NLP holds that reality is unknown to us. Only how we subjectively experience reality is known to us.
In prison. – My eyes, however strong or weak they may be, can see only a certain distance, and it is within the space encompassed by this distance that I live and move, the line of this horizon constitutes my immediate fate, in great things and small, from which I cannot escape. Around every being there is described a similar concentric circle, which has a mid-point and is peculiar to him. Our ears enclose us within a comparable circle, and so does our sense of touch. Now, it is by these horizons, within which each of us encloses his senses as if behind prison walls, that we measure the world, we say that this is near and that far, this is big and that small, this is hard and that soft: this measuring we call sensation – and it is all of it an error! According to the average quantity of experiences and excitations possible to us at any particular point of time one measures one’s life as being short or long, poor or rich, full or empty: and according to the average human life one measures that of all other creatures – all of it an error! If our eyes were a hundredfold sharper, man would appear to us tremendously tall; it is possible, indeed, to imagine organs by virtue of which he would be felt as immeasurable. On the other hand, organs could be so constituted that whole solar systems were viewed contracted and packed together like a single cell: and to beings of an opposite constitution a cell of the human body could present itself, in motion, construction and harmony, as a solar system. The habits of our senses have woven us into lies and deception of sensation: these again are the basis of all our judgments and ‘knowledge’ – there is absolutely no escape, no backway or bypath into the real world! We sit within our net, we spiders, and whatever we may catch in it, we can catch nothing at all except that which allows itself to be caught in precisely our net.
Daybreak paragraph 117
Richard Bandler is the genius who created NLP. If you would compare him to most other NLP trainers it is enough to replace “scholar” in the Nietzsche quote below with “average NLP trainer”. Some people take offence to calling Richard Bandler the creator of NLP. They claim he is the “co-creator” together with John Grinder. But fact is that when they split up Richard Bandler and John Grinder decided among the two of them to call themselves “co-creators”. This was a way out of the problems that had with each other. Those people who take offence this way are trying to unbend the taut NLP bow and remove Richard Bandler from the history of NLP.
It is impressive how the NLP community at large has been hypnotized by this claim. Whereas in fact as long as nobody can point to the parts of NLP that are supposedly developed by John Grinder he hasn’t created anything of value in modern NLP. For there would be no NLP whatsoever without Richard Bandler. Whereas there would have been NLP without John Grinder. NLP would only have grown less fast without John Grinder. So with the exception of the only true genius that NLP has known, Richard Bandler, all other big names of NLP are NLP scholars in the sense as described below:
Compared to a genius, which is to say: compared to a being that either begets or gives birth (taking both words in their widest scope –), the scholar, the average man of science, is somewhat like an old maid. Like her, he has no expertise in the two most valuable acts performed by humanity. And, as a sort of compensation, both the scholar and the old maid are admitted to be respectable – respectability is always emphasized – although in both cases we are annoyed by the obligatory nature of this admission. Let us look more closely: what is the scientific man? In the first place, he is an ignoble type of person with the virtues that an ignoble type will have: this type is not dominant, authoritative, or self-sufficient. He is industrious, he is patiently lined up in an orderly array, he is regular and moderate in his abilities and needs, he has an instinct for his own kind and for the needs of his kind. These needs include: that piece of independence and green pasture without which there is no quiet for him to work in, that claim to honor and acknowledgment (whose first and foremost presupposition is recognition and being recognizable –), that sunshine of a good name, that constant seal on his value and his utility which is needed, time and again, in order to overcome the inner mistrust that lies at the bottom of the heart of all dependent men and herd animals. It is only fair that the scholar has the diseases and bad habits of an ignoble type as well. He is full of petty jealousies and has eyes like a hawk for the base aspects of natures whose heights he cannot attain. He is friendly, but only like someone who lets himself go without letting himself really flow out; and just when he is standing in front of people who really do flow out, he will act all the more cold and reserved, – at times like this, his eye is like a smooth and unwilling lake that will no longer allow a single ripple of joy or sympathy. The worst and most dangerous thing that a scholar is capable of doing comes from his type’s instinct for mediocrity: from that Jesuitism of mediocrity that instinctively works towards the annihilation of the exceptional man and tries to break every taut bow or – even better! – to unbend it. Unbending it with consideration, and, of course, a gentle hand –, unbending it with friendly pity: that is the true art of Jesuitism, which has always known how to introduce itself as a religion of pity. –
Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 206