TikTok, Dolores Cannon and Hypnosis

About a month or two ago I cam across the work of Dolores Cannon. I saw videos of her speaking about her work TikTok, my new favorite (anonymous) social media application where all the strange and wonderful beasts of myth and fantasy seem to have found a home. Through some of these videos, I was inspired to get her books and read her story for myself. What I found there was nothing less than fantastic. She developed a technique for past life regression and wrote maybe ten or twelve books about her experience, through which she basically opened doors, or passed through doors, into other dimensions. As strange as that sounds that is really the only way to describe it. And what she found in these other dimensions, who and what she spoke to, is nothing short of incredible.

This is not a story of my exploration of her work (thats a more long and drawn out topic that has more or less seeded a new book on metaphysics that I have started, my new proverbial rabbit hole) but an exploration of her hypnosis technique as it relates to my own experience with meditation and mysticism more generally and my scientific work into the nature of reality, i.e. metaphysics, which has been a life long pursuit you could say. You could also call it an obsession.

My foray into TikTok land however is worth spending a moment or two on in and of itself. For more than a few months now I have gotten to know the platform, found my place in that world you might say, and the world that has opened up to me and many others due to the capabilities and design of that platform are quite astonishing really. Everyone can basically not only start their own channel and broadcast to the world in real time, but they also are given a wide variety of publishing and content creation tools that historically have been only available to experts in the field. The result is a wide array of content sourced all over the world, tangible and searchable all driven from, and by, this For You page algorithm that matches you with content it thinks would interest you with content it wants to push across its platform, leading to a sort of random and directed user experience where it seems like it is reading your mind. Which of course it is.

Once you get through the dancing girls, men dressed in drag, old clips of musicians and other such oddities (and pleasantries) you come to realize that beyond entertainment purposes you can actually tune the algorithm to deliver, or find, the content you want, rather than say the content it thinks you like or want through the For You page. This ‘AI’ based algorithm based upon past viewing history, who you follow, your basic demographic info, what is trending, what they are trying to sell you, etc. In addition to this experience you also have the option to just see the content from the people or content creators you have chosen to follow. This part of the system is basically programmable by you, you can select who you want to follow of course and if you want to just follow certain types of content, you can set up your Following feed to reflect that. Pick your poison as they say.

In my foray into this new digital world, where everyone is a celebrity with their own channel and viewers (followers) underpinned by an application, network and system infrastructure which provides the ability of users from around the world to upload and broadcast video content in near real time to anywhere in the world (thank the telecommunication companies, the device makers and the consumers who have all made this possible), I came to realize that what I was really interested in (I mean how many dancing girls can you see and still stay interested really?) was #witchtok #starseeds #ascension #mysticism #esotericism and #philosophytok. Where were my people?

In this digital world, you define yourself, in fact in a very real sense you create your digital world, based upon the hashtags (#hashtag) that are associated with your profile, your account, and perhaps most importantly your viewing history. This means that when you create content, you tell the system where to push it to by the hashtags you associate with the content. Most SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on the web works this way, and Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies also provide these types of hashtag/searchable type capabilities. We live in a #hashtag based world now and if you are missing the boat here you are doing yourself a great disservice.

As the AI goes, there are many other variables it uses to determine what to do with the content you produce outside of these hashtags, and ultimately it is trying to drive up engagement in its platform so whatever it is you are telling it to do with your content through hashtags will be used as a sort of guide, the primary motivation being the platform itself. Along with this have cropped up content creator gurus and folks that are experts in how to create ‘viral’ content and so TikTok in very short order has created a whole social and economic ecosystem unto itself. As of the time of this writing it is estimated that TikTok has over 1 billion users. The platform was launched in 2016. That’s quite a ride.

This is the new world of AI folks. This is the new digital revolution. Not TikTok necessarily but this is the way people are interacting with the digital world now, and the digital world is capturing more and more of people’s mindshare as people spend more and more time inside their computers and their devices which they take everywhere and are constantly plugged in thanks to the telecommunication carriers and again the device makers (Apple et al). In this AI world, content is delivered to you for you, context driven to time of year and your specific demographic information and your specific likes (and dislikes). It makes decisions about what it thinks you will like based on past experience, with just enough randomness thrown in there to keep you engaged and keep evolving the algorithm for you specifically based upon what you interact with primarily and and perhaps somewhat more ominously what it thinks you want to consume. For ultimately that’s what this is all about isn’t it? Consumption.

The more subtle psychological aspects of this tech of course are that as you use these types of platforms, engage with them, not only do they learn about you but they also in a subtle and yet powerful way are able to program you. The psychological impact of these social media platforms, given the amount of time folks are spending in them and their capabilities to absorb people into them (virtual reality) are only beginning to be understood. We know the effect on teens for example, and the anxiety associated with seeing all your friends and peers so happy all the time (self-selected, social media based happiness is the new thing now), but the broader effects on society and humanity as a whole are perhaps less well understood. Suffice it to say that it is profound, and it is in a very direct way driving social change too, so be careful what you expose yourself to and for sure make sure you are actively setting up your content to reflect who you want to be rather than who they think and want you to be. The AI can be hacked if you know how it works.

But I digress… back into past life regression and meditation now… So as part of this journey into the digital wasteland which is TikTok I found some amazing, really truly amazing content by some truly amazing, and totally out there to be sure, people. This assumes that everyone I am interacting with on TikTok is in fact a real person which actually is not at all clear actually. People can hide behind personas of aliens and witches and wizards and after a while you are not sure who you are seeing and engaging with. How far has the AI progressed? How much is it being hacked by those creating content from this world or some others? What is it doing to our basic understanding of reality? And time? In this mystical and esoteric world that I found in TikTok land, I seemed to open up some sort of portal to another dimension where angels and demons, light workers and devils, mystics and philosophers, lived side by side with the dancing girls and the musicians and self help gurus. I even found one guy who claims to be Hermes. How is it that you determine whether or not someone who claims to be Hermes is in fact Hermes? I mean how do you know really?

Two folks in particular kept showing up in my feed that particular resonated with me though – this guy who claimed to be channeling someone from another dimension (Bashar) and then our Dolores Cannon who we try and change down here. I will leave the Bashar topic for another day (completely mind blowing) and focus on Dolores, a very unassuming woman who wrote a few books about her experience with hypnosis therapy that led her into some very strange places – to Nostradamus, to Jesus and the Essenes, to aliens and UFOs, to multi-dimensional beings and other planets. The video clips were of her talking about these experiences on various book tours throughout the world. She had passed in 2014 apparently but had left behind not only her books that detail her experience with past life regression therapy specifically, but also a school of teachers and practitioners that carry on the technique and tradition that she created as part of her practice: Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique is what she called it.

As a sort of self proclaimed mystical scientist, a psychological adventurer you might call me, I was intrigued by the idea and wanted to try it myself. I went online and found a practitioner nearby and booked an appointment some 8 weeks out. Then I studied and waited. It’s nearly impossible to read her books and stay grounded in normal reality but I did my best to do so, and have some experience venturing into mystical worlds and remains grounded at the same time so this most certainly helped. For anyone who is interested in what she found I suggest you find her on YouTube or read her books. I promise you will not be disappointed.

The technique that she uses to tap into these other dimensions, through the subconscious minds of her patients, is scientific in the sense that it is based upon empirical (psychological) research, where she applies the same technique over and over again to many patients and records, literally records via tape, the experience (her books contain transcriptions of these recordings). She fancied herself as sort of a psychological investigative reporter, and ai find this to be a good description of her work. Her corpus, which she complied over some thirty years based upon thousands of past life regression therapy sessions for thousands of patients all over the world, are organized by topic and include, but are not limited to, the UFO phenomenon and alien abduction specifically, conversations with Nostradamus (yes conversations), the lost years of the life of Jesus, Atlantis and prior world history, and the Ascension and Starseed phenomenon (5d). Each of these areas, stories from these strange lands, were revealed to her through her work across a myriad of patients, each of which corroborated the stories of each other in a very strange and mysterious way, revelations that lend scientific and empirical credibility to her work. The phenomenon that comes out in her work, that she writes about, is in some respects analogous to the literature hallucinatory experience with ayahuasca, where many people report very similar experiences despite the fact that they don’t know each other and come from different backgrounds.

So I adventure out to see this therapist who has been trained in the same technique that Dolores used, who has worked with Dolores and her daughter Julia directly, and who has a lot of experience with the technique itself – a level 3 practitioner which is the highest or close to the highest level as indicated by the school of practitioners which Dolores founded. The technique itself, which Dolores written about in her books and is designed to put people in a hypnotic state and then, through suggestion and visualization, open up dialogue with that aspect of one’s psyche (again she calls it the subconscious) that has access to all the memories and all the experiences that that individual has had across lifetimes. A true window into the soul you might call it.

It is worth pointing out that there are others that have found this doorway as well, Dolores is not the only one – and the scope and breadth of what she found, and what others have found, deep within the recesses of the mind, should be giving both the psychological community as well as the mystical community great pause. Things are not what they appear to be folks, and we are most certainly not in Kansas anymore.

When the time comes, myself, my wife (who is concerned I might not come back from one of these journeys), and my three year old monster (adorable little monster but they are monsters, any mother knows this), get in the car for a day trip to the other coast of Florida. The car ride is some three hours, from the Atlantic side to the Gulf Coast on the way there and it is all pretty much on a one lane highway. It takes you through the Florida heartland you might call it and this is a special place mind you. Empty besides the random farm and some cows with electric cable lines on each side of the highway and trucks zooming past you almost the entire way. At one point on the ride you actually enter a ‘Scenic Route’ which takes you into a sort of tree nested portal where the entire road is surrounded nay trees, the top included, giving you the impression that indeed you were crossing into some mystical place where the boundaries of time and space themselves began to get fuzzy in a dreamlike sort of way.

Eventually we reached our destination and after a nice lunch at a Tiki bar on the water I was dropped off at the therapists house and it is here where my inward journey begins.

The session started as you might imagine with an introductory dialogue where you get to know each other – if someone is entering your mind they need to know the territory and as such the basics must be understood. Who you are, family history, interests, players in the game you might say and then the whole what are you doing here sort of thing. For us, given my own background and experience in these lands, and my interest with Dolores’s work, we had a very interesting discussion about not just who I was and what I was looking to understand, but also who the practitioner was, how she fell upon Dolores herself and her work and at least at some level her experience with it. The stage had been set and the intention and ethereal stage you might say was established. It was time to dive in.

I lay down, and almost immediately dropped into a deep state of meditation – as I have described elsewhere it feels as if the bottom sort of drops out from underneath you. Your level of awareness expends, and while you know, and are still fundamentally attached to your body, you have – with your eyes closed in this case – gone to a place above and beyond the physical. In this place, for me in particular (and this came out in the session ultimately) it is a communion with the energy itself that constitutes the physical form. It vibrates…. You can actually hear it. You can sense it around you, and within you, and when your eyes close you settle into it and at various what you may call levels of awareness, levels of depth, your awareness expands accordingly. As it expands your attachment to the physical sort of bleeds away, fades in a manner of speaking and it can be both very uncomfortable and even frightening as you fall into this experience. It takes practice to get comfortable to be in these spaces, and I have a lot of practice (although even I get somewhat taken aback if I fall too deeply too quickly).

The point being here is I fell quickly in this space just as the session had begun. We had created the energy space where it would be conducive for this sort of activity, a sort of inter dimensional portal you might say, but also at the same time it was clear that this woman had power and she had abilities that she was bringing to bear on the experience – independent of the technique that was employed (and she hadn’t even started at this point anyhow).

The rest of the session was what you might call a guided meditation, but it was guided with the intent of going not just deep within, but of (at least an attempt) to journey outside of the domain of the psyche that is associated with this realm of experience, this lifetime. Dolores speaks of this technique, the types of visualizations that she employs, in her work so I would refer you there for detail but suffice it to say that if the mind is a room, a house, or a place (a world you might say), how is it that you would want to leave it and find out what lay beyond it? The mind is suggestive so visualizations can be utilized, and are utilized in all meditative practices really, in order to facilitate such journeys – the one in particular that I was being guided through was to step out of this life, this box of being, into what lay beyond.

The problem however, was that I had a way, a method that I had been using for some time, and as such a sort of guardrail system was put in place – by my teacher – in terms of how this journey into the mind was to be conducted. As my teacher put it, we are all deluded and sick and we do not know it and as such he gives us each our own prescription to lead us back to health (sanity). The meditation practice, supported by a mantra and visualizations (sound, sight, smell, touch – all those senses coming to bear) that are given to the student as part of an initiation ceremony (a sort of marriage between the teacher, the student and the practice you might call it), was the prescription. Despite the fact that I have not always followed said prescription to the letter over the years, it had sunk in pretty deep and any journey into the realm within was for better or for worse at this point (hopefully for the better) supported by said guardrails. Deviation from said technique wasn’t really an option and as my practitioner told me at the closing part of the session, my teacher’s presence – the training – was felt throughout the session.

I tried to follow the suggested visualizations but my mind sort of blocked the passages if you will – I was given some static images, that I would not doubt if they ended up having persistent and lasting significance over time – but with respect to the journey outside of this frame of being, this life, we were ultimately unsuccessful. Stay the course, everything will be known in due time, and be patient – this was the message. The teaching I was given is one of discipline (Raja or Yoga), one of knowledge (Jnana) and one of devotion (Bhakti) primarily and the pursuit of other worldly spiritual experiences, or powers (siddhis as they are called) is frowned upon. God can be realized yes, but God is everywhere and in everything and you should set your mind to getting your own self straightened out first before you start exploring the beyond. The Ramakrishna Order is a proud, renunciate order with a long standing tradition of service and teaching as established by its founder (Vivekananda, the preeminent disciple of Ramakrishna) and the tradition, while being rooted in the philosophical tradition Vedanta, is nonetheless strongly rooted in the world in terms of (spiritual) transformation and ideology.

Or I just didn’t have the capability or capacity to move beyond this form, hard to say really, but regardless after many attempts to lead me out the only place to go was within. After a spell she gave me some space to fall as deep as I could and the place I fell into was comfortable to me. Familiar. What wasn’t familiar was the need to have a conversation while I was in this place, and this was sort of the rub in the end – the psychological technique that provides direct access to one’s ‘higher self’. This is why I was here.

In listening to the tape a few days afterwards it was clear that I was conscious during the entire time of prompting, the visualization phase you might say, as well as in the Q&A phase toward the end. What was in the middle, that I was not conscious for (and by conscious in this context I mean have a memory of), was that I had fallen asleep. You can hear my breathing on the tape, a sort of light snoring which on its face is humorous but in retrospect – from a psychological perspective – is interesting because this state is deep from a meditative perspective. I have no memory of what I experienced, or saw, during this phase. This could be because the experiential aspect of my psyche was deactivated or it could be that I simply have no memory of what I experienced during these phase of the session. It’s worthwhile noting that my therapist had the wisdom, at my prompting, to allow for this level of depth to be ‘fallen into’ – one falls asleep after all.

Out of this state, she began asking me a series of questions that we had prepared more or less at the beginning of the session during our conversation. As soon as she ‘woke me up’ for this part of the session I was definitely ‘conscious’ (again where conscious in this context is that I remembered the Q&A session afterwards) but I was the me that abides in a deep meditative state, that me – that you – that is sort of present when you wake up from a long, deep nap or sleep where the remnants of the knowledge of your deep sleep state self (turiya consciousness they call this in Upanishadic philosophy) is felt, a sort of aftertaste of the state of mind that you fall into in these deep states, but at the same time my conscious mind is now active and alert. Its an intermediary sort of state where you at some sense at least have access to this ‘higher self’ that you experience in these deeper states which all of us really go through as we sleep each night and then wake again each morning.

In this state, part of me was still in the depth of the presence of Self, but the other part of me was conscious and awake – certainly awake enough o have a conversation which I now found myself doing at her prompting. I was still connected to Self, but the egoic and analytic (specifically linguistic) part of my mind was now activated and I left the abode of pure awareness you could say. In this state I answered a series of questions, most of which were personal in nature that I will not share here, but ultimately the answers to them can be summed up as, perhaps not surprisingly, ‘shut up and be patient and let the universe unfold and all of your questions will be answered in due time.’

No nonsense. You have to appreciate it really. I most certainly do. Everyone out there chasing dragons, wizards and princesses and they can’t even get through the day without having some sort of altercation with someone. Back to basics people. This is very me and this is very much the attitude of my (spiritual) practice that was instilled in me. The practical aspects of the teaching have left a mark you could say, and from a philosophical standpoint most certainly one can conclude, as Nietzsche told us some 100 years ago, that God may be dead but this is no excuse to bring hell onto Earth. Even if we live in a multi-dimensional and inter-galactic world of myth and legend, this was no excuse to not look after the world as it had been handed to us, left to us in a way – to foster and cultivate for future generations, for future souls.

So in a sense I got my answers, except the answerer was perhaps somewhat different than I thought he would be. Or perhaps better put the answer was someone more familiar to me than I anticipated. The scene had been set, the states of mind laid bare, the topics were put forth by me, and the answers were ultimately mine as well – an experience mediated through the past life regression therapist that I had specifically chosen for this experience.

We closed then, and she brought me out and I opened my eyes and stretched out my legs. She removed the blanket from me and we began to talk lightly about the experience and how I was feeling, etc. We then had a brief exchange of words and some paperwork that I seem to recall. In retrospect it was clear that both of us were in a sort of altered state even if it wasn’t so clear at the time (to me at least, she is probably used to the experience and exchange of energy between therapist and patient in these settings and probably was more accustomed to this sort of withdrawal process you could call it). I would be lying if I didn’t say it was a little awkward coming out but that is to be expected when you share such intimacies with what more or less can be considered a total stranger.

After some pleasantries and a bathroom break I was escorted out where my wife and little boy were waiting for me. We had gone long, or at least longer than expected, and so they had been outside for some time. Our boy of course just wanted to run and play, and be chased primarily, and thankfully the area where she lived had no through traffic and he Wass fairly safe as he ran across the hill that divided the two sections of the road outside the house. There is a beauty in that is greater than any past life journey, but one must have the presence of mind to appreciate it no doubt. Here and now, if you’re paying attention, can lead you to the strangest places of wonder and amazement. This with eyes to see and ears to hear and that sort of thing.

We then left on the journey home, back through the portal in the dark with trucks and bright lights chasing us the whole way through. A stop for a snack and then back on the main highway until we arrived home at maybe 9 or 10 at night. My wife and I talked on the way back, about things we don’t usually talk about, about the mind and the journey through it, and what I had come to understand about it and what that understanding led me to believe about some of the very basic questions of life – what are we doing here and what is the purpose of all this madness primarily. The conversation spilled over for the next few days as well, as I gathered my thoughts and wrote this piece about our journey.

So I didn’t see anything about my past lives necessarily, but I most certainly learned more about who I was, and who ultimately had the answers to life’s burning questions – for me at least. As I had come to understand many times, no one is coming to save you my friend. And while that might be a frightening thought, it at the same time reveals the very source of your salvation.