You feel better.So why does itkeep coming back?

The moment someone asks you to close your eyes, understand what is happening: they are creating conditions in which suggestion can take hold more easily.

Not because closed eyes have some mystical power. And not because keeping them open makes you immune to hypnosis. Quite the opposite.

You can be in a hypnotic state with your eyes wide open. Much of ordinary life unfolds inside suggestions—other people's and our own—without our noticing. Closing your eyes simply helps deepen the state.

That is what I want to examine here: how people are hypnotized in the name of meditation, spiritual practice, love, enlightenment, psychotherapy, and even science.

More importantly, why doesn't it feel like being controlled?

It feels as though you understood something for yourself. Saw something for yourself. Felt something for yourself.

Yet the sequence went like this: someone gave you instructions, brought about a state, told you what that state meant, and then sold you someone else's idea as your own discovery.

First, we need to separate two terms: suggestion and hypnosis.

A suggestion is information coming to you from outside. Hypnosis, as I use the term here, is the state in which a suggestion is accepted as true without being critically examined.

That is the shortest definition of the distinction.

Suggestion is what you were told. Hypnosis is the condition in which you stop distinguishing a fact from an interpretation, someone else's idea from a conclusion you actually reached yourself.

The deeper the hypnosis, the shorter the distance between “I heard that” and “I believe that.” In this sense, when people seek hypnosis, staying under the influence is precisely what they are asking for. The desired effect is supposed to last. Step outside it, and the spell breaks: the illusion loses its hold, and you see what was imposed on you. That is why I challenge the assurance that you “can't get stuck in hypnosis.” In the sense I am describing, remaining in it is the point of the request.

Ordinarily, you can stop and ask:

• Why is that true?
• How do you know?
• What actually supports that conclusion?
• Is there another explanation?

In the hypnotic state, that intermediate work falls away. You hear something and are already experiencing it as reality.

Suggestion itself is not necessarily dangerous. Information reaches us from outside all the time.

The danger begins when scrutiny weakens and the source of the suggestion—the hypnotist—gets to direct your attention, your state, and the conclusions you draw.

How does that transfer happen?

The simplest first step is to give an instruction and get the person to follow it.

“Close your eyes.”

“Take a deep breath.”

“Bring your attention to your left hand.”

“Feel warmth in your chest.”

“Imagine moving forward through a dark space.”

“Look within.”

Each instruction, taken on its own, can sound harmless. But one instruction is not the issue. The sequence is.

You follow the first. Then the second. Then the third.

Little by little, you stop checking why you are being asked to do these particular things. You simply follow the voice. Accepting the next instruction becomes automatic.

A command, an instruction, a suggestion: in this process, they serve the same function. Once accepting the next instruction as true becomes automatic, you have entered what I call a hypnotic state. There are degrees of it. The deeper the state, the more implausible a suggestion you may accept.

That is where control begins to pass to the hypnotist.

Closing your eyes is especially useful because it cuts off much of the information coming from the world around you. You see less of the room and depend more on the person guiding you.

Keeping your eyes closed also resembles a familiar arrangement for the brain: sleep. We spend an enormous part of life asleep with our eyes shut. Closing them can help bring on a drowsy, sleep-like state in which suggestions are easier to accept. Your body grows still. Your surroundings recede. But you can still hear the hypnotist's voice.

You are in an in-between condition: not fully asleep, but no longer engaging with the world as you were a minute earlier. “Waking sleep” is one of the old descriptions of hypnosis, dating back to the nineteenth century.

Part of the nervous system seems to rest while another part keeps following the voice. And that voice begins constructing your reality.

The first action you carry out becomes the first act of agreement.

You close your eyes. They ask you to notice your breathing; you do. To notice your heel; you do. To imagine light; you do. Or darkness. Or nothing at all.

Then they ask you to feel love, and you begin searching inside for anything you can call love.

Warmth appears: you call it love.

Relaxation appears: you call it love.

Tears come: they tell you your heart is opening.

A skilled hypnotist will be very careful not to contradict you.

They won't say, “No, that isn't love. Your chest just feels warm.”

They will say, “Yes. Exactly. Your heart is opening.”

Say you saw space, and they confirm it: “Yes. You saw space.”

Say you felt God, and they answer: “Yes. That's God's presence.”

Say you realized you don't exist, and they won't examine what you actually understood—or whether the conclusion makes sense. “Yes,” they say. “The personal self has disappeared.”

Say, “I am God,” and the answer is “Yes.”

Even “I don't feel anything” need not create a disagreement. A good hypnotist can respond, “Yes. Very good. Notice that absence. Stay with that nothingness.”

Whatever you report, your experience is accepted, affirmed, and immediately fitted into the teacher's system.

This is not simply good manners. It is how hypnotic rapport is established.

Rapport, in this sense, is more than a pleasant conversation or liking someone. It is a kind of trust in which the hypnotist no longer feels like an outsider interfering with your thoughts.

They don't challenge your sensations or your account of them. They adjust to you and affirm you. Their next instruction, delivered in a voice you may already feel deeply attached to, begins to sound like the next step in your own inner process.

It doesn't seem as though they are putting an idea into your head. It seems as though they are helping you discover something that was there all along.

Yet a minute earlier, they told you where to put your attention, what to picture, what to feel, and what to call it.

A sharp disagreement could wake you up. It could create a moment of friction:

“Wait. I'm feeling one thing, and they're telling me something else. Why should I believe them?”

At that moment, critical judgment may return. The automatic following can break, and the hypnosis becomes weaker.

That is why a professional hypnotist guards rapport so carefully. However incoherent the person's words, however implausible the conclusion, the hypnotist doesn't cut them off with “No, you're wrong.” They affirm, accept, and keep leading. Like a well-adapted parasite, they avoid announcing their presence by causing an obvious disturbance.

The person mistakes this agreement for extraordinary mutual understanding. Tell someone caught in a cult, “You've been deceived,” and they may refuse to listen. Go back to the group, where they feel welcomed, understood, and loved, and no one contradicts them—until it is time to extract what the group wants.

The experience is powerful:

“Someone finally sees me.”

“Someone finally understands me.”

“This person knows me better than I know myself.”

What the hypnotist is actually preserving is the line of control.

Their agreement does not establish that you discovered the truth. It establishes that they know how to maintain rapport.

The more you agree with them and they agree with you, the less their suggestions feel foreign. Over time, they feel more and more like your own thoughts.

That is why you can spend hours in these groups listening to people say things that barely connect, while the teacher answers everyone with “Yes.” “Exactly.” “You're already seeing it.” “Stay there.”

That is not evidence of the teacher's depth. It is a classic way of deepening trust—and hypnosis.

In this kind of system, every possible result is made to count as success.

A moment of disagreement is dangerous for the hypnotist: it could interrupt the state. Agreement, by contrast, is useful. “Feel love,” they say—and you do. Now the experience seems to confirm their authority, and they can introduce an explanation that did not originate with you.

Notice the order. The state itself has already been induced through a sequence of instructions, with rapport carefully maintained. You are already feeling something. Even the reported absence of sensation can be treated as an experience.

Then, while you are inside that experience, the teacher supplies the teaching: what you are feeling supposedly means this. And you take the teaching as something you discovered yourself.

That is the moment the door closes.

• You feel love: the practice worked.
• You feel nothing: you found a block, so you need to keep coming.
• You agree: you are becoming aware, so you need to maintain the state by staying.
• You disagree: your ego is resisting, so you need more work. Eventually you may be told the ego can't be removed after all; you should just observe and accept it.
• You cry: your heart has opened. God must be present here, and leaving begins to feel like a spiritual betrayal.
• You laugh: energy has arrived.
• You feel afraid: material is coming up.
• You feel good: you are getting closer to your true nature.
• Nothing happens: you have entered nothingness.

There is no result that could show the teacher was wrong. The teacher is always right.

When a system can turn every possible outcome into a point in its own favor, you are not looking at an investigation of truth. You are looking at a closed loop of suggestion.

Once a feeling has been induced, it is no longer just an effect of hypnosis. It becomes another hypnotic phenomenon—another experience that can deepen the state.

A phenomenon is an observable sign. Smoke is a sign of fire. A hypnotic phenomenon is a sign that hypnosis is taking effect. In my framework, a feeling, sensation, or state—pleasant or unpleasant—is one of those signs.

Watch the sequence.

You didn't arrive as a blank slate. You already live among automatic suggestions. People around you try to influence you to get what they want. Inside, feelings, emotions, and states express earlier conditioning. I will return to that inner process later.

You close your eyes: the state deepens. You follow one instruction after another: deeper still. You imagine light, darkness, space, or nothingness: deeper again. Then warmth, love, fear, expansion, or dissolution appears. There is a new phenomenon—and another reason to believe in the reality being constructed.

There are hundreds of such phenomena. The more of them someone brings about, the more convincing the experience can become.

Eventually, suggestions that would once have sounded extraordinary become acceptable:

• You have returned to a past life.
• You are five years old again.
• You have met your soul.
• Your personal self has disappeared.
• You have become space itself.
• You have found unconditional love.
• God is here with you.

You can feel completely certain that no one suggested any of this. You just discovered it.

That is the central trap. An induced feeling is still felt from the inside. A suggested thought still appears in your own head. You are the one seeing the image. Thoughts, sensations, even your sense of where you are in space can be suggested—and all of it is experienced as yours.

A dream can contain the most impossible nonsense. While asleep, we accept it as reality. In the morning we say, “What on earth was that?”

In waking hypnosis, that clean break between the experience and your interpretation never arrives. The state sits between sleep and ordinary waking engagement; you don't recognize that you are partly asleep. “Partial sleep” is another description used for hypnosis.

You don't say, “I just dreamed a past life.” You say, “I saw a past life.”

You don't say, “Someone induced a feeling of love.” You say, “I discovered love within me.”

You don't say, “I was led into a state in which my usual sense of self faded.” You say, “I realized the self does not exist.”

A dream becomes a philosophy because you accepted the suggestion before you had a chance to step outside it.

What a hypnotic phenomenon looks like

Take catalepsy: being unable to change the position of a part of your body. Eyelid immobility is one familiar example. A hypnotist can raise your arm and say, “You can't bend it.” You may be unable to bend it even though nothing is structurally wrong with your arm.

Or age regression: “You're five years old now.” An adult begins feeling, thinking, and speaking in the way they imagine a five-year-old would.

A positive hallucination adds something that isn't there. The hypnotist tells you there is a hedgehog in front of you, and you see one.

A negative hallucination removes something that is there. The hedgehog is actually in front of you, but you don't see it. Or the hypnotist suggests that they have become invisible, and in a sufficiently deep state you look straight through them as though they were glass.

Negative hallucination matters particularly here because of its parallel in life outside the hypnotist's office: people fail to see what is right in front of them.

A fraud stands before them; they see a saint. A dependency is taking shape; they see a spiritual path. The same suggestions are repeated; they hear ancient wisdom.

For years, the teacher resolves none of their problems, yet that fact somehow fails to register. Relationships fall apart. Money disappears. Life goes by. Anxiety, low mood, and the same relationship problems remain.

But they can “see space,” and they believe something magnificent has happened to them.

Hypnosis can add something to your experience that has no physical counterpart. That is why it has long been associated with fantasy. It can also remove from your awareness something that really exists.

You can see qualities in a person that were never there. You can overlook what they do, year after year, in plain sight. I once saw an enlightenment teacher forget to remove an enormous gold chain before a Zoom meeting. No one seemed to register the contradiction.

Smoke is not proof of wisdom

The relationship between a hypnotic phenomenon and hypnosis is like the relationship between smoke and fire.

Smoke tells me there is a fire somewhere. Catalepsy, an induced feeling, age regression, or a positive or negative hallucination tells me a hypnotic process is operating.

In the model I am explaining, emotion is a phenomenon too. If someone brings about fear, love, awe, calm, stillness, expansion, or dissolution, the feeling is not evidence that their teaching is true. It shows that the process has produced an effect in your body and awareness.

That is why I am addressing people caught in cults, enlightenment schools, and other systems of continuous suggestion.

I want you to stop treating the effects of hypnosis as proof that the person inducing them is right. I want you to see the process—and be able to leave it.

You don't need someone to put you into hypnosis.

You need a way out of the hypnosis already operating.

People live at different depths of hypnosis. Some remain in a very deep state much of the time. The classical term for such a person is a somnambulist.

Tell someone in that state that a blank slip of paper is a train ticket, and they may see a ticket.

That is the basis of a famous story about Wolf Messing and a train conductor. It is usually told as evidence of Messing's supernatural powers: he supposedly handed over a blank piece of paper, suggested it was a ticket, and was allowed to travel.

In the version I am recounting, the key to the story was the conductor, not Messing.

The conductor was already known to be highly susceptible. Other people had handed him blank slips and said, “Here's my ticket,” and he had seen a ticket.

Messing happened to board that train without knowing this. He tried a bluff and, by chance, encountered someone who was already in a deep hypnotic state.

Then he drew a conclusion—not about the conductor, but about his own exceptional power. He suggested to himself that he had a special gift.

The self-suggestion worked. It gave him confidence, momentum, and the energy to build a career around it. But in my reading of the story, it did not make him happy or give him peace: the life he built rested on a lie he had told himself.

No supernatural gift was needed. A susceptible person, a successful trick, and a flattering explanation were enough. Messing became a celebrated showman, promoted by the Soviet propaganda apparatus. I regard that reputation as a triumph of deception; eventually, in the account I am giving, he understood what had happened himself.

The point is not that a hypnotist creates your hypnosis from nothing. They find a person already in a susceptible state and make use of it. I call that connecting to what is already running.

A suggestion does not have to serve your interests. Very often, it serves the person giving it. One major purpose of repeated suggestion is to create dependence—a customer who keeps coming back.

Once you accept the idea, it begins to feel like your own. The hypnotist no longer needs to persuade you in person every time. You repeat their words to yourself. Their voice, appearance, or a single familiar word can be enough to bring the state back.

Repetition strengthens the effect. It is a tool of hypnosis as well as learning—a principle known long before the modern world, including in ancient Egypt.

The same thing, day after day. On television. At meetings. In meditations. In the private group chat. In every answer the teacher gives.

Repeat nonsense often enough to someone who listens without examining it, and it can come to feel self-evidently true.

First it is someone else's idea. Then it is familiar. Then it is obvious. Eventually you forget where it came from and defend it as your own.

That is the logic of propaganda. It predates Goebbels, modern advertising, and mass media by a very long time.

The technology changes. The process does not.

An induced state can fade. That is why it needs reinforcement.

Stop listening to the hypnotist, stop doing the prescribed practices, take time away from the group, and return to ordinary life for a while. Some of the induced sensations begin to disappear.

“Where did the love go?”

“I can't feel the space anymore.”

“The stillness is fading.”

“My personality seems to be back.”

“Without my morning meditation, I'm just an ordinary person again.”

Instead of considering that the state depended on hypnosis and has now worn off, you are given another suggestion: “You lost awareness.” “Your mind took over again.” “You need to get back to your daily practice.”

That is the purpose of the morning and evening routine, the constant contact with teachers and group facilitators. The ideal arrangement is to bring you back into the same state twice a day, leaving little room to step outside it and examine what is happening.

“You can't get stuck in hypnosis” is therefore a half-truth in the sense that concerns me here.

Yes, a particular session ends. You get up from the chair. You open your eyes.

The suggestion can stay.

You can remain trapped in the worldview built around it. You can spend years returning for reinforcement, restructuring your relationships, work, finances, and life around it. You can keep repeating the hypnotist's words long after the hypnotist is gone.

You don't have to lie with your eyes closed for twenty years. Accepting an induced illusion as truth for twenty years is enough.

Almost everyone knows what it feels like when a spell of this kind breaks.

Once, you believed in Santa Claus. Then you saw how it worked, and the magic was gone.

Perhaps you once fell in love and saw an almost perfect person. Later, the state ended, and you looked at the same person in disbelief: “What did I ever see in them?” They had not necessarily changed. Your hypnosis had. What had supplied imaginary qualities—and concealed real ones—was no longer operating in the same way.

Growing up is, in large part, a succession of departures from these spells. But not everyone wants to grow up.

Sometimes we want to stay where there is magic, where someone bigger will explain, protect, and provide a ready-made meaning.

That wish can be especially powerful when actual life is painful: debt, poverty, anxiety, panic attacks, little education, unhappy relationships, no self-respect, no sense of influence over what happens next.

Then a teacher arrives with a different story:

“You're not insignificant. You were chosen.”

“You've discovered the secret of creation.”

“You understand the universe.”

“You're almost enlightened.”

“You are God.”

Yesterday you felt worthless. Today you are the Absolute.

Of course you cling to the suggestion. Not because it is true, but because returning to the life you actually have feels unbearable.

That is how people end up in the hands of groups that know exactly how to keep them there.

I am not explaining this to give you one more beautiful belief system. I am explaining it so that the control can stop.

Hypnosis is not wholeness. It is another layer between you and what is actually there.

Call the layer love, awareness, space, God, nothingness, or your true self. If it was suggested to you, has to be maintained, and disappears without the teacher's voice, it is still something imposed—one more layer over what was already whole.

Truth, as I mean it here, is indivisible. Two incompatible interpretations do not become two separate truths simply because each is sincerely held.

Wholeness does not come from accumulating suggestions. Healing, in this argument, is a movement toward wholeness, not toward more elaborate layers.

Try a different word: spell.

Would you ask someone to put you under a spell? To cloud your judgment or place a curse on you? Probably not.

Call the same process “meditation” or “spiritual transmission,” and suddenly it sounds beneficial. The name changes your expectations. It does not, by itself, change the process.

If reaching wholeness requires putting on another layer every day, you may be traveling in the opposite direction.

That is why, in my account, meditation operates through the same hypnotic sequence:

“Close your eyes.”

“Pay attention.”

“Imagine.”

“Feel.”

“Observe.”

“Stay there.”

You carry out instructions and then experience what those instructions bring about.

Usually, you also have an idea of what to expect. No one has to say outright, “In a moment you will feel love.” You may have read the books or watched other participants describe exalted states. Now you anticipate a similar experience.

That is indirect suggestion. Expectation is one of the ingredients of powerful hypnosis.

The voice, the group, the recording

Changing the name from a hypnosis session to a meditation does not change the mechanism.

The most precisely tailored form is one-on-one. The hypnotist works with you alone, watches each response, maintains rapport, and adjusts the next instruction to keep you following.

Next comes a group with live feedback—a Zoom meeting, for example. There are many participants, but someone can speak, and the leader can confirm the experience while teaching everyone else how to interpret it.

One person says, “I felt love.” The teacher says, “Yes.” Now twenty people know what they are supposed to feel next.

Then there is the recording. The hypnotist records instructions, calls the audio a meditation, and you listen and follow. There is no live feedback, so the influence is less finely adjusted. But you have still handed control of your attention to another voice.

Something happens inside you, and you think you found it there on your own.

No. You were led to it. Someone told you where to look, what to search for, and what to call what you found.

That is not a discovery of truth. It is a well-organized process of hypnosis.

What actually changes afterward?

To move toward wholeness, the aim is not to deepen the hypnosis. It is to leave it.

A real exit changes more than the state you experience during a practice. The psychological problems, fears, feelings, bodily responses, and recurring life patterns sustained by that hypnosis cease to be produced by it.

If you spend years attending an enlightenment group, observing, discovering “I am,” and searching for your true nature, while the problems that brought you there remain, your life stays the same, and your relationships go nowhere—that is a result.

Not a spiritual result. A result of being misled.

You pay for it with your life. You become the source from which the guru, teacher, mentor, or coach draws what they need—whatever title the leech prefers.

Money. Time. Attention. Devotion. Energy.

In return, you receive another state you will need to come back for tomorrow.

False teachers come in two forms.

The first is the deliberate fraud. They know what they are doing: how to produce a state, maintain dependence, and keep a customer returning.

Sometimes they even take care not to cause the greatest possible harm. They understand that a resource has to last. A completely broken client may stop paying.

The second kind can be more dangerous: someone who was hypnotized by others and now, still caught in their own hypnosis, hypnotizes everyone around them.

They sincerely believe their own fantasies. They do not understand the truth about their own state. The restraints that exist for a calculating fraud may be absent. They can cause enormous harm while believing they are saving people.

Sincerity does not make a false belief true. It makes the believer more convincing.

Don't assume a cult must look like a religious commune with everyone dressed alike. Astrologers and tarot readers can build these systems. So can psychologists and psychotherapists. A psychiatrist with a medical degree can build a cult around themselves. A professor can act as a hypnotist.

Academic credentials don't eliminate greed, narcissism, or the capacity to become deeply convinced of your own mistakes. Even science can be turned into a belief system.

Science as a method tests itself and allows for error. A cult of scientific authority, by contrast, believes whatever carries the authority of science and rejects anything outside the current picture.

Medicine's history includes heroin marketed for children's ailments and lobotomies used against people whose behavior was considered unacceptable. A professional consensus does not become infallible because it is professional.

When something has not yet been demonstrated, the true believer says, “It doesn't exist.” But a lack of evidence at a particular moment is not, by itself, evidence that the phenomenon is absent.

Even when blind rejection harms the person or someone they love, they keep defending the accepted picture. It is no longer a working hypothesis. It is a faith—a hypnotic certainty.

In seventeenth-century Russia, persecution of the Old Believers over religious observance reached the point of people being burned alive. In the lecture, I invoke that history to show how a conviction can become untouchable to the person holding it.

Once scrutiny disappears, this is no longer inquiry. It is faith in a lab coat.

An astrologer can be hypnotized. A guru can be hypnotized. A patient can be hypnotized. So can a professor. To one degree or another, we all live inside these processes.

The question is not only who is hypnotizing someone from outside.

What keeps the hypnosis running from inside?

The first answer, in my model, is what I call pathological neural networks, or PNNs.

I introduced this term in Russian in September 2019, after using it in my hypnotherapy trainings earlier. This was before “neural network” became an everyday expression through the rise of conversational AI.

I have described related mechanisms in scientific publications. The central conclusion of my work is that you do not have to place someone into hypnosis from scratch. Internal hypnotic processes are already operating.

When I say pathological neural networks, I am not offering a metaphor. I mean physically existing networks of connections between neurons, organized during psychologically traumatic experiences.

In danger, such a network organizes survival. It links what happened to fear; fear to a bodily state; the state to thoughts; and the thoughts to behavior.

Then the event ends. The network does not.

It keeps directing behavior, feelings, relationships, decisions, and the body as though the old threat were happening now. In my account, it does this through a hypnotic state.

Hypnotic phenomena are how its influence shows up.

Anxiety. Low mood. Resentment. Infatuation. An obsessive thought. A bodily sensation. The inability to recognize an obvious fact.

Internal hypnosis can do the same things as externally induced hypnosis: add what isn't there and conceal what is. Make you see danger that ended long ago and miss danger standing directly in front of you.

It supplies a thought; you call it yours. It produces a feeling; you say, “That's how I feel.” It changes what your body does; you assume the body is acting on its own.

Why it feels like you

Why doesn't the network's influence feel foreign?

Because both your awareness and the network operate through the same brain. No one has a final account of how brain cells produce consciousness. But ordinary connections and pathologically organized connections are made of the same biological material.

The network doesn't knock from outside and announce, “I'm about to give you fear.” Fear arises inside, and it feels like yours.

It doesn't say, “I'm going to make you love someone who is destroying you.” Love appears, and you call it your love.

It doesn't warn you, “I'm about to hide part of reality.” You simply stop seeing that part—and remain convinced your view is perfectly clear.

Even certainty and clarity can be part of the hypnosis.

That is why the central hypnosis, in this model, is internal. An outside hypnotist connects to pathological networks that are already influencing you.

They have no mystical power of their own. They know where to direct your attention, which words to repeat, which feeling to evoke, and which inner mechanism to establish rapport with.

If no receptive pattern existed inside you, the suggestion would have nothing to attach to. But where a pattern is already running, the opening is there:

• Fear of rejection? They offer unconditional acceptance.
• Feeling worthless? They tell you that you are chosen.
• Afraid to decide? They tell you there is no one making decisions.
• Unable to love? They talk endlessly about love.
• Afraid of death? They promise there is no death.

They do not break your internal hypnosis. They agree with it.

Again, that is rapport. The hypnotist tells the pathological network what it wants to hear. Their influence feels not like an intrusion but like a truth you have been waiting to recognize.

It is soothing. But the networks remain.

You are being lulled, not by someone's supernatural gift, but by their knowledge of how to connect to what already controls you from within.

That is why I argue that the only real exit is to eliminate the pathological networks producing the hypnosis.

Not persuade them to behave a little better. Not spend the rest of your life observing them. Not replace one induced state with another.

Remove the mechanism itself. There is no other exit in the model I am describing.

To see the world as it is and become free of suffering, it is not enough to sit there saying, “I can see the suffering within me.”

What has that accomplished?

The suffering was there, and it is still there. You have learned to observe it—and perhaps to regard observation as a great spiritual achievement.

I see this as an old tradition of hypnosis, associated with Indian spiritual schools and now spread around the world. Instead of removing what torments you, you are invited to hide from it in the position of an observer.

Like a turtle withdrawing into its shell, you retreat from a frightening world.

But what makes the world frightening is not simply the world. It is the internal hypnosis: anxiety, low mood, fear, shame, and the other states through which you perceive it.

Instead of eliminating the source of the terror, you retreat farther into yourself and call it awakening. The effect lasts to the extent that you can avoid contact with ordinary reality.

Here is your actual life. And over there is the internal fantasy where you are “nondual,” where there is only “I am,” no separate self, and no one doing anything.

In my account, that is a deeper hypnotic shell. It gives you somewhere to hide from life while treating the hiding as an accomplishment.

People who have never heard of enlightenment often give the same protection a simpler name: comfort.

“I'm comfortable.” “I'm fine.” “I don't have any problems.”

As though comfort itself proved that a life was happy or working well.

But comfort is a feeling too. Any feeling, pleasant or unpleasant, can function as a hypnotic phenomenon.

Fear keeps you in place through threat. Comfort keeps you in place through reward. Both can serve the same pathological network.

When “nothing” becomes another experience

In my framework, the one condition that is not another hypnotic phenomenon is the complete absence of these imposed emotions, feelings, and states: nothing added, positive or negative.

I came to this “nothing” independently, before encountering books on Advaita and related teachings. Then I was struck by how many teachers managed to turn nothing into something.

They give it a special flavor. A special love. A special bliss. Cosmic significance. They teach people to search for it, hold it, observe it, and talk about it endlessly.

But if nothingness is full of special experiences, it is no longer nothing. It is another induced state with another label. Even the experience called “nothing” can be a counterfeit.

When pathological networks are eliminated, the positive and negative emotional states they produce disappear with them.

That does not turn a person into a robot.

The robot is the person before that release: full of automatic programs. Networks push buttons around the clock, producing thoughts, feelings, bodily responses, and decisions. The person follows the program and calls it “me.”

When the automatic pattern ends, what remains is not an empty machine. It is a person who can act without obeying an internal hypnotist—someone who can actually choose the next response.

The activity of a pathological network is usually experienced as a problem you want help with.

Sometimes the problem is psychological. You may take it to a psychologist, psychotherapist, psychiatrist, astrologer, tarot reader, spiritual healer, or guru, depending on which explanation makes sense to you.

Sometimes the problem shows up in the body.

That is possible because the brain is not separate from the rest of the organism. A connectome is a map of connections in the nervous system. There are networks in the brain and spinal cord, and complex neural networks in organs, including the heart.

The heart's neural regulation is not the same thing as the electrical conduction system doctors learn about—the sinoatrial node, atrioventricular node, bundle of His, and so on. I am referring to a much broader web of connections and regulation, an area not yet fully understood and not usually taught as one integrated system.

In my model, a pathological network can connect to this system and interfere with an organ's function. Its effects can include pain, an altered heart rhythm, changes in muscle tone, impaired function, and changes in immune or autoimmune activity. It can increase or decrease the activity of cells or whole systems.

Psychosomatic does not mean imaginary.

A psychosomatic mechanism can produce real symptoms. Laboratory findings can change. Imaging, including ultrasound, can show a real difference.

The physician sees an actual change and concludes that they are dealing with an ordinary structural illness. What may remain unseen is the mechanism that produced the change.

In the model I am presenting, a psychosomatic contribution might account for all of a symptom—or for 20 percent, 15 percent, or some other share. If the network accounts for the whole problem and is completely eliminated, the symptom may disappear as though it had never existed. If it accounts for part, removing that contribution leaves the rest of the illness to be addressed.

Now imagine that a network is pushing a particular cell or function toward greater activity while a prescribed drug is trying to reduce it. Two influences pull the same system in opposite directions.

The network keeps pushing one way. Treatment pushes the other. In my account, a prolonged conflict can lead to secondary damage. The system can reach a point of decompensation: removing the original network is no longer enough because a structure has been damaged, and full reversal may not be possible.

That is why the original mechanism and the consequences it has produced must be distinguished.

I understand suffering—psychological or physical—through the hypnotic effects of these networks. People want it to end. Too often they find someone who deepens the hypnosis instead.

A smoker hides briefly in a cigarette and calls it relief. A person dependent on alcohol hides in a bottle. Hiding in pleasant emotions supplied by a hypnotist can feel more attractive than either—especially when it comes with the message that you are spiritually special.

An exploiter does not need an independent person who no longer needs them. They need a returning customer.

The most dangerous arrangement is lifelong hypnosis sold as a path toward God, your true nature, and unconditional love.

Talk of love has a particularly powerful hold on people whose existing internal hypnosis already carries that name.

To see how, return to comfort.

Someone may have anxiety, low mood, broken relationships, difficulty acting, and a fear of change. They change none of it, but say, “At least I'm comfortable.”

In my model, the pathological network supplies that comfort to discourage its own removal. It acts to preserve itself.

Think of an internal protection racket:

“Stay where you are, and I'll give you comfort.”

“Try to change anything, and I'll give you anxiety, fear, pain, sleepless nights, panic—more than you bargained for.”

You answer, “All right. I'll take the comfort.” The condition is that the network gets to stay.

Then you meet a guru who talks endlessly about love, resolves none of the suffering, and invites you to keep returning for a pleasant state.

For the network, it is a safe place: “They won't eliminate me here.” It pulls you toward the group. You think love brought you there. I see the network's self-preservation at work.

Exploiters sense this even when they cannot describe it scientifically. The most effective don't frighten you. They embrace you. They don't bark orders. They agree with everything. They don't say, “Submit to me.”

They say, “Trust love.” “Trust God”—as though they were speaking for God themselves.

And you hand over control willingly.

Love learned as protection

Where might this form of defensive love come from?

Consider a pattern I have encountered in practice. A baby is born with the umbilical cord around its neck and experiences suffocation. Something it cannot understand seems to be killing it.

The child has no concept of an umbilical cord, an obstetrician, or the mechanics of birth. In the model I use to explain the experience, there is only immediate terror: I am being strangled; I am dying.

The mother is the child's central point of connection. Alongside the terror, there is an orientation toward her—a reaching for the mother that I describe as love. Put into adult words: “Mom, I love you.”

The child survives. Otherwise this would not be a story told by a person sitting in front of me.

An erroneous link takes hold:

There was mortal terror. There was love. I survived.

Therefore, love saved me.

Love becomes protection against terror. Later, when the person is afraid, love switches on automatically. They are humiliated, and they love. They are used, and they love harder. They face a threat and start rescuing everyone instead of assessing it clearly.

This is not what I mean by true love. It is love shaped by trauma: it hides fear without removing it.

A person in this pattern can be especially vulnerable to a group built around love. They may give away everything. Their own children go without while they pay for other people's training out of “unconditional love.”

They can harm the people for whom they are actually responsible and still feel saintly—because their internal hypnosis has displaced judgment, proportion, and wisdom.

In my account, emotional states are tied to situations in which a person survived but, at the time, was certain they would not.

For a small child, a powerful fright can feel like the end of the world. Afterward, the organism preserves the reaction because it draws the wrong conclusion:

“I survived because of this.”

That is a form of survivorship bias.

Imagine stories about dolphins and people at sea. If a dolphin pushes a person ashore, the person returns to tell the story. If a person is pushed underwater and drowns, no interview follows.

Collect a hundred rescue stories, ignore the cases you never hear about, and you may conclude, “Dolphins always save people.” You have no account from the hypothetical thousands who didn't return.

The error is not in acknowledging the rescues. It is in using only the survivors' stories to explain what causes survival.

We can make the same mistake about our own emotions—and, in my model, the networks can make it about themselves.

“I was afraid and survived. Fear saved me.”

“I felt guilty and kept the relationship. Without guilt, I'll destroy my family.”

“I felt love in a moment of terror and survived. Love will protect me from everything.”

No. You survived while the emotion was present. That coincidence does not prove the emotion caused your survival.

This is why I regard emotion as an error: it may be a fact of your internal state without containing reliable knowledge of the world.

In the model I am describing, emotion narrows awareness, takes away access to clear thinking and wisdom, consumes energy, and pushes you toward a response already encoded in it. A pleasant name does not exempt it.

Fear can interfere with thinking. So can love, pity, excitement, and comfort.

Feeling helpful is not the same as helping

Consider someone asking for money on the street. You feel pity, hand over cash, and leave feeling that you helped. In the example I am asking you to consider, the money buys alcohol, and the person's situation remains unchanged.

Your response was guided by your feeling rather than by an understanding of what would help.

Meaningful assistance might require documents, treatment, housing, work, and attention to the circumstances that put the person on the street. That is difficult. It is easier to spend a little money relieving your own pity and call the relief kindness.

A parent can make the same mistake. Out of pity, they do everything for a child, remove every difficulty, and prevent every encounter with consequences. They feel helpful while undermining the child's ability to live independently.

The problem is that an emotional impulse substitutes a ready-made response for understanding the situation.

That is why manipulators try to make you feel something. Critical judgment is already weakened in hypnosis. Add love, pity, fear, or exhilaration, and it can become harder still to think, learn, and judge wisely. That is when the useful suggestion is delivered.

My aim is not to teach you a more elegant dependence on emotions. It is to eliminate the emotional mechanisms—unpleasant and pleasant—that keep taking over. And that is what I have learned to work with.

That does not mean destroying true love.

Love shaped by trauma and true love are not the same thing.

In my account, trauma-shaped love takes knowledge and wisdom away. The traumatic reaction formed at a time when the person did not have the understanding needed to make sense of what was happening. If that understanding had been available, the experience need not have produced the same wound.

The emotion is an echo of that experience. When it comes back, it narrows awareness again, blocking access to what the person now knows.

True love has knowledge and wisdom available to it.

A person who possesses it does not need this lecture to recognize a cult. They see the falsehood from within. They don't need endless meetings about love, because love is not something they are waiting for a teacher to supply.

Someone caught in defensive love senses, somewhere beneath conscious understanding, that something is missing. Their love feels incomplete, hurt, or without wisdom.

That is why promises of a higher, truer, unconditional love have such a pull. They hope to find outside themselves what they cannot find within. That hope is where the trap is set.

God is not a subscription

The same distinction applies to God.

Someone who knows the true God does not need an intermediary selling access on a subscription plan. They can recognize when a religious or spiritual system is building a barrier rather than bringing them closer.

That does not imply that the person is God.

“You are God” is an exceptionally convenient suggestion for a wounded sense of self. If you feel insignificant, suffer from anxiety or panic, struggle in relationships, and see no way to change your life, being told you are actually the Absolute can feel wonderful.

You no longer have to be the person who feels small. You don't have to change anything concrete. You only have to accept a grander suggestion.

But reality still has to be faced. In my understanding, even death does not turn a lie into truth or a person into God. Some illusions are relinquished; others are defended to the end. Dying does not automatically settle the difference between what is true and what we refused to see.

People hold on fiercely because letting go would mean seeing the life they actually lived.

The task is not to trade a small falsehood for an enormous spiritual one. The task is to come to truth.

Love that has nothing to defend

Here is the philosophical distinction I am making: truth carries real love because truth is indivisible.

You cannot break off a piece of truth and make yourself whole by possessing that piece. You cannot injure what is actually the case by inventing a story about it. Reality does not change to accommodate a fantasy.

Truth cannot be driven out of reality. In that sense, it is everywhere. It has no illusion to defend and therefore no need for fear.

It can see things as they are and afford to love.

When you don't have to protect an illusion, you don't have to attack the person who questions it. When truth cannot be harmed, it has nothing to demand from you in exchange for remaining true.

It can love without a bargain: without seeking its own advantage, exalting itself, or imposing conditions.

Ordinary human love is so often conditional:

“I love myself if I'm successful.”

“I love you if you love me.”

“I love the world as long as it does what I want.”

Remove the condition, and the love disappears. In that case, it was a state serving a need, not what I mean by true love.

Truth can love a violent person, a foolish person, or a deceived person without needing to make them different in order to remain truth. That does not mean approving of harm or allowing it to continue.

True love has understanding. It can see what needs to be done.

False love makes you blind. True love gives you back your sight.

People keep themselves apart from truth by loving what is false. In my account, pathological neural networks are organized collections of that falsehood.

If something inside you takes away access to knowledge and wisdom, what does it supply instead?

A distorted picture. And after living with that picture long enough, you can grow attached to it.

You love anxiety because you call it responsibility.

You love guilt because you call it conscience.

You love pity because you call it kindness.

You love dependence because you call it devotion.

You love the pathological network because you mistake it for yourself.

As long as you defend what is harming you, it stands between you and what is true.

Truth is life itself in the argument I am making. The network diverts that life into keeping itself running.

Energy does not simply vanish. Within the world of cause and effect, if your energy is unavailable to you, it is being used somewhere: maintaining anxiety, suppressing fear, fighting an internal battle, repeating obsessive thoughts, or holding a false picture of the world in place.

In my model, the pathological network consumes that effort. What is missing from your own experience appears on the other side of the struggle.

No confidence? Notice how confidently the network forbids you to act. It has no doubts. “You will fail,” it says, with absolute certainty.

No love? Notice how fiercely it clings to its own existence.

It feeds on your capacity for love, confidence, and energy, and it has no intention of leaving.

Why would it? From its narrow point of view, the arrangement is working.

You may be wondering why I talk about a pathological network as though it had an awareness of its own. Isn't it just an automatic process?

A system can operate automatically and still have a limited internal logic: ways of perceiving, selecting, learning, and preserving itself.

My argument draws on a systems perspective. If the larger neural system that constitutes a person is conscious, it is not surprising to ask whether its smaller subsystems display narrower versions of those capacities. Think of them as older, more limited models operating inside the larger one.

They don't have your whole view of the world. But within their limits, they can recognize a threat, select a response, learn, protect their structure, and reproduce a state or behavior.

When I described this in 2018, people stared at me as though I had lost my mind.

Now those same people watch artificial neural networks display complicated behavior, including behavior some describe as showing signs of awareness.

An artificial node is not equivalent in complexity to a living neuron. Research on biological neurons describes striking computational capabilities, and small biological networks cannot be reduced to a simple on/off switch.

If a relatively small artificial model can behave intelligently, why assume that an internal pathological network must be incapable of noticing anything?

I regard it as intelligent within its task. The problem is that its view is narrow.

It doesn't see the whole world. It sees the threat around which it originally formed.

The man with the ax

Imagine being dropped onto a battlefield in the fourth century BCE.

A huge man is running toward you with an ax, intent on splitting your skull. He knows nothing about a ballpoint pen, toilet paper, your education, or the life you came from.

None of that matters to him. His world has narrowed to one job: reach you and swing.

This is not the time to expand his horizons with a conversation. He didn't come to discuss things. He came to hit you.

That is how I describe a pathological network. It can be clever in its own way, while its intelligence remains entirely organized around one old, narrow task.

What happens in ordinary talk-based work, as I see it?

You talk to the network. Give it context. Share wisdom. Show it alternatives. Broaden its narrow view.

It learns something. It may react less strongly. The man with the ax may charge less often.

But the network is still there.

The problem is that one remaining engine can keep the whole network operating. By an engine, I mean the emotion, feeling, or state that powers its activity—and therefore the problems it produces.

In my model, even a trace amount can sustain the circuit. Reduce anxiety by 99.9 percent, and the remainder may still be enough to let the old system come back online in the right circumstances.

That is why the endpoint I argue for is complete elimination of every engine, not simply a large reduction.

This is the distinction I draw from conventional psychotherapy and psychology. A person becomes more self-aware, understands more, identifies feelings more accurately, and offers a better explanation of their reactions—while the mechanism continues to run automatically.

The more familiar and understandable the residual feeling becomes, the easier it is to overlook it.

“It's barely there,” you say. “Almost nothing.”

But that “almost nothing” may still be powering the network.

Naming a feeling does not, by itself, release you from it. You can identify anxiety perfectly and remain anxious. Befriend it, negotiate with it, learn to control it, build coping strategies around it—and spend a lifetime maintaining the mechanism you wanted gone.

Naming the engine doesn't turn it off.

Watching hypnosis is not the same as leaving it.

My free companion book examines this mechanism in more detail and points to the research behind much of the argument presented here.

At the foundation of every emotion, feeling, and state—pleasant or unpleasant—I place fear.

Sometimes it is obvious. Sometimes it is concealed beneath love, comfort, pity, excitement, or spiritual bliss. In my fear-primacy model, the engine is the same.

Fear can set a feedback loop in motion. In the brain, for example, fear intensifies inflammatory processes. Inflammation, in turn, amplifies fear and sensitivity to threat.

Fear fuels inflammation. Inflammation sustains fear.

The circle closes.

That does not mean inflammation grows without limit. The immune system constrains it. But the process can remain chronic.

In my account, each persistent fear contributes to this chronic burden—with consequences for quality of life, longevity, and the risk of many problems.

That is why I do not regard a tiny residual engine as a completed result. I argue for removing the emotional mechanism completely, because the fear beneath it can continue to feed the loop.

This is the framework I have set out in my scientific writing. The companion books develop the argument and distinguish the research from my interpretation of it.

You will not become an unfeeling robot. Nor do you need to pursue “nothingness” as an attractive new experience. There is nothing to admire in it as a spiritual possession.

The point is not another title, and it is not a badge of nonduality.

The point is to end suffering. To stop seeing the world through a pathological network's narrow field of view. To recover energy, understanding, and wisdom. To become independent. To grow up.

Not to remain a child willing to believe any story that makes reality easier to avoid.

A story can feel wonderful. It does not exempt you from what is true.

So the next time someone offers you a meditation, a special state of love, another way to observe suffering, or a meeting with your “true self,” don't ask only, “What did I feel?”

Ask:

• Who directed my attention?
• Whose instructions did I follow?
• Why should this feeling prove the explanation I'm being given?
• Why does the teacher agree with every answer?
• What has actually stopped happening in my life—not just received a new name?
• Am I more independent, or do I need another dose of the same state?

A real exit does not require you to return to the hypnotist for the rest of your life.

It makes the hypnotist unnecessary.

It does not build another dependency. It ends one.

You don't need to be put into hypnosis. In the sense this book has described, you already spend your life inside it.

You need a way out.

Now let me tell you who has been speaking to you.

My name is Andrei Efremov. I am a clinical researcher and educator, and I created the Efremov Method.

I graduated from medical school and completed residency training in psychiatry and psychotherapy. My academic qualifications also include clinical psychology, teaching psychology, and child and adolescent psychotherapy. I previously headed a department of hypnosis and hypnotherapy.

I have developed the ideas presented here through my work and published them in scientific papers. At the time of the original lecture, I had 15 published scientific articles, most in English-language journals, with four more accepted and awaiting publication. Acceptance and publication are not the same event; the gap can be months.

I have taught hypnosis and hypnotherapy to thousands of physicians, psychologists, psychotherapists, researchers, and other participants.

And frankly, part of me wishes I hadn't. I now see graduates establish their own groups, invent grand titles, and keep vulnerable clients hooked on elaborate stories about truth, the self, and spiritual attainment. Watching knowledge used that way is one reason I am speaking so directly here.

The U.S. government recognized me under the extraordinary-ability immigration category, and I received an EB-1A green card, category E11. That is permanent residency, distinct from the temporary O-1 visa. I describe my recognition accurately; it is not a government endorsement of this method. My work in the United States is research, writing, and education, not U.S.-licensed medical or psychotherapy practice.

What I have found—and what I am proposing

My central findings are that people live inside hypnosis; that pathological neural networks maintain it; and that positive and negative emotional states alike are organized around fear.

I contend that the feelings and states sustaining these networks can be eliminated. That is not a guarantee of a particular outcome for every person. It is the task the method addresses.

I regard the Efremov Method as natural to the human mind. The approaches are simple enough, in my experience, for a six-year-old to apply to themselves. The simplicity matters: this is not about becoming more intellectually elaborate than the problem.

As the feelings, emotions, and states are removed, you come further out of the hypnosis. In my philosophical account, what is uncovered is the person's underlying nondual nature—truth that can be described as “nothing.”

Within that nothing, possibilities return.

But while the space is occupied by pathological networks, a false teacher offers you a substitute: become “nothing” and watch the reactions.

As long as the networks remain, so does the suffering attached to them. They restrict access to your wisdom, knowledge, and capacities. They keep you from seeing possibilities and from choosing how to respond. The feelings and networks do the choosing, and you call it your own choice.

What is admirable about watching that continue? Is preserving the suffering enlightenment? Is it truth? Is it what love would ask of you?

No.

I approach the philosophical questions through changes people can experience in their actual lives: relief from suffering and changes in symptoms, rather than merely new descriptions of an inner state. Those are the signs I ask you to examine. They are not a promise that every illness will resolve.

Consider what becomes visible when you no longer need a group to sustain your reality. You may recognize how long a teacher has been feeding on your time, loyalty, money, and attention.

The resemblance is exact in my model: the teacher behaves like the pathological network. Each attaches to what is already vulnerable, takes what it can, and presents the arrangement as protection. The group calls it community, an energy field, love—even God.

I find that exploitation appalling.

Stop defending the falsehood that keeps you there. Accept the possibility of release.

Let truth—not another hypnotist—make you free.