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