by darkideals » August 7th, 2015, 4:02 am
Normally I would just say "well, obviously" but the way you're wording it deserves mention.
You say "hypnosis cannot alter reality", and I respond by asking "what is reality?" Seriously, what is reality? All reality is, is what your 5 senses bring back to your brain and interpret as "the world" you live in.
Imagine for a moment that you have no sight, no smell, no hearing, no touch, no taste, no speech etc.. What would your reality be?...you wouldn't have one! You couldn't talk to anyone, if someone came in front of you then you couldn't see them, if they fed you then you couldn't taste it, you couldn't smell anything, and if they touched you then you wouldn't even feel it if they picked you up and dropped you in a river somewhere. All that our reality is based on is the stimuli that our senses experience and give to the brain, and the brain "makes" it into reality. Without those senses there IS NO reality.
So if hypnosis can alter your senses, making you see/hear/taste/smell/feel something that "isn't there" then it can indeed alter reality. The first thing you'll probably say to that is "well that's a hallucination it isn't real" but why is that? All that hypnosis is, is somebody putting you in a relaxed enough state that your analytical/conscious mind is no longer 100% in the forefront and active, unable to contest anything. And since we've established that reality itself is just what your mind and senses make it, then basically all hypnosis is, is the hypnotizer pretending to be your senses/conscious brain, giving you the same kind of stimuli that your taste/touch/sight etc.. normally do, but since your in trance you have no other stimuli coming to your body and therefore can't tell that the stimuli the hypnotizer is giving "isn't real".
And the key thing is that the person giving the hypnosis is using HIS/HER senses to speak to you and snap their fingers etc.. just like you would in "reality". Are their brains and senses any less real than yours? Nope. So why is it that the stimuli given to your mind by THEIR senses is considered "not real" while yours is? For all we know what we consider "reality" might be fake, we could all be in the matrix, and as mentioned in the matrix "we'd never know".
So while, yes, hypnotizing yourself cannot make you appear to be a cat or a woman or something to "other people", this is only because THEIR senses haven't been effected by the hypnosis. So in other words it IS real, but it's only real to YOU; but if you were to hypnotize everyone else in the room and suggest that you are a woman then it becomes a "if a tree falls in an empty forest and nobody hears it does it make a sound" argument. If you become a woman in your mind as well as the minds of the only people who know of your existence, then are you really still a man? Schroedinger would argue with you if you said yes to that......https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAAlDoAtV7Y
(or if you're a gamer here's more appropriate creepy music to end my time/space discussion)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX6qdsXaeu4