At its core, self-hypnosis is simply this: moving from one state of consciousness to another.

A “state of consciousness,” as I use the term, is any stable pattern of thoughts, feelings, and expectations. For example, being caught in the belief “I can’t handle what life throws at me” is one state. Moving to “I am strong and capable of facing whatever comes” is another.

Self-hypnosis is the process of instilling the second in place of the first. There are many ways to do it. For me, deep self-inquiry and philosophy has been a very fruitful endeavour. Asking “Who am I?” have been especially powerful. When the answer shifts, my state of consciousness shifts with it.

Even writing about these ideas primes my mind and is part of my journey of self-hypnosis. It reinforces the knowing that belief and expectation shape my experience, that conviction alters how reality shows up.

This isn’t self-deception but a gradual transformation of one’s state of being. From this to that. I cannot believe in "magic" as some mystical force which I can not understand. I have to understand magic, to believe in it with conviction.

Writing about and exploring these ideas is the construction of a framework which I can understand and logically and rationally explain. The framework, once constructed, becomes the source of magic in my life precisely because I am convinced of its validity.

Belief is only powerful for me if it’s rooted in understanding. Blind faith simply does not do it for me, because I cannot be convinced by it. Perhaps I am "resistant to hypnosis" in that sense. Not easily misled, in other words.

I think rationality usually is what prevents people from being easily hypnotized on stage. Those who manage to suspend disbelief and "go with it" are more easily moved than I am.

Seen this way, a hypnotist isn’t casting spells. He’s guiding someone to accept a new belief. If you come to believe you’re a chicken, your consciousness has been altered. And we all do this to ourselves constantly when we adopt new convictions.

From this perspective, self-hypnosis overlaps with placebo, manifestation, “law of attraction,” even what some call magic. Different words for the same underlying principle. That convictions and beliefs shape reality.

In earlier times, people expected and believed that angels and demons would work in the world for them. Their belief and conviction made it so. But they failed to recognise, I think, that it was always themselves who was the source of magic.

They came up with all sorts of frameworks to hinge their beliefs and convictions on. Belief in these frameworks also - is self-hypnosis. They moved into a state of being, where angels and demons actually did respond to their requests and petitions.

Seen through this lens, everything we truly believe in is "self-hypnosis" in this view. Even belief in capitalism and mundane things like the structures that govern our lives.

State, religion etc. All of it, states of consciousness. These can be altered. Yuval Noah Harari calls these "shared fictions" or "intersubjective realities". Money, borders, laws, and corporations have no objective reality outside of our collective belief in them.

We have hypnotized ourselves, as a species, into a state of consciousness where these concepts are real and powerful

Examine your own life. What in it, have you not expected and believed on some level would happen? There is, as I understand it, strong reasons to believe that we attract what we expect into our lives.

At the very least, it is true for me. There is as far as I can discern nothing in my life which I have not invited through belief and expectations. In every case where I encounter something that makes me think "I cannot possibly have expected that!" it turns out that on some level, I actually did expect it.

The expectation may have been unconscious, but it was mine.

This perhaps, was the insight behind Carl Jung's (supposed) quote "until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate".