Bô Yin Râ:
A Critique of Hypnotism

I do not think I need to expend a lot of effort giving a detailed explanation of what is meant by “hypnosis” and how this abnormal state of will and consciousness control can be brought about.

Unfortunately, there is far too much experimentation going on in this area nowadays and the phenomenon of hypnosis is discussed widely and extensively in both scholarly publications as well as in the most questionable treatises.

In my opinion, one ought to be extremely careful when giving instructions about how to induce a hypnotic state. Even the mere description of the hypnotic state is not without risk.

Such descriptions do not have a positive effect. On the contrary, they stimulate one’s curiosity and awaken, depending on how active or passive the person’s disposition, the desire to either want to hypnotize or be hypnotized.

The assumption that a successful hypnotist must be blessed with some mysterious power is still prevalent in most of society. This notwithstanding the frequent assertion that everyone supposedly has the ability to hypnotize and that only the hypnotist’s will power plays a decisive role. In reality, however, things are quite different.

First of all, not everyone can induce the hypnotic state, no matter how familiar they are with the techniques of hypnosis and even if they are able to focus their will with perfect concentration. Secondly, hypnosis is by no means a matter of one person’s will binding another person’s will.

There are some very good hypnotists who are quite weak-willed, virtually incapable of single- mindedly pursuing a particular intention, while very strong-willed persons are often easily induced into a hypnotic trance.

Rather, there are forces at work here that have very little to do with the will. And when I spoke above of “binding the will,” this is not to be understood as if the will itself is weakened in any way.

In the normal state, the body’s organs respond almost exclusively to a person’s own will, and are only accessible to external impulses of will in a limited way, and only when one’s own will is diverted. In the hypnotic state, however, the link between the bodily organs and a person’s own will is severed to such an extent that hypnotic subjects become unable to perceive their own will or, in less severe cases, are only able to respond to it very incompletely.

Hypnosis therefore is simply the process of progressively deepening the detachment of the will of a person from their brain.

The will is only able to transmit its impulses to the brain via subtle, fluidic forces of the material body, which form part of the unseen realm of the physical world. The hypnotic state is brought about by nothing more than the numbing of these subtle, fluidic forces.

While this paralysis is set in motion by the will of the hypnotist, the rest of the process does not depend on the strength of this impulse nor does it depend on which theory the hypnotist uses to explain the hypnotic state. It is not actually the hypnotist who brings about the hypnotic state, although it certainly appears as if this is the case. And while the hypnotist’s concentration is steadily held, it need not be of more than normal strength.

The manifestations of hypnosis are based on a kind of “infection,” as strange as this may sound when one considers the prevailing theories on the topic. In this case, we are not talking about a disease that is transmitted by germs and microbes. Rather, centers of energy, invisible to even the best microscope, cause a paralysis of the subtle, fluidic bodily forces, as a result of which these energy centers are able to directly act upon the brain, while at the same time deactivating the will of the person.

Hypnotists are persons whose psycho-physical constitution is particularly suited to stimulating such centers of energy so that they are impelled to respond to the hypnotists’ wishes and to automatically carry out the task that is desired.

Not everybody is therefore able to hypnotize, just as not every person will be successful as a spiritistic “medium,” even though in both cases these abilities are present to a certain degree in every human being.

The myriad, invisible centers of energy exist at every point of the unseen physical world and fill all space as a homogeneous mass. They only require an impulse of will to become “charged”—to become the active servant of that will—so that it almost appears as if one were dealing with minute, invisible, half-conscious beings.

It is not the hypnotist’s impulse of will alone that forces them into action. Every desire, no matter how secret, activates them also, once such a desire succeeds in forcing the will to become its servant.

In the majority of human beings the subtle, fluidic bodily forces are insulated from external influence. Although in these instances there still can be some minor infiltration by the energy centers, their influence will always be minimal. However, one may also often come across a type of person whose own subtle, fluidic bodily forces have all but merged with these energy centers. Persons with this kind of psycho-physical constitution are, depending on whether their disposition is more active or more passive, either born hypnotists or born spiritistic “mediums.”

Spiritistic mediumship also depends upon the forces of these invisible centers of energy. The medium passively surrenders to the influence of these energy centers, and is “hypnotized“ by them. Thus, the true “hypnotist” here is to be found in the invisible realm of the physical world. In the case of one person hypnotizing another, it is a visible person who actively intervenes and artificially turns the subject—who may not have the natural disposition for this—into temporarily acting as a medium.

The whole process of hypnosis is essentially nothing other than what is generally referred to as “spiritism.” Hypnosis differs from spiritism only insofar as during hypnosis actual persons influence one another, while during a spiritistic session the human hypnotist is replaced by an entity from the unseen realm of the physical world.