The voice that beckons you in your dreams and tells you the truth just past the veil of Nightmare is so much more elegant, intricate, and beautiful than you could possibly imagine.
walking down the street with my 250 year old transgender elf gf and the other elves are glaring at her whispering cradle snatcher... predator... creep... and she grips my hand a little tighter, I wordlessly squeeze her hand back and stretch, revealing the handle of my dark killing blade, and they swiftly scatter and hide in their homes. she smiles, and I swear to you, she's more radiant than the sun, more precious than life itself, and she tells me "you're so widely feared for someone your age,"
these are cute but i don't think they're useful at all in any way or relevant and you might be the first person to ever write out these numbers! which is cool. yeah these are fun but i dont think they have any importance or connection to eachother or significance in larger math at all. thanks for submitting these i think they are awesome but not useful but awesome
so I spent a lot of last year working with / around this local activist group mostly made up of your typical ambiently queer, ambiently leftist college students. like every loose affinity group it struggled with the sort of unpredictable fluctuating capacity problem of most participants being tied to day jobs or college term times, variously disabled, turning up when they could make it and then vanishing for months at a time. it's to be expected with that kind of organising but it does also make for kind of a pain in the neck.
anyway this particular group does (or did?) have kind of a nucleus of very committed members who were more tight knit and ended up taking on a lot of the practical work themselves. they were your more serious vanguard party type communists, very much structure and role enjoyers, which is probably why things eventually played out the way they did. they took their commitments seriously and were constantly sort of irked that others saw the voluntary nature of the group as a reason to deprioritise it in favour of what might be life necessities but are still basically capitalist pursuits. fair, maybe.
about this time last summer, that inner circle apparently decided to get more serious about recruitment and figure out how to do outreach in a way that would bring in more committed membership to reliably spread the workload. the way these things go, a couple of these guys had originally met through a local gay bar's drag nights (specifically the drag king circuit) so one of the first things they did was draft in another friend who did marketing for those events already and get him pushing for more eyeballs on their event listings via twitter and instagram.
now, bar guy was very very good at this. one of his big innovations was the idea of using club promoter type strategies to get more students more consistently engaged with the group's activities. that basically meant appointing some of the more active members as 'outreach officers' and encouraging them to do things like organise socials for new volunteers and train those people in turn as recruiters, with a tiny bit of a floating budget for pot lucks and house parties every couple of months.
this worked astonishingly well, like beyond anyone's wildest expectations. at a certain point they had brand new members throwing their own parties just to introduce their friends to the people who recruited them, who in turn had been recruited by the volunteers the outreach officers trained. it worked so well that it got to be a problem because most of these newer members were also relatively new to organising and didn't have a whole lot of theory. it was getting very vibes based and suddenly there was a huge influx of people to handle who most original members didn't know. and also, because they'd asked a gay guy who promoted gay club nights to organise all this peer-to-peer recruitment, it turned out almost all the new members were gay men.
in itself that's not necessarily a problem, but obviously it presents a challenge for a group that's supposed to be open and diverse. especially because outside of the little clique who started all this, most of the old guard were not gay men. it didn't blow up into the kind of messy schism it could have, fortunately, but a lot of the older members (especially those who were less into the hardline soviet-nostalgia communist utopianism of the main organisers) decided around this point that they didn't feel the group was a good fit for them any more, and split.
so now the inner circle had a new problem. the remaining group was overwhelmingly now made up of very sweet well intentioned young gay men who wanted to volunteer with this cool voluntary circle of other young gay men who liked to party, and vanishingly few of them actually knew a whole lot about mao or lenin or the practicalities of community organising or what have you. but club guy was like "don't worry I've got this", and suddenly out of nowhere started producing all this orientation literature and politics 101 material that he was chain emailing to his army of new recruits and recruiters. like he just had all this shit ready to go. he had slogans, he had essays, he had these weird point by point breakdowns of what karl marx would have to say about your college courses and why communism was like actually a lot like bdsm if you think about it.
you will probably not be shocked to learn that it very quickly came out he had been generating all this shit with chatgpt. the group went into absolute meltdown, the vanguard party shut down their website and disassociated themselves completely from the whole mess, and the last I heard they're back to organising with some of the older group members and whoever turns up whenever they turn up. but club guy was unrepentant, he'd already sent out all his ideologyslop to his recruiters, who had sent it to their guys who sent it to their guys, who I guess are still out there recruiting twinks into the fully automated contentless communism mill,
Navigating Amnestic & Dissociative Barriers for Beginners
The first part's the hard part.
You have to figure out how to forget something, on purpose.
It's not the hard part because it's especially difficult, per se. It's because it's different for everyone, and you're as likely to get it in one go as to spend a few years trying to get it to click.
Click it does, though, and the good news is that you don't necessarily have to do it especially well (we'll get to this in a moment). Mindblanks are pretty standard hypnotic fare - anyone with an internet connection, Google, and/or a willingness to pirate a few books or listen to an excellently crafted educational erotic hypnosis podcast (Two Hyp Chicks, for those so inclined) can just about get there with some practice. Because it's different for everyone, this isn't the part I'm going to teach you. This will be a 200 level course.
A quick aside, a misconception out of the way: It's commonly stated that caution should be used when hypnotizing subjects with dissociative disorders, or even that they should not engage in hypnosis at all. Yes, use caution - if your goal is to maximally reduce dissociation, inclusive of short timescales, this may not be the practice for you. However, I have known a number of folks who dissociate heavily in their day-to-day who make fantastic hypnotic subjects, some of whom have learned to navigate "altered" states fluidly because trance is not too far from their baseline. For such entities, hypnotic exploration may be a valuable addition to the intuitive toolset they have built over time. This is an approach that does not centralize reduction of dissociation or amnesia, but quality of life, inclusive of having dissociation and amnesia as a healthy part of the way you navigate your mind and interface with the world around you. If that approach is not one that works for you, I advise against using it.
So. Let's say you've got the amnesia down. Let's do a couple exercises - it's ok if they don't come right away, or if you can't get them both. I gave two because everyone works differently, and because I think if one of them's a bit hard at first the other can help practice the relevant muscles.
To start: cordon a piece of information off from your conscious mind. This is where it not being perfect comes up again. It's ok if you're playing mental keep away a bit. It's alright, helpful even, if you can "feel" the thing you've forgotten. Maybe the texture is there, the knowledge is right there, but you're preventing yourself from accessing the details. This works fine for what we're doing.
What I want you to do is pulse the information back from the cordoned-off section of your mind, without breaking the barrier. The information can be that same intuitive feel - if anything, that's even better! You're setting up a rudimentary partition in your mind and allowing A to talk to B through that. Maybe you can walk into a room with a purpose in mind, intentionally wipe the purpose, and allow the forgotten purpose to take the steering wheel, taking you to whatever it was you were in here to get (mmm, pudding apparently!) without your ability to register details - if asked at any point what you were doing, it might be a certain sort of honest to say "I don't know."
Another exercise - let's say you've set up a memory barrier. It is pretty common in hypnotic amnesia for that memory barrier to be able to create emergent properties
For example, perhaps I've blocked out my knowledge of what day it is. If I'm able to hold that steady, my partner might be able to ask me what day it is and I could respond "I don't know" or "today," depending on what my mind spit out. If I looked at a phone with the date on it, I might not fully be able to process what I was looking at.
What I want you to try to get a feel for is the process of generating that sort of "extra layer" of amnestics. When you say "I don't know," that actually happens second. The first thing that happens is you hit the little marker¹ your conscious mind is using to say "I will not look at this information." When you hit the marker, your subconscious starts calculating and comes up with something plausible. "I don't know" is plausible because, sure, you can work memory barriers, that's been established.
I want you to get a feel for when you hit that marker. Maybe set up a separate hypnotic trigger that says that when you do, when it starts generating additional layers, you get a pulse back from it, informing you, consciously, that this is happening, again without breaking the barrier itself.
This one in particular is a big deal, because people create these sorts of barriers in their mind all the time. How often have you felt like you lost yourself while in a shitty situation, only to get out and go "oh. that isn't me." It's because you wrote that part of yourself out of your story for a while. Learning to recognize when you're doing this isn't the first step to stopping doing it - it's the first step to learning how to do it with intentionality when appropriate.
"But Jeans," I hear you asking, assuming you know that that's the name I use online. "This all feels pretty abstract. I'm better at learning hands-on with direct guidance."
The good news is I do teach this sort of thing online, so you are welcome to DM me if you'd be interested in having me guide you through the process (I do ask to be compensated for my time, though prices are negotiable). However, if that's out of your reach or interest, I suggest tracking down a hypnotist with some degree of experience and showing them this post. I don't think any of this has to be relegated to self-hypnosis, and my hope is that I've laid out the fundamental ideas I'm trying to get across here pretty well (it is a bit hard with something so abstract). If you have further questions, feel free to send me an ask - I love talking about this sort of thing.
¹ That marker is what makes this, so to speak, "CPU intensive," by the way, which is some of why these sorts of barriers aren't typically sustainable. The rest is that the "extra layers" start building up, and eventually brick you as your subconscious realizes in a sort of hanging paradox sense that looking at pretty much anything makes you know too much. Typically that bricking point results in catastrophes designed by the subconscious to get out of the amnestic structure.
Also, did you finish reading the sentence the ¹ was in while holding in your mind that you were going to come down here and read the footnote? If so, you've engaged in the sort of compartmentalization I'm talking about! If not, give it a try and see if you can - I've found myself doing it a few times while proofreading.
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