Adam Crabtree

Practically every contemporary mainstream scientist presumes that all aspects of mind are generated by brain activity. We demonstrate the inadequacy of this picture by assembling evidence for a variety of empirical phenomena which it cannot explain. We further show that an alternative picture developed by F. W. H. Myers and William James successfully accommodates these phenomena, ratifies the common sense view of ourselves as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with contemporary physics and neuroscience.

The two-hundred-year history of hypnosis and its predecessor, animal magnetism, is replete with stories of unusual phenomena. Perhaps surprisingly, a close reading of that history reveals that investigators and students of hypnosis have been unable to achieve an agreed-upon definition of their subject matter. Because of this failure to describe the essential nature of hypnosis, they resorted to lists of hypnotic phenomena as a means for confirming the presence of a hypnotic state in clinical and experimental situations. However, identification and enumeration of hypnotic phenomena proved to be problematic. The content of these lists varied from era to era and from practitioner to practitioner, and the selection of phenomena seemed to be an arbitrary process. With no agreed-upon definition and no definitive list of phenomena that would apply to hypnosis and hypnosis alone, there was no way to ensure that the “hypnosis” that was being studied in clinical and experimental work was the same entity in all cases. Although hypnosis research in recent decades has yielded important insights, significant difficulties and disagreements remain. It is the contention of this article that this confusing state of affairs came to pass because the discussion of hypnosis in the literature was wrongly situated and that there is a need to step back and gain a new perspective on hypnosis and hypnotic phenomena. The proposed fresh look at hypnosis situates hypnosis as a subspecies of trance as defined in a very specific way: a state of profound focus on something accompanied by a diminished awareness of everything else, which evokes appropriate subliminal resources. Hypnosis is then defined as an inner-mind trance characterized by rapport. This new approach and its implications are discussed in some detail. Keywords: hypnosis—trance—rapport.

Trance is a state of narrowed awareness, and culture by definition is the chrystallization of a specific mode of seeing the world. Cultural trance is the group-mind of a people and is so pervasive that it is virtually invisible to those living within it. Trances are at the root of what is the very best and very worst in human beings. We go in and out of trances all our lives: inour minds, in our relationships, our families, and in the community and culture at large. While we cannot extract ourselves completely from our condition of trance, we can become aware of these trances and gain greater control over our lives.

Adam Crabtree's pioneering work redefines the meaning of "mental health" as it reveals that these two disorders may be much more common than previously believed. Rather than being seen as a bizarre anomaly, multiple personality, in particular, may simple be an unusual yet common form of multiple consciousness we all experience. Multiple Man strives for a more complete understanding of human nature in all its eccentricities in order to illuminate important truths about the tremendous potential of the human psyche.

The widespread turmoil in the human community today is a symptom of the dominance of unchecked desire, or Greed. This book distinguishes two ancient concept of love (the Greed ideas of agape and Eros) and explores ow agape, the driver of evolution, when put into play through the harmonious action of eros, displays the true essence of love--Evolutionary Love--that alone is the antidote to the ravages of Greed. This approach makes us of ideas from Charles Sanders Peirce's "Evolutionary Love" and Robert Corrington's writings on ecstatic naturalism

As individuals bring their raw potentials into existence, the human race evolves. Trance states are the means through which these transformations take place. Trances are concentrated states of engagement with the world. They occur frequently in the ordinary course of living. Hypnosis is merely one variety of trance, but its study has led to a profound understanding of trance states in general. The idea that trance constitutes the technology for human advance has developed for Dr. Crabtree over a period of some thirty years. Memoir of a Trance Therapist is the story of that development, along with an explanation of the central elements of Dr. Crabtree's vision.