I participated a while back in a (amongst many other processes) DHE course. Michael Breen said: find an area within that you'd like to use more, build it up a little more. I found a partner and started talking, and I found myself kindly directed towards areas in my life that I used, but would like used more. Along the way quite a few useful things came up, which we anchored. I started talking about some of the NLP that I used all through the day, and I mentioned a 'black box' -- a computing term for a function that does something, but of which we have no need to understand the internals.

It would be useful to just have the outcomes without going through the actual techniques themselves. I mean, after all, it's your unconscious that actually chooses which technique is best at which time. Sometimes you may 'invent' a technique on the fly, but it's your unconscious that puts it all together and gives it to you. And it's your unconscious that actually does the technique. So why not allow your unconscious to do all those other changes? Now, just build a machine that takes a representation of your outcome - I generally see a photograph -- and does whatever techniques, NLP, DHE or other, to get to this.You might think through five, 10 or 20 techniques so that your unconscious gets the idea. In fact, it's probably already got it, at least twice. Now, I visualise a 'black box' on top of which there is a green light which goes on when the change is in place. Normally, the change is perceivable a few seconds before.

Test it: imagine your pretend black box. Feed in a picture of the black box itself, and wait until the green light turns on on your real black box. Now the fun really begins!

I used my black box to generate a class of useful hypnotic 'techniques', so it's definitely generative (it's wise to test this with recursive procedures to ensure that they 'bottom out' somewhere). I also found that I could open it up and find out exactly how it worked. I generated yet more new techniques as a result. Maybe even this one.

As we talked through this idea, my partner found that she'd installed a black box as well, just by listening to me describe one.

Last updated: 25 September 1997