Maybe this will save the smoker...

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Addicted to NOT Smoking:

A Hypnotic Trip into Cigarettelessness

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A www.DoctorMyDocument.com Publication

Changing Your Mind

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Hypnosis Consciousness

Born into a mysterious world that is too much to fathom, a life with no explanation, we grab hold of cigarettes the way a shipwrecked sailor grabs hold of a wooden plank in order to keep afloat.  A pack of cigarettes in your pocket is something that you can be sure of, and it helps you to cope with all the uncertainty of being a person.  Unfortunately, the sense of security that you find in cigarettes is a false one.  They’re killing you, actually.

Spacious Mind: A workspace for changing your mind.

This is where you free your person of the burdensome compulsion to judge and analyze every little thing, constantly missing the present moment and its vivid truth because of the distracting rant of the mind.  Listen to the sound of your breathing as you read.  There is a moment when the inhalation stops and the exhalation has yet to begin, like the moment of stillness when a ball thrown up in the air has stopped ascending but has not yet started to fall.  Within and between all movements of breath and body, there is the entirety of life—and life can be pleasure.  The volume of life’s pleasure can be turned up until it overwhelms the comparatively minor discomfort of nicotine withdrawal.  It is as simple as changing your mind.

Smoke-Strike: Like a hunger-strike, this is a practice of renunciation.

Resolve to be free of the habit for a few hours tomorrow.  The habit began when an occasional cigarette provided a temporary escape from your tired old routine.  No nicotine dependence had developed yet, so you smoked for other reasons.  When you first tried cigarettes you were trying something new, something exciting.  But cigarettes are not new anymore, are they?  Your relationship to cigarettes has changed completely.  Now they have become part of the tired old routine, and they offer enjoyment only in the form of relief from the physical discomfort associated with nicotine craving.  Your relationship to cigarettes has changed in such a way that, now, not to smoke would be an escape from the tired old routine.  Imagine that.

Reading Hypnosis: Rest in your practice. 

Breathe easy.  Relax your face and shoulders.  Loosen away any tension that you might be holding in the chest area.  A subtle trance occurs naturally while you read, and you can deepen the trance by deliberately sharpening your focus until you achieve slender, pinpoint precision.  Cooperate with the trance, and go deeper into the stillness of the moment.  To stay with the reading and the sound of your breathing is so much easier than letting your mind wander.  These words are good for you, so do not read them with your ordinary, wide-awake discernment—let your guard down.  Let your attention float slowly across the page with each breath. 

Creative Action: You can choose to be active or passive in any moment. 

The extent to which you inhabit your own mind is the extent to which you can be an active creator of life.  Act according to your will rather than serving the impulsive, monkey-mind of the person, and you can create life as you go, shaping your life situation by gently manipulating the unfolding of events in the present moment.  If you act on every little passing impulse, you’ll be busy like an overworked servant.  A slave.  Don’t be a slave to the monkey-mind’s thousands of stupid little thoughts (they have nothing to do with you), because you’ll be too busy to create anything; you will not be an active participant.  You’ll end up like the lonely kid sitting with no one to dance with, benched on the sidelines of life. 

Hypnosis Consciousness: Where subject and object meet.

You are awareness looking out at the world through the eyes of a person.  Humanity changes according to ideas that have been entertained, and your own life also changes according to ideas.  Hypnosis is the technique for accessing a deep place in consciousness, the place where subject and object meet, and introducing ideas.  The quality of your attention is what determines your ability to influence the changes that will happen in the world and in the person.  Strength of concentration is the necessary trait, the one that lets you co-create instead of suffering through life with no control.

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Chapter One

Changing Your Mind

This moment, you can go the right way.  You can take the path of a slightly different you, very much like the existing you, except without the cigarettes.  Changing your mind is delicate work.  It’s like brain surgery without the surgery.  It’s like cleaning an oven, only it’s a self-cleaning oven, so it cleans itself, but that is really hard for an oven to do.  

            Tic, toc, tic, toc, you spill into reality, moment after moment.  Tic, toc, tic, toc, your person mixes in with everything else.  The world is constantly changing.  The person is constantly changing.  Subtle manipulations can be made if you are sneaky enough.  Are you sneaky enough?  Guide the person.  Tell her what she wants to hear.  Be nice to her, so that she feels very comfortable.  The way to make change happen for the person you call “me” is to direct that person, gently and sneakily, according to your will.  Repeat instructions over and over while the person is calm, while “monkey-mind” is sleeping. 

Monkey-mind is the know-it-all kind, a control-freak that tries to run the whole show, and she has her own ideas about what the person should do.  If you challenge her, she just crosses her arms and tells you no.  Monkey-mind tells you that she has been running this person for a long time, and she is not about to let you start making all kinds of changes.  Not now, not ever.  She has worked too hard to establish this self-image, and the person is just barely keeping her shit together as it is.  Don’t change anything, monkey-mind says.  If you want to enact any changes, you’re going to have to trick monkey-mind.  Lull her to sleep.  Get her to go to bed before the person does, or distract her skillfully.  You need to steal some opportunities to speak with the person in private, without the interference of that busybody, monkey-mind.

Monkey-mind is the talkative type, a flamboyant and conceited little prick.  If you want to know what monkey-mind is, close your eyes and try not to think about anything for 60 seconds.  That little voice in your head, the one that doesn’t know how to shut up, is the voice called monkey-mind.  It can be a useful tool, just like your hands, or ears, or a shovel, or a pocket-dictionary.  When you ‘think about’ something, you suggest the topic to monkey-mind and allow it to start making a lot of associations.  Offer a topic, emphysema for example, and the voice will mumble: “…cigarettes, oxygen tank, permanent damage, hyperventilation, sadness, suffering…”  The talkative monkey-mind works just like a search engine on the Internet. 

            There is a problem with monkey-mind, though, and its usefulness is often compromised.  Tools are never as useful when used incorrectly.  Sometimes they actually become dangerous, and this is the case with monkey-mind.  What makes your mind dangerous is that it is like a computer from which you can’t log off.  Thinking is always going on, and when something is always present it seems to become a part of you.  Your home town, your family, your body, your monkey-mind, even your car—you are like that ugly little duck in the story, all confused about what you are, so you identify more with the things that are always around.  And because monkey-mind provides solutions to your problems and the words with which to express yourself, the tendency is to identify with it even more than with other things. 

What do we mean when we say ‘identification’ with one thing and another?  You live from there, perceiving those things to be the constituents of your ‘self,’ as if they are what make you up.  You relinquish part of your ability to be, settling for a comfortable illusion because you’re scared of the unknown.  But if Lewis and Clark had been scared of venturing into the unknown, they would never have discovered Sacajewia, and we wouldn’t have those Sacajewia dollar-coins.  At a loss for what to make of themselves in this human condition, people identify with mind and body, because mind and body are always present.  When that ugly duck thought he was a duck, he might as well have been a duck for all practical purposes.  He couldn’t fly until he found out that he was a misplaced eagle.  Or maybe he was a swan, or a seagull or something.  Nevermind the stupid duck.  The point is, when you let things in your environment affect the way you think of your ‘self,’ your actions are affected as well.  It’s not okay.  Even if you have a nice car that could make you feel better about yourself, don’t.  Pretending that you are your car is not the answer, and neither is it the answer to pretend that you are that voice in your head.

You are Not the Thinking Mind

The monkey-mind’s ongoing stream of thought could be compared to the process of Rorscharch Ink Blot Test: The present moment of your life shows you a particular scene from your life-situation, which is like an ink blot, and monkey-mind spouts a stream of associations between your preexisting knowledge/ideas and the content of the present-moment scene.  You are not your accumulation of memories and mental associations—you are not the thinking, monkey-mind.    

It is difficult to regard your self as separate from your thoughts, because your thoughts are the constituents of your “identity,” and it is scary not to know what you are.  That scariness was the reason for identifying with external things, like cigarettes, in the first place.  The unknown is so scary that members of religious groups have been willing to commit mass suicide under the leadership of some fanatic who convinced them that he had it all figured out.  We cling to our beliefs.  Just as your imagination fills in the blind spots in your vision so well that you don’t know you have them, identification with external things enables you to feel as though you know what you are when you really don’t.  Monkey-mind is one of those external things, like a wardrobe or a fancy house, but to see monkey-mind as external requires more self-study. 

Very simple people might identify with their sports cars, and when they hit spiritual puberty they might have a realization that the cars have little to do with the self, but they might still identify with their bodies.  After more self-study and further realization, they might discover that they are not their bodies either, but they might still identify with the thoughts of monkey-mind.  Only the most resolute seekers of spiritual truth can actually experience themselves beyond the level of thought. 

You can too, but until you do, you’re an ugly little duck.

A Word about Your Ninja Costume…

The one who makes the changes is not the one being changed.  Here, a distinction needs to be made. 

Changing your mind is like changing out of your ninja costume.  Undressing in your apartment after a night of ninja-ing around in other people’s yards just for the thrill, the naughty rush it gives you, you have achieved such a level of sneakiness that you can hardly even find yourself inside your costume.  Except for the face-mask and fanny-pack, your sleek, tight ninja costume is all one piece, and it provocatively contours every bulge and crevice of your equally sleek, tight ninja body.  You almost cannot tell where the hand-sewn, jet-black, cotton-polyester blend of fabric ends and you begin. 

You hate to take off your ninja costume, because so many of your best memories are of times when you were wearing it, peering through people’s windows while hiding in clouds of smoke, and you feel as though the costume is a part of who you are.  So, you sit alone at home sometimes, dressed as a ninja, trying to make a living as a writer so as to avoid ever having to leave the house.  You only go out on ninja missions.  And, you wear your mask.  That way, if anyone ever sees you, you can just ninja off to someone else’s yard and hide – until it’s safe to sneak home. 

You hate to change.  Your costume is what helps you to sneak around and be anonymous, so that, even if people see you, they won’t know you.  They’ll know they saw a ninja, sure, a ninja who disappeared behind a cloud of smoke, but they won’t know the real you.  You especially hate to take off your ninja face mask, because someone might see your true face.  Someone might catch you sneaking around, because you have a habit of sneaking around in public places during the day, and they would figure out that you are a ninja and tell everybody and they would all think you are really cool, but then someone would recognize you in your costume one night when they switch the flood light on and say, hey, Kevin, why don’t you put some normal pants on, and get away from my cat, before I call the police.  Get out.  Get out of here.

So, it’s like that.  Changing your mind is tricky business, because there is a part of your mind that sounds like a voice in your head, and you tend to think of it as your own voice, not like the others.  One voice doesn’t sound as hoarse and angry as the others.  The voice that is left over after medicine makes the others go away, the main character on the radio program in your head, is what meditation practitioners call “monkey mind.” 

It isn’t someone else’s voice, but it isn’t yours either.  It is more like the echo of your phenomenal experience.  A phenomena-commentary.  Your present moment experience pours into a puddle of memories, stirring up your stillness and making a sound like a voice in your head.  The voice is so familiar that you do not know where it ends and you begin.  To change your mind requires that you differentiate between what is you and what is not, discern what part of mind is changeable from the changeless one who manifests the change.  After all, this voice in your head is the culprit, giving you the notion that you would like to smoke a cigarette, even though you know you want to quit.  We name it monkey-mind in order to understand it as part of your experience rather than as a part of who you are.  You are the one who chooses the change; you are not that little voice, bitching about needing a cigarette.

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