by Stephen Gilligan, Ph.D.

Beat the drum and let the poets speak.
This is the day of purification for those who
Are already mature and initiated into what love is.

No need to wait until we die!
There’s more to want here than money
And being famous and bites of roasted meat.

Rumi

Life can be lived in many ways.  You can make it about making money or winning at all costs, or pleasing other people, or perhaps never standing out.  Or you can live your life as a great journey of consciousness, one filled with many challenges and surprises, one that makes a positive contribution to the world. I want to talk here a bit about these different paths, emphasizing that the Self-Relations approaches of Generative Self and Generative Trance are especially tools for supporting the latter path.

Life as a journey has been described by many people, most notably the mythologist Joseph Campbell.  Campbell (1949; Gilligan and Dilts, 2009) studied the stories of many different cultures and found a universal monomyth that he called the hero’s journey.  The hero’s journey is about a quest to go beyond the limits of the present world and create greater wholeness in one’s self and/or community. This can take a number of forms: a new type of artistic vision or social modality; some kind of personal or social healing; or perhaps a radically new way of thinking, acting, or understanding the world. Interestingly, Campbell’s model was used by the filmmaker George Lucas as the basis for the incredible Star Wars movies.

A great example of a hero’s journey is Milton Erickson, the psychiatrist who revolutionized ideas about how trance could be used for creative healing and transformation.  I studied with Erickson the last six years of his life.  He was a classic Yoda-like character by then, a wizened old healer with twinkling eyes and amazing skills. But it took a long and courageous journey for him to arrive at this place of a genuine healer.  He was born tone deaf, dyslexic (including not knowing the dictionary was alphabetized until he was 15!), and color blind (purple was he only color he could ‘enjoy’).   Severely paralyzed by polio at 17, a condition from which the doctors said he would never recover, Erickson learned to walk again through inner work that featured what only later he came to call “naturalistic trance.”  On the basis of his positive and creative relationship to his own challenges, he developed a startlingly original way of working with all sorts of psychotherapy problems.  His utilization approach changed core problems into resources by creatively accepting them and then opening a generative trance within which they could transform into their positive roots. The good news is that this anybody can learn and practice this positive utilization approach with the many challenges that life brings.  How to do this is the primary focus of the Generative Self approach.

You don’t have to be a genius, as Erickson undoubtedly was, for your own life to be a hero’s journey.   And the journey needn’t be on a grand social scale; it could be within your family or outside of the public spotlight.  But the possibility exists within each of us to live a deep and meaningful life, to be on the “long and winding road” of deep transformation and unique contribution.  Of course, such a life isn’t a given; you have to want it and choose it and commit to it with all of your being.  There are certainly alternatives to this way of living.  As Campbell (see Osborne, 1991) pointed out, we have three possible life paths available to us: (1) the village; (2) the wasteland; or (3) the journey.

The Ego Ideal of the Village Life

The “village life” is the ‘ego ideal’ of the group.  Here you basically follow the traditional pathways of your society/ culture/ family, where all values and structures are externally given.  In the village, “the good life” moves through a clear sequence: you are born, obey your mother and father, do well in school, graduate, get a job, get married, have kids, buy a house, retire and then die.  The promise is that if you successfully follow this script, you will be happy and fulfilled.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this way of life; for some people, it is the best path. However, many individuals find themselves unwilling or unable to live within the confines of the village.  They may be denied membership because of skin color, ethnicity, sexual identity or gender, or socioeconomic status.  Others may find that the way they think, the way that they know the world, the way that they are called to live, cannot fit within the “Pleasantville” of the village.  Still others may be exiled by a trauma that shatters the “ego trance” and plummets them into a dark shadow world that most villagers don’t want to know about.

The Shadow World of the Wasteland

The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank.  The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard.  The nymphs are departed.

T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

This shadow world is what Campbell and others (such as T.S. Eliot) called the wasteland.   Here, the predominant experiences are cynicism, meaninglessness, and negativity.  Many dark streets line the wasteland: the despair of depression; the numb trance-land of television; the violence of hatred, criminality, and fundamentalism; the haze of drugs, alcohol and other addictions; the withdrawal of fear and isolation.  As the shadow to the ego ideal, this world is primarily a negative rejection of (or by) the village.

When people come to therapy, they are typically stuck in the wasteland, unable or unwilling to participate in normal village life. Often the request, explicitly or implicitly, is to get them back to the village, so they can just be “normal.”  The fantasy is that if you can just get rid of the shadow world (of symptoms) through numbing, will power, medication, or other forms of self-violence, then you can re-enter the ego ideal of the village and live happily ever after.

It is important to realize that this may not be possible, or even desirable.  In generative trance, we see that seemingly negative experiences may be positive signals from the creative unconscious that some deep transformation is needed, that a person cannot live within the restrictive role that has been assigned to them.  As Campbell said, sometimes you climb the ladder all the way to the top only to discover you’ve placed it against the wrong wall—the wall of other people’s expectations.  In this view, symptoms are often a “call to return” to a deeper soul consciousness, a call to a hero’s journey.

Inherent in opening a positive relationship to a symptom is the crucial understanding that what makes an experience positive or negative is the human relationship to it.  That is, what comes out of the creative unconscious is not innately good or bad; its form, value, meaning, and subsequent unfolding in the world are created by the human connection to it.[1] Thus, a symptom represents some part of consciousness that has not yet been positively valued by human presence.  From this view, treating the symptom with hostility and violence is “more of the same,” splitting consciousness further into the seemingly irreconcilable “ego ideal” and “shadow” camps. In the hero’s journey, the exiled shadow is engaged with creative nonviolence to integrate the broken parts of a world into a new wholeness.

The Wholeness of the (Hero’s) Journey of Consciousness

by Stephen Gilligan, Ph.D.

Generative trance is a higher state of consciousness wherein new identities and realities may be created.  This state allows consciousness to unbind itself from the fixed settings of the conscious mind and re-attune to the infinite possibilities of the creative unconscious, thereby making possible the reorganization of the mental filters underlying reality construction.  This blog overviews a model of how to do this. We will start with the central premise of three interacting minds—Somatic (in the body), Cognitive (in the head), and Field (in the space around).  We will then see these three minds can operate at three different levels of consciousness— Primitive, Ego, and Generative.   These core distinctions of “three minds, three levels” can suggest how and why generative trance can be developed.

Central to the framework is the idea that the state in which an experiential pattern is held significantly determines its meaning and subsequent unfolding.  This was the basis of Milton Erickson’s core principle of utilization, which I believe was his most radical contribution to the practice of psychotherapy.  The utilization principle states that under proper conditions, a problem can become a solution.  Thus, creative acceptance of a problematic pattern allows you to turn it into a resource while also opening beyond it. This is what we are looking to do in generative trance: create the proper conditions that will allow a transformational relationship with a challenging experience.  What generally happens when individuals face a difficulty is that their state degrades—that is, they move from an ordinary “business as usual” ego state to a primitive “fight, flight, or freeze” state of diminished resources and response potential.  In generative trance work, we look to turn the tables by giving priority to establishing and then sustaining a high quality state of consciousness, so that the connection to the experiential challenge results in a positive outcome.

Three Minds of the Generative Self: Somatic, Cognitive, and Field

To develop a generative trance, it is helpful to distinguish three different minds that interactively operate in human consciousness—the Somatic mind of the body, the Cognitive mind of the intellect, and the Field mind of the larger contexts to which we belong.  The Somatic mind is the animal mind shared by all mammals; it is your embodied intelligence, knowing yourself and the world through feeling, action, nonverbal awareness, and emotion. The mammal mind carries a past and a present, but no future awareness.  Like your pets and young children, it has the potential for amazing awareness, but no self-awareness; that is, it can’t think about itself or represent itself.  It is attuned not only to your personal history, but also to ancestral history.  It carries instinct, archetypes, and intuitive knowing, all basic elements for transformational change.  In terms of trance, it is the first (but not only) “unconscious mind”.

The Cognitive mind is the conscious mind “in the head.”  It uses verbal descriptions and symbols to “re-present” self and the world in terms of images, maps, plans, meanings, beliefs, and possibilities.  It thinks in terms of narrative and story, sequences and values.  It has the potential to see the world from many different perspectives and with many different values, even though it often gets locked in one or two.  In traditional hypnosis, it is the “conscious mind” that is usually targeted by a hypnotic induction to dissolve or at least relax for awhile, so that the hypnotist’s “conscious mind” can re-program the person’s base somatic mind.  As we will see, however, in generative trance the cognitive mind is shifted to a higher level of consciousness and invited to be an active part of the trance process, in reciprocal interaction with the other minds.

The Field mind is the greater systemic intelligence that is operating all around us.  There are many different fields that may be operating at any given moment in time: culture, family, personal history, political, etc.  You may work in the field of psychology, or be absorbed in the field of your “family trance”, or sense a “negative field” in a business meeting, or be absorbed in the “zone” of “creative flow.”   These contexts for our consciousness may be positive or negative, and constitute a second type of “unconscious mind”, that is, the creative unconscious beyond the individual ego position.

Three levels of Consciousness: Primitive, Ego, and Generative

The three minds can take different forms, depending on the level of consciousness at which they are operating.  Self-Relations distinguishes three different levels: Primitive, Ego, and Field.

(1) Primitive Level: Wholeness without self-awareness.  This base level is connected with the core energies and forms of the primordial world.  It has “wholeness without self-awareness,”  a sort of “quantum soup” or great field of consciousness, without any linear order or conscious control within it.  Nature is an obvious example: Everything is part of an ecological unity.  The creative unconscious is another example: It is a unitary system of auto-poetic intelligence that guides the creation and balance of psychological life.   Its strength lies in its wholeness: within it, “everything is connected to everything” as part of a deeper unity.  Because it is the ocean from which our individual consciousness arises, we must sometimes return to it for rest, integration, and healing.  In this way, trance—whether it is developed through hypnosis, music, rituals, symptoms, etc.–is a return to primitive consciousness, a psychobiologically necessary state of consciousness.  At least periodically, we need to let go our constructed separateness and return to our native wholeness.  As we will see, this is not only when we need to rest, it’s also when we need to create new identity maps.

In primitive consciousness, time is cyclical rather than chronological.  There is a rhythmic circulation of elements: night and day, exhalation/inhalation, active/passive, etc.  As such, primitive consciousness is not especially generative; its evolutionary (or “generative change”) rate is rather slow. it is generally content to recreate endless versions of itself, only very slowly growing beyond itself.  In the ancient myth of the race between the turtle and the rabbit, it is the turtle.  (And as I tell my clients, always remember who wins that race!).

While its strength is its systemic wholeness, its shortcoming is its lack of self-awareness.   It cannot “stop time” and analyze a situation, or isolate one part of the system, or rapidly generate multiple different maps.  It changes from the inside out, (very) slowly evolving a greater complexity, and even more slowly making “evolutionary leaps” to higher levels of consciousness.

(2) Ego Level: Self-awareness without wholeness.   One of the most astonishing evolutionary leaps in the history of the universe is the emergence of self-awareness.  This capacity for symbolic self-representation has given rise to a second level of consciousness to rest on the surface of the Primitive, like waves arising from the ocean. The emergent properties are amazing: consciousness can now step out of time and create imaginary worlds in which symbols of all sorts are used to run very fast, virtually endless simulations of possible realities.  The evolutionary fruits of this shift are obvious and stunning: verbal language, art, awareness of future possibilities, technology, whole cities and other time-transcendent miracles.

All this, of course, has come at a great price.  Perhaps because this gift of self-awareness is so relatively new, we only seem able to self-identity with a small part of consciousness at a time.  Thus, I might end up identifying with the “me” of my physical body, or the “us” of my group, against the “it” or “them” of the rest of consciousness.  In this way, the Ego Level has self-awareness without wholeness.  We end up dividing the unbroken wholeness of primitive consciousness into endless units of “self” vs. “other”, “good” vs. “bad”, “us” vs. “them”.  This is not necessarily harmful in itself; in fact, the analytical process of breaking the whole into parts allows us to then recombine the parts in many novel ways, allowing the creation of new wholes which transcend the previous unities.  In other words, it allows evolution to develop at markedly increased levels.

However, the way we typically do it is what spells trouble. First, we usually break our connection to the natural world to enter the symbolic; in the simplest terms, we think with contracted muscles and inhibited breathing, thereby creating a functional dissociation from the living world.  (In trance terminology, the conscious mind is most often a disembodied intellect that dissociates from the creative unconscious.) Second, we identify with our ego position in a way that dis-identifies with the rest of the field.  Third, we maintain these one-sided ego positions inflexibly and indefinitely, not allowing a rhythmic shifting among different positions that would enable a more whole view.

As we will see, these limited forms of self-awareness are unnecessary though very seductive; like an addiction, once we get hooked on them, they’re difficult to release.  The predictable resulting experiences are alienation, loneliness, and violence.  We cut off from the wisdom and healing of natural intelligence and become disconnected from a space bigger than our map-making, leading to ever-more imbalances and unhappiness.  For many people, it is only when they “hit bottom” with terrible suffering that new options are possible.  This is where generative trance is helpful: it allows a safe letting go of ego positions and a reconnection with primitive consciousness. As we will see, however, this is not sufficient for healing and transformational change.  For that, we need to open to the third level of generative consciousness.

(3)  Generative Level: Mindful awareness within differentiated wholeness.  A core idea in Self-Relations is that it is possible to creatively combine the intense energy and wholeness of primitive consciousness with the disciplined intentionality and self-awareness of ego consciousness to form a tertiary system of generative consciousness. This integrated state allows intention with spontaneity, yin and yang, self and other, inner plus outer, conscious mind with creative unconscious. We can operate at two levels simultaneously: the wholeness of the field and its many differentiated parts. This creative patterning breaks the tyranny of the fixed ego positions while still allowing intentional thinking.  It is especially useful at those times when our regular maps are insufficient or unhelpful, when we need to go beyond where we’ve been before.  While the ego position is essential conservative, looking to re-generate versions of the past, the generative state allows fundamentally new realities to emerge.

This higher state of “disciplined flow” that comes from harmonizing the Primitive and Ego levels is distinguished by a variety of emergent properties. Five bear brief mentioning here.  The first is non-dual field awareness—that is, a “space of oneness” opens up, thereby making room for all the different forms in the field of awareness.  This non-dual field is non-judgmental, humanizing, and welcoming.  Examples are the “we-ness” that develops in a mature loving relationship (in a couple, a group, or even an individual) that allows all the different “me-nesses” to be welcome in their differences.  Gregory Bateson once defined wisdom as the capacity to sit around a table and talk about differences without trying to change them.  In this sense, the non-dual field is the base for wisdom.  As we will see in later blogs, it certainly is a necessary condition for a generative trance that can integrate and transform the many parts of a systemic identity.

A second property of generative consciousness is subtle energy.  At the ego level, awareness is muscle-bound and thus heavy-handed and relatively coarse; at the generative level, the “chi” flows in currents of grace and skillful sensing.  This is apparent in any aesthetic experience—for example, reading a good book, cooking, listening or playing music, being in nature.  In such intrinsically rewarding experiences, awareness becomes more subtle, less rigid, more differentiated and skillful.  I was once talking about this in a Berlin workshop, and a participant raised his hand.  He shared that as a brain surgeon, he often performed 10-12 hour operations with his team.  He noted that they typically listened to classical music and discussed philosophy while operating, and he had just realized why: Such aesthetic practices created the subtle awareness that a brain surgeon needs to do such intricate, demanding work.  As we will see, subtle awareness is similarly needed for the challenging work of transformation and creativity.

A third property is mindfulness, which we might define here as non-reactive self-awareness permeating an experiential field.  That is, you can be with something without reacting with the “fight, flight, or freeze” that distorts and degrades consciousness, thereby re-creating a “problem” state.  You can notice negative thoughts without being disturbed by them, become aware of different ego-parts playing out their automatic games, and sympathetically and analyze a particular conditioned pattern.  This allows consciousness to be helpful and not harmful, curious and intelligent.

A fourth generative property is what might be called quantum superposition, or the capacity to hold multiple contradictory states or positions simultaneously, without conflict.  (Interestingly, this is the definition of “trance logic,” which is typically regarded as a defining feature of trance.)   This means that something can be “true” and “not true” simultaneously; or something and its opposite are both true; or even more widely, that multiple positions can be simultaneously valid.  This “both/and” logic has been found in different studies of creative genius—e.g., those done by Frank Barron in the 50’s, and by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 80’s—to be a fundamental property of creative consciousness.  It is especially relevant in therapeutic work, where conflicts between different parts often create impasses.  By being able to hold multiple parts in a generative state, the possibility of creative reorganization of those parts into a deeper wholeness becomes possible.

A final characteristic of generative consciousness is creative flow of information and energy.  That is, when a subtle “space of oneness” is opened that allows mindful awareness of all the different parts of the whole, this naturally allows energy and information to flow freely.  This is encompassed in a core suggestion of both trance and meditation—“just let it happen”. This “creative flow” is the superior alternative to “fight, flight, and freeze allowing healing, vitality, and many new possibilities to emerge.  Oriental medicine generally holds that illness reflects “blocked chi,” and that healing and well-being occur when the life force is flowing within and through us.  This is precisely what we’re looking to develop and sustain in Generative Trance work.

In the next blog, I will further develop these ideas of “three minds, three levels of consciousness.”   We will investigate how the different minds can operate in negative or positive ways, depending on the human presence connected with them.  We will see also how significant life changes—for example, a birth or death in the family a job change, starting or ending a significant relationship—break a person’s normal identification with ego identity, and moves consciousness back into the Primitive level. If the neuro-muscular lock of a  “fight, flight, or freeze” response develops within this regression, a symptom is created.  But if a mindful state of “creative flow” is present, then the “death” of the old identity leads to the “birth” of a new self-identity that is more whole (integrated) and differentiated (i.e. more choices), i.e., you become more intelligent and capable of greater happiness. By learning how to develop and sustain a generate state of consciousness, we become able to significantly succeed on this amazing path of self-realization.

Stephen Gilligan, Ph.D.
February 19, 2011

NOTE: You can learn more about Generative Trance—how to help yourself and others to use it creatively—by attending my July “Trance Camp” held in San Diego.  Click here for further details.

This year’s “Trance Camp,” held in San Diego in July, is organized around the theme of generative trance as a third-generation trance work. The first generation of trance work is the traditional hypnosis that is still holds sway in most places. Here both the conscious mind and the unconscious mind of the client are considered to be, well, 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. So if a person comes in wanting to change a personal habit, they’re told to be quiet and follow the orders of the hypnotist. To relate to a person in this way seems like the problem, not a solution. Is it any wonder that so many people are (rightfully) leery of trance and hypnosis?

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 program 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. This radical idea of the unconscious as tremendously intelligent led to a very different type of trance work–for example, each trance was unique, the communications were primarily derived from the person’s own patterns and ongoing experience, and the hypnotist-client relationship was cooperative rather than authoritarian.

At the same time, Erickson for the most part carried the same low opinion of the conscious mind, seeing it as more a nuisance than an integral part of self-transformation and healing. Thus, Ericksonian hypnosis looks to bypass the conscious mind with indirect suggestions and dissociation, and depotentiate it with confusion techniques. The idea is that once the conscious mind is out of the way, the creative unconscious can do its thing.

The third generation of trance work sees this negative attitude toward the conscious mind as unnecessary and ultimately unhelpful. Creative action requires a skillful conscious mind to realize the potential of the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is needed to set and maintain intention, to sense and evaluate multiple pathways of possibility, to properly name and represent experience, and to organize actions in a sequential and linear way. William James used to say that the unconscious mind is the horse and the conscious mind is the rider; it’s the relationship between the two that is most important. And while some organizations of the conscious mind are unhelpful, this does not mean that all forms of conscious mind are.

Erickson demonstrated this beautifully in modeling a generative form of the conscious mind that was mindful, respectful, and attentive. His relational style with the unconscious mind was not the traditional “fight, flight, or freeze,” but rather the “creative flow” of skillful acceptance, positive curiosity, and endless flexibility. But in attributing the client’s positive change to the intelligence of their unconscious mind, Erickson gave an incomplete and misleading picture. If the unconscious was so smart, then why was the person showing up in the office with such troubling problems?

A more accurate description is that the change arose from the relationship between the client’s creative unconscious and Erickson’s generative conscious mind. In effect, Erickson replaced the client’s conscious mind with his own, and then skillfully interacted with the client’s unconscious mind to create extraordinary outcomes. To be sure, he was exceptionally respectful and skillful in utilizing the client’s reality as the basis for all communications. Still, the implicit message was that he could do for his patients what they couldn’t do for themselves. Given the cultural context that Erickson was working in some 50-60 years ago, this is hardly surprising: The ideas of self-generativity and mindfulness had not yet taken root.

We live in different times now, with a much deeper appreciation and support for each person’s capacity for self-awareness and self-transformation. So we must ask if the hypnotic strategy of dissociating (rather than differentiating) a person’s conscious mind from their creative unconscious is the best we can hope for. Was only Erickson capable of that generative form of the conscious mind pattern that we might call “the Erickson function”? If so, we’re in trouble, because he’s no longer here. Are only the “high priests” of psychotherapy skillful enough to speak directly with the unconscious? This would affirm the antiquated idea that the unconscious is fundamentally a dark and dangerous place that we should fear and stay disconnected from. Again, such attitudes seem like part of the problem that disempowers people, rather than the therapeutic goal of helping people to find their own voices and their own ways.

In emphasizing equally the complementary intelligences of the conscious and unconscious minds, Generative Trance is a third-generation type of work. It sees both minds as having an endless number of possible organizations— some helpful and others not–and seeks to help people to develop those that best allow them to live in a transformational way. Like William James, it sees the relational fit between the two minds as the most important issue. In this way, it is like couples therapy that starts out staring at two seemingly irreconcilable realities. The goal of both couples therapy and trance work is not to see one side as more “right” or “better” than the other, but to see what kind of context and conversation might allow a mutually respectful relationship in which the two sides can “make love, not war.” Moving to such a mutually inclusive and reciprocal relationship opens a space beyond opposites. In Self-Relations, this space is the Generative Self that allows healing, transformation, and creativity.

The practical question, of course, is how to create such a generative relationship. In the Generative Trance workshops, participants learn how to skillfully connect with three different types of Mind: Somatic (the mind of the body), Cognitive (the mind of the head), and Field (the mind beyond the individual position). You learn how to shift each of these minds to a higher (generative) level of consciousness that allows a deep conversation with the creative unconscious. Somatically, this is done via principles of alignment and centering, including basic elemental skills such as relaxation, absorption, fluidity, openness, and felt sense. Cognitively, this is done through principles of creative acceptance and transformation—for example, how to clear a space, set a positive intention, creatively make room for whatever is there, bring balance and complementarity, express something in multiple ways, and integrate parts into creative wholes. In field consciousness, we explore how to open a space beyond the problem, include resources, and receive direction from the creative unconscious.

That’s saying a lot in a short space, but the basic idea is that generative trance is a higher state of consciousness that can allow healing, transformation of problems into solutions, and the creation of new realities. And to find the highest state for a person, it’s best to include both their conscious mind and unconscious mind in a harmonious collaboration. Erickson demonstrated how he could this with a person’s unconscious. Generative Trance shows how each person can have that same generative relationship with their unconscious mind. In essence, you can “become your own Milton Erickson,” your own inner hypnotist that can work skillfully and safely to achieve extraordinary outcomes.

(For more info on trance camp, click here)

(For a free audio interview with Dr. Gilligan on the topic of generative trance, click here.)

I am in the beginning stages of getting this blog going, so pardon my “dust.” I’m going to be sharing with you some of my insights and stories about the history of hypnosis and trance, my initial work with Milton Erickson, and future directions in the work that I know call, “Self-Relations Psychotherapy” and the development of the “Generative Self.”

If you are interested in books, dvds, CD’s and downloads, please stop by my store where you can buy products related to Milton Erickson, Hypnosis, and the Generative Self.

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