In 1953, about the time the Bridie Murphy publicity was at its height, I jumped on the bandwagon, left my diamond cutting business and opened the Institute of Hypnosis.

Before long I realized that hypnosis was not what people needed, that hypnosis was not therapy (unless, of course, you could use it to lead a person out of that state), BUT THE VERY REASON PEOPLE HAD PROBLEMS. I had found the cause of human problems—hypnosis!

Life’s pressures were hypnotic and almost everyone was under this influence. Here was the cause of people not being themselves. Hypnotic influence was the cause of conflicts.

Things people did or said under the influence became the sole reason for their guilts, fears, anxieties and a host of other problems. Victims of hypnotic sins would smoke, drink or whatever, by compulsion, their peer group pressure being similar to the hypnotic influence I, too, could induce in my subjects.

Quite often drinking, drug taking, smoking and other odd habits were attempts by the guilty victims to hypnotize themselves into oblivion. You see, if the tempter-hypnotist-teaser has the power to reduce the awareness enough to make someone sin, then it is also powerful enough to take the awareness away again, this time to remove guilt.

I can’t remember how it all came about, but my own searching had everything to do with a Spirit of Reality leading me, the Truth greeting my desire to know what was right, even as it can do for you.

Years passed and changes began to take place in my approach. For seven years I probed and uncovered such secrets as few men have ever known. In the light of those discoveries my approach to hypnosis began to change into the meditation practice which I am teaching to this day.

What I discovered was that I could lead a person out of his life-long trance, lead him UP to a reservoir of knowing (which I later called the Light), and at a certain point the subject discovered that those realizations had the power to resolve old traumas and give needed direction to his life from within.

I saw the fine line between meditation and hypnosis, where one became the other through a person’s rising or falling from Grace. Hypnosis became the sinner’s practice of losing awareness as a means of solving problems; he simply lost his awareness in dreams as a means of dealing with any problems.

Meditation, through which the soul sought to gain awareness as a means of solving problems, was the reverse of hypnosis. However, for hypnosis to become meditation a special attitude was required and that attitude was the love of Truth.

There are those who are always seeking new hypnotic experiences to escape from Reality. The foolish ego finds great relief and comfort in deeper and deeper states of unconsciousness.

"The foolish ego finds great relief and comfort in deeper and deeper states of unconsciousness."

What was wrong with the entire world was that people were outwardly pressured and motivated. I began to see clearly that men were not created to be manipulated by the worldly authorities and pressures. We move against our own best interests when we respond to those appeals and pressures.

The people in control of other people know that fact. However, once we get caught up with their games we go on responding until that response becomes a conditioning and then we can’t prevent people from imposing their will on us. We become fearful, guilty and lost.

We can’t see how to get back to our own command center and stand on the podium of our own minds to conduct our own lives. Besides, we even become afraid of waking up because our conscience seems like the enemy. The way one lady put it, “I am afraid to give up sweets and sugar.” Eating kept her secure in her trance.

Once caught up in pressure, the only way we can deal with the guilt of failing is to escape seeing what is happening to us. This brings us to partying, drinking, smoking, distractions and other such pleasures, to those things which I have said are self-induced hypnotic states.

For while we are yet egocentric, we always deal with our problems by putting aside the consciousness of the problems. This is the way of pride, the way to false righteousness through hypnotic personalities, love affairs, religions, drugs—everything, in fact, labeled “culture.” “You set aside the laws of God,” said Jesus, “by your traditions [italics mine].”

The hypnotic sway of culture has the power to make wrong people forget.

I found a peculiarity of the ego which was this: Reality became the enemy after being seduced to degrading acts through hypnotic excitements. For until the ego is ready to admit its own faults and make friends with the God of Conscience, it relieves boredom and anxiety by using memories of experiences with people, places and things to reintroduce the hypnotic dream-state of oblivion.

I saw how an ego was the spirit of a man or woman which could be tempted by evil and led astray as if to glory; and when the Truth dawned, “the morning after,” there entered a pride factor that didn’t want to see the Truth. The soul preferred to stay in its trance.

One plus one made two, and two plus one made three, and slowly, but surely, I said, “My God, I see!” And even as I saw, the act of realizing enabled truth to realize Himself through me and He changed me and my ways.

I saw the secret of the Inner way to God. Meditation was the secret antidote to the hypnosis of the world. The ancient prophets spoke of the Light and they also spoke of living in darkness, and here it all was! People preferred the dark theater of their own minds to the Light of Reality.

Down there in their imaginations they could be what they wanted to be and have what they wanted to have, never seeing what was wrong with what they wanted and what they had become through reaching.