The most despicable, oft-repeated lie about hypnosis is that one cannot be hypnotized to think what is untrue or to act against one's own free will. That is flatly untrue. Skilled manipulators have known it forever. The manipulators have guarded this secret carefully, partly by repeating the lie that such influence is impossible. It is not safe to regard hypnosis as a harmless parlor game, or to remain oblivious to how it works. Without awareness of how hypnotic influence works and of how to counter and reduce its influence in oneself and others, even people living in supposedly free societies will become increasingly enslaved to influences largely invisible to them-while simultaneously being hypnotized to regard themselves as free and in charge of their own lives. Based on the author's discoveries about hypnotic influence gathered over more than 60 years, this book seeks to show you how to become less susceptible to past and present hypnotic influences and thus more able to live in true freedom, drawing your energy from what is real and right so that you are fully alive in a healthy sense. Freedom from hypnotic influence, even from influences seeking to get you to do what is right or think what is true, is essential if people are to be able to escape an unhealthy dependence on their manipulators, caregivers, experts and leaders (even the well-meaning among them). Reading this book, watching the hypnosis demonstration video and practicing the recommended exercise will awaken within you a spiritual center from which you will be impervious to improper influence and able to influence the world for the better-as effortlessly as the most skilled martial artist can deal with an opponent.
Roy Masters-who in his 80s continues to broadcast the longest-running counseling show in talk radio history-started his journey toward understanding human nature in the most unlikely of places. Growing up in pre-WWII England, he watched a performer easily put his volunteer subjects under a hypnotic spell and induced each of them to do strange and outlandish things. How, the young Roy wondered, could a smiling, personable stranger cause well-dressed, educated, competent adults to forget their names? Puzzled by the mysterious power the hypnotist had exercised over his subjects, Roy distinctly remembers pondering the question: "Why can't hypnotism be used to make people act sensibly, rather than foolishly?" Inspired by the idea of harnessing this baffling force for good, he later pursued the art of hypnotism and established a successful hypnotherapy practice. Over years of counseling as well as personal experience, Roy realized that the root of the power of negative suggestion lay in our wrong emotional response, and so he began to search for a way to help people overcome the hypnotic power of stress. After years of searching, he discovered a remarkably effective meditation method, and has been teaching it-with spectacular results-ever since. For over 50 years Roy counsels people primarily through his internationally syndicated daily radio program Advice Line, where callers discuss their most intimate problems and find genuine help and healing. He has served as a daily voice of sanity and conscience to his listeners, with the uncanny ability to zero in quickly on core problems. As the institutional home for his counseling work, Masters' formed the Foundation of Human Understanding in 1961. Through his daily radio broadcasts, lectures, seminars, his 18 books, countless audio and video programs-and the Internet-he has helped millions worldwide. He has also established a successful prison outreach and an innovative private K-12 school. Beyond all this, and at a time in life when most people would have long since retired, an energetic Roy Masters is delving deeply into yet another long-time interest-physics and cosmology. He has authored "Finding God in Physics" as well as a more technical treatise, "Gravity Driven Universe" and has lectured on "Electricity from Gravity" at the American Physical Society in Denver. Roy Masters and his wife, Ann, have been married since 1952. They have five grown children and 18 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
