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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