Introduction

Welcome to Super States. I am here with Phil Farber. Phil, thank you so much for being on the show. Why don’t you describe what you do and how that transforms lives and maybe for yourself as well.

Okay. I have a little, I don’t know, a little issue describing what I do. I’m always confronted with this and publishers and so on. Tell us what you do on the back of the book. But essentially, I mean, my original path of career and so on is I’m a writer. And I spent many years as a journalist and a technical writer and a science writer and all that kind of stuff. And so I’ve written several books on related subjects and so on.

But over the years, and actually since I was a kid, I’ve been interested in hypnosis and NLP and altered states and psychedelics and all of that kind of stuff. So in pursuing that, I sort of at one end I got into that a little bit to be a better writer. But once I got into it, I realized that was a whole world into itself. And so now I’m an NLP hypnosis practitioner and so on. And I’ve been doing that for many years, for going on 40 years now as a hypnotist.

So it’s fun in itself and I have clients who I work with personally and on the phone. And I do teach workshops and seminars and so on a wide range of subjects ranging from NLP to traditional ceremonial magic and the Western esoteric tradition, things like that.

Combining NLP, Hypnosis, and Magic

And one of the things that really fascinates me about the, your take on magic is how you apply these NLP and hypnotic processes to them. So tell me a little bit about how you got to that point. Like what, what brought you to bring all this together?

Well, I mean, let’s see. I really started, there are a few kind of things when I was very young sort of led me into the altered states and hypnosis path. One of them was my father, who was a physicist, he worked his way through college as a stage magician. And part of his routine was he had a stage hypnosis routine. And so. As a result, there were all these great books on hypnosis in the house. And I was told at a very young age, don’t read those. Those are for adults, right? They’re dangerous things for kids to play with. So of course, by age 10, I was reading them and practicing hypnosis with my friends. I mean, what else could I do? People say that kind of stuff. And so I was practicing that. I learned how to meditate around that time. I mean, I was like 10 or 11.

And then when I was 16 years old, I had a bike accident and a bicycle accident and severe head trauma and so on. And I had a classic near-death experience. I was out there somewhere. There was a light and an entity and it told me, it’s not your time yet. I mean, the classic kind of stuff, right? And I came back from that and I spent many years after that going like, you know, what the hell. and trying to figure out, you know, what was that all about? And I mean, the big lesson from that was that, wow, there’s just a lot more to consciousness and to our life than we are generally told about, right? Now, I’m still an agnostic about what happens during an NDA, right? It could have been a hallucination. It could have been something triggered by my brain, you know, whatever. I don’t really know. But I do know that something happened that was very much apart from normal consciousness.

Now, fast forward three or four years. I’m going to college. And I started, I came across some books on NLP. NLP was a pretty new thing then. This was late 1970s. And… I was fascinated by it. I was like, this is the… I was taking… In college, I was taking courses in psycholinguistics, which was the study of the psychology of language. And when I found the NLP books, I was like, wow, no, this is really what I was looking for. Right? The psycholinguistic courses were… They were interesting. We got a little bit of like Noam Chomsky’s theories on grammar, but a lot of stuff about how they taught sign language to apes and things like that. but not exactly useful in your day-to-day communication, unless you have a chimpanzee as a client or something like that.

So when I saw the NLP books, I was like, OK, this is really what I was looking for. It’s actually how to use syntax and grammar and things like that to make your language more effective. And part of that was to be a better writer, but also to start exploring altered states and consciousness and so on. around that same time, these are parallel things happening at the same time, a friend of mine inadvertently left some books on magic, on traditional Western esoteric magic, in my apartment. And so, of course, being the compulsive reader, again, you know, I have to read everything that that’s in front of me, I read those. I’m like, okay, this is, here’s another piece.

And since these were parallel studies, my first thought In neuroscience, there’s this phrase, neurons that fire together wire together. So here am I reading books about NLP and hypnosis and also about Western esoteric magic. And so I started thinking, well, how do these combine? How do I use one? How do I use the more modern techniques of NLP to explore these and see what’s really happening? Because in the esoteric tradition, you have, I mean, thousands of years of people describing the results of rituals and practices and things that are a little bit outside of what our cultural context these days usually describes. So descriptions of entity encounters and influencing other people and influencing the world and things like that.

The key pieces of Western esoteric magic that really struck me is that it’s really about becoming a better person, right? It’s about becoming a more well-integrated, complete human being, right? And of course, hypnosis and NLP, ultimately, if it’s not the goal, it should be, right? And sorry, my glasses are getting weird here. Okay. So immediately there’s these parallel goals in these traditions. And I started to find out some things that NLP actually had some roots in esoteric magic and things like that. So they diverged at some point, and then they’re converging again now.

And some of the descriptions of Hypnosis and things that we have from history, going back to things like the Egyptian temples of sleep and things like that, were really part of the magical tradition. They were part of the ritual work and the devotion to gods and goddesses and exploration and things like that. And so hypnosis actually arises from that. And through history, we had, you know, tales of different famous magicians and so on who were good hypnotists, ranging from John Dee and, you know, they did John Dee and Edward Kelly, who were some of the more famous magicians in Victorian times, where they were doing trance work. If you read it, Edward Kelly would go into a trance and they would… John Dee would be the one talking to him, putting him into trance, and then so on. And so it was really hypnosis, or a form thereof. And later on you have people like Aleister Crowley and George Gurdjieff and so on, who all claimed to practice hypnosis at some point. And Gurdjieff even at one point claimed that he got so good at hypnosis that he had to stop because he was using it all the time and influencing people unduly. Right? And I think the stopping thing was bullshit, because you read his books and stuff like that. I actually would pull out, when I would teach NLP courses, I would actually pull out some Gurdjieff books and just samples of language to show hypnosis, hypnotic language patterns, and so on, very much like Bandler and Grindr and so on. So fun stuff. So it all sort of converged in my head. And And I started over the years, you know, writing down the results of this and the things that I practiced with my clients and so on. It came out to be a few different books on the subject.

Yeah.

It’s often more about how they behave in general rather than necessarily that specific instance that’s causing them problems. And they need to look at that and be able to make lifestyle changes and so on. And we can help with that.

Yeah. So who would you say, who was your model as you’ve been kind of living your life?

Yeah. Oh, I mean, I’ve had a number of great role models. I mentioned Robert Anton Wilson earlier, who was one of my favorite writers when I was younger. And I got to meet him and become friends with him over the years. And he was certainly a role model in terms of writing and the things that he explored and so on. And he was always very, he proposed the idea of model agnosticism, right? understanding that everything that we understand and that we focus on, that we’re able to hold in our minds, are models. They’re not truth, right? It’s the way our brains interpret things. And there’s always a maybe to almost every question, right? Is there a God? Maybe. Is my favorite political party the one that’s going to have the best solutions? Maybe, right? There’s people who are convinced of things like that, right? Yes, there’s a dog. Yes, my political party is the one that’s going to do it. But you insert that maybe in there, and understanding that these are models, and they’re fallible, and they’re the way our brains are interpreting reality rather than reality itself. And it helps you to navigate life a little bit better, to understand that.

Mm-hmm.

It opens you up a little more to other people, right? You have a little bit more acceptance of what other people’s ideas. And also, it doesn’t get you into trouble as much. If you can, you can understand that your own your own positions are not as firm as that. Right. You always have that little maybe in there. He called it maybe logic. OK, so Bob Wilson was certainly one of my role models in terms of learning hypnosis. Richard Bandler, certainly. went to, you know, seminars and sat there and observed him as closely as I could without, you know, until I went into trance and came back out the other side going, whoa, what was that? You know, so, I don’t know, you know, Milton Erickson, certainly a role model, not someone I’d never met him, of course. And you know, many people like that, in terms of like doing magic, there’s some great folks out there who are sort of… The people who teach magic, who are very grounded, who have their feet on the ground and aren’t going off into the crazy, wacky stuff. There’s people out there like Lon Milo Duquette, who’s one of my favorite writers on magic. There’s a great book of his, people want to check it out, called My Life with the Spirits.

Mm-hmm.

Really good introduction to that whole kind of thing. Who else? He’s left the planet Earth, but Donald Michael Craig, who is the author of Modern Magic, he was a good friend of mine and definitely a role model back in the day. Let’s see, I’ve got some other folks like that. I know. It seems odd, but I know some people in the Voodoo community who they do some great magic. I mean, it’s really, they’re very inclusive and they’re open to learning new things and bringing new ideas into what they do as magic. And so, let’s see, there’s people, I’m friends with people who are involved in the New Orleans Voodoo Temple, Priestess there for many years. Lou Martinais is one of the folks there. Although he’s moved out of New Orleans. But he’s still a great teacher and so on. Lilith Dorsey, she’s great. She’s got some great books. If you want to learn about that side of magic, Lilith Dorsey, her books are great. I don’t know. There’s a lot of people.

Yeah.

I learned from everybody who’s got something there in front of me.

Practical Applications

So you gave us a ton there. So based on your 40 plus years of experience here, would you mind sharing a practical way that someone could use one of these super states to improve their life?

Sure, well, I talked about doing the evocation technique. I think that’s one of the core pieces there. I’m a little hesitant. I’m not going to demonstrate that here. It’s the kind of thing where you want to be there with somebody when you do it. Let’s see. In terms of the things that people can practice on their own. One of the great ones is the meditation technique known as pranayama, right, which is breath control. And it was probably the very first meditation technique that I learned when I was, again, 10 or 11. And this is called… I’ll discuss two types of pranayama. There’s a million types of pranayama. I’ll describe two types now which people can practice on their own. You get great results from this. It’s wonderful for anxiety. It’s very relaxing. It’ll calm you down. If you do 10 minutes of this a day, you’ll find that your life will change in terms of how you cope with things and so on throughout the day.

All right, the first one is called square breathing. And essentially, for most of these techniques, you sit with your back straight. A chair is fine, but if you want to be a… We’ll look in yogi. You can sit in lotus position or whatever it is. But you sit with your back straight, and your mouth closed, and inhale and exhale through your nose. And you’re going to inhale for a count of four, hold it for a count of four, exhale for a count of four, and hold it out for a count of four, and then repeat. And you do that for 10 minutes, if you can do it longer. Back when I was first getting into this, I learned that there was a magic order that would test you that you had to be able to do an hour of that. So I learned how to do an hour of that way back when, even though I never joined that magic order. But amazing experiences doing that for an hour.

All right, the other one. I don’t know if there’s a name for this. There probably is. But essentially what you’re going to do is you’re going to inhale through your nose whatever is a comfortable time, but time it. Let’s say it’s a count of four that they’re going to inhale through your nose. And then you’re going to exhale through your mouth for twice the length. So if you found that you were inhaling through your nose for four seconds, you have to fill your lungs all the way. And then you would exhale through your mouth for eight seconds. Now, that’s supposed to be supposed to activate the vagus nerve. I don’t really know if they’ve put people in the. the MRI machine and seeing that it actually does that. But it’s an extremely calming and relaxing technique. And the other one, the square breathing will help you to deal with anxiety and so on. So will the vagus breathing. But the square breathing will also kind of get you more into those higher, I don’t know what you want to call, mystical states, right?

Uh huh, okay.

The vagus breathing will just will be more of that relaxing grounding kind of experience.

Got it. Got it.

So those are two real basic things that people can do.

Is there anything that, any risk to those, anything people need to know before exploring those breath practices?

Well, any one of these techniques, there are risks, right? There’s risks with everything. There’s risks of drinking a glass of milk. But there’s the… Some people, these techniques will, as you relax, as muscles soften and relax, sometimes there’s emotional stuff that’s stored in the muscles that gets released. And people will find themselves… crying or having really emotional memories, thinking about traumatic experiences they had in the past. This isn’t all that common, but it does sometimes happen.

Mm-hmm.

If that happens to you while you’re doing it, stop and go find a practitioner to help you.

Yeah, okay, great, thank you.

Okay, help you to get through that. If it’s just minor stuff and you can deal with it, fine. I mean, great, right? But if it seems like it’s getting… towards traumatic stuff, then stop right there, find the practitioner and do it. Again, those things are rare, right? The AB reactions, right? We have AB reactions to basic hypnosis too sometimes. You start putting somebody into trans, they go, oh, holy, you know, it’s rare, but it happens, right? In the context of like being a hypnotist and doing it, we get trained in doing that as part of our training is dealing with AB reactions, or at least I hope it is. And the, right, but if someone is just there practicing by themselves, that’s a good time to stop and get some help.

The vagus breathing, I have, I really have never heard anybody have a problem with it, but again, the same issues could apply to that. There’s even, I mean, this stuff happens in people’s yoga classes and stuff like that. You go to yoga classes. Every now and then somebody has a… They get into something and they release some stored trauma or something like that. I saw just the other day an article came across my newsfeed. I have lots of yoga and meditation things on my newsfeed. It was like, so how come you want to cry every time you do hip stretches? Right? So I mean, that’s an example of that. That kind of thing. So hopefully, I didn’t read the article, but hopefully they just gave people some, if it’s not too bad, that’s fine. Let it go. Go through your crying. If it seems too traumatic, right.

Yeah. They probably said the exact same thing that you just…

If it seems like it’s getting in the way of your life or you can’t deal with it, get some help.

Yeah, as you think of the future and using altered states for personal growth, what’s giving you hope right now?

Well, it’s really interesting to see how psychedelics are becoming mainstream. Every day I pull up my Facebook or News Feed or whatever it is, and I’m seeing ads for like ketamine practitioners and, you know, go get therapy with magic mushrooms and things like that. I do know that, I mean, there’s some practitioners who are great. The people who are being trained by the MAPS organization, Multidisciplinary Arts Psychedelic Studies, okay, MAPS. And if you want to find them, maps.org. And the people who are getting trained by MAPS to do psychedelic therapy right now are using really good protocols. I know I have a friend who, was a consultant on one of the protocols that they did for the MDMA studies. And she’s a great NLP practitioner. So there’s a little bit of NLP in there, too. So when you have great practitioners who are doing that, there’s no substitute for it. There’s nothing else that will get in there and change things on the level that psychedelics will.

Right.

And in combination with therapy, and in a therapeutic context with hypnosis, NLP, whatever you want to do. Now, with that said, I mean, people have been using psychedelics and things like that for millennia, for recreational purposes. And yeah, I’ll quote, and for, you know, I mean, for spiritual things and… you know, productive change and things as well. I’ll quote Andrew Weil. Somebody asked him, you know, what do you think? You know, they were talking about MDMA in the context of therapy. And they said, what do you think about people who use it recreationally? And he said, well, recreation can be very therapeutic. So I like that idea, right?

A colleague of mine calls it re creation, right?

There you go. Right. And just taking a vacation, relaxing, doing something fun for a while, these things can change our lives. I mean, you got to have some fun in your life, too. But anyway, the fact that research and therapy for these substances is now open to study and open for people to practice with good practitioners and so on. I think that’s a big change. And it may revolutionize the, I hope it revolutionizes the mental health industry because I see a lot of real bad practices in the mental health industry right now.

There’s certainly a lot of room for growth. Ha ha ha.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s an awful lot of like psych meds, anti-psychotics, they don’t know how they work. They give them to people and hope it works. And they say, well, most people have to try two or three of these or three or four of these before they find one that works. And they don’t even know the mechanism of action for a lot of these things. Whereas psychedelics have been really well studied over the years. And now that they’re open to more study, we’re learning some just great things. As folks over in… England, who are giving people psychedelics and putting them in the MRI machine. And it’s revolutionizing what we know about the brain and revolutionizing neuroscience in general. There’s folks over there, Robin Carhart-Harris, David Nutt. They’re doing these great studies. So look for more of that. I mean, we’re just learning things about the way consciousness works.

Yeah, certainly seemed.

In fact… In fact, there’s interest in the idea of studying anesthetics, because anesthetics seem to be right at the core of what is consciousness, right? Turning consciousness on and off. And Roger Penrose, who’s a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, he got together with an anesthesiologist whose name is alluding me right now, and they tried to answer the question, what is consciousness? And they’ve come up with some really intriguing things. They’re finding that the anesthetics work in the brain on a quantum level. And right now, it’s kind of hard to see into the brain on a quantum level. But maybe they’ll find some ways that we can study that a little bit more closely and in real time. But absolutely intriguing and totally fascinating what they’re learning about it.

It’s a really exciting time to be alive.

I also think. Yeah. And I think the fact that we have neuroscience equipment now, right, you can put someone in the MRI machine and see what happens when you do a particular technique. That’s going to that changes everything right until now. Psychological stuff, therapy, whatever. It’s been a black box, right? I mean, every other thing a doctor can look inside, you get an x-ray, see what’s wrong, right? In psychiatry, psychology, therapy, they’re making guesses, right? The whole DSM manual is like this checklist of three from column A, two from column B. They’re not looking in the brain. They’re not seeing what happens, right? And so some of the…they’re guesses. Some of them are educated guesses based on things they’ve seen in the past, but they’re still guesses. And once we really start seeing what happens when you… You give someone a particular drug, or you put them in a state of hypnosis or meditation, and you see what happens in the brain in real time. It changes everything. It changes what we know about how people behave and stuff. I have a chunk of, you know, up until when I wrote the book some years ago, I have some chunks of neuroscience that are in the books relating to that kind of stuff, right? What happens when you do magic? What happens when you do meditation and stuff like that? So again, it’s a great time to be alive because we’ve never had these tools before.

Right.

And so we’re learning more about the things we do. We’re learning more about how the brain functions. And hopefully we’re going to find some more different modalities, different techniques and things that are going to come out of that.

I love that. Phil, how can people learn more about you if they’re curious?