Happiness

Because happiness is a nominalization one of the insights that NLP has, is that you do happy rather than be happy. For most people happiness is too big. Also, unlike many people think happiness is not high up in people’s hierarchy of values.

The new passion. – Why do we fear and hate a possible reversion to barbarism? Because it would make people unhappier than they are? Oh no! The barbarians of every age were happier: let us not deceive ourselves! – The reason is that our drive to knowledge has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or the happiness of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imagine such a state of things is painful to us! Restless discovering and divining has such an attraction for us, and has grown as indispensable to us as is to the lover his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference – perhaps, indeed, we too are unrequited lovers! Knowledge has in us been transformed into a passion which shrinks at no sacrifice and at bottom fears nothing but its own extinction; we believe in all honesty that all mankind must believe itself more exalted and comforted under the compulsion and suffering of this passion than it did formerly, when envy of the coarser contentment that follows in the train of barbarism had not yet been overcome. Perhaps mankind will even perish of this passion for knowledge! – even this thought has no power over us! But did Christianity ever shun such a thought? Are love and death not brothers? Yes, we hate barbarism – we would all prefer the destruction of mankind to a regression of knowledge! And finally: if mankind does not perish of a passion it will perish of a weakness: which do you prefer? This is the main question. Do we desire for mankind an end in fire and light or one in the sand? –

Daybreak paragraph 429

The Joyless Person. — A single joyless person is enough to make constant displeasure and a clouded heaven in a household ; and it is only by a miracle that such a person is lacking! — Happiness is not nearly such a contagious disease; — how is that?

Gay Science paragraph 239

Health

More and more NLP training programmes claim that NLP benefits your health. Most of the time it is wrong to make health claims in regard to NLP. NLP is not about a cure for problems, but education. Even when NLP rightfully is about health most of the time it a kind of middle of the road health. But that is not the kind of health Nietzsche is talking about.

Great Health. — We, the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand, we firstlings of a yet untried future — we require for a new end also a new means, namely, a new health, stronger, sharper, tougher, bolder and merrier than any health hitherto. He whose soul longs to experience the whole range of hitherto recognized values and desirabilities, and to circumnavigate all the coasts of this ideal ” Mediterranean Sea,” who, from the adventures of his most personal experience, wants to know how it feels to be a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal — as likewise how it is with the artist, the saint, the legislator, the sage, the scholar, the devotee, the prophet, and the godly Nonconformist of the old style: — requires one thing above all for that purpose, great health — such health as one not only possesses, but also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one continually sacrifices it again, and must sacrifice it ! — And now, after having been long on the way in this fashion, we Argonauts of the ideal, who are more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often enough shipwrecked and brought to grief, nevertheless, as said above, healthier than people would like to admit, dangerously healthy, always healthy again, — it would seem, as if in recompense for it all, that we have a still undiscovered country before us, the boundaries of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to all countries and corners of the ideal known hitherto, a world so over-rich in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the frightful, and the divine, that our curiosity as well as our thirst for possession thereof, have got out of hand — alas ! that nothing will now any longer satisfy us! How could we still be content with the man of the present day after such peeps, and with such a craving in our conscience and consciousness? What a pity ; but it is unavoidable that we should look on the worthiest aims and hopes of the man of the present day with ill-concealed amusement, and perhaps should no longer look at them. Another ideal runs on before us, a strange, tempting ideal, full of danger, to which we should not like to persuade any one, because we do not so readily acknowledge any one’s right thereto: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively (that is to say involuntarily and from overflowing abundance and power) with everything that has hitherto been called holy, good, inviolable, divine ; to whom the loftiest conception which the people have reason- ably made their measure of value, would already imply danger, ruin, abasement, or at least relaxation, blindness, or temporary self-forgetfulness; the ideal of a humanly superhuman welfare and benevolence, which may often enough appear inhuman, for example, when put by the side of all past seriousness on earth, and in comparison with all past solemnities in bearing, word, tone, look, and pursuit, as their truest involuntary parody, — but with which, nevertheless, perhaps the great seriousness only commences, the proper interrogation mark is set up, the fate of the soul changes, the hour-hand moves, and tragedy begins. . .

Day Science paragraph 382

History

One of the basic tenets in NLP is that what we remember of our past has little to do what actually happens. And that, as long as you leave intact what the community sees as strict facts, you can create for yourself a history that makes you feel good. This process is often called “Change Personal History” within NLP, although most of the time this term refers to an outdated NLP technique. Modern NLP establishes this through the use of timelines.

Facta! Yes, Facta ficta! – A historian has to do, not with what actually happened, but only with events supposed to have happened: for only the latter have produced an effect. Likewise only with supposed heroes. His theme, so-called world history, is opinions about supposed actions and their supposed motives, which in turn give rise to further opinions and actions, the reality of which is however at once vaporized again and produces an effect only as vapor – a continual generation and pregnancy of phantoms over the impenetrable mist of unfathomable reality. All historians speak of things which have never existed except in imagination.

Daybreak paragraph 307

 

Homage

When one does NLP one has to pay homage to Richard Bandler, the genius who created NLP in the seventies. Nevertheless, most NLP trainers rather try to minimize the role Richard Bandler plays in the development of NLP.

Learning to do homage. — One must learn the art of homage, as well as the art of contempt. Whoever goes in new paths and has led many persons therein, discovers with astonishment how awkward and incompetent all of them are in the expression of their gratitude, and indeed how rarely gratitude is able even to express itself. It is always as if something comes into people’s throats when their gratitude wants to speak so that it only hems and haws, and becomes silent again. The way in which a thinker succeeds in tracing the effect of his thoughts, and their transforming and convulsing power, is almost a comedy: it sometimes seems as if those who have been operated upon felt profoundly injured thereby, and could only assert their independence, which they suspect to be threatened, by all kinds of improprieties. It needs whole generations in order merely to devise a courteous convention of gratefulness; it is only very late that the period arrives when something of spirit and genius enters into gratitude. Then there is usually someone who is the great receiver of thanks, not only for the good he himself has done, but mostly for that which has been gradually accumulated by his predecessors, as a treasure of what is highest and best.

Gay Science paragraph 100