Hypnotism hijacks our mind
Hypnosis is the “induction of a state of consciousness in which a person apparently loses the power of voluntary action and is highly responsive to suggestion or direction.” Hypnotism bypasses the analytical side of one’s brain, the conscious mind, where value judgements are made, and taps into one’s subconscious mind, which has no ability to judge or censor information. In essence, it hijacks our control over ourselves.
(See Chinese versions: 简体中文 > 催眠术劫持了我们的思想 | 繁體中文 > 催眠術劫持了我們的思想)
Dedicating both conscious and subconscious minds to God
Jesus told us to love God with all our mind. We now know that our minds comprise two parts; a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. God wants us to love Him with both our conscious and subconscious minds – so we don’t become like a “double-minded man”.
Mark 12:30 ESV And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’
James 1:8 ESV He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.
As believers, we use our conscious minds when we invite Jesus to be our Lord and Saviour and when we meditate on God’s Word. This is how we consciously choose to renew our minds in God’s truths.
Romans 12:2 ESV Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Our subconscious mind is the “storage drive” of our unrestrained motivations, memories, interests and automated thought processes that we picked up since young. It controls our reflex emotions, habits and responses to the world. This is also where sin is activated – through ungodly motivations, impure memories, fleshly interests and sinful thought processes.
Consciously submitting our subconscious thoughts and actions to God can be hard work because our subconscious makes up 90% of our mind.
Philippians 2:12 ESV Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,
The enemy knows this. Through various New Age “healing techniques” such as hynotherapy, Satan seeks to tap into our powerful subconscious minds through psychic suggestions and mystical experiences. Many of these techniques corrupt us by enticing us to tap into our own “human potential” – instead of humbly surrendering every part of our bodies to God Almighty.
Romans 6:13 NLT Do not let any part of your body become an instrument of evil to serve sin. Instead, give yourselves completely to God, for you were dead, but now you have new life…
The Bible warns that we enter into foolishness when we trust in the “power” of our minds. When we let our subconscious sinful nature take control, God warns we will not be able to obey His laws. This will only lead us to spiritual death.
Proverbs 28:26 ESV Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered.
Romans 8:6-7 NLT So letting your sinful nature control your mind leads to death. But letting the Spirit control your mind leads to life and peace. For the sinful nature is always hostile to God. It never did obey God’s laws, and it never will.
Wikipedia states that “In the New Age community, techniques such as autosuggestion and affirmations are believed to harness the power of the subconscious to influence a person’s life and real-world outcomes, even curing sickness.” When we turn away from God for such “alternative healing” techniques, we will inevitably fall into Satan’s trap. Since the beginning, he has been the tempter who has offered man counterfeit knowledge and counterfeit promises of well being.
1 Thessalonians 3:5 NLT … I was afraid that the tempter had gotten the best of you…
Genesis 3:4 ESV But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.
The Holy Spirit is Lord over our subconscious minds
It is for this reason that we must take our mind captive to obey Jesus alone. We are told to be renewed in the spirit of our minds and no longer be subject to deceitful desires and suggestions.
2 Corinthians 10:5 ESV We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,
Ephesians 4:22-23 ESV to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds,
Over and over again, the Bible points to God’s Spirit as the source of our mental health, wisdom and healing. The Holy Spirit:
- Sets our oppressed minds free | Luke 4:18 ESV
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
- Counsels us | Isaiah 11:2 ESV And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
- Helps us understand things | Job 32:8 ESV But it is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand.
- Guides us to God’s truths | John 16:13 ESV When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.
- Teaches us what to do | John 14:26 ESV But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.
- Gives us peace of mind and self control | Galatians 5:22-23 ESV But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
When the Holy Spirit filled the disciples at Pentecost, He bypassed their conscious minds and took over their subconsciousness. This is how they were able to speak in new tongues.
Brain scans by neuroscientist Andrew Newberg in his research on people who speak in tongues showed that the part of the brain that makes people feel in control effectively shuts down whenever they prayed in tongues. The report on Newberg’s study in Science says another “notable change was increased activity in the parietal region–the part of the brain that “takes sensory information and tries to create a sense of self and how you relate to the rest of the world,” Newberg says. The findings make sense, says Newberg, because speaking in tongues involves relinquishing control while gaining a “very intense experience of how the self relates to God.””
1 Corinthians 2:12 ESV Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.
Hypnosis is an ungodly spiritual practice that hijacks our minds
Early spiritual rituals and practices in Hindu vedas and magical texts from ancient Egypt depict people who were placed into hypnotic trances to communicate with the “gods” and spirits. American historian and philosopher, Will Durant, stated that hypnotism for healing seemed to only appear later with “the Hindus of ancient India, who often took their sick to the temples to be cured by hypnotic suggestion or “temple sleep,” a practice of staying at night at a temple for meditational self-observance and communication with the gods, called Nidra in India.” Hypnotism then began to be adopted by Western scientists around the 1770’s, when Franz Mesmer (1734–1815), a physician from Austria, started investigating an effect he called “animal magnetism” or “mesmerism”, according to the history of hypnosis in Wikipedia.
Today, anecdotal evidence suggests that hypnotherapy helps patients in suppressing their phobias, addictions and chronic pain. A cautionary note is that while studies have shown hypnotism to have an effect, scientists are unable to explain how it works.
On the other hand, shamans, spiritists and mediums who practice witchcraft through hypnotic trances will explain that it is the spirits they worship that control them when they block out their conscious minds. The dictionary defines a trance as a “temporary state in which a medium, with suspension of personal consciousness, is controlled by an intelligence from without and used as a means of communication, as from the dead.”
When we are hypnotised, our conscious minds are switched off and so is our ability to judge or censor anything. We effectively lose control and are neither alert nor sober-minded – and hence are unable to guard our minds against Satan who is free to hijack our motivations, memories, interests and thought processes.
1 Peter 5:8 NIV Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.
Modern healthcare practitioners, including some professing Christians, can not deny the pagan origins of hypnotherapy’s psychic suggestions and mystical experiences, but yet still choose to use it because it seems to “work” and they want to “help” their patients. The Bible sends us clear warnings about this though. We are not to pick up any practices that are related to witchcraft or spiritualism because we become defiled when we turn to pagan practices. We “must no longer walk as the Gentiles do.
Deuteronomy 18:10 NIV Let no one be found among you who … practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft.
Ephesians 4:17 ESV Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.
People receive powerful suggestions in hypnotic trances
1. Biblical evidence
Both the apostles Peter and Paul went into trances while they were praying and received supernatural messages from God. The Holy Spirit revealed to Peter that the Gentiles, people outside the Jewish nation, could now receive salvation through Jesus Christ and told Paul to go to the Gentiles. Both experienced drastic changes in their thinking and directions.
Acts 10:9-11 ESV … Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray…. he fell into a trance and saw the heavens opened and something like a great sheet descending, being let down by its four corners upon the earth.
Acts 22:17-18,22 ESV “When I had returned to Jerusalem and was praying in the temple, I fell into a trance and saw him saying to me, ‘Make haste and get out of Jerusalem quickly, because they will not accept your testimony about me.’ … And he said to me, ‘Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’”
2. Scientific evidence
Research has proven that hypnotised subjects are very susceptible to implanted suggestions that they may be unaware of and that they will act on these suggestions subconsciously.
An example is posthypnotic amnesia (PHA), where a hypnotist suggests to a hypnotized person that he or she will forget particular things until he receives a “cancellation” from the hypnotist. Scientific American reports that “High hypnotizable people with PHA typically show impaired explicit memory, or difficulty consciously recalling events or material targeted by the suggestion, and a dissociation between implicit and explicit memory, so that even though they can’t recall the forgotten information it continues to influence their behavior, thoughts and actions. The forgetting is reversible—when the suggestion is cancelled, their memories come flooding back. These last two features—the dissociation and reversibility—confirm that PHA is not the result of poor encoding of the memories or of normal forgetting, because the memories return as soon as PHA is cancelled. Rather, PHA reflects a temporary inability to retrieve information that is safely stored in memory.”
3. Practical evidence
According to the page on hypnosis in Wikipedia, hypnotic music “became an important part in the development of a ‘physiological psychology’ that regarded the hypnotic state as an ‘automatic’ phenomenon that links to physical reflex… It was clear that music can be a potential threat to oneself, in which it create susceptibility to external stimuli and therefore as a danger to self-control and the sanity of an individual.” Hypnosis can also result in memory hardening, which increases the confidence in false memories. There have been troubling accounts of people who underwent hypnotic music therapies by psychologists who recall false memories and became suicidal afterwards.
Cutting off the effects of ungodly hypnotic trances
1. Turn to Jesus completely and cut ungodly spiritual ties
If we have ever allowed ourselves to undergo any form of hypnotism, whether it was intentional or not, professional or amateur, we must repent before God and submit our subconscious minds fully to the Holy Spirit once again. It is also important to declare out loud that we cut all ungodly spiritual ties with the hypnotists, psychology clinics and new age philosophies.
Romans 8:2 ESV For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
2. Invite the Holy Spirit to restore us
We should invite the Holy Spirit to reveal what ungodly suggestions which we unknowingly accepted through hypnosis and ask Him to restore our minds to perfect peace and fullness in Jesus Christ.
Isaiah 26:3 ESV You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.
3. Renounce any foothold to Satan
Next, we must revoke any footholds we had unknowingly given Satan through hynoptic trances in Jesus’ name.
Ephesians 4:27 NIV and do not give the devil a foothold.
4. Learn to submit to God in all circumstances
People subject themselves to hypnotherapy with the hope to deal with all sorts of ailments and addictions; from depression, anxiety, sleep disorders and post traumatic stress to compulsive behaviours, addictions and pain. Yet these are the very things that Jesus has come to set us free from through the Holy Spirit. When we truly step into our identity as God’s children, it won’t be impossible to continue as slaves to such spiritual strongholds.
Galatians 4:6-7 ESV And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.
Moving forward, we need to learn to submit ourselves to our Father in heaven in all situations through “prayer and supplication with thanksgiving”, and let Him take charge of whatever difficulties or sufferings we may be going through. Let us consciously train our minds to seek God’s will and fix our thoughts on things of God.
Philippians 4:6-7 ESV do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Colossians 3:2 ESV Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.
5. Praise God for His mercy and grace
Remember to keep praising God. Once Jesus sets us free, we are free indeed!
John 8:35-36 ESV The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
To receive notifications of new posts from Teaching Humble Hearts, please subscribe here .