Somehow, I found myself drifting to the subject of hypnotism on the Internet. This is in a season when the subject in town is the success story of Dangote Refinery and controversies on fuel pump price. But there was I confronted, as it were, with the success stories of five persons who had their afflictions resolved or ailments healed through the application of hypnotism. According to reports, there was the case of a 50-year-old lady who could not sustain a satisfactory love relationship with men. At a point, she had to go for psychiatric therapy that lasted many years. But this was unavailing. The problem was traced through hypnotism to mistakes made by her mother and stepfather. She was admonished to forgive them. After she did as admonished she was healed and is now happily married! There was the case of a man who had a stress problem at work. He was overweight owing to uncontrolled eating of snacks. Even as a child when he was bullied by his peers and his parents neglected him, he could find comfort only in eating chocolate and popcorn. The root of his problem was traced to these when he was put into a trance. The hypnotist helped him to adopt eating healthier food than what chocolate or popcorn could ever offer to him. He was also guided to cultivate beneficial exercise habits. There are three other cases, one which had to do with a 24-year-lady who could not make independent decisions. She relied on her best friend, but the friend relocated to another state. Her problem was traced to years when her parents worried themselves silly over chronic illness and the life-or-death decisions they had to make. The two other cases I wish to skip.

The cases remind me of the experiences of a lady who was only helped through hypnotism so that she could overcome her morbid fear of rivers and oceans. She would not move close to a river or an ocean. This was 30 years ago. I did state at the time in 1994 that hypnotists, once rejected by medical science as humbugs or fraudsters, unfortunately, have added yet another feather to their star-studded caps in the Monica O’hara case. I said unfortunately, for at least two reasons even when it is clear that hypnotism has become the cornerstone of many a healing process for psychic and bodily ailments when the sky would appear to be the limit for its budding potential, and when, no doubt, it offers a proof of supra earthly life and, therefore, a key to unlock the lost or hidden parts of the past, without which neither the present nor the future can make much sense.

First, hypnotism brings more harm than good. Second, and very importantly, it would appear from the way hypnotists carry on that many can be described as quacks, unfamiliar with the grounds they tread and, therefore, ignorant of the dangers to which their patients are driven. But first let’s quickly return to Monica O’hara, who has provided the hypnotism circuit with the pointer to its present-day development in the field and their reason to jubilate and celebrate. At the time she was a 47-year-old British mother of three, who since she was a girl, had been so terribly afraid of the sea that she could not even swim but had been helped by hypnotherapist Joe Keeton to recognize that this was because she drowned in a ship 81 years ago as of the time help came to her, and the curious British press had taken keen interest in the matter. Other people who drowned with her were more than 2,200.

When Monica went to Keeton to seek the aid of hypnotherapy for her sea phobia and her other problems, he did to her what hypnotherapists do to their patients: he put her body to hypnotic or magnetic sleep, overpowered her spirit and, in this captivity, projected it to finer ethereal currents or influences thereby making it more sensitive to the currents and readily accessible by them. The result was that Monica could then relate to ethereal entities in the so-called other world which is also called the Beyond on account of its tangibility being beyond the capacity of the earthly senses to fathom. The body and its senses having been suppressed and the spirit having been bound, a willing and hapless tool in the hands of the captor whose will it must now obey unconditionally, the tangibility of ethereal life to a powerless spirit forcefully projected there and sensitized to it is only a matter of course. Its eyes and ears are forcibly open to sights and sounds they would ordinarily not respond to!

In that state, it was possible for Monica to relay messages to Keeton and the audience, as has been reported, through the ethereal connections with her seemingly lifeless body as though through the telephone. And from the reported recorded messages, she has, on coming round, drawn information for newspaper interviews. She said in one:
“I went back to being a girl named Lucy Latymer, born in 1895. The family was very rich and our home was a large imposing white building. When I listened to the tape of my session, all the facts were new to me. I’d never heard of the village. I am now convinced that I drowned in my previous life when the Titanic went down. I believe, too, that the experience carried over into this life to give me my fear of the sea.”

The Titanic, British-built and the world’s most luxurious, biggest, promoted as the safest and fastest passenger liner of her days, sank on April 14-15, 1912 on her maiden voyage, to the dismay of the builders who had boasted that she was made unsinkable. (I made reference to the sinking of Titanic when I commented in July last year on the tragedy of Titan’s voyage to the depths of the ocean to find the wreckage of the Titanic ship that sank 111 years back. I sought to reflect on the correlations). Where other ships had a single bottom hull, the Titanic had a double. These were divided into 16 water-tight compartments, four of which could be flooded without any threat to the ship. There were 2, 224 persons on board, including Monica O’hara then Lucy Latymer, according to the report of her hypnotic regression, when the Titanic collided with an iceberg, a 300-foot hole on her right side which caused the flooding of five of the 16 water-tight compartments, one compartment too many. Monica O’hara’s trance message says she was 17 years old when she and her love, Arthur Stanning, a farm labourer, boarded the Titanic to elope to America and they drowned with many of the passengers. And as she recalled afterward:

“Since I was little, I’d never been able to swim and have always been too scared to learn. I am quite happy to go on a ferry, but I can’t handle being really close to water.” But when I first wrote about her, she was said to be overcoming her morbid fear and had even registered for a swimming lesson! The knot had been untied! The wine glasses were, therefore, clinking, and a lot of back-slapping ensued. This was one more clear victory all right for those who contend that life goes beyond tangible blood and flesh or one earth life. Even the doubting Thomases in the medical circles are shifting ground. With examples narrated in the three cases mentioned at the beginning of today’s piece, Monica’s experience could not have been the only time hypnotherapy has surmounted seemingly intractable problems. Women who had been too afraid to try having a baby may indeed have died at childbirth in previous earthlives. And people who are afraid of heights or anything may have undergone unpleasant experiences associated with such things emblazoned brightly on their unforgetful souls which keep returning to the earth. Those who crave war and boast of their invincibility will be born where there is unceasing siege and bombardment, and indeed, where war is fiercest in their next earthlives.

However, from the knowledge available to us mankind in these times mediated by Revealed Truth, In The Light Of Truth, The Grail Message, I am more concerned with the dangers inherent in hypnotism and the wrong assumptions of the practitioners that the risks are worth the trouble or that they are familiar with all that there is need to know in this terrain. To start with, when the hypnotherapist puts a sensitive medium such as Monica O’hara to magnetic or hypnotic sleep to bring the subject nearer the influence of another world, it does not necessarily mean that the spirit of the patient has to leave the body and float away. It simply means that the spirit is unnaturally made more sensitive than is otherwise safe at its level of strength or maturity so that it can respond to finer or stronger currents or influences at the level to which it has been projected. It is like prematurely pushing a person into what he is not ready for, asking a six-year-old to cross a 10-lane expressway all by himself, as an example. This certainly is a crime, no matter the gains for which the risks have been taken.

In the words of The Grail Message: “It is appalling to know what harm is done to thousands who today confidently place themselves in the hands of supposedly qualified in order to submit to hypnosis, either voluntarily or through persuasion , or worse of all, who are forced into it without their knowledge. Even if all this is done with the best intention to achieve something good, it does not alter the fact that this practice causes immeasurable harm in every case.”

In this hypnotic setting, the spirit has been bound, its free will caged and its intuitive perception that is its spiritual vision therefore blurred. It is defenceless, lacking natural protection inherent only in the freedom of movement. It takes instruction only from the hypnotherapist who can do to him what he wills and who is always in no position to offer him protection against on-rushing assailing influences before which he himself may crumble. Pushing a spirit forcefully against natural barriers to a world the radiations of which he is immature to bear is like exposing an unprotected person to the radiations from a nuclear plant accident. Or, like taking a little child to a thick virgin forest and leaving him all alone to find his way home. The harm may not be immediately apparent but it will surely come.

With the bits of success attained as in the cases of Monica O’hara, Susan,50, Peter, and Leah, 24, the impression has often been created that hypnotism is Eldorado. Little is said about disastrous cases in which a patient emerges from sleep with a split personality, the body having been invaded and occupied, possessed, so to say, by another entity while the occupying spirit is fettered. Or of a patient who returns seemingly whole all right but walks straight into a moving bus in the street oblivious of his environment. Only from a spiritual pedestal can the full implications of hypnotism be very clearly understood, therefore. The core of man, as I have stated severally in these pages, is spirit, and it is the spirit that comes to the earth often, each time in a different casing called the body, to continue the schooling, as it were, that is necessary to make him become mature to the point at which alone he will be ripe to be admitted into Paradise, our Homeland, the Home of blessed and clarified spirits.

When the spirit is bound, it is weakened. Exposure to currents it cannot yet bear scorches it, further escalating the weakening which may take years, many earthlives, or even centuries to remedy, depending on the degree of weakening. It does not matter if there appear to be immediate visible gains from the experiences as in the cases listed in the foregoing. Such manifestations soon wither, being not the products of a free volition and subject, under the Laws of Nature, to disappear with the exit of extraneous power which brought them into being. In any case, what are these gains compared to the gift of life? A weakened spirit is a disturbed and derailed spirit, disturbed from vigorously pursuing its course of development as willed by the Creator, and derailed, even if for a while from that course. It is the spirit that has been sinned against, a sin which the hypnotherapist will someday pay for in the ethereal. Whatever a man soweth…!