How Someone Else’s Idea Becomes Your Own
You heard an explanation. When did hearing it turn into believing it?
What you were told.
The state in which you accept it as true without examining it.
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.