Encyclopedia

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

History

One of the basic tenets in NLP is that what we remember of our past has little to do what actually happens. And that, as long as you leave intact what the community sees as strict facts, you can create for yourself a history that makes you feel good. This process is often called “Change Personal History” within NLP, although most of the time this term refers to an outdated NLP technique. Modern NLP establishes this through the use of timelines.

Facta! Yes, Facta ficta! – A historian has to do, not with what actually happened, but only with events supposed to have happened: for only the latter have produced an effect. Likewise only with supposed heroes. His theme, so-called world history, is opinions about supposed actions and their supposed motives, which in turn give rise to further opinions and actions, the reality of which is however at once vaporized again and produces an effect only as vapor – a continual generation and pregnancy of phantoms over the impenetrable mist of unfathomable reality. All historians speak of things which have never existed except in imagination.

Daybreak paragraph 307

 

Homage

When one does NLP one has to pay homage to Richard Bandler, the genius who created NLP in the seventies. Nevertheless, most NLP trainers rather try to minimize the role Richard Bandler plays in the development of NLP.

Learning to do homage. — One must learn the art of homage, as well as the art of contempt. Whoever goes in new paths and has led many persons therein, discovers with astonishment how awkward and incompetent all of them are in the expression of their gratitude, and indeed how rarely gratitude is able even to express itself. It is always as if something comes into people’s throats when their gratitude wants to speak so that it only hems and haws, and becomes silent again. The way in which a thinker succeeds in tracing the effect of his thoughts, and their transforming and convulsing power, is almost a comedy: it sometimes seems as if those who have been operated upon felt profoundly injured thereby, and could only assert their independence, which they suspect to be threatened, by all kinds of improprieties. It needs whole generations in order merely to devise a courteous convention of gratefulness; it is only very late that the period arrives when something of spirit and genius enters into gratitude. Then there is usually someone who is the great receiver of thanks, not only for the good he himself has done, but mostly for that which has been gradually accumulated by his predecessors, as a treasure of what is highest and best.

Gay Science paragraph 100

Identiy

One of the more useful metaprograms is the one that is called “sameness/difference” Our brain works by making things the same. Evolutionary this has  a great advantage because once your learn that a specific tiger is dangerous you don’t have to learn that again for the next tiger you meet. Sameness makes life saver. So the brain filters out differences. Nevertheless in some people the brain filters out less differences and in others more. That distinction can be described within NLP with the metaprogram “sameness/difference”.

Identity is also one of the seven principles that put people into a hypnotic trance. Hence the rise of identity politics, which is really just another form of hypnosis.

Judgement: this is the belief that ‘such and such is the case’. Thus, judgement involves admitting having encountered an identical case: it thus presupposes comparison, with the help of memory. Judgement does not create the appearance of an identical case. Instead, it believes it perceives one; it works on the supposition that identical cases even exist. But what is that function, which must be much older and have been at work much earlier, that levels out and assimilates cases in themselves dissimilar? What is that second function which, on the basis of the first, etc. ‘What arouses the same sensations is the same’: but what is it that makes sensations the same, ‘takes’ them as the same? – There could be no judgments at all if a kind of leveling had not first been carried out within the sensations: memory is only possible with a constant underscoring of what has been experienced, has become habit – – Before a judgement can be made, the process of assimilation must already have been completed: thus, here too there is an intellectual activity which does not enter consciousness, as in the case of pain caused by an injury. Probably, all organic functions have their correspondence in inner events, in assimilation, elimination, growth, etc. Essential to start from the body and use it as a guiding thread. It is the far richer phenomenon, and can be observed more distinctly. Belief in the body is better established than belief in the mind. ‘However strongly something is believed, that is not a criterion of truth.’ But what is truth? Perhaps a kind of belief which has become a condition of life? In that case, its strength would indeed be a criterion. E.g., regarding causality.

Notebook 40, August – September 1885 paragraph 15

Intention

Intention is a nominalization and as such a distortion of our communication. Nevertheless, it is often used in NLP. NLP can be used for good or for evil. The NLP techniques are basically tools that change the way your brain or someone else his brain work. Most of the time this is done in such a way that the person improves and for the greater good. Unfortunately, there are exceptions where people use NLP for the worse. Although it is better to discourage such use of NLP, this has nothing to do with whether NLP is done with good or bad intentions as Nietzsche explains below. The reason is that it is wrong to think that an intention can cause anything at all.

Because intention is a nominalization, there ain’t such a thing as intention.

Man believes himself to be cause, doer – Everything that happens relates as a predicate to some subject Every judgment contains the whole, full, profound belief in subject and predicate or in cause and effect; and the latter belief (namely the assertion that every effect is a doing and that every doing presupposes a doer) is, in fact, a special case of the former, so that the belief which remains as the fundamental belief is: there are subjects I notice something and look for a reason for it – that originally means: I look for an intention in it, and above all for someone who has intentions, for a subject, a doer – in the past, intentions were seen in all that happened, all that happened was doing. This is our oldest habit. Do animals share it? Do they, as living creatures, not also rely on interpretations in accordance with themselves? – The question’ Why?’ is always a question about the causa finalis, about a ‘What for?’ We do not have a ‘sense of the causa efficiens’: here Hume is right, and habit (but not just that of the individual!) makes us expect that one particular, frequently observed occurrence will follow another, nothing more than that! What gives us the extraordinary strength of our belief in causality is not the great habit of the succession of occurrences but our incapacity to interpret what happens other than as happening out of intentions. It is the belief that what lives and thinks is the only thing which effects – belief in will, intention – belief that all that happens is doing, that all doing presupposes a doer; it is belief in the ‘subject’. Might not this belief in the concept of subject and predicate be a great stupidity? Question: is intention the cause of something happening? Or is that, too, illusion? Is intention not itself that which happens? ‘Attraction’ and ‘repulsion’ in the purely mechanical sense is a complete fiction: a phrase. We cannot conceive of an attraction without an intention. – The will to gain power over something or to resist its power and push it away – that ‘we understand’: that would be an interpretation we could make use of. In short: the psychological compulsion to believe in causality lies in the unimaginability of things happening without intentions: which, of course, says nothing about truth or untruth (the justification of such a belief). The belief in causae falls with the belief in final causes (against Spinoza and his causalism).

Notebook 2, autumn 1886 – autumn 1886 paragraph 84

Irony

As a NLP trainer one is often better at the stuff you are teaching than the people you teach too. Especially on the subjects of decision making, feeling good, communicating well and achieving goals. For that reason it is important to make sure that in your training their is enough room for self-irony so to overcome any distance between you and your audience.

The inhumanity of the sage. – Since the progress of the sage, who, as the Buddhist hymn says, ‘walks alone like the rhinoceros’, is heavy and crushes all in its path – there is need from time to time of a sign of a conciliatory and gentler humanity: and by that I mean, not only a swifter progress, a politeness and companionableness, not only a display of wit and a certain self-mockery, but a self-contradiction and an occasional regression into the nonsense currently in vogue. If he is not to resemble a steamroller which advances like fatality, the sage who wants to teach has to employ his faults as an extenuation, and when he says ‘despise me!’ he pleads for permission to be the advocate of a presumptuous truth. He wants to lead you into the mountains, he wants perhaps to put your life in danger: in return he is willing, before and afterwards, to let you take revenge on such a leader – it is the price at which he purchases for himself the pleasure of going on ahead. – Do you recall what went through your mind when once he led you by slippery paths through a dark cavern? How your heart, beating and discouraged, said to itself: ‘this leader might do something better than crawl about here! He is one of those inquisitive kinds of idlers: – does it not already do him too much honor that we should appear to accord him any value at all by
following him?’

Daybreak paragraph 469

Jealousy

What sometimes happens is that after NLP training or coaching one’s life improves considerably and a negative reaction to this sudden change is coming from friends and family. What is happening is that they themselves have issues and the person who has overcome his problems is now a mirror to them showing them that they have some responsibility for their misery. For that insight they blame the other person.

One’s own path. – If we take the decisive step and enter upon the path which is called our ‘own path’, a secret is suddenly revealed to us: all those who have hitherto been our friends and familiars have imagined themselves superior to us, and are now offended. The best of them are lenient with us and wait patiently for us soon to find our way back to the ‘right path’ – they know, it seems, what the right path is! The others resort to mockery and act as though one had become temporarily insane, or they make spiteful allusions to the person they suppose to have misled us. The more malicious declare us to be vain fools and seek to blacken our motives, while the worst former friend of all sees in us his worst enemy and one thirsting for revenge for a protracted dependence – and is afraid of us. – What are we to do? My advice is: to inaugurate our sovereignty by promising all our acquaintances a year’s amnesty in advance for all their sins.

Daybreak paragraph 484

Judgment

Judgments are a form of the lost performative and as such part of the metamodel within NLP and a distortion of our communications when they are not accompanied with the person who is doing the judging.

Also, there is the tendency to condone judging. Which is of course a contradictio in terminis.

Judging is our oldest belief, our most habitual holding-to-be-true or holding-to-be-untrue In judgement our oldest belief is to be found, in all judging there is a holding-to-be-true or holding-to-be-untrue, an asserting or denying, a certainty that something is thus and not otherwise, a belief in having really ‘come to know’ – what is believed true in all judgments? What are predicates? – We have regarded changes in ourselves not as such but as an ‘in-itself that is alien to us, that we only ‘perceive’: and we have posited them not as something that happens but as something that is, as a ‘quality’ – and invented for them a being in which they inhere, i.e., we have posited the effect as something that effects and what effects as something that is. But even in this formulation, the term ‘effect’ is still arbitrary: for of those changes that take place in us and of which we firmly believe we are not ourselves the causes, we only infer that they must be effects – according to the inference: ‘Every change has an author’. – But this inference itself is mythology: it divorces what effects from the effecting. If l say: ‘Lightning flashes’, I have posited the flashing once as activity and once as subject, and have thus added on to what happens a being that is not identical with what happens but that remains, is, and does not ‘become’. – To posit what happens as effecting, and effect as being: that is the twofold error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty. Thus, e.g., ‘The lightning flashes’ – ‘to flash’ is a state of ourselves; but we don’t take it to be an effect on us. Instead we say: ‘Something flashing’ as an ‘in-itself and then look for an author for it – the ‘lightning’.

Notebook 2, autumn 1885 – autumn 1886 paragraph 84

Laughter

Laughter plays an important part in NLP.

The Olympian vice. – In spite of that philosopher who, being a true Englishman, tried to give laughter a bad reputation among all thoughtful people –, “laughter is a terrible infirmity of human nature, and one that every thinking mind will endeavor to overcome” (Hobbes) –, I would go so far as to allow myself a rank order of philosophers based on the rank of their laughter – right up to those who are capable of golden laughter. And given that even gods philosophize (a conclusion I have been drawn to many times –), I do not doubt that they know a new and super-human way of laughing – at the expense of everything serious! Gods like to make fun of things: it seems as if they cannot stop laughing, even during holy rites.

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 294

 

Law

One of the reason people believe in cause and effect is that they believe in the existence of laws of nature. But this mistakes a mathematical description of an event for an explanation. It also explains how cause and effect is tied up with necessity.

The ‘regularity’ of a succession is only a figurative expression, as if here a rule were being obeyed: it is not a fact. Likewise ‘conformity with a law’. We find a formula to express a kind of sequence that occurs again and again: doing this doesn’t mean we have discovered a ‘law’, and even less a force which is the cause of the recurrence of sequences. That something always happens thus and thus is here interpreted as if a being’s always acting thus and thus resulted from obedience towards a law or a legislator, while without the ‘law’ it would be free to act otherwise. Yet precisely that thus-and-not-otherwise might originate in the being itself, which behaved thus and thus not on the prompting of some law but as constituted thus and thus. It only means: something cannot be something else as well; cannot do first this, then something different; is neither free nor unfree, but just thus and thus. The mistake lies in a subject being invented in.

Notebook 2, autumn 1885 – autumn 1886 paragraph 142

Linguistic

NLP stands for Neur-Linguistic Programming. For that reason language is very important in NLP. Everything that you have learned from experience is somehow coded in the brain. The complete set of this code in NLP is called the world model. Whatever you say is coming from this world model. For that reason a NLP practitioner is very good at listening for in the way you phrase stuff, you can hear where the world model of a person is rich, poor or too poor or too rich. The idea of NLP is enrich someone’s world model so that he gets more options in life and more freedom to chose between these options. If someone has a problem, this only means that his world model is not rich enough to find the solution. So NLP solves problems by enriching world models. For that reason if a NLP practitioner gets someone to speak differently about his problems a first step towards a solution has been made.

At long last, let us contrast the very different manner in which we conceive the problem of error and appearance. (I say “we” for politeness’ sake.) In the past, alteration, change, any becoming at all, were taken as proof of mere appearance, as an indication that there must be something which led us astray. Today, in contrast, precisely insofar as the prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being, we see ourselves somehow caught in error, compelled into error — so certain are we, on the basis of rigorous examination, that this is where the error lies. It is no different in this case than with the movement of the sun: there our eye is the constant advocate of error, here it is our language. In its origin language belongs to the age of the most rudimentary psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language — in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere reason sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word. Very much later, in a world which was in a thousand ways more enlightened, philosophers, to their great surprise, became aware of the sureness, the subjective certainty, in our handling of the categories of reason: they concluded that these categories could not be derived from anything empirical — for everything empirical plainly contradicted them. Whence, then, were they derived? And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: “We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, because we have reason!” Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “Reason” in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

Twilight of the Idols, ‘Reason’ In Philosophy, paragraph 5