Thank you, recoverer.

I've meditated on these points you bring up and basically agree with you.
Also I got some input from my OverSoul/ HigherSelf that yes, hypnosis does block information from spiritual sources, and that is why they don't advise hypnosis as a method of treatment.

Some of the phrases used in these examples do leave some room for interpretation. so I've been wonderring what ever happened to pearly gates to heaven, and everlasting life on a cloud? 

Bets

Dave_a_mbs in some of his posts was sceptical about Newton, as the latter had been suggesting too much in his sessions.

I suggest everyone who goes to a hypnosis regression session, and to whom it is something really important, should make a record of the session, so that afterwards one can recapitulate what informations may have been provoked by something the session leader said. But as Recoverer said, it might even be that someone picks up thoughts, or something which has been said before the session.

Now, when we think about this "suggestability" or "front loading"- bias, is there any method which doesn't carry this problem? I don't think so. In all ancient meditation techniques, as far as I know, there is massive front loading. Or think of TMI, let's imagine there is a participant who never has heard about anything of RAM or similar authors, would get no advices, and the HemiSync wouldn't contain any verbal guidance. Would the results be the same? I don't think so.

So, we might go along with Bruce and take it from the practical side: Priming the pump with active imaginery, imagination as a tool, or way of perception. You then have to decide what part of your experiences is actively made up by yourself, and which is not. The most things we get aren't easily to verify, but it happens that what we experience on a mind-journey is so unexpected, foreign, and far out that we must at least conclude, there has not been our usual kind of imagination at work, but something different.

Spooky

Albert-

Several years ago Bruce said that he questioned the validity of the information obtained via hypnosis, precisely because of leading questions by the hypnotist and by clients' desire to please by giving answers they know the hypnotist wants.

I've read Newtons' books and initially was impressed, but like so many other things re the afterlife, learned that skepticism is always the best approach pending independent verifications.

despite the wanting to please idea, which I can say does happen, there's a little thing we study here called intention.

when two or more are joined in intention to create good, as in a healing situation, which is generally why one would go to see a regressionist, not a hypnotist, is to enact some sort of healing in the mind.

they might wish to uncover other lives associated with this one. unfinished business so to speak. If the person doing the session is the perfect guide, he or she knows exactly that this relationship must have the highest intention; for healing of what's bothering the client. closure.

the intention is what determines the result. a joining of minds occurs wherever love is. where love is, truth is the certain outcome.

this is spoken of in the bible, "whenever two or more are gathered, there I am in the midst."

but you don't have to be religious to discover the spiritual principle behind this saying. discernment of practitioners must be done when meeting them in person. do not trust the media to tell you the truth.
you must enter their energy field in person. we are each guided to the perfect person to help us.

I've no direct experience of hypnosis or regression, but I've had the same thought about psychic readings passed to me about deceased persons I had relationships with which while incredibly accurate seemed to draw on memories of them which in some cases were very specifically mine. i.e. trivia which were meaningful to me, but not necessarily to anybody else.

It's hard not to conclude that the psychic was not at least in part accessing my mind and memories.

Perhaps hypnotism enables something similar albeit by an apparently different method in that the subject talks out loud rather than sending at a more subtle level -  so that when the subject is too heavily front end loaded the hypnotist in effect gets back his/her suggestions.

Put another way. I've several times suggested that what we interpret as accessing past lives may in fact simply be our partially accessing in higher states of consciousness other lives lived out by members of our disc/collective - whether past, future or concurrent. That the presumption that what we perceive was a past life of ours may simply be an artefact of our tendency to see everything in personal/me/individual self terms.

It's maybe possible to simplify by saying that higher states of consciousness as Alysia says inevitably involve ever higher levels of integration/more seamless communication between apparently individual minds.

Meaning perhaps that all methods of accessing information by extra normal means (whether by hypnosis, regression, psychic readings or whatever) may draw on this basic phenomenon.

If that's the case then it's perhaps the ego driven delusion of physical individuality/selfhood which seems so real at C1 level that is the peculiarity and the barrier to this seamless communication.

That all of the above methods are simply means of getting above/beyond the resulting highly restrictive C1 belief system. e.g. that we can only communicate using the physical senses, but that this is only because duality/the dream of separation is only so pervasive at this level of existence....

PS A further consequence of this would be that information accessed by these means are the contents/beliefs of the mind(s) involved, by whatever means and whether living or deceased - no more, no less, whether correct or not; and certainly not deserving of being treated as some sort of higher truth. (as we're often inclined to do out of some sort of reverence/assumption of knowledge/assumption that the afterlife is a heaven)

Which if true gels rather well with the often made observation to the effect that the afterlife generally doesn't hold the answers to the big questions. i.e. absolute truths. What's accessible there may be a more evolved view than here (if you look in the right places that is), but only incrementally so since it's based on the life experience of deceased beings presumably assisted by the Holy Spirit much as is the case here.

Albert-

Several years ago a close friend of mine (former Catholic priest!) who was very interested in past life regressions.  There was a guy at work who we knew who was experienced in doing regressions and in fact had a contract with the Navy for hypnosis work (not involving past life stuff).

He offered to put my friend under and to regress him to a past life or lives.

My friend went into a deep hypnotic state and while under, he gave a stirring account of being a civil war soldier who lost his life during a battle at Gettysburg.  He said he was a private named Bruce Watson.

When he came out of hypnosis, he told us that he could hear the sounds of the battlefield and could see fierce battles all around him.  He was convinced that it was genuine.

To make a long story short, years later he was re-reading a book about the civil war (of which he was always fascinated) and came across an account of a battle along with the name of Bruce Watson!

Turned out, of course, he had read that book years prior to his hypnosis session and the name of BW had been buried in his subconscious only to re-emerge while he was hypnotized.

Bottom line is that we have to very careful before jumping to conclusions.  In his case he was initially convinced he had been a soldier during the civil war with the name of BW.  Now he realizes he simply regurgitated a long lost memory of something he had read.

R

Rondele:

That's a good example. Thank you.


Don:

Do you know of a link for the Harvard study?

Do you really think possession is a more reasonable explanation for what happened for the Stevenson cases than reincarnation? Do you believe we live in a universe where the divine powers that be have set things up so that just about any spirit can come along and possess a child? Even if one believes in a being such as Satan, the book of Job seems to state that Satan can cause trouble only when God allows him to do so. Would God allow former human spirits to possess children? The cases Stevenson speaks of don't show any indication of maliciousness. Perhaps an explanation other than possession and other than reincarnation as usually thought of is in order.


Since we are talking about suggestion, perhaps Scott Peck caused Jersey to believe she was demonically possessed. Consider some of the factors:

1. Scott Peck hypnotized Jersey early on during the process.
2. Jersey wasn't mentally stable. Psychologists have found that mentally unstable people are in the top five percent when it comes to suggestibility.
3. Consider Peck's explanations for why Jersey became open to demonic possession. When Jersey was 12 years old her father examined her private area. She told herself this was okay because her father wore a doctor's coat when he did so and even though he wasn't a medical doctor he was a psychologist. I believe it is very understandible why a young girl would make excuses for her father, a person she should be able to trust. Yet Peck stated that because of her dishonesty demons were allowed to mess with her. Give me a break! Would beings who represent the light allow this to happen?  Is every young girl who gets molested by her father and makes excuses for him allowed to be influenced by demons?
4. Peck also wrote that demons were able to influence Jersey because she had an interest in the teachings of Edgar Cayce. Once again, give me a break! Without getting into what Edgar Cayce is about, would the divine powers that be really allow a girl to be influenced by demons because she doesn't have the supposed "right" belief system? Going by this way of thinking, just about any of us including you Don are open territory for demonic possession, because certainly hardly any of us have the supposed "right" belief system. Not because we are people of evil intent, but because we are exposed to different external influences. Too bad Malachi Martin isn't still around, so we can ask him what the "right" belief system is.
5. Supposedly Peck eventually got Satan to speak through Jersey. This seems strange since the actual existence of a being named Satan is very questionable.
6. After the supposed exorcism process was over, Jersey could still hear demonic voices in the background. Peck wrote that Jersey stated that before the exorcism the voices were right here (I don't remember the exact words). If the exorcism was successful, wouldn't the voices be completely gone? Why would the divine beings that helped Jersey allow demons to hang "partly" around? Because they considered it evil for her to apologize for her father as she did, and because she became interested in the teachings of Edgar Cayce?
7. Peck wrote that he filmed the exorcisms so Jersey could watch them. I find this puzzling. If she was aware enough of what was going on so she could differentiate between when demons were right here rather than in the background, why was it necessary to see a film?
8. Peck wrote that he could tell that Jersey was possessed because of the evil facial expressions she made. Our bodies are wired so that our body language will reveal our state of mind. Our minds are able to create all kinds of thoughts and feelings. People have an experience of evil while watching horror movies not because demons jump off of a movie or television screen and influence them, but because their own minds are able to create the feeling of evil. Certainly it is possible that Peck caused Jersey to believe that she was demonically possessed, and this caused her to have a state of mind that led to evil expressions.
9. None of the people around Jersey, including her controlling husband and including Scott Peck, were messed with by demons.  Why wouldn't demons mess with the people that were around Jersey?
10. What motive would Satan and his demons have for possessing a girl who doesn't play a key part in the grand scheme of things? Doesn't this seem like an odd way to try to defeat God's will?
11. Between exorcism attempts Peck was able to go out and share a smoke with Jersey, and at one point invited her to have cocktails with her and the exorcism party. Doesn't this seem odd?
12. The connection between Malachi Martin and Peck.  Mark Cuneo wrote in his book "American Exorcism" that Father Nicola (spelling?) and Father Benedict Groeschel, were highly skepticle of Martin's five exorcism stories in "Hostage to the Devil." They stated that if cases of this nature happened in the New York City area, they would've become aware of them.  It seems odd that the people who were involved in these cases were able to network to an extent where they made contact with Martin, yet no information was leaked so that beyond Martin's word, anything could be proven.