As soon as you have calibrated to your partner, you can begin with the general category of "an important person." Everybody has an important person somewhere in their life, so that's a good way to get started. Then you can use binary categories. What are some additional binary categories you can use?
Woman: Short/tall.
Man: Happy/unhappy.
Sure. These are all pseudo–categories, but they are categories everybody operates with all the time, "Concerned about you./Not concerned about you." "It's night./It's daytime." I want you each to have a list of at least six binary choices such as these before you begin.
At the end of using these binary categories, you can practice using Ericksonian patterns by doing a process instruction. You could do the whole thing with just Ericksonian patterns. There are plenty of "psychics" who actually do just that. You could say "And that event from your past contains some information, some learning that you hadn't realized was there, … Because the meaning which that event has for you now may be different than the meaning you drew from it , . . at the time. … So that as your unconscious mind makes sense out of your past … in a new way … it doesn't matter if it allows your conscious mind to appreciate that understanding … a lot … or a little… . Your unconscious mind can apply that new understanding … in a meaningful … and surprisingly delightful way … to some experience … that will occur within the next forty–eight hours."
Or, once you've described the important person, you can say "And I don't know if you've realized that there is an important message which that person had never verbalized to you, but always wanted to relate … that could be useful to you now… . And as you watch and listen to them now … you can begin to hear what that message is… ."
When you use Ericksonian patterns, you can use this same yes/no feedback system to guide what you say. Make sure that you stay out of content.
After going through an experience like this with you, it will take a relatively sophisticated communicator to know what you actually said. His internal experience projected into the crystal ball will be so rich and detailed that he may mistakenly think that you specified the entire experience that he actually created internally. You mentioned some appropriate variable, and he filled in the specifics. Typically at the end of this, unless you've got someone really sophisticated, he will say "How did you know those things?" And of course the answer is, you didn't.
Woman: You are not getting verbal feedback from them at any time?
No. The point of this exercise is for you to learn to trust your ability to see nonverbal signals and to use those to guide what you say. Using the binary category approach, you will get more specific by following the yes/no signals down the binary tree. When using the Ericksonian approach, you will stay completely general, but still use the nonverbal feedback to know if and when the nerson is following you. If you notice particularly powerful involuntary responses as you go along, then you know to emphasize nominalizations in that general area. You still have no idea what his experience is, but as long as you have rapport, the person will be perfectly capable of filling in rich detail for himself and making it a very meaningful experience.
Crystal ball gazing is designed to refine your ability to make visual palm–reading instead. When you do palm–reading, you hold the other person's hand, and learn to feel the difference between your partner's "yes" and "no" responses when you are calibrating.
Ann: I do psychic readings for people and get information outside of the sensory channels. Are you saying that being psychic is really doing this?
I have no objections to notions of ESP and other psychic phenomena. At the moment the word "psychic" in the psychological realm has about the same meaning that the word "viable" has in the medical world. It's a term for things that are powerful somehow but we don't yet understand what they are or how they work. Some psychics certainly do their readings in the way I've described this exercise.
My hope is that there are hundreds of information–passing channels between human beings which lie outside of our recognized five senses and which I don't yet know anything about. I don't know. I do know that I now see and hear and tactilely feel things that I would have considered in the realm of psychic phenomena a few years ago.
I would be delighted if I could discover extra channels. One of my programs for discovering whether there are other such channels is first to refine my sensory channels as much as I can, and then model people who can do "psychic" phenomena. If I am getting the maximum amount of information I believe I can get out of the normally recognized channels, and I am getting other information as well, then I've got some evidence that there might be other channels.
Go find someone outside to try this exercise with, and find out how accurate you can be using just nonverbal feedback. Take about ten minutes.
*****
How did you do?
Woman: I made a mistake at the beginning. My partner got right into it. His head was starting to go down toward the crystal ball. I said the person was a woman, and his head jerked back up and he said "I see a man."
How did you respond to that?
Woman: I said "Oh, yes. I see now it is a man out there." OK, good. Calling something a "mistake" instead of an "outcome" or a "response" is an unnecessary judgement on the part of your how good you want to be in doing these kinds of things in order to motivate yourself to become increasingly more adept, I respect that. Do recognize, however, that what may seem like a "mistake" to you, may be totally unrecognizeable as such to the other person. You know what steps you are planning to go through. If for some reason you don't carry out that plan, that may or may not be apparent to other people. I recommend confidently utilizing whatever extra pieces of information they give you as you go along. "Of course you see a man, and examine carefully the expression on his face."
Woman: Your partner may be testing you to find out "Is this person going to be flexible and allow me to do what I want to do?" So it could be an opportunity to establish rapport.
Exactly. Erickson talks a lot about idiosyncratic needs that particular people have when going into altered states. It's possible that no matter what you propose, they have a polarity response to the first thing you say. Whatever their response is, you utilize it to go where you want to go.
Ann: I found it difficult to do this. When I started thinking about it and first took off, I started to go into the state that I go into to get psychic information.
Right. I thought that might happen.
Ann: Telling the other person I'm going to do crystal ball gazing immediately puts me into that state. When I do psychic readings, I close my eyes and get images on the inside, so I kept my eyes open to make this different. Even with my eyes open, it was difficult to stay out of the state where I receive that information, and just stay with the binary choices.
Right. Let me say several things in response to that. You have the ability to go to a special state in which you either have access to channels of communication I don't know about yet, or you have a really fine sensitivity to minimal cues so that you don't have to use the binary method. Whichever it is, is not important for me at this moment. You already have a well–developed strategy which you can use in order to get the same kinds of information that you can get using this step–by–step model of binary choices.
The question is "Is it worthwhile for you to add to your repertoire another way of doing it, independently of the special state you've learned to use effectively for yourself?" Ifyou are interested in that, then before you engage in activities like crystal ball gazing, palmistry, or anything else we do that's associated with the special skill you've already developed, you can reframe internally to make sure that your special state and all the skills connected with it are kept specially protected, separated from your learning a whole new way of getting information. If you do this, then you won't have the interference of constantly sliding into that special state.