This third step is designed to get those feelings and muscle patterns into your body so that when the situation comes up, you will automatically begin to respond in that way. After you have finished this third step you ask your unconscious to have this behavior naturally and spontaneously begin to occur more frequently in your behavior in the appropriate contexts. This works very, very well as a self–programming device.

Woman: Are you doing that as instruction to your unconscious before you go into a trance?

Yes. It's too complicated to do for yourself inside the trance. And I suggest that you start with small behaviors. For example, "I want to learn to smile when I want to get a certain response." Then later take bigger and bigger chunks of behavior.

I've given you a step–by–step process for inducing and using altered states for yourself. If you find these instructions tedious, let me reassure you that after you've practiced them, they will streamline very quickly so it will take only a matter of sixty seconds or so to alter your consciousness. You will be able to do it between sessions or during short breaks.

Discussion

Harry: Would you talk about how to distort your perceptions of time? How would you use hypnosis to speed up or slow down your perceptions of events?

How I would do that would depend upon whether I was going to do it to myself or to someone else. With myself, I would instruct my unconscious to find lots of experiences that have one factor in common: changing the speed of my perceptions. For example, you know what happens when you are zooming down the freeway and then exit from an off ramp into regular city traffic and seem to be going zero miles an hour. Or when you're really enjoying something, time seems to fly by, and hours seem like moments.

Those are examples of changes in your perception of time, which are indications that such changes are possible. I would ask my unconscious to find every example that it can think of, and to put me in those experiences. The only common thread that goes through all of the experiences is having control over time and the speed of reality.

While my unconscious was doing this, I would ask it to create some sort of control knob for me, so that I could speed things up or slow them down. I would set it up so that after I went through twenty experiences my eyes would open, I would still be in a trance, and I would be able to turn the knob one way to speed things up and turn it the other way to slow them down.

That is how I would go about it. I know that time distortion exists in my normal experience already, so that is where I would find it. Then I could make tennis an opportunity to use time distortion. I could make the time slow enough so that I could respond easily, and then adjust the speed in between serves. After each serve I'd go back and evaluate "Was it fast or slow that time?" and adjust the knob accordingly.

Harry: Is there a way that I could speed up learning things, like hypnosis?

My guess is that you should be able to tell me the answer to that question. 1 can give you an example of how to do it, but I'm more interested in your knowing how to do it yourself. You know what it is that you want. So what are the parameters you are working with? If you want to speed up your perceptions, find some examples of having done it, and then give yourself some control over the process. You know that you've learned things. You know that you can integrate them. You know you have a standard speed. So how can you speed that up?

Harry: By going to the contexts in which I would do that normally. Sure. But the factor that is really going to allow you to learn more quickly is the presence of more time. All you have to do is create two months. Is that enough? In other words, do what's called "pseudo–orientation in time." Put yourself into a trance and project yourself into the future. Tell yourself that instead of being tomorrow, it's two months from now, Then, in trance, relive fully all the time between now and then; create all the necessary history for if to be two months from now. You can make up all the clients you worked with and all the things you did; you can make up everything that happened between then and now. Create in detail all the history that you need in order to have already learned lots about NLP and hypnosis.

Whenever you want anything, all you have to do is think of where it would happen anyway, and then make that up. Hypnosis is a way of making a reality. If you know that something you want will happen in a specific reality, then use that reality to create what you want. If it doesn't happen in any reality that you know of, then create a reality in which it would happen.

Woman: Is it possible to create an overload of other realities?

Yes. It's called psychosis. When you use alternative realities, you must do so as a lawyer would. You must make sure that when you build realities, you build ones that are thorough and complete. You must make sure that they will accomplish what you want, and you must make sure that there's a doorway out of them. If you create sloppy realities and live in them, then you will respond in a sloppy way, and that will make you a junky person.

There's a book written by a well–known hypnotist that gives people inductions to read aloud to each other. There are programs in those inductions that make people really junky. People who read them will install strategies in each other which will not be beneficial for their overall functioning. To me that's foolish, and it's a kind of foolishness that I call indulgence. It's important not to be indulgent about using hypnosis. When you build a reality, build one that will work, and build it completely and thoroughly so that you gel exactly what you need. You don't want to just build a crazy reality and go live in it, because you have no idea how you will respond to it. You may respond to it with emphysema! You want to make sure that you build one that is going to work well for you.

Most of the hypnotic realities that people have built for themselves and live in most of the time—what they call the waking state —are not profoundly useful. I mean that literally. The majority of the people I meet in the world have built a hypnotic reality which, on the whole, weighing the good against the bad and the pleasure against the pain, isn't really beneficial for them. To me that's indulgent. You don't want to make matters worse, only more useful.

Erickson's criteria of usefulness were for all his clients to get married, get a job, have children, and send him presents. Those are not my criteria. People sent me presents but I never got anything 1 wanted, except once. I'm not going to change everybody so that they get married and so on. Erickson did, because he believed that you must do those things,

I do think that you've got to be thorough when you build alternative realities, or when you build your own reality. For instance, I think the reality that humanistic psychologists have built is incredibly indulgent and not useful. That kind of indulgence is dangerous. Sometimes I get invited to do a keynote address at some humanistic psychology conference, and I find being there more terrifying than being in a criminal institution. The ethic that criminals have is at least conducive to survival. Many of the programs and kinds of realities that people are installing in each other at humanistic conferences are not even conducive to their own survival. If anything, they are detrimental. Those realities have a tendency to put people in situations of danger where they might actually get hurt. It may never happen, but it could. People don't usually consider the premises of what they do, and it's not just humanistic psychologists who operate that way. Everybody does.

Woman: What kind of realities do psychologists create that are destructive?