A Question of Time

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Reviews

“An enjoyable and well-written tale of hypnotic adventures that combines good story-telling, memorable characters, and clever clinical pearls. The book is ideal for the hypnotically-oriented clinician and the psychologically-minded layperson.”— Eric Leskowitz, MD, Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School

“I appreciate Michael H. Cohen's contribution to the literature on shamanism, relaxation, and guided imagery through his novel. Gabriel's journey through hypnosis - the dual path of relaxation and creativity-may be an invitation for all of us to awaken to the power of our own imagination, of our own ability to consciously dream.”— Hilary Tindle, M.D., Research Fellow, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

“This is an intriguing introduction to Ericksonian hypnosis, revealed through a rich and reflective narrative. You may be surprised at how easily you are able to learn valuable, new information while being pleasantly entertained in a relaxing and comfortable way.”— Kathi J. Kemper, M.D.

“Literate and intelligent…written with consummate skill … exceptionally good, with skillful, realistic dialogue and a certain comfortable flow that is able to contain complex ideas... A Question of Time is a book that I recommend to all therapists, and to all who are interested in what the human mind is, and what it might become…. Michael Cohen has produced a truly marvelous piece of writing that succeeds because … it has color and humanity.”— Alexander M. Docker, DCH, Ph.D., President of The American Board of Hypnotherapy, and Dean of Academic Studies, American Pacific University


Table of Contents and Sample Excerpt

Prelude to a Trance
1. Departure
2. Disaggregation
3. Initiation
Inside the Dream
4. Induction
5. Discombobulation
6. Descent
7. Disassociation
8. Access
9. Catalepsy
10. Regression
11. Release
Perchance to Wake
12. Integration
13. Return
Illusion and Enigma
Afterward by Hilary A. Tindle, MD
Acknowledgments
Resources


A Question of Time

"Powerful stuff," I said. The taxi snaked down a winding road, and I could glimpse the ocean through the houses. "Genesis says: 'And Adam fell into a deep sleep.' Nowhere does the biblical text say that he ever awoke."

"Even God uses trance?" Anne asked.

The taxi driver looked over.

"I'll bet those techniques would be useful in front of a jury," Leo said.

His eyes had returned to normal, but his voice had acquired a new mellow richness, stress removed from throat. His eyes, shoulders and mouth were more relaxed, although he was not consciously aware of his new awareness. Leo took another deep breath. "You could hypnotize jurors to vote for your client."

"Erickson's work is not about manipulation. The purpose is healing."

This seemed to stupefy Leo. "What kind of law did you say you practiced?"

"Securities. But I've always been interested in the mind, in spiritual things, in the binding of reality behind the material plane. Law can lead to contemplating hidden realities: codes within codes."

"So it can be," Leo said, acknowledging his wife with a hand squeeze. The whole time she had remained silent, watching with a gaze that seemed cool and disinterested. Was she hypnosis-proof? I doubted it. The voice on the tape had said: There is no resistance; there is only feedback. Anne had responded by manifesting "polarity response:" each time I had mentioned the word relax, her eye muscles, mouth and shoulders had done the opposite, tightening or stiffening just a little more each time. I wondered whether my close observations and sensitivity to their responses infringed on ethical obligations-but right and wrong were skewed in a snaking taxi, after a long bus ride, with two strangers, on the path to study hypnosis. In fact, now Leo looked lovingly into Anne's eyes, a look she returned with a smile, at which point Leo looked back at me and asked me whether I was "religious."

"Not in the usual sense," I answered. I wondered how to explain the twisting paths I had taken, navigating through different religious traditions, exploring them first intellectually, and then experientially, moving from my Judaic training through Catholicism, then Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, Hinduism, and other sources of wisdom, and finally finding an eclectic satisfaction in a personal, mystical path that united, yet transcended, each one I had studied. "Well," I said, "I once studied Talmud."

"So did I," Leo said, and once again, we fell silent. My mind drifted to Hebrew school. I studied Talmud with Rabbi Rosen, my teacher, who coaxed the voice of ancestors out of a precocious nine-year-old. I haltingly read the italicized Aramaic words, while he adjusted the cobalt-blue yarmulke on his skull and pointed his tattooed arm at a yellowed page.

"The generations are getting weaker," he said. "Since Adam they are weaker." What a long lineage he and I thus shared: since the primeval dawn, our bodies and minds had been deteriorating. Once, the best of us, prophets, had walked with God, had spoken to him like a friend in a garden, had been taken to heaven in a whirlwind, had been shown the generations-as many as there are grains of sand, he was told. "And what happens," continued Rabbi Rosen, his outstretched fingers still stuck to the page, shifting back to the text at hand, "when one man's ox gores another in the marketplace-to what measure of damages is the owner of the injured ox entitled?"

"There are several measures," I responded, in my high and nasal, nine-year-old voice. "The measure of worth of the injured ox; the measure of worth of replacement for the ox." Generations separated us: he, a Holocaust survivor, living on a teacher's wages; me, an academic's child, a comfortable dweller of suburbs. His right arm, emblazoned with the legacy of crimes against humanity; mine, ripening to maturation with repeated throws of a hardball. His legs, thin but adequate to support him; mine, nourished by a healthy blood supply and the fruits of my mother's awareness of exercise physiology; his eyes, carrying wisdom, grief, memories of violence to ancestors and loved ones, tenderness to students, remnants of terror, hope, faith, struggle, witnessing, reconciliation of innocence and experiences of condemnation; mine, open, receptive, often still and unblinking, still untouched by the limitations of Newtonian physics, still unscarred by disappointment with humanity, still sheltered from undue pain, still fresh with belief in the power of redemption, still witnessing Platonic ideals in the spaces of mind. Spaces of mind separated us, generational spaces; and yet we were soul-linked: like father and son, in the eternal bond of teacher and student. I respected his teaching, and knew of his past only the tattooed number that caught the fluorescent light as his arm escaped from its rolled-up sleeve, and which, as he pointed to the Talmud, I inextricably linked with the ancient scriptures. "The phrase, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is not employment for ophthalmologists and dentists," Rabbi Rosen said in his heavy accent. "It refers to the principle of proportionality: just compensation is given for intentional injury." We spent evenings pouring over Aramaic texts, shuffling back and forth over the calligraphic words, reciting the phrases aloud in that singsong melody which my ancestors had used in Babylon and Palestine. The Talmud is brilliant, I now thought, staring out the taxi window, supplanting the gorging of eyes with the disgorging of monetary compensation.

Images of the past floated to consciousness, linking Talmud study and my identity as a lawyer. How the concepts carried from ancient Jewish-prudence into modern jurisprudence, as I taught Criminal Law as an adjunct instructor in a windowless amphitheatre to terrified, first-year law school students.... A line popped into my head: it is the object most sublime/to make the punishment fit the crime. With poetic zeal, scriptural authors began parsing the meaning of ambiguity and the ambiguity of meaning; thus one began discerning principles, distinguishing situations, setting the boundaries of the laws and the laws of boundaries. Why did one choose law as vocation, perusing the labyrinthine structure of obligations-to one's fellow creatures, to one's self, to God-disentangling codes within codes within embedded frameworks-it's all very complicated, I had told my clients, characterizing the securities code, repeating what Rabbi Rosen, three of his fingers on three different commentaries in the Talmud, had said to me earlier, as together we explored the mosaic of the Mosaic.

What a complicated mosaic indeed, with two sets of dishes in my parents' home (one for milk, the other meat), and then the dishes for Chinese food. How complicated, distinguishing a milchik fork from a fleishik knife-but eating Chinese food out (but only on Tuesdays), and bringing it into the home (but only eating it off paper plates with plastic utensils). Your unconscious has infinite capacity to learn, the voice on the tape had said, just as it once learned how a "d" differed from a "b" ... whether a "6" was an upside-down "9" ... or a "9" an upside-down "6" ... and what was the use of three different sets of dishes; even now, the unconscious mind was continuing to learn, accruing each new impression as another dusty classroom in Poland ... or school in Chicago ... or firm in New York ... or road in the Cape.

"The Talmud is brilliant," I said to Leo, snapping out of my reverie.