Generative Trance

The experience of creative flow

Stephen Gilligan

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781785833885
• eBook ISBN: 9781845907839
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

This book describes an entirely new way of conducting hypnotherapeutic interventions - Stephen Gilligan's generative trance. The first generation of trance work, the traditional hypnosis that still holds sway in most places, considers that both the conscious mind and the unconscious mind of the client are, to put it bluntly, idiots. So trance work involves first 'knocking out' the conscious mind and then talking to the unconscious mind like a 2-year old that needs to be told how to behave. Milton Erickson created the second generation of trance work. He approached the unconscious as having creative wisdom and each person as extraordinarily unique. Thus, rather than trying to programme the unconscious with new instructions, Erickson saw trance as an experiential learning state where a person's own creative unconscious could generate healing and transformation. At the same time Erickson, for the most part, carried the same low opinion of the conscious mind. Thus, Ericksonian hypnosis looks to bypass the conscious mind with indirect suggestions and dissociation and depotentiate it with confusion techniques.

Part I

The Framework of Generative Trance

Chapter 1

Consciousness and the Construction of Reality

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

George Bernard Shaw

Mary1 led a charmed life. She was smart, socially poised, and attractive. She had lived on the “fast track” to success: drawing the praises of adults and excelling in school as a child, earning a doctoral degree in science from a major university, marrying a wonderful man, and giving birth to two wonderful daughters. She was a superstar at work, happy in her family, and secure economically. So when she received a major lifetime achievement award at mid-life, she was understandably bewildered to find herself depressed and unhappy. Something was missing from her life.

Mary began a series of deep life explorations using trance work. She found tears and fears, as well as amazing and delightful awakenings of consciousness. Most important, she realized that she had been living away from her soul dreams. She hadn’t even realized she had soul dreams, longings deeper than external achievement or social pleasantries. She discovered a desire for spiritual development, as well as for mentoring young female scientists in her high-stress professional world. In addition, she and her husband began a series of interesting journeys through different psycho-spiritual processes.

In all of this, her old world wasn’t abandoned, just deepened to allow a more complete and fulfilling life. She was especially delighted to realize that she was responsible for, and capable of, creating her own life. The journey that became her life was a joy to behold.

The longing to live a deeply meaningful life is, of course, quite common. Many people feel a calling to go beyond the village life, to allow their light to shine brightly and uniquely into the world. If such callings are accepted and supported, beautiful miracles can happen. Generative trance is a great process for supporting such a journey.

The experience of generative trance begins with the appreciation that reality is constructed, and that each of us is responsible for creating our own lives in a meaningful way. To navigate such a journey, it is helpful to have some sense of this creative process. So in this first chapter, I want to offer a general map by which reality construction occurs, so that you can support yourself and others in such a venture.

I start by noting three different worlds that creative consciousness moves through: (1) a “pure consciousness” world of creative love and light; (2) a “quantum world” of the creative unconscious, with infinite possibilities and pure imagination; and (3) the classical world of the conscious mind, with its consciousness of time-space, matter, and other “reality” elements. Creativity requires flow between these three worlds of creative light, infinite imagination, and practical realities.

Accordingly, I next focus on how information/energy moves between these worlds. I suggest that there are “consciousness filters” that transduce one world into another. These gateways are akin to stained glass windows through which coherent light flows, creating a patterned world on the other side. A crucial idea for the entire book concerns whether these filters are open (in creative flow) or closed (in neuromuscular lock). Neuromuscular lock traps consciousness in a fixed and disconnected reality, giving rise to tremendous suffering and problems. Generative trance activates the creative flow that allows transformation, healing, and a great journey.

The three worlds of consciousness

How do you create a life that has purpose and growth? When your life isn’t working, how do you let go in order to reconnect with wholeness and peace? And from that place of wholeness, how do you create new realities that heal brokenness and generate new possibilities? These are core questions regarding generative trance, and to answer them we distinguish three worlds:

1. Consciousness itself (“original mind”)

2. Quantum world (“creative unconscious”)

3. Classical world (“conscious mind”)

The “original mind” of pure consciousness

Now, all the medical rituals we have been examining aim at return to origins. We get the impression that for archaic societies life cannot be repaired, it can only be re-created by a return to sources. And the “source of sources” is the prodigious outpouring of energy, life, and fecundity that occurred at the Creation of the World.

Mircea Elaide, Myth and Reality

Be a light unto yourself.

Buddha

We start our creative journey in “the middle of nowhere”. Milton Erickson used to playfully use this term when inviting people in trance to experience a safe place where one could detach from all content. This trance field served as a sort of transitional space where old identities could be released and new realities born.

The Buddhists use the term original mind to refer to this empty space of pure consciousness from which everything comes and goes. Experientially, it is a non-dual awareness, empty of all forms and qualities, but luminescent. In other words, consciousness at its source is pure creative light.

Lest this sound too far-fetched, note the metaphors used across different cultures and languages to describe creative consciousness. New ideas flash from out of nowhere or out of the blue. A person is brilliant, beaming, shining, light-hearted, radiant, or enlightened. The light went on, and it was like being hit by lightning. Heightened awareness may be free of thought, unclouded, or wide open. Taken together, these common expressions intuitively point to a consciousness before and beyond form that carries wisdom and bliss.

The practical relevance is that when we are connected to this creative consciousness, we are at our best – happy, healthy, healing, and helpful to others. Countless poems, songs, and stories sing its praises. Philosophical traditions give it different names: spirit, élan vital, life force, shakti, chi, divine consciousness, and prajna. It appears at moments of great success, or beholding aesthetic beauty, or in the presence of deep love. Suddenly an indescribable space opens beyond all thought and form, and a euphoric bliss fills you, if only for a few lovely moments.

For consciousness to be creative, connection to this first realm is vital. Without it, we feel disconnected and trapped in compulsive doing and thinking. Ironically, it is at such times that we are often most afraid of letting go, fearing a drop into an abyss of no return. Thus, one of the first goals in generative trance is to become comfortable with letting go of all content, surrendering to the creative source. T. S. Eliot spoke to this beautifully in writing:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

“East Coker” from Four Quartets

Appreciating this as our first base – the light of “all that is” is within each of us – allows a great creative energy to guide our path. Martha Graham, the late great luminary of the American modern dance field, expressed it in the following way:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. (Quoted in de Mille, 1991: 264)

Generative transformation is possible when we keep the channel open to this creative light source. We will see how this can be done skillfully. If you are confident that you can let go of your mental thinking and allow something underneath to safely catch and support you, a great freedom is achieved. Generative trance work looks to develop the conditions where a person can sense the immense goodness and intrinsic wholeness of this source level, so that it can be skillfully accessed again and again.

When we work in generative trance, we “follow the light” in various ways. For example, close attention is paid to to somatic resonance and subtle energies, such as when a person’s “light brightens” in a conversation. Such signals suggest that what is being communicated is deeply connected to creative consciousness, and encouragement is often given to slow down, take note, and attune to the resonant connection.

As a final note, this content-free, subtle field of awareness is the basis of what is called mindfulness. We will see how mindfulness supports the generative skill of being with something – a thought, feeling, behavior, person – without becoming it, thereby allowing creative engagement and transformational relationships. So we want to make friends with the great void, and discover that it is imbued with a subtle light of love, wisdom, even bliss.

The quantum world of the creative unconscious

The fundamental process of Nature lies outside space-time but generates events that can be located in space-time.

Henry Stapp

From the world of creative light we move to the quantum world of pure imagination. This is the creative unconscious mind, a field of infinite possibilities from which new realities are created. It is before and beyond classical time or space, empty of real (material) forms but pregnant with infinite potential ones.

As the source of all possibilities, it is to the creative unconscious that we turn when we need new visions, identities, ideas, or experiences. It is a sort of visionary consciousness that can see beyond the limitations of a given situation. It can create new possibilities “out of nowhere” and show many possible ways to proceed in a given situation. A journey of consciousness cannot proceed without such a presence.

One of the most interesting properties of a quantum field is superposition, which is a virtual wave field that contains all possible states of something simultaneously.2 Applied to psychological identity, this means that the creative unconscious holds all possible states of a given individual, in terms of iden...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: The Framework of Generative Trance
• Part II: The Methods of Generative Trance
• Epilogue
• References
• About the Author
• Copyright