Researchers have known

Researchers have known for many years that hypnosis seems to have a special effect on the self (Faria, 1819; Forrest, 1999; Hilgard, 1977; Kihlstrom, 1987). An example of this phenomena includes recent research that has shown the remarkably flexible self- structure of high hypnotizables who can experience a completely new sense of self in response to hypnotic suggestions to alter their identity (Barnier et al., 2010; Cox & Barnier, 2010, 2013). These subjects not only experienced profound alterations of self in response to hypnosis but also displayed greatly diminished signs of self-recognition when challenged to interact with a mirror or to talk with a close friend who knows them from real life. Another example is the tradition of neo-dissociation (Hilgard, 1977), which has demonstrated that many people can experience the sense of contacting other parts of themselves in hypnosis as if they had a family of ego states (Watkins & Watkins, 1997) operating within them at all times. The neo-dissociative tradition has hypothesized that there is an executive ego that integrates these aspects of self (ego states) and under

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ordinary conditions keeps one’s phenomenological experience of self as being unitary and stable when in reality it might be polypsychic (Frederick, 2005).

Another interesting aspect of neo-dissociative research is that it has demonstrated that ordinary people can experience their own actions and cognitions during hypnosis as if they were involuntary (Kihlstrom, 1992). A person can experience a suggestion to imagine that their head is “becoming very heavy and falling forward” as if their behav- ioral response to do so was involuntary and not volitional. Socio-cognitive theorists have tended to be skeptical of neo-dissociative and polypsychic theories of identity and have emphasized that these alterations of self might just be temporary roles that they are act- ing out (Spanos, 1996). However, even this position accepts the notion that hypnosis can alter the self temporarily and that ultimately our identity as human beings is merely a believed-in imagining, which is “constructed, role governed, and performed” as if it was real (Sarbin, 1998, p. 137). It is safe to say that no matter how you look at this issue, there is much evidence that processes of hypnosis can alter our experience of self and agency. It will be seen later that the ideas of self that have been proposed by the Bon- Buddhist schools of Dzogchen meditation (Wangyal, 2005, 2011) are consistent with both the socio-cognitive concept of the self as being a believed-in imagining as well as the neo-dissociative idea that there is a kind of executive ego actively constructing our experience of self.