The World is My Mirror by Richard Bates Page B

your progress through life as you reach your goal and realise your purpose. The goal is... ’
     
    ‘3-2-1, you’re back in the room.’
     
    We are all familiar with hypnosis, both as a form of therapy to rid us of phobias or to arrest our unhealthy eating habits, and as entertainment in a stage show that can highlight how suggestible and gullible we can be.
     
    I remember, whilst on holiday with my brother, we witnessed a stage hypnotist convince a young woman there was a fairy only a few inches tall dancing and singing right in front of her. The woman had been convinced that this Tinkerbell was the most magical and kindest fairy that had ever lived. In fact Tinkerbell was the best friend she’d ever had. The joy and love in her eyes was amazing to see and there was no doubt some message had been implanted into her brain. The real test was when my brother walked on stage and squashed poor Tinkerbell dead. Of course, the hypnotist orchestrated this manoeuvre and so it was all part of the act. Watching this woman slap my brother so hard around the face, though, raised an almighty laugh from the audience and a sense of amazement from me that anyone can be convinced of something so supernatural.
     
    Well, if you subscribe to the view about birth, death, planets and time, you are also under a spell. You are asleep. You are dreaming. You are totally immersed in the drama you call ‘me and my life’. Just like the woman watching her beloved Tinkerbell, you have taken on board a view of life that is bogus and fragmented. A life that you have been convinced that you have , that you own. Parents, teachers and peers, in fact the entire back catalogue of human history is weaving its magic and showing us how to see and what to see. There is a consensus reality of objects and perceivers that colour our every thought, our every action, and reaction. The world is out there and obvious. You are seeing it and interacting with it. It is full of peril. It is full of danger. You have got to make it work because you have a life and you better look after it. You had better play the game and play it well. Sit up straight, stop slouching. Eat your dinner and be grateful you are not poor and starving. Love your parents and respect your elders and those of higher status and class. Enjoy education; it is for your own good. Learn about the world and learn about your place in the cosmos and in the scheme of things. Play your role: you are a man, a woman; you are English or African; you are a Buddhist or a Christian. Save the whale but abuse your spouse. Be ‘good’ in this life and gloat in the next. Progress is good, we are going somewhere. Tomorrow things will be better.
     
    I will stop there because you are probably running out of breath. I have told it like this to give the sense of absolute frenetic activity and railroad expectations. Unceasing and unrelenting doing and becoming appear to be so commonplace. For most it appears there is no problem with ‘normality’. We accept we were born and had a beginning, and we accept, probably with degrees of fear and imagination, our eventual demise. Some of us think that we will leave this world behind to continue somewhere else, a ‘better place’, with the secret laid at our feet and the satisfaction we have done well.
     
    Many people, it seems, have accepted life as it is presented to them from a very young age by those who genuinely want us to function well and play the same game everyone is playing and not appear out of place, or, even worse, mad, bad or a total misfit. We become socialised and hypnotised. In short, we are conditioned.
     
    Conditioning reminds me of Pavlov’s dogs. If you are not familiar with this, I will explain. Pavlov was a Russian physiologist working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was interested in the digestive system and performed experiments on animals. He wired them up and studied their digestive chemicals, how they are produced and