Hypnotism - Divine or Demonic by Lester Sumrall

Author:Lester Sumrall [Sumrall, Lester]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-03-23T12:33:15+00:00

6

SOCIETY AND HYPNOTISM

THE AURA of respectability which professional men are giving to hypnotism is fast winning it a place in the warp and woof of our modern society Even the legal profession is being tempted to make use of hypnosis as a medium for arriving at evidential truth. There seems to be a mistaken theory that hypnotism can be used like a lie-detector or truth serum.

THE HYPNOSIS WITNESS

A close study of Dr. H. Bernheim's classic textbook on the subject, Hypnosis and Suggestion, should disillusion anyone.

Bernheim tells how he set up a susceptible young man by suggestion, until the patient was ready to swear in court to what he had "witnessed."

Charles R., an Italian mason, twenty years old, was in the hospital for tubercular pleurisy. He had no nervous history, but Bernheim discovered he was very open to hypnotic suggestion. The doctor asked Charles if he had witnessed a fight between two drunken male nurses, during which one had his leg broken. The young man responded that he wasn't present and did not know.

The operator then made the strong suggestion: "You told me about it this morning..." and went on to describe the details. Bernheim goes on record: "In about two minutes the hallucinatory memory had dawned on his mind. He saw it." The subject went on to describe in great detail the incident he had never seen.

"I asked him for the man's name, in order to give it to the police commissioner," writes Bernheim. "He should tell what he had seen and should take his oath."

Telling the subjects that they were mistaken only made them angry. The subjects persisted in believing the false evidence because they saw a retroactive hallucination that had been created.

PROFESSIONAL LIARS

If society accepts hypnotism into our law courts after testimony like this, we are headed for chaos (called after Hypnos' grandfather, remember Ch. 1)! Listen to the learned doctor once more: "Some subjects relate the facts with surprising accuracy of detail. Like a professional liar, they invent out of whole cloth, with imperturbable coolness and perfect conviction.

Their imagination suggests all the circumstances of the self-conceived drama."

The Lord Jesus Christ said that Satan is the father of all lies. What kind of devilish web do men weave when they first start out to deceive the passive subjects of their hypnotic arts? Anything that will get a man's mind into the state where he cannot tell truth from falsehood, reality from unreality, fact from fantasy, is a work of the devil. Paul, writing to the Ephesians, nails it fair and square:

And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them (Ephesians 5:11).

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