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Kaiden fox
Dedicated to Barbara Herodas, my Fiancée and Research Subject.
The Satanic Warlock
NLP and the Science of Seduction
3
“Language, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another’s treasure.”
Abrose Bierce
Anton LaVey was more then a Lion Tamer. While he undoubtedly picked up a number of tricks for dealing with the Human Animal from his experience with the majestic cats, his skills in Lesser Magic come from his experiences as a photographer, and as a hypnotist. A photo-essay in the “Command to Look” would be too large for a Word document, and I know nothing about cats. What I do know is Hypnosis. I originally wrote this paper for my Psychology class. It quickly grew beyond that, as can be seen by the page count (four to five times what it should have been).
This is a quick and dirty guidebook to how to manipulate people. It is in no means complete. To give full credit where credit is due, I recommend anyone seriously interested in the subject visit the web sites listed in the bibliography, especially www.seduction.com.
Before we start, I must give the Satanic Caveat. The information and techniques listed below assume the existence of an unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is a reality, but not everyone has one. Even the founder of NLP, Richard Bandler, warns about this. People with no unconscious mind never have disassociated memories, have no self-image (in Buddhist terms, no “ego.”), and if they are influenced by process language, it is by choice. This is because there is no chasm in them between “think” and “feel.” The core technique of my brand of lesser magic, as outlined below, is to capture and lead the imagination and thereby indirectly influence emotions on a level undetectable to the listener. This only works when what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling are different. Like stage magic, misdirection is the key.
Hypnosis is the orphaned child of psychology. It has a reputation slightly better than that of eugenics among the biological sciences. In fact, some otherwise brilliant people deny that hypnosis even exists.[1] Even those who will concede to the existence of hypnosis still balk at its successor, Neurolinguistic Programming (often abbreviated NLP).
The reason is complex. The primary reason is the conflict of themes within the science of psychology. The first theme is our experience of the world is highly subjective.[2] This forms the basis of hypnotic theory, as will be shown in depth. Conflicting with the previous theme, psychology is empirical.[3] The conflict arises from there being no way of empirically knowing another person’s state. Furthermore, the postulate of an unconscious mind naturally leads to the conclusion that sometimes, we don’t even know our own states. Another common misconception about hypnosis is that only small numbers of people are capable of going into a trance. According to the theory of NLP, this is comply wrong, and has arisen because the standard model of testing a theory is to do the same thing to everyone and see how many people respond. Because trance is a very personal and unique experience, that kind of research has little validity.
The people who practice this art are even more damaging to its reputation. The most famous of hypnotists is Anton Mesmer, whose name is preserved in our language as mesmerism. While he could be described as a quack, a more accurate description would be that Mesmer was a medical researcher who was on the wrong path with his theories of magnetism, yet, serendipitously, discovered the placebo[4] effect, suggestion, and hypnosis. While not a hypnotist, Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind constantly fall into greater and greater disrepute as the Victorian era he represented moved further into the past. In modern times, stage hypnotists give a popular misconception of what hypnosis is all about. Ross Jeffries is arguably the most hated character in the field of NLP. His life’s work is the transformation of Neurolinguistic Programming into Speed Seduction: using hypnotic language as a superior method to quickly establish trust, intimacy, and intense physical relationships.
Neurolinguistic Programming is the combination of many schools, but in essence, it is a study of the internal human experience. John Grinder and Richard Bandler are the creators of the science known as NLP. They took the hypnotic techniques of Milton Erickson, the family therapy of Virginia Satir and the basic principles of Gestalt psychology as their foundation. To this, Bandler and Grinder added the transformational grammar of Noam Chomsky and Gregory B. Bateson, as well as the metaphor of computer programming. Together, this to created a coherent theory of the internal human experience.[5] They wanted to know how to change other people, as a way of improving therapy. In doing so, they developed the theory of why this sort of change works. The modern hypnotic paradigm is epistemological in nature. Experience and perception are not raw, unfiltered views of reality. Far from it, humans filter experience through limited sensory organs, our previous experiences, our expectations, and through our language. Neurolinguistic Programming is the study of the internal experience of an individual… what happens on the inside of one’s mind… and how that can be changed. Changing one’s internal experience is an act of altering states; trance is all about altered states.
What makes NLP both powerful and controversial is that it breaks out of the beliefs that most people have about hypnosis. The most essential belief about hypnosis is that no one can be hypnotized against his or her will. While there is a kernel of truth to this, NLP can hypnotize someone without his or her knowledge. Hiding the commands of hypnotic trance inside of a normal conversation achieves this.
We don’t talk to ourselves the way we talk to other people. Conversely, if a person were to talk to you in the same way you talked to yourself, your unconscious would believe it to be your own thoughts. This is the basic premise behind the process language.
Process language gets its name from the idea that everything is a process. Anger, joy, love, admiration, fascination; these are not quantum events. They are processes. It is possible to take any process and, using skillful description, lead another person through that process.[6] The following is a short introduction to process language.
In English, the flow of a sentence does not change tone much. Actually, do you believe this is the way it works? Tell me that it does.
If you are a native speaker of English, the odds are you read the first sentence in a monotone. This is the normal, default way of creating a statement. Did the second sentence ended with an upturned tonality? English marks out a question with an upward inflection at the end of a sentence. The last sentence, being a command, ends with a downward inflection. Tonality drops.[7] The best way to demonstrate this is through the observation of interaction between pets and humans when pets vocalize. Mammals like cats and dogs cannot speak English, nor do they understand more than a fraction of it. Yet, pets and humans understand each other by listening to the tonality. The embedded works because it takes the linguistic form of a question, but the tonal quality of a command. For example, “If you were to give me an A, do you think it would be a high enough grade?”
An embedded command starts with either a question (or a universal statement) that starts the wheels of the mind along a hypnotic path. For the sake of brevity, we will deal in depth with only three of these phrases. Perhaps the most powerful is, “have you ever?” This is not a question. It only looks like a question. In fact, this is a command, to search through one’s mind and remember a time that the experience I am about to describe has occurred.[8] “Have you ever read a paper so mind-blowing that you just had to give this person an A?”
Another category worth mentioning is the negation. Here’s a classic hypnotic example, “Don’t think of a purple balloon.” If you’re thinking of one right now, then you already have an intuitive understanding of how negation works. It works on the theory that the only way to understand something is to experience just a bit of it for yourself. The only way you could process the idea of not doing something is if you first process the idea of doing it.[9]
The third major way to embed a command is with quotes.[10] By quoting the experience of another person, you make it safe and natural for the subject to experience the process you are going to describe. For example, if I were to say to you[11] “I deserve an A on this paper,” the most natural reaction would be to question the validity of my statement. Consider the beginning of a hypnotic pattern like “What’s it like when you see a paper, and you can tell right away that you’re going to give it an A?” It still would be natural for you to think I was giving you a direct command to give me a high grade. The truth is, I don’t know what kind of paper deserves that kind of grade. However, I was talking to my friend, Jeff, who was a TA for the English department of UWM, and he told me that his professor gave him very good advice on how to grade papers. He told Jeff that when he was a TA, his professor told him about a lecture given by Milton Erickson, who said that the grade A paper has three parts. First, it has to be different. An A-Class paper has to go outside of what’s in the textbook, so that you know the person really looked. Second, it has to make you think… because that shows that your student is capable of thought himself, and not just telling you what you want to hear. Third, it has to be well organized, so that it’s easy to read.
Trance words and presuppositions must be explained together, because a trance word is a word that, in the English language, presupposes trance.
A presupposition is a statement, which can only be understood if certain elements are understood to be true. An example of a simple presupposition would be, “All hypnotists are evil.” This presupposes that there is a class of objects, which the label “hypnotists” identifies. That all of them are evil is a matter of personal morality. “Kaiden Fox is a hypnotist,” assumes that there is some person, named Kaiden Fox, who may or may not be a hypnotist. The identity of Kaiden Fox is not called into question, only his skill as a hypnotist. A more complex example would be: “If you fall into trance again, you will be my slave.” This assumes that you have fallen into trance, because of the presupposition made by the word again. Furthermore, the verb fall into describes some sort of change, and therefore presupposes that you are not now in trance.[12]
Here’s how it works. Consider the following phrase, which is an example of a simple presupposition.
I am going to give this paper an A.
The opposite of that sentence would be, “I am not going to give this paper an A.” A presupposition is anything that is true in both cases[13]. The most obvious is the existence of the speaker. The other presupposition is the existence of a paper.
Now, let’s look at a more complex presupposition.
I am aware of my reasons for giving this paper an A.
The opposite of that would be your being unaware of your reasons for giving out an A. To me, it doesn’t matter as a student if my teacher has awareness or not of all her motivations, so long as I get my result. This is the presupposition is both one of action (you will give an A), and one of intention (you have reasons). Included are, of course, the presuppositions that I exist, you exist and a paper exists.
Trance words presuppose that one is (or was) in trance. As you imagine what those words might be, you might begin to suddenly realize that this sentence is full of them, to the point where you find yourself noticing more and more of these in every day language.[14] Imagine is the classic trance word. When a person imagines, they are using the part of the mind that dreams, that forms images, and that creates internal reality. Other words in this category would be picture and wonder. The other category of trance words includes such gems as find yourself and suddenly. Have you ever found yourself in a conversation so fascinating that although hours have passed, it seems like only minutes? Finding yourself means that, previously, your conscious mind was unaware of its surroundings. The same applies to suddenly. When you suddenly realize that this paper deserves an A, it implies that beforehand, for reasons you probably won’t understand until after you’ve already given me the highest mark possible, your mind so was absorbed that it’s like the rest of your environment disappeared. The fact that you were reading a student’s paper never even entered your awareness, because the only thing that mattered was the new ideas that you are being exposed to.
Perception forms the basis of all experience. Internal experience is reconstructed from external perceptions. Even concepts that have no concrete forms are experienced through representational systems, and such abstract concepts might “look good” to us, we might “like the sound of that” when they are presented to us. We may have a “bad feeling” about them, or they might just “smell fishy.” Representational systems are ways that we make sense of the information presented to us through the senses. One way to gain influence is to listen for words that mark out a person’s favored representational system. Armed with the knowledge, or even the intuition, one can use this in a number of ways.
The most direct one is pacing the person’s experience of reality by matching their favored representational system. This is a basic component of the psychology of education: a “tactile learner” needs to have information presented in a “hands on” manner for them to really “grasp” the concept. By keeping your language on the same metaphoric level, in regards to their channels of information processing, you gain deeper rapport. Beyond this is the ability to pace and lead. When a hypnotists takes a representational system that a person is comfortable in, and suddenly changes to a completely different one, the shift in description creates a shift in the person’s consciousness. The most advanced technique is the synethesiac induction. In this sort of induction, the hypnotist switches the normal channel of processing a given real-world stimulus. My personal favorite is to take the real world stimulus of my voice. I then switch to a tactile description that seems natural, “and as the warmth of my voice wraps itself around you.” From here, I ask for responses, because synethesia is a highly personal experience, with the question, “what color is my voice?” It is essential the question be asked in this format, as the very question presupposes my voice has a color, which otherwise runs the risk of absurdity. From here, I switch back into tactile mode and describe the feelings as that (color) energy just wraps itself around you.
Can you think of someone you really like? As you allow yourself to see that picture, now, point to where you see it in your mind. I invite you to notice how big it is, how far away, and what color it is. Now, think of someone you don’t like. As you see that picture, point to where that picture is located. Maybe you can see the first image more clearly than you see the second or perhaps the second might come into focus easier than the first. Here is an experiment for you to try. Take the picture of the person you like, and try to move it into the same mental space as that of the person you don’t like. It doesn’t want to go there, does it?[15] You have just been introduced to submodalities.[16] While this is very powerful, it’s not usually resisted if a high level of rapport has already been established. The two basic techniques of using these in Neurolinguistic Programming is to move the contents of a submodality, and thereby change the way the contents are viewed internally, or to put new information in a submodality. While submodalities are primarily visual phenomena, one effective technique is to set up a sort of “hypnotic ventriloquism” by which one’s voice seems to emanate from the appropriate submodality.
Self-image is the most important internal representation you have. Inside of your mind is a mental map of everything you have experienced or imagined, including your self. Most people have profoundly negative self-images. An essential element of persuasiveness is the ability to project a powerful self-image. Because self-image can take the form of a visual image, which we can see with our minds’ eye, it is easy to manipulate, if we believe we can. Most people take the static image they have, and accept it as reality. Ross Jeffries’ developed a technique where once the self-image acquires the proper physiology[17], enlarge that image until it is forty feet tall. Walking around through life with a self-image this large, and this powerful, is a huge asset in the realm of charisma.[18]
Another important aspect of self-image and self-representation is that there is an assumption that we have different “parts” to ourselves[19]. It’s a natural part of our language to talk about states like confusion or ambivalence as if there were two or more facets of our personality at conflict with each other. This truth is an asset to hypnotists. Agreeing that “a part of you believes that” can minimize any objection. The statement presupposes that there is another part, which does not believe. All human behaviors can be explained (through twisting the evidence to fit the premise) as two or more parts negotiating with each other.
My own contribution to the science of Neurolinguistic Programming is in the realm of affirmations. Affirmations have been around for decades, but they all have certain flaws. Parts-of-self theory explains the reason for the flaws, and suggests ways to get around them. Ross Jeffries was the first person to take affirmations out of the first person[20]. When a person says a new affirmation for the first time, the odds are they are lying. An overweight person saying, “I no longer desire doughnuts” is not going to work. The reason is that there is a part saying “YES I DO!” That part negates and sabotages any attempt to affirm otherwise. What Ross Jeffries did is move the subject of the affirmation from the first person to the second person. Saying, “YOU eat only healthy, nutritional, bland and tasteless food,” silences the part that objects.
While silence may construe consent in British common law, I am an American. I want slavish, willing, enthusiastic obedience from every part of myself. As such, I use the first person plural as the subject for my affirmations. We are powerful. We are seductive. We can do anything we desire. The effects I have experienced from this type of affirmation defy explanation.
As an experiment, try moving your self-image into different sub-modalities and observe the results.
Despite the metaphors to programs, the human mind is not a computer. It does not store information the same way that a computer does. Memory can be altered, and in hypnosis, it is more likely to be altered than to be accurately recalled. One way, as we have seen, is with presuppositions. Asking a person in trance, “who did this to you?” presupposes that whatever happened was caused by someone.
Memory is a constant reconstruction of events, and can be changed quite easily. Scientific tests have shown that hypnosis is highly effective at distorting memory.[21] If you will indulge my personal bias towards a strictly biological interpretation of mind, then one of the more controversial practices of hypnotherapists, past-life regression, is proof positive that an entire lifetime of memory can be created. It is, at times, useful to do this in both oneself and others.
The most direct way to do this is to construct a fantasy, and place it in the proper mental space. Finding this proper place is another example of submodalities. When you imagine what you ate for breakfast, the picture you are seeing is a different mental location then the picture you have of yourself eating breakfast as a child. By location, I’m not talking about dining room, kitchen or livingroom. The childhood picture is also in a different location than the picture you see yourself when you imagine yourself eating breakfast as a retiree. Rather, a sub-modality is where the picture is in your personal space; for example, up and to the right, or in the center around chest-level. When people imagine, they project pictures into the area around them. If you take four memories – Distant Past, Recent Past, Recent Future, Far Future – and observe their location, you can form a line.
This timeline hold every memory you have ever had.[22] It is possible to create new memories by viewing yourself performing a different set of actions in that segment of your time line. For maximum effect, one should also experience the new memory in an associated state. An associated memory is one in which instead of seeing yourself perform an action as an external observer, one actually goes back and feels, hears, and sees from a “behind the eyes” perspective.
Time distortion is an indirect way of altering the time line. Your current state of consciousness controls your sense of time. A boring event may drag itself to a virtual eternity in your inner world, as if hours have past, when in reality it is only minutes. Conversely, “time flies when you’re having fun” is an accurate description of the natural trance that occurs when a person is experiencing some sort of fascination. These descriptions are most useful to the hypnotist as a way to introduce the subject of a process as something that happens instantly, as if time has been accelerated. The best way to do this is to take the missing time and push it into the future. The language for this is quite simple, as can be seen below.
…maybe you were even able to imagine a time in your future, say six months from now, still feeling that same sense of incredible [state, process or experience], and looking back on today as having been the start of that.[23]
When used properly, the unconscious mind will believe that the process you have just d...
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