Mind Manipulation

• The Thuggee Stranglers of India encouraged both enemy and initiate to believe they were actual “Faithful Tigers” who had been given human form by the dark Goddess Kali:

“Walking around the circle of tigers counterclockwise, one by one, Kali-ma raised the nine fierce tigers up as men. . . . When she finished walking completely around the circle, where once had stood nine fierce tigers, now stood the first nine Thugs!”²

One ninja-trained warrior who wielded superstition like a fine sword was 12th century samurai hero Yoshitsune, who did nothing to stop the spread of stories that he’d been schooled by tengu demons.

Yoshitsune founded the karuma-hachi school of martial arts responsible for teaching the guerilla (i.e. ninjutsu) tactics that helped his Minimoto clan defeat their enemies. Through Yoshitsune’s efforts, his brother Yoritomo became Japan’s first shogun in 1192.

No sooner had Yoritomo ascended to power than he began killing anyone he imagined posed a threat to his absolute rule. A superstitious paranoid, Yoritomo performed daily cleansing rituals designed to prevent the angry ghosts of those he’d killed from returning to haunt him. EventuallyYoritomo turned to killing even those loyal to him, and Yoshitsune was forced to flee.

Some sayYoshitsune was eventually murdered byYoritomo’s agents, others that Yoshitsune committed hari-kiri rather than be taken captive. According to shinobi lore however, Yoshitsune used his ninja skills to escape to China, but not before getting revenge against his evil brother.

Shortly after Yoshitsune’s reported death, small, inexplicable incidents began happening to Yoritomo.

Objects belonging to his dead brother began appearing and often Yoritomo would hear Yoshitsune’s voice from behind a screen, yet when the screen was jerked aside no one was there!

Yoritomo, an accomplished rider, died in 1198 after a fall from his horse. Critically injured, the shogun lingered in agony for days and died screaming to his last breath that he had been attacked by the ghost of his dead brother!

Shinobi lore tells it this way: Yoshitsune first faked his death and then began harassing his brother by making Yoritomo believe he was being haunted by the restless ghost of the brother he had unjustly killed. This kyonin-no-jutsu campaign culminated in the “ghost” ofYoshitsune (Yoshitsune himself or a confederate) suddenly “materializing” before his already frazzled brother during Yoritomo’s evening ride.

Of course, ninja are not the only ones to use superstition as a weapon.

Voodoo and Bone-Pointing

“Although methods differ, the magic works when there is sufficient belief in its power.”

—Mysteries of the Unexplained

Many primitive peoples believe that through spells, rituals, hexes, and curses a person can wound or even kill another. (While this might seem like mindless superstition to our more “advanced” sensibilities, stop and think for a moment how many of us regularly pray for health, healing, and tomorrow’s lottery numbers.)

Australian Aborigines use “bone-pointing” to strike down foes from a distance. Basically, a curse is placed on a symbolic weapon made of bone, wood, or stone and when this weapon is pointed at the victim or touches the victim, illness and death occur in a short time unless a counterspell is administered by the nangarri (medicine man).

Most in the West are familiar with Caribbean voodoo. The popular idea of a voodoo priest sticking pins in a doll in order to cause the illness or death of an enemy may seem farfetched to non-believers, but is taken quite seriously amongst voodoo believers. Therein lies its power.

While the bulk of voodoo practice is aimed at healing, as in all religions there are always those few mind-slayers who use the faithfuls’ beliefs against them. This is known in voodoo as the “Work of the Left Hand” and includes death spells and the creation of zombies, both often accomplished through the use of poisons.³

Each voodoo priest or priestess is also a dokte fey (master herbalist).Thus voodoo priests are adept at using drugs in addition to sleight-of-hand and symbolism to mimic true magical powers. When the faithful are convinced a voodoo priest possesses great power (mojo) and/or is favored by the spirits, that voodoo priest (i.e. mind-slayer) is much feared.

(Note: In Louisiana, in the 1980s, a man got life in prison for contracting a voodoo priest to put a death spell on his enemy. The judge instructed the jury that it didn’t matter if they (the jury) didn’t believe in the power of voodoo to kill from a distance, because the defendant believed he was hiring a magical hitman!) ⁴

How Fear Kills

“It would seem that in societies where the effects of a curse are accepted as common knowledge,
there is no question that the spear of thought can kill.”

—Mysteries of the Unexplained

There is always an element of fear in superstitions: fear we will jinx our favored baseball team unless we wear our jersey inside-out; fear we will break our mother’s back if we step on a crack; seven years bad luck for breaking that mirror.

It is fear that gives power to superstitions.

Our body doesn’t know the difference between real fear caused by an actual physical threat and superstitious fear caused by faulty reasoning. This is why a black cat crossing our path can cause the same reaction from our body as facing a down an actual tiger; that is, if we believe in the power of the black cat to curse us.

One explanation for how fear and superstition kill, and hence how the mind-slayer can kill with a single word, with a single thought placed in their victim’s mind, is based as much on physiology as it is on psychology.

When faced with a threat (real or imagined) our body increases its production of adrenaline (you know, that same glandular secretion that allowed that woman to lift the car off her trapped child). Simultaneously, the body reduces blood supply to organs that are not immediately needed for “flight-or-fight” (such as the digestive system). By constricting the small blood vessels in these “non-essential” parts of the body, the body can then reroute blood to vital areas and to the limbs needed for flight-or-fight.

Unfortunately, when the blood supply is reduced to “non-essential” areas, the oxygen the blood carries is also reduced. Thus, prolonged fear reduces the overall volume of blood circulating through the body. Less blood circulation equals reduced blood pressure. Reduced blood pressure, in turn, adversely affects those parts of the body responsible for maintaining blood circulation in the first place and this further reduces circulation, further reducing blood pressure—on and on—in a vicious downward spiral that, if left unchecked, kills!

How Superstitions Survive

“Best safety lies in fear.”

—Shakespeare, Hamlet

No matter how many times you explain to some people that viruses cause colds, they still stubbornly cling to their superstitious fear that getting their heads wet somehow causes colds. Madison Avenue understands this and tailors every television commercial for cold medications to reinforce this superstition.

How many of us step a little more carefully on Friday the 13th? Yet who among us can point to the true origin of the superstition?

FLIGHT OR FIGHT RESPONSE TRIGGERED

What about Astrology? Modern astronomy teaches us that those same stars ancient peoples thought were close beside one another and all the same distance from the Earth—stars they then used to form their Zodiac “pictures” in the sky—are in reality billions of miles removed from one another and have no relation to one another whatsoever except for what primitive people without telescopes, and modern superstitious people without lives, give them.

Still, horoscopes continue to appear daily in every major newspaper.

Superstitions and rituals meant to invoke luck survive from generation to generation, passing from person to person like a virus, because of two factors.

First, sometimes our superstitious rituals actually do seem to work. This is called coincidental reinforcement. We walk across that same street a thousand times without incident, yet the time we survive almost getting run over we thank that rabbit’s foot on our key-chain. Likewise, we buy a thousand lottery tickets and, so long as one of them is a winner, we will continue carrying our lucky four-leaf clover (the same talisman we had in our pocket for the other 999 losers!).

In other words, our rituals work some of the time, thus we keep using them.

Secondly, and more ominous, superstitions survive because we fear to trespass against them.

If we don’t wear our lucky hat, our team will lose! If we don’t scratch that lottery ticket with our lucky coin, we’ll lose out on millions!

Mind-slayers root out any personal and/or cultural superstitions their potential victims consciously or subconsciously possess, knowing that within those superstitions is the key to controlling—even killing—those victims.

These strategies can range from something as simple as stealing a ballplayer’s lucky glove prior to a play-off game to making a victim believe he has a terminal illness. Remember, all superstitions are based on fear. Remind yourself, fear kills!

This explains why superstitions so rarely die off, though those who trust in them all too often do!

Digging Up Dark Secrets

“I rather tell thee what is to be fear’d
Than what I fear.”

—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

A ruthless mind-slayer is one-half psychologist, one-half private investigator. . . and one-half undertaker. This makes up the 150 percent the mind-slayer needs to first dig up the dirt on his victim . . . and then bury him with it!

We all have secrets, if not out-and-out bloody secrets then at least skeletons in the closet whose dusty bones we’d rather not have rattled on The Jerry Springer Show.

These secrets can range from our own embarrassing lapses in judgement to secrets we are entrusted with by loved ones and friends. Mind-slayers are adept at digging up these secrets—the darker those secrets, the better.

Birth Secrets

At one time being born a bastard assured that your life was pretty much over before it began. While we no longer blame the children for being conceived outside marriage, an unwed mother is often still looked upon with disdain, and some individuals and families still go to great lengths to keep such things secret. Sometimes this requires sending the girl away to “visit relatives” in another state, then quietly putting the baby up for adoption.

This leads to another birth-related shock, finding out (or being made to think) you are adopted.

Unwanted pregnancy can also end in an abortion, which, while legal, isn’t something the young woman (or her family) wants broadcast.

Body Flaws

We all have an image in our minds of “the perfect body.” Unfortunately, none of us seem to have this body.

For teenagers, zits and freckles can undermine self-confidence. For the middle-aged, it’s hair-loss or being fat—the latter often judged by others to be the result of lack of control or laziness.

Mind-slayers learn to spot and then exaggerate and exploit the smallest of body defects and deformities—real or imagined—both in the minds of the insecure individuals and/or in the minds of insensitive people around them.

Failure Secrets

Failure to achieve a dream of success makes many people frustrated and then bitter before their time.

Internally-motivated people torture themselves when they fail to meet their goals. (Of course, there is always a mind-slayer close by willing to lend them a cat-o-nine-tails!)

Externally-motivated people often feel they have failed to live up to others’ expectations (e.g. parents, spouse, etc.). Mind-slayers get close to such people by promising to show them how to satisfy others.

Sex Secrets

From Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, sex has always been a hot potato (or in Clinton’s case a cigar).

In addition to adultery (seen as a weakness in character), there are a host of other sex-related wounds people have into which the mind-slayer can twist a knife:

Unexpressed sexual fantasies can lead to secret guilt, humiliation (if revealed) and, when unearthed, can cause a person to be added to a mind-slayer’s (black)mail route.

Feelings of impotence and inadequacy can lead people to go to extremes, from hiring a prostitute to jumping out of a plane to prove they’re macho.

Since sex is often seen as the measure of a man’s worth, feeling that we just don’t measure up can undermine a man’s self-confidence and lead to feelings of frustration, anger, even violence. The same thing happens when a woman thinks (or can be made to believe) that her actions or inactions have driven her lover into the arms of another.

Feelings of inadequacy often feed the fear of losing a lover, this in turn fuels suspicion and jealousy. Sex and jealousy go hand in hand. Making a person doubt his or her loved one’s devotion drives a wedge between the two. The bigger the wedge, the more easily a mind-slayer can slip in.

Homophobia, fear of homosexuals and/or the fear of being (thought) gay can be a powerful slander against a person, either because others believe it, or because the person being targeted fears others will believe it. Another consideration is the effect of a loved one being (or even being thought) gay has on friends and family. Often when a gay person comes out of the closet, parents feel guilt (“Where did we go wrong?”), siblings fret it might be genetic and run in the family, and spouses think, “I drove them to this!” and begin to doubt their self-worth as wife or husband.

Even longtime friends have been known to abandon one another if one is thought to be gay, fearing people will think, “If your buddy is gay, you must be gay too!”

Mind-slayers know this and use such rumors to drive a wedge between friends and family, further undermining their victim’s support network.

Molestation can also be used to both discredit a victim’s credibility with others and even make the targeted people doubt themselves. Even false allegations of child molestation can ruin a career. The media are quick to plaster a person’s name on the screen when he’s accused of a heinous act (child molestation, rape), yet when’s the last time you saw them run a follow-up story when the charges were dropped?

A second way molestation can be used is to convince your victim that he himself has been the victim of molestation as a child. Or, say a mind-slayer targets a rival businessman. Convincing that rival’s teenage daughter to go to the authorities with memories she has suddenly recalled of being molested by her father as a child might be a good place to start.

Couldn’t happen? You might want to study the 1988 Washington State case where, after attending a fundamentalist Bible camp which featured a “cult expert” lecturing on how prevalent “Satanic ritual abuse”’ was “even in good Christian families,” two daughters (aged 18 and 22) became convinced they’d been the victims of child abuse years before. This “revelation” led to the breakup of their family and the subsequent imprisonment of their father. (This case will be explored in more depth later in this chapter.)

Crime Secrets

From those paper clips we stick in our pocket as we’re leaving work to our son’s shoplifting problem, there is always a friendly mind-slayer giving us a conspiratory wink, willing to help us smooth things over or sweep it under the rug.

What they never tell you is that trying to cover such things up usually turns out to be twice as much trouble as the actual crime itself.

Illness Secrets

Sometimes illness is seen as a weakness on the part of the sick person. Other times illness is seen as something the person brought on himself (for example through drug abuse or lifestyle). When illness is combined with a sexual element, it is doubly useful to the mind-slayer. For example, AIDS is seen by some as God’s punishment for a wicked lifestyle, or some other STD is your punishment for committing adultery.

The first step in crooked faith-healing is convincing the person they actually have an illness.

The only thing better than dealing in physical faith healing is tampering with mental illness, since the mind-slayer doesn’t even have to produce any physical evidence (unlike psychic surgeons who have to at least palm some bloody chicken organs in order to remain convincing!).

The next best thing to making a foe doubt his own sanity, is making those around him doubt it for him. A classic cutting-at-the-edges ploy using this strategy was played out during the 1972 presidential campaign when presidential hopeful George McGovern’s running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, resigned from the ticket after someone leaked to the media the fact that Eagleton had been hospitalized three times for treatment of emotional exhaustion and depression.

Whatever Eagleton’s actual qualifications, the assumptions about his mental dependability made him a political liability, and effectively sank McGovern’s campaign.

Death Secrets

We all dread the day that Ol’ Grey Mower decides to knock on our door. Mind-slayers wrapped in the robes of religion count on this, selling us salvation from damnation.

Death always leaves unresolved feelings, what thanatologists call lack of closure. These unresolved feelings open the way for mind-slayers (psychics, cult leaders, etc.) to get their foot in the funeral home door. Feelings of responsibility and guilt (justified or not) over the death of another is a powerful motivator. Recall Yoshitsune’s devious kyonin-no-jutsu plot against his evil brother.

The suicide of a loved one always leaves behind guilt in the survivors (i.e. “I should have seen the signs . . .”) and mind-slayers are quick to exploit this guilt. Where guilt doesn’t occur naturally, mind-slayers create it.

If their intended victim doesn’t have any true dark secrets, it is necessary for mind-slayers to create them, or, resort to cutting at the edges by unearthing the dark secrets of the victim’s friends and relatives.

Thus the mind-slayer patiently looks for weaknesses, digs up the victim’s dark secrets, and collects the ammunition the mind-slayer all too often convinces the victim to aim at his own head!

The One-Eyed Snake

“Tricks well-mastered are called techniques.
Techniques half learned are merely tricks.”

—Ralf Dean Omar, Death on Your Doorstep

Remember: Reputation often spills less blood. Thus shinobi ninja, like other secretive societies throughout history, intentionally drew around themselves an impenetrable shadow-cloak of mystery designed to dissuade casual interest and discourage deliberate assault. Outsiders were encouraged to believe the ninja were descended from the mysterious tengu demons and therefore possessed magical powers.

While we may never know whether the shinobi ninja truly possessed some sort of psychic ability, we do know that the shinobi used a strategy known as The One-Eyed Snake. This strategy was comprised of tactics and techniques intended to give outsiders the illusion they possessed true magical powers, in particular, the power to strike down a foe from afar and/or with a single touch without so much as a mark left on the victim.

Belief in this dreaded “death touch” (dim-mak) was first promoted by the moshuh nanren “ninja” of China.5 The original art of dim-mak killed by interrupting the flow of a victim’s chi (the body’s vital energy). When using dim-mak, moshuh nanren targeted the victim’s most vulnerable body spots during that victim’s most vulnerable time of the day.

One-Eyed Snake techniques, on the other hand, only pretended to be true dim-mak. To accomplish this, ninja used poisons, specialized unarmed blows, and specially designed weapons, all of which left no marks on the victim’s body.

For example, an assassin could place poison on his fingertips that, when coming into contact with the victim’s skin, would seep into the victim’s bloodstream, causing the victim to become ill and die in minutes, hours, or days, thus simulating a true death’s touch. Other poisons were neurotoxic, paralyzing the nervous system like cobra venom, stopping the victim’s heart within seconds.

The uses of such One-Eyed Snake poisons were many. For example, a ninja could secretly make a high-ranking official ill with poison, opening the way for a second ninja (posing as a healer or astrologer) to worm his way into the sick person’s confidence by administering a miracle cure.

A variation on this miracle-cure ploy involved secretly poisoning a counselor of the emperor and then having a ninja spy posing as an astrologer accurately predict to the day, even to the hour or minute, when the counselor would die. When the specially timed poison did its job and the counselor dropped dead as predicted, the astrologer would instantly become an invaluable addition and trusted advisor to the emperor.

One of the most inventive One-Eyed Snake techniques, taken from the moshuh nanren, involved breeding silk worms that were fed poison so that the silk they spun was poisonous. Finely woven silk robes would then be presented as gifts to enemies.

Other One-Eyed Snake ploys included suffocating victims, cutting a victim’s throat from the inside (by shoving a hook-ended blade through their mouths), and skewering into an enemy’s brain with ice-pick weapons (through the nose or ear). Once, a ninja assassin succeeded in killing a hard-to-reach enemy by hiding for days under the man’s toilet and then skewering up through the man’s anus when the unsuspecting man sat on the crapper, killing the man without leaving a mark!

Still today, unscrupulous mind-slayers plying the faith-healers trade pretend to possess magical healing powers by using some of the same techniques developed by ancient ninja.

For example, faith-healers can secretly place healing anesthetic salves on their hands that, when touching a patient, makes the patient “feel” the healing.

More insidious still, an unscrupulous mind-slayer “priest” can secretly administer a psychosis-inducing drug to an unsuspecting cult member, then in full view of other cult members, perform an exorcism, curing the patient through merely the laying on of hands—hands soaked in the antidote, of course.

Wily shamans eat special herbs that are activated by the digestive juices in their stomachs to create a “hypnotic” vapor. A discrete belch then allows the shaman to exhale this “healing breath” onto the patient’s face, making the patient woozy and thus more susceptible to suggestion.

Crafty hypnotists use similar ploys.

While the variations of the One-Eyed Snake are infinite, the purpose of the One-Eyed Snake strategy is always the same: to increase the superstition and fear others have of the mind-slayer whether in his guise as healer, astrologer, cult-leader, or assassin.

HYPNOTISM

“I’ the name of something holy, sir, why stand you
In this strange stare?”

—Shakespeare, The Tempest

From ancient shamans and temple oracles, down to modern-day psychotherapists, ethical healers of the mind and unethical mind-slayers have used hypnosis.

According to one source, hypnosis in the West was derived from the practices of Asian shamans brought West by Jesuit missionaries.6 However, ancient Celtic priests already claimed to possess a skill called “glamour” which meant to dazzle another’s mind, often with only words.

The man credited with discovering hypnosis in the West is Marquis DePuysegur, a disciple of Dr. Franz Mesmer (1733-1851). From his studies of primitive shamanistic trances, Mesmer developed “animal magnetism,” an early form of hypnotism. DePuysegur carried on Mesmer’s research and during one session he observed one of his patients entering a trance-like state of true hypnotism.

By the mid-1800s, DePuysegur’s hypnotism (a.k.a. “magnetic sleep”) was being used to relieve patients’ pain during operations in London. After observing patients’ reactions while in magnetic sleep Sigmund Freud formulated his theory of the unconscious mind.

In 1852, researcher James Braid coined the term “hypnosis.” Since then, hypnotism has been used to heal and to entertain. Hypnotism has also been used by mind-slayers for darker purposes.

What is Hypnotism?

Whether you know it or not, you’ve been in a hypnotic state literally thousands of times. Anytime you’ve been caught daydreaming or being absent-minded, you’ve been under a form of hypnosis.

Ninety percent of people can be deliberately hypnotized to some degree and of that number, fully 10 percent are highly suggestible and thus susceptible to being placed in deep levels of trance.

How does hypnotism work? We still don’t know. We do know, however, that effective hypnotism depends on the power of suggestion.

The term absent-minded is appropriate since during hypnosis our usual controlling conscious “higher” mind is temporarily absent or asleep, while our “lower” subconscious “shadow mind” (responsible for emotion and motor control) is still awake.

Under hypnosis, our brains go to sleep while our lower brains, accustomed to being given commands by our higher brains, continue to take orders from the hypnotist. Thus, under hypnosis, this lower brain simply substitutes the outside commands of the hypnotist for the commands of its sleeping higher brain.

Three things make this hypnosis possible:

First, the subject’s focus is narrowed to the point to where only a single source of information is coming into the subject’s brain—information controlled by the hypnotist. The hypnotist then literally defines reality for the victim’s subconscious mind.

Second, it is important the subject believe in the process of hypnosis and in the hypnotist.

Finally, for hypnotism to be successful the subject must be willing to suspend logic and temporarily accept distortions in cause and effect, and in his perception of time and space.

For example, a hypnotized subject can be given post-hypnotic suggestion to forget the number seven. When awakened from the trance and asked “What is three plus four?,” the subject readily answers either “six” or “eight.” Asked how many fingers he has, the subject correctly responds “10” and often seems unbothered by the fact he has an “extra” digit when asked to count his fingers.

Any time such discrepancies in logic appear, hypnotized subjects either attempt to rationalize them away or simply ignore them. This is known as trance logic and is often seen in cults where members go to great extremes to rationalize the bizarre and often contradictory actions of their leaders.

Putting Them Under

All hypnosis techniques first relax the body and then narrow the mind’s focus, making the hypnotic subject oblivious to external stimulation, except for the voice of the hypnotist.

Hypnotic Strategies

There are three main approaches used to induce a hypnotic state:

• Single-point focus captures and holds the subject’s attention on a single object (e.g. light, a swinging pendulum, a metronome, or a hypnotic coin);

• The command approach gives the subject direct instructions and works especially well where the hypnotist is seen as an authority figure; and

• The imagery approach uses analogies, symbols, and metaphors to separate the subject from his external environment. This approach is effective for use with those patients who resist the command approach.

Imagery approach induction allows the mind-slayer to craft commands designed especially to capture and hold the attention of the subject through use of his favored speech style. Tell watchers: “Picture in your mind . . .”; listeners: “Listen to the sound of my words . . .”; touchers: “Feel the soft breeze on your face, smell the flowers . . .”

The imagery approach is effective because it is difficult for a person to resist suggestions he does not consciously know he is receiving, that is, when the suggestion is disguised in symbolism that only the subconscious mind registers. This subliminal approach is favored by the unscrupulous—con men, cult leaders, and Madison Avenue.

How a subject views the hypnotist determines which of these hypnosis strategies will work best. Once the mind-slayer establishes himself as an authority figure, the command approach—direct repetitious orders used in connection with single-point focus—works best.

If the subject is on an informal or personal basis with the hypnotist (where subject and hypnotist are seen as equals), the imagery approach, augmented with single-point focus, works best.

The Power of Voice

The most important aspect of any hypnotic induction is the voice of the hypnotist.

The human voice alone can produce a hypnotic state because the pre-verbal “lower” brain remains in awe of “higher” brain’s verbal ability.

Speech-Induced Trance

Before beginning, determine the subject’s “type”—watcher, listener, or toucher—and mirror it when giving suggestions.

When inducing a hypnotic state by speaking:

• Avoid interruption in the flow of your words;

• Speak in short separate sentences tied together with “and”;

• Speak in a rhythmic monotone “singsong” as pleasantly as possible, stretching out soothing and relaxing words: “looose . . . sleeepy . . . deeeply.”

Types of Hypnotic Suggestions

The kinds of hypnotic suggestions given vary with their intended goals.

• Relaxation suggestions are designed to place the subject into a state more receptive to additional, more complex, suggestion.

• Trance-deepening suggestions take the subject to deeper levels of trance, opening him to deeper conditioning.

• Imagery-building suggestions reinforce the trance state with pictures of reality drawn by the hypnotist.

• Direct command suggestions order the subjects to do specific things, such as change his behavior.

• Post-hypnotic suggestions are orders given to the subjects that he carries out after being awakened from the actual trance. Mind-slayers refer to post-hypnotic suggestions as “time bombs.”

Giving Hypnotic Commands

When giving hypnosis commands, follow these guidelines:

• Break complex goals into simple, more manageable ones. Use small steps to accomplish one goal at a time;

• Keep suggestions simple and concise, believable and desirable;

• Use positive words wrapped in clear and appropriate imagery;

• Repeat suggestions in order to reinforce them;

• Use synonyms as much as possible (the same words repeated over and over lose meaning);

• Avoid vague time periods such as “soon” or “in the future.” Instead, give definite time suggestions: “When I snap my fingers” or “Upon awakening.” And, most importantly,

• Always include a post-hypnotic suggestion, for example a “trigger-word” that produces instant re-hypnosis any time the subject hears it.

Ninja Use of Hypnosis

Shinobi called hypnosis yugen-shin, “mysterious mind,” and saw it as a valuable tool for helping them accomplish their missions. Self-hypnosis was taught to ninja students to improve their control over self, and hypnosis was taught them so they could overshadow their foes.

Despite their bloodthirsty reputation, ninja preferred non-violent means to an end. Hypnotism helped them accomplish this ideal. And, when violence was unavoidable, ninja used hypnosis to strengthen their own resolve, while undermining the resolve of foes.

Ninja use of hypnosis helped foster the belief—and fear—that all ninja possessed the power to overshadow the minds of others. Hypnotism also aided in the ninjas’ miraculous vanishing acts after completing a mission. Often a post-hypnotic suggestion left victims with the illusion that ninja possessed true magical powers (a là the One-Eyed Snake).

Self-Hypnosis

Self-hypnosis allowed these knights of darkness to relax themselves physically and calm themselves mentally in preparation for dangerous missions. Ninja trainees were each given a post-hypnotic mantra-like trigger word that when spoken aloud (or even thought of) in times of stress, fear, or pain triggered their flight-or-fight adrenaline response.

Self-hypnosis was also used to enhance an agent’s mental concentration, for example, enhancing the memory of a ninja entrusted with a special message.

Often such carriers—whether ninja operatives or unwitting draftees—would be given messages they were not consciously aware they were carrying until another agent at a prearranged rendezvous spoke a code word triggering a post-hypnotic suggestion to remember the information. On the flip-side, agents could be given a hypnotic trigger-word to make them forget information they carried if captured.

Of course, hypnosis was also used by ninja to manipulate foes.

Basic Hypnosis Exercise

To place another person in a light hypnotic trance, begin by having him sit back or lay down in a quiet, comfortable place. After guiding the subject for a few minutes of slow, deep breathing, instruct the subject as follows:

“Take a deep breath and remember that feeling you feel right before waking up after a really good night’s sleep, when you feel yourself half-awake, half-asleep, oh, so comfortable and warm that you just want to lay there, relaxed, barely touching the bed, floating on a warm cushion of air, one part of you wanting to move, the other savoring the warm, relaxing, comfortable sensation of floating on a warm bed of clouds . . . so you reward yourself, resting relaxed, warm and comfortable, allowing your body to float, allowing your mind to drift comfortably from thought to thought . . .”

Do not rush your relaxation of the subject. The more relaxed your subject becomes, the deeper his hypnotic trance. Having relaxed your subject into a light hypnotic trance, gently draw his focus to the specific subject and/or suggestions you want to work on.

(Note: A light hypnotic trance state is actually better for learning suggestions than a deep trance.)

WAY OF THE WORD WIZARDS (JUMON-NO-JUTSU)

“Good words are better than bad strokes.”

—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Ninja word wizards mastered the art of stabbing manipulative images, thoughts, and emotions into the minds of their enemies.

To craft these “mind-daggers,” ninja called upon their understanding of jujushin, kyonin-no-jutsu, and the insight given them from studying shadow language. Ninja call this kiai-shin-jutsu, literally “shouting into the mind.”

Words as Weapons

“Many have fallen by the sword, but not as many as by the tongue.”

—Aprocrypha Sirach 28:18

Samurai Lord Asano of the 47 ronin fame was killed by a single word when he allowed himself to be angered by a word specially chosen by his rival to incite him into drawing his sword in the presence of the shogun. Like Asano, many of us are chained to “word slavery,” and easily manipulated by the words we hear:

• Words that move us to tears;

• Words that shock and anger us;

• Words that can lull a baby to sleep;

• Words that can lull adults into a false sense of security;

• Words that can convince us to buy things we don’t need and to buy into ideas we’d be better off without;

• Words that can heighten our awareness; and

• Words that can hypnotize us.

Mantra

Poetry of the 18th century Romantic Movement was specifically arranged to create a trance-like state when read correctly. Many religious chants and hymns are also designed to draw listeners into a hypnosis-like state, making them more susceptible to the underlying message.

Recall that our voices alone have the power to put another person (or ourselves) into a hypnotic trance. Ancient peoples respected and feared the power of words. Thus we have tales of heroes going in search of magic words that would grant them great power: “Abracadabra,” “Open Sesame,” or “Aum.”

Some of these mysterious sounds and words were used to accomplish magic, others to freeze an enemy in his tracks. The Kama Sutra speaks of magical verses that have the power of “fascination” and makes reference to them appearing in ancient Indian texts such as the Indian Anunga Runga (Kamaledhiplava).

Down through the ages, many “words to conjure by” were sacred or forbidden. In India, these sacred sounds are known as mantra.

Yogi practitioners maintain that reciting these mantra can grant chanters all kinds of magical abilities. As a result, mantra formulas are found throughout the Far East, in the religions of Hinduism, Tibetan Lamanism, and Buddhism.

One theory claims that mantra are the original sounds made by primitive man to express basic emotions (fear, surprise, love, etc.) and that accounts for why mantra are recognized by the more primitive parts of our brains. Mantra vibrations act as codes that stimulate the brain on a subconscious level, in effect, acting like a TV remote control, changing our moods and energy levels.

Mind-slayers know the potential of the spoken word and use specially chosen words and phrases that put us under their spell before we know it.

The Art of Agreement

If you can get a person to say “yes” to a little point, he is more likely to say “yes” to a big point. In order to persuade others, mind-slayers first listen to them.

By listening to others—listening to their desires, their version of reality, letting them blow off steam and get it off their chests, you allow them to exhaust themselves. By listening to the other person’s point of view we also see their best argument before they see ours.

Getting in Synch

When countering a person’s argument, don’t get personal. Attack the position rather than the person. Require him to defend his position, produce evidence, verify facts and explain his reasoning.

Since we tend to cooperate with people we like, those with whom we share common interests, once you determine his position and the direction his argument is taking, place yourself in synch with him by finding common ground and points of common interest.

Beginning a conversation, use wide, open and friendly arm gestures designed to grab the listener’s attention. From these large gestures, gradually move inward, into smaller, more intimate hand gestures that gradually draw all the listener’s focus onto you.

Pay attention to what others say as well as how they say it.

Watch the body language of the person you are trying to persuade (how he sits, moves, rate of breathing, gestures) then imitate his actions and attitudes.

Agreeing without Agreeing

No matter how different another person’s argument is, the mind-slayer agrees with them, or at least appears to.

Using phrases like “I see your point,” “I agree 100 percent,” and “It would be hard to argue with that,” mind-slayers effectively diffuse others’ arguments and purposely drive a wedge between the person and his argument.

To accomplish this, first determine whether the person is trying to prove his point or trying to prove himself. In other words, does he really believe his point is worth arguing for and his position worth defending, or is he simply saying “Hey, look at me. I’m smart!”?

If the latter, assure him that he is, indeed, smart and valuable, that it’s his position that’s wrong. Acknowledge his concerns as valid and, most important, stroke his ego. You can recognize another’s need to feel important and accepted without actually agreeing with him.

Make the person choose between promoting himself or promoting his argument. Make him choose between accepting your compliments or supporting his position. For example, tell him, “You’re obviously an intelligent person, someone must have purposely given you incorrect facts.”

Remember: Mirroring tells people you’re just like them. Once adept at reflecting the other person, you can take control of the communication, adjusting the pace, tone, and direction of the conversation, gently guiding the conversation where you want it to go, leading the person into agreement with you.

To paraphrase Tu Mu, show him a way to safely withdraw from the conversation by creating in his mind an alternative to losing. Thus, when trying to bring a person into agreement with you, always leave him a face-saving way out of a disagreement, a way of honorably abandoning his position.

Two points work in the mind-slayer’s favor when attempting to do this: the human need for personal consistency and our desire for social acceptance.

Personal Consistency

We all try to justify our earlier behaviors. Thus, when the mind-slayer points out that something we’re doing or saying today contradicts yesterday’s actions and opinions, we may go to great lengths to justify our actions.

Mind-slayers pay close attention to any inconsistencies in the other person’s narrative, including contradictions between his stated goal and any effort (or lack of) he makes toward accomplishing his goal. Mind-slayers are quick to point out personal contradictions and inconsistencies in the argument of the person they are trying to persuade. They will either offer him a way to mend his inconsistencies (perhaps by showing him how your proposed course of action, your product, etc., helps him meet his goals), or else using his contradictions to further undermine his credibility.

Social Acceptance

We all care what other people think about us, especially people we look up to. Thus, the deep-seated sense of duty we feel toward authority figures (and institutions) can be invoked by mind-slayers in arguments with references to tribal totems, fallen heroes, and authority figures we admire and seek blessings from. Mind-slayers never tire of reminding us of our obligations.

(Note: Duty is a debt you owe yourself. Some call it honor. An obligation, on the other hand, is what other people try to tell you your duty is.)

The Craft of Lying

“To lapse in fullness
Is sorer than to lie for need, and falsehood
Is worse in kings than beggers.”

—Shakespeare, Cymbeline

According to Dr. Robert D. Hare, psychopaths have a natural talent for lying, deceiving, and manipulation.7 Lying may be a natural talent for psychopaths, but the rest of us have to practice! It has been speculated that lying may be a survival skill determined by genetics to save your lives. Of course, getting caught lying can also get you killed!

Despite that fact, a recent study determined that 91 percent of Americans lie regularly. Twenty percent admit they can’t get through the day without telling a few premeditated “white” lies.⁸

More ominous still, people seem endlessly capable of justifying their lying—whether lying about their bowling score or about flying cocaine in from Central America in defense of God and country.

How to Spot a Liar

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

—Benjamin Disraeli

For mind-slayers, becoming adept at unraveling a foe’s wicked web of deceit is as important as learning to effectively weave their own.

Down through the ages, various techniques have been devised for testing truthfulness. Ancient Chinese placed rice powder in the mouths of suspected liars. The nervous liar’s mouth would already be dry, thus a guilty person would be unable to speak. As dubious as some ancient lie-detection methods were, the accuracy of modern electronic lie-detection equipment is equally debatable. In the final analysis, even modern lie-detection equipment only does what we can learn to do with our eyes and ears, and through mastery of shadow language.

To trip up a liar, listen for verbal inconsistencies in his story, slips of his tongue, and other verbal clues. To do this, first slow down a fast-talking speaker so as not to allow his lies to get buried in all the bullshit he is shoveling your way. Remember to listen to how something is said in addition to what is said. Often what isn’t said reveals the most.

Leakage

Look and listen for “leakage” tells at the end of a person’s sentences and at the end of conversations. Leakage includes such things as changes in voice pitch, changes in breathing (deeper or shallower), inconsistencies in facts, and slips of the tongue, especially those that appear at the end of a conversation.

Also look for emotional leakage beneath the words. Disguising words is easy, disguising emotions difficult. Fleeting facial expressions often reveal genuine underlying emotion.

On the other hand, strong shows of emotion (anger, feigned indignation) may be a defensive strategy designed to divert attention from a lie.

In addition to verbal clues, remember to look for revealing body language tells a lying person is consciously unaware of, such as compulsive swallowing, nervous gestures, the initial nod a speaker unconsciously gives just before saying “no,” and the almost imperceptible shrug coming right before he agrees with you (a sign the speaker is uncertain and has second thoughts).

Picking Up “Vibes”

Often we experience a vague feeling of unease, of “bad vibes,” when listening to someone. This is because we subconsciously perceive lying “tells,” words that don’t match body language, warning us that we are being lied to.

To illustrate how important it is to match body language to words, try this experiment the next time a friend asks you a question: Nod “yes,” but say “no.” Watch the confusion on his face as his brain tries to reconcile two contradictory messages.

When talking to someone of questionable truthfulness, ask three “control” questions: a question you know the person knows the answer to, a question the person might know the answer to, and a question you know the person doesn’t know the answer to. As the person responds, watch for the speaker’s tells. Spotting tells in response to these different questions provides clues to his truthfulness.You can also use his answers to help you determine whether he is a watcher, listener, or toucher.

If you get a vibe someone is lying to you, he probably is and you are picking up on it on a subconscious level. Trust your “gut-feelings.”Your “gut” evolved a few million years before your over-rationalizing brain.

Lying by Gender

Lying techniques vary by gender. In general, men make lies of commission (adding information), woman make lies of omission (leaving out important details).

When talking to a man, keep track of what he says, noting any inconsistencies, returning to contradictions and points needing clarifying at the end of his speaking.

When talking to a woman, pay attention to what she doesn’t say. Look for gaps in the continuity of her narrative.

Rule of thumb: Men lean toward you when lying, women lean away.

The Power of Suggestion

Mind-slayers never give orders; they make suggestions. Sometimes these suggestions are direct, even blunt. At other times, circumstances and the sensibility of their victims require mind-slayers to make less direct—but nevertheless effective—suggestions.

When a less direct attack is called for, mind-slayers employ a variety of symbols, gestures, and word-play tactics that allow them to influence their victims on a subliminal level.

Subliminal Suggestion

Toward the end of the 1950s there was a public panic when it was revealed that advertisers were trying to influence buyer behavior on a subconscious level by planting hidden messages in advertisements and in movies. These messages were called “subliminal suggestions” (from the Latin sub-limen, meaning “below consciousness”).

The idea of using subliminal messages is hardly new.

Third century IndianYoga master Pantanjali taught that thoughts (caused by seeing a symbol, hearing a word, etc.) or any physical act (such as gestures made by another) leave behind impressions (samskara) that subtly (subliminally) influence a person’s future thought and actions.

Subliminal suggestion works in two ways: first by creating an association of one thing with another in a viewer or listener’s mind and, second, by taking advantage of preconceived connections the person has.

To accomplish this, mind-slayers employ a host of words-ploys, evocative symbols, and gestures targeting these subliminal connections.

Madison Avenue fully understands the value of subliminal suggestion. That’s why the Pillsbury Doughboy is modeled after a fetus (baking and giving birth being closely related in women’s minds) and why Joe Camel’s nose is modeled after male genitalia (associating smoking with “manly” virility).

Subliminal suggestion works best when attacking the viewer or listener on an emotional level rather than on a higher reasoning level. Evoking an emotional response via subliminal suggestion is called subception.

The carriers of these subliminal messages can employ any number of words, symbols, or gestures purposely designed to penetrate into a person’s mind castle without his normal conscious “gatekeeper” recognizing them as dangerous or superfluous, and thus turning them away.

Psychology pioneer B.F. Skinner once proved how his Behaviorism theory of psychology could be used to subliminally affect noted psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who had disputed Skinner’s findings that showed just how easily human behavior could be shaped or manipulated.

Attending a lecture Fromm was giving, Skinner passed a note to a friend, “Watch Fromm’s left hand. I’m going to shape a chopping motion.”

From then on, every time Fromm raised his left hand to emphasize a point, Skinner looked directly at him with a steady gaze. When Fromm lowered his hand, Skinner nodded and smiled. Within five minutes, Fromm was chopping the air so vigorously that his wristwatch kept slipping over his hand!9

Skinner’s manipulation worked because, on a subconscious level, Fromm craved Skinner’s approval. Thus, Skinner’s subliminal gestures were able to influence Fromm’s actions.

Words are the most oft used tool in the mind-slayer’s subliminal bag of tricks. Correctly crafting subliminal suggestions requires distinguishing between neutral words and emotional words.

For example, “coffee” is a neutral, unambiguous word carrying only one meaning. The word coffee does not evoke an emotional response in us. A word like “death,” on the other hand, evokes a host of emotional reactions (unease, fear, excitement).

Emotional words have more impact because we “file” them in more than one place in our brains. Deliberately using emotional words therefore allows the mind-slayer to penetrate more of our brain than using “neutral” words would.

Word Play

We all enjoy wordplay. All our jokes are based on a slip of the tongue, misunderstood or mispronounced words, or on words with double meaning.

Mind-slayers often use wordplay to place subliminal suggestions in their victims’ mind. This wordplay includes the manipulation of sentence structure (syntax), the Theory of Liaison, the use of homophones.

The Theory of Liaison

Subliminal suggestions can be placed into another’s mind by using words that, while by themselves are innocent, when spoken together with another innocent word create a third “subliminal” word-image.

For example, while the words “loose” and “exchange” have neutral meanings in and of themselves, when pronounced together, the phonetic ending of “loose” joins with phonetic beginning of “exchange” to form “sex.” Likewise, the neutral juxtaposed words choose-examples and views-expected also form the liaison “sex.”

In practical application, an unscrupulous seducer can liberally seed their friendly proposal with liaison words that subliminally plant the idea-image of “sex” in their listener’s mind.

Likewise, using liaison, politicians and cult leaders preach to us of our “common need” (common need = “money”).

The advent of computers allows for the creation of tens of thousands of liaison combinations. Thus during the course of a 30-second commercial, or a 30-minute lecture, mind-slayers using liaison can implant any number of subliminal images in their audience’s collective mind.

Homophones

Words that sound like other words can also affect us on a subliminal level.You see a beautiful woman. Do you want to meet her or meat her? Here is the basis for so much of our humor.

Here is also the key to how mind-slayers use wordplay to confuse and control us.

Mind-slayers also often use “pairing,” associating one word with another, exploiting already perceived connections in people’s minds. Homophones work perfectly for this.

For example, during Desert Storm, President George Bush was advised by his political and military strategists to deliberately pronounce Saddam Hussein’s name as “Sodom,” as opposed to the more proper “Sah-damn.” This was done in order to provoke the connection in Western minds with wicked Sodom(y) and Gomorrah.

When subtlety is called for, being able to present ideas to others as suggestions—especially subliminal suggestions—is a vital skill for the mind-slayer.

More important still, for self-defense, we must also learn to recognize any subliminal messages—intentional or unintentional—that could be used to overpower ourselves and our loved ones.

MASTERMINDS AND BLACK MAGICIANS

No fictional mind-slayer is more devious than the title character in King Richard III. Yet Shakespeare based his play on the real Richard (1452-1485) who schemed and murdered his way to the throne.

Fictional depictions of manipulating ninja mind-slayers are hardly less flattering. But although fiction is exciting, the ninja’s ability to penetrate into the minds of others is well documented and no less fascinating. Surrounded by enemies, medieval shinobi mastered mind-control for self-defense and the elimination of foes.

Today, we would be naive to think there aren’t still criminals, cult leaders, and tyrants that possess few qualms about using every mind-control secret in the book for ill, for thrill, and for personal gain.

Crimes of the Mind

“It should be understood that every country has its criminal element and that criminals the world over are an opportunistic lot with the predator’s sense for sniffing out inherent weaknesses in situations and individuals. Where others see a natural disaster, the criminal mind sees an opportunity to plunder. Where honest folk see the terrible ravages of war, the criminal sees an opportunity to sell guns or set up a black market.”

—Dr. Haha Lung 10

Criminal mind-slayers range from confidence swindlers and sinister seducers to out-and-out killers, all of whom lurk in the corridors of the mind looking for victims.

These mind-stalkers are always on the alert for new and inventive ways to ensnare their prey.

For example, the Russian scientist known for his creation of a hi-tech “mind-control” machine that the U.S. government reportedly considered using against David Koresh at Waco, says he regularly gets visits from the Russian Mafia asking to use his device to get the edge on their business partners.

Smooth-talking criminals and con men always prefer bullshit to bullets.

The Confidence Man

“A good psychopath can play a concerto on anyone’s heartstrings.”

—Dr. Robert D. Hare¹¹

By definition, all mind-slayers are “confidence men”—confident in their abilities to weasel their way into our confidence, confident all human beings have flaws that can be exploited, confidently wielding the manipulation skills necessary to undermine our confidence.

Beyond fictional depictions in The Sting, The Flim-Flam Man, and The Grifters, Eastern and Western history is filled with real silver-tongued, black-hearted rogues all too adept at leaving their victims red-faced. These real-life mind-slayers range from Russia’s Rasputin to Utah’s “Resurrection Man.”

Today Alta, Utah, is a ski resort. But in 1873 it was a lawless mining town. In a kyonin-no-jutsu ploy worthy of any ninja mind-slayer, a stranger dressed all in black appeared in town one day announcing he possessed the power to resurrect the 100 gunmen buried in Alta’s Boot Hill.

Fear sliced through the small mining town like a scythe.

Some of the miners wanted to hang the stranger. But finally the most superstitious miners passed the hat, collecting $2,500 to bribe the “Resurrection Man” into leaving Alta permanently.¹²

To show how little people change, 120 years later in Salem, Massachusetts, a similar rogue was convicted of swindling $500,000 from an heiress by convincing her he was a witch.¹³

Confidence men mix eloquent, pandering language and pleasing looks with captivating body language and mesmerizing mannerisms, dealing out offers too good to be true. To this, they add a dash of natural and/or practiced charisma with a liberal spicing of deliberate distraction and pressure ploys, creating an intoxicating mind stew that’s sweet in the mouth but bitter in the belly.

Mind-slayers reason with you, wear you down with their incessant arguments, command, and, when necessary, threaten—anything to accomplish their agenda. These sinister students of human nature become adept at spotting innate weaknesses and dark secrets in others. They understand all our fears and foibles. They know that nine times out of 10, even when they take us for all we’re worth, we won’t go to the authorities for fear of looking foolish, or for fear of being arrested as a greedy accomplice in our own downfall.

They know all our dark secrets, or at least can make us believe they do.

In their informative study of the Japanese mafia, Yakuza authors David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro relate how one enterprising gangster sent out thousands of letters to prominent Japanese reading simply: “I know what you did and I will reveal your secret to the world unless you send me money!”

Despite the fact no specific wrongdoing or actual secret was mentioned in the letters, despite the fact that no specific extortion amount was mentioned, the money was soon rolling in from those fearing someone had discovered their dark secret . . . whatever it was!

Mind-slayers make us prance to psychological tunes, step lively to patriotic marches, and dance religious jigs till Jesus comes home. Some of these rogues feign mental powers while others twist the legitimate tools of psychology and hypnotism to their dark purposes.

Black Hypnosis

“Hypnotism, and the act of depriving another person of choice or use of will, does constitute one of the most loathsome forms of black magic.”

—Israel Regardie¹⁴

In the hands of ninja, hypnotism was a formidable weapon. Captured individuals were hypnotized and then released after being programmed with post-hypnotic suggestions designed to be triggered when the victim heard a specific code word whispered, was confronted by a specific sign or symbol, or even when he smelled a special blend of perfume.

When true hypnotism couldn’t be done, ninja mind-slayers resorted to One-Eyed Snake strategies that mimicked real hypnotism. Many of these fake hypnosis techniques are still used by unscrupulous hypnotists today.

Hypnosis Dirty Tricks

“About a Svengali taking advantage of an unwilling Trilby: it can happen that an emotional, gullible person in need of masterminding, may fall under the spell of a stronger, positive personality.”

—Hans Holzer¹⁵

While clinical hypnosis is now a respected tool used by both the medical and psychiatric communities, the type of hypnotism the average person is familiar with is audience-participation stage hypnosis.

When it comes to using hypnosis, mind-slayers hedge their bets by not only studying the legitimate techniques of hypnosis used by doctors and psychologists, but also by studying the tricks of the trade of stage hypnotists. While most stage hypnotists are capable of inducing true hypnosis, there are some who use skullduggery rather than true hypnosis to accomplish their effects.

Stage hypnotists use their knowledge of body language and personality typing to spot the most susceptible subjects. They then use a combination of psychological and physical ploys to “put them under.”

Spotting a Good Hypnosis Subject. The stage hypnotist’s greatest skill is the ability to spot those people most likely to obey his commands without question. Stage hypnotists therefore select only the best subjects from a group of volunteers, those with a predisposition to obey. People don’t volunteer unless they want to take part in the show. They avoid those volunteered by friends. The best subjects for hypnosis appear enthusiastic, cooperative, outgoing, and funny. They are natural hams.

Listeners (as opposed to watchers or touchers) make excellent hypnosis subjects since they pay special attention to words.

A quick test of subjects’ ability to take commands: Have the group hold their arms straight out. Note those who respond immediately, without questioning looks on their faces. Eliminate those whose arms begin wavering after 30 seconds.

Psychological Hypnosis Tricks. With rare exceptions, the process of hypnosis requires at least a minimum of cooperation from the subject. In a clinical setting, it is important the patient agrees to be hypnotized.

On stage, not only do most subjects want to be hypnotized, but they are willing—to some extent—to play along with the hypnotist. Often, even if an individual is not truly hypnotized, if he sees others appearing to be hypnotized, he will play along with the crowd, even to the point of convincing himself he is truly hypnotized. For this reason, when a stage hypnotist chooses a group from the audience, you can bet at least one of them is a “shill,” a confederate whose job it is to convince the other members of the group that the hypnotist actually has the power to hypnotize them.

The old saying among stage hypnotists is: “If you can hypnotize one, you can hypnotize 100.” In other words, people tend to go along if they see someone else doing it.

Hypnotists also play on subjects’ egos by assuring them that “the more intelligent you are, the better you respond to hypnosis.”

Physical Hypnosis Tricks. Initially the hypnotist must get his foot in the door. If the hypnotist can convince the subject that he has the power of hypnosis, then the subject’s skepticism will disappear and he will truly be drawn into a trance.

Unscrupulous mind-slayers have a variety of physical tricks they use to accomplish this.

One hypnotist rigged his subjects’ chair to give a slight electrical shock, making anyone sitting in it “tingle” as soon as the hypnotist started “putting them under.” This tingling sensation convinced the subject the hypnotist had “the gift.” Other hypnotists give suggestions to their subjects that they will smell a certain odor (secretly sprayed in the air by the hypnotist). Others will be made to touch items coated with sugar and then touch their fingers to their mouth right before the hypnotist suggests they remember the taste of a birthday cake. Itching powder has been used to induce the suggestion of itching.

Hypnotists often keep a mint in their mouth, breathing this soothing vapor into the subject’s face in order to relax them. Others spray a light vapor of ether, chloroform, or other calmative agent onto the victim in order to make the victim light-headed. To accomplish this the hypnotist hides a small squeeze-ball up his sleeve.

Modern hypnotists can flood the room with relaxing positive ions or with very low-frequency (VLF) waves specially tuned to make a victim more susceptible to the hypnotist’s commands.

When all else fails, the hypnotist can bulldog a subject by pinching the back of the subject’s head and/or squeezing the side of his neck to constrict the carotid arteries just below the Adam’s apple. This cuts the blood-flow to the victim’s brain. Even slight pressure can cause dizziness and loss of consciousness as the victim passes out into a “trance.”

While a useful tool in the hands of ethical therapists, in the hands of unethical mind-slayers (con men, cult leaders, and rogue government elements) hypnotism can be a frightening tool.

Crime and Hypnosis

While the common belief is that you cannot make people under hypnosis do what they wouldn’t normally do when not under hypnosis (e.g. commit crimes or immoral acts), mind-slayers know how to frame hypnotic and post-hypnotic suggestions so as to make their victims willing to participate in the unthinkable.

Thus, whereas an otherwise loyal servant would never consciously agree to betray his master, that same servant could be given the post-hypnotic suggestion: “You will open the (usually locked) widow in your master’s bedroom so that your master can enjoy the night breeze.” An agent could then take advantage of the open window to enter the residence. A variation of this ploy involves convincing the servant that a poison he is to give his master is really medicine.

Therefore, while it is universally agreed that no one under hypnosis can be forced to commit an act he knows is wrong, he can be tricked into committing an illegal or immoral act if the mind-slayer first convinces him it is right.

Numerous experiments have shown that, given the proper justification, hypnotized subjects can be made to steal, lie, and according to one experiment, even throw acid in another person’s face.¹⁶

Critics claim that the hypnotized subjects still know it is only an experiment.

This leads to a logical question: Why couldn’t a mind-slayer hypnotize a victim into believing an illegal or immoral action was “only an experiment” in order to convince the subject to commit questionable acts, up to and including murder?

A recent example of hypnosis being used to aid in the commission of a crime involves a Virginia man who was accused of sexually assaulting a man he had placed in a hypnotic trance at a stop-smoking clinic.¹⁷ Another involved a bank robber in Reggio di Calabria, Italy, who hypnotized a bank cashier into giving him $4,000 during a hold-up.¹⁸

Murder by Hypnosis

In the 1950s, the possibility of hypnosis being used to commit crime was debated by legal experts after psychologists determined that an unscrupulous hypnotist who really wanted to use hypnosis to commit murder could almost certainly do it.¹⁹ There are at least two documented cases in the United States of hypnosis being used as a murder tool, one successful, the second barely averted.

In 1894, a man confessed to having killed a girl while under a hypnotic spell. The hypnotized killer received a life sentence and his hypnotist was hanged.²⁰

A second murder-by-hypnotism, also in 1894, was barely averted in time when the hypnotized victim “woke up” from the post-hypnotic suggestion he had been given to shove the target—the hypnotist’s wife—into the Grand Canyon.

The hypnotist in this second case was Dr. Henry Meyer, who it was later discovered had left a string of corpses from New York to Chicago. Meyer had studied hypnotism in Leipzig, Germany, under one of the most celebrated mesmerists of the era, Professor Herbert Flint. By the time he got around to targeting his second wife, Meyer had reportedly murdered several people in order to collect on insurance policies, including his first wife.

In preparation for killing his second wife, Meyer hypnotized a plumber named Bretz to believe that Mrs. Meyer was in love with him so Bretz would run off with her to the Grand Canyon. Meyers had already given Bretz a post-hypnotic suggestion to push the woman into the Grand Canyon once they got there. The two lovers “eloped” and were actually standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon before Bretz shook off Meyer’s spell.

The two returned to Chicago and reported the incident to the police, but a grand jury opted not to indict the good doctor. Meyer was set free, but was subsequently arrested for another murder.²¹

In the hands of devious and immoral mind-slayers, the potential for the misuse of hypnotism is obvious. It’s not just the Rasputins and the Mansons we need to watch for, but the potential for the art to be systematically misused by cults, police, and rogue government elements.

There are documented cases of police using forced hypnosis to obtain confessions.²² There are also documented instances of government attempts to use hypnosis for brainwashing.

The Cult Craft

“And thus I clothe my naked villainy with odd old ends stolen forth of holy writ,

And seem I a saint, when most I play the Devil.”

—Shakespeare, King Richard III

“Cult” is what the big religion calls the little religion, what the old religion calls the new.

At one time or another, every new religion has been accused of being a cult. Christianity was originally branded a cult by Jewish authorities.

Modern sociologists and religious historians now avoid using the term “cult,” which is inherently elitist, insulting, and implies that members of these groups are “mind-control victims.”

Political correctness aside, many of these members are mind-control victims!

For every sincere religious leader in history there have always been nine morally bankrupt religious opportunists and extremists eager to prey on the spiritual needy.

More than three million Americans belong to more than a thousand separate groups that qualify as “cults.” These cults come in religious, political, and secular varieties—from breakaway religious sects and mystical New Age schools, to motivational self-help organizations. These cults are not limited to any one age, gender, or race.

What qualifies each of these as a cult is the fact that, no matter what their outward teachings and trappings appear to be, their inner workings, ruthless recruiting methods, and heavy-handed indoctrination techniques vary little.

Three areas act as warning signs that a group—religious or secular, no matter how sincere their beliefs—have crossed the line to become a cult: their attitude (mind-set), their recruiting tactics, and their identity-stripping indoctrination methods.

Cult-Think

Cults and the people trapped in them don’t think like the rest of us. Their “cult-think” allows them to pick and choose the parts of reality that suit them, that support their version of the universe, a universe easily identifiable since they are always at the center of it. Other important aspects of cult-think include:

Cults Claim a Monopoly on “The Truth”

For cults, there is only one locked box of “The Truth” to which only they possess the key.

Sometimes this key is a sacred book containing all “The Truth,” past and to come. Other times, “The Truth” comes in the form of an all-seeing leader with a special pipeline to salvation.

Cult Views Are Not Open to Interpretation

Cults are intolerant of any challenge to their version of, and exclusive guardianship of, “The Truth.” Cults view the world in simplistic terms: black and white, good or evil (as in the cult is good, the rest of the world is evil).

Cults Don’t Tolerate Dissent

Cults discourage open discussion, punishing any member who dares question the cult’s doctrine and leader(s), often assaulting and even killing outsiders who “blaspheme” against their leader, their sacred scriptures, or the group’s collective identity.

Cults Move from Love to Menace

Cult messages begin with “love” but always end with a threat. Cult members approach potential recruits and potential financial contributors with “The Good News,” and talk of “universal love and brotherhood.” But the moment you reject (i.e. openly question) their message, their facade of “bliss” and “brotherhood” crumbles into frustration and their “message of love” quickly turns to veiled and not-so-veiled threats of what will happen to “non-believers” on the “Day of Judgement” when the cult takes power.

Cults Teach Separateness

Cults never tire of telling us (and themselves) how different they are from every such group that has come before. Cult members also never tire of reminding each other how different they are from “the infidels,” often adopting outlandish dress and mannerisms to emphasize the point.

Cults Teach Dependence

Legitimate religious and self-help groups emphasize the empowerment of the individual.

Cults on the other hand make individuals totally dependent on them. To accomplish this, cults demand that recruits turn over any personal money they might have. In return, the cult will see to all their “needs.” Without money, the individual becomes dependent on the cult for everything.

Another way a cult takes away an individual’s independence is to take control of more and more of the recruit’s time. This takes the form of holding the new member to a strict regimen of specific prayer times, bathing and eating rituals, and mandatory group studies, all designed to take away more of an individual’s “free time”—emphasis on the word “free.”

The Cult and the Leader Come First

Cults exist only to promote themselves and their agendas. Thus, the cult and it’s leader(s) are always more important than any single member. Members are encouraged to sacrifice all their bothersome personal wants—friends, family, identity, and wallet—for the higher needs of the cult and its leader(s).

Cults Control

Cults are compulsive about control, managing every aspect of a member’s life, and are committed to wiping out the last vestige of individuality.

Members are given strict standards of dress, deportment, and special greetings—salutes and recognition phrases to parrot when meeting other cult members.

Members are forced to adopt strict dietary rules. Abrupt and drastic changes in diet literally change brain and body chemistry, affecting mood and energy levels. This makes recruits less able to resist the cult’s brainwashing.

It is possible to find people who hold extremist views that qualify as cult-think who actually belong to recognized religious and social organizations that are not cults per se. Mind-slayers are quick to spot and exploit these fanatics. The more extreme, unreasonable, and unbending a person’s views, the easier it is to manipulate that person by simply adding fuel to the fire.

Cult Indoctrination

Change of diet, sleep deprivation, physical stress, and psychological strain can all work together to put a person into a receptive hypnotic state.23 Cult mind-slayers use these tactics and more to break down recruits, making them more susceptible to indoctrination.

Indoctrination Ploys

Cult indoctrination strategies use physiological and psychological tactics.

Physiological tactics break a person down physically. This includes controlling members through isolation, making drastic changes in diet designed to induce physical weakness, and mandatory participation in various types of physical training (strenuous work, yoga-like exercises, mandatory prayer postures), all designed to produce hyperventilation, dizziness, and exhaustion.

After a hard days work filling the cult’s purse, exhausted—hence more receptive—members are forced to attend mandatory classes and/or listen to long speeches by the cult leader.

Psychological ploys attack the recruit’s former beliefs and self image. To accomplish this, cult mind-slayers cut recruits off from all outside sources of information, and use hypnosis and memory manipulation. In many ways, cult indoctrination resembles induction into army boot camp.

The major difference between boot camp training and cult indoctrination is that the aim of boot camp is to challenge the individual to go beyond previous self-limitations, to make the individual stronger, both physically and mentally. Cults, on the other hand, aim to weaken recruits, undermine any vestige of self-worth, and make recruits more susceptible to cult programming.

The Manufacture of Identity

“If you really want to change people,change their appearance.”

—Margaret Thaler Singer²⁴

Once initiated into the cult, recruits must discard their old names and appearances and adopt new identities provided by the cult. Cult recruits must wear extremes of dress (distinctive hats, robes) meant to further isolate them from non-members.

Memory Manipulation

Our memories are our identities. The further back our memories go, the more identity we have and the more rooted we feel. That’s why cults go to great lengths to create fantastic cult histories stretching back into the distant past.

Our memories are not perfect records. They are instead reconstructions. Studies have shown that at least 25 percent of people are susceptible to having false memories implanted in their brains. In fact, memory researchers have successfully implanted false memories in people’s minds, making subjects “remember” characters that never existed and events that never happened.²⁵

Try this experiment: Read the following list of words to a friend: sugar, honey, cake, candy, icing, as long a list of synonyms of “sweet” you can think of. After waiting a few minutes, read the list back to your friend, asking him to identify which of the words you said before. While reading back the list, insert the word “sweet.” Most people will say that “sweet” was one of the original words, a false memory, because all the words listed are associated with being sweet.

The easiest false memories to implant are at least mildly traumatic and are planted by a trusted or admired figure (e.g. relative, friend, or authority figure). Since true memories are richer in sensory details than false memories, mind-slayer hypnotists must add vivid imagery and sensory details to their suggestions especially designed to fit the victim’s type (watcher, listener, toucher).

Cults can manipulate memory to convince recruits they’ve experienced visions or heard the voice of God. Sometimes cults dig up “memories” of a recruit’s “past lives” (where, coincidentally, they belonged to the same cult). Other times, cults help recruits unlock “repressed memories” of spousal and/or parental abuse (a tactic for further alienating recruits from former friends and family).

Cults go out of their way to suppress any pleasant memories recruits cling to of their lives before the cult. Cults also suppress real memories of cult contradictions and abuse.

Some cults use a combination of hypnotism and drugs (narcohypno-tism), which together are very effective for creating amnesia.²⁶

Hidden Agendas

The major difference between military boot camp and cult indoctrination is that the boot camp agenda is overt and abrupt, while cults are covert and subtle.

Changing a person’s thinking works best when the person is unaware he is being manipulated. Thus cults keep recruits unaware of the cult’s hidden agenda until the recruit is completely ensnared. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Once in a cult, people tend to stay in.

Cult members programmed to believe that their leader and the cult’s teachings are infallible, tend to blame themselves when something seems contradictory. They tell themselves that the contradictions must be a result of their misperception of the leader’s actions, of their misinterpretation of “infallible” holy scripture. In for a penny, in for a pound. Cult members always find ways to rationalize away any contradictions in the cult’s message or in the cult leader’s behavior.

This kind of cult rationalization is the same kind shown by hypnotized subjects, such as the man who is given the hypnotic suggestion to forget the number seven and then must rationalize where he acquired an “extra” finger. Rather than openly question and leave when doubts arise, ensnared cult members actually redouble their efforts to be good followers, even to the point of dying with their leader rather than surviving and having to face the criticism of the outside world. Do the names Jonestown, Guyana, or Heaven’s Gate ring a bell?

Conclusions

If you think you might be in a cult, you probably are!

For some, facing real world problems and making adult decisions every day is too daunting. It’s easy to give in and allow someone else to do the worrying for a while. Mind-slayers know this and are all too eager to take our lives off our hands, offering us a nice, safe haven from the world—inside their cult.

Watching Big Brother

By 1590 Hideyoshi Toyotomi had succeeded where no other leader before him had, uniting the islands of Japan. Hideyoshi’s rise to power—from thief, to spy-for-hire, to able general, and finally to dictator of Japan—was due to his ninja trained insight into the human mind.

Hideyoshi’s reign was so successful because he was an accomplished ninja mind-slayer who masterfully used psychological plots and ploys to confuse potential enemies, and used propaganda to cower and control the masses.

Hideyoshi was not the first—and unfortunately not the last—ruthless government leader to use mind-manipulation to control citizens.

Throughout history, from the building of the Tower of Babel down to the babbling of present day politicians, government agencies and police have used mind-slayer psychology, propaganda, and brainwashing to control the very people they were intended to serve.

The Sixties

The 1960s were the heyday of mind-control experiments in the United States.

While rebellious youth experimented with a kaleidoscope of Eastern mysticism and psychedelic drugs to free their minds, shadowy government agencies (our own and, in at least one case, a foreign government) also experimented with psychotropic chemicals, experimental devices, and even “killer psychics,” all in an effort to influence the minds of Americans.

According to firebrand Lyndon LaRouche, there was a concerted effort made by British Intelligence to “dumb down” the United States with drugs and rock music during the ’60s. According to this scenario, many antiestablishment “hippie” leaders and rock stars were really unwitting stooges of the British Secret Service.

As outlandish as this tale might at first appear, it is a known fact that at least one ’60s counterculture icon, Jerry Garcia of the band The Grateful Dead, took part in what was later found to be CIA-sponsored LSD experiments in the San Francisco bay area.

Likewise, it has been proposed that government-sponsored mind-control experiments that took place in the California prison system in the 1960s and ’70s may be responsible for helping create such monsters as Charlie Manson and may have led (inadvertently?) to the 1980s “explosion” of serial killers:

“Victor Marchetti, author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, confirmed. . . that the agency did indeed have a program of experimental mind control and that it used prisoners in American penal institutions as its subjects.”27

For decades, including the ’60s, the Central Intelligence Agency experimented with several mind-altering drugs, not the least of which was LSD. These included atropine (a poison); scopolamine (a depressant); sodium amytal and sodium pentathal (so-called truth serums); and aminazine (the Soviet sister to thorazine), all of which made subjects more “open” to programming.

But the CIA was not the only U.S. government agency to experiment with the minds of U.S. citizens:

• The U.S. Army admits to giving LSD to 2,000 subjects over an eight-year period in the ’60s.

• Between 1954 and 1975, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare tested LSD on 2,500 prisoners, mental patients, and paid volunteers.

• The government also gave millions of dollars in grants to more than 30 university researchers for LSD testing on human subjects, primarily college students.²⁸

Reportedly, several suicides and psychotic reactions occurred amongst those subjects who were given drugs such as LSD without their knowledge.²⁹ Beyond these documented admissions of abuse are accounts of government mind-control research ranging from the recently declassified to the outright bizarre: from UFO disinformation campaigns and attempts at mass subliminal suggestion, to “backwards-masking” on rock-n-roll records.

Three cases from the ’60s illustrate better than all others the extent to which modern governments can go in the use and misuse of mind-manipulation.

The first deals with successful government mind-control techniques intended to turn an ordinary person into an unwitting government agent.

The second illustrates how those citizens with special skills can have their abilities callously perverted for questionable government gain.

The third is a cautionary tale from the ’60s, warning that all of us are susceptible to mind-slayers targeting our need to belong and tempting us with promises of absolute power.

The Seduction of Candy Jones

In 1943, G.H. Estabrooks and E.P. Dutton published the book Hypnotism, which contained a chapter entitled “Hypnotism in Warfare: The Super Spy.” Estabrooks and Dutton advanced the theory that hypnotism could be used to plant information so deeply in an agent’s subconscious that it could not even be tortured out of him since the information would not be in the agent’s conscious mind.

This idea, of using hypnosis to augment the abilities of agents, is nothing new.

As mentioned earlier, Japanese ninja and other groups (moshuh nanren, Hashishins, the Thuggee) successfully used hypnotized agents. Following World War II, with the rise of the Cold War, great strides were made in the black science of mind-manipulation.

All the bizarre theories, techniques, and fears of Cold War mind control came together in the case of Candy Jones.

During the ’40s and ’50s, Candy Jones was one of America’s leading models. In a single month, she made the cover of 11 magazines and was featured in a smash Broadway play. By 1960, having fallen on hard times, Candy was approached by the CIA to act as a courier. She accepted and worked for the agency for the next 12 years.

Then, in 1972, after she began suffering emotional problems (mood swings, insomnia, etc.), Jones sought professional help that culminated in her undergoing hypnosis.

While under this hypnosis, Jones suddenly remembered having been a human guinea pig in CIA mind-control experiments throughout the 1960s. Subsequent investigation revealed that from 1960-1972 Jones had been the victim of CIA narcohypnosis (a combination of drugs and hypnosis), during which a CIA doctor effectively split her personality in two!

To accomplish this, the mad doctor used a variety of hypnosis induction methods including candles, a swinging pendulum, flashing lights, and monotonous “oriental” music. A variety of drugs were used to augment the process.

Candy Jones was not the only person to undergo such experimentation by the CIA. In Trance Formation of America, author Cathy O’Brien recounts her own experiences at the hands of CIA mind-slayers.³⁰ Successful mind-control experiments such as Jones’ and O’Brien’s encouraged covert government mind-manipulation Black-Ops such as the Government’s MONARCH program, a.k.a. MK-ULTRA.

MK-ULTRA aimed to create subconsciously controlled couriers and assassins triggered by a secret code word (as in the Charles Bronson movie Telefon). Still another notorious government program involved attempts to create psychic killers!

Psychic Assassins

In 1995, the U.S. government acknowledged the existence of the secret program known by several names but finally as Stargate. This CIA-sponsored group of “psychic spies” operated from the mid-’60s up through 1988.

This secret unit of eight or more men was made up of recruits who had scored high on ESP tests. Taught to control their ESP ability through biofeedback, these psychics were initially employed to do “remote viewing” of “soft targets” (such as pinpointing the location of hostages and reading the minds of enemy leaders and scientists) and “hard targets” (such as locating hidden military installations).

Stargate was eventually discontinued, but not before attempts were made to turn Stargate’s psychic spies into psychic assassins capable of using their ESP power to kill enemy leaders with a psychic bolt from afar!³¹

During President George Bush’s trip to Japan, it was alleged that Japanese intelligence used their own psychic assassins to make Bush sick enough to vomit during an important dinner, causing America to lose face in the eyes of the Japanese people. This would ensure Bush would then feel obligated to give economic and political concessions to Japan in order to recover his face. These Japanese psychic assassins reportedly employed an ancient ninja mind-control technique known as ki-doll.³²

The Third Wave

“You thought that you were the elect. That you were better than those outside this room. You bargained your freedom for the comfort of discipline and superiority. You chose to accept the group’s will and the big lie over your own conviction. Oh, you think to yourself that you were just going along for the fun. That you could extricate yourself at any moment. But where were you heading? How far would you have gone?”

—Ron Jones³³

It took less than five days in April 1969 for teacher Ron Jones to turn 200 students at normal, middle-class Cubbely High School in Palo Alto, California into goose-stepping Nazis.

Jones’ intent was to help students in his world history class understand the mentality of Nazi Germany. Jones planned to do this by having his class form “The Third Wave,” a role-playing group complete with all the fascist trappings: easy-to-parrot slogans (Strength through Discipline, Strength through Action, Strength through Pride); pseudo-military rankings; even a Nazi-like salute.

Jones was shocked at how quickly students took to his new, strict, and arbitrary rules of conduct. He was also alarmed at how easily “normal,” middle-class students accepted orders—without question—from an authority figure.

On the third day, Jones issued membership cards, three of which were marked with red “X”s to indicate that these three students had been singled out to be monitors responsible for ensuring that other Third Wave members followed the rules even while not in class.

While only three red-X monitors had been appointed, Jones soon discovered that half the class was spying on the other half!

Jones also opened Third Wave membership, encouraging his original class members to recruit other students from outside the class. By the end of the day more than 200 students at Cubberly had joined The Third Wave!

By now, students’ Third Wave role-playing had begun to bleed over into their lives outside class. When some parents expressed concern, a local Rabbi stepped up to give his blessing to Jones and The Third Wave. Soon, even the principal was observed giving the Third Wave salute.

Ironically, Third Wave students’ academic skills improved noticeably during the experiment. Jones found the students more focused and eager to learn and do more. Belonging to the Third Wave gave the students identity and purpose. On the more ominous side, some students became totally lost in their Third Wave identities. One student went so far as assigning himself the job of “bodyguard” to Jones.

Jones himself began feeling increasingly uncomfortable with his role as leader of The Third Wave, finding himself slipping into the role of dictator. He decided to end the experiment after some Third Wave students began bullying those students who took The Third Wave too lightly.

Jones needn’t have been surprised that middle-class students, even those raised in the “Land of the Free,” should so easily embrace an authoritarian system.

The research of psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980) concluded that, given a choice between freedom and security, people will choose security every time. Fromm determined that the more freedom of choice a person has, the more anxiety that person has.

Fromm also found that most individuals take their identity from their association with others. Thus they tend to do what others around them are doing—they “go along to get along.”

The Third Wave experiment also reinforced the findings of controversial ’60s researcher Stanley Milgram (born 1933). Milgram’s experiments, conducted at Yale in the early 1960s, concluded that, in obedience to authority, people would go to extremes, even to the extent of torturing others. When test subjects were ordered to administer electric shock to other students:

“They trembled, sweated, and showed other signs of stress when “punishing” the student. Still, a large majority carried out Milgram’s order, administering what they believed was great pain. This led Milgram to conclude that ordinary people will follow orders, if they come from a legitimate authority, in the same way as the Germans did when told by their Nazi leaders to commit atrocities against the Jews.”³⁴

Mind-slayers know full well how attractive promises of security, order, and power can be, whether offered to an individual, a disenfranchised minority, or an entire nation. It is therefore vital each of us do a realistic assessment of our own susceptibility to the seduction of the symbols, ploys, and promises of power routinely used by both mind-slayers in power, and by those mind-slayers striving to be in power.

Police Mind-Slayers

“By what methods do police obtain such an unbelievable percentage of confessions? Perhaps a goodly number of these confessions are false, elicited only by unfair, illegal, or reprehensible methods of interrogation.”

—Philip G. Zimbardo³⁵

Tyrannical police forces—domestic and military—have routinely used physical torture to obtain confessions from prisoners. Today, under more scrutiny from human rights groups, the badge-wearing mind-slayers serving such regimes have taken to using more subtle techniques of interrogation, such as drugs (truth serums, chemical pain enhancers), forced hypnosis, and brainwashing. One tried-and-true strategy still used by police worldwide is good old-fashioned psychological intimidation.

Police have always used psychology to break suspects. For ethical police, a keen insight into psychology helps them stay one step ahead of criminals, aids in hostage negotiations, and helps them convince criminals to confess.

Yet depending on who is wielding it—an ethical policeman or a ruthless mind-slayer—insight into the human psyche backed by the power of a badge can be either a valuable tool for getting at the truth or a fearsome weapon of humiliation, torture, and mind-manipulation.

Thus, it is important to study these techniques, if not to improve our own craft, then to protect ourselves from mind-slayers wielding these techniques.

Confession is Good for the Soul

In the United States today, 80 percent of all crimes are solved by confessions. While most American police have progressed from yesterday’s crude “billy-club brainwashings” to more subtle psychological “beatings,” contemporary mind-slayer interrogation techniques are no less effective and, in many instances, hardly less brutal than medieval thumbscrews.

Japan has an even higher confession rate than the United States: 90 percent. However, human rights groups allege that Japanese police extract confessions through interrogations that are often “brutal attempts to break suspects psychologically.”³⁶

Many psychologists maintain that all of us harbor deep-seated guilt feelings for real and imagined crimes and sins committed during childhood, making wringing a confession out of a suspect all the easier. This theory goes on to say that we all have something we want to confess, something we need to get off our chests. (Remember our enterprising Yakuza gangster in the section on the confidence man?)

Police interrogators know how important a feeling of guilt is when interrogating a suspect. Therefore, in lieu of outright arresting a suspect, the investigator invites the suspect to come along to the police station to help clear up a few things, or to help police find the “real” culprit in a mug-book.

By doing this, in effect police are asking the suspect to “volunteer” to go with the police.

Innocent individuals often comply because they don’t want to look guilty, or simply as a knee-jerk reaction to having been conditioned all their lives to obey authority. This is also why innocent people foolishly waive their right to have an attorney present. (Police always imply that even thinking about getting a lawyer will make you appear guilty.)

“Volunteering” to go down to the station is the suspect’s first act of giving in to the interrogator. When the subsequent “interview” turns against the suspect, the suspect is reminded how he “volunteered.” This is the interrogator’s way of making a suspect feel guilty and foolish for having placed himself in such a situation.

In places where physical torture is still the order of the day, women prisoners are forced to strip off their own clothing. This humiliation is designed to make the woman feel guilty of assisting in her own torture. Rapists also use this ploy—planting the seeds in their victim’s mind that she didn’t fight back hard enough, proving she “wanted it.” These seeded doubts following so close on the heels of the rape trauma are why so many rapes go unreported.

Setting the Stage

In the same way the producers of a Broadway play begin with a plot, develop a script, then assemble the players and props, so to do police interrogators “set the stage” for their well-rehearsed play. But this play’s purpose is to trap, trick, and—when necessary—terrorize suspects into making confessions.

All interrogators begin with preparatory techniques designed to soften up the suspect. First, police interrogators make sure they control the time and place of the interrogation. Ideally, a suspect is never interrogated in familiar surroundings. An isolated, windowless room is best, one that is quiet and free of distraction. The room should be empty except for a bare table and one or two hard chairs. Armless, straight-backed chairs permit the suspect’s conscious and unconscious movements to be observed. The suspect is never allowed any “tension-relieving” activities (such as playing with pencils or paperclips, etc.) that would allow him to occupy his hands.

Suspects are forbidden to smoke. Cigarettes are allowed only when they can be used by interrogators as a bribe.

As much as possible, suspects are reduced to a child-like state. To accomplish this, suspects are forced to sit quietly and told not to speak unless spoken to. They must ask permission to go to the restroom. (To increase a suspect’s discomfort, interrogators offer the suspect a soda pop or cup of coffee prior to a lengthy interrogation, knowing that sooner or later the suspect will have to beg permission to pee.)

Studying these techniques, it is not hard to imagine how they can be easily tailored to suit individual needs of mind-slayers to gain the upper hand over their victims.

During wartime, POWs are always stripped of their uniforms to symbolize their loss of identity and their separation from comrades and support network. Likewise, criminal suspects are never interrogated in the presence of anyone they know and can lean on for support. Any distinctive clothing (gang colors, etc.) are taken from them.

Police interrogators usually opt to wear civilian clothes rather than uniforms in order to look less threatening. Career criminals often feel a sense of false pride when interviewed by plainclothes detectives, as opposed to uniform officers. Such criminals are prone to brag.

Psychological Ploys

“Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity.You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

—George Orwell, 1984

Once the stage is set, police interrogators begin reciting a well-rehearsed dialogue of psychological threats and promises designed to unnerve the suspect. A cutting at the edges ploy is used by reminding the suspect how ashamed he’s made his mother, his friends and family; how he’s “failed” his gang, his country, his “manhood.”

Other tried-and-true police interrogation tactics include:

The Knowledge Bluff. Police pretend to possess more evidence of crimes than they actually have. To do this, interrogators reveal a few clues to the suspect (most often only guesses) and pretend to know more, inviting the suspect to “fill in the blanks.”

Often police up the ante by staging a phony ID line-up, complete with false witnesses who “positively identify” the supect.

Bargaining Down. Involves police making a suspect believe he is being charged with crimes more serious than the one the interrogators are actually trying to get a confession for.

For example, a burglar might be told he is being charged with a murder committed at the same time the burglary (the actual crime being investigated) took place. The suspect’s only alibi is to say he was committing a burglary at the time of the murder.

Lie-Detector Scams. One enterprising police interrogator bought a novelty rock designed to change color when warmed by the hand. Asking a suspect to hold the rock, the interrogator stuns the suspect by pointing out the fact that the “truth rock” is changing color because the suspect lied! Other interrogators have had naive suspects hold walkie-talkies or keep their hands on the metal chair they are sitting in, a chair the suspect is told is hooked up to a lie-detector.

Note: Many cults also use pseudo-lie-detector machines that supposedly reveal a recruit’s “secret feelings” and “dark secrets.” This implants doubts in the recruit’s mind about his previous beliefs, his feelings toward friends and family, and can even make him question his sexuality. Having “discovered” these hidden problems, the cult then offers ways to help the recruit work through his problems.

Playing one suspect off another. This works when two or more suspects are involved in a crime. One suspect is told the other suspect is being released (implying his partner snitched on him).

Other ploys of this nature include the first suspect “accidentally” seeing an interrogator talking in hushed tones to the second suspect. Or, the second suspect hearing a stenographer being called to record his partner’s “confession.”

If all else fails, one suspect hears the sounds (either real or feigned) of a fellow suspect being beaten and is told he is next!

Limited Time Offers. These are given to suspects to pressure them into confessing.

Like cult recruiters and Madison Avenue pitch-masters, police interrogators know most people don’t make good decisions under pressure, therefore suspects are pressured to take advantage of “a limited time offer,” to strike a plea bargain—before the other suspect grabs the offer.

Good Cop/Bad Cop. This strategy works because the unfamiliar surroundings of a police station and interview room cause suspects to look around for a sympathetic face. Realizing this, police interrogators work in pairs, with one playing the role of “Bad Cop,” acting rude and threatening, while his partner, “Good Cop,” pretends to have sympathy for the suspect. If you’ve ever seen a movie or television show about cops, this ploy will be familiar to you.

Bad Cop is quick to pounce on any nervous tells: facial tics, fidgeting, sweating, bobbing Adam’s apple, or veins popping out on the suspect’s neck as “proof ” the suspect is lying. The more Bad Cop points out these “signs of guilt” (real or made up), the more the signs actually appear!

When Bad Cop launches into an uncontrollable tirade or makes motions to physically abuse the suspect, Good Cop steps in and orders Bad Cop to back off. With Bad Cop out of the room, cooling off, Good Cop apologizes for Bad Cop’s behavior and confides to the suspect how he wishes they would assign him someone else to work with before Bad Cop hurts another suspect and gets them both in trouble again.

Like the accomplished mind-slayers they are, both Good Cop and Bad Cop have learned to spot and exploit psychological fault lines.

Where Bad Cop uses fear to browbeat a suspect, Good Cop uses sympathy ploys. (“I’d have done the same thing in your situation.”) Good Cop also appeals to the suspect’s ego, “Only a smart guy could pull off a job like this.”

Good Cop minimizes the seriousness of the crime and always leaves the suspect with ready-made excuses for his actions and creates opportunities for the suspect to “come clean.” Good Cop uses a macho appeal, “It took some big cojones to pull off something like this!” and then watches the suspect for body language tells such as his unconsciously sitting up straighter when “complimented.”

Conversely, Bad Cop mocks the suspect and questions the suspect’s “manhood”: “Why are you afraid to talk? Who are you scared of?” Where Good Cop is polite, Bad Cop takes every opportunity to derail the suspect’s train of thought, interrupting in mid-excuse, making the suspect start over, always pointing out any inconsistencies in the suspect’s alibi—frustrating the suspect at every turn.

Unscrupulous interrogators have always relied on torture—both physical and psychological. Ethical police interrogators on the other hand rely solely on psychological ploys. Individual mind-slayers are well acquainted with these police interrogation tactics and they often adopt and adapt these techniques to manipulate their victims.

Ironically, many of these criminal mind-slayers learned their mind-manipulation tactics by themselves spending time “in the box,” i.e. by being subjected to intense police interrogation.

On a grander scale, the same psychological insights the ethical police at your local station house use to get at the truth can be used by ruthless police mind-slayers in a tyrannical regime to cower and control a whole nation.

Implanting False Memories

“If we can’t trust our own minds to tell us the truth, what is there left to trust?”

—Loftus and Ketcham³⁷

Recent scientific studies have proven what police interrogators and mind-slayers have always known: that it is possible to implant false memories into a person’s head and thereby get even the most innocent person to confess to the most heinous of crimes.

The most infamous case in modern times involving police interrogation and memory manipulation took place in Olympia, Washington, in 1988. In a scenario straight out of Salem, Massachusetts 1692, two daughters (aged 18 and 22) accused their father of having molested them.

The two daughters “remembered” this history of abuse while attending a fundamentalist Bible camp, where a charismatic cult expert lectured on how prevalent Satanic ritual abuse was, even in good Christian families.

Encouraged by the fellow camp-goers stepping forward to “confess” they had been the victims of ritual Satanic abuse and feeling peer pressure to fit in, the oldest daughter stepped forward to proclaim that she, her sister, and her brothers had been molested by her father, in her case for more than 17 years!

Returning home to Olympia, the two girls told their stories to the local sheriff.

Their father, a church-going, upstanding member of the community, was invited down to the police station for questioning. After hours of continuous interrogation, the father confessed to being a “High Priest of Satan,” to being a sodomizer of children and a willing participant in the murder, dismemberment, and cannibalization of infants. He even remembered being abused himself at age 4 or 5. The man’s stories became increasingly bizarre: incorporating infant sacrifice, Satanic ritual, and bestiality.

Before long, the accused man’s wife and his two sons were also “remembering” incidents of abuse. When their memories became sketchy, their preacher and the police investigators were there to encourage them.³⁸ When questioned about his abuse, one of the sons first denied it, then “remembered” it, and then recanted. Soon the second daughter upped the ante by implicating two of her father’s poker buddies.

All these “memories” were later proven false.

Eventually the father would come to his senses and try to withdraw his confession, but his appeal fell on deaf judicial ears and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Why would a man confess to such a heinous array of crimes he didn’t commit, crimes that never happened?

Recall that false memories are more easily implanted when they are both traumatic and when they are planted by a trusted person. Both these prerequisites came into play during the father’s interrogation.

First, the father trusted his police interrogators who, ironically, were his friends and colleagues (he was a chief civil deputy for the same sheriff’s department investigating the allegations against him).

Second, the father trusted his daughters who he’d described to police as “good Christian girls” incapable of lying. (Therefore, they must be telling the truth about the molestations, the police countered!)

Third, police interrogators knew the father’s beliefs and were able to use kyonin-no-jutsu to turn those beliefs against him.

Investigating detectives (trusted friends and authority figures to the man) played on the father’s religious fervor, liberally loading their questions with religious references they knew the man would respond to.

The father’s religious beliefs (i.e. superstitions) taught him that “demonic forces” were real and warned him that the Devil had not only the power to make people do something they wouldn’t normally do, but also to make them forget they had done it. These fundamentalist beliefs were reinforced by a visiting minister (a trusted authority figure) who invited the man to “get it off his chest,” reassuring the confused and traumatized Christian that “confession is good for the soul.”

Ironically, the prosecution’s case began falling apart when their own expert on cult mind control turned against them, convinced that the father was not guilty and that he had been led to confess through a combination of leading questions and suggestive comments.

Eventually all the allegations of “Satanic abuse” remained unproven and the charges were dropped against the man’s two poker buddies. By then however, it was already too late since the father had pled guilty and received his sentence.

The real injustice of the Olympia case was that no one was ever called to account for implanting the false memories of abuse into the two daughter’s minds in the first place.

How police ask questions can have as much impact as the actual questions they ask. Evidence shows that even the phrasing of questions can influence answers.³⁹ There is a big difference in a police investigator asking an accident witness “How fast was the blue car going when it slammed into the red car?” and his asking “Did you see the cars collide?” Such leading questions are called “priming,” as in priming a water pump. Thus:

“No two interrogations are the same. Every interrogation is shaped definitively by the personality of the source—and of the interrogator, because interrogation is an intensely interpersonal process.”

—KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation ⁴⁰

Interrogation Hypnosis

“Any spellbinder is part hypnotist.”

—Hans Holzer⁴¹

It has often been pointed out how closely the typical police interrogation session resembles hypnosis. Police interrogators are trained to keep suspects isolated (minimizing distractions, forcing a suspect to focus on a single subject) and to use words and tone designed to lull the subject into a state of tranquility. ⁴²

In the Olympia, Washington, case, interrogators reportedly spoke in soft, soothing tones and constantly encouraged the suspect (their “friend”) to relax. This strategy succeeded in lulling the man into a “trance-like state,” where he began speaking in a “strange, faraway voice.”

Torturous conditions such as dieté (extremes of diet), sleep deprivation, and stress—all of which are used routinely by police interrogators—have all been shown to induce hypnotic-like trance states in suspects.

According to KUBARK, the CIA’s counterintelligence interrogation manual, the main purpose of interrogation hypnosis is not to get at the truth, but rather to help the subject “align himself with his interrogators.” Once this is accomplished:

“ . . . once the subject is tricked into believing that he is talking to a friend rather than foe, or that divulging the truth is the best way to serve his own purposes, his resistance will be replaced by cooperation. The value of hypnotic trance is not that it permits the interrogator to impose his will but rather that it can be used to convince the interrogatee that there is no valid reason not to be forthcoming.”

—KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation⁴³

Under hypnosis subjects become more compliant and hypersusceptible to leading questions, cues, and suggestions from police and other observers.⁴⁴

An estimated 5 to 10 percent of the population is already highly suggestible, hence hypnotizable, and can shift instantly and almost imperceptibly from normal consciousness into a deep hypnotic trance state. Therefore a police interrogator (or a long-winded salesman, for that matter) might inadvertently trigger a hypnotic state in a person they are interviewing without being aware of it, causing that person to become more susceptible to their message. How much more so if the interrogator (or salesman) is a ruthless mind-slayer deliberately trying to lull his subject into a trance?

Attempts have even been made to use forced hypnosis to coerce confessions. ⁴⁵ Such deliberate mind-manipulation is often a prelude to cult and government brainwashing.

Making a suspect think he has been hypnotized is the next best thing to actually hypnotizing him. For example, a suspect may be slipped a “silent drug” (i.e. a drug he is not aware he has been given) before being told he is about to be hypnotized. As the interrogator begins to speak and the drug begins to take effect, the suspect feels “warm,” “sleepy,” or feels a “tingling in his limbs” all indications (to him) that he is actually being hypnotized.

Such One-Eyed Snake hypnotism ploys often have the effect of relieving a suspect of responsibility, giving him a reason to confess. If a suspect consciously or subconsciously wants to talk, your “pretending” to hypnotize him can induce him to “pretend” to be hypnotized, giving him the excuse he needs to spill his guts and save his skin. (This follows Sun Tzu’s advice of always leaving an enemy a face-saving way out.)

Hypnosis can also be used to make a person forget, to cloud and confuse his true memories.

Once a suspect is placed in a relaxed, receptive state, doubts can be planted in his mind. Post-hypnotic suggestions can also be given to deeply-entranced subjects to make them repress certain facts, or to forget altogether that they’ve been hypnotized.

Hypnosis designed to induce amnesia is often augmented with drugs. Drugs to accomplish this, such as lorazepam (which blocks all memory of surgical procedures) and others mixed in concoctions with LSD-25 were studied by the CIA.⁴⁶

“Did I not tell you just now how we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, not even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will.”

—George Orwell, 1984

“The Effectiveness of a threat depends not only on what sort of person the interrogatee is and whether he believes that his questioner can and will carry the threat out but also on the interrogator’s reasons for threatening.”

—KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation

Often the mind-slayer’s craft comes down to simply making threats. Some of these threats are overt, some more subtle. For example, the Good Cop’s threats are always implied, the Bad Cop’s threats overt.

Threats are effective with some personality types, useless with others.

INTERROGATION CHARACTER TYPES

Character type:	The Orderly Type
Traits:	Orderly and frugal; intellectual; reaches decisions slowly; uses “The Cause” for self advancement; can rationalize turning traitor. Nurses grudges. Stubborn. Hates authority.
Countertactics:	Appear orderly when talking to him. Turn him against his superiors (who have failed him).
Character type:	The Optimistic Type
Traits:	Happy-go-lucky; impulsive and inconsistent; drug user; hopeful. Avoids responsibility and leaves self in the hands of “fate.” Seeks reassurance. Sometimes the youngest in the family.
Countertactics:	Convince him that fate has turned against him. Make him place his hope in you. Be his protector (Good Cop/parent).
Character type:	The Greedy, Demanding Type
Traits:	Attached to others, his loyalties will shift if he feels authority has let him down. Thinks the world owes him something. Seeks substitute parents.
Countertactics:	Threaten his support network. Be his father or big brother. Show concern.
Character type:	The Self-Centered Type
Traits:	Fearful, he compensates with false bravado. Lies. Brags and craves approval. Externally motivated. Vain, sensitive to criticism.
Countertactics:	Pretend to be impressed by his daring. Play on his vanity. Accuse his superiors of abandoning him.
Character type:	The Masochistic Type
Traits:	Has a strong, cruel, unrealistic side. Needs to relieve guilt, to atone. Compulsive gambler who loses on purpose. May remain silent to invite punishment. Beware of false confessions.
Countertactics:	Play on his guilt. Use “parental” scolding. Convince him that if he confesses, he will be punished and then reinstated.
Character type:	The Fear-of-Success Type
Traits:	Cannot tolerate success. Accident-prone, fantasy-prone, “Elephant-shit” artist. Blames others. May have a need to suffer. (See The Masochistic Type)
Countertactics:	Feed his grandiose, “Elephant-shit” plans. Convince him others (superiors) are holding him back.
Character type:	The Reality-Challenged Type (a.k.a. The Schizoid)
Traits:	Lives in a fantasy world. Unrealistic image of self. Doesn’t like “inferiors” questioning him. No lasting relationships. Often unaware of his own lying. “The Cause” is simply a means to an end.
Countertactics:	Reinforce his fantasy world. Play on his need for approval. Then destroy his fantasy world.
Character type:	The Unjustly Victimized Type (a.k.a. The Exception)
Traits:	Feels he is the victim of a great injustice. Believes the world owes him. He will make demands for special treatment in exchange for turning traitor. His fight is against “The System,” whose power he secretly envies. He is above the law.
Countertactics:	Turn his hatred of “The System” around, showing him how he can finally be part of “The System” and share its power because he deserves special recognition. Turn him against his comrades who “abandoned” him.
Character type:	The Normal Type
Traits:	Exhibits various combinations of traits from the previous eight types.
Countertactics:	Remain observant and flexible in your responses. Adjust approach as specific traits are identified.

The following are rules of thumb mind-slayers use when making threats:

• Implied threats are better than direct threats.

• Threats delivered coolly and quietly are most effective.

• Never threaten out of anger, especially in response to the subject’s anger.

• Threats should include a “way out,” a way for the victim to give you the information you want, or do the thing you are asking him to do, and still save themselves (their self-respect, their life, etc.).

• Threats attacking self-esteem are more effective than physical threats.

• The threat of death should be used sparingly. Care should be taken that the subject does not see death as a welcome release from suffering and/or shame, or that his death will make him a “martyr.”

• The threat of futility convinces the subject that all his efforts to resist interrogation (and/or indoctrination) are ultimately useless, a waste of time and effort causing him (and others) needless hardship. For some people, the idea of throwing their lives away means nothing, so long as they are “remembered.” For such people, to die in obscurity is worse than death.

• Cutting-at-the-edges threats use implied and explicit threats against a subject’s support network (family, friends, etc.).

When making threats, the mind-slayer watches the victim closely for any response tells given away by the victim’s face and/or body language. This allows the interrogator to gauge the effectiveness of overt threats, and to notice when the victim has realized the implications of more covert threats.

How Propaganda Became a Dirty Word

“The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in the calling of the masses’ attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed in their field of vision.”

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Since World War II, propaganda has been a dirty word. Yet the concept of propaganda is hardly a 20th century invention:

“No doubt propaganda has existed ever since primates have been sufficiently articulate to use it. Artifacts from prehistory and from early civilizations give evidence that dazzling raiment, mystic insignia, and monuments were used to advertise the purported majesty and supernatural powers of early rulers and priests.”⁴⁷

Thus, propaganda as a tool and weapon of both religious and government policy has been known and used since ancient times.

If you happen to be a conqueror preferring to win territory by scaring people rather than having to skewer them, then the propaganda you send ahead of your army makes such conquest all the easier.

Persian dictator Cyrus the Great used propaganda against Babylon and Xerxes used it against the Greeks. Alexander the Great’s father Philip II of Macedon also used it against Athens. Likewise, Genghis Khan’s conquests were to a great extent aided by the propaganda (fear!) that rode ahead of his horde, warning of the futility and fatality of resisting the coming wave.

Ancient propaganda ploys concentrated on spreading myths and legends of a king’s invincibility. Little has changed.

The most successful political and religious leaders either had a natural talent for propaganda or were smart enough to employ wily advisors adept at crafting and spreading easily memorized political slogans, or religious parables, proverbs, and commandments from their particular gods—all meant to excite and/or cower the people.

Propaganda and the Art ofWar

“How to influence people was an old quest long before Dale Carnegie wrote about it.”

—Hans Holzer⁴⁸

Our modern word “propaganda” comes from the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), “The Propaganda” for short, a powerful group of cardinals in charge of promoting the Roman Catholic Church since 1622.

As the “art” of war became more sophisticated, systematic approaches to propaganda began appearing.

In China Sun Tzu understood the importance of propaganda when he wrote, “All warfare is based on deception.”

In 4th century BCE, roughly around the same time Sun Tzu was penning his Art of War, a man named Kautilya, who was a Brahmin prime minister to the Nanda kings of Magadha, India, felt unappreciated by his employers and frustrated by their shortsightedness. He packed his bags and defected to their rival, Candragupta Maurya.

Candragupta was wiser than the Nanda, and recognized the wisdom of Kautilya’s advice. Using Katilya’s insights, Candragupta quickly swallowed up the lands of the Nanda and become emperor.

Kautilya eventually wrote his thoughts down into the Arthasatra (Principles of Politics), a treatise on the art of governing that is often compared with Plato’s Republic and Machiavelli’s The Prince. The Arthasastra discourses on both politics and economics.

Kautilya asserted that moral considerations have no place in politics and championed the use of spies, psychological warfare, and propaganda. According to Kautilya, propaganda, both overt and covert, should be used to disrupt an enemy’s army and capture his capital:

“He advised the king to follow only that policy calculated to increase his power and material resources, and he felt no scruple in recommending dubious and sometimes highly unjust and immoral means to achieve that end. For this purpose he sketched an elaborate system for recruiting spies and training them.”⁴⁹

Covertly, propaganda agents should be sent to infiltrate the kingdoms of both present and potential enemies: spreading defeatist gloom and doom among enemy troops; planting rumor and misleading news (a.k.a. “disinformation”) among enemy civilians:

“Like modern propagandists, Kautilya was much preoccupied with techniques for sowing fear, dissension, and confusion in the opponent’s ranks (psychological warfare) and for showering blandishments on allies without becoming excessively dependent upon them.”⁵⁰

Overtly, propagandists raise the standard of the king as high as possible: proclaiming the king to be the embodiment of all that is good, convincing the people that the king can do magic, announcing that God and the Prophets are all on the king’s side! Within the king’s own kingdom, internal propaganda is used to manipulate a king’s subjects in order to stimulate their support for state policies.

According to Kautilya, a king has two goals: to keep himself in power, and to ensure the prosperity of the people (thereby safeguarding his own position). All propaganda is therefore intended to teach a simple lesson: All who support the king’s goals will reap great benefit. All who oppose the king will reap the whirlwind!

This is why Kautilya is often referred to as “the Eastern Machiavelli.”

Systematic approaches to propaganda appeared in the West as early as Athens, 500 BCE. But not until the notorious Florentine Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) penned The Prince (1513) and The Art of War (1520), outlining how to ruthlessly gain and then maintain power, was propaganda seen as a vital and indispensable part of both military and political conflict.

Considered by many to be “the father of modern political science,” Machiavelli wrote that a ruler was justified in using any means necessary to maintain the stability of his lands, including cruelty, force, and deception (i.e. propaganda).

According to Machiavelli, a virtuous prince maintains power not by crushing his subjects when they rise against him, but by preventing his subjects from becoming rebellious. To accomplish this, the prince utilizes propaganda and the institutions of religion to keep the people satisfied.

Machiavelli became required reading and his writings influenced not only ambitious political and religious leaders, but social philosophers and even playwrights.

While works of fiction, many of the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) reveal an astute familiarity with the use of psychological warfare and propaganda.

In King Richard III (1591), Buckingham plants rebel-rousers in town to stir popular support for Richard’s coup. In another propaganda ploy, Richard leaves a note on Norfolk’s tent prior to battle meant to undermine Norfolk’s morale. And prior to the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard gives a propaganda-laden speech, inciting his men, assuaging their consciences and destroying their doubts.

Similarly stirring was King Henry V’s (1600) inspiring speech to the king’s men prior to Agincourt, goading them to victory. In Hamlet (1603), the depressed Prince of Denmark puts on a play to unnerve his traitorous uncle. What are Iago’s whispered rumors and the suggestions of infidelity he successfully planted in the mind of the Moor in Othello (1622) if not propaganda?

Mark Anthony’s rebel-rousing, sarcastic speech in Julius Caesar (1623) gradually turns the crowd of listeners into a mob ready to burn and kill in order to avenge Caesar’s assassination. Macbeth (1623) sees a man led astray by the prophecy-propaganda of three witches and by the whispers of his ambitious wife.

Today, propaganda is an intrinsic factor in any military campaign.Yet we need not be attached to the military to be affected by it. Each of us are also affected on a daily basis by propaganda beamed at us by a variety of groups, some political, some religious, many with questionable, shadowy, and downright dangerous agendas.

Whatever their goals—obvious or hidden, global or backyard—the same tried-and-true tactics and techniques of propaganda are used by all such mind-slayers.

Types of Propaganda

“The proper words can make people take actions. ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words . . . ?’ Wrong. Words can do all sorts of things. For instance, words of praise can make you work harder, run faster, or behave in a jollier way. A word of criticism can do the opposite. Whether or not we believe the words, they do their work. ‘Something always sticks’ is the way the Romans put it. The word, being an externalization of a thought, is the key to our behavior.”

—Hans Holzer

Propaganda attacks all three of Sigmund Freud’s classic levels of mind:

• Rational and logical arguments engage the Ego;

• Pleasurable promises appeal to our child-like Id; and

• Moral arguments target the higher reasoning Super-Ego.

Propaganda arguments fall into two categories, depending on their intended target audience. Strategic propaganda is aimed at a mass audience, and carries a more generalized message (e.g. the enemy is a bad person). Tactical propaganda, on the other hand, is more specific, more finely tuned and aims to get us do specific things (e.g. buy this car, buy this war).

Where strategic propaganda uses commonly shared symbols and universal archetypes that affect everyone (e.g. all Americans), tactical propaganda uses the same images in addition to images and symbols that have special meaning within a specifically-targeted group (e.g. a minority or a specific religious group).

Whether strategic or tactical, all propaganda must be adjusted to the particular level of understanding of those being targeted:

“All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.” (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf)

Thus, depending on its intent and intended audience, a typical propaganda ploy can include the use of suggestions (overt and subliminal), innuendo, and rumor on both a personal and/or mass scale. In other words, propaganda is just a rumor on steroids.

In The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, author R.M. Goldenson, Ph.D., defines a rumor thus:

“An unverified report or account that circulates primarily by word of mouth. Rumors may be wholly false or may contain an element of truth that is usually distorted or exaggerated. Though they often circulate in the form of gossip and may be deliberately ‘planted’ at any time, they tend to occur in greatest profusion during periods of public crisis when reliable information is hard to obtain.”⁵¹

Whether spread thin by individual mind-slayers or slathered on thick by professional government spin-doctors, rumors are the butter on the bread of propaganda.

All concerted programs of propaganda begin as rumors. Some are deliberately planted by mind-slayers in preparation for future propaganda, while others occur spontaneously (in lieu of real information being available) and are helped along by mind-slayers.

The classic office rumor goes something like this: You casually mentions to the office gossip that “Bob certainly seems to be doing better since he finished the program . . .” Then you quickly change the subject when asked “What program?”

Drug problems? Emotional problems? Marital problems? No one seems to be sure, and you can bet they aren’t going to ask “Poor Bob.” Just to be on the safe side, not wanting to upset Bob, they start avoiding the troubled man.

The boss, having heard the rumor, may decide to take it easy on Bob ’till Bob works out his problems. The boss then assigns Bob’s pet project to the next man in line . . . you!

The more sketchy a rumor the better. Rumors work best when you allow others to fill in the blanks.

Tools of Propaganda

Propaganda aims to accomplish one of two goals: Integration propaganda helps form people into more easily manageable units, causing them to hold the same opinion about a specific thing. This makes it easier to control them and, when need be, to focus their collective energies against the enemy. Agitation propaganda incites us to do a specific action.

Both integration propaganda and agitation propaganda use one or more of the following arguments:

• Us versus them: There is no middle ground. They are different than us. They don’t think like us, ergo They are less deserving of life and land than us.

• Taboo and terror: They have committed atrocities—crimes against humanity. They trample our traditions and commit taboo acts shocking to both man and God.

• Exaggeration: The number of the dead killed and oppressed by our enemy are purposely inflated to make matters sound worse than they really are. Statistics are skewed. Someone once said that if you torture numbers long enough, they’ll confess to anything!

• High stakes: We are shown how we will be directly affected by any failure on our part to act. Our children are at risk! Our way of life is being threatened!

• Demonization: The enemy isn’t human. He is a Godless beast, or he is subhuman. His barbaric acts have cost him his humanity (thus he can be slain and his lands seized without any guilt attaching itself to us).

• God is on our side: We are good, they are evil. God loves us more than he loves them.

• Turnabout’s fair play: They did it to us, we are justified in doing it to them. This is also where you turn an enemy’s propaganda against him, using his own words to indict him.

What makes these propaganda arguments so effective is that they all contain a little bit of the truth. Humans have a lazy habit of thinking that if A, B, and C are true, D must also be true. Mind-slayers count on this. Hide little lies inside a big truth. Wrap big lies in a lot of little truths.

Techniques of Propaganda

“To influence the masses rather than one single subject is of course more difficult, but certain key words, slogans, tones of voice, and emotional circumstances are all part of the hypnotists’ “one-step . . . two-step . . . three-step” formula; it is just applied to a broader audience.”

—Hans Holzer⁵²

For propaganda to be successful, mind-slayers must determine their audience’s mind-set, including their susceptibility to physical and psychological inducements (i.e. threats and bribery).

First, what is likely to be your audience’s initial attitude to your strategic, overall message? Does the targeted audience have a predisposition to the message you are offering? Is it something they (secretly) want to hear? Your message is designed to replace the person’s present belief. Does it strike a chord with him? Have you been sure to wrap any bitter message pills in sweet propaganda—easy-to-swallow symbols and phrases the audience recognizes, identifies with, and has been known to respond favorably to in the past?

Second, what inducements (bribes or threats) does your offer carry? In other words, what does the audience have to gain or lose psychologically and/or physically by accepting your message?

This includes economic inducements, bribes of money, and lucrative job opportunities on the one hand, threats of losing the same on the other hand. Physical inducements can also include promises of security, sex, and material wealth.

Psychological inducements people are most likely to respond to include offers for fulfillment of personal (perhaps secret) desires, promises of recognition, promises of increased social acceptance, prestige and power. At the opposite extreme, your propaganda can threaten to take all these things away if your agenda is not embraced.

Common propaganda ploys to accomplish this include:

• Identification ploys. The mind-slayer goes out of his way to identify himself and his cause with the common man, plain folks—anything to win the hearts and minds of his audience.

• Argumentum ad Populum (argument to the people). Mind-slayers frame their appeals in everyday language meant to appeal to the common folk and common sense.

• Bandwagon ploys. These assure us “Everyone is doing it” and we don’t want to be left out, do we? This appeals to our need to be accepted, to be part of the crowd.

• Testimonial ploys. Present us with famous people (war heroes, movie stars, sports figures) who entice us to buy what they’re endorsing.

• Transfer ploys (a.k.a. guilt by association). A cutting-at-the-edges ploy in which you are attacked for the company you keep and held suspect by your associations.

• Name-calling ploys. These label others as bleeding hearts, communists, Godless pagans, or use other societal taboo slur words.

• Stroking ploys. The opposite of name-calling ploys, these use societal prestige words, terms such as patriot, true American, and “an example to us all” to attract and flatter members of the target audience.

• Purr Generality ploys. Rather than stick to the facts and address specific solutions to specific problems, generality ploys use emotional pleas and speak in vague terms. They use evocative but unclear terms like justice, family values, motherhood, and other societal virtue words to jerk our chains.

• Slur Generality ploys. Slur generalities include New-Ager, pagan, godless, and occult catchalls. (We’re not sure exactly what these terms mean, but we know they can’t be good!) Politicians are often accused of being soft on crime, although there is no specific definition for the general slur “soft.”

• Faulty reasoning ploys. Include use of faulty cause and effect, false analogy, and defective comparison. The statement “Crime has risen 90 percent since he took office” may be true, but no connection—cause and effect—has actually been established.

• Assumption ploys (a.k.a. “begging the question”). The mind-slayer puts out the notion that “No one in his right mind would support such an unfeasible plan.” Has it been shown to be “unfeasible” or are we being asked to assume it is unfeasible?

• Selective memory (a.k.a. lying by omission). We’re all pretty good at remembering what bolsters our own agendas, forgetting to mention pertinent facts that reveal the downsides of our agendas. Mind-slayers using reasoning ploys are notorious for having selective memories .

• Pressure ploys. These force listeners to choose between two extremes (e.g. between good and evil), with no compromise allowed to be considered. A cult’s “limited time offer” falls into this category.

• Semantics ploys. Use plays on words (homonyms, vague definitions, etc.) to confuse and wear down their audience.

• Argumentum ad Hominem (“argument to the man”). When all else fails, propaganda attacks are made against the person himself, whether he is a candidate running for office or the salesman endorsing a rival product.

Ninja Use of Propaganda

The shinobi-ninja understood the need for, and the effectiveness of, propaganda in both peacetime and war.

Shinobi propaganda included perpetuating the belief—both to recruits and to outsiders—that ninja were descended from demons; that they were unbeatable warriors who could walk through walls; that they possessed the secret of the death touch.

The effectiveness of these kyonin-no-jutsu propaganda ploys is evident in the fact that, still today, when the word “ninja” is spoken, people both East and West conjure up an image in their mind of mysterious shadow-warriors capable of killing with a single touch!

Spreading tales added to the fear in which their foes held them, increasing safety for the whole clan. The individual exploits—the “personal propaganda”—of any single ninja increased the awe in which the whole clan was held.

Personal Propaganda

“An agitator who demonstrates the ability to transmit an idea to the broad masses must always be a psychologist, even if he is only a demagogue.”

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

What is the future of propaganda?

According to some experts, tomorrow’s mind-slayer media manipulators will move away from propaganda aimed at mass audiences and more toward crafting different versions of a message for each audience segment (race, demographic). This is known as “The Dear Mary” approach and is already used by direct marketing copywriters. As technology increases and privacy decreases, mind-slayers armed with data from credit card and tax records, medical data bases, and other sources will be able to target individuals with propaganda personalized to suit that particular individual.

Wherever the person turns, he will be confronted in print (such as newspapers or magazines he subscribes to), via television shows he watches regularly, through the video games he plays, and at the Web sites he most frequents.

For example: You set your clock-radio to awaken you at 7:30 a.m. and the moment it comes on you hear a message targeting you specifically with a subtle—perhaps subliminal—message in the form of an ad or a piece of news. At the newsstand, your favorite newspaper and/or magazines carry a cover story of the same news or a blatant ad for the same product. The placard on the side of the bus you take every day to work or on that billboard alongside the same road you drive to work holds the same message.

These media masters are already “laying in wait” to ambush you at work, having already used a cutting-at-the-edges approach to make sure all your co-workers are standing around the water-cooler talking about the same news or product.⁵³

Even today, think how easy it is for a propaganda message to be infiltrated into entertainment. For example, how many times a day do you hear-repeated the joke Jay Leno told last night?

If this is indeed the future of propaganda, then what does the future hold for individuals in regard to propaganda? Scant, unless we learn to master propaganda before its masters master us!

We start by reminding ourselves that our reputations precede us. How many times have we been warned to watch out for a particular salesman, an opposing attorney, or even a rival ball team, simply because they are known to be tough customers? That is propaganda!

Remember, ancient Celtic shaman cultivated a power called “glamour,” an overpowering personal presence that, coupled with specially chosen words, could accomplish dazzling effects, from disrobing a lover to disarming an enemy. Our “personal propaganda” works in this same way. At the most basic level, our personal propaganda is how we carry ourselves: our walk of alertness that turns aside muggers, our air of confidence that makes the salesman lower his price.

How we carry ourselves tells the world we are tough customers—that we won’t put up with their bullshit. Word gets around and the wolves no longer come sniffing at our door.

For the most part, criminal mind-slayers are a mangy lot, culling the human herd by targeting the weak and the unwary. By studying the tactics of these human hyenas, we make ourselves less of a target for their mind-manipulation ploys. (Recommended reading: Winning Through Intimidation by Robert J. Ringer.⁵⁴

Coming Clean about Brainwashing

“Although brainwashing is a comparatively recent addition to the armory of political weapons, it has many points of similarity, both in behavioral manifestations and in psychological dynamics, to phenomena with which the Western world is quite familiar. Among these are spontaneous religious conversions, voodoo rites, hypnosis, conditioned reflex behavior, and of course, the extraction of confessions from ‘witches’ in earlier centuries.”⁵⁵

All of us maintain those beliefs and behaviors that are most helpful to us in any given environment. These beliefs and behaviors are first and foremost functional; they help us survive and get along with others.

When conditions change—or we are tricked into believing conditions have changed—we survive by changing our behavior.

Our beliefs determine our behaviors. Our behaviors, in turn, reflect our beliefs. What we do, we become.

Change a man’s beliefs and you change his behavior.

Convince him to do things he wouldn’t normally do and you begin to change his beliefs, both about himself and the world.

Brainwashing therefore aims at first convincing us our present beliefs and behaviors are not functional, thus convincing us to throw away those beliefs and behaviors and adopt the “suggestions” being fed to us on what we should believe and how we should behave.

In modern times, horror stories of Communist Chinese trying to subvert and indoctrinate NATO POWs during the Korean War brought the word “brainwashing” to worldwide attention.

Reportedly, Communist Chinese had been using various brainwashing techniques against enemy soldiers and civilians as early as the 1920s. Such techniques have long been known in China and some can be traced as far back as the moshuh nanren.

The Soviets also experimented with such techniques, giving Western countries the justification they needed to carry out their own brainwashing experiments. It is now common knowledge that U.S. intelligence agencies like the CIA poured millions into brainwashing research.

In his book Crusade: Undercover against the Mafia and KGB, author Tom Tripodi, a 27-year veteran CIA agent and undercover narcotics officer, admits to a consensus among CIA agents that “The Company” had at its disposal the resources for what is commonly called brainwashing. ⁵⁶

Since 1954, brainwashing techniques have greatly improved, becoming more refined due in part to the rise in modern mind-altering drugs and electronic mind-control machines.

What is Brainwashing?

Brainwashing has been defined as: intensive propaganda techniques that are applied under conditions of stress and/or coercive persuasion, during which an individual is confronted by conditions deliberately designed to undermine his morale and make him question his accepted attitudes. This paves the way for indoctrination with a “replacement set of beliefs” that will produce a change in behavior.⁵⁷

Using this definition, we find that political education, religious indoctrination, and general socialization can all be said to contain elements of brainwashing since all three have the same basic goal: to replace a person’s present beliefs and behaviors with beliefs and behaviors more in line with the agenda of whomever is doing the brainwashing.

To accomplish this, mind-slayers use reason and logic, evoke emotion, make appeals to faith, use psychological persuasion and, when need be, use physical coercion to change a person’s behavior.

They do this by first breaking the person down and then rebuilding him in the brainwasher’s image.

Phase One: Breakdown

Breakdown undermines the person’s morale, causing the person targeted to begin to doubt, making him question his accepted beliefs and behaviors. This phase of the brainwashing process uses both physical and psychological tactics.

Physical breakdown is accomplished by assuming as much control over the body of the person targeted as possible. In extreme cases, such as with POWs or cult recruits, a person’s movement is physically restricted and all their “intimate needs” (eating, bathing, using the toilet) are controlled by the brainwasher in order to bring about a feeling of powerlessness in the person.

Isolation is used two ways during this initial phase. First, the subject is kept cut off from outside information and influence. Second, actual physical isolation and/or enforced silence (solitary confinement) makes the brainwashee more eager to join a re-eduction group or thought reform class, if only to experience some human contact.

Psychological breakdown then takes a person already weakened in body by physical mistreatment—exhaustion, meager diet, sleep deprivation, and torture—and attacks his mind.

Psychological attack often begins with humiliation: first stripping the person of his dignity, and then offering to restore that lost dignity bit-by-bit in exchange for cooperation. Forced to remain naked and filthy for days, a POW is grateful to the “kind” interrogator offering him a shower and giving him clothes to wear, helping him restore a little of his lost dignity.

This is the brainwasher’s foot-in-the-door: first he creates doubt in the subject’s previously held truths, then he offers the brainwashed subject “new truths.”

Planting doubt in the subject’s mind begins with seeding small uncertainties about such things as the day and time or even who is winning the war.

Little uncertainties lead to big doubts, to distrust of past beliefs, opening the subject up to future changes in attitudes.

The mind-slayer does this by showing the subject with new variables, previously unseen connections, and heretofore unimagined considerations (e.g. how their former political and religious leaders lied to them, how they were involved in an unjust war, how to see reality from their new-found “friend’s” point of view). Eventually doubt takes root: doubts of self-worth, doubts in comrades and country. Doubt becomes resentment, then becomes anger that his government and God are unable to protect or rescue him from harm. Weakened in body and mind, under constant bombardment of the interrogator’s “facts,” the brainwashee’s former self-image (of being invincible and of being valued by his country) begins to crumble.

The interrogator’s job is to recognize and then voice what the captive is thinking by this time: that they have been forgotten, even betrayed by country and comrades. Such doubts often cause captives to actually identify with their captors. (This attitude is known as “The Stockholm Syndrome.”)

Previously brainwashed prisoners can be used to help break down their fellow prisoners. Such peer pressure is highly effective, especially when coming from a respected figure (friends, commanding officer).

Phase Two: Build-Up

Build-up then introduces the subject to a new set of beliefs and behaviors. Techniques of brainwashing indoctrination include both physical controls and psychological attacks such as those already discussed in the section on The Cult Craft.

Their old identity shattered, the sympathetic brainwasher offers the broken brainwashee a new, more functional identity.

In a cult or POW indoctrination situation, the brainwasher sometimes asks the person to just “pretend” to cooperate (so that the brainwasher won’t be accused of failing and get into trouble with his superiors). In return for the brainwashee’s role-playing, the brainwasher promises him special rewards, perhaps even the promise of escape in the future.

To quote the Brainwasher’s Bible chapter and verse:

Saying is believing.

Believing leads to behaving.

What we do, we become.

It is a short step from “pretending” to be a traitor or a cult member to forgetting you’re only role-playing.

We must learn to recognize the signs of brainwashing—whether by cults, police or by other government entities—both in order to guard our loved ones and ourselves.

Psychotronics

“One must concede at least the possibility that technological advances may someday . . . remold the human mind on the same mass scale and with the same economy and efficiency which advances in nuclear technology have enabled us to use in dealing with the human body.”⁵⁸

—International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences

The inherently dangerous nature of their lives demanded that medieval shinobi-ninja keep up on the latest innovations—whether the latest tactic for penetrating an enemy stronghold, or the latest technique for penetrating a foe’s mind castle.

As vital as it was in medieval times for mind-slayers to keep up on the latest technological developments, it’s all the more important to do so in a time when technology is changing on a daily basis. Thus, for the survival of their dark craft, modern mind-slayers keep abreast of the latest psychotronic advances for peering into the mind and/or for augmenting their already fearsome mind invasion prowess.

Psychotronics is the applied science of influencing, controlling and/or destroying the human mind via electronic devices.

On the one hand, the electronic augmentation of the human mind holds the promise of helping us expand our own minds (our awareness, memory, etc.). However, in the hands of ruthless mind-slayers, misuse of psychotronics holds sinister possibilities for mind-manipulation and mental enslavement.

This is not the stuff of future fiction. Serious attempts have already been made by individuals, by cults, and by governments (our own included) to use psychotronics to influence and control the minds of both individuals and the masses.

Lie-detection

Despite the fact that polygraph experts disagree as to the accuracy of modern polygraph machines, and despite the fact that polygraph results are not admissible in courts of law, each year hundreds of thousands of Americans are nonetheless subjected to polygraph interrogations, not only during criminal investigations but, increasingly, as part of pre-job screenings. ⁵⁹ Today the polygraph remains the most widely used method for psychotronic lie-detection.

Some have beaten the polygraph through the use of another “psychotronic” device, the biofeedback machine, which teaches them to control heartbeat, respiration, pulse, and skin conductivity—the indicators the polygraph relies on.

Less known and not as widely used as the polygraph is the CVSA—“Computer Voice-Stress Analyzer.” The CVSA has been called “high-tech truth serum” and has been praised as the replacement for the polygraph. While only recently in the news, the CVSA was proposed as a lie-detection tool more than 25 years ago.

During the 1960s, the U.S. Defense Department spent countless dollars developing electronic devices for secretly detecting when someone was lying. These devices measured body stress without a person’s knowledge. One such device, the “wiggle seat,” measured tiny movements made by a sitting subject. Another device used an infrared detector to measure the heat of a person’s upper lip.

Note that all the tells measured by devices such as the polygraph and the wiggle seat can be spotted by alert mind-slayers using only their five senses. We can see fidgeting, a flushed face and a sweating upper lip on someone we are talking to. We can also see, and in some cases hear, changes in a person’s breathing. We can even note changes in a person’s pulse and heart rate by shaking his hand and touching the inside of his wrist, and check his heart rate by either observing arteries on the side of his neck or by placing our hands on his back or on his shoulder (touching the sub-clavicle artery under the collar-bone) .

Hypnopaedia

The theory of sleep learning has been around for decades. In Aldous Huxley’s dark vision of the future, Brave New World (1932), sleep learning—actually sleep indoctrination and brainwashing—is called “hypnopaedia” and operates on the same theory as subliminal suggestion.

Studies testifying to the truth of sleep learning show that it works best when we are trying to modify lower-level behaviors and improve physical skills as opposed to trying to acquire higher-level skills such as learning a language.

We already know the human voice alone can be used to heal, hurt, and hypnotize. For example, it has been estimated that the frequency of Adolf Hitler’s voice in a typical sentence from one of his speeches was 228 vibrations per second, whereas 200 vibrations is the usual frequency of a voice raised in anger.⁶⁰

A typical Hitler speech started quietly, gradually rising to a crescendo and then stopping abruptly, with the “punch line” delivered in a loud, sometimes hoarse and high-pitched voice.

To exploit Hitler’s “gift,” the Nazis ordered German radio manufacturers to place a radio in every German home. As a result, by 1939, 70 percent of all German households owned a wireless set, the highest percentage anywhere in the world, including the United States. Listening to Nazi radio propaganda was mandatory. In addition to radios in the home, loudspeakers were placed in all factories, and work stopped whenever Hitler spoke. Nazi plans to install 6,000 loudspeaker pillars in streets nationwide—first pioneered by the Soviets, by the way—was interrupted by the War.⁶¹

While Nazi attempts at using psychotronics (i.e. radio waves) to disseminate propaganda were effective for their time, they were naive by today’s standards. (Imagine what Hitler could have accomplished with MTV!)

This kind of saturation propaganda employs the same principle as hypnopaedia. In the case of pervasive Nazi propaganda, since there was no escaping it, people began ignoring it on a conscious level. However, the insidious messages continued to burrow into their subconscious minds, subtly influencing them over time.

In the same way, sleep-learning enters our subconscious brains while our “higher” conscious brain is “asleep.” This explains why sleep-learning is more effective for teaching physical skills (controlled by the lower brain).

The Russian Device

In 1993 a top FBI scientist admitted proposing the use of an experimental Russian “mind control device” against David Koresh during the standoff in Waco.⁶²

Reportedly, just a few weeks before 80 Branch Davidians died in the Waco fire, a small group of American Military Intelligence and law-enforcement officials in Washington witnessed a demonstration of a device that was designed to control people by implanting thoughts in their minds. According to its Russian creator, the device could subconsciously alter Koresh’s behavior by sending the cult leader a subliminal message over the telephone while the FBI was negotiating with him.⁶³

The Russian Device first used an electroencephalograph (EEG) to measure brain waves during various emotional moods (such as anger or excitement). Subliminal messages could then be recorded at the same frequency as a previously mapped out “mood.” Hearing these “matched” subliminal messages would then produce the same mood in the listener.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same process mind-slayers use—minus the electronic device—when mirroring their victims’ speech and body language.

In a bizarre variation of this, members of Japan’s Aum Shinri Kyo death cult reportedly paid $115,000 a piece for headsets that were supposed to let them tune into their leader Asahara’s brainwaves, thus “matching” their brainwaves to his.

In the wrong hands, the inventor of The Russian Device admits his device—and, conceivably, other such devices—could be used to push people into violent acts. Still, he waxes philosophic: “A knife can be used to cut sausage, or cut your throat.”⁶⁴

The U.S. government eventually decided not to use The Russian Device. Still, the potential for the use or misuse of such technology is obvious. As one writer put it: “If David Koresh now, who next?”⁶⁵

The Electro-Magnetic Enemy

Russian research into psychotronic devices is nothing new, nor was their 1993 offer the first time Russian scientists tried to peddle such a device in America. In the early 1980s, Soviet scientists offered the United States “The Lida,” a mind-control device that broadcast radio waves attuned to the frequency of deep-sleep EEGs. The Russian scientists claimed they had used The Lida successfully on human beings to treat insomnia, anxiety, hypertension, and other neurosis. When demonstrated on an agitated cat, The Lida zapped the cat into a docile trance.

There were rumors at the time of a more sophisticated version of The Lida capable of controlling minds at a distance.⁶⁶

The Lida was engineered around the fact that a person’s brain waves tend to “mimic” surrounding electromagnetic frequencies. Thus, applying different hertz (hz) frequencies can produce different mental states ranging from drowsiness to transcendental serenity.”⁶⁷

For example, Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) waves up to 100 hz are not normally noticed by our unaided senses, yet they have been shown to cause both physical and emotional disorders.

Infrasound vibrations (up to 20 hz) can subliminally cause our brains to align with Alpha, Beta, Theta, or Delta (sleep) wave patterns, producing moods in a listener ranging from alertness to passivity.

Infrasound generators using very low frequency sound waves have already been tested by France and other nations for crowd control. A beam from one of these generators makes people fall to the ground vomiting and shitting on themselves.⁶⁸

ELF sound waves that provoke nausea and vomiting and disrupt orientation have effectiveness estimated at 1,600 miles.

California neurologists have found a way to focus ultrasonic waves into a beam of vibrations capable of affecting the brain’s neurons, thus changing the targeted person’s mood. More powerful beams of such energy could easily wreck the human nervous system permanently.⁶⁹ A growing number of investigators are convinced that the United States employed radio-frequency wave “mind control” weapons during certain phases of the Persian Gulf War.⁷⁰

Internally, the human body communicates by electromagnetism (EM) and electrochemical impulses. Chinese acupuncture, Japanese shiatsu therapeutic massage, and the dreaded dim-mak all work by influencing the flow of our natural internal EM field, which is closely related to the Taoist concept of chi. It has been theorized that fluctuations of the body’s EM field may be responsible for people experiencing various “psychic” phenomenon (seeing visions, ghosts, etc.).

This is not surprising considering that researchers have discovered that the deliberate manipulation of the body’s EM field can actually cause such phenomenon.

In People of the Web, Dr. Gregory Little explains how, like a hallucinogenic drug, EM fields can be used to alter brain chemistry and influence a person’s perception of reality.⁷¹

At Laurentian University in Canada, neuropsychologist Michael Persinger designed a computer-controlled helmet (dubbed “the God Machine”) which, by focusing small magnetic fields around the heads of test subjects, causes them to have “mystical” and “psychic” experiences (such as seeing visions or experiencing being abducted by a UFO). Such studies seem to indicate that many such experiences and phenomenon, rather than actually being caused by an external force, may be caused by over-stimulated neurochemical processes within the brain itself.⁷²

The 1992 discovery of the mineral magnetite in the human brain provided a valuable link to how EM can influence the body and mind. Areas in the brain’s temporal lobe are among the richest in receptors for endorphin (the brain’s natural painkillers). It is this area of the brain that is most affected by magnetic fields, both the artificial EM field created by The God Machine, and by naturally-occurring geomagnetic fields radiating from the Earth.

Persinger suggests that exposure to such fields may act like LSD, triggering endorphins in the brain, and creating subjective “mystical experiences.”

Imagine such a tool in the hands of a cult leader who could cause cult members to see visions anytime he wanted. Other mind-slayers might use this technology to make victim’s believe they possess psychic abilities. Rogue government agencies might use the technology to convince sane individuals they are going crazy.

The fact that external EM conditions can affect a person’s moods, for example influencing their susceptibility or resistance to new ideas, may validate belief in Eastern astrology. Simply put, the “base EM frequency” (caused by atmospheric EM variables and naturally-fluctuating EM fields of the Earth) in affect at the time of our birth could continue to influence us—positively or negatively—throughout our lives as that EM frequency fluctuates up and down due to external (and internal) factors. Such oscillations would affect our moods, our performance, etc.

The Ion Attackers

Negative ions (electrically charged atoms) in the air enhance alertness and create exhilaration. An excess of positive ions, on the other hand, produces drowsiness and depression. Devices are already being sold commercially that increase negative ions in a room. These devices are very popular with cult leaders and with other mind-slayers who use these devices to help “relax” potential victims, making them more susceptible to their message.

Beyond individual use, calculation of the ionic content of an enemy army’s location can help determine that foe’s level of readiness. Thus, the study of pre-battle weather conditions becomes all the more important.

On the more proactive side, devices are in development to allow the military to deliberately flood enemy-held territory with positive (pacifying) ions, sapping a foreign army (or domestic rioters) of their will to fight.

Such ion weapons fall into the category of “calmative agents,” part of a growing arsenal of “non-lethal” police and military weapons designed to defeat foes without killing them.

When employed, these calmative agents are mixed with DMSO (which quickly delivers chemicals through the skin into the bloodstream).⁷³

Killer Cartoons

“[The victors of WW II] introduced an all-pervasive, ultra-powerful society-shaping drug. This drug was the first of a growing group of high-technology drugs that deliver the user into an alternate reality by acting directly on the user’s sensorium, without chemicals being introduced into the nervous system. It was television. No epidemic or addictive craze or religious hysteria has ever moved faster or made as many converts in so short a time.”

—Terrence McKenna, Food of the Gods⁷⁴

In Toyko, December 1997, more than 700 people, most of them children, were rushed to hospitals complaining of a host of ailments (ranging from blackouts to nausea, spasms, and hyperventilation) after watching the children’s cartoon Pokémon (Pocket Monsters), based on a Nintendo game of the same name. Twenty minutes into the program there appeared scenes with strobing light producing “rhythmic bursts of blue, red, and white light” so intense it interrupted normal brain function.

Although aimed primarily at elementary school-aged children, victims of the seizures ranged from ages 3 to 20. Initially nearly 600 were effected, but the number rose to 729 after kids watched a videotaped rerun of the show. Other factors believed contributing to the seizures were the intense concentration with which young viewers normally watch the fast-paced show, and the fact that most of those affected lived in cramped apartments with large-screen TVs sitting only three feet away.

A normal brain functions by processing electrical impulses at regular rhythms, sort of like a telegraph sending Morse code. A strobe-like pulsing light flashing at a certain frequency can upset this “code,” in effect, changing a “dot” here to a “dash” there; changing the message the brain receives from “get up” to “shut down,” throwing the brain into a seizure.

After investigation, authorities declared the Pokémon incident to have been unintentional.

However, two years earlier in May 1995, Japan’s infamous Aum Shunri Kyo “Supreme Truth” cult (responsible for the March 1995 Sarin nerve gas attack on Tokyo’s subway that killed 12 and left 5,500 injured), slipped a subliminal picture of cult leader Shoko Asahara into another popular children’s television show.⁷⁵

Whatever you think of television, you would be foolish to dismiss it as a mindless boob tube. “Mind-controlling” might be a more apt description:

“Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation. Television induces a trance state in the viewer that is the necessary precondition for brainwashing.”⁷⁶

Cults and others fully realize the potential of television. Television and videotapes can easily be paired with other psychotronic innovations such as subliminal VLF and pacifying ion sprays designed to make the viewer even more receptive to the small screen’s magic.

According to a report in the July 1975 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, hypnotic induction by videotape is as effective as induction by a live person. This explains why modern religious and motivational cults require recruits to view endless hours of “The Leader” on videotape.

Blue Beam and Beyond

There are always two sides to any innovation, be that innovation philosophical or technological. New developments in technology can be used for good or to do harm, to heal or hurt.

While modern mind-slayers hone the powers of mind that nature gave them—and greed perverted—they are ever on the lookout for any new technology offering to make their edge all the more keen.

In order not to become the slave of such developments, it is important we keep up on the latest in psychotronics, especially since there is some scary stuff on the horizon:

Implants. In Michael Crichton’s novel and subsequent movie The Terminal Man, emotion-controlling implants (“terminals”) are placed in a violent man’s brain to help him control his homicidal rage. This cautionary Frankenstein story ends predictably, with the implants burning out and the killer going berserk and slaughtering everybody connected with the project.

While the plot is fictional, the technology for implanting such devices in the human brain has been around since the 1960s. Only the medical community’s precarious hold on ethics keeps them from using such a tool. Beware: Others are not constrained by the Hippocratic oath.

Some even believe we are not far from the day when computer links and other brain-enhancing devices will routinely be implanted in our brains and bodies, even as today hearing aids and heart pacemakers are implanted. With nanotechnology, microscopic machines capable of delivering drugs or a tiny, mood-altering EM pulse would be injected into the bloodstream (via a syringe or an “accidental” cut). From there, these tiny time bombs would make their way to the brain where they could lay dormant for years, waiting for their signal (a certain frequency, a spoken word) to activate.⁷⁷

* * *

Virtual Reality. Cults routinely isolate their members in communes, artificial utopias where the recruit is kept “safe” from the wickedness of the outside world.

This is nothing new. In medieval Persia, the infamous Sect of the Assassins maintained a secret garden where drugged recruits would awaken to find their every fantasy fulfilled. Later these recruits would again be drugged and, upon awakening, find themselves back in the mundane world where they would be assured that if they died in the service of the cult, they would return to paradise. Having already seen heaven first-hand, such men became suicidal killing machines.⁷⁸

Virtual reality (VR) has us on the threshold of creating electronically created environments where victims (such as cult recruits or captured POWs) could be “trapped” without their knowledge. With the current technology, an excursion into VR requires a traveler to wear a bulky helmet and special gloves that allow him to interact with the computer world.Yet the VR equipment of today is far less bulky than it was five years ago. Five years from now, it may disappear altogether, replaced by a VR room, or even by VR contact lenses.

In the worst-case scenario, we can envision a time in the not-too-distant future where an unwitting victim could become trapped in a VR world of his enemies’ construction, never knowing he’d been captured—or perhaps given a taste of VR “heaven” as medieval Assassin recruits were hundreds of years ago.

Faking UFOs. UFOologist Jacques Vallee proposes that UFO phenomenon may actually be a secret form of psychotronic mind control.⁷⁹

Likewise, author Robert Temple says that faking UFO abductions and even mass sightings could be accomplished through the use of sophisticated hypnotic procedures.⁸⁰ For example, highly suggestible subjects, chosen in advance, could be given a post-hypnotic suggestion that an “abduction” will occur at specific time and place.⁸¹

Once programmed, this post-hypnotic suggestion could be triggered by watching an innocuous television message or hearing a trigger word spoken over the phone. Hypnotized individuals might be programmed to arrive at the same place at the same time in order to “witness” such an event. Faking UFO encounters might also include dressing people as aliens (a là The X-Files).

Project Blue Beam. In 312, at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, Roman Emperor Constantine saw the vision of a bright cross hovering over the battlefield. This inspired him to win the battle and embrace Christianity, thus creating the Holy Roman Empire.

Other religious movers and shakers were also inspired by the appearance of heavenly signs. For example Joan of Arc (1412-1431) saw a vision of Mary commanding her to rally the French during the HundredYears War. The apostle Paul was struck down on the road to Damascus by a brilliant light that inspired him to convert to the new Christian “cult.” Mohammed received a vision of the angel Gabriel, founded Islam, and the rest is bloody history.

Whatever the truth of these historical visions, there is no denying the world-shaking events that often follow such “revelations.” Today, the technology exists to fake such heavenly—or devilish—events.

In his comprehensive report Project Blue Beam, Canadian journalist Serge Monast investigated a United States government study into the feasibility of using holographs as weapons. Monast died shortly after making this information public.

The simplest way to explain a holograph is that criss-crossing laser beams create a 3-D image capable of being seen from all angles. This technology opens the possibility of projecting images into the sky in order to affect the minds of anyone seeing the images. Even on a small scale, cult leaders could make “angels” or “devils” appear.

On a larger scale, a Middle Eastern tyrant might cause a Godlike hand to appear, writing verses from the Koran calling for Jihad (Holy War) over the heads of his waiting army. Might those Muslims then fight to the death? This kind of sky show could be used in connection with “electronic telepathy,” using ELF, VLF, and LF waves, beaming messages directly into onlookers’ brains, making them believe God was sending them messages.

Or what if the government decided to fake an alien invasion?

As early as 1917, Professor John Dewy (member of Britain’s elitist Fabian Socialist society) stated that the best way to unite Earth would be an alien threat.

This was not the last time a “common world threat” solution was proposed.

Some maintain that Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast that panicked listeners in 1939 was a government dry-run, testing the public’s readiness should such an emergency announcement (real or rigged) have to be used.

At the 1963 Iron Mountain summit of the Kennedy administration’s Special Study Group, it was again proposed that faking an “alien invasion” was a viable alternative for war.

One theory behind the sudden resolution of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was that, in order to avert war with the Soviets, Kennedy convinced the Soviets they shared a “common threat” by showing the Soviets the crashed flying saucer recovered at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1949.

For conspiracy buffs, the ultimate Blue Beam scenario has been dubbed “The Night of 1, 000 Stars”: It will begin with phony earthquakes, predicted ahead of time by “psychics” on trash-talk TV, psychics either in the pay of the government or else individuals targeted for subliminal (EM) messages. A campaign to debunk traditional religions (Christianity, Islam, etc.) would already be in place (in media, movies, etc). This disinformation campaign would be further aided by new “scientific discoveries” (in the fields of archeology and astronomy) calling religious scriptures into question.

This program would culminate in gigantic “signs in the sky” produced by lasers. One scenario has traditional religious figures (Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, and Buddha) appearing in the sky and then merging into form one new God!

A liberal use of ELF, VLF, and LF subliminal waves would make people “hear” this new God speaking directly to them inside their heads.

An already-in-place Emergency Broadcasting System computer chip that turns your television on automatically whenever there is a national emergency would allow images to be projected along existing fiber-optic lines, causing “angels” (or aliens) to appear in your living room. Amidst the chaos that follows, the government is “forced” to declare martial law and suspend civil rights.

People pray to the “New Messiah” to deliver them and he does, giving his blessing to specific leaders or to the “New World Order.”

Far-fetched? All the technology for a “Blue Beam” scenario exists today, whether for targeting masses of people or for singling out individuals for shadowy purposes.

Submitted for your approval: On March 13, 1997, thousands of Phoenix, Arizona, citizens watched while a “V-shaped object, three football fields long” hovered 6,000 feet above the city for 106 minutes. Although this UFO was videotaped from several angles, it failed to show up on radar.

The air force dismissed the phenomenon as flares dropped by passing aircraft.

Even using such psychotronic technology on an individual (a potential Joan of Arc or a wannabe Mohammed) could have far-reaching consequence. Consider:

At a press conference held in Washington, D.C. in October 1989, and subsequently repeated in the November 30, 1989, issue of the Nation of Islam’s newspaper The Final Call, Louis Farrakhan claimed that on the night of September 17, 1985, while on a hilltop near ancient ruins in Tepotzlan, Mexico, he was lifted up by a UFO “wheel” and carried to a gigantic “Mother Wheel” in orbit above the Earth.

This Mother Wheel was 1/2 mile by 1/2 mile in size.

According to Farrakhan, this gigantic spaceship was built by humans and is the same “Mother Plane” preached about by Farrakhan’s predecessor Elijah Muhammed, founder of The Nation of Islam. Farrakhan said that while on this ship he heard the voice of the dead Elijah Muhammed speaking to him.

Three possible explanations have been proposed for Farrakhan’s vision:

First, Farrakhan made the whole thing up in order to more closely link himself in his followers’ minds with the mythology of a gigantic Mother Plane spaceship espoused by his predecessor. Or, Farrakhan really had such a vision, a dream springing from his own wish-fulfillment. The brain tends to see what it wants to see. Finally, and perhaps most ominously, many believe Farrakhan was the victim of a Blue Beam-type operation, either in order to discredit him, or in order to manipulate him toward a specific agenda.

“It is conceivable that the Image of the Beast could be a laser holographic image or perhaps a robot that New Age priests and ministers someday will set up in churches and temples throughout the world.”⁸²

Ninja learned long ago that any weapon, no matter how technologically advanced, is only an extension of their own mind and body, their senses and savvy.⁸³

Mind-slayers—whether they be individuals or belong to cults or governments—all keep up on the latest psychotronic weapons in order to further their own shadowy agenda.

We would therefore be remiss if we did not do likewise, if only for safety and sanity’s sake.

To allow fear of technology to prevent us from keeping abreast of the latest science would be foolish, when we will undoubtedly benefit from future technology as we have past developments. However, we must never forget that a good knife cuts both ways:

“For the sword of knowledge cuts two ways. It can be used in offense. It can destroy an opponent even before his first lunge. But it can also cut off the very hand that wields it.”⁸⁴

MIND-DANCING

Kamiizumi Hidetsuna, 16th century samurai founder of the shinkage-ryu of ninjutsu (“New Shade School,” so-called for the “shade” pulled over a foe’s eyes) once saved a hostage child from a sword-wielding madman by using a single rice cake.

Rather than physically trying to overpower the lunatic and risk further endangering the child, Kamiizumi opted to “mind-dance” around the enraged man.

Disguising himself as a Buddhist monk, Kamiizumi slowly approached the madman and his hostage, offering the child a rice cake and then tossing one to the madman. When the madman instinctively reached to catch the rice cake, Kamiizumi grabbed hold of the madman’s extended arm and easily restrained him with a jujutsu hold.

Kamiizumi’s “mind-dance” employed the following insights:

First, by donning the guise of a Buddhist monk, Kamiizumi invoked the man’s social conditioning, that is, the respect all Japanese are taught for a holy man.

Second, it is universally known that Buddhist monks are sworn to peace, therefore the madman did not feel threatened by the harmless monk approaching.

Third, Kamiizumi recognized that the enraged man was functioning on a primal rage level. To try reasoning on a higher level with such a person would be useless and only confuse him all the more.

Therefore, Kamiizumi opted to meet the man on the same level at which the lunatic was functioning, distracting the madman with an even more basic urge, hunger. Finally, tossing the rice cakes reveals Kamiizumi’s knowledge of instinctive body reactions.

An interviewer once asked Bruce Lee to describe the “essence” of Lee’s martial arts. In response, Lee threw an apple to the interviewer who reacted by instinctively by catching it. “That, is the essence of my art!” Lee explained, indicating the natural action the interviewer had performed without conscious thought.

To the average person mind-dancing sounds exotic, yet mastery of psychological warfare—defensive or offensive, on the battlefield or in the boardroom—brings us one step closer to Sun Tzu’s ideal of subduing an enemy without fighting.

Guarding your Mind Castle

As we said earlier, think of yourself as a castle. The physical walls are your actual body and its innermost locked and guarded rooms are your mind. The gates, windows, and other openings in a castle allow a ninja to spy on what is going on inside the castle and to enter that stronghold by stealth.

In the same way, our everyday actions and reactions, as well as our five senses, are the gates, windows, and all-too-easily jimmied doors through which a wily mind-slayer slips in unnoticed.

From our study of body language, we know our actions (conscious and unconscious) can give others insight into our thinking. Our physical stumblings and verbal slip-ups are windows into our minds, through which can be glimpsed our deeper (perhaps deliberately hidden, perhaps subconsciously buried) fears and desires.

In addition to our observable actions, there are nine “gates” into our mind castle, as we discussed in Chapter 2. These gates are the nine openings in the body: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, urethra (organs of sex), and the anus. While we diligently guard our castle’s drawbridge (the conscious mind), adept mind-slayers slip in through one of these unguarded gates.

Over the centuries, many ingenious ploys have been developed by mind-slayers to penetrate these nine gates. Often the mind-slayer penetrates our mind castle below our line of sight (the way a ninja burglar might enter a stronghold through a neglected drain or unguarded sewer) by attacking us obliquely, through our friends and families.

Or, no matter what guards we stand atop the walls, these spies of the mind walk boldly in the front door disguised as a trusted friend, a priest, or a salesman with an offer too good to turn down.

In other words, eyes can easily be dazzled and ears seduced by hearing what they want to hear. “Sweet-smelling” offers, like the richest of perfumes, can literally lead us around by the nose. Likewise our various appetites and our sex drive can be targeted by a skilled mind-slayer.

Bypassing Defense Mechanisms

To guard our own mind castles, we construct and maintain elaborate defense mechanisms; strong-arm strategies and avoidance tactics designed to keep out unwanted visitors.

The particular defense mechanism an individual favors tells the mind-slayer much about that person’s personality. There are basically three types of defense ploys: avoidance, rationalizing, and anger.

Avoidance Ploys

Avoidance ploys are either active or passive. Active avoidance includes distraction (including flattery, vague generalizing, joking about serious matters, and attention-shifting humor) and distancing (pushing people away by being obnoxious or by giving them the silent treatment, and the geographic cure, simply running away from problems, for example to a bar or a cult).

Sex can also be used to avoid facing problems, a way to both change the subject (distracting) and to temporarily change the way you feel (distancing).

Passive-avoidance defenses include pretending to be helpless (a sympathy ploy), self-depreciation (putting oneself down in order to avoid taking responsibility), being lazy, and shifting the blame to others.

Lying and cheating can be both passive and active.

Rationalizing Ploys

Rationalizing ploys include minimizing (downplaying the extent of a problem), slow-walking (drawing out a problem by talking it to death), and justifying (making excuses for your actions and the actions of others).

Anger Ploys

Anger Ploys can be directed outward or turned inward. Outward-directed anger appears as sarcasm, snitching, making faulty comparisons (“You do it, too!”), maximizing (blowing things out of proportion), verbal abuse, vandalism, and violence. Anger turned inward shows up as self-pity, feelings of powerlessness, fear of success (anxiety over being given added responsibility), recklessness, and self-destruction (unconsciously sabotaging yourself, deliberate self-mutilation, or suicide). (Note: Anger is almost always a secondary emotion used to cover a primary feeling.)

When confronted with unexpected and/or inappropriate anger, mind-slayers seek the real cause, for example a hidden fear or secret desire that is not being satisfied. Having discovered this true source of the person’s anger and frustration, the mind-slayer institutes a two-step attack: commiserate and satiate. That is, tell the victim you understand and offer him a way to satisfy his needs.

“Over the Wall!”

A masterful military commander will never attack an enemy blindly, not without first gathering every piece of intelligence about that enemy’s weaknesses and blind spots.

To map out his attack strategy, a commander uses information drawn from many sources, including intelligence brought him from spies and traitors in the enemy camp.

In the same way, adroit mind-slayers use their abilities to spot our favored defense mechanisms to help them map out their strategies prior to beginning their assaults on our mind castles.

Once the mind-slayer has figured out a person’s favored defense mechanism (s), the mind-slayer then adds fuel to the fire by encouraging that defense mechanism. Even though these defense mechanisms are inherently bad for the person clinging to them, the ruthless mind-slayer assures his victim that his way of dealing with life is perfect. Perfect, that is, for the mind-slayer!

Since everyone else (family, friends, counselors) keeps begging the victim to change, the mind-slayer (in his guise of confidant, cult leader, or fellow gang member) assures the victim that he or she is right and everyone else is wrong. This further endears the mind-slayer to the victim, allowing the mind-slayer to get even closer.

Cults, fringe political groups, and disenfranchised ethnic groups often collectively adopt these same defense mechanisms as part of their shared group identity.

Maslow’s Pyramid

Buddha taught that wanting things we don’t need is the beginning of all suffering. Yet all of us have things we need in order to survive.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) is famous for summing up a basic list of human needs and priorities in what has become known simply as “Maslow’s Pyramid.”

At the most basic level all of us have physical needs (food, sleep, sex) and safety needs (protection, freedom from fear, a need for familiar and reassuring structure in our lives).

Once these basic physical and safety needs are satisfied, we turn our attention to the second tier of the pyramid, needs for love and a sense of belonging.

Self-esteem needs (a need to feel vital and valued) and self-actualization needs (the need to explore one’s full potential) top off Maslow’s Pyramid.

Where a person focuses on this pyramid of needs determines their priorities. Determining a person’s priorities then enables the mind-slayer to either encourage that person’s negative priorities, or stifle his positive priorities.

* * *

Some say honest people shouldn’t study these techniques of mind-manipulation, that it is truly “The Black Science.”

Yet what is blacker, this dark craft to be mastered—or the blackness of the grave planned for us by mind-slayers if we decline to learn The Black Science?

ENDNOTES

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John Stossel, The Power of Belief. ABC-TV. Original air date: October 6, 1998.

Omar, Ralf Dean. Ninja Death Touch: The Fact and the Fiction. Black Belt magazine, September, 1989.

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New York Times News Service, June 16, 1996.

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Lung, Haha. The Ancient Art of Strangulation. Boulder, Colorado: Paladin Press, 1995.

Hare, Robert D. Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. New York: Pocket Books, 1993.

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USA Today March 6, 1992.

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Holzer, Hans. ESP andYou. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966.

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USA Today. January 29, 1992

USA Today. April 17, 1992.

Sifakis, Carl. Encyclopedia of American Crime. New York: Facts-on-File, 1981.

Ibid.

L.A.Times. March 25, 1995.

Singer, Margaret Thaler. Cults in our Midst. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1995.

Loftus, Elizabeth F. and Katherine Ketcham. The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

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Strange Universe. November 12, 1997

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Thio, Alex. Sociology: A Brief Introduction. New York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1994.

Zimbardo, Philip G. The Psychology of Police Confessions. Psychology Today, June 1967.

USA TODAY. June 1, 1995.

Loftus, Elizabeth F. and Katherine Ketcham. The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Newsweek. April 4, 1994.

Kadish, Sanford H. editor in chief. Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice. New York: Free Press, 1983.

KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, CIA training manual, July 1963.

Holzer, Hans. ESP andYou. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966.

Zimbardo, Philip G. The Psychology of Police Confessions. Psychology Today, June 1967.

KUBARK Counter Intelligence Interrogation, CIA training manual, July 1963.

Kadish, Sanford H. editor in chief. Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice. New York: Free Press, 1983.

Sifakis, Carl. Encyclopedia of American Crime. New York: Facts-on-File, 1981.

Bain, Donald. The Control of Candy Jones. Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976.

Sills, David L. editor. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan, 1968, Vol. 12.

Holzer, Hans. ESP andYou. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966.

Sills, David L. editor. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan, 1968, Vol. 12.

Ibid.

Goldenson, Robert M. The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Holzer, Hans. ESP andYou. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966.

Toffler, Alvin and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1993.

Ringer, Robert J. Winning Through Intimidation. Crest/Fawcett, 1993.

Sills, David L. editor. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan, 1968, Vol. 12.

Tripodi, Tom and Joseph P. DeSario. Crusade: Undercover against the Mafia and KGB. Brassey’s, 1992.

Goldenson, Robert M. The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Sills, David L. editor. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan, 1968, Vol. 12.

Few people know that William M. Marston, the man credited with inventing the modern polygraph machine (lie-detector) was also the creator of the comic book character Wonder Woman (using his pen-name, Charles Moulton).

Zeman, Zbynek.A.B. Nazi Propaganda. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Ibid.

Drosnin, Michael. Mind Control in Waco? Village Voice, March 8, 1994.

Ibid.

Elliot, D. and J. Barry. A Subliminal Dr. Strangelove. Newsweek, August 22, 1994.

Drosnin, Michael. Mind Control in Waco? Village Voice, March 8, 1994.

Clarke, Arthur C. July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century. New York: Mcmillan, 1986.

Ibid.

Toffler, Alvin and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1993.

Vancouver Sun. January 25, 1992.

“Weapons of the Future Attack the Mind,” Sunshine Coast Daily, February 27, 1993.

Little, Gregory. People of the Web. Memphis, TN: White Buffalo Books, 1990.

Ibid.

Toffler, Alvin and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1993.

McKenna, Terrence. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution. New York: Bantam Books, 1992.

USA Today, May 30, 1995.

McKenna, Terrence. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution. New York: Bantam Books, 1992.

Toffler, Alvin and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1993.

Lung, Haha. Assassin! Secrets of the Cult of Assassins. Boulder, Colorado: Paladin Press, 1997.

Vallee, Jacques. Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults. Berkeley, Calif.: And/Or Press, 1979.

. Temple, Robert. The Sirius Mystery. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1976.

Sachs, Margaret. The UFO Encyclopedia. New York: Putnam, 1980.

Marrs,Texe. Mystery Mark of the New Age: Satan’s Design for World Domination. Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1988.

Skinner, Dirk. Street Ninja: Ancient Secrets for Surviving Today’s Mean Streets. New York: Barricade Books, 1995.

Toffler, Alvin and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1993.