Choices and Illusions (15 page)

is played backward, it is meaningful, such as “daddy, help!”

What is more, various law-enforcement agencies have learned,

as I did, that reversing the answers in a statement may reveal some interesting information. This first happened to me when I was

manually reversing a reel-to-reel tape recording made at 7 inches

per second (IPS) to replay it at 15/16 IPS through a Psychological

Stress Evaluator, a method of truth verification. As I manually

turned the spool on my Uher recorder, the forward answer “no”

became “liar.” This astounded me, especially when the charts

agreed that deception was present. A confession taken later verified that the subject was indeed lying. How was this possible? Well, the exact mechanics are not known. What has been verified, though,

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is that reverse speech can add information, refute statements, and

often do even more. In one criminal case, for example, statements

that dealt with an armed robbery actually revealed the location

of the hidden money when they were slowed down and played in

reverse. As with the so-called Freudian slip, apparently the subconscious needs to get in its proverbial two bits’ worth as well.

Choosing the Messages

My new method gave rise to the detection of occasional speech

sounds, such as someone talking softly, but the words were not

consciously discriminated. The next problem I had to solve was

with regards to the messages I should use on my program. What

message would give rise to minimizing distress in a detection of

deception examination unless the subject intended to practice

deception—and then have the reverse effect? This was not easy,

but in the end I elected to use two components: the statement “The

truth shall set you free” and the entire 23rd Psalm. (The 23rd Psalm was used by many prisoners of war during WWII and the Korean

War, according to their reports, to assuage the anxiety and stress

of capture.) The results astonished me. not only did inconclusives

disappear, but confession rates soared. In fact, there were times I thought of saying, “Stop, don’t tell me yet—I get paid by the hour.”

The Prison Study

I reported my findings to some of the local law-enforcement

agencies and heard back that the prosecutor did not think our using this technology was such a good idea, so we stopped. Still, now that I knew this could work in a lie-detection scenario, I wondered about using it to rehabilitate prison inmates. A friend of mine from the

Utah State Prison staff, lee liston, approached me with the initial idea, and we went to work on setting up a rather extensive study. We called upon another friend, dr. Charles McCusker, a psychometric

specialist, and set up a study using the Minnesota Multiphasic

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Information processing Without awareness

Personality Inventory (MMPI), which is the clinical instrument

most often used to provide an objective measure of personality. It

is employed quite often in court cases and is generally deemed the

most reliable instrument for personality assessment.

Our study used prison inmates who volunteered to take part.

They were divided into three groups: an experimental group that

would receive the messages designed to lower hostility and aggres-

sion and improve chances at rehabilitation (interrupt the recidivism rate), a placebo group that would listen to the sounds of the ocean without messages, and a control group that would do nothing. The

study was to take place over 30 days, with the inmate volunteers

listening to the programs a minimum of one hour a day every day.

The MMPI was administered using a modified version devel-

oped for the incarcerated environment, known as the Fowler lens.

The MMPI was used first to determine a so-called common denomi-

nator. The results yielded no real surprises, as there were high scores in both social and self-alienation. We decided to use the Thurstone Temperament Schedule (a psychometric instrument/questionnaire/

scale designed to measure behavior) before and after the test to

determine what effect our InnerTalk program had. However, I was

still faced with the question, “What do we say to the inmates?”

It’s okay to do better than Daddy.

Mommy and I are one.

The research literature had only two magic messages. The work

of dr. lloyd H. Silverman, a research psychologist at the Veterans

Administration in new York, demonstrated that the message “It’s

okay to do better than daddy” had remarkable results in a variety of domains, and the “Mommy and I are one” message seemed to have

universal power, from improving dart-throwing ability to reducing

symptoms of schizophrenia. Silverman theorized that Freudian

complexes were often sublimated in adaptive ways that could lead

to schisms in the psyche, which led him to the subliminal message,

“Mommy and I are one.”3 My own work (as I have set out in my

other books) suggests that this “Mommy” is not our actual physical

mother, but rather the universal archetype of motherhood, namely

the womb. The womb—whether of a mother or of nature, the

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CHOICES AND ILLUSIONS

planet, or the living consciousness known as Gaia—is a place

of sanctuary. Indeed, Silverman’s own work showed that the

message had no effect if the subject was conscious of its presence.

How wonderful,
I thought in reviewing this literature.
However, I
somehow don’t think that the “Mommy” message is quite enough with
our prison population.
So what message or messages should be used on the program?

Researchers at Boston University’s Center for Brain

and Memory have pinpointed the mechanism

that makes subliminal learning work.

It was time to speak with the inmates and let them tell us what

should be on the program. What we discovered changed my life

and could change yours. In the next chapter, we will review this

information, and I will again attempt to make it personal with

some stories and experiential material. In chapters to come, I will share other experiences and offer my opinions on what is behind

some of the misconceptions regarding subliminal communication.

It is worth noting that today there is little controversy. Even the neurological mechanism for subliminal learning has been identified. In May 2005, a team of researchers, led by Takeo Watanabe of

Boston University’s Center for Brain and Memory, announced that

his team had “pinpointed the mechanism that makes subliminal

learning work.”4

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a siMPle Model of Mind

and Behavior

“You have powers you never dreamed of. You can do things

you never thought you could. There are no limitations in

what you can do except the limitations of your own mind.”

— d A r W i n p. k i n g s l e y

When I have spoken to inmates, they all have stories and per-

sons or events on which to blame their life errors. In lectures, I have often summed up their attitudes this way: “Ah, but for the grace of God, you would be where I am today. My mother was a prostitute,

and my daddy an alcoholic. The neighbor boy hung heroin on

me when I was 12.” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, their situation is not their fault. Even when their stories are false or greatly exaggerated, it still is not their fault. They all have someone or something to blame. They would seek to gain understanding and

even sympathy with their life stories. not that some of the stories are not touching, but my point is that the function of blame essentially removed their responsibility through rationalizations such as

“What would you have done?” or “Maybe it was wrong, but what

else could I do?” Their choices are framed in experience much like

those in our flowerpot story.

The inmates generally have a compensation mechanism that

differs from that of people in society. Remember the high scores

in social and self-alienation. Typically, the person with low self-

esteem tends to adapt by thinking of others as better. This was

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CHOICES AND ILLUSIONS

not necessarily true in our inmate population. Many of them had

compensated this way: “If I’m no good, you’re no good. do unto

others before they do unto you. don’t get even; get ‘evener.’”

The Magic Bullet

For the record, I have discovered that what I am about to share

with you works everywhere. It worked in the prison system, and it

works in hospice centers. It works with elite professional athletes, Fortune 500 types, small children, and everyone in between. It

works in Germany, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico, Canada,

India, England, Ireland, and more. I know it works there because

we have distributors and customers, as well as studies, coming from these areas. I am convinced that it works everywhere, in every

language, and on all human beings.

What, then, to put on the prison subliminal program? It should

be obvious, but allow me to digress for a moment. There are two

ways to be tied up in the world. In one way, another person binds

you. In the other way, you choose to hold on to a tiny thread

attached to anything and refuse either to let go or pull hard enough to break it. You might feel as if you’re walking around, but as soon as you reach the thread’s end, you turn and retreat. It’s interesting that this is how elephants are trained. Tying elephants when

they are very young with large chains causes them to soon learn

that they are attached, and if they try to run the ground will sud-

denly be jerked out from under them and they will fall and hurt

themselves. When these animals are fully grown and could eas-

ily snap the chain, they are content tied only with a small rope.

They choose—if you can use that word in this context—not to test

the boundary.

Similarly, blame is a bind—pure and simple, it ties you up!

As long as we blame, we effectively rob ourselves of our own

empowerment. After all, if it’s not my fault, then there is nothing I can do about it. The “everything sucks and then you die” attitude,

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a Simple Model of Mind and Behavior

the “it’s not my fault” approach, and similar beliefs strip individuals of the power to affect their own world. The net result, as R. d.

laing so eloquently says in
Politics of Experience,
is:

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being

unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition

of the normal man.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates chil-

dren to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus

to be normal.

normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their

fellow normal men in the last fifty years. . . .

We are not able even to think adequately about the be-

havior that is at the annihilating edge. But what we think is

less than what we know; what we know is less than what we

love; what we love is so much less than what there is. And

to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.

As long as we blame, we effectively rob

ourselves of our own empowerment.

now, let us build a model and see if we can find the gears and

tumblers that cause all of this nonsense to seem sensical. In Figure 24, the circle represents the mind.

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CHOICES AND ILLUSIONS

Figure 24

According to the notion that we use 10 percent or less of our

brain/mind, our model shows that 3 percent is conscious aware-

ness at any given time; 7 percent or so is preconscious, or that part of our mind that accesses, say, the verse to a favorite song that

we do not carry around full-time in our conscious mind; and the

remaining 90 percent is untapped resources and our subconscious

or unconscious. Here I am again using
subconscious
and
unconscious
synonymously, despite my being fully aware that there is a sharp