Category: NLP in general

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!

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 268

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!

Daybreak paragraph 129

Nietzsche is of course well known for his nihilism. NLP sounds like the exact opposite of nihilism. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s nihilism has been often misunderstood. Nowadays we would classify Nietzsche’s thinking more as pragmatism than nihilism. The best definition of pragmatism has been given by the philosopher Stephen Stich: any theory that values other things besides truth or instead of truth is a form of pragmatism.

NLP is a form of pragmatism. Inspired by William James and John Dewey, one of the most important ideas within NLP is that NLP practitioners don’t care about the truth and are only interested in what works. So that they can do of what works and less of what isn’t working.  Critics of NLP have often held this against them, but this is only because these critics are not pragmatist themselves.

I. Nihilism as a normal condition. Nihilism: the goal is lacking; an answer to the ‘Why?’ is lacking. What does nihilism mean? – That the highest values are devaluated. It is ambiguous: (A) Nihilism as a sign of the increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. It may be a sign of strength: the force of the spirit may have grown so much that the goals it has had so far (‘convictions’, articles of faith) are no longer appropriate – for a belief generally expresses the constraints of conditions of existence, submission to the authority of the circumstances under which a being prospers, grows, gains in power . .. On the other hand a sign that one’s strength is insufficient to productively posit for oneself a new goal, a ‘Why?’, a belief. It achieves its maximum of relative force as a violent force of destruction: as active nihilism. The opposite would be the weary nihilism that no longer attacks: its most celebrated form Buddhism: as passivist nihilism. Nihilism represents a pathological intermediate state (what is pathological is the tremendous generalization, the inference that there is no meaning at all): whether because the productive forces are not yet strong enough or because decadence is still hesitating and has not yet invented the resources it needs. (B) Nihilism as a decline and retreat of the spirit’s power: passive nihilism: as a sign of weakness: the force of the spirit may be wearied, exhausted, so that the goals and values that have prevailed so far are no longer appropriate and are no longer believed – that the synthesis of values and goals (on which every strong culture rests) dissolves, so that the individual values wage war on each other: disintegration that everything which revives, heals, soothes, benumbs comes to the fore in a variety of disguises: religious, or moral or political or aesthetic, etc. 2. Presupposition of this hypothesis: that there is no truth; that there is no absolute nature of things, no ‘thing-in-itself’ – this is itself a nihilism, and indeed the most extreme one. It places the value of things precisely in the fact that no reality corresponds and has corresponded to that value, which is instead only a symptom of force on the part of the value-positers, a simplification for the purposes of life.

Notebook 9, autumn 1887

Nonsense is important within NLP. The idea is that as soon as people stop taking their problems so serious their problems disappear.

Pleasure in nonsense. – How can man take pleasure in nonsense? For wherever in the world there is laughter this is the case; one can say, indeed, that almost everywhere there is happiness there is pleasure in nonsense. The overturning of experience into its opposite, of the purposive into the purposeless, of the necessary into the arbitrary, but in such a way that this event causes no harm and is imagined as occasioned by high spirits, delights us, for it momentarily liberates us from the constraint of the necessary, the purposive and that which corresponds to our experience, which we usually see as our inexorable masters; we play and laugh when the expected (which usually makes us fearful and tense) discharges itself harmlessly. It is the pleasure of the slave at the Saturnalia.

Human, All Too Human, part 1, paragraph 213

One of the lesser used modalities is the olfactory system. For most people it is too unconscious to be of much use. Nevertheless, given that the olfactory system works so unconsciously when it works, it works really, really well. For that reason it is one of the systems to check if the main modalities, visual, auditory & kinestetic, don’t work as well as wished for.

And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses — to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through. The rest is miscarriage and not-yet-science — in other words, metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology — or formal science, a doctrine of signs, such as logic and that applied logic which is called mathematics. In them reality is not encountered at all, not even as a problem — no more than the question of the value of such a sign-convention as logic.

Twilight of the Idols, ‘Reason’ In Philosophy, paragraph 3

It is important to make a distinction between pain and bad feelings. In the brain neuroscientists identified two neurological circuits involved with pain. One processes pain data from the body and one is a backup system that can duplicate the data from the body in case the body stops sending this data. If people complain about pains it is a good idea to have them checked out by a doctor first before applying NLP.

Pain teaches us that the location of where the pain  is felt is a projection of the brain. There is the so called rubber hand illusion that shows that the brain is easily tricked into feeling pain (or any other feeling) in a rubber hand rather than in the body.

Pain is something different from pleasure – I mean to say, it is not its opposite. If the essence of pleasure has been accurately described as a feeling of more power (thus as a feeling of differentiation that presupposes comparison), this doesn’t mean the essence of unpleasure has thus been defined. The false oppositions believed in by the common people and consequently by language have always been dangerous shackles for the course of truth. There are even cases where a kind of pleasure is conditioned by a certain rhythmic succession of small unpleasurable stimuli: this leads to a very rapid growth of the feeling of power, the feeling of pleasure. This is the case, e.g., in tickling, including the sexual tickling in the act of coitus: here we see unpleasure working as an ingredient in pleasure. It seems a little resistance is overcome and is immediately followed by another little resistance, which in turn is overcome – this play of resistance and victory most strongly stimulates that overall feeling of surplus, excessive power, that feeling which amounts to the essence of pleasure. – The reverse, an augmentation of the feeling of pain through little interpolated pleasurable stimuli, doesn’t exist: pleasure and pain are, precisely, not the reverse of one another. – Pain is an intellectual process in which a judgement makes itself unmistakeably heard – the judgement ‘harmful’, into which long experience has accumulated. In itself there is no pain. It is not the wound that hurts; it is the experience of what grave consequences a wound can have for the organism as a whole that speaks in the shape of that deep agitation called unpleasure (in the case of harmful influences unknown to earlier men, e.g., from new combinations of toxic chemicals, pain bears no witness – and we are undone …). In pain, the really specific thing is always the long agitation, the after-trembling of a terrifying shock in the cerebral focus of the nervous system: one’s suffering is not actually due to the cause of the pain (some injury, for example) but to the long-lasting upset of equilibrium proceeding from that shock. Pain is a sickness ofthe cerebral nerve centres – whereas pleasure is by no means a sickness …- That pain is the cause of counter-movements may be supported by appearances and even by the prejudice of philosophers; but in sudden cases, if one looks closely, the counter-movement manifestly arrives earlier than the feeling of pain. I’d be in a sorry plight if, having stumbled, I had to wait until the fact struck the bell of consciousness and a hint of what to do was telegraphed back … Instead, I distinguish as clearly as possible that the counter-movement of the foot happens first, to prevent a fall, and then, after a measurable passage of time, a kind of painful wave suddenly makes itself felt in the front of my head. One does not, thus, react to the pain. Pain is afterwards projected into the injured place – but the essence of this local pain is, nevertheless, not the expression of the type of local injury: it’s merely a place-sign, appropriate to the injury in strength and tone, that the nerve centres have received from it. If the organism’s muscular strength drops measurably as a consequence of the shock, this by no means indicates that the essence of pain should be sought in a lessening of the feeling of power … To repeat, one does not react to pain: unpleasure is not a ’cause’ of actions, pain itself is a reaction, the counter-movement is another and earlier reaction – the two things originate in different places.

Notebook 14, spring 1888 paragraph 173

NLP is about having good feelings most of the time rather than peak experiences.

Faith in intoxication. – Men who enjoy moments of exaltation and ecstasy and who, on account of the contrast other states present and because of the way they have squandered their nervous energy, are ordinarily in a wretched and miserable condition, regard these moments as their real ‘self’ and their wretchedness and misery as the effect of what is ‘outside the self’ and thus they harbor feelings of revengefulness towards their environment, their age, their entire world. Intoxication counts as their real life, as their actual ego: they see in everything else the opponent and obstructor of intoxication, no matter whether its nature be spiritual, moral, religious or artistic. Mankind owes much that is bad to these wild inebriates: for they are insatiable sowers of the weeds of dissatisfaction with oneself and one’s neighbor, of contempt for the age and the world, and especially of world-weariness. Perhaps a whole Hell of criminals could not produce an effect so oppressive, poisonous to air and land, uncanny and protracted as does this noble little community of unruly, fantastic, half-crazy people of genius who cannot control themselves and can experience pleasure in themselves only when they have quite lost themselves: while the criminal very often gives proof of exceptional self-control, self-sacrifice and prudence, and keeps these qualities awake in those who fear him. Through him the sky above life may perhaps become perilous and gloomy, but the air stays sharp and invigorating. – In addition to all this, these enthusiasts seek with all their might to implant the faith in intoxication as being that which is actually living in life: a dreadful faith! Just as savages are quickly ruined and then perish through ‘fire-water’, so mankind as a whole has been slowly and thoroughly ruined through the feelings made drunk by spiritual fire-waters and by those who have kept alive the desire for them: perhaps it will go on to perish by them.

Daybreak paragraph 50

NLP often gets confused with positive thinking. NLP is different though. NLP is all about having the freedom to chose what you want. Nevertheless, most people when they have the power to chose, chose good feelings over bad ones for instance. Yet, when NLP is applied correctly it doesn’t want to paint a rosy picture of a fantastic future. No, not at all. It is much better to paint an uncertain future where problems happen, but where you see yourself reacting calmly to trouble and where you see yourself solving any issues that come up.

Mental imagery about the future where you see yourself work as an instruction video for the unconsciousness. If you imagine a future without any problems then your brain doesn’t know how to react in case there are issues in real life. By imagining that things can go wrong and seeing yourself reacting calmly and correctly, solving the problems, then your brain knows what to do if there are issues.

My new path to ‘Yes’ My new version of pessimism: willingly to seek out the dreadful and questionable sides of existence: which made clear to me related phenomena of the past. ‘How much “truth” can a spirit endure and dare?’ – a question of its strength. The outcome of a pessimism like this could be that form of a Dionysian saying Yes to the world as it is, to the point of wishing for its absolute recurrence and eternity: which would mean a new ideal of philosophy and sensibility. Understanding that those aspects of existence previously negated are not only necessary, but also desirable; and desirable not merely with respect to the aspects which have previously been affirmed (perhaps as their complement and precondition) but for their own sake, as the more powerful, more fruitful, truer aspects of existence, in which the will of existence expresses itself more clearly. To devalue those aspects of existence that have previously been the only ones affirmed; to draw out what it is that actually says Yes here (first the instinct of those who suffer, second the instinct of the herd, and that third instinct, the instinct of the majority against the exception). Conception of a higher kind of being as ‘immoral’ according to existing ideas: the beginnings of this in history (the pagan gods, the ideals of the Renaissance).

Notebook 10, autumn 1887 paragraph 3

NLP is very critical of what psychologists do. In fact the stance in psychology of distance, observing and empathy is exactly what NLP found doesn’t work.

Moral for psychologists. — Not to go in for backstairs psychology. Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective, leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as the wish to experience does not succeed. One must not eye oneself while having an experience; else the eye becomes “an evil eye.” A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see; the same is true of the born painter. He never works “from nature”; he leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura, to sift through and express the “case,” “nature,” that which is “experienced.” He is conscious only of what is general, of the conclusion, the result: he does not know arbitrary abstractions from an individual case. What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But note what finally comes of all this: a heap of splotches, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by the Goncourts; they do not put three sentences together without really hurting the eye, the psychologist’s eye. Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study “from nature” seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism; this lying in the dust before petit faits [little facts] is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is — that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is.

Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, paragraph 7

NLP has been developed in 1970s by Richard Bandler as a criticism of psychology. His criticism was that psychology was wrong to think that they could get objective knowledge about mankind. NLP on the other hand focuses on the subjective experience people have rather than a hopeless quest for objectivity.

However gratefully we might approach the objective spirit – and who hasn’t been sick to death at least once of everything subjective, with its damned ipsissimosity! – nevertheless, in the end we even have to be cautious of our gratitude, and put an end to the exaggerated terms in which people have recently been celebrating the desubjectivization and depersonification of spirit, as if this were some sort of goal in itself, some sort of redemption or transfiguration. This kind of thing tends to happen within the pessimist school, which has reasons of its own for regarding “disinterested knowing” with the greatest respect. The objective man who no longer swears or complains like the pessimist does, the ideal scholar who expresses the scientific instinct as it finally blossoms and blooms all the way (after things have gone partly or wholly wrong a thousand times over) – he is certainly one of the most expensive tools there is: but he belongs in the hands of someone more powerful. He is only a tool, we will say: he is a mirror, – he is not an “end in himself.” The objective man is really a mirror: he is used to subordinating himself in front of anything that wants to be known, without any other pleasure than that of knowing, of “mirroring forth.” He waits until something comes along and then spreads himself gently towards it, so that even light footsteps and the passing by of a ghostly being are not lost on his surface and skin. He has so thoroughly become a passageway and reflection of strange shapes and events, that whatever is left in him of a “person” strikes him as accidental, often arbitrary, and still more often as disruptive. It takes an effort for him to think back on “himself,” and he is not infrequently mistaken when he does. He easily confuses himself with others, he is wrong about his own basic needs, and this is the only respect in which he is crude and careless. Maybe his health is making him suffer, or the pettiness and provincial airs of a wife or a friend, or the lack of companions and company, – all right then, he makes himself think about his sufferings: but to no avail! His thoughts have already wandered off, towards more general issues, and by the next day he does not know how to help himself any more than he knew the day before. He has lost any serious engagement with the issue as well as the time to spend on it: he is cheerful, not for lack of needs but for lack of hands to grasp his neediness. The obliging manner in which he typically approaches things and experiences, the sunny and natural hospitality with which he accepts everything that comes at him, his type of thoughtless goodwill, of dangerous lack of concern for Yeses and Noes: oh, there are plenty of times when he has to pay for these virtues of his! – and being human, he all too easily becomes the worthless residue of these virtues. If you want him to love or hate (I mean love and hate as a god, woman, or animal would understand the terms –) he will do what he can and give what he can. But do not be surprised if it is not much, – if this is where he comes across as fake, fragile, questionable, and brittle. His love is forced, his hatred artificial and more like un tour de force, a little piece of vanity and exaggeration. He is sincere only to the extent that he is allowed to be objective: he is “nature” and “natural” only in his cheerful totality. His mirror-like soul is forever smoothing itself out; it does not know how to affirm or negate any more. He does not command; and neither does he destroy. “Je ne m´eprise presque rien”, he says with Leibniz: that presque should not be overlooked or underestimated! He is no paragon of humanity; he does not go in front of anyone or behind. In general, he puts himself at too great a distance to have any basis for choosing between good or evil. If people have mistaken him for a philosopher for so long, for a Caesar-like man who cultivates and breeds, for the brutal man of culture – then they have paid him much too high an honor and overlooked what is most essential about him, – he is a tool, a piece of slave (although, without a doubt, the most sublime type of slave) but nothing in himself, – presque rien! The objective person is a tool, an expensive measuring instrument and piece of mirror art that is easily injured and spoiled and should be honored and protected; but he is not a goal, not a departure or a fresh start, he is not the sort of complementary person in which the rest of existence justifies itself. He is not a conclusion – and still less a beginning, begetter or first cause; there is nothing tough, powerful or self-supporting that wants to dominate. Rather, he is only a gentle, brushed-off, refined, agile pot of forms, who first has to wait for some sort of content or substance in order “to shape” himself accordingly, – he is generally a man without substance or content, a “selfless” man. And consequently, in parenthesi, nothing for women. –

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 207