Science

NLP is not a science and anyone dumb enough, and this counts double for NLP trainers, to claim that NLP is scientific, is only making NLP into a pseudoscience. The best we, the NLP community, can do is do protoscientific research into how good NLP works. Nevertheless, it is important that NLP trainers never contradict the findings of NLP. Nor do the opposite and make all kinds of pseudoscientific claims that supposedly support NLP.

Apparent toleration. – You speak fair words about science, but! – I see behind your toleration of science! In a corner of your heart you believe, all this notwithstanding, that you do not need it, that you are being magnanimous in according it recognition, in being indeed its advocate, especially since science does not exhibit the same magnanimity in regard to your views on life. Do you realize that you have no right whatever to this exercise of toleration? that this gracious demeanor is a cruder insult to science than the open mockery of it which some arrogant priest or artist permits himself? You lack the strict conscience for what is true and actual, it does not torment you to find science in conflict with your feelings, you do not know a greedy longing for knowledge as a law ruling over you, you do not feel it as a duty to desire to be present as a witness wherever knowledge is present and to let nothing already known escape again. You do not know that which you treat so tolerantly! And it is only because you do not know it that you are able to adopt so gracious a demeanor! You, precisely you would glare in bitter and fanatical hostility if science should ever look you straight in the face with its eyes! – What do we care, then, if you practice toleration – towards a phantom! and not even towards us! And what do we matter!

Daybreak paragraph 270

See

It is very important that a NLP practitioner is able to listen and see very well. When you work with other people in the way they tell you about their problem linguistically in most cases they also tell you what the solution is. At the same time there are many unconscious movement in their physiology that give away a lot more information about what is the case.

I put forward at once — lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily — the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see — accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to “will” — to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion — almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word “vice” is merely this physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one’s hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one’s stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things — in short, the famous modern “objectivity” — is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence.

Twilight of the Idols, What The Germans Lack, paragraph 6

System

NLP is inherently anti-systemic. If you ever find a NLP system it is wrong.

There are schematic minds, who hold a complex of thought to be truer if it can be inscribed into schemata or tables of categories drawn up beforehand. The self-deceptions in this field are countless: almost all great ‘systems’ are among them. The fundamental prejudice is, though, that it is inherent to the true being of things to be ordered, easy to survey, systematic; conversely, that disorder, chaos, the unpredictable can only make its appearance in a world that is false or incompletely known – in short, that it is an error – which is a moral prejudice, drawn from the fact that the truthful, reliable human being is a man of order, of maxims, and all in all tends to be something predictable and pedantic. And yet it cannot be demonstrated at all that the in-themselves of things follows this recipe for the model civil servant.

Notebook 40, August – September 1885 paragraph 9