neurolinguistic_programming DannyH I had a daydream of my last words the other day. I said “ I would have achieved so much more if I’d been less happy.” There are worse fates. The level of our suffering always slowly rises to meet our happy state. You just pump more paranoia into the misery balloon. This is a large part of the novel I am writing now, about the seductiveness of being able to live without fear. The map is not the territory, the NLPers say and you can see what they mean, especially when the edges of the map have “here be dragons” emblazoned on them, limiting your field of vision. Of course these personal effectiveness coaches offer a morphine cure. Their medicine only works if you keep on taking it and creates a need within itself. There is no coming to terms with the contours of your personality, no learning to love the map made by your scars. The map is not the territory, you have to strip back the damaged skin and reveal the perfect human being beneath. Either that or cover it up and act as though you have no scar in the hope that it will become true. “Fake it to make it.” They say. Sounds abhorrent but the trouble is it works. People have rebuilt broken relationships this way, reengaged with their lives. I have firsthand knowledge of people who have been helped by the “Landmark Forum.” The basic idea is this: you are responsible for what your world is. You create a view of the world – a map if you will – from which you form your expectations. This map needs tweaking in two different ways. The first is simple. Sometimes your perceptions are just wrong (they always seem to find that it is wrong in a negative way) the map needs to be readjusted to fit the territory better so you don’t keep getting stuck behind what you think is a wall but is actually a ladder. Most forms of therapy offer this adjustment in one way or another. Helping you to correct a twisted world view distorted by some trauma is pretty much the psychotherapists stock in trade. The next adjustment is more controversial. They argue that even if something is negative at the moment, you can simply adjust your map to make it positive and it will become true. They argue that your map is altering reality, emotional reality at the very least. The territory can be made to fit the new map! The classic example of this which the Landmark’s seem to specialise in is bad realationships with parents. You say to them that you have a bad relationship with your father. He has done terrible things to you. You have said terrible things to him. You hate each other and cannot be reconciled. They say you have chosen to allow the bad things your father did to you to affect you. He didn’t hurt you, you did it to yourself. You drew a map with a mountain of pain in it which then became the truth. If you decide that it doesn’t affect you any more and draw a new map then hey presto, you love your dad again. You then act just as if everything between you was fine, better then fine. You call him up and tell him you love him. And you know what? Before long you’re going on fishing trips together. All the pain and hurt you thought you were suffering, you suddenly realise you were self-generating. And then if he starts being mean to you again, it just bounces off. He can’t hurt you. You fire his negativity back at him as love and before long you’ve broken him down and he’s weeping like a baby and apologising to you. Then you send him to the Landmark forum to get fixed himself. You can relandscape your emotional territory. Pretty seductive huh? So what if it seems inauthentic. Emotional truth is fluid, malleable. Forgiveness is magical. In the physical world if you break a bottle it’s broken forever, no way you could put all those shards back together. In the emotional world, forgiveness pulls that bottle back together and self awareness makes it unbreakable in the future. By using the right emotional techniques you can have a kind of super-personality. So what’s wrong with this picture? Why does it make me shudder. Why do I recoil in horror at the thought that I or anyone I’m close to should get caught up in this sort of thing. I suppose for me it comes form a deeprooted fear of the idea of perfectability. I grew up in a world still recovering from the psychological shock of the Nazi regime. The horror that could be permitted within that doctrine of superhumanity was writ large across the whole world. Of course the subsequent myth that was created, that of a war between liberalism and fascism, became the psychologically comfortable way of dealing with modernity’s greatest bloodletting. The reality, as everyone at the time knew, was that fascism, fed by the idea of technological progress and physical perfectability was becoming the ruling ideology across the whole of the developed world. The arrogance of scientists and engineers and the reductive newborn pseudo science of sociology were leading to a situation where the miraculous complexity of human consciousness was beginning to be seen as the enemy, not the essence of human existence. For these reasons I can’t help seeing such things as NLP, particularly as it is so closely associated with business performance, as a tool of human subjugation, designed to make us fit neatly into the machine. The more sophisticated these attempts at reengineering humanity become the more sinister and seductive I find them. Whenever anyone offers answers I distrust them. More interesting questions, now that I can cope with. 050701 ... 心 经 * The_Heart_Sutra * 050424 ... http://www.towise.net/english/sultra/xinjin/xinjing.htm When Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara was practicing the profound Prajna Paramita, he illuminated the Five Skandhas and saw that they are all empty, and he crossed all suffering and difficulty. 观自在菩萨，行深般若波罗蜜多时，照见五蕴皆空，度一切苦厄... 050701 ... DannyH Sorry KX21 but frankly, you're not the best advert for that stuff. Not since you lost your sense of humour (and proportion.) There are many parrallels and interconnections between NLP and buddhism. Some wisdom, somewhere but also the whiff of charlatanism, even fascism. 050701 ... misstree find peace through compassion. when you are offered negativity, exhale hope and love. turn your back on your own pain. don't deny it, but don't let it own you. i think one problem you may be sensing is that pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps disobeys the laws of physics. but emotions aren't physics, and a positive attitude goes a long way. but what do i know. 050701 ... LS Sounds like good advice to me. 050701 ... oldephebe yep 050701 ... DannyH Turn your back on pain? Because it doesn't exist if you can't see it? I can't live that way. I just don't see how denial and self-deception can lead to any greater understanding of self. It just feels like painting a sunny sky onto the inside of your windows. I'm not saying it doesn't work for you, or that you feel you're deceiving yourself if it works for you. The trouble is I can't help feeling that if that's your attitude then it's unlikely that if we met we would ever be able to have a genuine connection, that unless we could be honest about how fucked up we both are that we'd be left communicating through avatars. 050704 ... oldephebe ahhhh... "we'd be left communicating through avatars.." Very interesting choice of words. I don't think mtree was impling or saying that one should paste bright orange construction paper festooned with rainbow sparkles over windows that are painted black. Umm..Lemme see here...I think she was saying that pain is an inescapable part of being a flawed and sometimes broken creature in a dystopic world filled with other people who march to the beat of ME!! and in so doing are bound to purposefully and or inadvertantly cause you great pain, but..i think she was saying if you can find something to anchor your self to, something perhaps constructed from w/in ,cause theses are all constructions, god, zen positive thinking, alternative perspectives..blah..if you can accept the pain and let it roll off your shoulders (and i'm sorry if it seems as though i'm being reductive or facile or disingenuous...'cause someones personal private hell canNOT be reduced to an abhorrent little cliche or aphorism) I mean because I am despairs Bitch, I'm its slave, I'm its wanton emotionally crippled vassal OK? But there are moments when i rediscover something about me or god or a different perspective that gives me hope. It keeps me from tapping out despair's horrific score with a razor blade across my not densly muscled arms. I don't, or I am incapable of articulating an epistemological framework for saving ones soul. It just happens in me. Every now and then something breaks through all that sludge and gives me its hand and pulls me out of it. Hope. Hope endows the Human with resiliency. Hope and belief in self or god or a belief system or neuro-chemical changing perspective such as Zen, and or the writings of these humble holy mean of the East who taught humanity how to release the soul, ego heart body from the tethers of superficiality and banality and cruelty and dependancy and the despotic viccissitudes and caprice of anothers ego and co-dependancy our own bi-polar broadcasts and whatever else that has laid claim and seige to your soul/mind/body. Google The Wisdom of the Sadhu. I've only read a few pages of that stuff but god does it chill me out. It actually combined with reducing my sugar and dairy intake and limiting myself to one small meal a day, has allowed me to weather the storms in my life. Why why WHY! do i allow myself to articulate things in the banal framework of aphoristic sayings? so try Googling The Wisdom of the Sadhu, I wish I could remember the actual site, but it'll be in PDF formate or something... when i get the exact site I'll post it to this page Hope you feel better man. Peace. ... 050705 ... DannyH I don't think Mistree was saying any such thing, I think you were. I've read with great interest a number of Mistree's excellent blathes and I don't think she needs you to act as her spin doctor. As for the rest, Oldephebe, it's tough to communicate with you, as you do dance around the point so and you will insist on showing off your undeniably superb vocabulary but I like your style so I'll take your right hand in my left, slide my right around your waist and see if we can't remember a few of the old steps... Hope. I couldn't agree more. Because there it is, isn't it? Hope. What other hope do we have than hope? Okay, so we're both agreed that hope is a good thing. Two questions: 1. Is hope a cause or an effect 2. If a blind man steps off a cliff, he may hope his next step will meet the ground. Is hope still a good thing in his case? 050705 ... oldephebe Well, i'll say this. She Queen of all things deciduous certainly does NOT need me running acting as a spokesperson for her. We're agreed on that. Or spinmiester or hair dresser or something. Yeah man Hope. Is it a cause or effect? Depending upon your perspective and or state of mind it can at different times be both. But I mean get out of your head man and get into your heart and I say that with love man. Brotherly love. You ever read the Book of Job? It's cool. Don't worry about it. Job was a dude who man had several tropical forest rainseasons of woe. World wrending woe as in God allowing fate or caprice or the Accuser (an angelic being who held up before God the sins of man) or Satan just pimp slap him all ovah the place. Pow!! There's all your real estate holdings, gone man and you ain't got no earthquake insurance. Bladow!! You just lost most of your employees due to faulty wiring and an act of God and guess what you ain't got no liability insurance and thier all suing you and your attorny, the law firm you've retained just got implicated in this years Enron scandal and so on. A couple of his kids die, his entire body is covered in sores. Threee of his best friends just rip into him for being "down on himself." He basically wrote Murphys law okay? But Job even though he rails at God and accuses God of ignoring him. He never curses Him. His faith, albeit having sustained some pretty heavy mortatr is more or less still intact, even though with the interstitial damaged it hurts like hell every time it or he breaths. That glorious path back to God that he thought had been lost to him was merely covered in dust and shadow. Job just had to stop standing in his own way, and bend down and sweep the dust, and the dense mast of melancholy and go from wailing to worship and wash those shadows right out of his hair or at least his path, cause they were blocking him, obfuscating his vision like cataracts. The stream of living water was dammed, was blocked up with his own histrionics. He's elevated that failure, that bad memory that trajedy that ruined relationship, that Bankruptcy, that deal that was supposed to be million dollar manna wich turned to soppy, over cooked leavened bread seeded with rancid yeast and was the cause of a kind of dysentary that lasted almost two weeks..okay so you get the picture. Despite my facile and reductive contemporaenization of Job (a beautifully poetic book that illustrats the triumph of faith and or in some respects neuro-linguistic programming over seemingly insourmoutable adversity) I think you can see where I am trying to go with this. What's the most salient and or coherent or linear point that I'm trying to make? Hope, faith, belief works. So one day I said to myself "Just push away the beer and bring me the ballast baby." ... 050706 ... see: standing_chest_deep_in_the_dark 050706 ... DannyH So your logic is, neurolinguistic programming works because The Book of Job says it does? Now I would hate this thread to spin off into a debate about whether the bible is inviolable truth because in no way am I slamming christianity here, that is for a million other strings to knot themselves up over. The point is that however you look at the Book of Job, we know Job is right to maintain his faith because the story presupposes that God really does exist and is ultimately kind and merciful (even if he does spend most of the old testament fucking with people's heads for no apparant reason) Let us suppose that another book of the bible is discovered, The Book of Bob. In the book of Bob everything happens the same except that Bob worships a donkey. The happy ending here is for Bob to renounce his faith and switch his allegiance to God. If Bob carries on worshipping the donkey despite all these terrible things, indeed if he sees that he should be made stronger in his faith because the donkey is testing him then he becomes a fool AND he doesn't get to go heaven. 050706 ... marked . 050711 ... oldephebe No. You misunderstand or innappropriately misapply the meaning of my words. What I AM saying is that, Job was able to persever for the same reason a lot of us do, because He changed his perspective, or he tenaciously clung to a vivid image of His God, His Faith and let that be a ballast for him. Thoughts, and the things that we say to ourselves about what is standing right before us does result in a change in our neurochemistry. Long exposure to a single thought or mood or image can quantifiably be proven to effectuate change in our brain chemistry. Therefore my logic is NOT that because it worked for Job that that somehow constitutes an irrefutable and hence inviolable dictum that does not require critical analysis or application to ones life to see if melancholy, despair, the inescapable and drowning sense of desolation that descends over the mind like a low lying fog can be swept out by merely choosing to WORK to change your perspective. While I am not sure if I am Bi-polar I do have 2 sisters who ARE and have dated a few women who were so...I think my erratic emotional proclivities to vascillate widly between two extremes is probably pretty much indicative of well..you know if not acute then at least a moderate form of bi-polarism. I HAVE been pulled away from the churning seas edge, I have denied the powerful pull of self-immolation, of flinging my body against the insuperable forces of nature, of physics like a starving woman holding her dying baby in her arms bleakly wading into the buzz and roar of rush hour traffic. I believe it was by deciding to tell myself something DIFFERENT about my circumstances that I was able, AM able to hold on. But sure you want to do more than just to hold on right? It does work but I believe it takes more than just the sheer computatioal power of the human cognitive engine in order to actuate the benefits of re-scripting the ellptical and pernicious self-searing soliloquys we find ourselves mired in. ... I believe The Wisdom of the Sadhu that I mentioned in an earlier post can be found at the following url:www.ccel.org/s/singh/wisdom try keying it in as sadhu_wisdom in your browser window as well. ... it's in pdf format, you probably have adobe reader version 6.01 or higher sooo.. -------- 050714 ... DannyH Well, I read as much of it as I could face and though it is a very pretty attempt to meld together a number of different religious doctrines to appeal to a twentieth century post enlightenment pallette I couldn't find a single reference to neurolinguistic programming. You have to understand that I believe in forgiveness and hope and the value of a positive attitude. I just don't believe you can skip straight to these things without finding a way to understand what is happening to you. I also believe that any kind of one size fits all program of character development will inevitably stifle the human spirit. The Wisdom of the Sadhu is easy for us to swallow because it is vague and ethereal enough to evade the dogma that characterises the religious organisations from which it has developed. From what I understand of his life he was persecuted as a heretic. That's organised religion for you. I abhor dogma, of any kind. I think it is the single thing most responsible for holding back human development. I believe groups like the Landmark forum have created a new and very subtle form of dogma. They provide a filter through which to see the world which holds together just as long as you continue to invest in it's existence. I say free yourself, abandon unhelpful dogma and construct your own reality based on the truth of what you see and feel. Employ counsellors and wise men by all means to help you come to a true understanding of yourself but if ever one of those motherfuckers asks you to believe in something...drop them like a hot brick. 050714 ... DannyH Also I have a very vague and probably wildly inaccurate theory about the milder forms of bi-polar disorder. I think the reason people who suffer from these extreme states swing so wildly is because they build their sense of reality rather like cardhouses. They can get quite high quite fast with the mimimum of material but when it comes time for them to have something to lean on, it all comes tumbling down. Jumping straight to thinking you have a complete understanding of the way the universe works because you have become a christian/buddhist/sikh/muslim seems like a good example of this kind of thing. 050714 ... DannyH If I'm sounding a bit riled up at this point you'll have to excuse me. Blind faith just killed sixty people in my town. 050714 ... DannyH And I don't blame the bombers themselves. They were just four poor young lads from Leeds, looking for some hope and a way out of the life they were living. There's always someone around waiting to offer you a way out... 050714 ... oldephebe Well we agree on two things at least. 1.Blind faith w/o critical analysis, that divests the individual of his/her sacred soul endowed self and that usues and exploits the individual now brain wahed and programmed at the expense of innocent lives is evil, is insidious, it is mephistopholean at its core. I'm not so crazy about organized religion either. I abhor it. I don't belong to a church and haven't for years because of the insidious pursuit of personal gain and power and control that some clericks and Church boards engage in to the annihilation of everything else resembling the character of a truly humble and compassionate Jewish mystic. Whether or not you believe He was God is another thing. He WAS a man and a man that began to tear down an oprressive patriarchal "Religious" system in favor of humility, compassion. This system like most other organized religions fixate on peripheral issues and turn a life inspired to consider, ahem..a life inspired to embrace transendance. I mean they offer perfect love and then they (the christian church) begin to fixate and pile upon the acolytes back all of theses requirments for successful matriculation through the kingdom of god. When will the church abandon doctrinal dileneation, the sublimation of ego and personal identity to racially and gender and culturally idealized concepts of devotion and decency that turn the christian walk into a life of petty unremitting drudgering. It's about falling back into the figurative arms of perfect acceptance, love compassion and forgiveness. But enough of that. I mean essentially in some protestant and catholics permutations of the gospel in order to participate fully in the priveledge of belonging to such an omnibus and prestigious church/denomination etc. they construct a theatre of punishment and pennance. God! To devote oneslef to the avaricious and aggrandizing exploits of a singularly Napoleonic ego in order to achieve spiritual or some sense of spiritual acceptance is no different than sumitting yourself to the dictates of some social tyrant. ... uh... this is not exactly what i intended to say... geez 050714 ... oldephebe Riled? Nah man. Don't worry about it. Hey brother I remember how I felt after 9/11 and the bombing in New York in the mid-90's. My sister worked near the area and I was extremely concerned and out raged at the seneslessness of killing innocent people to exert pressure, or to confront remorseless constituencies of power. No offense taken. I've been living at the mouth of hell for the last 3 years and I've tried to figure out just what the heck was happening to me, and it just made me more miserable. Recently, I've just stopped trying to figure it out and rationalize it and gave up trying to plumb the mysteries (wait there is no mystery about what lies in my advesarys hearts they are quite articulate when it comes to displaying what is in thier heart and minds)...SO anyway I gave up trying to understand the psychological dynamics of what to me seems to be a group enforces psychosis bent on intimidation and hey I don't live in the dystopic cultural spaces these depraved people construct thier style and meaning from soooo... I've faced rascism before, but this is even more senseless and pernicious than anything I've encountered. People who LOOK like me and yet programmed or condition over the course of years to stalk, harass, threaten ONE guy because for some reason I represent a threat to the matriarch and patriarch of that sub-cultural consortium of depravity. They exact advantage and power by resorting to these criminalized tactics, or tactics that hve nothing to do with godd business or hard work..merely the crushing unrelentic application of intimidation for 24 hours a day. Soooo...I don't know what your going through but you seem like a strong person. No odious aphoristic fecal nuggets to drop here..I'm just saying strong people are resilient, you'll find your way through, and I do mean THROUGH this. ... 050714 ... DannyH I think we've probably delighted the crowd enough don't you OE? We're close to agreeing and I've had a lovely time dancing with you. In any case I don't think I can top "aphoristic fecal nuggets" And don't worry old boy, I don't have anything I need to go through. Just a lot of stuff I want to get into... 050714 ... () () 060525 ... u24 how did I miss this delicious banterage? 060526 ... Ptolemy DCLVIII A curious banterage indeed... here are some more thoughts on the pros and cons of NLP (i.e. mine). On the whole, I find NLP to be another one of those things that if you believe in it, it works alright, but if you are skeptical it will accomplish little. Of course, it also really depends on what one is trying to accomplish. In the world of the psyche it is a tool that may work for the minds of some but will surely NOT work for the minds of all, as with any of the other tools: ART, psychotherapies, hypnosis, exercise, medication, Walden-ism, etc. Some techniques of NLP I have found to be useful now and then, such as the "Swish" technique. It can be useful for managing routine and predictable sources of stress, although (for me) most stress sources are neither routine nor predictable. There are various methods for utilizing the "Swish" technique that can be found elsewhere on the web and I'm not going to delineate my own version here, but I have found it helpful in coping with a few personal sources of insanity. I must note that this technique, while effective against expected-franticness, is not much help in coping with boredom or loneliness. Many of the other techniques, however, I find quite trivial and/or ineffective. For instance, while "Anchoring" might work for someone deep in hypnosis, it seems highly unlikely that placing an "Anchor" by touching someone's hand while they are laughing will enable one to solicit their happiness by touching the Anchoree's hand at a later time. I realize this is a very simplified example, but even some of the more complicated Anchoring methods seem to rely on a higher level of subconcious suggestibility than is present in most persons. That "Association" is a powerful thing, I agree, but it has been working powerfully for many years before a person begins using NLP.... When NLP brings about sudden changes in people I always wonder whether they have used it to clean up the littered grassland of their mind or if they have merely paved over everything, creating a vacant field of tar (which will eventually crack and then yield to the grass while the same old litterbugs mess the place up). Of course, this can be said for other therapies also. Many aspects of NLP seem to assume that people's thought is dominated by words and this is not the case for myself; one of my recurring challenges in this life is translating multidimensional thought into monodimensional language. There are huge areas of my thinking-life that are almost wholly incompatible with words, such as musical thought, and most spiritual thinking is even more intangible than is music. Certainly we program ourselves neurally on a daily basis, but I reject the idea that most - or even that much - of it is linguistic. For me, it certainly isn't, but perhaps I am abnormal. And then there is the matter of the eye-movement nonsense. Perhaps not entirely nonsense, but I have found myself "accessing" thoughts of all natures while looking in any number of directions, and have witnessed others doing the same (so far as I can discern, anyway). Nevertheless, I like the idea of teaching people to take control of their minds. Learning about NLP can help people learn how to do this, not necessarily because of any truth in current NLP trends per se, but because such study stimulates an individual's thinking about how their unique mind works. Reading about NLP is certainly an example of something where if one disagrees completely, one learns perhaps more than if one actively agrees with what is presented. I feel compelled to reiterate the idea that NLP is something which is probably more effective the more one believes in it. However, I must also agree with Danny H's wariness because I think it is quite callous to expect people to dismiss painful realities of their lives and simply "think happy thoughts". Bad attitudes are not all bad.... Lastly, there is the "trend" factor. Some aspects of NLP seem like old products repackaged and remarketed. Dianetics comes to mind as a previous mind-tool trend. Does anyone still practice Dianetic technique? I haven't heard it mentioned in almost a decade. So, in conclusion, I think there are some interesting ideas in NLP, and it certainly is something to consider for those who are seeking mind-tools. However, I wouldn't throw out any of the other tools to make room for this one, and I myself have found other things to be as or more effective. 060531 ... unhinged . 190823 what's it to you? who go blather from