Osho,
Hearing you talk about hypnosis the other morning, I reached into a very quiet, relaxed state. I felt totally safe and wrapped in a wonderful softness.

When I did a three-month dehypnotherapy with Santosh at the ranch, however, I often found myself in total horror and fear, regressing into my early childhood. What did I experience with you?

Hypnosis is such a simple, innocent experience, that even hearing about it can give you a taste of it. And that’s what happened. Even when I am not talking about hypnosis, the same is happening to those who are really listening to me. A softness, a calmness, a silence starts surrounding them. That is a signal that whatever is being said is being heard too, that I am not talking to the walls.

About your experience with Santosh and his dehypnotherapy, I can only say one thing: Santosh knows nothing about dehypnotherapy. He himself is so tense, so continuously worried, has so many problems…but he had studied hypnosis as a student for years in Germany so he knows the technique; but he has never been in those spaces himself.

It is just like…you can read the map of the whole world and you have never been to those places, ever. Knowing where Constantinople is does not mean that you have been there. Knowing about it is one thing; being there is a totally different phenomenon. And in the schools only the technique, the know-how, is being taught.

So when Santosh came to me he had the know-how of hypnosis. I engaged him in hypnotherapy, and I tried my best to make him understand that we have first to create a state of dehypnotherapy – because every child is being hypnotized, from the very childhood. That’s how conditioning happens; that’s how you get your mind. Your parents may not know, your teachers may not know, your priests may not know what they are doing: they are practicing hypnotic techniques. By the time you leave the university, you know all the techniques for conditioning others. So whoever comes to me is already conditioned.

I was trying to make Santosh understand, “First dehypnotize these people, let them get rid of what society has forced upon them, and only then will hypnosis be clean, young, fresh, just born.”

He was only a student, so he changed the name of his therapy to dehypnotherapy on my suggestion. But what he has been doing is still the same techniques that he had learned in Germany. And those techniques can create horror, because first you are filled with social conditionings, and on top of it you are hypnotized.