The Power of Imagination.

The use of imagination cannot be underestimated.  It is without a doubt one of the greatest sources of knowledge that we are capable of employing in the betterment of ourselves.   Through imagination a great deal can be learned that could not otherwise be learned.  Allow me to provide you with a perfect example, or should I say, a perfect way to use your imagination to get a sense of the reality which is occurring in this physical world.  Since the book I am reading is a history book I will give a bit of history myself.

I mainly study three themes; philosophy, metaphysics, and psychology.  Because college was/is a joke, I am forced to educate myself, so I read the books that the masters of these fields wrote during and after their studies.  For instance, Carl Jung, the man spent his entire life researching the human mind and then put down his thoughts and the conclusions of his research into written form.  This prevents me, luckily, from having to devote my life to the same subject, which would take me decades as well, because I can read his works, and then immediately pick up where he left off.  I can test his theories and conclusions in my own life without having to collect decades worth of research.  Those same decades worth of research can enter into my conscious thought in a matter of days or weeks depending on the topic, and on top of that I can accumulate the works of others regarding the same issues.  But this cannot be done fully without imagination.  I cannot simply take their word for it.  I must get a sense of the totality of it on my own.  Historically speaking I cannot go back in time, physically anyways, so I must go there in my imagination.

Currently one of the books I am reading is called Hidden Depths; The Story of Hypnosis by Robin Waterfield.  This book is fantastic.  It is well written, descriptive, and gives a good background on hypnosis and its history.  He covers all the aspects one would want, giving a full biblio.  The book is well researched, so just like Carl Jung, Waterfield has prevented me from having to do months and months of research.  He has given me the ability to condense months of research into just a few weeks.  Not to mention the information is free because I checked the book out at the public library.  That is true power in effect.

To summarize the book, Waterfield starts with what little is known of the Greeks and Romans regarding hypnotism.  He is very brief regarding that period in history which makes sense, because honestly we do not know a whole lot about that time period regardless of what some historians try to say.  Anyways, the majority of this history book begins with Franz Anton Mesmer on page 64, and ends with Freud around page 280.  Mesmer was born in 1734, while Freud was born in 1856.  Considering that the book is 400 pages that is nearly half the book being devoted to the 17 and 1800's, which is fine by me.  I became interested in this Mesmer guy because of a lecture I listened to on the internet by Manly P. Hall.  Not being able to just take Halls word as it is I must look into the matter more deeply.

Obviously they did not have the internet in the 1700s so their main modes of communication were lectures and letters.  People of note like doctors, scholars, aristocrats, etc., would travel all around giving lectures, which were well documented.   They would also write pamphlets and books which contained their lectures, and they would also submit essays to the popular journals of the time.  Back then complete ideas would be hashed out in public journals or newspapers so everyone could see what was going on, to a certain degree anyways, if they wanted to. 

 This is good news for us because this allows us a chance to really see what was going on during that time.  This gives us the ability to factually see what it was like without it being clouded by other people’s opinions which is exactly what happens if one studies history any further back than this period; it becomes more opinion than fact.  These people literally wrote out their thoughts for the entire world to see.  Waterfield is able to give a really good look at how it all came about, hypnotism, and it turns out to be quite a story.  If you are interested in the growth of human consciousness, mainly the growth in our own culture and our collective ability to understand our own consciousness, I would say this book is a must.  I do not know if Waterfield did it intentionally or not, but he masterfully created a sense of the culture from which our own culture comes.

Now is when imagination becomes the most important tool in learning what all this means.  To truly grasp the situation, one must imagine they were alive back then, when all of this stuff was going on.  One must imagine what it would be like to be a human being suffering those circumstances and to imagine the impact that would have on ones own psyche.   More importantly, the use of imagination with awareness of our own cultural bias directly in mind must be put into play.  It's like looking back on a mistake we made in our own lives after having new knowledge of the situation.  Like the girl who after learning her lesson regarding a relationship with a boy wishes she could go back in time and do it differently.  Our culture is growing up, and to most effectively do this we must look back on our mistakes.  We must do this not only in our personal lives but in the cultural aspect as well.  This is an extremely important part of truly growing up which many overlook, that is, the study of culture.

For instance, those people in the 1700's were, comparatively to us, what I would call extremely superstitious.  Our culture has learned that to be superstitious is quite immature, but to them that was not the case.   Here is an example of what I mean.   They called it the "evil eye," but I call it the "stink eye."  Back in those days giving someone the stink eye was a really big deal.  Because of their belief that it was a big deal, it actually manifested in their lives as a big deal when it happened.  This phenomenon is well documented.  What I mean is, if they believed someone cursed them via the stink eye, they would act cursed, and it would manifest in their lives in often times quite serious ways.  Seriously enough that people would literally get sick and die just because they believed something was true.  This is what made the beginning of hypnotism, called animal magnetism by Mesmer, or mesmerism by others such a huge deal.  

Why is it such a big deal?  Because it goes both ways.  If you believed that you could be healed by being magnetized by someone, you were healed!  One of the doctors who studied animal magnetism in what we would call a psychiatric ward would literally just command someone to be healed, and they would be healed!  They did not fully understand what was going on obviously, and I am greatly reducing the idea to prove a point, but I hope you get the idea.  I was quite curious as to how a connection to Christ was not made regarding this ability.  This is probably why these men had such an ego.  Mesmer's ego was famous.  Mesmer literally convinced people that he magnetized a tree and because of that people would go to that tree and be healed!  He was a medical doctor!  Like I said, he had quite a personality, so keep this in mind as I attempt to make my point.

Here is another example of this idea that believing something makes it true.  Mesmer was mainly working in Paris, France at one point, and the people there would have convulsions when he mesmerized them.  Well, he taught another guy how to do it, but this guy lived in a different area.  The people in his area had no knowledge of what was going on in Paris, so that when they were mesmerized they would display a completely different physical reaction, yet would still be healed.  In other words, they did not have the expected convulsions.  What this showed is, that the people in Paris believed that when one was mesmerized a certain thing, convulsions,  would happen so that is exactly what happened.  It is important to realize they weren’t faking it.  Crazy huh?

Use your imagination, and imagine yourself to be alive back then.  You go to Mesmer's home, and under his magnetized tree, yes I wrote that! He magnetized a tree!  Now imagine people are everywhere and more than a few of them are having convulsive fits.   Much like an epileptic fit, spasms, screaming, the whole works.  Add to this that the aristocrats, the well to do people, the people who were in charge of society so to speak, were the ones caught up in this phenomenon.  Mesmer personally paid his bills charging those people large amounts of money to heal them.  The rich people were the ones writing all the letters, debating, discussing, and participating in this phenomenon.  It was not the ordinary folks, although it was accessible to them as well.  In fairness, I would add that Mesmer did not charge the poor like he did the rich.  It is interesting that despite his ego he did have compassion for the "lesser" humans. 

Why is this important?  Because those humans then, were very little different from us now.  Their minds, by this I mean the totality of their mind, knew the right way to live, yet they were so immersed in an extremely dysfunctional culture, their conscious minds could not see the truth, so they were quite naturally collectively highly disturbed.  They were, in fact, quite crazy.  They were humans just like you and I; same emotions, desires, all of it.  They suffered greatly because of their dysfunctional social system, yet they were the ones actively designing the culture!  They simply were not aware of this fact. 

You would have to read the book to fully grasp what I am trying to say.  I cannot truly summarize the totality of it into such a small essay, but to say it simply; those people were truly and deeply messed up on a certain level.  In my opinion, pretty much every last one of them were neurotic, even the ones who thought they were not.  Can you imagine that?  The people in charge of society, back then, can you imagine how crazy they were; literally crazy!  Because Waterfield was writing a book about the history of hypnosis, not the culture, he does not comment about this at all, one only gets the sense of it through the actions depicted in the book by these people because of hypnotism.  Doing his job, quite well,  Waterfield just accepts history as it is, without putting it into context regarding our current culture.  It is mind boggling to me how crazy those people were.  What may seem even crazier, is that looking back, it is really easy to see why that was, which makes it difficult to see why collectively we are still doing a lot of the same crazy stuff they were doing.

Crazy people were deciding the fate of the world and they had no awareness of this fact.  Like a child that has no comprehension of his actions in the moment on the future.  They were too trapped in their own ego to realize the effect they were having on themselves and others.  Imagine being alive then, imagine looking at someone crazy and then being lynched for it.  Women by far had it the worst.  Those men back then had such a low opinion of what it was to be a human they literally caused every single human alive in their culture to suffer, and it was no small amount of suffering.  This next statement though, does not require any imagination because it is right in front of our faces, alive and happening as we speak; our current culture came directly from those extremely crazy people.  Our culture is a direct, immediate descendant of that culture.  The Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776! Remember Mesmer was born in 1734.

After reading such an intimate account of the people, how they acted, what they thought, gives me goose bumps as I see how that applies to my own life living in this culture as I do.  All of these institutions which are causing so much suffering in the world are a direct descendant of the neurosis of those people.  Can you wrap your mind around that?  We have not improved nearly so much as we would like to pretend that we have.  Living our daily lives as we do, we are not so much different than those living in the 1700s.  Because we are ruled by crazy people we are practically forced into being crazy ourselves!

Those people were so whack, in comparison to how a human is actually meant to live, much like it is now, is quite disturbing.  They were literally disgusting human beings, mainly because their regard for their fellow human beings was so low, and this mind set is still quite prevalent to this day.  Their collective outlook was horrendous.  Unfortunately for us they are the ones who set up this current system that we have.  We still call people who are not wealthy by the term "lower" class.  Somehow one is not actually a human being if they do not acquire material possession.  That is an extremely low way of thinking.  True enough, those men who came to America and set up their own government were attempting to break away from that culture.  They were trying to free themselves, but sadly, they failed, because they did not put people in place to carry on what they started.  With them came all the crap that degrades human existence and it is still dominating our culture to this day.

One of the best ways maybe to illustrate this is through one of the benefits that can be brought about by being hypnotized.  Via hypnosis one can become oblivious to pain.  One of the more famous examples is a man who had his leg amputated.   In the 1700s there was no real way to prevent pain during surgery.  If a person had to have surgery they had to endure it awake, and most people did not survive such operations.  Use your imagination.  Imagine that you are going to die if you don't have a surgery, but that you must be fully conscious as your leg is cut off!  Now imagine that there is a way for this pain to be eliminated but you are not allowed that procedure because some egotistical superstitious individual says it is evil.  Hypnosis provided a way to eliminate this suffering, yet the medical associations of the day did not employ it because of their own selfish reasons.   Can you see this concept alive and well in our current culture?  There are great many ways in which we could ease the suffering of people, but they are not being employed because the people in power are egotistical and crazy.   They put their egos above the well-being of their patients.  They put their selfish opinions above the well-being of their culture.  Almost all of those famous people you have heard about knew of this phenomenon as well.  People like Darwin, Napoléon, Dickens, Franklin, etc.  Everyone knew about it.  Yet the suffering went on unabated.

It is a sad state of affairs.  It didn’t have to be that way.  It doesn’t have to be that way now.  Those people in power could have been, and can be, in positions of power, and maintain their wealth without making everyone else suffer for it.  It does not have to be one way or the other.  That is not some crazy idea.  It really wouldn’t even be that difficult to bring about.  Yet here we are, collectively, still doing the same old thing.  Can you wrap your mind around that?