Somebody came to my site earlier by googling for “We are all hypnotized,” which I thought was a pretty cool thing to be looking for. Anyway, the quote I have of that on my website is from my post about the brain as a reducing valve:

To function, we must deceive ourselves as to the actual nature of reality—a form of adaptation which LSD researcher Willis W. Harman has termed cultural hypnosis. “We are all hypnotized from infancy,” wrote Harman, who went on to propose that this was just another way in which to describe enculturation.

I thought it’d be fun to put together snippets from other websites that appeared when searching for this string also. So here goes. This one’s from a page about hypnotherapy:

Did you know that beginning with childhood, we are all “hypnotized” in various ways to form a consensual reality and trance. We are led to believe certain things about the “way the world is,” or about the way we are, our abilities, our limits. We enter into a conspiracy of self limitation. WE are hypnotized into believing, for example, that our powers begin to fade at a certain age (usually sixty-five), that work is never fun, that we are stupid, or not creative. The messages on television hypnotize us, for example, with “this is flu season” So we prepare to get the flu and purchase the medications and receive our shot.

From a page called Forging a New Reality:

Once we begin to initiate the Awakening process, we start to have different perceptions, and those perceptions may not harmonize with the perceptions of the people around us, maybe not even with the people closest to us. So, right away a conflict arises. We find ourselves in a dilemma. Seeing the structure of the Illusion we are surrounded with, it is no longer possible to comfortably continue living within the confines of that Illusion, yet there is a strong force working to keep us enfolded there. That force is generated by the people we know who still live within the confines of the Illusion.

The next natural impulse is to share the truth of our new perceptions with someone else, generally someone who we care deeply about, and who we want to share our excitement with. We present them with our new found sense of awareness in the hope they will get the picture. We may go around trying to save everyone we know.

Anyone who attempts this will soon discover that their new found perceptions of truth will probably not be well received. Those who have not yet awakened are not interested in having their “sleep” disturbed. It is not yet time for them to awaken.

From a page about a Doris Lessing novel:

Mrs. Lessing’s view of recent politics is not everyone’s. Her view of the future (inevitably brutish and painful) is that it is the present: that we are all hypnotized, awaiting cataclysms which we are in fact living through now; that we are now - as we run and read - in the process of a rapid evolution; that we are mutating fast but can’t see it, the chief characteristic of our race being its inability to see what is under its nose; that historians and scientists, in their timid traditionalism, feed our fantasy view of ourselves - suppressing truths about the human condition, about madness, about sanity, about the essential nature of the mind.

A page about nakedness…

Truth is, we are all hypnotized to some extent. Beginning from the day we’re born, our parents and other elders feed us carefuly selected ideas along with our food. When we learn to play, other children echo back to us what they’ve been told. When these thoughts have run through our minds enough to get a momentum on their own, we are deemed to be mature adults, and able to be “independent.” And even those who smell something a bit off in all this, have lost track of what was originally their own and what they’ve been fed. Rebellion against minor things seems like such a big deal, the real issues are overlooked and stay lost.

From a customer review of some stupid album by Nickelback:

This is the kind of music that one or two completely delusional number-crushing music hating douche-suits liked and decided to play ad-nauseum until we are all hypnotized into thinking it’s awesome.

I really just liked his use of the word “douche-suits.” That’s clever.