If somebody says to you "Well, 1 was driving down the road, and I was on my way to Texas, and I was looking out the window and seeing the other cars go by, and it was a beautiful sunny day, and I said to myself 'It's raining so hard!'" that last phrase will jar you out of listening. Usually that's the point at which somebody will ask a question or begin to argue or disagree. Natural transitions lead people into an altered state without jarring them.

There are ways to induce an altered state by jarring someone as well. Both ways of using communication can induce altered states. People often use what is called the confusion technique as an induction procedure. When you use the confusion technique, you do not build in meaningful transitions. You induce a state of mild confusion in people, and then you begin to build natural transitions from that point. We'll get to that later.

If you listen to the kinds of things that jarred people, usually they were things that weren't sensory–based, or things that weren't universal to the experience. If you're playing the piano, you are going to have contact between the keys and your fingers, but you are not necessarily going to feel that "the music is you." For example, if you were playing "Chopsticks" would you feel like a chopstick? It wouldn't necessarily work that way.

Exercise 2

Soon I'm going to ask you to do the same thing again, only this time I want you to restrict yourself to descriptions of what must be there in sensory experience and to be non–specific. If you say "You can hear the splash of the water" and the person is underwater, it won't work. But you can say "You can hear the sounds that the water makes" because there will be some sounds.

This time I'd like you to add one other important piece: I'd like you to have a steady voice tempo and use the other person's breathing as the speed… and rate … and the pace … of the speech … that you generate.