It’s not so much to give clear cut answers,
there’s a premise I have, a presumption.
When I say presumption it’s one that I reason
out, but you may or may not agree with it,
I’ll give it to you anyways and hopefully
it’ll be useful.
The presumption is this, and it reverses a
cultural bias.
The presumption is that certainty is only
for amateurs.
Certainty is only for beginners.
They need certainty to feel like they’re
not cast adrift on this wild ocean, have a
sense of control in something they’re doing.
Once you get to a certain point at any particular
endeavor, I think certainty is poisonous.
You, of course, want to be certain enough
about certain things.
There are anchor points that keep you working
in a functional sort of way, but really it’s
uncertainty where growth happens.
It’s uncertainty where things are developing,
and if you really want to understand hypnosis
you have to be really uncertain about what
it is.
If you want to become better at doing hypnosis,
you can’t be too certain of it, because
all you can do with certainty is replicate
what you are certain about.
If you want to improve it you have to go beyond
what you are certain about and by definition
that’s what you are uncertain about.
Does that make sense?
Now, what I’m not suggesting, of course,
is that you stay uncertain and become a nervous
wreck.
That’s not at all what I mean.
It’s good to pretend that the things you
know are actually true and be certain about
them whilst you’re doing them, as long as
once you’re finished doing those things
you’re honest enough with yourself to realize
that you were just tricking yourself a moment
ago.
That you were only pretending that this is
actually true.
You were pretending that hypnosis exists,
that the unconscious mind exists and you’re
trying and really only pretending to get better
over whatever problem that they have.
As long as your client continues to pretend
that for the rest of their life that’s okay,
because eventually they’ll forget that they’re
pretending and they’ll just get on with
being certain that their life is better and
that’s good.
But, if you want to enhance your skill, if
you want to break new ground, if you want
to do what’s never been done before you
can’t do it with the things you’re certain
about.
You have to go to the places you’re not
certain about and you have to be willing to
investigate the things you are certain about
to start finding those gaps in your certain,
the premises that uncertainty is built upon
and you’ll notice there’s nothing there.
Physics was very close to being what’s called
a close field at the end of the last century.
A close field is a field where we know everything
there is to know about this field.
There’s nothing new to learn.
The only thing that was left was this little
thing called life and this little thing called
gravity.
You know what, I’m sure any day now someone’s
going to explain how these things work.
Newton really had singlehandedly developed
basically most of physics and everything after
Newton was really an elaboration on the ideas
he already set in motion.
It’s a gross exaggeration but a useful one,
I think.
But then of course, in trying to figure out
how life works, and how gravity works, this
led to the whole idea of relativity, the whole
idea of both the general and specific theories,
and the whole idea of quantum physics.
Basically, quantum physics is completely at
odds with everything we thought we knew about
regular physics.
Here’s a weird thing… quantum physics
is a demonstrable phenomenon that works in
rules that violate regular Newtonian physics
and yet Newtonian physics works and quantum
physics works.
The way that the gap has been bridged, and
this is really a patchwork it’s not an actual
integration of the theories, it’s a patchwork
of the theories.
It’s a Band Aid that lets’ you bridge
from one to the other.
It’s to suggest that… it’s a question
of scale.
Quantum physics only works in very, very small
scales and some suggest that a variation of
it works on a very large scale.
Newtonian physics works in between.
It has a scale range in which it works very
well to predict the universe and outside of
that scale range it stops working.
So is Newtonian physics wrong?
Well, it is and it isn’t.
It’s useful.
This building, we’re not dead right now
because this building is holding us up and
it’s holding us up based on Newtonian principles.
The architect that designed this building,
the engineer that tested this building, these
are all things based on Newtonian principles.
There’s very little quantum mechanics that
operates this building.
But, of course, quantum mechanics is fundamentally
infused in every element of this building.
So basically, we’re very comfortably and
safely sitting on a lie.
And it’s only by investigating that “lie”
and looking at or questioning the underpinnings
of something that more questions come out
to the purpose of our roundtable here today,
especially when it comes to Ericksonian hypnosis,
which is all about uncertainty.
It’s where the growth is.
So our purpose today is to give you enough
certainty about what you know so that you
can move forwards, but to actually leave you
less certain about what you knew so that you
actually can move forwards.
Does that make sense?
