Lecture: Spacation, Anchor Points and Attention (1953)

Now, ridges are points where attention is too fixed. There are too many anchor points per unit of space if the ridge is a painful or unwanted ridge. So, what do you do? You just got too many anchor points in the same unit of space…

Now, let’s take where we have no attention; I mean, it’s just all over the place. You really have a condition there of unable to fix on any anchor point. And you’ll find that there’s a near vacuum around this person. There’s just — there’s just no attention units in it at all, no anchor points in it.

So, these two conditions are the two conditions of a case. But both of the conditions change as the spiral is unwound backwards or as it proceeds down through life.

You find this girl who is scattering her attention here and there will eventually get into a situation where her – oh, something happens – life and some young fellow marries her or something and leaves her or something happens like that. All of a sudden her attention goes bong and fixes. This is how you hypnotize somebody. You lead him into dispersing his anchor points all around, see, and then making him suddenly fix on one anchor point.

This is very curious. I had this happen a few times. One notable time I noticed this was – I was just a kid and it was a situation which had a little bit of – a lot more drama than is permissible on this planet.

Down along the docks and this – I had a ship, the old Doris Hamlin, and a sailor who was wobbling around and pretty, pretty darned drunk took out a knife and started in my general direction and I planted a shot exactly to part his hair, just exactly and that’s exactly what happened. That’s very dramatic. This doesn’t happen very often on this planet. You don’t get this opportunity unless you’re young and don’t care what the police say.

The guy went into a complete hypnotic trance. His attention unit was completely dispersed all over the place, you see, and then all of a sudden this slug and a sudden noise takes a few of the hairs out of the top of his crown of his head and it was no impact there or anything like that; it knocked his hat off He went into a complete hypnotic trance. He just stood there and his eyes dilated from the relatively small point they were in, completely out! They just went zzrooomm. There he was!

Anyway, I said to him, seeing something had happened to him with regard to this – I says, “You will now be a model sailor and will be very obedient to your captain.” And he was.

For years, though, I wondered why he got sick after he left that ship. He got real sick.¹

Notes