Part 8

“Yes, at twenty-five dollars a lesson.”

“Will you teach five of us for less?”

“Yes, one hundred dollars.”

And these clever amateurs paid me the one hundred dollars. The subject they brought me was one that, after experimenting upon, was always left to lie on the floor from six to ten hours, as they could not awaken him and he had to “sleep it off.”

Now, to answer the question previously asked, “Why is it that I have never failed and all others do fail?” The reason is simply this: That when we put the thought of sleep into a subject’s “mind,” it must be done with a firm voice. That is the key. The moment we become doubtful or frightened, we have lost the firm voice; inasmuch as the voice is the utterance of the “mind,” and what we think, we say in tone and in action; if we are frightened and say, “All right,” to the subject and clap our hands, he doesn’t respond to it because we have lost the key; but if we never get rattled, there is no possibility of failing to awaken the subject. It may be that we will be obliged to use language expressed by dashes—such a case happened in a city in Arkansas. A young lady had been reading about the woman who had been asleep in St. Louis for thirty days, and whom none had been able to awaken. Of course, she was a neurotic. When I said, “All right,” and clapped my hands, she failed to awaken. Her friends in the parlor became greatly frightened, so I asked them to retire; then quietly informed the lady that if when I said, “All right,” and clapped my hands, she failed to awaken I would have to do things that would be very inelegant, seemingly ungentlemanly, and above all things I was not there to be made a —— fool of. I then said, “All right,” clapped my hands, and she was wide-awake. Keep your nerve, always treat a hypnotized subject as a rational being, and there will be no trouble. If you are possessed of a doubt as to the subject awakening, you are lost; he may be awakened to the degree of “lack of doubt,” but not thoroughly. The operator’s voice is the thought (in action).

Man is like a piano keyboard, played upon by his environment; as we touch the keys, so is the response. Hit vigorously and there will be a corresponding result. When we strike key “A,” do the other notes refuse to respond, or have we failed to force (suggest) them?

My audiences have wondered why it is that when I get a subject whom some one else has operated on (as I call it “handled”), and he goes through many gyrations while going into hypnosis, that I say to him, “Now, my dear fellow, there is no need of this ‘monkey-shine.’ You go quietly to sleep; otherwise, you and I will have trouble,” after which I have but little trouble with the subject, and the people say, “That’s funny; I wonder if he was ‘faking?’ How can he talk to them as he does?” A hypnotized subject must comprehend; that is, his Abdominal Brain must respond and words when given him must arouse thoughts. The operator should know how to use words with the proper emphasis and construction.

The first attribute of all consciousness is “place,” and the subject, when he opens his eyes, is always in the place where he went to sleep unless that place has been changed by the operator. Therefore, first place the subject, then give him the attributes, naming each sense, thus: “When you open your eyes, you will find yourself in a certain place, and you will see so and so, and you will hear so and so, and you will feel so and so,” covering feeling, seeing, hearing, and feeling as to minor attributes.

Assuming that we desire the subject to go through the actions of milking a table for a cow, the inspiration should be as follows: “When you open your eyes, you will find yourself seated on the back porch of a farmhouse. You will see a small cow before you in the yard. The cow requires milking; there is a milk bucket at your feet. You will be careful with the cow, inasmuch as she is very nervous, and as the flies bother her, she is likely to switch her tail. You must refrain from swearing as the ladies can hear any remarks which you make.” If you should say, “You must not swear as there are ladies in the audience,” what would be the result? The subject, when he opened his eyes, would sit still, because the word “audience” rearouses the thought of where he went to sleep. Only one picture at a time can be held in the “mind,” and that picture must be thoroughly consistent, for if at any time through the misunderstanding of correlation you step without the picture, you will either get no effect or a “dopy” subject.

If I hypnotize a subject can anyone other than myself awaken him? Decidedly not. What will awaken him? My telling him that he is awake (?) or my saying, “All right,” and clapping my hands. If anyone else tells him he is awake will he awaken? No. Because he does not hear (respond to) them. As far as the general public is concerned, being in hypnosis consists only of taking a thought from the operator’s voice. If he could hear (respond to) anyone else, he could hear (respond to) all sounds and each and every sound would arouse some thought, and he would be wide-awake. The consciousness or realizing is “being awake.” Those put to sleep by magnetic (?) passes can be awakened by another operator, as the subject goes to sleep with his sense of feeling acute, and has been taught that when he feels upward strokes he will awaken. He has no way of distinguishing (?) who is the one that is making the strokes; yet a super-sensitive subject, very familiar with the operator, will unconsciously be able to distinguish, or, more properly, will respond.

What things can you most readily put a subject at doing? Things likely to occur to him at any time.

Reader, I am still afraid you are not a hypnotist.

We will assume that you are a gentleman and you have one of your companions, a gentleman, hypnotized, seated in a parlor that is filled with your lady friends. You desire him to take off his coat. What would you say to him? You would say, “When you open your eyes, you will find that your coat is on inside out.” What would he do? Being a gentleman, and in the presence of ladies, he would look abashed and might go into the hall and change his coat, but we desire him to take his coat off in the parlor before the ladies. What must we do? Give him a new environment. Tell him that when he opens his eyes he will find himself in his bedroom, it is evening, and excessively warm. “Now open your eyes.” Is he now in the parlor filled with ladies, or is he in his own room? Man is ruled by his environment. First place your man, then give him the attributes.

In a city I visited last winter a doctor informed me that the year before a hypnotist had visited their city, given some very enjoyable performances, besides putting a man to sleep in a window; that he thought the hypnotist was a fraud inasmuch as that one day he was in the store where the fellow was sleeping, and the hypnotist said, “Doctor, feel of the man in the window, he is stiff.” The doctor said, “And when I felt of him I very decidedly felt him become rigid, which satisfied me that the operator was a fraud.”

That was not the case, the operator did not know how to give his inspiration; the subject necessarily is forced to respond to the operator when the operator’s voice is firm. When he said to the doctor, “Feel of him, he is stiff,” he told the subject, “When the doctor feels of you, become stiff.” But if he had said to the doctor, “The subject is stiff, feel of him,” when the doctor got hold of him he would have found him stiff.

The alleged fraudulent hypnotists are simply fools who do not know how to convince their audiences or handle their subjects. Subjects cannot “fake.” When you credit the hypnotist with being able to teach the element that goes on the stage to act their parts, you credit both with having more intelligence than our best stage managers and actors, and my experience teaches me that their faces would instantly deny any such credence.

One “authority,” in Chicago, concludes his work by doubting hypnosis. Quotations from him show his lack of knowledge of the Law of Suggestion. The following example was the one that shook his faith most: The subject was lying in hypnosis on an operating table, and several spectators were challenged to awaken him. They tried many ways and failed, then asked if they might spit in the subject’s face. The “authority” said, “Yes, you may spit in his face if you wish.” They did so, and the subject immediately awakened, thus satisfying the “authority” that the subject had not been in hypnosis. Dear reader, need I explain this? If so, throw the book away or go and give yourself to the authorities having charge of a school for imbeciles.

In the “handling” of subjects two tones should be used, one for the inspiration, and one to emphasize (force) minor actions.

In my early days, while giving exhibitions in the South, at the conclusion of an entertainment a Southern gentleman came onto the stage with a friend and said, “Mr. Santanelli, this gentleman does not believe that young man was hypnotized. Will you “hypnotize” that nigger (pointing to one) and prevent him from picking up this one hundred dollar bill? If he picks it up, he can have it.” I “hypnotized” the negro, put the one hundred dollar bill at his feet and told him he could not pick it up. The negro immediately became cataleptic, rigid, and failed to move. I wanted him to stoop and put his hand on the bill and attempt to pick it up, knowing that if he could not pick it up he must shove it to the floor, so I said “Oh, yes you can; go ahead, pick it up.” The negro failed to respond for a moment, then bent over and took hold of the bill; I saw that he had responded to my last remark as an inspiration, so I immediately called to him that he could not move. Cold chills passed up my back, as I could not afford to lose one hundred dollars; and, of course, would not have allowed my friend to do so provided I had it. Since then I always use two tones, for fear of the subject mistaking or not comprehending (responding to) the difference in the tones, I always finish in this manner: “Go ahead, pick it up. Go on, but you cannot.”

There are no stages in so-called hypnosis. The subject is either hypnotized or awake.

Catalepsy is not a stage of the hypnosis, it is simply an inspired condition. Any subject can be made cataleptic if he knows how to become so. The inspiration I give to produce catalepsy is as follows: “Put your feet together, put your hands to your sides. When I call ‘now’ you will take a long breath, pull your muscles together and you will be stiff, stiff as iron.” It is very rarely that a subject fails to respond to this. Sometimes they will draw their knees and arms up, not knowing how to become rigid in the position I give them. Many operators tell a subject to hold his arm up and then that he cannot take it down, and the spectator, noting the tightening of his muscles when he gets the inspiration that he cannot put his arm down, believes the subject to be “faking.” If the operator will remember that all negations are affirmations against, and would first put the muscles at the tension or in the position he wants them and then deny, there would be no such action. Tell a subject to hold his arm up and close his fist; the muscles are now contracted, and by telling him he cannot put it down, you are really saying to him to keep the muscles in the position they are in. If you wish to produce a condition of the muscles, first put the muscles into the desired position and infer that he cannot release them, because if he cannot, he must hold the position.

How many ways are there of inducing hypnosis? Only one.

When I was in Utica last winter, on the second day of my return engagement, a lad called on me and said, “Mr. Santanelli, how many ways do you know how to hypnotize?”

I replied, “But one, my lad.”

He looked surprised, saying, “Why that is strange, I know of nineteen ways.”

“Good for you, lad. Can you lay them out on the floor as I do?”

“No, sir, that is the funny part of it; I cannot get any of them asleep. You have only one way; I have watched you nightly and so far you only failed to hypnotize two, and three-fourths of them were new ones every night. What is your way?”

“The right way.”