opening minds: the secret world of manipulation, undue influence and brainwashing by Jon Atack

Author:Jon Atack [Atack, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Trentvalley ltd
Published: 2016-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

6 the imitation game: from mimicry to compliance

‘Everything you are is the construction of your own thoughts.’ The Buddhist Dhammapada

It is said that ‘seeing is believing’ but it is quite possible to manipulate someone into believing that they have seen almost anything. This is a manipulation of the imagination.

Our perception is easily directed. As we have seen, four out of five participants do not notice the gorilla-suited man who crosses the court during a basketball game, due to ‘inattentional blindness.’ We tend to focus on the task in hand to the exclusion of everything else.

It is highly relevant that in accounts of alien abduction, the subject is usually on the verge of sleep. The dream nature of such experiences is apparent, because the aliens look different from one country to another – in line with local media descriptions. Indeed, the first ‘flying saucer’ was seen only after a media description of a ‘cigar shaped’ object that skimmed across the water like a ‘flying saucer’.126

False memories are easily generated: there has been an avalanche of ‘recovered memory’ cases where therapists have convinced clients that they were abused in childhood. The therapist often spends years suggesting abuse until the client begins to picture it. As imagination and memory are shown on the same ‘screen’ in the mind, we readily believe that an imaginary event was real given enough persuasion.127

As I have said, the dream state, which exists in the background of the mind, is vital in understanding altered states of consciousness. Thousands of sensations assault us at every second – from both the outside and the inside worlds. We are constantly besieged by information, but we can only focus on a fraction of it, so we tune out the rest, without necessarily realizing that some of it may lodge without examination. This is the basis for positive suggestion, where a command by-passes consciousness. The manipulator distracts the subject who will later find a justification for some odd implanted behaviour. A stage hypnotist may convince a subject to open a window whenever he shakes his head. The subject will protest that it is either to hot or too cold, too stuffy or too breezy and open and close the window without realizing that these are justifications for directed actions. Eager to suspend belief, we create experiences that are believed as readily as dreams are believed in while dreaming.

The simplest way to look at the nebulous subject of hypnosis is that the process guides the imagination. The hypnotised person pretends the phenomena of hypnosis all of which occur inside the imagination, but believes the pretence as if it were real. Hypnosis hijacks the normal internal process of the imagination: it is guided imagining. Followers live in the pretend world of the totalist manipulator. Groups and even couples perform elaborate rituals that bind them together in a pretend world. We each live in our own version of the world – the world as we believe it to be – and that version can be profoundly changed by a manipulator.

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