Waking Up from the Trance of Ego

by Jack Elias, CHT
An excerpt from Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy/NLP

The notion of the possibility of waking up from this trance of ego in relationship to self-improvement arises with the recognition of the flaw of the “third mala”—action. In other words, trying to improve the ego, trying to fix it, is still within the circle of the trance of ego – the dilemma of self. Wakefulness is outside the circle, and nothing you do in the circle to try to fix things in the circle gets you outside the circle!

To the untrained entranced observer, it may seem that action or striving helps, but it doesn’t. The only thing that gets you out,  that wakes you up, is waking up — just do it! Waking up occurs as grace—from your Self to yourself, because you are inherently pure and perfect and that purity never goes away — in fact, our purity indulges us and supports the egoic play. The egoic play, this trance of ego, has no energy of its own.

There is only one energy source, and it (you) supports everything until it (You) decides that enough is enough. Within the play that may look like striving to improve, but there comes a point where one learns of the notion that the striving is not to create the goodness, the freedom, but to clean the perceptual and cognitive faculties to see the already existing perfection and freedom that one forgot one is (i.e., anava mala), and conversely, to see that the dilemma of self was an illusion.

Perhaps this is your first introduction to this notion of waking from the illusion of dilemma altogether vs. trying to fix things in the illusion. It is a very subtle shift that deserves contemplation, moment by moment, in an ongoing fashion, taking care not to let the egoic process use this insight for its own ends — primarily by creating black and white extreme conclusions to get you to discount the insight altogether, never learning how it is useful as an operating theory to foster waking up. This course is intended to clarify this issue, and to make it a useful notion to help you become more and more sensitive to this beguilement of egoic thinking.

View from Mangrt Pass in the autumn looking from Slovenia towards Italy at sunset, Slovenia, Europe

Waking up, rather than changing how you act, initially, is more akin to having been acting in a dark room, and, suddenly, the lights are turned on. From one perspective nothing has changed, but from another, everything has changed.

Becoming established in this perspective will enable you to use all the hypnotic and NLP techniques to much greater effectiveness. Why? Because you won’t be playing unconsciously in the shadows with your clients! You won’t be caught in the serious and endless trance game of fixing things (although you delightfully may fix things as a skillful choice). You will be moving clients into the wakefulness that allows people to see that they don’t have to fix their problems if they realize they can dissolve them. You help clients understand how to walk away from problems and experience them dissolve of their own accord because they are unreal (yet powerful) to begin with.

Walking away will require strength, but the strength is not developed in opposition to the strength of the trance. It is the very strength of the trance as you recognize it as your own strength, with the understanding that you are at cause over it.

So we have come back again to honoring the pure intent underlying the problem, embracing the problem so that the energy of the problem can change its patterning and expand the flexibility of energy utilization in the context of the wakeful recognition of the expansion of choice and meaning, i.e.: “I don’t have to do that anymore!” “I don’t have to let that bother me anymore.” “I can afford to take my time and learn new ways of living without fear of making mistakes. Its O.K. to make mistakes — the trance of shame (the anava mala) is over.”

These last few concepts may seem very dense, even obtuse. Again, the whole Finding True Magic course, consists of discussing and exploring the meaning of these statements.

Accessing the True Self

The first way we can begin to apply these notions is by going into “trance” to access the inherently pure intelligence. People will generally come to you with a sense of it and a name for it: God, God-self, True Self, Higher Self, True Inner Self, etc. It is important to know their preference and to use it, incorporating it into the script. Later on we will discuss ways to ascertain whether and how their beliefs about the Higher Self actually inhibit the direct experience of the Higher Self, and what you can do to alleviate those problems. In a sense, that is a statement of what this course is all about.

Einstein said, “Everything has changed with the splitting of the atom except one thing — the way we think. We must change the way we think!”

I would suggest to you that the new way we need to think is an old way we have simply forgotten about.  It’s this “old” way (of wisdom) that we seek to remember and apply to hypnotherapy in the course, Finding True Magic.

You may also want to check out this Finding True Magic Audio Seminar: “Mindfulness & Awareness”