When Dr. Milton H. Erickson was an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin, he participated in a series of seminars exploring hypnotic phenomena. Erickson, even as a student, was in disagreement with his professor sponsoring the seminars. Erickson thought hypnotic phenomena had little dependence on the hypnotist, and crafted experiments to demonstrate this assumption. The experiments were wildly successful, beyond Erickson’s expectations. Erickson wrote: “The entire sequence of events was disturbing and obviously displeasing to my professor, since he felt that the importance of suggestions and suggestibility and the role of the operator (the hypnotist) in trance induction were being ignored and by-passed, with the result that this approach to a study of hypnosis was then abandoned in the university seminars.” Can Creator elaborate on why his professor was so “disturbed?”

The reason for this odd sequence of events, that a promising and highly creative student met with summary dismissal for his ideas, and even demonstrated excellence and productive findings pointing towards important principles at work, could be so easily cast aside and suppressed in pursuing those promising leads, is very much sinister in its origins. Here is a demonstration of someone in the field of inquiry, but trapped by some hidebound thinking that was cultivated to develop, and enforced so it would be maintained without branching out much further. This was done to the professor, and to others in the field as well, to stifle their curiosity and exploration, and limit it to safe boundaries that would be relatively modest in adding to understanding, and with little practical value in the end. So this is a practical real-world example of this dynamic underway, that scientific advancement is constrained to keep it from proceeding reliably and rapidly, but rather to stagnate, so people will be discouraged and content to return to old ideas and procedures to milk them for some further utilization but, by definition, will only be revisiting "old ground" and not adding greatly to knowledge, and certainly will not create opportunities to make a further breakthrough in understanding to widen the horizons in a significant way. All are losers with this kind of orchestrated subjugation. It is true from top to bottom, both the opinion leaders in the fields of scientific inquiry and the learned professors in positions of authority, become gatekeepers constraining new generations of researchers who are coming up through the ranks, and may be burning with curiosity and eagerness to take on new challenges, but will be met with resistance and indifference by their would-be mentors. This is how the lid is kept on things and human progress stalls out, when the opposite could happen through a series of breakthroughs and revelations about how the mind within truly functions—that is why it is left to others and so little gains are made over time. Erickson was on to something important here, that the mind has a power and will of its own and is not simply a puppet on a string in the hands of a hypnotist, which is more like a circus act akin to an animal trainer that has little to offer in the way of real learning, but more like a parlor trick, when people are seemingly reduced to being under the spell of a hypnotist, simply following suggestions in a robotic fashion. What Erickson was seeing and wanting to demonstrate was that there was much more to the realm of the subconscious mind, reachable via hypnosis, and it was met with disdain. And this was purposeful in its orchestration because the blinders had already been put in place for those overseeing his education, and they could not evaluate his research objectively and provide any acceptance or encouragement, because of rigid inner beliefs that were highly constraining and faulty to begin with.