Hypnotizing Maria

footnoting every sentence he remembered.
    He nodded, convinced. Now this breakfast partner had him accepting her suggestion that he was guiding Maria’s mind. Is hypnotism so easy?
    ... “‘I’m going to talk to the control tower a bit on another radio. Don’t worry, I’ll be listening on this radio, too. You can talk to me any time you want, OK?”’ “Stop,” she said. “What are you telling her now?”
    “She hardly has to do anything. Mister Authority is watching her every move, even though he’s talking to somebody else.”
    “Exactly.”
    ... “I told the tower, ‘Negative, but it wouldn’t hurt to roll an ambulance and a fire truck. Keep the vehicles behind the landing aircraft, will you? We don’t want to distract her, equipment driving alongside when she’s landing.’”
    “Stop. What are you doing now?”
    He smiled. “I’m hypnotizing the tower operator.” She nodded, solemn. “Yes. You are suggesting that you are in control, and that he will accept that you are.”
    ... “‘There’s the runway ahead of us, Maria. We’re going to do a big gentle turn to line up with it. Real smooth, no hurry. This is easy for you.’”
    “There you have it,” she said. “Suggesting a future already finished, successful.”
    “I was, wasn’t I?”
    “What do you think?” said Dee Hallock. “Telling me the story, how many suggestions, two dozen, three dozen? How many didn’t you tell me about? My clients are in moderate trance after a single sentence.” She lifted her teacup, didn’t drink. “Suggestion-Affirmation-Confirmation, round and round, like the spirals they used to put in movies, to show someone’s... hyp-no-tized. ...”
    “It isn’t just me, you’re saying? Anybody can hypnotize us? Everybody can do it?”
    “Not only everybody can do it, sir, but everybody does it, every day. You do it, I do, all day, all night.”
    He guessed from her look that she thought he didn’t believe.
    She leaned forward, earnest. “Jamie, every time we think or say: I am ..., I feel..., I want..., I think ..., I know ..., You look ..., You can ..., You are ..., You can’t..., You ought..., I should ..., I will..., This is .. . , This isn’t . . . Every time we use some value judgment: good, bad, better, evil, best, beautiful, useless, terrific, right, wrong, terrible, enchanting, magnificent, waste-of-time ...”
    Her look said you can imagine how far it goes. “On and on, every statement we make isn’t a statement, its a suggestion, and every one we accept slides us deeper. Every suggestion intensifies itself.”
    “I tell myself I feel wonderful when I feel bad,” he said, “and ‘wonderful’ is intensified?”
    “Yes. Tell ourselves we feel wonderful when we feel bad, the badness fades with every suggestion. Tell ourselves we feel terrible when we feel bad, we get worse every word. Suggestions intensify.”
    She stopped, raised her eyebrows for a second. Surprised, he guessed, at her own intensity.
    “That’s interesting,” he said, his words underlining themselves, slipping him into a trance of knowing that what she said was wildly more than interesting. If what she said were a quarter true, a tenth true ...
    “Hypnotism’s no mystery, Jamie. That’s all there is to it: repetition, over and over. Suggestions from everywhere, from ourselves, from every other human being we see: think this, do this, be this. Suggestions from rocks: they’re solid, they’re substance, even when we know that all of matter is nothing but energy, patterns of connections, which we perceive as substance. There’s no such thing as solid anything, beyond seems to be.” As though she were determined not to go plunging deep again, she held her teacup, silent.
    Suggestion, affirmation, he thought. The lady is right. From all the suggestions we’ve ever heard or seen or touched, our truth is the crowd of those we’ve accepted. It’s not our wishes that come true, or our dreams; it’s the suggestions we accept.
    “You did it to Maria,” she said at last, “put her so deep in trance it wasn’t Maria landing the airplane, it was you. Your mind borrowing her body just long enough to save her life.”
    She set her teacup down as carefully as though she knew that tea must never be tilted. “Tell me this . . .” She fell silent.
    “Tell you what?” he said, after a while.
    “Was it possible, in your mind yesterday, that she wouldn't land that airplane safely?”
    Silence from the pilot.