If you are a master at NLP then it is important to make sure that you always have feedback to see where you stray away and think something is “NLP” where in fact it is not.
To whom a court jester is a necessity. – The very beautiful, the very good, the very powerful almost never learn the full and universal truth about anything – for in their presence one always involuntarily lies a little, because one .is always subject to their influence and in accordance with this influence presents the truth one might communicate in the form of an adaptation (by falsifying the facts in some degree and color, omitting or adding details, and keeping back that which absolutely resists being adapted). If people of this kind are nonetheless determined to hear the truth they have to maintain their court jester – a being with the madman’s privilege of being unable to adapt himself.
People think they understand what the other person means by what he says. According to NLP this is an illusion. Communication is always miscommunication. We think we understand what the other person is saying, but we don’t. We create our own interpretation of what the other is saying. There are three processes here at work in both the speaker and the listener: deletion, distortion and generalization.
A ‘thing-in-itself just as wrong-headed as a ‘meaning-in-itself, a
‘significance-in-itself. There is no ‘fact-in-itself; instead,for there to be a fact, a meaning must always first be projected in. The question ‘What is that?’ is the positing of a meaning from the viewpoint of something else. ‘Essence’, ‘essential being’, is something perspectival and presupposes multiplicity. At bottom there is always the question ‘What is that for me?’ (for us, for everything that lives, etc.). A thing would be determined only when all beings had asked of it, and answered, their ‘What is that?’ If just one being, with its own relations to and perspectives on all things, were missing, then the thing wouldn’t yet be ‘defined’.
The strength of the metamodel lies in the fact that it is also a model of how the brain store information. Everything you learned from experience about the world can be said to be stored in the brain in your world model. Whenever you describe something honestly then the way you phrase it reflects your world model. If you violate one of the rules of the metamodel this indicates an issue where your world model can be improved, because there is something that either has been deleted, distorted or generalized.
On psychology and theory of knowledge. I maintain that the inner world is phenomenal as well: everything me become conscious of has first been thoroughly trimmed, simplified, schematized, interpreted – the real process of inner ‘perception’, the causal association between thoughts, feelings, desires is absolutely hidden from us, like that between subject and object- and may be just a figment of our imagination. This ‘apparent inner world’ is managed with quite the same forms and procedures as the ‘outer’ world. We never encounter ‘facts’: pleasure and unpleasure are late and derivative phenomena of the intellect … ‘Causality’ escapes us; to assume an immediate, causal bond between thoughts, as logic does, is the consequence of the crudest and clumsiest observation. Between two thoughts there are, in addition, all sorts of affects at play: but they move so fast that we mistake them, we deny them … ‘Thinking’, as posited by the theorists of knowledge, simply doesn’t occur: it is a quite arbitrary fiction achieved by selecting one element from the process and subtracting all the others, an artificial trimming for the purpose of intelligibility … The ‘mind’, something that thinks: maybe even ‘the mind absolute, pure, unmixed’ – this conception is a derivative, second consequence ofthe false self-observation that believes in ‘thinking’: here first an act is imagined that doesn’t occur, ‘thinking’, and secondly a subject-substratum is imagined in which every act of this thinking, and nothing else, originates; i.e., both doing and doer are fictions.
Notebook 11, November 1887 – March 1888 paragraph 113
In NLP we have so called metaprograms. A metaprogram is a brain filter. Our senses produce way too much data. For instance a single eye produces about one million signals per second. Within psychology there is a dubious experiment that tries to show that our consciousness is only capable of processing two hundred signals per second. Even if we take this figure with a pinch of salt, the way our brain works by more and more abstracting data a lot of data is lost. NLP describes this loss as metaprograms. Although there aren’t specific metaprograms in the brain we as human interpreters of the lost data can name certain parts of this lost data to single that part out to use within specific NLP techniques and NLP strategies. For that reason it is important to note that metaprograms are made up rather than found. And that, although you can make up hundreds of metaprograms, there are only a handful that are helpful.
Our perceptions, as we understand them: i.e., the sum of all those perceptions the becoming conscious of which has been useful and essential to us and to the whole organic process before us; not, then, all perceptions in general (e.g., not the electrical ones). That is: we have senses only for a certain range of perceptions – those we have to be concerned with in order to preserve ourselves. Consciousness exists to the extent that consciousness is useful. There is no doubt that all sensory perceptions are entirely suffused with valuejudgments (useful or harmful- consequently pleasant or unpleasant). A particular color simultaneously expresses a value for us (although we seldom admit this to ourselves, or only after a single color has operated on us for a long time, e.g., for prison inmates or lunatics). This is why insects react differently to different colors: some they love, e.g., ants.
The Miltonmodel is the model in NLP for influencing people. It is named after Milton Erickson, the famous psychiatrist who thought up hypnotherapy. It was named after him because no-one has so many publication where it clearly states that one shouldn’t manipulate other people while at the same time he manipulated so many people. The Miltonmodel consists of the reversed metamodel, indirect elicitation patterns, metaphor and ambiguities.
That in the ‘process of the whole’ the work of mankind is of no account, because there is no total process (conceived of as a system -) at all: – that there is no ‘whole’, that no evaluation of human existence, of human goals can be made with a view to something which doesn’t exist … – that necessity, causality, purposiveness are useful illusions – that the goal is not the increase of consciousness but the enhancement of power, an enhancement in which the usefulness of consciousness is included, with pleasure as much as with unpleasure – that one does not take means as the highest measure of value (thus not states of consciousness, such as pleasure and pain, if consciousness is itself a means -) – that the world is not at all an organism, but chaos: that the development of ‘mental life’ is a means for the organisation to gain relative permanence … – that all ‘desirability’ is meaningless with respect to the total character of being.
Notebook 11, November 1887 – March 1888 paragraph 74
Not enough! – It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to sounds like folly!
Daybreak paragraph 330
The difference between the metamodel and the Miltonmodel
In the quote below, if you replace “science” with the metamodel and realize that the conjurer is the hypnotist using the Miltonmodel, you get a very good explanation of the difference between the Miltonmodel and the metamodel.
The conjurer and his opposite. – What is astonishing in the realm of science is the opposite of what is astonishing in the art of the conjurer. For the latter wants to persuade us to see a very simple causality where in truth a very complicated causality is at work. Science, on the contrary, compels us to abandon belief in simple causalities precisely where everything seems so easy to comprehend and we are the fools of appearance. The ‘simplest’ things are very complicated – a fact at which one can never cease to marvel!
Daybreak paragraph 6
To be Profound and to Appear Profound. — He who knows that he is profound strives for clarification; he who would like to appear profound to the multitude strives for obscurity. The multitude thinks everything profound of which it cannot see the bottom; it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.
Gay Science paragraph 173
More seriously. – One takes an obscure and inexplicable thing more seriously than a clear and explicable one.
If one wants to make rapport, one can mirror the other person. But mind you if you start to copy them exactly this will only irritate the other.
Empathy. – To understand another person, that is, to imitate his feelings in ourselves, we do indeed often go back to the reason for his feeling thus or thus and ask for example: why is he troubled? – so as then for the same reason to become troubled ourselves; but it is much more usual to omit to do this and instead to produce the feeling in ourselves after the effects it exerts and displays on the other person by imitating with our own body the expression of his eyes, his voice, his walk, his bearing (or even their reflection in word, picture, music). Then a similar feeling arises in us in consequence of an ancient association between movement and sensation, which has been trained to move backwards or forwards in either direction. We have brought our skill in understanding the feelings of others to a high state of perfection and in the presence of another person we are always almost involuntarily practising this skill: one should observe especially the play on the faces of women and how they quiver and glitter in continual imitation and reflection of what is felt to be going on around them. But it is music which reveals to us most clearly what masters we are in the rapid and subtle divination of feelings and in empathising: for, though music is an imitation of an imitation of feelings, it nonetheless and in spite of this degree of distance and indefiniteness often enough makes us participants in these feelings, so that, like perfect fools, we grow sad without there being the slightest occasion for sorrow merely because we hear sounds and rhythms which somehow remind us of the tone-of-voice and movements of mourners, or even of no more than their customary usages. It is told of a Danish king that he was wrought up to such a degree of warlike fury by the music of his minstrel that he leaped from his seat and killed five people of his assembled court: there was no war, no enemy, rather the reverse, but the drive which from the feeling infers the cause was sufficiently strong to overpower observation and reason. But that is almost always the effect of music (supposing it capable of producing an effect at all – ), and one does not require such paradoxical cases to see this: the state of feeling into which music transports us almost always contradicts the real situation we are apparently in and the reasoning powers which recognize this real situation and its causes. – If we ask how we became so fluent in the imitation of the feelings of others the answer admits of no doubt: man, as the most timid of all creatures on account of his subtle and fragile nature, has in his timidity the instructor in that empathy, that quick understanding of the feelings of another (and of animals). Through long millennia he saw in everything strange and lively a danger: at the sight of it he at once imitated the expression of the features and the bearing and drew his conclusion as to the kind of evil intention behind these features and this bearing. Man has even applied this interpretation of all movements and lineaments as deriving from intention to inanimate nature – in the delusion that there is nothing inanimate: I believe that all we call feeling for nature at the sight of sky, meadow, rocks, forest, storms, stars, sea, landscape, spring, has its origin here – without the primeval habit, born of fear, of seeing behind all this a second, hidden meaning, we would not now take pleasure in nature, just as we would take no pleasure in man and animal without this same instructor in understanding, fear. For pleasure and pleased astonishment, finally the sense of the ridiculous, are the later-born children of empathy and the much younger siblings of fear. – The capacity for understanding – which, as we have seen, rests on the capacity for rapid dissimulation – declines in proud, arrogant men and peoples, because they have less fear: on the other hand, every kind of understanding and self-dissembling is at home among timid peoples; here is also the rightful home of the imitative arts and of the higher intelligence. – If, from the standpoint of such a theory of empathy as I have here suggested, I think of the theory, just at this time much loved and sanctified, of a mystical process by virtue of which pity makes two beings into one and in this way makes possible the immediate understanding of the one by the other: when I recall that so clear a head as Schopenhauer’s took pleasure in such frivolous and worthless rubbish and passed this pleasure on to other clear and not-so-clear heads: then there is no end to my amazement and compassion! How great must be our joy in incomprehensible nonsense! How close to the madman does the sane man stand when he pays heed to his secret intellectual desires! – (For what did Schopenhauer really feel so grateful and so deeply indebted to Kant? The answer was once revealed quite unambiguously: someone had spoken of how Kant’s categorical imperative could be deprived of its occult qualities and be made comprehensible. Thereupon Schopenhauer burst out: ‘The categorical imperative comprehensible! What a fundamentally perverse idea! What Egyptian darkness! Heaven forbid that it should ever become comprehensible! For that there is something incomprehensible, that this misery of the understanding and its concepts is limited, conditional, finite, deceptive: the certainty of this is Kant’s greatest gift to us.’ – Let us ask ourselves whether anyone who feels happy in believing in the incomprehensibility of moral things can be sincerely interested in acquiring a knowledge of them! One who still honestly believes in inspirations from on high, in magic and spiritual apparitions, and in the metaphysical ugliness of the toad!)
Within NLP miscommunication is as important as communication. We think we understand each other, but in reality there is misunderstanding due to the processes of deletion, distortion and generalization. Interesting is that even though misunderstanding is central in NLP almost no NLP practitioner realizes that there is very good chance that he misunderstand Richard Bandler.
What, in the end, is base? – Words are acoustic signs for concepts; concepts, though, are more or less determinate pictorial signs for sensations that occur together and recur frequently, for groups of sensations. Using the same words is not enough to get people to understand each other: they have to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences too; ultimately, people have to have the same experience base. This is why a people in a community will understand each other better than they understand people belonging to other groups, even when they all use the same language. Or rather, when individuals have lived together for a long time under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, necessities, work), there arises something that “understands itself ” – a people. In all souls, an equal number of frequently recurring experiences have gained an upper hand over ones that occur less frequently: understanding takes place faster and faster on this basis (the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation); and people join closer and closer together on the basis of this understanding. The greater the danger, the greater the need to agree quickly and easily about necessities. Not to misunderstand each other when there is danger: people require this in order to interact with each other. In every friendship or relationship, people still put this principle to the test: nothing will last once the discovery is made that one of the two feels, means, senses, wishes, fears something different from the other when using the same words. (Fear of the “eternal misunderstanding”: this is the benevolent genius that so often keeps people of the opposite sex from rushing into relationships at the insistence of their hearts and senses – and not some Schopenhauerian “genius of the species” –!) What group of sensations in a soul will be the first to wake up, start speaking, and making demands is decisive for the whole rank order of its values, and will ultimately determine its table of goods. A person’s valuations reveal something about the structure of his soul and what the soul sees as its conditions of life, its genuine needs. Now, assuming that needs have only ever brought people together when they could somehow indicate similar requirements and similar experiences with similar signs, then it follows, on the whole, that the easy communicability of needs (which ultimately means having only average and base experiences) must have been the most forceful of the forces that have controlled people so far. People who are more alike and ordinary have always been at an advantage; while people who are more exceptional, refined, rare, and difficult to understand will easily remain alone, prone to accidents in their isolation and rarely propagating. Immense countervailing forces will have to be called upon in order to cross this natural, all-too-natural continuation of the same thing, people becoming increasingly similar, ordinary, average, herd-like, – increasingly base!
Mistakes are good in NLP. We like people to make mistakes. Preferably, every mistake only once. If people try to avoid making mistakes they limit themselves unnecessarily. One of the basic ideas in NLP is that there is no failure only feedback.
Against remorse. I don’t like this kind of cowardice towards one’s own deed; one should not desert oneself when attacked by unexpected disgrace and distress. Extreme pride is more fitting here. In the end, what good is it! Remorse can’t undo any deed; neither can ‘forgiveness’ or ‘atonement’. One would have to be a theologian to believe in a power that cancels guilt; we immoralists prefer not to believe in ‘guilt’. We hold that every kind of action is at root identical in value – likewise that actions directed against us may yet, considered economically, be useful and generally desirable actions. – In individual cases we’ll admit that we could easily have been spared a particular deed – only circumstances favored our committing it. – Which of us, favored by circumstances, wouldn’t already have run the entire gamut of crimes? ,One should therefore never say: ‘You shouldn’t have done this or that,’ but only ever: ‘How strange that I haven’t done that a hundred times,’- In the end very few actions are typical actions and really abbreviations for a personality; and considering how little personality most people have, a man is rarely characterized by a single deed. A deed of circumstance, merely epidermal, merely a reflex triggered by a stimulus: before the depths of our being have been touched by it, consulted on it. A rage, a grasp, a knife-thrust: what is there of personality in that! – The deed often brings with it a kind of fixed stare and unfreedom: so that the doer seems transfixed by the memory of it and sees himself as no longer anything more than an appendage of it. This disturbance of the mind, a form of hypnosis, is what one must combat most of all: after all, a single deed, whatever it may be, is zero compared to the entirety of what one has done, and may be counted out without falsifying the calculation. The fair interest which society may have in calculating our whole existence in just one direction, as if its whole aim had been to produce one single deed, should not infect the doer himself: unfortunately this happens almost constantly. That is because every deed with unusual consequences is followed by a disturbance of the mind: regardless even of whether those consequences are good or bad. Look at a man in love who’s gained a promise; a writer applauded by the whole house: as far as their intellectual torpor is concerned, they differ not at all from the anarchist surprised by a raid. – There are actions that are unworthy of us: actions that, if we took them as typical, would push us down into a lower species. Here the one mistake to be avoided is taking them to be typical. There is the converse kind of action, of which we are unworthy: exceptions born of a special plenitude of happiness and health, our highest tidal waves, driven that high by a storm, a chance: such actions and ‘works’ are not typical. One should never measure an artist by the yardstick of his works.
One of the NLP basic presuppositions is: “All distinctions human beings are able to make concerning our environment and our behavior can be usefully represented through the visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory senses.” Or to put it in different terms: within NLP we can express all that is human in terms of the five senses. A different name for a sense is a modality as this a mode that data from the outside world enters your subjective experience. The most important modalities are visual, auditory and kinestetic. The less important modalities are olfactory and gustatory.
Why we are not Idealists.— Formerly philosophers were afraid of the senses: have we, perhaps, been far too forgetful of this fear? We are at present all of us sensualists, we representatives of the present and of the future in philosophy, according to theory, however, but in praxis, in practice. . . . Those former philosophers, on the contrary, thought that the senses lured them out of their world, the cold realm of “ideas,” to a dangerous southern island, where they were afraid that their philosopher-virtues would melt away like snow in the sun. ” Wax in the ears,” was then almost a condition of philosophizing; a genuine philosopher no longer listened to life, in so far as life is music, he denied the music of life — it is an old philosophical superstition that all music is Sirens’ music. — Now we should be inclined at the present day to judge precisely in the opposite manner (which in itself might be just as false), and to regard ideas, with their cold, anaemic appearance, and not even in spite of this appearance, as worse seducers than the senses. They have always lived on the “blood” of the philosopher, they always consumed his senses, and indeed, if you will believe me, his “heart” as well. Those old philosophers were heartless: philosophizing was always a species of vampirism. At the sight of such figures even as Spinoza, do you not feel a profoundly enigmatical and disquieting sort of impression? Do you not see the drama which is here performed, the constantly increasing pallor — , the spiritualisation always more ideally displayed? Do you not imagine some long-concealed blood-sucker in the background, which makes its beginning with the senses, and in the end retains or leaves behind nothing but bones and their rattling ? — I mean categories, formulae, and words (for you will pardon me in saying that what remains Spinoza, amor intellectualis dei, is rattling and nothing more! What is amor, what is deus, when they have lost every drop of blood ? . . .) In summa : all philosophical idealism has hitherto been something like a disease, where it has not been, as in the case of Plato, the prudence of superabundant and dangerous healthfulness, the fear of overpowerful senses, the shrewdness of a shrewd Socratic. Maybe we modern are not healthy enough to need Plato’s idealism? And we don’t fear the senses because –
NLP doesn’t take into account what motives are behind an action except that it is a positive intention. The reason being that these motives are formed in the unconsciousness and hence unknowable.
Alleged conflict of motives. – One speaks of a ‘conflict of motives’, but designates with this phrase a conflict which is not one of motives. That is to say: before an act there step into our reflective consciousnesses one after another the consequences of various acts all of which we believe we can perform, and we compare these consequences. We believe we have resolved upon an act when we have decided that its consequences will be more favorable than those of any other; before reaching this conclusion we often honestly torment ourselves on account of the great difficulty of divining what the consequences will be, of seeing all their implications, and of being certain we have included them all without omission: so that the result obtained still has to be divided by chance. Indeed, to come to the worst difficulty: all these consequences, so hard to determine individually, now have to be weighed against one another on the same scales; but usually it happens that, on account of the differences in the quality of all these possible consequences, we lack the scales and the weights for this casuistry of advantage. Supposing, however, we got through that too, and chance had placed on our scales consequences that admit of being weighed against one another: we would then in fact possess in our picture of the consequences of a certain action a motive for performing this action – yes! one motive! But at the moment when we finally do act, our action is often enough determined by a different species of motives than the species here under discussion, those involved in our ‘picture of the consequences’. What here comes into play is the way we habitually expend our energy; or some slight instigation from a person whom we fear or honor or love; or our indolence, which prefers to do what lies closest to hand; or an excitation of our imagination brought about at the decisive moment by some immediate, very trivial event; quite incalculable physical influences come into play; caprice and waywardness come into play; some emotion or other happens quite by chance to leap forth: in short, there come into play motives in part unknown to us, in part known very ill, which we can never take account of beforehand. Probably a struggle takes place between these as well, a battling to and fro, a rising and falling of the scales – and this would be the actual ‘conflict of motives’: – something quite invisible to us of which we would be quite unconscious. I have calculated the consequences and the outcomes and in doing so have set one very essential motive in the battle-line- but I have not set up this battle-line itself, nor can I even see it: the struggle itself is hidden from me, and likewise the victory as victory; for, though I certainly learn what I finally do, I do not learn which motive has therewith actually proved victorious. But we are accustomed to exclude all these unconscious processes from the accounting and to reflect on the preparation for an act only to the extent that it is conscious: and we thus confuse conflict of motives with comparison of the possible consequences of different actions – a confusion itself very rich in consequences and one highly fateful for the evolution of morality!
