Chapter Twenty. One White Horse

Some of the evenings in the Santa Cruz mountains were spent experimenting with and developing deep trance phenomena in and out of trance. On one evening the agenda was to elicit positive hallucinations out of trance.

Some peoples' criteria for going into trance is to experience wild and bizarre hallucinations. My test for deep trance was to be able to hallucinate a full size live white horse. After many futile attempts assisted by group members, Richard came over to see what was going on. It wasn't until years later that I realized he performed a very slick induction on me.

Richard asked me if I could see auras. When I said no, he talked in a dimly lit room about defocusing my eyes and seeing peripherally to be able to see his aura. If you are ever around Richard in a dimly lit room, you have to be almost blind to not see his vibrant orange, red and yellow aura. From there we progressed to seeing black holes which are the vulnerable spots in people's auras.

After inducing a trance in me he asked me if I could see the white horse. I said no and he said where. I said [pointing] over there. He asked me to outline it for him and I did. He then asked me if I could see it now. As I was stroking its mane I said no. A week later I not only believed that I saw the horse, I went riding on it!

Chapter Twenty Two. Xray Eyes

Experiencing positive hallucinations consciously is fun. Even more fun can be to create a negative hallucination. Negative hallucinations are the process of taking away an object that is present. The technique developed in much the same manner as positive hallucinations. We used trance states to access resources for when we had the ability to create negative hallucinations then we developed techniques to create the phenomena out of trance.

The evening we experimented with negative hallucinations was especially fun for me as I practiced developing xray eyes. Imagine what you can do with that. Well I did, and started practicing partial negative hallucinations and of course I practiced firstly on women.

Actually it began as a joke one evening at the Alda Road training programs. We were practicing negative hallucinations so I thought, why don't I try this on women. I practiced partially undressing women in the workshop and then telling them what color their underclothes were. When you think of it, we do this activity all of the time anyway, don't we? It was all done in the name of science of course.

Negative hallucinations got to be my forte after a while although I decided to give it up one day when I was practicing taking away automobiles and it dawned on me that may not be such a useful thing to do. It scared the shit out of me actually. When I now teach the practice I am sure to include a statement of caution. You may ask, why bother to do it in the first place? Aside from the fun factor, it assists in developing and reaccessing the visual flexibility you once had as a child. Anyone who is an architect would find immediate application to positive and negative hallucination skills.

The experimenting of these techniques of deep trance phenomena kept leading to the same question. What makes it possible for people to do all of these fun things in trance and not be able to do them in a normal state of consciousness? Why do people sometimes change easily when hypnosis is used and don't change when it is not?

These questions and others led to building exercises and techniques that could enable people to demonstrate deep trance phenomena and a variety of trance states when not in a trance. Erickson, Satir, and Perls' language patterns and Castaneda's metaphors combined with classical conditioning models came together and the synthesis which was the collapse anchors exercises, change history and reframing models.

The combination of these techniques and their historical roots led people to believe that Neuro-Linguistic Programming was a new psychotherapy. In fact Robert wrote a paper titled NLP: A New Psychotherapy which was the precursor to the book NLP: The Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience Volume 1.

Chapter Twenty Three. J Ward

I can remember one evening at the Santa Cruz mountain retreat lodge, it was a training group night, and on this night Richard and John designated us patients in "J ward". J ward was in a psychiatric hospital, where burnt out psychologists and psychiatric social workers were placed.

The specific task for each person in J ward was to take on a role that was given to them by either Richard or John. Our task was to completely identify with our role. For example with stubbornness, a person who is very stubborn had to take on the role of being catatonic. A person who was putting himself on a pedestal would be asked to take on the role of Jesus Christ and so on. We had a catatonic, we had Jesus Christ, we had Mary Magdalen and several other biblical, historical and political characters.

After the individuals were given roles, they were then taken into separate rooms where another student would put them into an altered state of consciousness using Milton Erickson's model of hypnosis and then have the person do deep trance identification with the role that they were to be playing, come out of trance and completely identify with that role.

They would then circulate around J ward and the person who induced them into a trance was then to take on the task of curing that patient. Using any one of the NLP tools which were available, some of these consisted of lying congruently, using the meta model, using anchoring or using metaphor.

I played the role of suffering from the delusions of being Jesus Christ. Paul was to cure me. I was asked to take my clothes off and to put on a robe. Paul tried out various techniques including the meta model and metaphor. After circulating around the ward Jesus Christ had to fend off being seduced by Mary Magdalen and was asked to assist in the building of a house seeing he was a carpenter. I was then taken to an upstairs room and underwent further treatment.

After awhile I was tired of being Jesus Christ, so I jumped out of a two story window and to everyone's surprise entered through the main entrance on the ground floor and as I watched mouths hang open with amazement, I announced that I had returned.

The technique of stopping the world became a very significant component of being a people helper and utilizing the tools of NLP effectively. It was ingrained in us, week after week, and we were taught several techniques through the use of reframing and anchoring to assist us in stopping the world. The results were to be able to be more accessible to information and resources as they came our way.

These groups also experimented with positive and negative hallucinations, time distortion, and integration using the pattern called transderivational search, which was later on incorporated into an anchoring model called "change history".