplest types of adding machines were good examples of hardware bound technology. The advantage of the primitive adding machines was that they could be used in a variety of disciplines. It doesn't matter whether you are counting up apples, oranges or sheep. It doesn't matter whether you are a merchant, an accountant or a scientist. If you had numbers that you needed to add together a mechanical adding machine could do the job for you. Some of the older mechanical adding machines had gears that would turn whenever a new amount was to be added in. As you added from right to left the gears would turn the next highest gear each time that you exceeded a "9".

The earliest electronic computers were very limited in their uses. The approach used in the earliest computers was to hardwire the machines to solve a particular problem. Then came hardwiring to solve a class of related problems. Finally, computers were designed that allowed their range of applicability to change on the basis of programs or software that would direct the power of the computer. This change from hardware to software problem solving was one of the most significant steps forward in the evolution of machine technology. Nowadays, the same basic computer can be used to play games, perform complex mathematical computations, solve numerous scientific and business problems, create art, process words and graphs, and on and on. As time goes on, computers with more and more latent power are developed. As ever more useful software is developed the range of applicability of computers will continue to grow wider and wider.

Human beings are incredibly complex machines but you are a machine. From a hardware point of view you are remarkably similar to every other human being. Most human beings are born with the usual arms, legs, eyes nose, feet, toes, fingers etc. They are also born with what may be the most intriguing piece of hardware in the universe - the human brain. But the brain is simply hardware. The brain is composed of billions of neural cells. As such, there is again a remarkable similarity between human beings when it comes to their brains. The fundamental issue is that the brain is programmable and, more important, it is re-programmable. In fact, the human brain, unlike most machines, can decide to re-program itself. There is no other machine built by mankind that comes close to the human body and the human brain. The real shame about human beings is that most of humans have "meta-programming" and "saboteur programs" that limit their ability to see that re- programming is both necessary and appropriate on a regular basis.

A computer can have a program, called a meta-program that changes the way the computer works. A multi-tasking system is a good example of this. You might have a computer at home or at work that allows you to run two, or more, different programs at the same time. You might have a "windowing" program on your terminal, that allows you to create separate "windows" to work on different tasks, one for spreadsheet work and another for word-processing... If you are working on a letter you might be in the word-processing window. If someone calls up and asks you what 396 times 404 is, you might jump to the spreadsheet window to have the computer calculate this product for you. The operating system allows you to instantaneously adapt the computer to whatever problem you want to solve. In fact, with multi-tasking the computer is actually solving two or more different problems at the same time.

By the way, 396 times 404 is 159,984 -- 400 times 400 minus 16. This shows another aspect of the way the human brain operates. A machine that is given the product of 396 and 404 to calculate will proceed quite mechanically. I, on the other hand, noticed that both 396 and 404 are equally spaced four units on either side of 400. The product then is 400 times 400 minus 4 times 4. Given the same problem as the machine, I was able to use a neat little trick of mental arithmetic. A machine could be programmed to check if this "trick" applies. However, this would be a waste of time for the machine. It can, in general, do the calculations faster than it can check for the appropriateness of using the trick.

I have a set of programs for rapid mental calculation. I developed these as a child and almost all of them were in place by the time I finished high school. Given a particular arithmetic problem I can often tell whether I can do the rapid calculations necessary to solve the problem. Given that I decide to use one of these tricks (programs), I select one, not necessarily the best one, and solve the problem. This element of strategizing and selecting between alternative programs is a unique characteristic of the human brain. This capacity for selecting, on the run, between such competing skills is, perhaps, the most unique capacity in the universe.

The human brain is many orders of magnitude superior to the most complex computers created to date. It has the fundamental distinction of being somewhat self-aware. This means that not only can it be re-programmed but it can monitor itself and it is capable of making a decision with regard to whether or not to re-program itself and what type of re-programming is necessary. The most pitiful aspect of the re-programmability of the human brain is that almost all of you opt either to not engage in re-programming at all or you reprogram your brain each day to function exactly the same way as it functioned the day before.

Worse yet, most of you accept the unintentional, random and haphazard programming you received from your "PARENTS" as you were growing up. You assume that this is the "right" programming and will fight to your deaths to maintain those programs. This wouldn't be too bad except for the fact that most of this initial programming is, completely flawed.

This early programming is flawed in many ways. First, it is flawed because the programs that you created are not even what your "PARENTS" intended. Your "PARENTS" might have been uptight about sexuality/sensuality, so they reprimanded you for playing with yourself, for touching and exploring your genitalia. They believed, perhaps, that it was inappropriate for infants and children to enjoy stimulating themselves. They intended that you not play with yourself, especially when others might be around to see you, but they never intended that you deny yourself the right to be pleasured by your husband, wife or lover. But you may have been only a few months old when they stopped you from playing with yourself. The program you created, around pleasure, was that it was not okay to be touched at all, or that you should be ashamed of your impulses to seek pleasure from yourself or others.

Another good example is the banal program for non-being in the world. Many children are told that they should be "...seen and not heard". In more severe cases they are told (programmed) not to be seen or heard at all. They grow up and become wallflowers. They take menial jobs because they think that they are inadequate. They either don't enter into relationships at all or they enter into abusive relationships where they are taken advantage of over and over. They fail at school, at work and at life because they never even try to succeed. Even in this case, their "PARENTS" didn't intend to produce losers in life, their "PARENTS" thought that they were showing them how to succeed. The problem is that succeeding with your "PARENTS" when you are an infant or young child is not at all the same thing as succeeding in the world as an adult.

Likewise, your parents may have been afraid of fire so they reprimanded you not to play with matches. They never intended for you to die of exposure to the cold with 20 boxes of unopened matches and a pile of firewood in your possession. But there are some people who would do just that because of early childhood prohibitions and the programs they created around them. In the worst case scenario, the programming is so banal that you don't even make the connection between the matches and the wood and that of a fire and warmth. There are many people who are homeless and living on the streets who have not made this type of connection with the fact that there is money all around them.

The reason that it doesn't matter who your "PARENTS" were is that knowing where your internal dialogue and your programs come from doesn't free you from the constraints you have imposed on yourself. Sigmund Freud encouraged awareness and expression of the internal dialogue as a primary ingredient in psychoanalysis. He felt that as a person became more aware of the internal dialogue, they would be freed of their neuroses. In fact, very few people have benefitted from psychoanalysis.

Five generations of psychoanalysis patients have bravely trooped in to their analysts offices three to five times per week. Many such patients have continued psychoanalysis for decades. They have become incredibly self-aware in that process. They have ascribed most of their behavior to re-directed sexual impulses and they interpret their behavior and the behavior of others in largely sexual terms. What most of these clients haven't done is to transform their lives so that they can be free. Free of their programs, free of the influence of their "PARENTS", and most of all free of their analysts.

In my terms, Freud was trying to make his patients self-aware of their programs. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with becoming more aware of your programs. In fact, that is precisely what you are encouraged to do in this book. The difference is that that was all that Freud had his patients do until the analysis stage of their therapy was close to completion. This book, on the other hand, has you working to CHANGE your programs from the start.

This book is a relatively painless way to bring about profound change very rapidly. This book is excellent for people who have not had, until now, the self-control to use other methods of bringing about significant behavioral and emotional change in their lives. If you have tried meditation but didn't "get it", this book is for you. If you have been on more diets than you can remember, this book is for you. If you have trouble concentrating on your work or your studies, this book is for you. In fact, if you even have trouble sticking with this book, this book is for you - so dedicate yourself to getting through the first few chapters. At that point you will have learned enough about how to re-program yourself to enable you to finish the book.

There is no gut-wrenching requirement to consciously change. Instead, you decide what you want to change. Then, you write a script that will "gently" encourage that change. Then you make a self-hypnosis tape that contains that script. Then, you listen to the tape as you are ready to go to sleep at night. At the end of the tape you will just drift off to sleep. When you wake up the next morning you will feel relaxed, refreshed and better than you have ever felt before.

This book is about striving for freedom. It is easier and more efficient than psychoanalysis and other traditional forms of therapy and self-help. But, human beings "being" as they are, it is a never ending process. Once you start to realize your ability to transform your life, you will want to do it often. At first, most readers will be thinking thoughts such as: "I don't want to feel ugly anymore" or "I don't want to feel stupid anymore". They will use this book to transform themselves and they will start feeling beautiful and intelligent.

Other people will see and respond to these changed self- images. Then the person who used to feel ugly or stupid will not be satisfied with feeling beautiful and intelligent. They will want to re-program themselves to feel stronger, healthier, more socially adroit, more confident in business and personal relationships, more energetic and more sexually responsive. This is exactly what I intend to happen.

There is no end to the refinement that can be achieved using the methods described in this book. The person who feels ugly and stupid does not immediately think of being sexier and more energetic. However, when they feel beautiful and intelligent, they come to realize that there is more to life than not feeling ugly and stupid. Likewise, there are many people whose daily lives are filled with unpleasant memories or fears. This book will help those people leave these unpleasant memories and fears behind. Once relieved of those memories and fears such readers will see an entire universe of possibilities opening up for them. This is all just as it should be.