sure enough, i looked into hypnotic rapture progression this morning and learned A LOT.
as i said yesterday, the rapture state takes you through the FIVE levels of trance. the first is the beta state of alertness. the three middle ones (alpha, theta with gamma sync, and delta) are the rapture. delta is the somnambulist state for evocation if it leads to slow wave sleep, with eyes open rather than nrem/rem sleep with eyes closed. as i have said elsewhere on this board, satan informed me that the crossroads was ‘sleeping wide awake’ and i now realize that is open-eyed somnambulism. in hypnosis this is known as the esdaile state.
trance ratification (the ability to know how deep your trance is) is measured by five main trance phenomena (FOUR more than the structuring work that erik has in his course). i outline all five below:
a. structuring VAK modalities (visual hallucinations, imagined/remembered sounds, or sensory alterations such as hyperestehesia or analgesia/anesthesia). vak structuring is ONE method of ratifying your trance level. if you know your primary vak modality, you can then structure (see, hear, or feel) objects or phenomena. in magick this is known as visualiztion but the fact of the matter is that NOT EVERYBODY IS A VISUALIZER. the key is using what nlp practitioners call your driver modality. if you are auditory, your main modality is your hearing. in that way, you wouldn’t visualize but would use your EAR to HEAR sounds in 3D space around you (almost like tuning your ear to surround sound). and if you are kinesthetically oriented, you would use your senses (skin’s nerves and intuition) to FEEL/SENSE changes around you in air pressure, heat/coldness, sharpness/dullness, etc in the atmosphere. if you are olfactory/gustatory (which is very rare but it happens), you’d use your sense of smell or taste to catch scents or taste the changes. if you’ve ever done evocation and didn’t see anything, but heard noises, or felt a temperature change or pressing on different parts of your bodies, of had sweet or sour smells out of nowhere that you couldn’t explain, you were successful and you’re approaching the crossroads.
b. another form of trance ratification is automatic movement or stiffness. automatic movement includes ideomotor work with a pendulum, hand levitation, or automatic drawing, and can also include involuntary movements such as swaying, jerking, spinning, limp limbs, or shuddering/shaking. stiffness is hypnotic catalepsy (eyes that can’t open, or stiff limbs). if you’ve ever had any of those things happen to you and you wondered what the hell was going on, good news - you were deep in trance.
c. a third form of trance ratification is time distortion. that includes both age progression into the future, and age regression into the past, which can also lead to false memories (confabulation), so be careful about going backward in time, it’s pretty controversial in hypnosis and you want to avoid anything coming up that you aren’t able to deal with. in chaos magick the sigil for fotamecus is used to create time distortion. in nlp tad james’ timeline therapy modality is used to travel back and forth in time. and radionic practitioner steven gibbs uses his hyperdimensional resonator to take time distortion to its logical conclusion of time travel. clearly time distortion is powerful trancework and useful for many applications. if you’ve ever done an evocation and it seemed like you were there forever but were only there for a short time, or it seemed like moments but ended up being hours, you were deep in trance.
d. a fourth method of trance ratification is hypnotic amnesia or forgetfulness. if you’ve ever done rapture work and drew a blank or forgot what you were doing and had to snap yourself out, you were in medium or deep trance. if you have the mastering evocation course you will notice that many times in the course ea would pause for long periods of time, or he would suddenly stop talking and have to resume. he was moving in and out of deep trances the whole time he filmed the course, and it’s plain to see that he caught hypnotic amnesia many times right on camera and had to reset his mind.
e. the fifth and final method of trance ratification is hypnotic dissociation. for this you consciously separate your mental or astral bodies from your physical body and do a mental/astral projection or a remote viewing. that isn’t covered in mastering evocation. it might be covered more in the mastering soul travel course, which i don’t have so i can’t tell you any more about that other than dissociation is one of the roads you take on the crossroads. the second road is the astral double which is the road you take for evocation, and the third road is drifting off to sleep.
i put a few of these ideas to the test by cueing up my hypnotic trance trigger and then running quick suggestibility tests this morning. using scripts in hypnotic manuals and slow steady breathing, i went into medium trances very quickly. when structuring a cube on the floor in front of me i realized why i was having so much trouble structuring: i kept my eyes wide open and did not concentrate on my breathing. in order to get the right frame of focus for inductions and deepeners to work you have to do a double focus: your vak modality (see an object, hear a sound, or feel a sense), AND breathing concentration. then to get to the deeper part of the trance you either close your eyes or squint, which happens as you deepen your trance. that gives you that eyelid flutter you get in deep trance, you are playing a physical ‘as if’ and it puts you into trance faster.
if you get into a proper light trance and then close your eyes and do nothing else, your trance automatically deepens. quiet is another hypnotic deepener. so technically, if you are relaxed enough you can go from the rapture to the crossroads by doing not a damn thing other than getting into a light trance, breathing with your eyes closed, and waiting. the only real effort on your part at that point is not falling asleep and also not awakening yourself suddenly, thereby throwing yourself back into beta state.
a lot of useful information to digest. i won’t need to use all of it but now i know i have choices and options for getting through the rapture to the crossroads. i’m going to play around with these methods and see if they get me all the way there in the next little while.