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Mind State Management
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rituals have been successful in invoking a relaxation response, but only to dedicated
devotees who practiced religiously. The required discipline often had to be main-
tained externally through social constraints against leaving the place of meditation
or the practice of prayer. The reason for such control was obvious. The tasks were
inherently boring and ineffective unless practiced diligently, so the sessions needed
to be practiced often enough for the benefit to be realized.
Nevertheless, over the centuries and across cultures, a general principle of the mind-
body unity seems to operate:
• Stimulate the mind-body with rapid movement and loud sounds.
• Soothe and settle the mind-body with slower and quieter movement and
sound.
• Transport the mind-body to altered states of consciousness through very slow
pulsing of movement and sound.
The principles of mind state management are similar:
• Repeated rhythmic stimulation reduces the distraction imposed by the external
world.
• Attention gradually and consistently turns to internal experiences.
If slower rhythms are better for inducing deeper states of consciousness, then it
would seem that the ultimate meditation would be to cultivate total stillness and
quietness—a slowing of all movement in a total focus of concentration. In fact,
many forms of yogic meditation attempt to do just this. However, they flourish in
cultures where patience, acceptance and the concept of “no-thing-ness” are taught
from an early age. The effort required to focus the wandering and impatient mind
is unbearably demanding and tedious to the undisciplined Western mind. Some
would argue that this lack of patience and discipline is the very attitude that the
practice of meditation is designed to overcome, the antidote to Western thinking.
However, such an argument is actually a taunting tautology, describing a condition
that prevents its own remedy. After we watch the dog chasing its own tail, we know
he is merely playing with his dilemma. Not so with meditation. For whatever rea-
son, most people in our Western culture will not meditate in a consistent way long
enough to thoroughly learn the skills of MSM.
Hypnosis: The advent of formal hypnosis in the past two centuries provided a new
and perhaps more readily acquired method of learning MSM. In hypnosis, a state
of focus is generated by the use of language, with words, phrases, and ideas using
the contradictions provided in the language itself. Words can twist and reflect upon
themselves, leaving the listener confused and detached.
Hypnosis as a path to MSM was limited by two popular perceptions:
• Hypnotic suggestibility was thought to be an inherent, almost fixed, capacity
rather than a learned skill which some people acquire more easily than others.
• Hypnosis was thought of as a weird state in which the hypnotist somehow took