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

Consciousness

Who we are is mainly how we subjectively experience ourselves in our conscious mind. Nevertheless, we know that the most of what we do and think is processed in our unconsciousness. Within NLP we make sure that our unconsciousness is programmed the way we want so that we can become more conscious of the great moments of life.

Consciousness. — Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic, and consequently also the most unfinished and least powerful of these developments. Innumerable mistakes originate out of consciousness, which, “in spite of fate”, as Homer says, cause an animal or a man to break down earlier than might be necessary. If the conserving bond of the instincts were not very much more powerful, it would not generally serve as a regulator: by perverse judging and dreaming with open eyes, by superficiality and credulity, in short, just by consciousness, mankind would necessarily have broken down : or rather, without the former there would long ago have been nothing more of the latter! Before a function is fully formed and matured, it is a danger to the organism: all the better if it be then thoroughly tyrannized over! Consciousness is thus thoroughly tyrannized over — and not least by the pride in it ! It is thought that here is the quintessence of man ; that which is enduring, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him! Consciousness is regarded as a fixed, given magnitude ! Its growth and intermittences are denied! It is accepted as the “unity of the organism”! — This ludicrous overvaluation and misconception of consciousness has as its result the great utility that a too rapid maturing of it has thereby been hindered. Because men believed they already possessed consciousness, they gave themselves very little trouble to acquire it— and even now it is not otherwise! It is still an entirely new problem just dawning on the human eye, and hardly yet plainly recognizable: to embody knowledge in ourselves and make it instinctive,— a problem which is only seen by those who have grasped the fact that hitherto our errors alone have been embodied in us, and that all our consciousness is relative to errors!

Gay Science paragraph 11

Conviction

Conviction is a nominalization and as such a distortion of reality according to NLP. Convictions are stronger than believes. Most of our convictions are trival like for instance the conviction that tomorrow the sun will still shine. Relevant convictions are way more uncommon than relevant believes. As there is a difference in meaning between conviction and belief it is important for the NLP practitioner to know whether a certain idea is a conviction or a belief because the submodalities of those two will differ. Confusing the two leads to working with the wrong set of submodalities.

As convictions limit people’s options the correct application of NLP entails breaking down negative convictions to the level of things you believe could happen (or they could not). It is wrong to use NLP to build strong positive convictions and certainty. This not only leads to less options for the person involved but it also leads to arrogance without competence as people use NLP to become convinced that they are able to do so whereas in fact they can’t.

Given that a conviction is a nominalization, I am convinced that there ain’t such a thing as a conviction.

Enemies of truth. – Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Human, All Too Human part 1, paragraph 483

Conviction is the belief that on some particular point of knowledge one is in possession of the unqualified truth. This belief thus presupposes that unqualified truths exist; likewise that perfect methods of attaining to them have been discovered; finally, that everyone who possesses convictions avails himself of these perfect methods. All three assertions demonstrate at once that the man of convictions is not the man of scientific thought; he stands before us in the age of theoretical innocence and is a child, however grown up he may be in other respects. But whole millennia have lived in these childish presuppositions and it is from them that mankind’s mightiest sources of energy have flowed. Those countless numbers who have sacrificed themselves for their convictions thought they were doing so for unqualified truth. In this they were all wrong: probably a man has never yet sacrificed himself for truth; at least the dogmatic expression of his belief will have been unscientific or half-scientific. In reality one wanted to be in the right because one thought one had to be. To allow oneself to be deprived of one’s belief perhaps meant calling one’s eternal salvation into question. In a matter of such extreme importance as this the ‘will’ was only too audibly the prompter of the intellect. The presupposition of every believer of every kind was that he could not be refuted; if the counter-arguments proved very strong it was always left to him to defame reason itself and perhaps even to set up the ‘I believe because it is absurd’ as the banner of the extremest fanaticism. It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions. But if all those who have thought so highly of their convictions, brought to them sacrifices of every kind, and have not spared honor, body or life in their service, had devoted only half their energy to investigating with what right they adhered to this or that conviction, by what path they had arrived at it, how peaceable a picture the history of mankind would present! How much more knowledge there would be! We should have been spared all the cruel scenes attending the persecution of heretics of every kind, and for two reasons: firstly because the inquisitors would have conducted their inquisition above all within themselves and emerged out of the presumptuousness of being the defenders of unqualified truth; then because the heretics themselves would, after they had investigated them, have ceased to accord any further credence to such ill-founded propositions as the propositions of all religious sectarians and ‘right believers’ are.

Human, All Too Human paragraph 630

To what extent even we are still pious. — It is said with good reason that convictions have no civic rights in the domain of science: it is only when a conviction voluntarily condescends to the modesty of an hypothesis, a preliminary standpoint for experiment, or a regulative fiction, that its access to the realm of knowledge, and a certain value therein, can be conceded, — always, however, with the restriction that it must remain under police supervision, under the police of our distrust. — Regarded more accurately, however, does not this imply that only when a conviction ceases to be a conviction can it obtain admission into science? Does not the discipline of the scientific spirit just commence when one no longer harbors any conviction ? . . . It is probably so: only, it remains to be asked whether, in order that this discipline may commence it is not necessary that there should already be a conviction, and in fact one so imperative and absolute, that it makes a sacrifice of all other convictions. One sees that science also rests on a belief: there is no science at all “without premises”. The question whether truth is necessary, must not merely be affirmed beforehand, but must be affirmed to such an extent that the principle, belief, or conviction finds expression, that “there is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value” — This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will not to allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could also be interpreted in this fashion, provided one included under the generalization, “I will not deceive” the special case, ” I will not deceive myself” But why not deceive? Why not allow oneself to be deceived? — Let it be noted that the reasons for the former eventuality belong to a category quite different from those for the latter: one does not want to be deceived oneself, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived, — in this sense science would be a prolonged process of caution, foresight and utility; against which, however, one might reasonably make objections. What? Is not-wishing-to-be-deceived really less injurious, less dangerous, less fatal? What do you know of the character of existence in all its phases to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of absolute distrust, or of absolute trustfulness ? In case, however, of both being necessary, much trusting and much distrusting, whence then should science derive the absolute belief, the conviction on which it rests, that truth is more important than anything else, even than every other conviction? This conviction could not have arisen if truth and untruth had both continually proved themselves to be useful : as is the case. Thus — the belief in science, which now undeniably exists, cannot have had its origin in such a utilitarian calculation, but rather in spite of the fact of the inutility and dangerousness of the “Will to truth” of “truth at all costs” being continually demonstrated. “At all costs”: alas, we understand that sufficiently well, after having sacrificed and slaughtered one belief after another at this altar ! Consequently, “Will to truth” does not imply, ” I will not allow myself to be deceived,” but — there is no other alternative — ” I will not deceive, not even myself”: and thus we have reached the realm of morality. For let one just ask oneself fairly: “Why wilt thou not deceive?” especially if it should seem – and it does seem— as if life were laid out with a view to appearance, I mean, with a view to error, deceit, dissimulation, delusion, self-delusion; and when on the other hand it is a matter of fact that the great type of life has always manifested itself on the side of the most unscrupulous devious. Such an intention might perhaps, to express it mildly, be a piece of Quixotism, a little enthusiastic craziness; it might also, however, be something worse, namely, a destructive principle, hostile to life “Will to Truth, that might be a concealed Will to Death.- Thus the question Why is there science? leads back to the moral problem: What in general is the purpose of morality, if life, nature, and history are non-moral? There is no doubt that the conscientious man in the daring and extreme sense in which he is presupposed by the belief in science, affirms thereby a world other than that of life, nature, and history; and in so far as he affirms this “other world” what? must he not just thereby— deny its counterpart, this world, our world? … But what I have in view will now be understood, namely, that it is always a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests,— and that even we knowing ones of today, anti-metaphysical, still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief a millennium old, the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth, that the truth is divine. But what if this itself always becomes more untrustworthy, what if nothing any longer proves itself divine, except it be error, blindness, and falsehood; — what if God himself turns out to be our most persistent lie? —

Gay Science paragraph 344

 

Conviction is the belief that on some particular point of knowledge one is in possession of the unqualified truth. This belief thus presupposes that unqualified truths exist; likewise that perfect methods of attaining to them have been discovered; finally, that everyone who possesses convictions avails himself of these perfect methods. All three assertions demonstrate at once that the man of convictions is not the man of scientific thought; he stands before us in the age of theoretical innocence and is a child, however grown up he may be in other respects. But whole millennia have lived in these childish presuppositions and it is from them that mankind’s mightiest sources of energy have flowed. Those countless numbers who have sacrificed themselves for their convictions thought they were doing so for unqualified truth. In this they were all wrong: probably a man has never yet sacrificed himself for truth; at least the dogmatic expression of his belief will have been unscientific or half-scientific. In reality one wanted to be in the right because one thought one had to be. To allow oneself to be deprived of one’s belief perhaps meant calling one’s eternal salvation into question. In a matter of such extreme importance as this the ‘will’ was only too audibly the prompter of the intellect. The presupposition of every believer of every kind was that he could not be refuted; if the counter-arguments proved very strong it was always left to him to defame reason itself and perhaps even to set up the ‘I believe it because it is absurd’ as the banner of the extremest fanaticism. It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions. But if all those who have thought so highly of their convictions, brought to them sacrifices of every kind, and have not spared honor, body or life in their service, had devoted only half their energy to investigating with what right they adhered to this or that conviction, by what path they had arrived at it, how peaceable a picture the history of mankind would present! How much more knowledge there would be! We should have been spared all the cruel scenes attending the persecution of heretics of every kind, and for two reasons: firstly because the inquisitors would have conducted their inquisition above all within themselves and emerged out of the presumptuousness of being the defenders of unqualified truth; then because the heretics themselves would, after they had investigated them, have ceased to accord any further credence to such ill-founded propositions as the propositions of all religious sectarians and ‘right believers’ are.

Human, All Too Human, part 1, paragraph 630

Deep structure

In NLP there is the distinction between the surface structure and the deep structure. The deep structure is basically reality. Yet, often we keep forgetting that we are not in reality but are part of reality. Hence there is much deep structure inside of us.

The so-called ‘ego’. – Language and the prejudices upon which
language is based are a manifold hindrance to us when we want to
explain inner processes and drives: because of the fact, for example,that words really exist only for superlative degrees of these processes and drives; and where words are lacking, we are accustomed to abandon exact observation because exact thinking there becomes painful; indeed, in earlier times one involuntarily concluded that where the realm of words ceased the realm of existence ceased also. Anger, hatred, love, pity, desire, knowledge, joy, pain – all are names for ‘extreme states’: the milder, middle degrees, not to speak of the lower ,degrees which are continually in play, elude us, and yet it is they which weave the web of our character and our destiny. These extreme outbursts – and even the most moderate conscious pleasure or displeasure, while eating food or hearing a note, is perhaps, rightly understood, an extreme outburst – very often rend the web
apart, and then they constitute violent exceptions, no doubt usually consequent on built-up congestions: – and, as such, how easy it is for them to mislead the observer! No less easy than it is for them to mislead the person in whom they occur. We are none of us that which we appear to be in accordance with the states for which alone we have consciousness and words, and consequently praise and blame; those cruder outbursts of which alone we are aware make us misunderstand ourselves, we draw a conclusion on the basis of data in which the exceptions outweigh the rule, we misread ourselves in this apparently most intelligible of handwriting on the nature of our self. Our opinion of ourself, however, which we have arrived at by this erroneous path, the so-called ‘ego’, is thenceforth a fellow worker in the construction of our character and our destiny.

Daybreak paragraph 115

Deletion

Deletion is one of the categories of the metamodel. It includes the simple deletion, the comparison deletion, the lack of referential index and the unspecified verb.

If I have anything of a unity within me, it certainly doesn’t lie in the conscious ‘I’ and in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the sustaining, appropriating, expelling, watchful prudence of my whole organism, of which my conscious self is only a tool. Feeling, willing, thinking everywhere show only outcomes, the causes of which are entirely unknown to me: the way these outcomes succeed one another as if one succeeded out of its predecessor is probably just an illusion: in truth, the causes may be connected to one another in such a way that the final causes give me the impression of being associated, logically or psychologically. I deny that one intellectual or psychological phenomenon is the direct cause of another intellectual or psychological phenomenon – even if this seems to be so. The true world of causes is hidden from us: it is unutterably more complicated. The intellect and the senses are, above all, a simplifying apparatus. Yet our erroneous, miniaturized, logicized world of causes is the one we can live in. We are ‘knowers’ to the extent that we are able to satisfy our needs. Studying the body gives some idea of the unutterable complication. If our intellect did not have some fixed forms, living would be impossible. But that doesn’t prove anything about the truth of all logical facts.

Notebook 34, April-June 1885 paragraph 46

Denominalization

Denominalization is the process of turning a nominalization back into the active process that lies behind the noun.

On ‘causalism’: It’s obvious that things-in-themselves cannot stand in a relation of cause and effect to one another, and neither can phenomena: from which it follows that within a philosophy which believes in things-in-themselves and in phenomena, the concept ’cause and effect’ cannot be applied. Kant’s mistakes – … In fact the concept ’cause and effect’, considered psychologically, only arises from a way of thinking that believes will to be working upon will, always and everywhere – that believes only in what lives and at bottom only in ‘souls’ (and not in things). Within the mechanistic view of the world (which is logic and its application to space and time), that concept reduces to the mathematical formula – using which, as must be emphasized again and again, nothing is ever understood, but is denoted, distorted. The unalterable sequence of certain phenomena does not prove a ‘law’ but a power relation between two or several forces. To say: ‘But precisely this relation remains the same!’ means nothing more than: ‘One and the same force cannot be a different force as well’. – It’s not a matter of one after another – but of one in among another, of a process in which the individual factors that succeed one another do not condition each other as causes and effects…. The separation of ‘doing’ from the ‘doer’, of what happens from a something that makes it happen, of process from a something that is not process but is enduring, substance, thing, body, soul, etc. – the attempt to grasp what happens as a kind of displacement and repositioning of what ‘is’, of what persists: that ancient mythology set down the belief in ’cause and effect’ once this belief had found a fixed form in the grammatical functions of language.

Notebook 2, autumn 1886 – autumn 1886 paragraph 139

Difference

Sorting for sameness or difference is one of the metaprograms.

What is ‘knowing’? Tracing something alien back to something one is acquainted’ and familiar with. First principle: what we have got used to we no longer consider a riddle, a problem. The feeling of the new, of the discomfiting, is dulled: everything that happens regularly no longer seems questionable to us. This is why the knower’s first instinct is to look for the rule – whereas, of course, finding the rule doesn’t yet mean anything at all is ‘known’! – Hence the superstition of the physicists: where they can stand still, i.e., where the regularity of phenomena allows them to apply abbreviating formulas, they think knowing has taken place. They have a feeling of ‘security’, but behind this intellectual security is the soothing of their fearfulness: they want the rule because it strips the world of dreadfulness. Fear of the unpredictable as the hidden instinct of science. Regularity lulls to sleep the questioning (i.e., fearing) instinct: to ‘explain’ is to show a rule in what happens. Belief in the ‘law’ is belief in the dangerousness of the arbitrary. The good will to believe in laws has helped science to victory (particularly in democratic eras).

Notebook 5, summer 1886 – autumn 1887 paragraph 10

Direction

Within NLP we prefer direction rather than goals or worse outcomes. If you make a goal too specific you only increase the chance of failure. With direction you give maximum freedom to the force that drives us.

Two Kinds of Causes which are confused.— It seems to me one of my most essential steps and advances that I have learned to distinguish the cause of an action generally from the cause of an action in a particular manner, say, in this direction, with this aim. The first kind of cause is a quantum of stored-up force, which waits to be used in some manner, for some purpose; the second kind of cause, on the contrary, is something quite unimportant in comparison with the first, an insignificant hazard for the most part, in conformity with which the quantum of force in question ” discharges ” itself in some unique and definite manner : the lucifer-match in relation to the barrel of gunpowder. Among those insignificant hazards and lucifer-matches I count all the so-called “aims,” and similarly the still more so-called “occupations” of people: they are relatively optional, arbitrary, and almost indifferent in relation to the immense quantum of force which presses on, as we have said, to be used up in any way whatever. One generally looks at the matter in a different manner: one is accustomed to see the impelling force precisely in the aim (object, calling, etc.), according to a primeval error,— but it is only the directing force, the steersman and the stream have thereby been confounded. And yet it is not even always a steersman, the directing force… Is the “aim”, the “purpose,” not often enough only an extenuating pretext, an additional self-blinding of conceit, which does not wish it to be said that the ship follows the stream into which it has accidentally run? That it ” wishes ” to go that way, because it must go that way? That it has a direction, sure enough, but— not a steersman? We still require a criticism of the conception of “purpose”.

Gay Science paragraph 360

Distortion

Distortion is one the three categories of language patterns in the metamodel. In this category you find: nominalization, cause and effect, mind reading, complex equivalence and lost performative.

The continual transitions do not permit us to speak of the ‘individual’, etc.; the ‘number’ of beings is itself in flux. We wouldn’t speak of time at all and would know nothing of motion if we didn’t, in a crude way, believe we saw something ‘at rest’ alongside things in motion. Just as little would we speak of cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of the ’empty space’ we would never have arrived at the conception of space itself. The principle of identity has as its background the ‘appearance’ that things are the same. A world of becoming could not, in the strict sense, be ‘grasped’, be ‘known’; only inasmuch as the ‘grasping’ and ‘knowing’ intellect finds an already created, crude world, cobbled together out of deceptions but having become solid, inasmuch as this kind of illusion has preserved life – only to that extent is there such a thing as ‘knowledge’: i.e., a measuring of earlier and more recent errors against one another.

Notebook 36, June – July 1885, paragraph 23

Ecology

Ecology is one of the four requirements for well-formed goals. It means that if you think of a goal that you ought to check whether this goal is good for you, your loved ones, your colleagues, society and the planet. Ecology is overused in NLP most of the time. It is only a requirement of goals, not a requirement of every step you take. Besides,  the further away from the person you get the less weight you ought to give to ecology issues. First of all, no-one can predict the future. One cannot know what will happen if a certain action is taken. There is no cause and effect, so how can one determine the consequences of certain steps ecologically? The best you can do, is make your estimation and when necessary take into account what happens to others.

In society today there’s a great deal of considerateness, of tact and forbearance, of good-natured pause before the rights of others, even before the claims of others; more than that, there’s a certain benevolent instinct of human value in general, which reveals itself in trust and credit of every kind; respect for men, and by no means just for the virtuous ones – is perhaps the element which separates us most sharply from a Christian valuation. We feel a good measure of irony if we so much as hear morality being preached nowadays; preaching morality lowers a man in our eyes and makes him comical. This moralist liberality is among the best signs of our era. If we find cases where it’s clearly lacking, this strikes us as a sickness (the case of Carlyle in England, of Ibsen in Norway, of Schopenhauerian pessimism throughout Europe). If anything reconciles us to our era, then the large amount of immorality it permits itself without therefore thinking less of itself. On the contrary! – So what constitutes the superiority of culture over unculture? of, e.g., the Renaissance over the Middle Ages? – Always one thing alone: the large amount of admitted immorality. It follows from this, necessarily, how all the heights of human development must appear to the eye of the moral fanatic: as the non plus ultra of corruption (-think of Plato’s judgement of Periclean Athens, Savonarola’s judgement of Florence, Luther’s judgement of Rome, Rousseau’s judgement of Voltaire’s society, the judgement of the Germans against Goethe).

Notebook 10, autumn 1887 paragraph 176

Education

NLP is important in education. First of all NLP differs from therapy. Within NLP we think that most people who have issues are not broken, and they don’t need to be healed. Instead they haven’t learned yet how to deal easily with difficult situations. So NLP prescribes education instead of medication.

The second point is that NLP works wonders in the classroom. For those people who want to know more about this, go to our specialist website at: Teaching Excellence.

Education. – Education is a continuation of procreation, and often a kind of supplementary beautification of it.

Daybreak paragraph 397