Virtually any technology can be dangerous for a person. However the degree of danger is very different. Playing the guitar is obviously less dangerous process than driving a sport bike. While driving a bike seems rather safe when compared to the chemical synthesis of explosive nitroglycerine. For this reason safety arrangement is the essential part of any technology. The first point from which one should start the acquaintance with a novel technology is safety precautions. When you meet a mental technology description without explicit safety instruction, using this technology is a dance on volcano.
Mental technologies are extremely dangerous! They conceal high potential risk to the health (physical and mental) and life of both the user and the objects. However their potential hazard is traditionally underestimated. For example, many people take hypnosis as a joke. After reading a book on this subject they try it on their friends and relatives. They do not see an immediate effect and they say “Oopps, nothing happened. That does not work”. The trick is that the hypnosis always works, but the effect may be not immediate but more or less delayed. To the moment when the hypnotic effect manifests, the user would normally forget about the “joke”. And nobody would ever link the emerged heart rhythm violations with funny “failed” hypnosis attempt.
The big problem about mental technologies is that the effect is often delayed in time and that the mechanism is insensible.
It’s not very dangerous to slice the cucumber with a knife. You feel how your hand moves; you can see where the knife is. And when you miss the cucumber and start slicing a finger instead – you immediately feel it and stop the process.
And know imagine a person that works with radioactive substances, which emit extremely harmful ionizing radiation. One cannot see this radiation; a man is not able to smell, to hear or to feel it. The radiation injures cells, but the process takes time. Health problems may manifest after several months or even years. And when this happens the elimination of radiation will not help, since the process is irreversible. Hereby I have described a true story of Marie and Pieree Curie, who discovered the first radioactive element. At that time (the end of XIX century) they knew nothing about biological effects of ionizing radiation.
Today the story repeats. We have hundreds (if not thousands) of books, describing various mental technologies (from hypnosis to woodoo, from love spell to NLP). According to the calculation made by V.U. Laman, since 1990 over 400,000,000 of books with mental technologies instructions have been published in Russian language. The population in Russia is estimated approximately 140 millions. Let’s take the average family to consist of 3 persons. That means that every family in Russia has 8 books on mental technologies on a bookshelf. Why do people buy books on mental technologies, which are rather expensive? The only reason is that they are going to use these technologies!
Today every person on earth is a target of action of multiple mental technologies used by low-qualified, more or less aggressive executives in a totally uncontrolled way.
This awakes a new problem – a problem of personal mental security. Unfortunately, this subject is poorly discussed in contemporary literature on mental technologies. There are explicit instructions on how to control other persons, how to force them to elicit desirable decisions or behavior. Nobody thinks about side effects.
The principles of mental safety were first described by V.U. Laman. Their discussion requires several articles. We are going to publish this materials soon.
