“The sensory apparatus we know as the ear is simply an external attribute of the cerebral cortex.”
— Dr. Alfred Tomatis, otolaryngologist and originator of sound-based therapies for communication, learning, and listening skills
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Hearing
What do you ever really hear in all that you’re listening to? Do you hear all of your thoughts or just the ones that make the most sense? Some of our thoughts come as images or impulses, some as sensations, and others come with words attached. Our first impression often determines whether we focus on a thought or let it drift past.
Not many thoughts are considered in our heads. Most of our thinking just flows past us as a kind of distracted story line. Ask someone for their opinion and you’ll get a burst that will fade away after a few sentences. If your question is not recharged by some act of relevance, reward, or rejection their comments will settle into a kind of closure.
Consider conversations at a gathering, party, or social event. There will be a set of topics which people typically expect to hear about. These will be of short duration which will stimulate many associations. Common topics typically sustain five or ten minutes of discourse, but rarely more.
We mostly use language to focus and form social contacts. There is little original thought or exploration of things that can’t easily be said. This limits us to rather superficial topics. It also limits how we tend to think when we’re on our own. We have similarly short conversations with ourselves, most of which don’t break new ground.
As I write this I’m asking myself, “What is there to say on this topic? What can I say that goes beyond repetition?” I have to create or picture some structure before I start talking. To do otherwise is just to repeat things I’ve already heard. The value of what I say is determined by the importance of the questions it asks.
Focus
It seems obvious that before you can have an answer, you first need a question, but most of what we say doesn’t answer a question of any significance. Most of our thoughts repeat a train of unjustified ideas awakened by whatever brought them into our heads. Our minds create thoughts like a spotlight meandering over the events that surround us. This light continually dwells on issues that attract or annoy us. There’s a lot that we miss, misinterpret and misunderstand.
You can have too much or too little focus, but focus may not be the right word. Having too much focus leaves you feeling anxious about important and unsolved issues. You don’t question your focus; you question the issues. But the problem is rarely the issues, it’s your obsession with them. This is a kind of hyperactivity disorder which, when manifested by kids, bothers adults, but when it’s manifested in adults it’s explained as reasonable anxiety. It’s not reasonable but we don’t recognize this; we rarely recognize our obsessions as unreasonable even when they obviously are to others. If you were the kind of person who questioned whether you’d left the stove on twenty times a day would you consider yourself obsessive? Maybe you did leave the stove on!
Too little focus is just as easily overlooked. Being forgetful, distracted, or disengaged are symptoms of poor focus. We don’t blame ourselves and we laugh it off by saying we have too much on our minds, but this just rationalizes our lack of attention, our state of hypoarousal, or a failing memory.
We are creatures of habit and we rely on our habits to keep us consistent and reliable. As a therapist in private practice, I have an irregular schedule. I notice myself missing less important appointments and I have recognized this as a combination of weaker memory and an inadequate system of reminders. I now use a computerized calendar, a physical whiteboard, two alarm clocks, and a system of flags and timers. I’ve built new regularities around my need to respond to irregularities.
Attention Deficient, Normal, and Disordered
I experience hypoarousal when waiting at stop lights. My mind does not do well when nothing’s happening. I start to fall asleep. Something like this used to happen in school when I was expected to listen to a boring or disorganized speaker. From the teacher’s point of view I had an attention deficit, but I didn’t: my lack of attention was justified.
Most of what’s diagnosed as childhood ADHD stems from situations of this sort. Children are rewarded for tolerating boring and useless material. The ridiculous argument you’ll typically hear is that this material will be useful someday. To solve this nonexistent problem, children are given amphetamines that create a state of stimulated engagement. This temporarily enables a child to attend to worthless, boring material.
I have treated clients who lack the brainwave rhythm of engagement. To use a motoring analogy, these are people whose brains are like engines that idle at too low a level. Such engines typically stall when subjected to a load, and a person who idles too low will disengage. They may drift off, lose track, become confused, or get angry.
The problem can be environmental, as it is for energetic children asked to sit, and for me to enter a state of suspended animation. The better solution for school children is to set them free, as the medication they’re given destroys brain function. The solution for drivers could be to avoid traffic but, as that isn’t possible, they’ll turn to their cell phones.
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Listening Deeply
Deep listening goes beyond paying attention. I first learned this from playing classical guitar. I learned there were structures hidden in the sound that were not easily apparent: overtones, textures, resonances, and background rhythms. I learned how to shape and control these. As a result, I found listening to the sound to be so interesting that I lost interest in the music.
My next lesson in listening came from mountaineering, but this wasn’t auditory, it was attending to visual, personal, and topographic rhythms. And while this is not auditory, it has many features in common with listening, namely focus, attention, distinction, and the ability to remember. I recall a wonderful passage through the bowels of a glacier, listening to the ice groan while quickly climbing up and around walls, pillars, and crevasses of steep, granulated ice. We had to do this at night and by headlamp, as moving through an icefall in the daytime is too dangerous.
My last lesson comes from being a therapist because much of what’s communicated isn’t verbal. I’ve read that human communication is 60 to 90% nonverbal but I suspect those numbers are largely invented. As a statistician I get very suspicious when people start quoting numbers. The amount of nonverbal communication differs for each person. Some people are effective at verbal communication either because they speak or think well. That doesn’t mean they’re honest, it means they’re effective.
An analytical person will speak their thoughts and show little affect, while an emotional person or a child will communicate with their posture and body. Consider cats and dogs. Cats are attentive listeners but they don’t get much from human language. On the other hand dogs, who both listen and hear well, can pick up on what we mean with virtually no attention to our words.
Hypnotic Listening
There has long been a debate over the nature of hypnosis. Some researchers claim hypnosis is not really a state at all, it’s just a disconnection from your environment. And while it’s true that you disengage from your environment, it’s what you otherwise engage with that’s important. As a hypnotherapist, this is what I focus on: to what are you listening when you’re no longer here?
This is the crux of hypnosis: whatever is going on inside your mind but outside your awareness is crucially important in shaping how you think. If you become aware of what’s happening in your mind, or more connected with your inner energy, then you have the opportunity to redirect it or have it redirect you. In effect, you have the opportunity to rewrite aspects of your conscious or subconscious programming.
Hypnotic listening means establishing a common mental territory on which you can hear your feelings and your feelings can connect with your rational mind. This isn’t listening in the ordinary sense, it’s not auditory or visual, though it can involve sound and vision. It’s more akin to listening to your heart.
What makes hypnotic listening so powerful and unusual is that it happens on another level of consciousness. Your subconscious mind exists on a separate level, a level on which there is little external perception, little interest in external perception, and surprisingly little interest in what you think.
States of Trance
The somnambulistic trance is the stereotypically hypnotic state of heightened inner awareness. Such a person may not appear to be aware, as they are shut off from both perception and memory, but they are aware in a greater metabolic sense, and they’re able to access a deeper, more fluid memory.
Addressing addiction is a good example of the possible effects of hypnosis. If you’re addicted to a substance or behavior, and a strong part of you wants to change, then there is an opportunity to make your strong inclinations stronger and your other inclinations weaker. This does not work unless you have the fortitude to adopt a new pattern. It’s sort of like redirecting a river: you can accomplish such redirection if you have machinery, the energy, the time, and the resolve to change the geography around it.
The hypnotherapist does not implant memories, but they can amplify ideas you’re already sympathetic to. Through hypnosis you can inflate or deflate existing ideas by creating associations that target those ideas you would like sooner to come to mind. You can be “hypnotized” to remember your aversion more powerfully than your attraction to the behavior at issue. This only works to a degree. You must have an authentic aversion to start with, and your compulsions must already be vulnerable to redirection.
Insights and Hallucinations
There are common elements between hypnotic and psychedelic trances. In both cases you are taken into a state of amplified internal perception. Depending on the person, the hypnotic state is easier or harder to induce, while the psychedelic state simply occurs with the appropriate dose. But the way the state is received is really what’s important, and that’s harder to predict and control using psychedelics.
Analytically minded people have a difficult time releasing themselves to the irrational, emotional, and vulnerable hypnotic state. Emotional, creative, and associatively inclined people generally have an easy time. In contrast, chemical psychedelics can sweep most people away regardless of their intentions. Despite this, I think a less analytically-minded person will have an easier time processing the results of a psychedelic experience.
It’s commonly said that easily hypnotizable people are suggestible, and the hypnotism itself is an experience of suggestion. I think this is a facile misunderstanding of how thoughts are built. Thoughts are built by association not by suggestion. A suggestion means nothing unless it triggers an association, and the more powerful the association the more impact it will have. This is the same mechanism that makes psychedelic experiences impactful. There must be some association that you can bring back.
Change Grows From Associations
Psychedelic experiences, like hypnotic experiences, are largely associative. Like nighttime dreams, they present impactful visions that are difficult to describe. Even in simple dreams where the setting is easy to describe, the meanings of the dream elements are not.
Dream visions involve semi-realistic, familiar elements. These will not be as realistic as hypnotic visions, but they’ll be more realistic than psychedelic visions. Despite these differences, I suspect all of these altered state experiences carry similar meanings seen through different lenses. The largest differences lie in the sense or reason that you can take from them.
Hypnotic visions are the most rational, which is not to say they’re reasonable but that the ideas seem connected. Dreams are both irrational and disconnected, and their lack of connection confuses us. Dream scenes are sequential, but they are so weakly related as to seem random.
Psychedelic visions can have impact without reason. They can have miraculous powers to restore a kind of balance we might call sanity. It is a fundamental truth that what we call sanity has more to do with what we communicate and understand than anything we do. It’s only when you do what other people don’t understand that your sanity is called into question.
Inspiring people express ideas that are motivational, not material or prescriptive. Healing ideas are similar in that they create resolve, faith, and self assurance. They are directive and actionable. This is why being given a diagnosis can often bring relief even when it provides no solution.
Beyond Understanding
Messages received in trance exceed common understanding. They may reveal themselves in bits and pieces when seen from different perspectives. Many feel so important that you’ll never forget them, even though you don’t know what they mean. Inspiring experiences resonate with one’s sense of self.
A crucial feature of all transformative ideas is that they are not clear at first, but they carry a sense of importance that keeps them in your mind and compels you to make sense of them. Just as people with creative insights know a new idea is valuable, a profound trance experience will herald its importance by the associations it evokes.
Integration Aims
Psychic integration provides powerful self-understanding. The two keys to integrating an experience are continuing to recall its details, and figuring out what it means. Psychedelic experiences offer the benefit of being large, dramatic, and contained. They are brief but impactful. And while the visions may be complex, your role is simply that of a witness.
Contrast this with trauma which is often unpleasant, complicated, and extended. Trauma is harder to integrate because it has complicated associations. It is interesting that dreams avoid trauma, nightmares being an exception. Dreams are normally disturbing but not traumatic. Given that your past traumas are your greatest roadblocks to growth, and your dreams are your most focused engagement with memory and associations, it is strange that dreams do not resolve trauma more effectively.
As a dream therapist, I think this is because healing from trauma requires conscious engagement, something that often escapes us in dreams. What’s missing is our conscious involvement, and this applies to the integration of other altered state experiences. The reason this is missing is that we don’t want to go there; the reason dreams are not more effective in restoring our mental health is that we refuse to work on traumatic issues.
I approach dream, hypnotic, traumatic, and psychedelic experiences as similar tools for integrating our consciousness. None of them work automatically and they all require a similar kind of conscious engagement. You must engage your traumatic issues in order to make progress in resolving them.
Integration Skills
I would go further: I think we have to use all of these tools, and that none of them alone can provide all of the integration we need. This is a bold statement given that few people engage in any of these experiences. I feel this can be explained simply: most people do not make progress because they are not ready to.
If you are interested in integration, then I suggest you consider what it means. It certainly means more than solving a particular issue or problem. Integration is a full life canvas, one that includes physical and mental health, as well as individual, family, family lineage.
This is also not really a choice, though you can build motivation and develop supporting skills. The motivation you need must come as an inspiration, the recognition that you can become something larger than you know or have been told.
This inspiration will encounter resistance both from your normal thoughts and behaviors, but also in the thoughts and behaviors of those around you. You are affected by the collective in which you’ve embedded yourself. You are tied to the culture you accept or create, which is why recognizing the world around you, whether this means accepting or contradicting it, is a component of personal integration.
The skills you’ll need are broad and include perception, tolerance, patience, temperance, diligence, courage, endurance, resilience, and discernment. You will need to purify your body, your environment, and your thoughts. By pure I don’t mean virtuous, profitable, or safe, I mean authentic, honest, insightful, and vigilant.
Reconsider your traumas and ask how they are still attached to you. Engage in both mindful and mindless exercises that develop potentially uncomfortable skills such as concentration, relaxation, trust, disclosure, endurance, exuberance, and restraint. In short, stretch yourself.
Integration Dreams
Learn how to engage with your dreams. It is easier than you think. Develop a meditation practice on your own regular schedule. Fundamentally, meditation means engaging the world with an open mind. Give yourself daily time to think and act creatively through music, writing, movement, or some form of construction. Do not expect to achieve anything and don’t let yourself or others limit what you think. Being unlimited is the point.
Enter altered state experiences mindfully. It is your intention that counts more than your skill or effect. For example, dreamwork starts with thinking about dreaming before you sleep. This is as important as remembering dreams. Work to make regular daytime experiences more psychedelic, as this will make psychedelic experiences feel more regular. Listen to some of my free self-hypnosis audio files to free your imagination.
My books The Skills of Sleep, Becoming Lucid, and Operating Manual For Enlightenment will help you. Don’t be misled into thinking that integration requires new experiences; new experiences just provide recent evidence. Integration means finding balance. You do this by exploring the boundaries of what unbalances you. This extends across all of your life. Let integration become a habit.
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