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“Mental Machine” Methods

Igor: Welcome back.

Students: [Yay!]

Igor: I like that that’s good. How are you doing? Having fun? Keeping up with the pace? It’s this a good pace? Not too fast, not too slow? Okay, good.

You may have noticed on each one of your chairs, we had a little a white handout. Please keep it safe, cherished, love it and treat it like your own

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Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved children. Not the kind that take away your freedom, but the kind that the government gives you subsidies for, because this list of children is going to help you be more influential.

1. It’s the list I referred to, earlier on of some of the more important symbols and some of the meanings that you can apply to them.

Remember, this list is a starting point. It’s not an ending point. It’s just to get your ideas rolling.

2. Secondly, this is not a fixed thing.

You must always apply it to the context, the people and the situation in an intelligent manner. If you don’t, you’re welcome not to. Seriously, you can do what you want. You’re all adults here. It’s just please don’t come complaining to me saying oh, I did this and this, and I don’t know why the results got there. If you want to do your own thing, then I guess you have to experience your own results and make your own conclusions from that.

My opinion is that this is a starting point. It’s a good thing to get a sense of what symbols you can start using and framing fro which outcomes, for which unconscious maneuvers.

However, we cannot get locked into them, that this must mean that. If someone talks about ants, it does not necessarily mean that they’re feeling controlled or stuck in a social role. They might just love ants. They might have studied them, and for them it means something very different, the fascination of them and so on. Do you see where we’re going with this?

I want to make sure that is a clear disclaimer so that you realize this is not the Freudian thing of saying, cigars are other things that look like cigars and it’s always the same thing. It’s not, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to consider that, so it gives you more scope in terms of how to make it fit different contexts.

Student:

♦ Is this derived mainly for Jungian archetypes?

Igor: Primarily, that’s a starting point, and then what we do is – and this is what I encourage you guys to do – the same thing you did in your groups. I sat

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Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved down and thought about what the cultural associations are to these things?

If someone starts talking about this, how do they typically use these symbols in everyday language and what do they mean by them?

When someone says you know what, I’ve been coming to this job in and out and I feel like an ant. What are they saying? They might say they’re feeling insignificant. They might say that they’re feeling the social control. So I’m mapping out those associations, those feelings that come with people and that gives me a richer sense of the symbols; hence, it’s a starting point.

There may be flaws within it because they’re just my current perceptions of it and, hopefully, they’re relatively close, but they’re just educated guesses and your educated guesses are as good as mine. Does this help you?

Student:

♦ Do you recommend looking further into Jungian archetypes?

Igor: Absolutely, 100%.

Student: More than Freud.

Igor: Yes. Freud was interesting. He had a lot of things right, but the problem is two things. He had a lot of things wrong and because he did not like – he’d didn’t brook any arguments or especially his daughter, Anna Freud, someone who really messed things up. She idolized her father. He became a god, so that he could do nothing wrong and that, I think, destroyed the whole Freudian thing as far as I’m concerned because you couldn’t start sorting out the weak from a chaff.

If all you get is whatever this person is doing is always got to be right, the sun shines from everything he says and does well, that person is going to end up doing some very weird things that have no bearing on reality, and you’re going to ruin the potential that was there. I personally believe that’s happened with Freud’s work.

He had some real ingenious ideas around defense mechanisms and stuff like that, but then other things got over accentuated, because no one was

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Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved allowed to question the church of Freud, so it got a little bit weird in my opinion and Jung was less cluttered. Jung was much more open about it.

Do you want to know a little bit of Jung? He’s a very interesting character.

Jung was Freud’s protégé and got his start in life in psychoanalysis and so on. Then, as he was going into his 30’s, he and Freud started having increasing clashes and Freud did not like people saying, no you’re wrong.

Jung had to. His ideas were going this way.

Something very interesting happened. Eventually, Freud kicked him out of the organization broke. There was a big – it was like a father denying his son and it affected Jung terribly. Before this big split came, Jung was your quintessential clinical cold professor. Very smart, very fast, he got all these concepts and connections, very logical and very left brained, but personal skills were very low on the scale of things. People respected him, but they didn’t like him very much.

Soon after he split with Freud, he ended up having a psychotic break. He ended up for the next, I don’t know, four or five years having figures from Hell come up randomly and chat to him in his garden. Now most people would freak out at this point. Jung actually did something that is, I guess, very Shamanic.

Rather than inducing more fear in himself because of the psychosis, the psychotic break that he had, he became very curious about this. He postulated that these figures from Hell were actually his own subconscious, his shadow self as he later called, teaching him things about himself, things that would free him, rather than all these insecurities that were keeping him all hemmed in as he had been before.

So for those five years he kept a very detailed set of journals. I believe they’re called The Red Book. They’re a large collection of works over the period of four or five years and he documents these conversations with his own psychosis, which is really, when you think about, psychosis is talking directly to your unconscious mind with no social filters. Really, that’s what it is.

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Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved The problem is, if you medicate psychosis– I’m not going to start preaching about this whole thing, but you’re welcome to my opinion, and seeing how I’m on my soapbox, I’m going to stay here for a little longer– you don’t have any chance to shift it, to shift the river somewhere else. It’s either on or off, and the message is this is bad, this is scary, so you increase fear, which now, of course, increases the fear feedback loop.

Jung did something unique for Western society, something which is actually very common in older societies – the more Shamanic, native traditions – which is he embraced the psychotic break and came out of it a truly changed person. He was like this avuncular grandfatherly figure that people loved. They just wanted to sit and listen to him. They didn’t care what he said; they just wanted to sit and listen to him and they felt good.

Young people idolized him as a true positive force in their lives. Old people respected him for his intellect and his way with other people. It was a truly remarkable change, all because of the psychotic break and how he interacted with it.

Another way of putting it is it was all because of how he was willing to interact with his unconscious symbols, the messages that were coming out in a very powerful way, and how he interacted with them. So that’s one of the reasons, I think, Jungian psychology is a phenomenal place to start with this whole unconscious symbolism, but only start there. Please, like anyone else – and I include myself in this category – do not assume that it’s the gospel truth. James knows the gospel truth. Nobody else does. You share the gospel truth, thank you.

The point is it’s a starting point, unless you do your own thinking. Unless you do your own experimenting, you come to your own conclusions and you try it out and notice different reactions, all this stuff will be to a certain extent hit or miss. It’s a great starting point. It’s a great way to feed your mind, but really you must engage in this yourself to understand this more.

The process is very simple. It is to track your own associations. A great resource for this is dreams and so on. If we get a chance, we’ll show you how to do some kind of waking dream processes. You actually started

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Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved already earlier on with the strange new world. Wasn’t that a form of waking dream? And you had to quickly interfere.

You can build that up into something very profound, which incidentally to answer your question from earlier, is another one of the projects that are bubbling in the background. It’s kind of how to transform your own personal blueprint without having to have a psychotic break. That’s kind of nice, isn’t it? But that’s not ready yet. There’s a lot of work involved in that. Does that help you? So yes, I would recommend Jungian archetypes as a starting point, rather than an end-point.

We may as well have a general Q&A session right now because we’re going to be covering a lot of content.

Is everyone clear so far?

Are you having fun?

Who here feels that they have a better grasp of what we mean by the performance elements when it comes to storytelling now?

You may have read a lot about this stuff. Hopefully, it has now brought it to life and it’s easy. It’s within each one of you. It’s not a skill that you have to learn from scratch and spend years mastering. It’s there; you just have to find how to uncover it. It’s actually about doing less, rather than doing more.

It’s putting less effort in, rather than more. It’s still an effort in terms of it takes work and energy and commitment and so on, but less of this kind of effort. Does that make sense? It becomes easier and so you get better results.

This is your starting point for the symbolism and you’ve already got your starting point in terms of the performance. Please don’t think that just because you did half an hour or an hour and a half of exercises around performance stuff that it’s there, it’s perfect and it’s going to be there for you at all times. Like anything else, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. So once again, consider those exercises as starting points.

The beauty is every time you have a conversation, you have free practice time, and you have 100 hypnotists in the room with whom I hope you’ll have at least one more conversation before you leave in the next three days.

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Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved Then you have a whole world of people out there who are waiting to hear things from you, so you may as well practice, right?

The key is to always keep it simple. Just choose one idea, one concept, throw it in, and when it’s so simple that it’s easier to not think about it than to just do it, than you add the next principle and so on. Does that help?

Yes/no? Get on with it? I’ll get on with it then.

All right, what I’d like to cover now as the final portion of today is how do we create metaphor machines? How would you like to be able to build a machine inside your mind that automatically tells you or helps you find the perfect simile or metaphor for a situation to be more persuasive? Wouldn’t that be something? Yes?

Well, actually there are about four of them that I have in mind, and I’m going to try to get through all of them if I can in the process of the next one and a half hours. Is that cool? It does mean; however, that we’re going to have to be strict on the whole timing to make sure we fit it in. Is that okay with you guys? Because personally, I’d rather give you more than less, that’s up to you though.

The first metaphor machine I call the analogy machine. The analogy machine is very simple. We’re going to use the guiding principle – by the way, you know the guiding principle we’ve been using all afternoon, do you know what it’s called? It’s called the access state principle or at least, I call it that.

Where you access a certain state and everything else – behaviors, abilities, skills, insights and memories – are attached to that state. We already spent 90 minutes figuring out how to find the storytelling state, and notice how your abilities grow with it, haven’t we?

We’re going to use state– our emotional feelings and moods– as the engines or even maybe the fuels that drive these machines. Does that make sense? So the analogy machine works like this. I’d like you to start with a simple feeling and do your best to actually feel it. It could be something like feeling in love. It could be something more negative like an argument or feeling frustrated, feeling helpless.

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Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved It could be something more positive like being excited, a sense of hope or the feeling of kindness towards another human being, whatever it is that you need to convey to the other person or where they’re starting from. Is that easy to do, to experience an element of that emotion inside yourself? Yes?

Okay, now if you recall the strange new world, you opened your mind up and allowed something to come to you, rather than trying to force a situation didn’t you? Would that be fair to say? So it’s more like you open the gates and let a stream come out than you trying to drag something out from your unconscious. So when I say your next stream, a situation out of your mind, I hope you understand what I mean by this. It’s like that strange new world thing.

What you’re essentially going to do is you’re going to feel that feeling and ask yourself, what other situations does someone or something feel this way? For example, let’s take the idea of frustration. Anyone ever feel frustrated? No one. Is it just me? My God, I must have something wrong with me. So when we feel frustration, ask yourself the question what is this like, what kind of situations? Well, let’s think about it.

Anyone here ever stand in line like at a bank or a supermarket, and it’s slowly creeping forward? I had something like this happen to me during the last trip I came here. I was standing in line in the Immigrations going to the U.S. and all I have to say is the New York Airport, and I think most people understand what I’m talking about.

So it’s slow. I get right to the front and there are two people in front of me.

Closed! What? Oh, you’ll have to go to the back of that queue. Slow, slower, slower. Closed! Twice! How are you guys feeling, by the way? Is this a story happening? It happens to be true as well, and at the time I thought, at least I’ll be able to use this in a seminar. So do you get the idea of how feelings stream a situation to you? What if I did something completely different?

Let’s think about a different kingdom, the animal kingdom rather than the human world. What if there’s a dog and it’s time for its walk. It’s been running around and it’s waiting and waiting and waiting, but the master’s not coming home. Now its bladder is starting to get a little bit full as well, and it

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Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved knows that if it pees in the kitchen, there’s a newspaper going to come, so he’s got to hold on tight.

There’s the door, its waiting and there are steps outside. Is it? Then they walk right past and the dog goes, oh Christ, I was so close– if dogs could talk, of course.

Does that again evoke a similar experience? So it’s a very simple process.

You start with a feeling and you allow that to evoke or stream a situation, a context that you can talk to people about. Now if you wish to – icing on the cake – if you wish to, you can then accentuate or even add some symbols to accentuate your message. Chances are, however, the situation you find will automatically have certain symbols in there that fit the context that you have. It’s just the way your unconscious mind works, it would rather have things fit and have meaning than not. It’s easier.

Do you remember the language exercises we did on the first day? Which was easier, to not make sense and talk complete nonsense or to actually focus your language into making sense and connections and so on? Which one was easier? Honestly. The second, right? That’s because it’s easier to make meaning than not. It’s easier to find meaningful stories and examples than not, and the only reason people have trouble with it is you know why?

Because you’re trying too hard, it’s not you.

Student: It’s the other you.

Igor: Exactly. It’s the other you. Then it’s all easy. Does this analogy machine make sense to you guys? It’s very simple when you know how. This is the

Igor: Exactly. It’s the other you. Then it’s all easy. Does this analogy machine make sense to you guys? It’s very simple when you know how. This is the