NATURAL USE OF TRANCE

(a question after a counseling session that used trance without an induction)

Cl: I notice and admired the naturalistic trance and wondered if that is the way you are using trance work, more naturalistically, pacing the breathing, what you are observing.

Dick: Yes, and I don't very often consciously do trance induction any more. I just know that if I pace he is going to start going into trance and if it doesn't happen, well....all right. No big deal. I don't need that to complete my young life and if it happens....good... we will take advantage of it. You just take what the universe gives you. but you are quite right when you call it a naturalistic induction, and I do it almost automatically because it seems to me that ......some people think of trance as being a state of very high suggestibility and that is an aspect of it. But there is another aspect of it that is very important to me. Ahkter Ahsen calls it hypo-noeia. Hypo, under and noeia, knowing. the knowing underneath. the knowing that goes on in the subconscious. And when you contact that, that is what some people call trance, and Ahkter will get mad if you tell him he does trance work. He doesn't do trance work. But he constantly is putting people in touch with this hypo-noeia state. And I like that, the under-knowing, rather than the idea of the suggestibility. That in this state this person accesses in myself. And of course Erickson said that, although Erickson is coming from a different place than I come from, coming from behaviorism. And before Erickson, Jung was saying it around the turn of the century and the first part of the century that our unconscious is our storehouse and to access it. And you access it when you enter this state of under-knowing, which Ahkter talks about. And it is a state of all of a sudden being in touch with that stuff that most of the time you are out of touch with. And then all kinds of strange things happen. They are strange in terms of the left brain, but otherwise they are not strange at all. You are a sharp observer. So who wants to work?
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