I’d heard about this stage show in Canada where the hypnotist made people do extraordinary things… On one of my 00’s of trips to Canada, I got to see it first hand.

300 people packed into a pub at midnight for the show. Many drunk. Rowdy. He took the stage, spoke 10 words and had 50% of the seated audience asleep. How? I don’t know. I had matchsticks holding my eyes open. I’d heard what happens next.

He then went through a process of standing up the 100 or so sleepers. Through a process of elimination, he got rid of the fakers. He was left with 50. Of the 50 – 30 ended up on stage. My goodness I’m so glad I still had those matchsticks holding my eyes open. My host, my Canadian business partner ended up on stage.

Humiliation is a strange word. But more strange when we volunteer for it. Those on stage ended up dry sexing each other, kissing and leaving the stage to the bathroom to put their underpants on their head. Each was still under hypnosis when they were instructed to have an orgasm anytime a person shook hands with them with their left hand. Their journey back to stage with their undies on their head through the crowd keen to shake their hand was hilarious.

But this wakes us up. How hypnotised are we? Coke adds life. Nike just do it. Parents with principles. Games we play in our own mind of self-respect or self-worth. And what are the possibilities for the positives.

Our internal dialogue is complex. We see a crying person and feel sad. We see an accident and feel shocked. We go to a funeral and feel depressed. We go to a wedding and feel love. Feelings surface without any context because these situations, and millions more, are meme’s we more often than not, never question.

Sports stars seek psychological support – mental strength to reprogram many of the natural meme’s of the body. Lactic acid accumulation for most people is a sign to stop but for an athlete, it can become a positive sign to keep going stronger. Failure is humiliating for the average joe but for some, it’s a stimulant.

When training people for telephone sales we use the standard failure to success model. The average success rate for cold calling phone calls is 1 for 100 calls. So, we use each failed call as a step toward a successful one. In this “hypnosis” failure brings success, so, they celebrate failures.

The Universal Laws are also a form of hypnosis. The conventional memes we have embedded in our brain are such that there can be false expectations of life. For example: attraction is a truth. This meme leads us to purchase products, fall into relationships, have children, buy dogs, change our careers and move countries. It can create family feuds, mental illness and require extreme forms of medication.

But attraction is a meme. It is less than true. It is actually an illusion. Much more poison than hypnotism or brand marketing. It is a subliminal meme that causes untold troubles but is endorsed by those who claim to hold the moral and ethical high ground of life.

Taking the power back from meme’s that are socially generated is more than a challenge. It’s harder than climbing Mt Everest with your undies on your head. It’s nearly impossible without a solid deep commitment. For what is the opposite to the meme of attraction? The opposite is love.

To love something one must lose attraction to it. If I am drawn to something by attraction then I am emotionally charged, blinded in fact, to the essential nature of what I am being drawn to. For example if I am drawn toward a woman with attraction, then all the good things of arousal will follow and I will feel great about it. So, I might even proclaim that I am in love, instead of attracted. But over time, that attraction does not go away, it actually gets balanced.

In all matters of life there are balancing forces always attempting to rebalance. Nature seeks a balance in all things. A high tide is, in isolation, an out of balance force, that a low tide will seek to rebalance. Of course, if one were to look from the moon, high tides and low tides exist on opposite sides of an ocean, there is really no imbalance overall, but locally, on Bondi, we can see nature seeking balance between high and low tides. This is the parallel to attraction.

To witness another person at high tide we might feel attracted. But what do we feel at low tide? Attraction and repulsion are inseparable partners. The more aroused we are at first, the more resentment we feel at last. Put them both together as one, and we have love. Attraction and repulsion both added up, means love.

The movies we watch, the scripts we witness, the tides we celebrate, social media and the smiling facebook love, never last. Time teaches love. But I hear a very different hypnosis… I hear, “I loved him before, but I don’t love him now.” That isn’t the way of The Universal Laws, it is a defiance of truth, a hypnosis. Truth is, infatuation (immature emotional wellbeing) at first, leads to resentment (immature emotional wellbeing) at the end. The search for happiness is at the heart of it.

All humans seek happiness. With low emotional maturity that happiness is in a bar, a kiss, a love affair, a new something, a fresh chance, a stimulant, a promotion, a pay rise, a compliment, this is the norm. Happiness in this form is sad because it is transient. The experience of high hope happiness is always balanced by its opposite tide. The low.

To seek love, to be emotionally mature, one has a battle on their hands. The audience at the theatre did come to experience high’s and lows and so the actor, whether at home or on stage will have to deliver that experience in order to be interesting. But the actor who cannot act, will become the highs and lows, will invest in the hypnosis they act in, they will become the tides, and have no anchor to themselves or love for that matter. In this way, we are all potentially actors.

There are three keys I feel to being emotionally mature that can change the meme of upper beats lower, or attraction lives without repulsion.

Know the Universal Laws and have the eye of a detective in all life matters to find those laws in function…

Vision the future that requires you to be both supported and challenged to arrive there. Embrace the dark and light with the same enthusiasm.

Have a purpose in life greater than yourself so you do not become a self-serving emotionally hypnotised individual walking around with your underpants on your head, shaking left hands and having orgasms whenever you do. Or as Jesus said “be in the world but not of the world” I think he meant “Enjoy life but know the Universal laws”

Seek where the balance already exists and you’ll save yourself allot of time and energy.