Encyclopedia

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

Logic

Many NLP language patterns work because they break the laws of logic.

We do not succeed in both affirming and negating one and the same thing: that is a subjective empirical proposition which expresses not a ‘necessity’ but only ‘a non-ability’. If, according to Aristotle, the principle of non-contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the final and most fundamental one upon which all proofs are based, if the principle of all other axioms lies within it: then one ought to examine all the more carefully what it actually presupposes in the way of theses. Either, as if it already knew the real from somewhere else, it asserts something with respect to the real, to what is: namely, that opposite predicates cannot be ascribed to the real. Or does the principle mean that opposite predicates shall not be ascribed to it? Then logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us. In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to the real, or are they measures and means to create for us the real, the concept ‘reality’? … But to be able to affirm the former one would, as I have said, already need to be acquainted with what is; and that’s simply not the case. The principle thus contains not a criterion of truth, but rather an imperative about what shall count as true. Supposing there were no A identical with itself, such as that presupposed by every logical (including mathematical) principle, supposing A were already an illusion, then logic would have as its presupposition a merely illusory world. And indeed we believe in that principle under the impression of endless experience which seems continually to confirm it. The ‘thing’ – that is the real substratum of A: our belief in things is the precondition for our belief in logic. The A of logic is, like the atom, a re-construction of the ‘thing’ … By not grasping that, and by making of logic a criterion of true being, we are well on the way to positing all those hypostases – substance, predicate, object, subject, action, etc. – as realities: i.e., to conceiving a metaphysical world, i.e., a ‘true world’ (- but this is the illusory world once again . ..). The most basic acts of thought – affirming and negating, holding-to-be-true and holding-to-be-not-true  are, inasmuch as they presuppose not only a habit but a right to hold-to-be-true or hold-to-be-not-true in general, themselves ruled by a belief that there is knowledge for us, that judging really can reach the truth. In short, logic does not doubt its ability to state something about the true-in-itself (namely, that this cannot have opposite predicates). Here the crude, sensualist prejudice reigns that sensations teach us truths about things – that I cannot say at the same time of one and the same thing that it is hard and it is soft (the instinctive proof’I cannot have two opposite sensations at the same time’ – quite crude and false). The conceptual ban on contradiction proceeds from the belief that we are able to form concepts, that a concept doesn’t merely name what is true in a thing but encompasses it … In fact logic (like geometry and arithmetic) only applies to fictitious truths that we have created. Logic is the attempt to understand the real world according to a scheme of being that we have posited, or, more correctly, the attempt to make it formulatable, calculable for us …

Notebook 9, autumn 1887 paragraph 97

Logic is tied to the condition: assuming that identical cases exist. Indeed, in order to think and conclude logically, the fulfillment of this condition must first be feigned. That is: the will to logical truth cannot realize itself until a fundamental falsification of all events has been undertaken. From which it follows that a drive rules here which is capable of both means, firstly of falsifying, then of implementing a single viewpoint: logic does not originate in the will to truth.

Notebook 40, August – September 1885 paragraph 13

Lost performative

All sentences that express a norm, rule, opinion or judgment without stating whose judgement, opinion, rule or norm it is, is a lost performative and is part of the metamodel. It is classified as a distortion of reality whereas one can, of course, also argue that it is a deletion. The word “lost” certainly suggests that.

Man as the measurer. – Perhaps all the morality of mankind has its origin in the tremendous inner excitement which seized on primeval men when they discovered measure and measuring, scales and weighing (the word ‘Mensch’, indeed, means the measurer, he desired to name himself after his greatest discovery!). With these conceptions they climbed into realms that are quite unmeasurable and unweighable but originally did not seem to be.

Human, All Too Human book 3, paragraph 21

Injustice necessary. – All judgments as to the value of life have evolved illogically and are therefore unjust. The falsity of human judgement derives firstly from the condition of the material to be judged, namely very incomplete, secondly from the way in which the sum is arrived at on the basis of this material, and thirdly from the fact that every individual piece of this material is in tum the outcome of false knowledge, and is so with absolute necessity. Our experience of another person, for example, no matter how close he stands to us, can never be complete, so that we would have a logical right to a total evaluation of him; all evaluations are premature and are bound to be. Finally, the standard by which we measure, our own being, is not an unalterable magnitude, we are subject to moods and fluctuations, and yet we would have to know ourselves as a fixed standard to be able justly to assess the relation between ourself and anything else whatever. Perhaps it would follow from all this that one ought not to judge at all; if only it were possible to live without evaluating, without having aversions and partialities! – for all aversion is dependent on an evaluation, likewise all partiality. A drive to something or away from something divorced from a feeling one is desiring the beneficial or avoiding the harmful, a drive without some kind of knowing evaluation of the worth of its objective, does not exist in man. We are from the very beginning illogical and thus unjust beings and can recognize this: this is one of the greatest and most irresolvable discords of existence.

Human, All Too Human Part 1, paragraph 32

Love

One of Richard Bandler’s favorite sayings is: “Freedom is everything and love is all the rest.” These are the two values of NLP: freedom and love.

Love. Is the most astonishing proof wanted of how far the transfigurative force of intoxication can go? ‘Love’ is that proof, what’s called love in all the languages and mutenesses of the world. Intoxication here gets the better of reality in such a way that, in the consciousness of the lover, the cause seems obliterated and something else located in its place – a quivering and a sudden gleam of all the magic mirrors of Circe. Here man or animal makes no difference; even less do spirit, goodness, probity … One is made a fine fool of if one is fine, a gross fool of if one is gross; but love, and even love of God, the saintly love of ‘saved souls’, at root remains one thing: a fever that has reasons to transfigure itself, an intoxication that does well to lie about itself. And anyway, when one loves one is a good liar, to oneself and about oneself: one strikes oneself as transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect, one is more perfect … Here we find art as an organic function: we find it embedded in life’s most angelic instinct: we find it as life’s greatest stimulus – art, thus, sublimely expedient even in its lying … But it would be a mistake to stop at love’s power to lie: it does more than just imagine, and actually alters the ranking of values. And not only does it change the feeling of values … The lover is more valuable, is stronger. With the animals, this state produces new substances, pigments, colors and forms: especially new movements, new rhythms, new calls and seductions. With man it’s no different. The economy of a man is richer than ever, more powerful, more whole than the non-lover’s. The lover becomes a spendthrift: he’s rich enough for it. He now dares, becomes an adventurer, becomes a donkey of generosity and innocence; he believes in God again, he believes in virtue because he believes in love. On the other hand this idiot of happiness grows wings and new capacities, and even the doors of art open up to him. Discount from poetry in sounds and words the suggestion of that intestinal fever – and what remains of poetry and music? … L’art pour l’art, perhaps: the virtuoso croaking of abandoned frogs despairing in their swamp … All the rest was created by love …

Notebook 14, spring 1888 paragraph 120

Mastery

If you are a master at NLP then it is important to make sure that you always have feedback to see where you stray away and think something is “NLP” where in fact it is not.

To whom a court jester is a necessity. – The very beautiful, the very good, the very powerful almost never learn the full and universal truth about anything – for in their presence one always involuntarily lies a little, because one .is always subject to their influence and in accordance with this influence presents the truth one might communicate in the form of an adaptation (by falsifying the facts in some degree and color, omitting or adding details, and keeping back that which absolutely resists being adapted). If people of this kind are nonetheless determined to hear the truth they have to maintain their court jester – a being with the madman’s privilege of being unable to adapt himself.

Daybreak paragraph 451

Meaning

People think they understand what the other person means by what he says. According to NLP this is an illusion. Communication is always miscommunication. We think we understand what the other person is saying, but we don’t. We create our own interpretation of what the other is saying. There are three processes here at work in both the speaker and the listener: deletion, distortion and generalization.

A ‘thing-in-itself just as wrong-headed as a ‘meaning-in-itself, a
‘significance-in-itself. There is no ‘fact-in-itself; instead,for there to be a fact, a meaning must always first be projected in. The question ‘What is that?’ is the positing of a meaning from the viewpoint of something else. ‘Essence’, ‘essential being’, is something perspectival and presupposes multiplicity. At bottom there is always the question ‘What is that for me?’ (for us, for everything that lives, etc.). A thing would be determined only when all beings had asked of it, and answered, their ‘What is that?’ If just one being, with its own relations to and perspectives on all things, were missing, then the thing wouldn’t yet be ‘defined’.

Notebook 2, autumn 1885 – autumn 1886 paragraph 149

Metamodel

The metamodel is a model for communicating in order to get more clarification. It has three categories: deletion, distortion and generalization; and twelve rules or guidelines: simple deletion, comparative deletion, lack of referential index, unspecified verb, nominalization, cause and effect, mind reading, complex equivalence, lost performative, universal quantifier, modal operators of necessity or possibility and presuppositions.

The strength of the metamodel lies in the fact that it is also a model of how the brain store information. Everything you learned from experience about the world can be said to be stored in the brain in your world model. Whenever you describe something honestly then the way you phrase it reflects your world model. If you violate one of the rules of the metamodel this indicates an issue where your world model can be improved, because  there is something that either has been deleted, distorted or generalized.

On psychology and theory of knowledge. I maintain that the inner world is phenomenal as well: everything me become conscious of has first been thoroughly trimmed, simplified, schematized, interpreted – the real process of inner ‘perception’, the causal association between thoughts, feelings, desires is absolutely hidden from us, like that between subject and object- and may be just a figment of our imagination. This ‘apparent inner world’ is managed with quite the same forms and procedures as the ‘outer’ world. We never encounter ‘facts’: pleasure and unpleasure are late and derivative phenomena of the intellect … ‘Causality’ escapes us; to assume an immediate, causal bond between thoughts, as logic does, is the consequence of the crudest and clumsiest observation. Between two thoughts there are, in addition, all sorts of affects at play: but they move so fast that we mistake them, we deny them … ‘Thinking’, as posited by the theorists of knowledge, simply doesn’t occur: it is a quite arbitrary fiction achieved by selecting one element from the process and subtracting all the others, an artificial trimming for the purpose of intelligibility … The ‘mind’, something that thinks: maybe even ‘the mind absolute, pure, unmixed’ – this conception is a derivative, second consequence ofthe false self-observation that believes in ‘thinking’: here first an act is imagined that doesn’t occur, ‘thinking’, and secondly a subject-substratum is imagined in which every act of this thinking, and nothing else, originates; i.e., both doing and doer are fictions.

Notebook 11, November 1887 – March 1888 paragraph 113

Metaprogram

In NLP we have so called metaprograms. A metaprogram is a brain filter. Our senses produce way too much data. For instance a single eye produces about one million signals per second. Within psychology there is a dubious experiment that tries to show that our consciousness is only capable of processing two hundred signals per second. Even if we take this figure with a pinch of salt, the way our brain works by more and more abstracting data a lot of data is lost. NLP describes this loss as metaprograms. Although there aren’t specific metaprograms in the brain we as human interpreters of the lost data can name certain parts  of this lost data to single that part out to use within specific NLP techniques and NLP strategies. For that reason it is important to note that metaprograms are made up rather than found. And that, although you can make up hundreds of metaprograms, there are only a handful that are helpful.

Our perceptions, as we understand them: i.e., the sum of all those perceptions the becoming conscious of which has been useful and essential to us and to the whole organic process before us; not, then, all perceptions in general (e.g., not the electrical ones). That is: we have senses only for a certain range of perceptions – those we have to be concerned with in order to preserve ourselves. Consciousness exists to the extent that consciousness is useful. There is no doubt that all sensory perceptions are entirely suffused with value judgments (useful or harmful- consequently pleasant or unpleasant). A particular color simultaneously expresses a value for us (although we seldom admit this to ourselves, or only after a single color has operated on us for a long time, e.g., for prison inmates or lunatics). This is why insects react differently to different colors: some they love, e.g., ants.

Notebook 2, autumn 1885 – autumn 1886 paragraph 95

Miltonmodel

The Miltonmodel
The Miltonmodel

The Miltonmodel is the model in NLP for influencing people. It is named after Milton Erickson, the famous psychiatrist who thought up hypnotherapy. It was named after him because no-one has so many publication where it clearly states that one shouldn’t manipulate other people while at the same time he manipulated so many people.  The Miltonmodel consists of the reversed metamodel, indirect elicitation patterns, metaphor and ambiguities.

That in the ‘process of the whole’ the work of mankind is of no account, because there is no total process (conceived of as a system -) at all: – that there is no ‘whole’, that no evaluation of human existence, of human goals can be made with a view to something which doesn’t exist … – that necessity, causality, purposiveness are useful illusions – that the goal is not the increase of consciousness but the enhancement of power, an enhancement in which the usefulness of consciousness is included, with pleasure as much as with unpleasure – that one does not take means as the highest measure of value (thus not states of consciousness, such as pleasure and pain, if consciousness is itself a means -) – that the world is not at all an organism, but chaos: that the development of ‘mental life’ is a means for the organisation to gain relative permanence … – that all ‘desirability’ is meaningless with respect to the total character of being.

Notebook 11, November 1887 – March 1888 paragraph 74

Not enough! – It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to sounds like folly!

Daybreak paragraph 330

The difference between the metamodel and the Miltonmodel

In the quote below, if you replace “science” with the metamodel and realize that the conjurer is the hypnotist using the Miltonmodel, you get a very good explanation of the difference between the Miltonmodel and the metamodel.

The conjurer and his opposite. – What is astonishing in the realm of science is the opposite of what is astonishing in the art of the conjurer. For the latter wants to persuade us to see a very simple causality where in truth a very complicated causality is at work. Science, on the contrary, compels us to abandon belief in simple causalities precisely where everything seems so easy to comprehend and we are the fools of appearance. The ‘simplest’ things are very complicated – a fact at which one can never cease to marvel!

Daybreak paragraph 6

To be Profound and to Appear Profound. — He who knows that he is profound strives for clarification; he who would like to appear profound to the multitude strives for obscurity. The multitude thinks everything profound of which it cannot see the bottom; it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.

Gay Science paragraph 173

More seriously. – One takes an obscure and inexplicable thing more seriously than a clear and explicable one.

Human, All Too Human, part 1, paragraph 532

Mirroring

If one wants to make rapport, one can mirror the other person. But mind you if you start to copy them exactly this will only irritate the other.

Empathy. – To understand another person, that is, to imitate his feelings in ourselves, we do indeed often go back to the reason for his feeling thus or thus and ask for example: why is he troubled? – so as then for the same reason to become troubled ourselves; but it is much more usual to omit to do this and instead to produce the feeling in ourselves after the effects it exerts and displays on the other person by imitating with our own body the expression of his eyes, his voice, his walk, his bearing (or even their reflection in word, picture, music). Then a similar feeling arises in us in consequence of an ancient association between movement and sensation, which has been trained to move backwards or forwards in either direction. We have brought our skill in understanding the feelings of others to a high state of perfection and in the presence of another person we are always almost involuntarily practising this skill: one should observe especially the play on the faces of women and how they quiver and glitter in continual imitation and reflection of what is felt to be going on around them. But it is music which reveals to us most clearly what masters we are in the rapid and subtle divination of feelings and in empathising: for, though music is an imitation of an imitation of feelings, it nonetheless and in spite of this degree of distance and indefiniteness often enough makes us participants in these feelings, so that, like perfect fools, we grow sad without there being the slightest occasion for sorrow merely because we hear sounds and rhythms which somehow remind us of the tone-of-voice and movements of mourners, or even of no more than their customary usages. It is told of a Danish king that he was wrought up to such a degree of warlike fury by the music of his minstrel that he leaped from his seat and killed five people of his assembled court: there was no war, no enemy, rather the reverse, but the drive which from the feeling infers the cause was sufficiently strong to overpower observation and reason. But that is almost always the effect of music (supposing it capable of producing an effect at all – ), and one does not require such paradoxical cases to see this: the state of feeling into which music transports us almost always contradicts the real situation we are apparently in and the reasoning powers which recognize this real situation and its causes. – If we ask how we became so fluent in the imitation of the feelings of others the answer admits of no doubt: man, as the most timid of all creatures on account of his subtle and fragile nature, has in his timidity the instructor in that empathy, that quick understanding of the feelings of another (and of animals). Through long millennia he saw in everything strange and lively a danger: at the sight of it he at once imitated the expression of the features and the bearing and drew his conclusion as to the kind of evil intention behind these features and this bearing. Man has even applied this interpretation of all movements and lineaments as deriving from intention to inanimate nature – in the delusion that there is nothing inanimate: I believe that all we call feeling for nature at the sight of sky, meadow, rocks, forest, storms, stars, sea, landscape, spring, has its origin here – without the primeval habit, born of fear, of seeing behind all this a second, hidden meaning, we would not now take pleasure in nature, just as we would take no pleasure in man and animal without this same instructor in understanding, fear. For pleasure and pleased astonishment, finally the sense of the ridiculous, are the later-born children of empathy and the much younger siblings of fear. – The capacity for understanding – which, as we have seen, rests on the capacity for rapid dissimulation – declines in proud, arrogant men and peoples, because they have less fear: on the other hand, every kind of understanding and self-dissembling is at home among timid peoples; here is also the rightful home of the imitative arts and of the higher intelligence. – If, from the standpoint of such a theory of empathy as I have here suggested, I think of the theory, just at this time much loved and sanctified, of a mystical process by virtue of which pity makes two beings into one and in this way makes possible the immediate understanding of the one by the other: when I recall that so clear a head as Schopenhauer’s took pleasure in such frivolous and worthless rubbish and passed this pleasure on to other clear and not-so-clear heads: then there is no end to my amazement and compassion! How great must be our joy in incomprehensible nonsense! How close to the madman does the sane man stand when he pays heed to his secret intellectual desires! – (For what did Schopenhauer really feel so grateful and so deeply indebted to Kant? The answer was once revealed quite unambiguously: someone had spoken of how Kant’s categorical imperative could be deprived of its occult qualities and be made comprehensible. Thereupon Schopenhauer burst out: ‘The categorical imperative comprehensible! What a fundamentally perverse idea! What Egyptian darkness! Heaven forbid that it should ever become comprehensible! For that there is something incomprehensible, that this misery of the understanding and its concepts is limited, conditional, finite, deceptive: the certainty of this is Kant’s greatest gift to us.’ – Let us ask ourselves whether anyone who feels happy in believing in the incomprehensibility of moral things can be sincerely interested in acquiring a knowledge of them! One who still honestly believes in inspirations from on high, in magic and spiritual apparitions, and in the metaphysical ugliness of the toad!)

Daybreak paragraph 142

Miscommunication

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