My own experience with circling is much more like hypnosis than it is like the more cognitive/alert state described in this post. On the other hand, this may be because ordinary social charisma has a strong hypnotic effect on me.
My experience with being in circles is that the closer they are to the original “genuine article” (with The extreme end being me being birthday circled by Guy Sengstock, the founder of circling) the more it feels like plain old hypnosis: a rapid induction of an emotional catharsis, tears, gratitude, a sort of suspended or awed and highly receptive state of mind...
My other personal observation of circling is that it makes men hotter, by making them more hypnotic.
I think hypnosis is nothing more than a mental state in which one is more disposed to play along with suggestions. It’s not inherently bad — you may choose to induce a suggestible state in order to learn faster, or to be more spontaneously creative. You can induce it by doing perfectly “normal“ things like looking deep into someone’s eyes and breathing deeply. I don’t think it’s an especially dangerous tool, especially given how common it is and how many people use hypnotic techniques without knowing it.
I do think that hypnosis is kind of boring. If you offer something as a technique for leveling up my skill, and all I get out of it is being hypnotized, then I haven’t really leveled up at all. I’ve heard meditation teachers describe trance states as a trap to avoid while meditating, not to be confused with the actual goals of meditation.
I think circling can be hypnotic, at least for some people. It is for me, pretty consistently. That doesn’t mean that other people may not be getting something else out of it, something more interesting. The author of this post is definitely describing a more interesting effect.
I’ll add that I don’t expect the people most effective at inducing highly suggestible trance states to identify as hypnotists. For example, you enter such a state every time you’re totally absorbed in a movie, and we call the people who caused that effect “filmmakers” and “actors”, not hypnotists.
To clarify, my claim below is that the practice of Circling does not include in its philosophy or its intended practice to involve hypnosis (the intentional induction of a trance state where a person loses their full agency and becomes highly receptive to suggestion, including to the point where their perceptions can be rewritten or their TAPs can be altered to, e.g. stop smoking cigarettes).
If you’re talking about something weaker than that, something that happens all the time by accident, even in normal, everyday conversation, then … that makes sense it happens.
I don’t think Circling is supposed to be for this. If it were me, I would hopefully notice myself in it and be like, “I seem to automatically want to do whatever it is you suggest.” (And I’ve had that level of noticing before.)
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I’m confused why “a rapid induction of an emotional catharsis, tears, gratitude, a sort of suspended or awed and highly receptive state of mind...” would be considered reminiscent of hypnosis except for the ‘highly receptive state of mind’ part. ?
The cluster of things I’m calling hypnotism involves pretty much any ”guided meditation”, the opening ritual/warmup to most physical classes like martial arts or dance, some kinds of teaching, flirting of the kind where one partner “leads” the other, political rallies, movies, etc. It’s not so universal as to be meaningless, but it’s really really common.
It doesn’t permanently remove one’s agency, but literal hypnotists and cult leaders don’t do that either. Suggestible states are usually temporary and you don’t totally lose your preexisting personality. See Gwern’s research on “brainwashing” being mostly a myth. I think being influenced hypnotically to some extent is common, and as we go through our days we’re affected by a lot of influences, but total mind control is probably impossible.
I would totally buy that circling can have cool epistemic and relational properties beyond the hypnotic effect it has on some people. I’m just reporting that the hypnotic effect does exist.
It sounds like you don’t identify as the source of these feelings when you have them, hence your framing of other people suggesting the feelings to you. Is that an accurate description of your position?
Let me offer an alternative frame for what I think is going on when I see similar strong-feelings-as-a-result-of-circling in myself and others (although it’s certainly possible that your experience is quite different from the experiences I’m using as a reference): there are some parts of you (the generic you) that have strong feelings about things for a variety of reasons, and for a variety of reasons your response to this is often to shut those parts up and stuff them in a corner in the back of your mind. It generally doesn’t feel safe to let these parts out, so you don’t.
Circling can offer an environment in which things feel safe enough in some emotional sense (the term of art is that people are “holding space” for you) that these parts temporarily get let out, and the result can be surprisingly strong displays of emotion, crying, screaming, shuddering, etc. I have personally had this effect on people without any explicit suggestion on my part that they have strong feelings about anything; I “hold space” for them (whatever that means, I don’t have gears around it yet) and they start crying. This has been done for me at least twice and I’ve done it for others at least four times now.
When this has happened to me it has not felt even slightly hypnotic; I strongly identified as the parts that were having the emotions (although I think I identify as my S1 in general much more than most rationalists), and it never felt like the emotions were coming from anywhere other than me.
Yeah, to me it feels like “sure, you can do ‘magic’ and make me cry and hug and shudder, but that has very little to do with my long-term behavior patterns, it’s just a transient effect.” It feels like being flipped onto the mat by a skilled martial artist; I’m being a guinea pig for someone to demonstrate a cool trick.
My experience is that the cluster of experiences around “cry and hug and shudder” are what it feels like to become aware of something that’s important to my system 1, and that those moments are intervention points for shifting system 1′s heuristics. Progress on reducing akrasia, unendorsed social anxiety, etc. has often come from moments like that.
I don’t know you well, but I model you as someone with strong willpower and a general “mind over matter” attitude. This may make it less salient what your system 1 is up to?
My own experience with circling is much more like hypnosis than it is like the more cognitive/alert state described in this post. On the other hand, this may be because ordinary social charisma has a strong hypnotic effect on me.
My experience with being in circles is that the closer they are to the original “genuine article” (with The extreme end being me being birthday circled by Guy Sengstock, the founder of circling) the more it feels like plain old hypnosis: a rapid induction of an emotional catharsis, tears, gratitude, a sort of suspended or awed and highly receptive state of mind...
My other personal observation of circling is that it makes men hotter, by making them more hypnotic.
I think hypnosis is nothing more than a mental state in which one is more disposed to play along with suggestions. It’s not inherently bad — you may choose to induce a suggestible state in order to learn faster, or to be more spontaneously creative. You can induce it by doing perfectly “normal“ things like looking deep into someone’s eyes and breathing deeply. I don’t think it’s an especially dangerous tool, especially given how common it is and how many people use hypnotic techniques without knowing it.
I do think that hypnosis is kind of boring. If you offer something as a technique for leveling up my skill, and all I get out of it is being hypnotized, then I haven’t really leveled up at all. I’ve heard meditation teachers describe trance states as a trap to avoid while meditating, not to be confused with the actual goals of meditation.
I think circling can be hypnotic, at least for some people. It is for me, pretty consistently. That doesn’t mean that other people may not be getting something else out of it, something more interesting. The author of this post is definitely describing a more interesting effect.
I’ll add that I don’t expect the people most effective at inducing highly suggestible trance states to identify as hypnotists. For example, you enter such a state every time you’re totally absorbed in a movie, and we call the people who caused that effect “filmmakers” and “actors”, not hypnotists.
To clarify, my claim below is that the practice of Circling does not include in its philosophy or its intended practice to involve hypnosis (the intentional induction of a trance state where a person loses their full agency and becomes highly receptive to suggestion, including to the point where their perceptions can be rewritten or their TAPs can be altered to, e.g. stop smoking cigarettes).
If you’re talking about something weaker than that, something that happens all the time by accident, even in normal, everyday conversation, then … that makes sense it happens.
I don’t think Circling is supposed to be for this. If it were me, I would hopefully notice myself in it and be like, “I seem to automatically want to do whatever it is you suggest.” (And I’ve had that level of noticing before.)
…
I’m confused why “a rapid induction of an emotional catharsis, tears, gratitude, a sort of suspended or awed and highly receptive state of mind...” would be considered reminiscent of hypnosis except for the ‘highly receptive state of mind’ part. ?
The cluster of things I’m calling hypnotism involves pretty much any ”guided meditation”, the opening ritual/warmup to most physical classes like martial arts or dance, some kinds of teaching, flirting of the kind where one partner “leads” the other, political rallies, movies, etc. It’s not so universal as to be meaningless, but it’s really really common.
It doesn’t permanently remove one’s agency, but literal hypnotists and cult leaders don’t do that either. Suggestible states are usually temporary and you don’t totally lose your preexisting personality. See Gwern’s research on “brainwashing” being mostly a myth. I think being influenced hypnotically to some extent is common, and as we go through our days we’re affected by a lot of influences, but total mind control is probably impossible.
I would totally buy that circling can have cool epistemic and relational properties beyond the hypnotic effect it has on some people. I’m just reporting that the hypnotic effect does exist.
Because suggestibility + being prompted to have strong vulnerable feelings results in actually having said strong vulnerable feelings.
It sounds like you don’t identify as the source of these feelings when you have them, hence your framing
of other people suggesting the feelings to you. Is that an accurate description of your position?
Let me offer an alternative frame for what I think is going on when I see similar strong-feelings-as-a-result-of-circling in myself and others (although it’s certainly possible that your experience is quite different from the experiences I’m using as a reference): there are some parts of you (the generic you) that have strong feelings about things for a variety of reasons, and for a variety of reasons your response to this is often to shut those parts up and stuff them in a corner in the back of your mind. It generally doesn’t feel safe to let these parts out, so you don’t.
Circling can offer an environment in which things feel safe enough in some emotional sense (the term of art is that people are “holding space” for you) that these parts temporarily get let out, and the result can be surprisingly strong displays of emotion, crying, screaming, shuddering, etc. I have personally had this effect on people without any explicit suggestion on my part that they have strong feelings about anything; I “hold space” for them (whatever that means, I don’t have gears around it yet) and they start crying. This has been done for me at least twice and I’ve done it for others at least four times now.
When this has happened to me it has not felt even slightly hypnotic; I strongly identified as the parts that were having the emotions (although I think I identify as my S1 in general much more than most rationalists), and it never felt like the emotions were coming from anywhere other than me.
Yeah, to me it feels like “sure, you can do ‘magic’ and make me cry and hug and shudder, but that has very little to do with my long-term behavior patterns, it’s just a transient effect.” It feels like being flipped onto the mat by a skilled martial artist; I’m being a guinea pig for someone to demonstrate a cool trick.
My experience is that the cluster of experiences around “cry and hug and shudder” are what it feels like to become aware of something that’s important to my system 1, and that those moments are intervention points for shifting system 1′s heuristics. Progress on reducing akrasia, unendorsed social anxiety, etc. has often come from moments like that.
I don’t know you well, but I model you as someone with strong willpower and a general “mind over matter” attitude. This may make it less salient what your system 1 is up to?
Thanks for posting this. Strongly agree with learning to notice trance states and not confusing them for things they aren’t.