Are You Hypnotized?

 I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with an old friend. She was extremely upset over various news stories leaning in one particular direction.  That is, she didn't consider any other point of view. She would say something about what I believed or did, which was not what I believed or did, and it took me several times of repeating something until her eyes blinked and she looked at me and said "oh."

It flashed in my mind that she was coming from a state of hypnosis, clicking back into the present moment. That made me think about when I studied hypnosis back in the late 70s with a medical doctor that had delivered over 5,000 babies with hypnosis. I took his class at the advice of a mentor who said it would teach me how the mind worked. I certainly learned a great deal!

One thing in particular flashed in my mind in relationship to yesterday. He said the cycles of a television are in sync with the brain cycles, and if you sit and watch television for a few minutes, you go into at least a light state of hypnosis, and for some people a deeper state. What that means is that everything said goes deeply into your subconscious mind. If you only listen to left leaning or right leaning news, that point of view is deeply seared in your subconscious mind. So when you hear anything to the contrary you fight it. You probably don't realize that you've been programmed subconsciously by somebody else's point of view. are angry and upset because you know the truth, or so it seems to you. 

You're highly unlikely to realize that these ideas have bypassed your conscious mind and have been instilled in your subconscious, so they seem like the truth. We owe it to ourselves to awaken.

There have been so many revelations lately about how we've been lied to by leaders and by the press, that to me it makes everything they say somewhat suspect. I think it's important to listen to both sides of whatever issue and to critically weigh through them so that you're sure that what you think you believe is your actual belief not somebody else's.

 At the very least, listen to left and right leaning stations and realize they have opposite interpretations of what just happened or is happening. They are mutually exclusive. They cannot both be true. My general rule of thumb is the truth must lie somewhere in between these two extremes. But if I do not have personal experience and knowledge of whatever the subject is, I can never know for sure. If I look at all sides and think clearly and logically, perhaps I can figure out what's the most likely thing to be true, but even that's not fail safe. 

To be the best person I can be is my ultimate responsibility. That's a big project and something I've been working on for all 86 years, and still in process.