The Secret of the Inner Way to God

When I was a small boy . . .

....I became aware that there was something missing in my life, and so I began to search. I asked my parents, my rabbi and my teachers those questions which burn in the heart of every searcher, only to realize that no one had the answers. At least I had discovered one very important truth, that no one could tell me what I needed to know. I had to find it for myself.

That brings to mind an amusing, yet meaningful, story about the soldier who went around picking up bits of paper on the parade grounds. He would read each bit and throw it away, muttering to himself, "That's not it." He would repeat this process over and over saying, "That's not it." So finally his superiors sent him to a psychiatrist, who gave him his discharge papers, to which the soldier cried triumphantly, "That's it!" You see, he knew what he was looking for all along. In a similar way, every seeker knows in his heart what ISN'T it. What is saying to him, "That's not it" is really IT all the time. Do you see what I am trying to say?

By the time I was fifteen I had developed a keen interest in hypnosis. Anyway, at the time it did seem as though hypnosis had a key to the mystery of human behavior. I remember seeing a stage demonstration of hypnosis and thinking to myself, "lf people can be made to do silly things, why not the sensible?" lt took many years to discover that HYPNOSIS WAS THE POWER OF FOLLY. Please give me time to layout a foundation for this statement.

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.

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.

Another interesting thing and a very curious fact was that I found that only certain people are you ready for this?-who were believing Christians could be cured permanently. This was a very puzzling actuality. I had to find out what it meant. Here I was, somehow with the power to lead people to Reality and right there at the gate there was some kind of magic principle that l, the therapist, the guide, didn't yet understand. Those people had a part of the mystery and I had the other part. Together we had a whole.

Before I go into that, let me explain away so-called hypnotic cures. Suggesting a headache away while the subject is under hypnosis often compels the victim to say that his headache is gone, even when it is not. The subject must dramatize the hypnotist's will as best he can. A person under hypnosis reflects the will of the authority post-hypnotically. Suggest that the subject had been in Florida, wake him and ask, "Where were you last week?" and he will reply that he was in Miami and fabricate other details-the bars he was in, all the girls he met, and so on. His mind makes it all up as he goes along, amplifying and rationalizing what he was commanded to accept. But a certain kind of hypnosis (which I later understood to be meditation and which brings the soul back to Reality) was responsible for really curing headaches. But sometimes a person would trip into the meditation state instead, by chance. Most hypnotherapists do not realize that real cures under hypnosis do not come from hypnosis at all but from a state of induced Reality.

I found two states of mind existed, separated by a razor's edge. Hypnosis, induced a certain way, could sometimes become a meditation by "accident." Sick Christians who came to me simply weren't Christian enough. lf they had been Christian all the way through they would not have needed the services of a hypnotist. But many were searching people of "Christian" hypnosis and persuasion; that is to say they had practiced a surface Christianity through pressure and conditioning, contrary to the way Christ Himself taught. I would speak to them about my discoveries, about responding to pressure and ego, about love and patience as a defense against evil hypnotic pressures called temptation, and about bringing them to the stillness of their own souls to realize Reality.

They would even exclaim, "That's all in the Bible!" And I would say, "Oh really?"