You can also ask for a conscious output of what you went through in trance, but I recommend that you don't. I recommend that you simply get in the habit of trusting your unconscious processes. You will discover new patterns in your behavior, or old patterns which are occurring more frequently in the appropriate context. When that happens, you can use your own behavior as examples from which you can then come to a conscious understanding of what changes you have made. It's more efficient to go from unconscious change to behavior and then to a conscious digitalization of it, than it is to begin with a conscious understanding which you attempt to apply to behavior. Do yourself a favor and do it the easy way.
Bob: What if you want to do something that you have never done before?
If you don't know that you've ever succeeded with a particular behavior, then use the New Behavior Generator that we taught you this morning. Think of someone else who does this behavior very well. Pick yourself a really elegant model—somebody whom you really respect and admire—who does this behavior particularly elegantly and effectively. Then use a variation of the same instructions. Ask your unconscious mind to review all the internal stored images, sounds, and feelings of this person doing that particular behavior. Do this in three phases. In the first review, you just see and hear what is going on. Watch and listen to that person do what you want to learn to do. In the second phase you ask your unconscious mind to substitute your image and your voice for the other person's. So the second time you run the movie, you will see yourself doing the things that you just observed and listened to the other person doing. In the third phase you step into the movie and experience it from the inside, feeling yourself do the behavior, as well as seeing and hearing from that new point of view.
For instance, I might use Milton Erickson. I have spent a lot of hours watching and listening to his behavior. I give myself the instruction before I go into trance "Pick out the times when he has responded to incongruency with clients when I have been present. What specifically does he do?" The first time around I would see and hear him do whatever he does. The second time around, I would put myself in his position and see and hear myself doing the same thing he did. In order to actually get that into my behavior—which is where I want it—I have to step into the movie myself and feel the muscle movements and feelings that I would have if I were actually doing it.
This third step is designed to get those feelings and muscle patterns into your body so that when the situation comes up, you will automatically begin to respond in that way. After you have finished this third step you ask your unconscious to have this behavior naturally and spontaneously begin to occur more frequently in your behavior in the appropriate contexts. This works very, very well as a self–programming device.
Woman: Are you doing that as instruction to your unconscious before you go into a trance?
Yes. It's too complicated to do for yourself inside the trance. And I suggest that you start with small behaviors. For example, "I want to learn to smile when I want to get a certain response." Then later take bigger and bigger chunks of behavior.
I've given you a step–by–step process for inducing and using altered states for yourself. If you find these instructions tedious, let me reassure you that after you've practiced them, they will streamline very quickly so it will take only a matter of sixty seconds or so to alter your consciousness. You will be able to do it between sessions or during short breaks.
Discussion
Harry: Would you talk about how to distort your perceptions of time? How would you use hypnosis to speed up or slow down your perceptions of events?
How I would do that would depend upon whether I was going to do it to myself or to someone else. With myself, I would instruct my unconscious to find lots of experiences that have one factor in common: changing the speed of my perceptions. For example, you know what happens when you are zooming down the freeway and then exit from an off ramp into regular city traffic and seem to be going zero miles an hour. Or when you're really enjoying something, time seems to fly by, and hours seem like moments.
Those are examples of changes in your perception of time, which are indications that such changes are possible. I would ask my unconscious to find every example that it can think of, and to put me in those experiences. The only common thread that goes through all of the experiences is having control over time and the speed of reality.
While my unconscious was doing this, I would ask it to create some sort of control knob for me, so that I could speed things up or slow them down. I would set it up so that after I went through twenty experiences my eyes would open, I would still be in a trance, and I would be able to turn the knob one way to speed things up and turn it the other way to slow them down.
That is how I would go about it. I know that time distortion exists in my normal experience already, so that is where I would find it. Then I could make tennis an opportunity to use time distortion. I could make the time slow enough so that I could respond easily, and then adjust the speed in between serves. After each serve I'd go back and evaluate "Was it fast or slow that time?" and adjust the knob accordingly.
Harry: Is there a way that I could speed up learning things, like hypnosis?
My guess is that you should be able to tell me the answer to that question. 1 can give you an example of how to do it, but I'm more interested in your knowing how to do it yourself. You know what it is that you want. So what are the parameters you are working with? If you want to speed up your perceptions, find some examples of having done it, and then give yourself some control over the process. You know that you've learned things. You know that you can integrate them. You know you have a standard speed. So how can you speed that up?
Harry: By going to the contexts in which I would do that normally. Sure. But the factor that is really going to allow you to learn more quickly is the presence of more time. All you have to do is create two months. Is that enough? In other words, do what's called "pseudo–orientation in time." Put yourself into a trance and project yourself into the future. Tell yourself that instead of being tomorrow, it's two months from now, Then, in trance, relive fully all the time between now and then; create all the necessary history for if to be two months from now. You can make up all the clients you worked with and all the things you did; you can make up everything that happened between then and now. Create in detail all the history that you need in order to have already learned lots about NLP and hypnosis.
Whenever you want anything, all you have to do is think of where it would happen anyway, and then make that up. Hypnosis is a way of making a reality. If you know that something you want will happen in a specific reality, then use that reality to create what you want. If it doesn't happen in any reality that you know of, then create a reality in which it would happen.
Woman: Is it possible to create an overload of other realities?
Yes. It's called psychosis. When you use alternative realities, you must do so as a lawyer would. You must make sure that when you build realities, you build ones that are thorough and complete. You must make sure that they will accomplish what you want, and you must make sure that there's a doorway out of them. If you create sloppy realities and live in them, then you will respond in a sloppy way, and that will make you a junky person.