WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

Hypnotism

10 September 1958

[...] Now they are finding out that they can replace anaesthetics by hypnotism with infinitely better results. Well, hypnotism is a form--a form modernised in its expression--of occultism; a very limited, very small form of a very tiny power compared with occult power, but still it is a form of occultism which has been put in modern terms to make the thing modern. And I don't know if you have heard about these things, but they are very interesting from a certain point of view: for instance, this process of hypnotism has been tried on someone who had to have a skin-graft on a wound. I don't remember all the details now, but the arm had to remain attached to the leg for a fortnight.... If the person were immobilised by plaster and bandages and all sorts of things, at the end of the fortnight he wouldn't be able to move--everything would become stiff and he would need weeks of treatment to recover the free use of his arm. In this case, nothing was tied up, nothing was physically immobilised--no plaster, no bandages, nothing--the person was just hypnotised and told to keep his arm in that position. He kept it for a fortnight, without any effort, any difficulty, without any intervention from his will: it was the will of the hypnotiser which intervened. It was perfectly successful, the arm remained in the required position, and when the fortnight was over and the hypnotism [old p. 395]removed, and the person was told, "Now you may move", he began to move! Well, that's a step forward.

They are soon going to meet--it will be nothing more than [new p. 395]a question of words--then, if they are not too rigid, they can agree on the value given to the words!

Sweet Mother, they say hypnotism has a bad after-effect on the hypnotised person?

No, no! If somebody practises hypnotism to impose his will on another, it can obviously do much harm to the other person, but we are speaking of a hypnotism which is practised in a humanitarian way, it might be said, and for precise reasons.

All the bad effects can be avoided if the one who does it has no bad intentions.

If you use chemical formulas in an ignorant way, you can cause an explosion (laughter), and that is very dangerous! Well, if you use occult formulas ignorantly--or egoistically, which is even worse than ignorantly--you can also have harmful results. But that doesn't mean that occultism is bad or hypnotism is bad or chemistry is bad. You are not going to ban chemistry because there are people who cause explosions!

Collected Works of The Mother, First Edition, Volume 09, pp. 394-95