A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

‘locks’ him so that he cannot escape. The hypnotist seems to be able to ‘lock’ the mind in the same
way. And the two ‘legs’ that obstruct each other to their mutual disadvantage are habit and selfconsciousness.
We have all had the experience of trying to do something under the gaze of another
person and doing it badly because we have become self-conscious. This is because when some
function - like driving a car - has been handed over to habit, then we do it best when we are not
thinking about it. Asking someone to pay attention to a task he normally does mechanically is an
infallible way of throwing a spanner in the works. This is exactly what the snake does when it fixes
the rabbit with its gaze.
But people can become hypnotised without staring into the eyes of a hypnotist (or listening to his
voice). If I go into a room to fetch something and then forget why I went there, I have slipped into
one of the commonest forms of ‘hypnosis’. The journey to the room has distracted my attention
from my purpose, causing my mind to ‘go blank’. There is a story of an absent-minded professor
who went up to his bedroom to change his tie before guests arrived; when he failed to return, his
wife went upstairs and found him fast asleep in bed. Removing his tie had made him automatically
proceed to get undressed and into bed. We can see here how close absent-mindedness is to
hypnosis: the professor behaved as if he had been given a hypnotic command to go to bed. And this
came about because, as he went up to change his tie, he was living ‘inside his own head’, connected
to reality by a mere thread. The unconscious suggestion that it was time to sleep snapped the
thread, just as it might have been snapped by the command of a hypnotist.
It is important to recognise that most of us spend a large proportion of our lives in this state of nearhypnosis.
And the chief disadvantage of this state is that it makes us highly susceptible to negative
suggestion. Our moods change from minute to minute. The sun comes out; we feel cheerful. It goes
behind a cloud; we experience depression. In a modern city, most of the sights and sounds are
depressing: the screeching of brakes, the smell of exhaust fumes, the roar of engines, the people
jostling for space, the newspaper placards announcing the latest disaster. To a man with a strong
sense of purpose, these things would be a matter of indifference, for purpose connects us to reality.
But the ‘purposes’ of the modern city dweller are almost entirely a matter of habit. So he spends
most of his time bombarded by negative suggestions - often sinking into that state of permanent,
undefined anxiety that Kierkegaard called Angst and that a modern doctor would simply call
nervous depression.
The Hindu scripture says: ‘The mind is the slayer of the real’ - meaning that our mental attitudes
cut us off from reality. Thomas Mann has a short story called ‘Disillusionment’ that might have
been conceived as an illustration of that text. The central character explains that his whole life has
been spoilt by boredom, by a ‘great and general disappointment’ with all his experience. Literature
and art had led him to expect marvels and prodigies, and everything has been a let-down. ‘Is that
all?’ Death, he believes, will be the final anti-climax, the greatest disappointment of all... We can
see that his problem is not that life is a disappointment, but that he never experiences life. His ‘life’
is lived inside his own head. He is in a more or less permanent state of hypnosis. And, by its very
nature, this state tends to be self-propagating. Lack of expectation - or negative expectation -
induces ‘hypnosis’, and a man in a condition of hypnosis is susceptible to negative suggestion,
which prolongs the hypnosis. It is a vicious circle.
As soon as we become aware of this mechanism, it becomes easy to observe it in ourselves. If, for
example, I am feeling ill, trying not to be physically sick, I can observe how almost any thought
can push me in one direction or another. The mere mention of food is enough to make me wonder
what I ever saw in it. Yet it is equally easy for me to ‘snap out’ of it. I hear a pattering noise on the