Opinion

Any statement that expresses an opinion without stating whose opinion it is, is a lost performative according to NLP and as such a distortion of reality.

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, book 1, paragraph 32

Ridiculousness

Many processes within NLP are ridiculous. This is done on purpose. For the more laughter there is in the world, the better it is.

Pleasure in nonsense. – How can man take pleasure in nonsense? For wherever in the world there is laughter this is the case; one can say, indeed, that almost everywhere there is happiness there is pleasure in nonsense. The overturning of experience into its opposite, of the purposive into the purposeless, of the necessary into the arbitrary, but in such a way that this event causes no harm and is imagined as occasioned by high spirits, delights us, for it momentarily liberates us from the constraint of the necessary, the purposive and that which corresponds to our experience, which we usually see as our inexorable masters; we play and laugh when the expected (which usually makes us fearful and tense) discharges itself harmlessly. It is the pleasure of the slave at the Saturnalia.

Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 213

Seriousness

The idea within NLP is that if you can laugh at your problem your problems disappear. Only when people take their problem seriously problems remain. So many NLP techniques have an inherent ridiculousness on purpose. As soon as there is laughter in the room, things start to get better.

Taking Things Seriously. — The intellect is with most people an awkward, obscure and creaking machine, which is difficult to set in motion: they call it “taking a thing seriously” when they work with this machine and want to think well — oh, how burdensome must good thinking be to them! That delightful animal, man, seems to lose his good humor whenever he thinks well; he becomes serious! And “where there is laughing and gaiety, thinking cannot be worth anything” — so speaks the prejudice of this serious animal against all “Gay Science” — Well, then ! Let us show that it is prejudice!

Gay Science paragraph 327

In the field. – ‘We must take things more cheerfully than they deserve; especially since we have for a long time taken them more seriously than they deserve.’ – So speak brave soldiers of knowledge.

Daybreak paragraph 567

Sign

Within NLP we make a distinction between the surface and deep structure. The surface structure is where all the signs and symbols are.

Just as there are many things a general doesn’t want to know, and must not know if he is to keep hold of his overall view, so in our conscious mind there must be above all a drive to exclude, to chase away, a selecting drive – which allows only certain facts to be presented to it. Consciousness is the hand with which the organism reaches out furthest: it must be a firm hand. Our logic, our sense of time, sense of space are prodigious capacities to abbreviate, for the purpose of commanding. A concept is an invention which nothing corresponds to wholly but many things slightly: a proposition such as ‘two things, being equal to a third thing, are themselves equal’ assumes (I) things and (2) an equivalence – neither exists. Yet with this invented and rigid world of concepts and numbers, man gains a means of seizing by signs, as it were, huge quantities of facts and inscribing them in his memory. This apparatus of signs is man’s superiority, precisely because it is at the furthest possible distance from the individual facts. The reduction of experiences to signs, and the ever greater quantity of things which can thus be grasped, is man’s highest strength. Intellectuality as the capacity to be master of a huge number of facts in signs. This intellectual world, this sign-world, is pure ‘illusion and deception’, as is every ‘phenomenal thing’ – and ‘moral man’ will probably be outraged! Oust as, in his calculations, Napoleon considered only man’s most essential instincts and was entitled to ignore the exceptional ones, e.g., compassion – at the risk of miscalculating now and again.)

Notebook 34, April-June 1885 paragraph 131

Simple deletion

The simple deletion is part of the metamodel and as such through the reversed metamodel part of the Miltonmodel.

The effectiveness of the incomplete. – Just as figures in relief produce so strong an impression on the imagination because they are as it were on the point of stepping out of the wall but have suddenly been brought to a halt, so the relief-like, incomplete presentation of an idea, of a whole philosophy, is sometimes more effective than its exhaustive realization: more is left for the beholder to do, he is impelled to continue working on that which appears before him so strongly etched in light and shadow, to think it through to the end, and to overcome even that constraint which has hitherto prevented it from stepping forth fully formed.

Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 178

Surface

Within NLP we make a distinction between the surface structure and the deep structure. The surface structure are all symbols and signs that we can perceive. Basically this boils down to our language. The deep structure is what the symbols refer to. Normally we would call this reality.

Only as Creators ! — It has caused me the greatest  trouble, and for ever causes me the greatest trouble, to perceive that unspeakably more depends upon what things are called, than on what they are. The reputation, the name and appearance, the importance, the usual measure and weight of things — each being in origin most frequently an error and arbitrariness thrown over the things like a garment, and quite alien to their essence and even to their exterior — have gradually, by the belief therein and its continuous growth from generation to generation, grown as it were on-and-into things and become their very body; the appearance at the very beginning becomes almost always the essence in the end, and operates as the essence! What a fool he would be who would think it enough to refer here to this origin and this nebulous veil of illusion, in order to annihilate that which virtually passes for the world— namely, so-called “reality”! It is only as creators that we can annihilate! — But let us not forget this: it suffices to create new names and valuations and probabilities, in order in the long run to create new “things”.

Gay Science paragraph 58

Scientific precision is achievable first in the case of the most superficial phenomena, in other words where things can be counted, calculated, touched, seen, where quantities can be ascertained. Thus, the most impoverished fields of existence were the first to be fruitfully cultivated. The demand that everything must be explained in mechanistic terms is the instinctive idea that it’s precisely there that the most valuable and fundamental insights are first reached: which is a piece of naivety. In fact, nothing that can be counted and grasped is worth much to us: what we cannot reach with our ‘grasp’ is what we consider ‘higher’. Logic and mechanics can only be applied to what is most superficial, and are really only an art of schematizing and abbreviating, a coping with multiplicity through an art of expression – not an ‘understanding’, but a designating in order to make oneself understood. Thinking the world as reduced to its surface means above all making it ‘graspable’. Logic and mechanics never touch on causality.

Notebook 5, summer 1886 – autumn 1887 paragraph 16

Will

Richard Bandler expressed a strong preference during his Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning (NHR) seminar in 2015 in Brighton, U.K. for a stronger will. He showed the difference between “wanting something” and “willing something”.

The will – Every willing unites a multiplicity of feelings: the feeling of the state to be left, the feeling of the state to be reached, the feeling of this ‘leaving and reaching’ itself, the feeling of the duration of the process, then lastly an accompanying feeling of the muscles which begins its play through a kind of habit, even without our moving arms or legs, as soon as we ‘will’. Feeling, then, in fact many ways of feeling, must be recognized as an ingredient of the will, and so, secondly, must thinking. In every act of will, a thought commands – and it would be a great mistake to believe we could separate this thought off from the willing itself, as if willing would then remain behind. Thirdly, the will is not only a complex of feeling and thinking, but above all also an affect: that affect of command. What is called freedom of the will is essentially a feeling of superiority over the one who must obey: ‘I am free, he must obey’ – this consciousness is present in every will, and it’s that tense alertness, that clear gaze focused on one thing only, that exclusive valuation: ‘this and nothing else is now necessary’, that inner certainty of being obeyed, how all this belongs to the state of the one commanding. A man who wills- commands a something in himself which obeys, or which he believes will obey. Now, however, notice what is the most essential aspect of ‘will’, of this so complicated thing for which the common people have a single word. Because in a given case we are simultaneously the commanders and the obeyers, and as obeyers know the feelings of resisting, harassing, pushing, which usually begin immediately after the act of will; because, however, in using the synthetic concept ‘I’ we habitually disregard, disguise from ourselves this duality, willing has become encumbered with a whole chain of erroneous conclusions and consequently false valuations of will itself- so that the willer believes in all good faith that his will itself is the actual and sufficient motor for the whole action. And because, in almost every case, willing only happened where some effect of the command – obedience, thus some action – was to be expected, the appearance has translated itself into the feeling that there is a necessity of effect. Enough: the willer believes with a fair degree of certainty that will and action are somehow one – he ascribes the success of execution to the will itself, enjoying a growth in that feeling of power which all commanding brings with it. ‘Freedom of will’: this is the word for that very mixed state of the willer, who commands and at the same time, as the executor of the command, enjoys the triumph of superiority over resistance; who, however, judges that the will itself is what overcomes the resistance. He takes the pleasurable feelings of the successfully executing tool – the ministering will and sub-will- and adds them to his pleasurable feelings as the giver of the command. – This tangled nest of feelings, states and false assumptions, which the common people designate with one word and as one thing, because it is there suddenly and ‘at once’ and is among the very most frequent, consequently most ‘well-known’ experiences: the will, as I have described it here – who can credit that it has never been described before? That the common people’s clumsy prejudice has kept its validity and remained unexamined in every philosophy? That philosophers’ opinions have never differed on what ‘willing’ is, because they all believed that precisely here one had an immediate certainty, a fundamental fact, that precisely here there was no room for opinion? And that all logicians still teach the holy trinity of ‘thinking, feeling, willing’ as if ‘willing’ did not include feeling and thinking? – After all this, Schopenhauer’s great mistake of taking the will to be the best-known thing in the world, indeed as the genuinely and solely known thing, seems less crazed and arbitrary: he only adopted a tremendous prejudice of all previous philosophers, a prejudice of the common people- adopted it and, as philosophers generally do, exaggerated it.

Notebook 38, June – July 1885 paragraph 8

‘willing’ is not ‘desiring’, striving, wanting: it distinguishes itself from these by the affect of the command there is no ‘willing’, but only a willing-something: one must not uncouple the goal from the state, as the theorists of knowledge do. ‘Willing’ in the way they understand it occurs just as little as ‘thinking’; is pure fiction. that something is commanded is part of willing (this does not, of course, mean that the will is ‘executed’ …) That general state of tension by means of which a force strives to discharge itself- is not ‘willing’

Notebook 11, November 1887 – March 1888 paragraph 114

Wish

Any statement that expresses a wish but doesn’t mention whose wish it is, is a lost performative and as such a distortion of reality.

Very few people make it clear to themselves what is implied by the standpoint of desirability, by every ‘It ought to be so, but it is not’ or even ‘It ought to have been so’: a condemnation of the entire course of things. For in that course nothing is isolated, the smallest element carries the whole, upon your little injustice stands the whole edifice of the future, every criticism of the smallest part condemns the whole as well. Assuming even that the moral norm, as Kant himself supposed, has never been perfectly fulfilled and remains like a kind of beyond, hanging over reality without ever falling into it: then morality would imply a judgement of the whole, which would, however, permit the question: where does it get its right to this? How does the part come to sit in judgement on the whole? – And if this moral judging and discontent with the real were indeed, as has been claimed, an ineradicable instinct, might that instinct not then be one of the ineradicable stupidities or indeed presumptions of our species? – But by saying this we’re doing exactly what we rebuke: the standpoint of desirability, of unwarrantedly playing the judge, is part of the character of the course of things, as is every injustice and imperfection – it’s only our concept of ‘perfection’ which loses out. Every drive that wants to be satisfied expresses its dissatisfaction with the present state of things – what? Might the whole be composed entirely of dissatisfied parts, all of which have their heads full of what’s desirable? Might the ‘course of things’ be precisely the ‘Away from here! Away from reality!’, be eternal discontent itself? Might desirability itself be the driving force? Might it be – God? It seems to me important to get rid of the universe, unity, any force, anything unconditional; one could not avoid taking it as the highest agency and naming it God. The universe must be splintered apart; respect for the universe unlearned; what we have given the unknown and the whole must be taken back and given to the closest, what’s ours. Kant, e.g., said: “Two things remain forever worthy of admiration and awe”, – today we would rather say: ‘Digestion is more venerable.’ The universe would always bring with it the old problems, ‘How is evil possible?’, etc. Thus: there is no universe, there is no great sensorium, or inventory, or storehouse of forces.

Notebook 7, end of 1886 – spring 1887 paragraph 62