Encyclopedia

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Seriousness

The idea within NLP is that if you can laugh at your problem your problems disappear. Only when people take their problem seriously problems remain. So many NLP techniques have an inherent ridiculousness on purpose. As soon as there is laughter in the room, things start to get better.

Taking Things Seriously. — The intellect is with most people an awkward, obscure and creaking machine, which is difficult to set in motion: they call it “taking a thing seriously” when they work with this machine and want to think well — oh, how burdensome must good thinking be to them! That delightful animal, man, seems to lose his good humor whenever he thinks well; he becomes serious! And “where there is laughing and gaiety, thinking cannot be worth anything” — so speaks the prejudice of this serious animal against all “Gay Science” — Well, then ! Let us show that it is prejudice!

Gay Science paragraph 327

In the field. – ‘We must take things more cheerfully than they deserve; especially since we have for a long time taken them more seriously than they deserve.’ – So speak brave soldiers of knowledge.

Daybreak paragraph 567

Sight

It is very important that a NLP practitioner is able to listen and see very well. When you work with other people in the way they tell you about their problem linguistically in most cases they also tell you what the solution is. At the same time there are many unconscious movement in their physiology that give away a lot more information about what is the case.

I put forward at once — lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily — the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see — accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to “will” — to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion — almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word “vice” is merely this physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one’s hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one’s stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things — in short, the famous modern “objectivity” — is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence.

Twilight of the Idols, What The Germans Lack, paragraph 6

Sign

Within NLP we make a distinction between the surface and deep structure. The surface structure is where all the signs and symbols are.

Just as there are many things a general doesn’t want to know, and must not know if he is to keep hold of his overall view, so in our conscious mind there must be above all a drive to exclude, to chase away, a selecting drive – which allows only certain facts to be presented to it. Consciousness is the hand with which the organism reaches out furthest: it must be a firm hand. Our logic, our sense of time, sense of space are prodigious capacities to abbreviate, for the purpose of commanding. A concept is an invention which nothing corresponds to wholly but many things slightly: a proposition such as ‘two things, being equal to a third thing, are themselves equal’ assumes (I) things and (2) an equivalence – neither exists. Yet with this invented and rigid world of concepts and numbers, man gains a means of seizing by signs, as it were, huge quantities of facts and inscribing them in his memory. This apparatus of signs is man’s superiority, precisely because it is at the furthest possible distance from the individual facts. The reduction of experiences to signs, and the ever greater quantity of things which can thus be grasped, is man’s highest strength. Intellectuality as the capacity to be master of a huge number of facts in signs. This intellectual world, this sign-world, is pure ‘illusion and deception’, as is every ‘phenomenal thing’ – and ‘moral man’ will probably be outraged! Oust as, in his calculations, Napoleon considered only man’s most essential instincts and was entitled to ignore the exceptional ones, e.g., compassion – at the risk of miscalculating now and again.)

Notebook 34, April-June 1885 paragraph 131

Simple deletion

The simple deletion is part of the metamodel and as such through the reversed metamodel part of the Miltonmodel.

The effectiveness of the incomplete. – Just as figures in relief produce so strong an impression on the imagination because they are as it were on the point of stepping out of the wall but have suddenly been brought to a halt, so the relief-like, incomplete presentation of an idea, of a whole philosophy, is sometimes more effective than its exhaustive realization: more is left for the beholder to do, he is impelled to continue working on that which appears before him so strongly etched in light and shadow, to think it through to the end, and to overcome even that constraint which has hitherto prevented it from stepping forth fully formed.

Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 178

State

NLP is all about state. What state you are in and how you can change from being in a state you dislike to a state that you prefer. Each state is defined by its complete set of submodalities.

Yet it is highly unlikely that there are such things as mental states. It is much better to see mental states for what they really are: internal behaviors of feeling, imagining and inner self talk.

Sympathetic resonance. – All stronger moods bring with them a sympathetic resonance on the part of related sensations and moods: they as it were root up the memory. Something in us is provoked to recollection and becomes aware of similar states and their origins. Thus there come to be constructed habitual rapid connections between feelings and thoughts which, if they succeed one another with lightning speed, are in the end no longer experienced as complexes but as unities. It is in this sense that one speaks of the moral feelings, of the religious feelings, as though these were simple unities: in truth, however, they are rivers with a hundred tributaries and sources. Here too, as so often, the unity of the word is no guarantee of the unity of the thing.

Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 14

Strategies

NLP is all about learning. Basically what NLP does is find someone who is capable of something that is interesting to learn, map out what he is doing and learn it yourself to test whether it also works for you. And if it turns out to work for you as well, then you can pass it on to others. What is learned within NLP is called a NLP strategy. If a strategy is very useful, very versatile and often used, the NLP strategy is generalized into a NLP technique.

Grades of traveller. – We can distinguish five grades of traveller: those of the first and lowest grade are those who travel and, instead of seeing, are themselves seen – they are as though blind; next come those who actually see the world; the third experience something as a consequence of what they have seen; the fourth absorb into themselves what they have experienced and bear it away with them; lastly there are a few men of the highest energy who, after they have experienced and absorbed all they have seen, necessarily have to body it forth again out of themselves in works and actions as soon as they have returned home. – It is like these five species of traveller that all men travel through the whole journey of life, the lowest purely passive, the highest those who transform into action and exhaust everything they experience.

Human, All Too Human, book 2, paragraph 228

Submodalities

All NLP techniques consists of the manipulation of submodalities. Submodalities, or qualities as they are called in philosophy, are properties of the five modalities. So if you see something what you see is either in color or black & white, two dimensional or three dimensional, it has a size etcetera. The same goes for hearing, smelling, tasting or feeling something. Submodalities are they way meaning is coded in our brain. For each different meaning we know there is a specific combination of submodalities that represent that meaning inside our brain. The most important submodalities are visual, auditory and kinestetic.

Qualities are our insurmountable barriers; we have no way to stop ourselves feeling mere quantitative distinctions to be something fundamentally different from quantity, namely to be qualities, no longer reducible to one another. But everything for which the word ‘knowledge’ makes any sense refers to the realm where there can be counting, weighing, measuring, refers to quantity – while conversely all our feelings of value (i.e., all our feelings) adhere to qualities, that is, to the perspectival ‘truths’ that are ours and nothing more than ours, that simply cannot be ‘known’. It is obvious that every being different from us feels different qualities and consequently lives in another world from the one we live in. Qualities are our real human idiosyncrasy: wanting our human interpretations and values to be universal and perhaps constitutive values is one of the hereditary insanities of human pride, which still has its safest seat in religion. Need I add, conversely, that quantities ‘in themselves’ do not occur in experience, that our world of experience is only a qualitative world, that consequently logic and applied logic (such as mathematics) are among the artifices of the ordering, overwhelming, simplifying, abbreviating power called life, and are thus something practical and useful, because life-preserving, but for that very reason not in the least something ‘true’?

Notebook 6, summer 1886 – spring 1887 paragraph 14

Might not all quantities be signs of qualities? A greater degree of power corresponds to a different consciousness, feeling, desiring, a different perspectival view; growth itselfis a craving to be more; the craving for an increase in quantity grows from a quale; in a purely quantitative world all would be rigid, unmoving, dead. – Reducing all qualities to quantities is nonsense: what follows is that one thing and another stand side by side, an analogy.

Notebook 2, autumn 1886 – autumn 1886 paragraph 157

Surface structure

Within NLP we make a distinction between the surface structure and the deep structure. The surface structure are all symbols and signs that we can perceive. Basically this boils down to our language. The deep structure is what the symbols refer to. Normally we would call this reality.

Only as Creators ! — It has caused me the greatest  trouble, and for ever causes me the greatest trouble, to perceive that unspeakably more depends upon what things are called, than on what they are. The reputation, the name and appearance, the importance, the usual measure and weight of things — each being in origin most frequently an error and arbitrariness thrown over the things like a garment, and quite alien to their essence and even to their exterior — have gradually, by the belief therein and its continuous growth from generation to generation, grown as it were on-and-into things and become their very body; the appearance at the very beginning becomes almost always the essence in the end, and operates as the essence! What a fool he would be who would think it enough to refer here to this origin and this nebulous veil of illusion, in order to annihilate that which virtually passes for the world— namely, so-called “reality”! It is only as creators that we can annihilate! — But let us not forget this: it suffices to create new names and valuations and probabilities, in order in the long run to create new “things”.

Gay Science paragraph 58

Scientific precision is achievable first in the case of the most superficial phenomena, in other words where things can be counted, calculated, touched, seen, where quantities can be ascertained. Thus, the most impoverished fields of existence were the first to be fruitfully cultivated. The demand that everything must be explained in mechanistic terms is the instinctive idea that it’s precisely there that the most valuable and fundamental insights are first reached: which is a piece of naivety. In fact, nothing that can be counted and grasped is worth much to us: what we cannot reach with our ‘grasp’ is what we consider ‘higher’. Logic and mechanics can only be applied to what is most superficial, and are really only an art of schematizing and abbreviating, a coping with multiplicity through an art of expression – not an ‘understanding’, but a designating in order to make oneself understood. Thinking the world as reduced to its surface means above all making it ‘graspable’. Logic and mechanics never touch on causality.

Notebook 5, summer 1886 – autumn 1887 paragraph 16

System

NLP is inherently anti-systemic. If you ever find a NLP system it is wrong.

There are schematic minds, who hold a complex of thought to be truer if it can be inscribed into schemata or tables of categories drawn up beforehand. The self-deceptions in this field are countless: almost all great ‘systems’ are among them. The fundamental prejudice is, though, that it is inherent to the true being of things to be ordered, easy to survey, systematic; conversely, that disorder, chaos, the unpredictable can only make its appearance in a world that is false or incompletely known – in short, that it is an error – which is a moral prejudice, drawn from the fact that the truthful, reliable human being is a man of order, of maxims, and all in all tends to be something predictable and pedantic. And yet it cannot be demonstrated at all that the in-themselves of things follows this recipe for the model civil servant.

Notebook 40, August – September 1885 paragraph 9

Talent

One of the things that struck Richard Bandler at an early age was that people explained away the results of the great therapists like Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson by claiming that they were gifted. This motivated Richard Bandler to show the world that great skills are learnable.

Talent. – In as highly developed a humanity as ours now is everyone acquires from nature access to many talents. Everyone possesses inborn talent, but few possess the degree of inborn and acquired toughness, endurance and energy actually to become a talent, that is to say to become what he is: which means to discharge it in works and actions.

Human, All Too Human part 1, paragraph 263

The serious workman. – Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquire greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole. The recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example, is easy to give, but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says ‘I do not have enough talent.’ One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one’s eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will produce an artistic effect when it is well described, one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the workshop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. – What, however, do most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole. Perhaps they chance to strike a right note, excite attention and from then on strike worse and worse notes, for good, natural reasons. – Sometimes, when the character and intellect needed to formulate such a life-plan are lacking, fate and need take their place and lead the future master step by step through all the stipulations of his trade.

Human, All Too Human part 1, paragraph 163