Encyclopedia – Influence

One of the more useful metaprogram is the hierarchy of value. On any topic you can determine which values are in the top 3. These are the values that the brain processes. All other values are filtered out.

The world which matters to us is only illusory, is unreal. – But the concept ‘really, truly there’ is one we drew out of the ‘mattering-to-us’: the more our interests are touched on, the more we believe in the ‘reality’ of a thing or being. ‘It exists’ means: I feel existent through contact with it. – Antinomy. To the same degree that this feeling produces life, we posit meaning in what we believe is the cause of the stimulation. Thus, we construe ‘what is’ as what exerts an effect on us, what proves itself by exerting its effect. – ‘Unreal’, ‘illusory’, would be that which is incapable of producing effects, yet appears to produce them. – Supposing, though, we put certain values into things, then these values have effects back on us after we’ve forgotten we were the ones who put them in. Supposing I think someone is my father, then much follows from that concerning everything he says to me: it’s interpreted differently. – Thus, given the way we comprehend and construe things, the way we interpret them, it follows that all the ‘real’ actions of these things upon us then appear different, newly interpreted – in short, that they exert different effects on us. But if all construals of things have been false, it follows that all the actions of those things upon us are felt and interpreted in terms of a false causality: in short, that we measure value and disvalue, benefit and harm, in terms of errors, that the world which matters to us is false. Fundamental solution: we believe in reason, but this is the philosophy of grey concepts; language is built in terms of the most naive prejudices now we read disharmonies and problems into things because we think only in the form of language – thus believing in the ‘eternal truth’ of ‘reason’ (e.g., subject, predicate, etc.) we cease thinking when we no longer want to think within the constraints of language, we just manage to reach the suspicion that there might be a boundary here. Thinking rationally is interpreting according to a scheme we cannot cast away.

Notebook 5, summer 1886 – autumn 1887 paragraph 19

One should at last put human values nicely back in the corner where alone they have any right to be: as personal little values. Many species of animal have already disappeared; if man disappeared as well, nothing would be lacking in the world. One must be enough of a philosopher to admire even this nothingness (- Admire nothing -)

Notebook 11, November 1887 – March 1888 paragraph 103

The visual system is one of the more important modalities within NLP.

Man is a creature that makes shapes and rhythms; he is practised at nothing better and it seems that he takes pleasure in nothing more than in inventing figures. Only observe how our eye occupies itself as soon as it receives nothing more to see: it creates itself something to see. Presumably in the same situation our hearing does just that, too: it practices. Without the transformation of the world into figures and rhythms there would be nothing ‘the same’ for us, thus nothing recurrent, and thus no possibility of experiencing and appropriating, of feeding. In all perception, i.e., in the most original appropriation, what is essentially happening is an action, or more precisely: an imposition of shapes upon things – only the superficial talk of,impressions’. In this way man comes to know his force as a resisting and even more as a determining force – rejecting, selecting, shaping to fit, slotting into his schemata. There is something active about our taking on a stimulus in the first place and taking it on as that particular stimulus. It is in the nature of this activity not only to posit shapes, rhythms and successions of shapes, but also to appraise the formation it has created with an eye to incorporation or rejection. Thus arises our world, our
whole world: and no supposed ‘true reality’, no ‘in-themselves of things’ corresponds to this whole world which we have created, belonging to us alone. Rather it is itself our only reality, and ‘knowledge’ thus considered proves to be only a means of feeding. But we are beings who are difficult to feed and have everywhere enemies and, as it were, indigestibles – that is what has made human knowledge refined, and ultimately so proud of its refinement that it doesn’t want to hear that it is not a goal but a means, or even a tool of the stomach – if not itself a kind of stomach! – –

Notebook 38, June – July 1885 paragraph 10