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Age

The first generation of NLP trainers is getting older. So it becomes important to take note of what Nietzsche writes on age. For we do want to prevent first generation NLP trainers to canonize NLP.

The philosopher and age. – It is not wise to let the evening judge the day: for it means all too often that weariness sits in judgment on strength, success and good will. And great caution is likewise in order with regard to age and its judgment of life, especially as, like evening, age loves to dress itself in a new and enticing morality and knows how to put the day to shame through twilight and solemn o·r passionate silence. The reverence we accord the aged man, especially when he is an aged thinker and sage, easily blinds us to the aging of his mind, and it is always necessary to draw forth the signs of such an aging and weariness out of their hiding-place – draw forth, that is to say, the physiological phenomenon behind the moral predispositions and prejudices – so as not to become the fools of reverence and injurers of knowledge. For it not infrequently happens that the aged man is subject to the illusion of a great moral renewal and rebirth and from the sensibility thus engendered in him passes judgment on the work and the course of his life, as though it was only now that he had been endowed with clear sight: and yet the inspirer behind this feeling of well being and these confident judgments is not wisdom but weariness. Its most dangerous characteristic is probably belief in their own genius, which usually assails great and semi-great men of the spirit only at this frontier of their life: the belief they occupy an exceptional position and enjoy exceptional rights. The thinker visited by this belief henceforth considers himself permitted to take things easier and, as genius, to promulgate decrees rather than demonstrate: yet it is probably the drive to seek relief for weariness of mind which is the most potent source of this belief; it precedes the latter, even though the reverse may seem to be the case. Then: at this time of life one wants, in accordance with the thirst for enjoyment which characterizes the weary and aged, to enjoy the results of one’s thinking instead of testing and sowing them out again, and to that end needs to make them palatable and enjoyable and to get rid of their dryness, coldness and lack of spice; and so it happens that the aged thinker appears to elevate himself above the work of his life, though in reality he ruins it through infusing it with enthusiasms, sweetness, spices, poetic mists and mystic lights. This is what happened in the end to Plato, this is what happened in the end to that great honest Frenchman beside whom, as embracer and conqueror of the strict sciences, the Germans and English of this century can place no rival, Auguste Comte. A third sign of weariness: that ambition which burned in the great thinker’s breast when he was young, and at that time could find satisfaction in nothing, has also grown old; now, like one who can afford to lose no more time, he reaches for coarser and broader means of satisfaction, that is to say for the satisfactions of active, dominant, violent, conquering natures: from now on he wants to found, not structures of thought, but institutions which will bear his name; what does he care now for ethereal victories and honors in the realm of demonstrations and refutations! what do being eternalized in books, a tremble of
exaltation in the soul of a reader, mean to him! The institution, on the other hand, is a temple – that he knows well; and a temple of enduring stone will keep its god alive more surely than will the sacrificial gifts of rare and tender souls. Perhaps he will also encounter at this time for the first time that love which is more appropriate to a god than to a man, and his whole being will grow gentler and sweeter beneath the rays of such a sun, like fruit in autumn. Indeed, he will in fact grow more divine and more beautiful, this great aged man – and nonetheless it is age and weariness which permit him to ripen out in this way, to grow silent, and to repose in the radiant idolatry of a woman. It is all over now with the self-surpassing desire that filled him in earlier years for genuine pupils, that is to say genuine continuators of his thought, that is to say genuine opponents: that desire proceeded from the unweakened power, the conscious pride, of being able at any time himself to become the opponent and mortal enemy of his own teachers – what he desires now is resolute party followers, unhesitating comrades, auxiliaries, a pompous processional train. Now he can no longer endure at all the dreadful isolation in which every spirit lives who flies on out ahead; he henceforth surrounds himself with objects of veneration, communality, emotion and love; he wants at long last to enjoy what all the religious enjoy and celebrate within the community that which he values; indeed, in order to possess this community he will invent a religion. Thus does the aged sage live, and in doing so drifts imperceptibly into so wretchedly close an approximation to the excesses of priests and poets that one hardly dares to remember his wise and rigorous youth, the strict intellectual morality he then practiced, and his truly manly dread of inspirations and fantasies. When in earlier years he com pared himself with other, older thinkers, it was so as seriously to measure his weakness against their strength and to grow colder and freer towards himself: now he does it only so as to intoxicate himself in his own delusions. In earlier years he thought with confidence of the thinkers yet to come, indeed he joyfully saw himself extinguished by their more perfect light: now it torments him that he cannot be the last thinker; he ponders how, with the inheritance he will bestow upon mankind, he can also impose upon them a limitation of independent thinking, he fears and reviles the pride and thirst for freedom felt by individualist spirits – : after him none shall have full power over his own intellect, he wants to stand as the bulwark against which the surges of thought in general shall ever afterwards break – these are his secret, and perhaps not always secret desires! The hard fact behind such desires, however, is that he himself has come to a halt before his teaching and has erected in it his boundary-stone, his ‘thus far and no farther’. By canonizing himself he has also displayed above himself his own death certificate: from now on his spirit may not develop father, time has run out for him, the clock stands still. Whenever a great thinker wants to make of himself a binding institution for future mankind, one may be certain that he is past the peak of his powers and is very weary, very close to the setting of his sun.

Daybreak paragraph 542

Analogue marking

Analogue marking are meaningful gestures that NLP practitioner make in their communication. As such it is part of the Miltonmodel.

Gesture and language. – Older than language is the mimicking of gestures, which takes place involuntarily and is even now, when the language of gesture is universally restrained and control of the muscles has been achieved, so strong that we cannot see a mobile face without an innervation of our own face (one can observe that feigned yawning will evoke real yawning in one who sees it). The imitated gesture leads him who imitates it back to the sensation which it expressed in the face or body of the person imitated. That is how people learned to understand one another: that is how a child still learns to understand its mother. In general, painful sensations may well also be expressed by gestures which in turn occasion pain (for example by pulling hair out, beating the breast, violent distortions and strainings of the facial muscles). Conversely, gestures of pleasure were themselves pleasurable and could thus easily convey their meaning (laughter as an expression of being tickled, which is pleasurable, again served as an expression of other pleasurable sensations). – As soon as the meaning of gestures was understood, a symbolism of gestures could arise: I mean a sign-language of sounds could be so agreed that at first one produced sound and gesture (to which it was symbolically joined), later only the sound. – It appears here that in earlier ages there often occurred that which now takes place before our eyes and ears in the evolution of music, especially of dramatic music: while music was at first empty noise without explanatory dance and mime (gesture-language), the ear was, through long habituation to the juxtaposition of music and movement, schooled to an instantaneous interpretation of the total figurations and has at last attained to a height of rapid understanding at which it no longer has any need of the visible movement and understands the tone-poet without it. One then speaks of absolute music, that is to say of music in which everything is at once understood symbolically without further assistance.

Human, All Too Human book 1, paragraph 216

Arrogance

Critics of Neuro-Linguistic Programming often find their practitioners to be arrogant.

The spiritual arrogance and disgust of anyone who has suffered deeply (order of rank is almost determined by just how deeply people can suffer), the trembling certainty that saturates and colors him entirely, a certainty that his sufferings have given him a greater knowledge than the cleverest and wisest can have, that he knows his way around and was once “at home” in many distant and terrifying worlds that “you don’t know anything about!” … this spiritual, silent arrogance of the sufferer, this pride of knowledge’s chosen one, its “initiate,” almost its martyr, needs all kinds of disguises to protect itself from the touch of intrusive and pitying hands, and in general from everyone who is not its equal in pain. Profound suffering makes you noble; it separates. One of the most refined forms of disguise is Epicureanism, and a certain showy courage of taste that accepts suffering without a second thought and resists everything sad and profound. There are “cheerful people” who use cheerfulness because it lets them be misunderstood: – they want to be misunderstood. There are “scientific people” who use science because it gives a cheerful appearance, and because being scientific implies that a person is superficial: – they want to encourage this false inference. There are free, impudent spirits who would like to hide and deny that they are shattered, proud, incurable hearts; and sometimes even stupidity is the mask for an ill-fated, all-too-certain knowing. – From which it follows that a more refined humanity will have great respect for “masks,” and will not indulge in psychology and curiosity in the wrong place.

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 270

Assertion

The use of the Miltonmodel consists of stating many assertions. People recognize an assertion by the tone of voice. With an assertion there is no change in the tone of voice. This fact can be used to hide commands or questions by tonality. Asserting something leads to less critical reception by the unconsciousness of the other whereas arguments make the other more critical. The point of the use of the Miltonmodel is to lessen this critical reception.

Assertion safer than proof. – An assertion produces a stronger effect than an argument, at least among the majority of mankind: for argument arouses mistrust. That is why public speakers seek to hammer home their party’s arguments with assertions.

Human, All Too Human book 2, paragraph 295

Auditory

One of the most important modalities within NLP is the auditory system.

The desensualization of higher art. – By virtue of the extraordinary exercise the intellect has undergone through the artistic evolution of modern music, our ears have grown more and more intellectual. We can now endure a much greater volume, much more ‘noise’, than our forefathers could because we are much more practiced in listening for the reason in it than they were. Because they at once inquire after the reason, the ‘meaning’, and are no longer content to know that a thing ‘is’, all our senses have in fact become somewhat blunted: a fact betrayed by, for example, the complete dominance of the well-tempered tonal system; for ears that can still hear the subtle distinction between for example C sharp and D flat are now exceptional. In this matter our ears have become coarser. Then, the ugly side of the world, the side originally hostile to the senses, has now been conquered for music; its sphere of power especially in the domain of the sublime, dreadful and mysterious has therewith increased astonishingly: our music now brings to utterance things which formerly had no tongue. In a similar way, some of our painters have made our eyes more intellectual and have gone far beyond that which was formerly called pleasure in form and color. Here too the side of the world that originally counted as ugly has been conquered by artistic reason. – What will be the consequence of all this? The more capable of thought eye and ear become, the closer they approach the point at which they become unsensual: pleasure is transferred to the brain, the sense-organs themselves grow blunt and feeble, the symbolic increasingly replaces the simple being – and along this path we thus attain to barbarism as certainly as along any other. For the moment we still believe: the world is uglier than ever, but it signifies a more beautiful world than there has ever been. But the more attenuated the fragrant odor of ‘significance’ becomes, the fewer there will be still able to perceive it: and the rest will finally be left with the ugly, which they will try to enjoy directly – an endeavor in which they are bound to fail. Thus there is in Germany a twofold current of musical evolution: on the one hand a host of ten thousand with ever higher, more refined demands, listening ever more intently for the ‘meaning’, and on the other the enormous majority growing every year more and more incapable of comprehending the meaningful even in the form of the sensually ugly and therefore learning to seize with greater and greater contentment the ugly and disgusting in itself, that is to say the basely sensual, in music.

Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 217

Away from

One of the most important metaprograms is called “away from” / “towards”. This is the distinction that some people motivate them by focusing what they want to get away from (and hence they filter reasons to move towards something away). Or people who motivate themselves by moving towards a goal (and hence filter reasons to move away from something bad).

The desire for suffering.- When I think of the desire to do something, how it continually tickles and stimulates millions of young Europeans, who cannot endure themselves and all their boredom.-I conceive that there must be a desire in them to suffer something, in order to derive from their suffering a worthy motive for acting, for doing something. Distress is necessary! Hence the cry of the politicians, hence the many false trumped-up, exaggerated “states of distress” of all possible kinds, and the blind readiness to believe in them This young world desires that there should arrive or appear from the outside-not happiness – but misfortune; and their imagination is already busy beforehand to form a monster out of it, so that they may afterwards be able to fight with a monster. If these distress-seekers felt the power to benefit themselves, to do something for themselves from internal sources, they would also understand how to create a distress of their own, specially their own, from internal sources. Their inventions might then be more refined, and their gratifications might sound like good music : while at present they fill the world with their cries of distress, and consequently too often with the feeling of distress in the first place! They do not know what to make of themselves — and so they paint the misfortune of others on the wall; they always need others! And always again other others! — Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

Gay Science paragraph 56

Belief

Beliefs are very important within NLP. First of all one must make a distinction between believes and convictions. Second of all, one needs to take into account that a belief is a nominalization. Thirdly given that a belief is a nominalization, there ain’t such a thing as a belief. There is only believing as an unspecified verb. Therefore I believe that there ain’t such a thing as a belief.

That a beliefs strength alone guarantees nothing whatsoever about its truth, in fact is even capable of slowly, slowly distilling out of the most reasonable thing a concentrate of folly: this is our real European insight in this, if in anything, we have become experienced, been made cautious, shrewd, wise, apparently through much injury … ‘He that believeth shall be saved’: fine! Now and again, at least! But he that believeth shall most certainly be made stupid, even in the rarer case that the belief is not already stupid, that it was an intelligent one in the first place. Every long-held belief finally becomes stupid, which means (to express it with the clarity of our modern psychologists) that its reasons sink ‘into the unconscious’, disappear there – from then on it no longer rests upon reasons but upon affects (that is, whenever it needs help it gets the affects, and no longer the reasons, to fight its cause). Supposing one could discover which was the most strongly believed, longest held, least disputed, most honest belief that exists among men: it would then be highly justified to conjecture that this belief could also be the most profound, most stupid, ‘most unconscious’, the most thoroughly defended against reasons, the longest abandoned by reasons. – Agreed: but which is that belief? – Oh, you’re curious! But since I’ve started setting you riddles, I’ll be fair and come out quickly with the answer and solution – they won’t be easily anticipated. Man is above all a judging animal; but in judgment lies concealed our oldest and most constant belief. Every judgement rests on a holding-to-be-true and an asserting, on a certainty that something is thus and not otherwise, that in it man has really come to ‘know’: what is it that, in every judgment, is unconsciously believed to be true? – That we have a right to distinguish between subject and predicate, between cause and effect – that is our strongest belief; in fact, at bottom even the belief in cause and effect itself, in condition and conditioned is merely an individual case of the first and general belief, our primeval belief in subject and predicate (as the assertion that every effect is a doing and that every conditioned presupposes something that conditions, every doing a doer, in short a subject). Might not this belief in the concept of subject and predicate be a great stupidity?

Notebook 4, beginning of 1886 – spring 1886 paragraph 8

Causality

According to Neuro-Linguistic Programming causality is a distortion of our communications.

The error of imaginary causes. To begin with dreams: a cause is slipped after the fact under a particular sensation (for example, the sensation following a faroff cannon shot) — often a whole little novel is fabricated in which the dreamer appears as the protagonist who experiences the stimulus. The sensation endures meanwhile as a kind of resonance: it waits, so to speak, until the causal interpretation permits it to step into the foreground — not as a random occurrence but as a “meaningful event.” The cannon shot appears in a causal mode, in an apparent reversal of time. What is really later (the causal interpretation) is experienced first — often with a hundred details that pass like lightning before the shot is heard. What has happened? The representations which were produced in reaction to certain stimulus have been misinterpreted as its causes. In fact, we do the same thing when awake. Most of our general feelings — every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension, and impulsion in the ebb and flow of our physiology, and particularly in the state of the nervous system — excites our causal instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that — for feeling bad or good. We are never satisfied merely to state the fact that we feel this way or that: we admit this fact only — become conscious of it only — when we have fabricated some kind of explanation for it. Memory, which swings into action in such cases without our awareness, brings up earlier states of the same kind, together with the causal interpretations associated with them — not their actual causes. Of course, the faith that such representations or accompanying conscious processes are the causes is also brought forth by memory. Thus originates a habitual acceptance of a particular causal interpretation, which, as a matter of fact, inhibits any investigation into the real cause — it even excludes it.

Twilight of the Idols, The Four Great Errors, paragraph 4

Causation

In NLP causation is considered to be a distortion of our communications because there doesn’t exist such a thing as a cause and effect. For that reason within NLP we don’t look for the root cause of the problem as they would in psychology, but rather make sure that we help people overcome the symptoms of their issues. When you get rid of all the symptoms of the problems then there are no hidden or repressed problems anymore. In fact the person is free of problems.

The error of a false causality. Humans have always believed that they knew what a cause was; but how did we get this knowledge — or more precisely, our faith that we had this knowledge? From the realm of the famous “inner facts,” of which not a single one has so far turned out to be true. We believe that we are the cause of our own will: we think that here at least we can see a cause at work. Nor did we doubt that all the antecedents of our will, its causes, were to be found in our own consciousness or in our personal “motives.” Otherwise, we would not be responsible for what we choose to do. Who would deny that his thoughts have a cause, and that his own mind caused the thoughts? Of these “inward facts” that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness (“spirit”) or, later, that of the ego (the “subject”) as a cause are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it. But we have reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of this is true. The “inner world” is full of phantoms and illusions: the will being one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence it does not explain anything — it merely accompanies events; it can also be completely absent. The socalled motives: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something shadowing the deed that is more likely to hide the causes of our actions than to reveal them. And as for the ego … that has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words! It has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will! What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all. The whole of the allegedly empirical evidence for mental causes has gone out the window. That is what follows! And what a nice delusion we had perpetrated with this “empirical evidence;” we interpreted the real world as a world of causes, a world of wills, a world of spirits. The most ancient and enduring psychology was at work here: it simply interpreted everything that happened in the world as an act, as the effect of a will; the world was inhabited with a multiplicity of wills; an agent (a “subject”) was slipped under the surface of events. It was out of himself that man projected his three most unquestioned “inner facts” — the will, the spirit, the ego. He even took the concept of being from the concept of the ego; he interpreted “things” as “being” in accordance with his concept of the ego as a cause. Small wonder that later he always found in things what he had already put into them. The thing itself, the concept of thing is a mere extension of the faith in the ego as cause. And even your atom, my dear materialists and physicists — how much error, how much rudimentary psychology still resides in your atom! Not to mention the “thing-in-itself,” the horrendum pudendum of metaphysicians! The “spirit as cause” mistaken for reality! And made the very measure of reality! And called God!

Twilight of the Idols, The Four Great Errors, paragraph 3

Cause

Cause and effect statements are a distortion of our communications according to NLP. In fact there are no cause and effects. Hence claiming that there are causes distorts our communications. So if you want to use your communication for clarification and thus follow the guidelines of the metamodel you need to refrain from the use of cause and effect statements. On the other if you want to use the reversed metamodel as part of the Miltonmodel to influence people than the use of cause and effect is highly recommended. Nevertheless, NLP is only applied correctly when you are able to use cause and effect statements without believing in their truth or existence.

The cause of itself is the best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived, a type of logical rape and abomination. But humanity’s excessive pride has got itself profoundly and horribly entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense. The longing for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense (which, unfortunately, still rules in the heads of the half educated), the longing to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for your actions yourself and to relieve God, world, ancestors, chance, and society of the burden – all this means nothing less than being that very cause of itself and, with a courage greater than Munchhausen’s, pulling yourself by the hair from the swamp of nothingness up into existence. Suppose someone sees through the boorish naivete of this famous concept of “free will” and manages to get it out of his mind; I would then ask him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further and to rid his mind of the reversal of this misconceived concept of “free will”: I mean the “un-free will,” which is basically an abuse of cause and effect. We should not erroneously objectify “cause” and “effect” like the natural scientists do (and whoever else thinks naturalistically these days –) in accordance with the dominant mechanistic stupidity which would have the cause push and shove until it “effects” something; we should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts, which is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of description and communication, not explanation. In the “in-itself ” there is nothing like “causal association,” “necessity,” or “psychological un-freedom.” There, the “effect” does not follow “from the cause,” there is no rule of “law.” We are the ones who invented causation, succession, for-each-other, relativity, compulsion, numbers, law, freedom, grounds, purpose; and if we project and inscribe this symbol world onto things as an “in-itself,” then this is the way we have always done things, namely mythologically. The “un-free will” is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills. It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in a thinker when he senses some compulsion, need, having-to-follow, pressure, unfreedom in every “causal connection” and “psychological necessity.” It is very telling to feel this way – the person tells on himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, “un-freedom of the will” is regarded as a problem by two completely opposed parties, but always in a profoundly personal manner. The one party would never dream of relinquishing their “responsibility,” a belief in themselves, a personal right to their own merit (the vain races belong to this group –). Those in the other party, on the contrary, do not want to be responsible for anything or to be guilty of anything; driven by an inner self-contempt, they long to be able to shift the blame for themselves to something else. When they write books these days, this latter group tends to side with the criminal; a type of socialist pity is their most attractive disguise. And, in fact, the fatalism of the weak of will starts to look surprisingly attractive when it can present itself as “la religion de la souffrance humaine”: this is its “good taste.”

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 23