One of the many interesting individuals who have been associated with Maybe Logic Academy, Philip H Farber’s NLP training, combined with a life-long fascination with hypnosis and a strong and disciplined understanding of the ritual forms that underlie occult tradition, has brought an interesting fusion to the forefront of consciousness studies. He’s integrated his knowledge to provide a unique approach to magical thought and consciousness alteration. Having been associated with Robert Anton Wilson and Terrence McKenna, to mention just a few, Philip Farber’s work has become part of a neo-psychedelic movement that has internalized the early work of consciousness exploration and turned those lessons learned into skills with practical applications. In the first half of this two-part interview, we’ll talk about what NLP is, how he came to be a hypnotist, and the impact of NLP and hypnosis on the growth of the internet. We’ll also talk about early electronic self-publishing, and the nature of celebrity. In the second half of this interview, coming up in X days, We’ll talk about his books, both fiction and non-fiction, and the challenges and benefits of self-publishing vs traditional publishing. We’ll also discuss his work at live events, and the material he is teaching in seminars and online courses throughout this year.

Wes Unruh:
So you run Meta-Magick.Com right now, that’s magick with a k. You’re a hypnotist, an NLP trainer, and you’ve written extensively and do live seminars around ideas about NLP, Hypnotism, and magic and how they all intersect. How did you get to this point?

Philip Farber:
How did I get to this point? I ask myself this same question. How did I get to this point?

Let’s see, I’ve been heading in this direction most of my life. My grandfather, Max Farber, a promoter and newspaper editor in Hartford, CT was friends with Harry Houdini. Houdini was often by the house and inspired my father to get interested in stage magic. My father must have been a wee child at the time, when Houdini was around but he got his start to practice stage magic. He actually worked his way through college as a stage magician, then he became a physicist and an electronics engineer. But he worked his way through college as a stage magician, and over the course of that he added a stage hypnosis piece to his act. So when I was growing up there were all these great books on hypnosis.

And they were old, kind of classic books, definitely not the style of hypnosis that most of us practice today; stuff about mesmerism and animal magnetism, names like Estabrooks and William Wesley Cook, real old stuff. But I was reading that stuff when I was like ten years old, mainly because I was forbidden to read it. I was told “these are books for adults, leave them alone” so I had to read them.

That sparked my interest from a very early age. With a little time off here and there, I really have been pursuing hypnosis all along. When I was in college I was getting interested in ritual magic/golden dawn type stuff and also around the same time while I was in college the early NLP books started coming out and I started looking at those and got hooked pretty quickly. It seemed like a much more practical and sensory-based hypnosis than the old school stuff.

WU:
Is there a functional difference between NLP and hypnosis, or are they sort of ‘of the same coin’, just sliced differently?

PF:
There are a couple of ways you could approach that. One of the stories Richard Bandler tells about how he created NLP was that at the time in California you had to be a medical doctor to practice hypnosis, so he wanted to create something where you could get all the same effects of hypnosis without actually using (quote) hypnosis (endquote). But of course Richard Bandler tells a different story about how he created NLP every time somebody asks him. So who really knows? NLP is more about learning how to calibrate our senses and observe the states, and act upon what we observe. You can use that towards the same ends as hypnosis, you can use that to create
trance inductions and to achieve hypnosis. But using NLP – we can define that as
a set of tools that you can use in hypnosis as well as other things.

WU:
Sort of like the states that the Sufi’s would master, as far as this method of trance induction.

PF:
Absolutely yes. In fact NLP, really a lot of it was learned by modeling Milton Erickson and understanding how he conducted his hypnosis sessions. And I’m trying to remember the name of the Sufi who made the comment, but a famous Sufi once commented that “Erickson was more of a Sufi than any of us.”

WU:
After encountering NLP at that point in college, where did you take it from there?

PF:
There were a couple of people locally who were teaching some NLP workshops, I’d go and check those out. There was a fellow named Richard Zarro who was pretty well known, he died a few years back. Steve Leeds who’s now down in NYC was also teaching in this area. I picked up every book I could get. I got friends whenever I could to get together and practice. I guess it was shortly after I got out of college, 1984, 85 that I started taking on clients and practicing in that way. I’ve been doing that for quite a long time. I follow up, I take seminars with interesting trainers and teachers whenever I can. Richard Bandler, I’ve been to quite a few of his, and Steve Andreas… many others.

WU:
Now you’re helping people use these tools you’ve learned with your website. I know you used an interesting phrase in podcast 6 from your meta-magick site which was ‘Contriving your Circumstance’. Could you explain what you mean by that?

PF:
I think there’s a sort of ritual aspect to most of the things that we do. We don’t necessarily think consciously in those terms, but say you wanted to have a romantic dinner with somebody. There’s a ritual to the music that you play or the way you set the lighting or the food that you serve. And on the most basic level you’re contriving the circumstances for a particular outcome. For the dinner to be successful, for the other person to enjoy, to like it, whatever. When we’re talking about psychedelic drugs we have the phrase ‘Set and Setting’ which was coined by Timothy Leary and company, to describe something very similar. You want to make the circumstances of the event something that’s going to give you a particular experience or outcome.

And in the podcast I was talking about contriving the circumstances of your life. In effect we need to look around us and see are these the elements of our life, the place where we live, the people that are around us, the things that are in front of us, are they supporting our goals in life, are they supporting who we really want to be? And if they’re not, well, go out there and make them do that. It’s something at the basic level of who you associate with, how your office is set up or whatever, these are all factors that we at least have some control over. There’s certainly a lot of things out there we don’t have control over, but the things that we do have control over, you know, why not maximize them? Make all the elements in your life fit who you want to be.

WU:
And I’ve noticed Richard Bandler has said positive things about your work, that’s pretty cool.

PF:
Richard Bandler just gave me a nice jacket blurb for my forth-coming book, I’m pretty pleased about that.

WU:
Yes, I know right now you have a few books out. I understand that you wrote one of the earliest fictional ebooks out there.

PF:
It was called “Breaks: The Adventures of Richard Nixon in the 21st Century”. And I did release it as a self-displaying .exe file on a floppy disk. At the time it seemed like a cost-effective and unique way to publish something and to get it out there. (ed. note: textfiles.com/stories has the original .asc files for the 3 parts of “Breaks”.)

I actually sold a lot more of those floppies than when I came out with the book. I sold very few of the actual book but the floppy disk did pretty well for a while.

WU:
So that’s pretty interesting, It was a very early form of self-publishing at a point where most people didn’t know what a floppy disk was.. the internet didn’t really take off until 97-98, and you had this thing up on bulletin boards.

PF:
Yeah, I had it up on bulletin boards, pre-internet really. And I was also offering, when I’d go around to workshops I’d have the floppy disks and sell them.

WU:
Much easier to pack than actual books.

PF:
Absolutely. Now when I go around to do workshops most of my products I’m selling are DVD’s at these events because I really hate lugging boxes of books around.

WU:
Speaking of the internet, and you’ve been in an interesting position to observe it, what do you think the hypnosis and NLP community have had on it’s growth?

PF:
The NLP and hypnosis end of things has certainly had some influence on the way that we have perpetuated our ideas that have helped the internet to grow. I think there’s a non-linear way of thinking that the internet promotes, that’s sort of central to the internet. It sort of initially required a different way of thinking. People who were interested in studying altered states and ways that we think were a little more naturally inclined to be involved.

I know I personally was involved. I used to work for one of these earliest web development companies which was Spectral Resources, and we were developing some of the first commercial web sites for pharmaceutical companies and financial institutions, things like that, real early on. I was certainly incorporating my knowledge of NLP linguistics into the copy that I would write for those web sites. And there were a lot of other people doing that as well.

More recently there’s been a big trend in marketing where people who are thinking in these terms, in hypnotic and memetic terms, are much more involved in marketing. Some of these things that we see online now are viral marketing and memetic marketing are really coming out of this.

WU:
They certainly seem to be informed by it, NLP in particular. I know copywriters who talk about how just using the right words, by constraining your language sets you can create a mood. Just by consistently over long copy using the same key words, So I see what you’re saying, this has filled the marketing, it’s permeated the marketing actually.

PF:
Marketing people have always had a little bit of that, if your medium is written language then that’s where you have to look at what kinds of language patterns you are incorporating into your direct marketing letters or your ad copy or whatever. One of the things that immediately interested me about NLP way back when, was that one of my ambitions in life was to be a professional writer and I was sort of looking for ‘what are the secrets to consciousness, what are the secrets to language that offer keys to really getting people to respond?’ And when I was in college I took courses like Psychology of Language and Psycho-Linguistics. Where you learn really neat things about how they taught sign language to chimps and things like that but wasn’t all that practical in terms of like, ‘How do we use language with each other to accomplish a goal?’, ‘How do we get rapport with each other?’, ‘How do you influence someone with your language?’, there wasn’t much of that. And the books were deadly dull. Which, I’d pick up the books, and I’d go ‘You know so much about language, why is this chapter putting me to sleep?’

I had a different response when I found some of the earlier NLP books where they were really incorporating what they were talking about into the language of the book itself. And I was just.. this was something different. Just by reading it I was having a different kind of experience.

WU:
It was much more practical, than just the pure theory.

PF:
Yeah. I mean now you have people out there like Joe Vitale who’s hypnotic marketing kind of thing is very influential in the way a lot of people market. You go out there and you see people with marketing websites that are Joe Vitale clones basically.

WU:
Right. And The Secret has made him extremely high profile since it’s come out, which also was totally a viral marketing phenomenon.

PF:
Absolutely. I’ve known Joe from hypnosis conventions going back for years, and he’s always been well-known in that community, certainly. So it’s interesting to see somebody gain celebrity status from what they do. There’s an interesting phenomena which I would call.. there isn’t really a term for it but I’ll call it entity modeling. When we look at another person we don’t necessarily see them, we see something that in magical terms would be the equivalent of an ‘Evoked Entity.’ We see our internal idea of what we think they are. And that becomes even more magnified in terms of celebrity, where their persona and their image is so manipulated by the marketing and the publicity that when you see one of these people, I don’t know, Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, or something like that on the news or on the screen, it’s so carefully tailored, even the things that seem controversial about it are so carefully planned and tailored that we have these impressions of them that if we actually got to meet them, we’d be like, you know, ‘who is this person’?

WU:
Right.

PF:
I was a journalist for 15, 20 years doing Arts and Entertainment stuff so I got to interview all sorts of so-called celebrities, rock stars, things like that. And celebrities generally are not.. most of these people were very rarely who their public persona was.

WU:
That almost seems like a given, but its so hard to forget, I mean, you only see people who are celebrity through some form of media filter, that’s the only way you interact with them. And you aren’t really even interacting with them, it’s all about the image.

PF:
That’s right. And it even happens with non-celebrity when you’re interacting with somebody on a blog site, or a forum, or something like that. You’re still interacting with your perceived idea of them, which has been partly manipulated by what they want to show you, and what they don’t want to show you, and their language skills, and so on, and so forth.

WU:
Right, their wikipedia entry, for example.

PF:
That’s right. (Laughs)

Hawk Ridge Productions

Philip H Farber on Wikipedia