"I'd like to talk to you for a little bit about the number zero. That's right; just take a moment, clear away all the distractions in your head, and really think about zero for a little bit. It's a very unusual number, when you think about it. It's actually unique. Every other number represents something, but zero is all alone, neither positive or negative. Zero is nothing. It's emptiness made concrete. Just thinking about zero means you're thinking about nothing.
"But sometimes, we need to think about nothing. That's why mathematicians invented zero, because it's important. It's the balance point that all the numbers revolve around. Think for a moment about a graph. The lines stretch up and down, left and right, all the way out of sight to infinity...but right there in the center, they converge at zero. Right at the center where your eyes are drawn by the crossing line, all the positive numbers and all the negative numbers are drawn down, down, down to zero. A bit like your eyes, really, when you look at the graph. Drawn to zero.
"Even the number itself is special. It's a perfect circle, a single line looping round and round, endlessly circling the blank, white emptiness in the middle. No matter how many times you follow the circle around and around and around, you can never get away from that blankness. Zero contains nothing inside it, just like it is nothing itself.
"That's why so many hypnotists use zero in their hypnotic inductions, because they understand that zero is special. Zero is magical. When a hypnotist wants to hypnotize someone really, really deeply, they count down to zero, knowing that the special qualities of zero will help them hypnotize someone. So they count down, 'Three...two...one...zero', and the person becomes entranced, because they're thinking about zero and letting it draw their mind into that special white nothing at its heart, looping around and around and lost in the blankness, thinking about zero until their whole mind becomes empty like zero.
"And when hypnotists count down like that, you know that they're getting closer and closer to zero, and even the anticipation of reaching that special, magical number helps to sedate your mind and get you ready for trance. The hypnotist knows that too. They use a longer countdown, sometimes, to give you more time to anticipate trance, more time to still your mind as it gets ready to hear the number zero and sink into trance. You hear 'five...four...' And before the hypnotist can even say it, you already know that the next number will be 'three...' And you know that inevitably, inexorably, you'll proceed down to 'two...' And there's a certainty to that fall, that descent down to 'one...' And then, waiting at the very bottom, that blankness that is waiting for your mind, and you've known it all along, you've just been waiting to hear...