Encyclopedia

A B C D E F G H I J L M N O P R S T U V W
Fa Fi Fo Fr Fy

Fact

Fact is a nominalization and as such NLP considers facts as a distortion of our communication.

Freedom of will and isolation of facts. – Our usual imprecise mode of observation takes a group of phenomena as one and calls it a fact: between this fact and another fact it imagines in addition an empty space, it isolates every fact. In reality, however, all our doing and knowing is not a succession of facts and empty spaces but a continuous flux. Now, belief in freedom of will is incompatible precisely with the idea of a continuous, homogeneous, undivided, indivisible flowing: it presupposes that every individual action is isolate and indivisible; it is an atomism in the domain of willing and knowing. – Just as we understand characters only imprecisely, so do we also facts: we speak of identical characters, identical facts: neither exists. Now, we praise and censure, however, only under this false presupposition that there are identical facts, that there exists a graduated order of classes of facts which corresponds to a graduated world-order: thus we isolate, not only the individual fact, but also again groups of supposedly identical facts (good, evil, sympathetic, envious actions, etc.) – in both cases erroneously. – The word and the concept are the most manifest ground for our belief in this isolation of groups of actions: we do not only designate things with them, we think originally that through them we grasp the true in things. Through words and concepts we are still continually misled into imagining things as being simpler than they are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself. A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language which breaks out again every moment, however careful one may be otherwise. Belief in freedom of will – that is to say in identical facts and in isolated facts – has in language its constant evangelist and advocate.

Human, All Too Human, book 3, paragraph 11

Failure

One of the basic NLP presuppositions states: “Feedback vs. Failure – All results and behaviors are achievements, whether they are desired results for a given task/context or not.” Or in short as it is expressed most of the time: “There is no failure, only feedback”. In NLP making mistakes and failing are good. Richard Bandler often says that he achieved so much more than most people because he was more willing to make mistakes than others.

Feedback is an integrated part of the TOTE model. If you generate a lot of feedback, meaning you make a lot of mistakes, this only indicates that the TOTE model is working. Especially if you make sure that you make a new mistake each time you fail.

Two Happy Ones. — Certainly this man, notwithstanding his youth, understands the improvisation of life, and astonishes even the acutest observers. For it seems that he never makes a mistake, although he constantly plays the most hazardous games. One is reminded of the improvising masters of the musical art, to whom even the listeners would fain ascribe a divine infallibility of the hand, notwithstanding that they now and then make a mistake, as every mortal is liable to do. But they are skilled and inventive, and always ready in a moment to arrange into the structure of the score the most accidental tone (where the jerk of a finger or a humor brings it about), and to animate the accident with a fine meaning and soul. — Here is quite a different man; everything that he intends and plans fails with him in the long run. That on which he has now and again set his heart has already brought him several times to the abyss, and to the very verge of ruin; and if he has as yet got out of the scrape, it certainly has not been merely with a “black eye”. Do you think he is unhappy over it? He resolved long ago not to regard his own wishes and plans as of so much importance. “If this does not succeed with me”, he says to himself, “perhaps that will succeed; and on the whole I do not know but that I am under more obligation to thank my failures than any of my successes. Am I made to be headstrong, and to wear the bull’s horns? That which constitutes the worth and the sum of life for me, lies somewhere else; I know more of life, because I have been so often on the point of losing it; and just on that account I have more of life than any of you!”

Gay Science paragraph 303

Familiar

A favorite saying within NLP is: “we like what if familiar, yet we learn from what is unfamiliar”.

The psychological explanation: to extract something familiar from something unknown relieves, comforts, and satisfies us, besides giving us a feeling of power. With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. Because it is fundamentally just our desire to be rid of an unpleasant uncertainty, we are not very particular about how we get rid of it: the first interpretation that explains the unknown in familiar terms feels so good that one “accepts it as true.” We use the feeling of pleasure (“of strength”) as our criterion for truth. A causal explanation is thus contingent on (and aroused by) a feeling of fear. The “why?” shall, if at all possible, result not in identifying the cause for its own sake, but in identifying a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving. A second consequence of this need is that we identify as a cause something already familiar or experienced, something already inscribed in memory. Whatever is novel or strange or never before experienced is excluded. Thus one searches not just for any explanation to serve as a cause, but for a specific and preferred type of explanation: that which has most quickly and most frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new, and hitherto unexperienced in the past — our most habitual explanations. Result: one type of causal explanation predominates more and more, is concentrated into a system and finally emerges as dominant — that is, as simply precluding other causes and explanations. The banker immediately thinks of “business,” the Christian of “sin,” and the girl of her love.

Twilight of the Idols, The Four Great Errors, paragraph 5

The Origin of our Conception of “Knowledge” — I take this explanation from the street, I heard one of the people saying that “he knew me,” so I asked myself: What do the people really understand by knowledge? what do they want when they seek “knowledge”? Nothing more than that what is strange is to be traced back to something known. And we philosophers — have we really understood anything more by knowledge? The known, that is to say, what we are accustomed to so that we no longer marvel at it, the commonplace, any kind of rule to which we are habituated, all and everything in which we know ourselves to be at home: — what? is our need of knowing not just this need of the known? the will to discover in everything strange, unusual, or questionable, something which no longer disquiets us? Is it not possible that it should be the instinct of fear which enjoins upon us to know ? Is it not possible that the rejoicing of the discerner should be just his rejoicing in the regained feeling of security ? . . . One philosopher imagined the world “known” when he had traced it back to the “idea”: alas, was it not because the idea was so known, so familiar to him? because he had so much less fear of the “idea” — Oh, this moderation of the discerners ! let us but look at their principles, and at their solutions of the riddle the world in this connection ! When they again find aught in things, among things, or behind things that is unfortunately very well known to us, for example, our multiplication table, or our logic, or our willing and desiring, how happy they immediately are! For “what is known is understood”: they are unanimous as to that. Even the most circumspect among them think that the known is at least more easily understood than the strange; that for example, it is methodically ordered to proceed outward from the “inner world”, from “the facts of consciousness” because it is the world which is better known to us! Error of errors! The known is the accustomed, and the accustomed is the most difficult of all to “understand” that is to say, to perceive as a problem, to perceive as strange, distant, “outside of us”. . . The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the criticism of the elements of consciousness — unnatural sciences, as one might almost be entitled to call them — rests precisely on the fact that they take what is strange as their object: while it is almost like something contradictory and absurd to wish to take generally what
is not strange as an object. . . .

Gay Science Paragraph 355

Filter

A useful metaprogram is the one called “filter on/off”. The brain has to filter out a lot of the data that the five senses produce in order to work. Every person filters a lot. Yet, sometimes some people filter a little bit less than others. Even if an average person filters out like 98% of the data and someone else would filter only 97% that 1% difference can mean a whole lot of problems. For instance, in most cases of real High Sensitive Persons (HSP) what is happening is that said person is filtering maybe 1% or 2% less than average. For instance, if people experience something traumatic the brain might change the way it filters and filter less in order to try to not overlook what happened just before the traumatic event in the senseless notion that if only the brain had filtered less the trauma might have been avoided. Of course this is nonsense and fortunately with NLP it is easy to get the brain to filter more so the HSP disappears.

The fundamental errors. – For man to feel any sort of psychical pleasure or displeasure he must be in the grip of one of these two illusions: either he believes in the identity of certain facts, certain sensations: in which case he experiences psychical pleasure or displeasure through comparing his present states with past ones and declaring them identical or not identical (as happens in all recollection); or he believes in freedom of will, for instance when he thinks ‘I did not have to do this’, ‘this could have happened differently’, and likewise gains pleasure or displeasure. Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasure a humanity would never have come into existence – whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the eternal miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world history! – man is the vanity of vanities.

Human, All Too Human, book 3, paragraph 12

Forgetting

One of the NLP basic presuppositions is: “The resources an individual needs to effect a change are already within them.” What this means is that someone has always had an experience in the past that is the solutions for today’s problems. This holds even if the person is currently unable to retrieve this experience.

Forgetting. – It has not yet been proved that there is any such thing as forgetting; all we know is that the act of recollection does not lie within our power. We have provisionally set into this gap in our power that word ‘forgetting’, as if it were one more addition to our faculties. But what, after all, does lie within our power! – if that word stands in a gap in our power, ought the other words not to stand in a gap in our knowledge of our power?

Daybreak paragraph 126

Freedom

NLP is not about only good feelings or prescribing only one way of living. NLP is about getting the freedom to make sure you live the life you want to live.

What we are at liberty to do. – One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis; one can do it with the good or bad taste of a gardener and, as it were, in the French or English or Dutch or Chinese fashion; one can also let nature rule and only attend to a little embellishment and tidying-up here and there; one can, finally, without paying any attention to them at all, let the plants grow up and fight their fight out among themselves – indeed, one can take delight in such a wilderness, and desire precisely this delight, though it gives one some trouble, too. All this we are at liberty to do: but how many know we are at liberty to do it? Do the majority not believe in themselves as in complete fully-developed facts? Have the great philosophers not put their seal on this prejudice with the doctrine of the unchangeability of character?

Daybreak paragraph 560

Fysiology

Although NLP is often mistaken for an intellectual mind game, the body is in fact very important to NLP practitioners. There is a variant of NLP called Patterns of Physical Transformation (PPT) that does with hands and muscles what NLP does with words.

Morality and physiology
– We find it ill-considered that precisely human consciousness has for so long been regarded as the highest stage of organic development and as the most astonishing of all earthly things, indeed as their blossoming and goal. In fact, what is more astonishing is the body: there is no end to one’s admiration for how the human body has become possible; how such a prodigious alliance of living beings, each dependent and subservient and yet in a certain sense also commanding and acting out of its own will, can live, grow, and for a while prevail, as a whole – and we can see this does not occur due to consciousness! For this ‘miracle of miracles’, consciousness is just a ‘tool’ and nothing more – a tool in the same sense that the stomach is a tool. The magnificent binding together of the most diverse life, the ordering and arrangement of the higher and lower activities, the thousand-fold obedience which is not blind, even less mechanical, but a selecting, shrewd, considerate, even resistant obedience – measured by intellectual standards, this whole phenomenon ‘body’ is as superior to our consciousness, our ‘mind’, our conscious thinking, feeling, willing, as algebra is superior to the times tables. The ‘apparatus of nerves and brain’ is not constructed this subtly and ‘divinely’ so as to bring forth thinking, feeling, willing at all. It seems to me, instead, that precisely this thinking, feeling, willing does not itself require an ‘apparatus’ but that the so-called apparatus, and it alone, is the thing that counts. Rather, such a prodigious synthesis of living beings and intellects as is called ‘man’ will only be able to live once that subtle system of connections and mediations, and thus lightning-fast communication between all these higher and lower beings, has been created – and created by nothing but living intermediaries: this, however, is a problem of morality, not of mechanics! Nowadays we’ve forbidden ourselves to spin yarns about ‘unity’, the ‘soul’, the ‘person’: hypotheses like these make one’s problem more difficult, that much is clear.And for us, even those smallest living beings which constitute our body (more correctly: for whose interaction the thing we call ‘body’ is the best simile -) are not soul-atoms, but rather something growing, struggling, reproducing and dying off again: so that their number alters unsteadily, and our living, like all living, is at once an incessant dying. There are thus in man as many ‘consciousnesses’ as – at every moment of his existence there are beings which constitute his body. The distinguishing feature of that ‘consciousness’ usually held to be the only one, the intellect, is precisely that it remains protected and closed off from the immeasurable multiplicity in the experiences of these many consciousnesses and that, as a consciousness of a higher rank, as a governing multitude and aristocracy, it is presented only with a selection of experiences – experiences, furthermore, that have all been simplified, made easy to survey and grasp, thus falsified – so that it in turn may carry on this simplification and making graspable, in other words this falsification, and prepare what is commonly called ‘a will’ – every such act of will requires,so to speak, the appointment of a dictator. However, what presents this selection to our intellect, what has simplified, assimilated, interpreted experiences beforehand, is at any rate not that intellect itself; any more than it is the intellect which carries out the will, which takes up a pale, watery and extremely imprecise idea of value and force and translates it into living force, precise measures of value. And just the same kind of operation as is enacted here must keep being enacted on all the deeper levels, in the behavior of all these higher and lower beings towards one other: this same selection and presentation of experiences, this abstraction and thinking-together, this willing, this translation of always very unspecific willing back into specific activity. Along the guiding thread of the body, as I have said, we learn that our life is possible through an interplay of many intelligences that are very unequal in value, and thus only through a constant, thousand-fold obeying and commanding – speaking in moral terms: through the incessant exercise of many virtues. And how could one not speak in moral terms! – – Prattling in this way, I gave myself up dissolutely to my pedagogic drive, for I was overjoyed to have someone who could bear to listen to me. However, it was just then that Ariadne – for this all took place during my first stay on Naxos – could actually bear it no more: ‘But, sir,’ she said, ‘You’re talking pigswill German!’ – ‘German’, I answered untroubled, ‘Simply German! Leave aside the pigswill, my goddess! You underestimate the difficulty of saying subtle things in German!’ – ‘Subtle things!’ cried Ariadne, horrified, ‘But that was just positivism! Philosophy of the snout! Conceptual muck and mish-mash from a hundred philosophies! Whatever next!’ – all the while toying impatiently with the famous thread that once guided her Theseus through the labyrinth. – Thus it came to light that Ariadne was two thousand years behindhand in her philosophical training.

Notebook 37, June – July 1885 paragraph 4