Encyclopedia

A B C D E F G H I J L M N O P R S T U V W

Teacher

Often a lot of stuff is being sold as “NLP” whereas in reality it has very little to do with NLP. For that reason it is very important to investigate any NLP trainer quite well before committing to participate in a NLP training programme.

Our teachers. – In our youth we take our teachers and guides from the time in which we happen to live and the circle in which we happen to move: we are thoughtlessly confident that the times we live in are bound to have teachers better suited to us than to anyone else and that we are bound to find them without much trouble. For this childishness we have in later years to pay a heavy price: we have to expiate our teachers in ourself. We then perhaps go in search of our true guides throughout the whole world, the world of the past included ­but perhaps it is too late. And in the worst case we discover that they were living when we were young – and that we missed them.

Daybreak paragraph 495

Therapy

NLP is often thought of as a form of psychotherapy. Nothing can be further away from the truth. In fact NLP has been developed in the seventies as a criticism of psychotherapy.

Where are the new physicians of the soul? – It has been the means of comfort which have bestowed upon life that fundamental character of suffering it is now believed to possess; the worst sickness of mankind originated in the way in which they have combated their sicknesses, and what seemed to cure has in the long run produced something worse than that which it was supposed to overcome. The means which worked immediately, anesthetizing and intoxicating, the so-called consolations, were ignorantly supposed to be actual cures; the fact was not even noticed, indeed, that these instantaneous alleviations often had to be paid for with a general and profound worsening of the complaint, that the invalid had to suffer from the after-effect of intoxication, later from the withdrawal of intoxication, and later still from an oppressive general feeling of restlessness, nervous agitation and ill-health. Past a certain degree of sickness one never recovered .- the physicians of the soul, those universally believed in and worshipped, saw to that. – It is said of Schopenhauer, and with justice, that after they had been neglected for so long he again took seriously the sufferings of mankind: where is he who, after they have been neglected for so long, will again take seriously the antidotes to these sufferings and put in the pillory the unheard-of quack-doctoring with which, under the most glorious names, mankind has hitherto been accustomed to treat the sicknesses of its soul?

Daybreak paragraph 52

Thinking

One of Richard Bandler’s more recent ideas about NLP is that NLP is thinking on purpose.

In the form in which it comes, a thought is a sign with many meanings, requiring interpretation or, more precisely, an arbitrary narrowing and restriction before it finally becomes clear. It arises in me – where from? How? I don’t know. It comes, independently of my will, usually circled about and clouded by a crowd of feelings, desires, aversions, and by other thoughts, often enough scarcely distinguishable from a ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’. It is drawn out of this crowd, cleaned, set on its feet, watched as it stands there, moves about, all this at an amazing speed yet without any sense of haste. Who does all this I don’t know, and I am certainly more observer than author of the process. Then its case is tried, the question posed: ‘What does it mean? What is it allowed to mean? Is it right or wrong?’ – the help of other thoughts is called on, it is compared. In this way thinking proves to be almost a kind of exercise and act of justice, where there is a judge, an opposing party, even an examination of the witnesses which I am permitted to observe for a while- only a while, to be sure: most of the process, it seems, escapes me. – That every thought first arrives many-meaninged and floating, really only as the occasion for attempts to interpret or for arbitrarily fixing it, that a multitude of persons seem to participate in all thinking – this is not particularly easy to observe: fundamentally, we are trained the opposite way, not to think about thinking as we think. The origin of the thought remains hidden; in all probability it is only the symptom of a much more comprehensive state; the fact that it, and not another, is the one to come, that it comes with precisely this greater or lesser luminosity, sometimes sure and imperious, sometimes weak and in need of support, as a whole always exciting, questioning – because every thought acts as a stimulus to consciousness – in all of this, something of our total state expresses itself in sign form. – The same is true of every feeling. It does not mean something in itself: when it comes it first has to be interpreted by us, and how strange this interpretation often is! Think of the distress of the entrails, almost ‘unconscious’ to us, of the tensions of blood pressure in the abdomen, of the pathological states of the nervus sympathicus – and how many things there are of which the sensorium commune gives us hardly a gleam of consciousness! – Faced with such uncertain feelings of displeasure, only the expert anatomist can guess the right type and location of their causes, whereas everyone else, in other words almost all men for as long as they have existed, searches not for a physical explanation of this kind of pain but for a psychological and moral one. They misconstrue the body’s actual ill humors by fetching from their store of unpleasant experiences and fears a reason to feel so bad. Under torture, almost anyone confesses himself guilty; under a pain whose physical cause is unknown, the tortured man subjects himself to an interrogation as long and inquisitorial as it takes to find himself or others guilty: – like, for example, the Puritan who, as a matter of habit, made a moral interpretation of the ill humor resulting from an unwise lifestyle: as the pangs of his own conscience.

Notebook 38, June – July 1885 paragraph 1

Time

Time is especially important within NLP. The brain creates something called a time line which is a visual and spatial representation of time.

The logic of our conscious thinking is only a crude and facilitated form of the thinking needed by our organism, indeed by the particular organs of our organism. For example, a thinking-at-the-same-time is needed of which we have hardly an inkling. Or perhaps an artist of language does: reckoning back with the weight and the lightness of syllables, reckoning ahead, and at the same time looking for analogies between the weight of the thought and the phonetic, or physiological, conditions of the larynx: all this happens at the same time – though not consciously. Our feeling of causation is something quite crude and isolated compared to our organism’s real feelings of causality. In particular, ‘before’ and ‘after’ is a great piece of naivety. Finally: we first had to acquire everything for consciousness: a sense of time, a sense of place, a sense of causality; it having long existed, and far more richly, without consciousness. And what we acquired was a certain simplest, plainest, most reduced form: our conscious willing, feeling, thinking is in the service of a much more comprehensive willing feeling thinking. – Really? We are still growing continually, our sense of time and place, etc., is still developing.

Notebook 34, April-June 1885 paragraph 124

Our subjective experience of time can be influenced by NLP and hypnosis.

The length of the day. – When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

Human, All Too Human, part 1, paragraph 529

TOTE

The TOTE model is the basic unit that NLP uses for strategies. TOTE stands for Test Operate Test Exit. It takes any procedure as a black box. The first test is to see whether it makes sense to start the procedure. The final test is to check whether the outcome is correct of faulty. In the latter case the TOTE model uses feedback to let the Operation know that something has gone wrong. For that reason is feedback always negative in NLP. If the outcome is correct control is passed on to a different Operation through the Exit. One can praise such an outcome and give a compliment, but that has nothing to do with feedback. As you can combine a single TOTE unit with another, one can see a person as a single TOTE black box.

What we do. — What we do is never understood, but only praised and blamed.

Gay Science paragraph 264

Trainer

If you replace in the quote below “philosopher” with “NLP trainer” you get a lot of insight in the two different NLP trainers that are around. One who only cares about holding on to a vast body of knowledge and another who creates new things within NLP.

When I was younger I worried about what a philosopher really was: for I believed I saw contradictory features in the famous philosophers. Finally I realized that there are two different kinds of philosopher: those who have to hold fast some large body of valuations, that is, of previous assignments and creations of value (logical or moral ones), and then those who are themselves the legislators of valuations. The former try to gain power over the present or past world by summarizing and abbreviating it with signs. These inquirers are charged with making all events and all evaluations up to now easy to survey, easy to think through, to grasp, to manage, with subduing the past, abbreviating everything that is long, even time itself a great and wondrous task. However, the real philosophers command and legislate, they say: this is how it shall be! and it is they who determine the Where to and the What for of man, making use of the spadework done by the philosophical laborers, those subduers of the past. This second kind of philosopher rarely turns out well; and indeed their situation and danger is tremendous. How often have they intentionally blindfolded themselves to stop having to see the narrow margin that separates them from the abyss, the headlong fall: for instance Plato when he persuaded himself that the good, as he wanted it, was not the good of Plato but the good in itself, the eternal treasure that just happened to have been found on his path by some man called Plato! In much coarser forms this same will to blindness rules among the founders of religion: their ‘thou shalt’ must on no account sound to their ears like an ‘I want’ – only as the command of a God do they dare to discharge their task, only as ‘divine inspiration’ is their legislation on values a bearable burden which does not crush their conscience. – Once those two means of consolation, Plato’s and Mohammed’s, have fallen away and no thinker can any longer relieve his conscience with the hypothesis of a ‘God’ or ‘eternal values’, the claim of the legislator of new values arises with a new and unprecedented terror. Now those chosen ones, on whom the presentiment of such a duty begins to dawn, will try and see whether they can’t slip out of that duty, as if out of their greatest danger, ‘just in time’, through some trick or other: for example by telling themselves that the task is already solved, or is insoluble, or that they don’t have the shoulders to carry such burdens, or that they are already weighed down with other, more immediate tasks, or even that this new, distant duty is a seduction and a temptation, a diversion from all duties, a sickness, a kind of madness. One or the other of them may in fact succeed in evading it: the trace of such evaders and their bad conscience runs through the whole of history. Mostly, however, such men of fate have been reached by that redeeming hour, that autumn hour of ripeness, where they had to do what they did not even ‘want’ to do – and the deed they had most feared fell easily and undesired from the tree, as a deed without choice, almost as a gift.

Notebook 38, June – July 1885 paragraph 13

Truth

Critics of NLP often point that one of the ideas within NLP is that NLP practitioner don’t care about the truth, only about what works. Of course this is a misconception as these critics overlook the philosophical sound theory of pragmatism of which NLP is a part. NLP practitioners want to be practical and actually do something to test whether it works rather then discuss theoretical stuff that makes no difference in practice.

Sense for truth. — Commend me to all skepticism where I am permitted to answer: “Let us put it to the test!” But I don’t wish to hear anything more of things and questions which do not admit of being tested. That is the limit of my “sense for truth”: for bravery has there lost its right.

Gay Science paragraph 52

Unconsciousness

NLP works a lot with the unconscious mind. Although there is nothing more miraculous as our conscious mind, a lot of what we do and the patterns that we follow lie in our unconsciousness. Hence, if you want to optimize yourself or others you have to deal with the unconsciousness.

Everything which enters consciousness is the last link in a chain, a closure. It is just an illusion that one thought is the immediate cause of another thought. The events which are actually connected are played out below our consciousness: the series and sequences of feelings, thoughts, etc., that appear are symptoms of what actually happens! – Below every thought lies an affect. Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born of one particular drive but is a total state, a whole surface of the whole consciousness, and results from how the power of all the drives that constitute us is fixed at that moment – thus, the power of the drive that dominates just now as well as of the drives obeying or resisting it. The next thought is a sign of how the total power situation has now shifted again.

Notebook I, autumn 1885 – spring 1886 paragraph 61

Value

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

Visual

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