"First they ignore you. Then they disagree with you. Then they fight you. Then you win." -- Ghandi

The progress of scientific revolutions is less violent, but sometimes no less heated, than political ones. I highly recommend the excellent outline and study guide  for Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 2012),  which has recently been published in its fiftieth anniversary edition. (In my opinion, the outline reads better than the original!) Of particular relevance are Pajares' notes on Chapter V, X, and the chapters which follow it.

As Shakespeare said in his play, The Tempest, "The past is prologue" -- or, as a New York cab driver reportedly phrased it, "Brother, you ain't seen nothin' yet!"

Reference

Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4th ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press

 

A One-Minute Meditation for the Management of Chronic Pain

The world is too much with us, late and soon.

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

==William Wordsworth, 1807

By experiencing one minute a day of mindfulness meditation some significant changes can occur in your life, because the effects begin to multiply as the one minute meditations become a more frequent part of your life. You will feel more calm, resilient, creative, clearer thinking, focused and peaceful without detatching yourself from liife or interfering with other activities., When combined with other applications, for example,  meditation can be helpful in the management of chronic pain.

You can do this one minute meditation with eyes closed or eyes open. If you choose to have your eyes open in the beginning, I suggest you focus your eyes on something that has little meaning such as a doorknob or a speck of dust on the floor. If you are driving, you can use stopping for a red light as a cue to practice your one minute meditation by focusing on the red light until it changes.

Your focus of attention during the meditation is the experience of your breathing in and out. You will focus on some aspect of your breathing that feels natural to you, such as your chest moving, the feeling of air moving through your nose or mouth, your belly moving, your shoulders moving, or any aspect of breath that feels comfortable and natural. As you breathe out, relax any lightness in your body. During the one minute you will likely experience your mind having shifted from focusing on your breath to focusing on something else such as your thoughts, images, feelings, sensations, memories, conversations, movements, and/or other things. You may suddenly notice sounds you had not noticed before. You may find yourself reviewing conversations that you had earlier, or you may find yourself solving problems that you have been working on,or you may notice tensions in your body that come into awareness. When you notice that your awareness and attention have shifted away from your breath, you will mindfully, gently, calmly, and peacefully return your attention to your breath, just noticing the distraction without pushing it away or taking it in, or evaluating, judging, or getting involved in the distraction. Just gently and lovingly return your attention to your breath. You may find yourself doing this from 10 to 100 times during your one minute meditation. Eventually you will find that your "meditation muscle" gets stronger and there are fewer distractions. The distractions are normal and are part of the nature of our minds. Thoughts are like clouds in the sky. If you just notice them without trying to push them away or analyze them, they usually just pass away. The mindfulness practice will eventually bring you more peace, compassion, joy and calm for yourself and for others. 

Don't expect immediate results. The purpose of meditation is not to turn you into master overnight. Meditation works best when it is done for its own sake, without becoming attached to results.

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Hypnosis and the MYTH of the "Unconscious Mind"

Here's an experiment you can perform yourself. Call up a college or university near you and ask to speak to somebody who teaches in the psychology department. Ask them about the existence of the "unconscious mind" in light of current research on brain structure and see what they have to say.  Or, if you prefer, you can call up the biology department and ask them the same thing. Professors from both of these departments will tell you that in view of our current understanding of the structure of the brain, the notion of a separate "unconscious mind" is at best a crude approximation which only sounds logical because it is circular. If we see two people fighting, for example, we say that it's because they're angry. Why do we think that they are  angry?  Because they're fighting! Why do hypnotized people so frequently experience a trance? Because hypnotic suggestions bypass the censor of the conscious mind. Why is there such a thing as a "conscious mind" which  has such a censor? Because this is how hypnotized.people behave!

Wouldn't it  be easier to simply say that you can reframe yours perception of reality using the power of suggestion, without having to infer the existence of two separate minds, one conscious and the other unconscious, each one operating according to different principles and constantly scheming against each other?  How and why could such a contraption possibly have come into existence, either by creation or by evolution?

Of course, we are able to do a number of things without the direct supervision of our  conscious awareness. We do have the ability to make some actions as automatic and habitual as possible without having to attend to each separate detail, as is the case when we are able to drive from one end of town to the other, stopping at each red light and alternately braking and accelerating to keep up with the flow of traffic without consciously planning each movement in advance. In extreme cases, this can take the form of dissociative reactions such as amnesia, fugue, or dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder), in which  conflicts are split off from conscious attention because they have become too painful for our attention  to bear  For example, one client who is a genuine multiple has shown me printouts from a Web site operated for people diagnosed as having DID. Although there may be only ten to twenty people who actually belonged to this site, the actual number of members was over two hundred, because each personality was given a name and allowed to register and post entries separately, sometimes arguing or disagreeing with the other personalities with whom they shared a common physical body.  She informed me that the site was very secretive, and operated like a cult. Its "members" were generally opposed to psychotherapy, because their separate personalities do not want to be integrated.  Indeed, they were inclined to view any therapist who attempted such integration as a potential executioner! My client reports that she was blocked from membership because, in her efforts to collect information about this site, the administrators began to suspect that she was an "informant." The site was subsequently closed, and many of the former members organized a secret group on Facebook.

The reasons for this splitting can be readily understood in terms of a person's ongoing conflicts, without reference to a separate "unconscious mind" lurking somewhere beyond the bounds of everyday awareness. In fact, it is possible to create an artificially induced dissociation in which two or more ego states talk to each other, merely by suggesting it. I would never want to discourage my friends from using such a technique, for it can still be a valuable tool in the practice of hypnotherapy. 

What, then, is hypnosis. if it is not a means of bypassing the conscous mind and speaking directly to the unconscious? There are so many ways to hypnotize people that entire books have been written on this subject, and more ways are being devised all the time -- so many, in fact, that it is easy to see that the only thing which they have in common is the actualization of the suggestion that one's conscious processes are beginning to operate differently, as defined by the suggestions of the hypnotist and the prevailing expectations of the culture and the participant.

I prefer to use the term multiversal meditation instead of the term hypnosis, because it enables me to employ the concepts of modern physics instead of the outdated ansociaations with sleep, which contemporary brain research has now completely disxredited. The brain waves which characterize a state of sleep are totally lacking when a person  is simply responding to the expressed or implied suggestion that one is in a state of hyonosis. And the only person who is really able give you scientific, research-based information about the nature and properties of the "unconscious mind" is an anesthetist!

Viirtual Reality Hypnosis? Throw Away Those Goggles!

Most people are familiar with Charles Dickens' story, "A Christmas Carol," in which the miserly Scrooge is sited by three spirits who "scare the Dickens" out of him and he becomes a lovable old gentleman who "knew how to keep Christmas better than anyone."If Dickens had been writing in the twenty-first century instead of the nineteenth, he would probably have had Scrooge make a few visits to an experiential hypnotist who, as Kelley Woods and I have been doing, would use hypnosis guide the client to a series of parallel universes, in which things would turn out differently i-- except we know now that we should use love and happiness rather than fear as an incentive to make the point. We don't need to use 3-D glasses to use virtual reality hypnosis. We use a combination of Kelley's mindful hypnosis and Don's BEST ME technique to allow clients to project their entire being into another Universe -- and it works!

Virtual Reality Hypnosis: Adventures in the Multiverse extends Dickens' approach to the modern era, often with dramatic results., Clients have been saying things like, "I can't thank you enough!" and, "I'm at a point in my life now where I think I can accomplish anything!" The changes which they are reporting in their lives seem to bear this out.