Never to Return, Chapter 7: "Hidden Persuaders"

NEVER TO RETURN:

A MODERN QUEST FOR ETERNAL TRUTH

A Multimedia Spiritual Adventure Memoir
by Sharon Janis

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money
they don’t have for something they don’t need.

Chapter Seven

HIDDEN PERSUADERS

A SOBERING DISCOVERY AWAITED ME near the end of my first semester of college. I read a book called The Hidden Persuaders, which postulated and documented the use of subconscious, subliminal manipulation by the advertising industry.

Anyone who watched television, read magazines, or listened to the radio at the time was bound to notice certain obvious manipulations – not all were subliminal or well disguised. Sexy women were often posed next to cars, implying that this was one of the extras one might expect with the purchase.

Cigarette commercials told us, "It's not how long you make it, it's how you make it long," or "It's round and firm and fully packed," or "Taste me, taste me, taste me!"

But The Hidden Persuaders revealed something more sinister – an entirely different layer of deception, the realm of subliminal influence. This book showed examples of whiskey ads where images of skulls had been airbrushed into ice cubes – a subliminal marketing tactic that was based on studies showing that alcoholics had a subconscious attraction to death. According to the author of this book, the word “sex” was embedded in everything from magazine photographs to the surface of Ritz crackers, and he had the photos to prove it.

Many readers probably found these bizarre claims fascinating but unbelievable, and some may have been a bit far-fetched. However, I’d been studying the subconscious mind since early childhood, and had already read some of the research studies behind these new subliminal marketing ploys. I’d read about a theatre owner in the 1950’s who had spliced in single frames of popcorn into a feature film to test the viability of subliminal suggestion. Even when the audience didn’t consciously see the popcorn frames, receipts showed that the sales of popcorn during showings of the spliced film was shown were more than fifty percent higher than usual.

The idea behind subliminal advertising is to get to the customer on a subconscious level, and to inspire them to want a particular product due to subconscious associations and triggers. It’s a mini-hypnosis, a bit of brainwashing, if you will – not so much different from when our hypnosis teacher prompted a woman in trance to act like a gorilla. He had bypassed communication with her conscious, decision-making mind, and injected the command directly into her much more obedient subconscious mind. This is also what subliminal ads attempt to do.

While exploring my unconscious for hours every day, the subconscious realm had become more available to my conscious mind. After reading this book, I was often able to detect uses of subliminal advertising. One advertisement showed a fun-loving couple, river rafting down the rapids. But if you looked closely, it was obvious that one of the woman's arms could not possibly have been coming from where her body was. This subliminally triggered a confusion, or mini-trance state in the subconscious mind, while also suggesting a third person joining in the fun, which would assumedly trigger some hidden, deep, dark desire. Other couples would be laughing with large, orgasmic smiles, holding all kinds of poles and rod-shaped objects. All this subconscious activity would then be projected on the project being touted, and suddenly the person might just think they could use one of those things.

These hidden images were intended to trigger our subconscious minds into taking notice of that wonderful brand of cigarettes the orphan hand was holding, or to associate a particular brand of mascara with the word sex subliminally drawn into in a woman's hair. Once I could clearly hear audio commands embedded in the background music track of a particularly intrusive television commercial. The potential of these efforts made sense to me, based on my understanding and experience of the subconscious mind. It was a form of mass hypnosis.

At first, I was entertained by this new project of looking for subliminal manipulation in the advertising world. I had always enjoyed the feeling of discovering secret layers of reality, and this one was available everywhere. Just walking into a store or flipping through a magazine became an adventure of discovery.

But then my concern for humanity took over, and the excitement turned sour. The human minds that make up our society were being manipulated recklessly and subliminally by forces of greed! The keys to the control panels of our basic desires and behavior were being used for the purpose of getting us to buy more stuff! I began to see a bleak future ahead of us, as the burden of the world fell suddenly and heavily on my teenage shoulders.

I began to feel sad, exhausted, and at the mercy of decision-makers I could not trust to do the right thing. At every turn was another marketing strategy, looking to screw around with my precious subconscious mind. And none of my friends seemed to really care about this deception, even when they believed it was true. But I couldn't sink into apathy about this. For me, the implications were appalling. We were being told what to think and what to want, using techniques that bypassed our conscious minds. With all the political activism taking place at the time, I wondered why nobody was protesting this intolerable psychological pollution?

My closest friend became concerned about my well-being. It wasn't so much that she questioned whether my ideas were accurate, as that she felt I was entering dangerous territory. She thought I had stumbled into matters we were not supposed to know about or worry about. I also began to have my own concerns about where my explorations were leading me. This became a frightening and confusing time for me, as I realized that I had no control over information that was being purposefully injected into the receptive tissues of my subconscious mind.

It concerned me deeply to see intelligent people buying things they didn't really need, feeling things they didn't really feel, and thinking things they didn't really think. The ever-evolving belief systems of humanity were being engineered by the limited vision of a few greedy companies. And ultimately, even the CEO's of those companies were nothing but puppets of -- of what? What controlled it all? Who held the puppet strings?

It was all much bigger and more complicated than I could handle at age 18. I was growing increasingly isolated and frustrated. Nobody seemed willing to join me in this agonizing exploration. Who would want to see through my glasses and enter this madness, even, and especially if it were true?

At this time, I experienced another shift. I began to see worlds of subliminal communication and symbolism, not only in commercial products, but also in nature. It was not only the advertising industry that was manipulating us through subliminal control – it seemed as though some level of subconscious communication was woven throughout the texture of life itself.

I had discovered the symbolic quality of life. I noticed that certain events would be foreshadowed symbolically before they took place. Objects with particular significance to me seemed to appear in correspondence with my mood or the situations at hand.

Not only did I perceive symbolic expressions in the world around me, but I was surprised to find myself using subliminal tactics on others, without my conscious intention! Who was speaking through me? Who orchestrated the sexual innuendoes behind my word choices when I spoke with someone I was physically attracted to? Who positioned my body in ways that would announce my innermost thoughts? And who was receiving the information?

Messages were being sent through me, and all of us, without our conscious participation! This went way beyond noticing an occasional Freudian slip. I began to see subliminal communication as a constant and all-pervasive thread of reality. My experience was like stepping into a dream and being able to interpret the symbolic elements while they were occurring. I watched as brilliant subliminal expressions moved through people who were not even aware of their own brilliance. They thought they were saying one thing, while woven through their apparent conversations were prophecies, synchronicities, commands, insults, flirting, and so much more.

It was becoming clear to me that we are not just simple objects called "people." Everything about us and everything coming out from us is intricately designed. It is ultimately impossible to hide anything about ourselves. Even sitting completely still, our posture would nonetheless reveal our character. Maybe somebody's surface consciousness wouldn't know if I slipped a mistruth past them, but their subconscious mind would know that and much more.

Here I had thought I was in charge of this body and its actions, and now it was becoming clear that my ownership had been a fairy-tale. I was just a process, as was everyone and everything else.

The spacing of my written words would tell the universe if I was feeling miserly or generous; the way I wrote the letter "I" would reveal intimate details about my self-image. Even the lines on my palm and the time of my birth seemed to carry information about me. Symbolic shapes were often subconsciously incorporated into my and other people's signatures. One book I read during this time showed a woman's signature with an unusual loop she'd always add to the top. When a Gestalt psychologist guided her to identify with being her signature and describe herself, the woman replied, "Well, there's a hump." She then realized that this loop represented a hump she'd had on her back as a teen. It was during those years, in fact, that she had added the representational hump to her signature.

I could have pretended to be a psychic, based on my ability to perceive and translate the subliminal expressions of people around me. But this was no time for games. Everything was so much bigger and more complicated than I had ever imagined. My isolation became inescapable. It was becoming more and more difficult for me to deal with the surface level of the world – with classes, studies, and social interactions – when so much was going on beneath the illusion of simplicity. While my classmates worried about what girl or boy liked them in which class, I was unraveling the guts of reality. Things had clearly gone too far.

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