Hypnotizing Maria

die to wake up? What suggestions do we hear otherwise?
    Nobody snaps their fingers hey! we can leave spacetime whenever we want, go home when we want, come back when we want, a little vacation to get some perspective. Nobody snaps hey! we don’t have to be dragged screaming out of this world by our beliefs of accident and sickness and age.
    Nobody tells us dying’s a custom, not a law.
    He sat bolt upright in bed, two a.m.
    That’s what Sam Black discovered.
    That’s the dimension he wrote about in his journal, a dimension of different suggestions.
    It felt like a psychic waterfall, a cascade of revelation, puzzles fitting together by themselves, the monkey watching.
    That’s how the man left his body in excellent health. Sam Black the hypnotist used his training to de-hypnotize himself from Conditioned Awareness, from the billions of suggestions he’d accepted, that all mortals have accepted, that we’re trapped in bodies, trapped in gravity, trapped in atoms, trapped in cultures, trapped in Earth-minds so long as we play the game.
    The whole sport called space-and-time, he realized, it’s hypnosis! Suggestions, they’re not true until we give our consent, until we accept. Suggestions that tie us are nothing but offers, proposals, until we accept and hammer them into chains, custom-made, for ourselves.
    We players, we were all sitting in row A, every one of us volunteers eager for the stage.
    What’s in front of the audience? What’s on the stage?
    Nothing!
    What’s in front of the audience is the play of suggestions become belief become visible, ideas become stone to believers.
    When it was him in that dungeon so long ago at the Lafayette Hotel, what he saw, what he battered against around him was as real as this world: tight-packed granite, cement and mortar way thick. He saw it, touched it, felt it. Hit it hard and it hurt his hand.
    Yet Blacksmyth the Great walked through that wall as though it were air.
    The subject believed it was rock, knew it was rock, impenetrable. The hypnotist knew it was air, nothing there to penetrate but the invisible private conviction of somebody hallucinating prison.
    In the dark of Oklahoma midnight, he pressed the switch on the bedstand lamp, squinted against its light, grabbed the hotel pencil and jabbed words on the notepad.
    Same as that prison, he thought, is my belief this moment, that I’m tight-packed in a body of flesh, in a motel room, sheetrock walls, keyed entry.
    I never questioned my own beliefs! Long ago convinced myself and never asked again: must have air to breathe, shelter food water, see with eyes to know, hear with ears, touch with fingers. I’ll see it when I believe it. No belief, no appearance.
    But listen: not some simple change-my-mind-and-it’ll-go-away belief, but deep every-second-of-a-life-time convinced this game’s the only truth there is.
    We don't need our belief in limits to live, he wrote, we need ’em to play the game!
    Can’t play hockey without ice and stick, can’t play chess without board and pieces, can’t play soccer without field and goal, can’t live on Earth without believing we’re infinitely more limited than we are.
    The pencil stopped. She’s right! It’s hypnotism, a hundred trillion suggestions accepted, when maybe eight would have done the trick.
    So what?
    Out in the night, faint, a siren. Someone’s playing a fateful move, this dark moment.
    So what? he thought.
    So I don’t need to get solemn, I don’t need to get scared over this or that, no matter how many people believe it.
    Scared over what?
    Poverty, loneliness, illness, war, accident, death. They’re terrorists, every one of them. And every one of them powerless the instant we choose to be unafraid.
    Lamp out, head on pillow, ’round the track again.
    If it weren’t for the time I served in Blacksmyth’s prison, he thought, this would all sound mad: a world made out of suggestions accepted, nothing’s real but thinking makes it so.
    Hey . . . don’t assume belief’s some limp-wristed half-heart. Belief has ferocious power, it’s the steel vise of the game, clamps us to it every second till we die.
    We die from our beliefs, he thought, every minute someone’s dead of terminal illusion.
    The only difference between the reality of Blacksmyth’s prison and the reality of the walls around me now, he thought, is that the prison would have dissolved overnight without my dedicated reinforcement, believing. The room will take longer than that.