Interesting...

The ABC New report is badly written. [Imagine that!} It does not identify this "mentor." (Update: The mentor has now been identified. See below.) Whoever he is, his recommendation must have had some pull -- because this bizarre interest in changing the past earned Holmes a major federal grant to study neuroscience at a highly competitive institution. I've heard that fewer than ten students each year get such a grant. To the best of my knowledge, the only scientist who ever tried to do what Holmes proposed to do was a famous hypnosis researcher named Milton Erickson. Many years ago, while wandering without aim through a college library, I ran across a fascinating book by Erickson called The February Man. In short and in sum, that book discusses a technique of using hypnosis to create the illusion of a past that never actually occurred. Although copies of the book are now rare and expensive, a summary may be found here. I'm afraid that the precis does not do the book justice. Basically, Erickson was dealing with a young woman who needed to change her self-destructive behavior. As the saying goes, "the child is father to man." Thus, the hypnotherapist reasoned that changing the subject's past -- through hypnotic regression -- could change her present. In the third interview Erickson spends five hours training her in hypnotic responsiveness. He regresses her to various ages and neutral memories, including their first interview, into which he "interpolates" a brief hypnotic episode that did not occur in the actual interview... When Erickson has established various regressions as a "general background for new, interpolated behavioral experiences" he rouses her "somnambulistically in this regressed state." Erickson defines somnambulistic trance as "a form of hypnotic behavior always significant of a deep trance state. In this condition subjects behave and respond as if they were wide awake and may even deceive observers with their seeming wakefulness." In her wide-awake four-year-old state, he begins to talk to her and identifies himself as a friend of her daddy's. After each episode of meeting Erickson while regressed, she is instructed to sleep hypnotically, then roused with the wrist cue for another meeting with him at a different age. Finally, she receives "extensive posthypnotic instructions to ensure a comprehensive amnesia for all trance experiences" and the session ends. In subsequent sessions, "usually of several hours' duration," Erickson carefully interpolates himself into her regressed memories, offering perspective and "friendship, sympathy, interest, and objectivity, thereby giving him the opportunity to raise questions concerning how she might later evaluate a given experience." "The consistent and continual rejection she experienced from her mother presented many opportunities to reorganize her emotions and understanding." He offers therapeutic reframes of traumatic events (she will be able to remember her childhood grief over a broken china doll when she herself is a mother, and will be able to understand when her own daughter is sad), perspective (a teenage humiliation will one day be looked on as amusing), and weaves real happy memories in with the February Man episodes to insure integration. (The strangest thing you'll read all day about the Batman killer)

Technique, technique, technique.... in tongues and neurolingistic programming of a different sort than what those "speaking in tongues" in the past experienced?  Maybe, it's all pseudo-science and charlatanism except those times when it isn't.  So the only question remaining... how many lower orders of beings will Apollyon, the destroyer sweep along with him into the abyss after rising from it like an angel of light from a dark night?  Apparently he might not care about the penalty for playing pretend about being God.  Heck, even people like ants in the sight of his false gods and lower orders of being don't care either... but note that it is typically the lower order of beings that get sacrificed by the higher, even in our own civilizations.  (But then we turn and have a problem with the Creator allowing the same thing in other cases, I guess.)

Indeed, some argue that we wouldn't even have civilization if "lower" animals were not around to sacrifice, domesticate and essentially make into our slaves or slaughter at will (Guns, Germs and Steel).  They are ours to rule, are they not?  Yet when a serial killer begins by torturing animals we sense the significance of it.

But in any event, ruling, domesticating, sacrificing and slaughtering at will seems to be the pattern... at least until the tables are turned... attack of the Lamb and his lambs, will He be silent and allow the slaughter by the sooper dooper elite ruling classes (including man at a low level) forever?  Perhaps Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow... and then things got a bit more apocalyptic/revelatory later?  It's curious how we do not want to be condemned for slaughtering or hunting animals because they are lower, yet we have deep issues with the idea of the Creator allowing any other higher orders of being similar privileges.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?  Hmmm....  I can only imagine if someone was able to communicate to lambs they were going to save from slaughter.  "Fear not little lambs.... wait, don't run away because I seem scary... after all, you're running toward a butcher's shop anyway."  Plus someone else might get upset about having their lowly and dumb little lambs stolen even if they do have a right to slaughter them according to the laws of our higher forms of civilization, etc.  Imagine that.  (I'm still back on the concept of sheep dogs scaring the little lambs away from wolves too.  Maybe one could imagine that.  Or maybe I just like dogs.)

Anyway... more rambling and random notes, since that's what I'm doing now.  Maybe the world doesn't revolve around the iWorld of our needy and touchy feely needs... despite the best marketing techniques that therapeutic Christians can develop too.  (How about marketing some iChristianity or water slides in the nursery of a megachurch?  Theories seem to vary as to the best techniques but many seem to have more to do with growing the church than reality.).

Imagine that.  Quick, someone form a small group and join the circle to talk about how imagining that makes you feel!

Just kidding.  Sort of.  I could be wrong in trying to critique the impact of technique in the church, easily.  Plus I like snacks and cookies along with the rest even if I don't actually go to small groups to sit around in a circle talking about feelings or "what does that mean to you" the way that I probably should.  But seriously... maybe it's little wonder that a theology of evil in reality and beyond feelings has been lost in general.  It's not the best marketing technique to grow the church in general unless one does a little "loop dee doo da" reverse psychology on people to come full circle through the art of technique.  After all, who wants to talk about the depths of evil in reality?  That might hurt someone's feelings.  So much better to use techniques to entertain ourselves with evil and a "dark knight rising" in a mooovie instead of looking around in reality to see what is going on around us due generally to trends emerging from epicenters of corruption and forces of wealth in places like Gotham/NYC.   

Anyway... we're a long way from studying nature and nature's God while wandering the wilderness without food now, aren't we?