Identiy

One of the more useful metaprograms is the one that is called “sameness/difference” Our brain works by making things the same. Evolutionary this has  a great advantage because once your learn that a specific tiger is dangerous you don’t have to learn that again for the next tiger you meet. Sameness makes life saver. So the brain filters out differences. Nevertheless in some people the brain filters out less differences and in others more. That distinction can be described within NLP with the metaprogram “sameness/difference”.

Judgement: this is the belief that ‘such and such is the case’. Thus, judgement involves admitting having encountered an identical case: it thus presupposes comparison, with the help of memory. Judgement does not create the appearance of an identical case. Instead, it believes it perceives one; it works on the supposition that identical cases even exist. But what is that function, which must be much older and have been at work much earlier, that levels out and assimilates cases in themselves dissimilar? What is that second function which, on the basis of the first, etc. ‘What arouses the same sensations is the same’: but what is it that makes sensations the same, ‘takes’ them as the same? – There could be no judgments at all if a kind of leveling had not first been carried out within the sensations: memory is only possible with a constant underscoring of what has been experienced, has become habit – – Before a judgement can be made, the process of assimilation must already have been completed: thus, here too there is an intellectual activity which does not enter consciousness, as in the case of pain caused by an injury. Probably, all organic functions have their correspondence in inner events, in assimilation, elimination, growth, etc. Essential to start from the body and use it as a guiding thread. It is the far richer phenomenon, and can be observed more distinctly. Belief in the body is better established than belief in the mind. ‘However strongly something is believed, that is not a criterion of truth.’ But what is truth? Perhaps a kind of belief which has become a condition of life? In that case, its strength would indeed be a criterion. E.g., regarding causality.

Notebook 40, August – September 1885 paragraph 15

Intention

Intention is a nominalization and as such a distortion of reality. Nevertheless, it is often used in NLP. NLP can be used for good or for evil. The NLP techniques are basically tools that change the way your brain or someone else his brain work. Most of the time this is done in such a way that the person improves and for the greater good. Unfortunately, there are exceptions where people use NLP for the worse. Although it is better to discourage such use of NLP, this has nothing to do with whether NLP is done with good or bad intentions as Nietzsche explains below. The reason is that it is wrong to think that an intention can cause anything at all.

Man believes himself to be cause, doer – Everything that happens relates as a predicate to some subject Every judgment contains the whole, full, profound belief in subject and predicate or in cause and effect; and the latter belief (namely the assertion that every effect is a doing and that every doing presupposes a doer) is, in fact, a special case of the former, so that the belief which remains as the fundamental belief is: there are subjects I notice something and look for a reason for it – that originally means: I look for an intention in it, and above all for someone who has intentions, for a subject, a doer – in the past, intentions were seen in all that happened, all that happened was doing. This is our oldest habit. Do animals share it? Do they, as living creatures, not also rely on interpretations in accordance with themselves? – The question’ Why?’ is always a question about the causa finalis, about a ‘What for?’ We do not have a ‘sense of the causa efficiens’: here Hume is right, and habit (but not just that of the individual!) makes us expect that one particular, frequently observed occurrence will follow another, nothing more than that! What gives us the extraordinary strength of our belief in causality is not the great habit of the succession of occurrences but our incapacity to interpret what happens other than as happening out of intentions. It is the belief that what lives and thinks is the only thing which effects – belief in will, intention – belief that all that happens is doing, that all doing presupposes a doer; it is belief in the ‘subject’. Might not this belief in the concept of subject and predicate be a great stupidity? Question: is intention the cause of something happening? Or is that, too, illusion? Is intention not itself that which happens? ‘Attraction’ and ‘repulsion’ in the purely mechanical sense is a complete fiction: a phrase. We cannot conceive of an attraction without an intention. – The will to gain power over something or to resist its power and push it away – that ‘we understand’: that would be an interpretation we could make use of. In short: the psychological compulsion to believe in causality lies in the unimaginability of things happening without intentions: which, of course, says nothing about truth or untruth (the justification of such a belief). The belief in causae falls with the belief in final causes (against Spinoza and his causalism).

Notebook 2, autumn 1886 – autumn 1886 paragraph 84

Irony

As a NLP trainer one is often better at the stuff you are teaching than the people you teach too. Especially on the subjects of decision making, feeling good, communicating well and achieving goals. For that reason it is important to make sure that in your training their is enough room for self-irony so to overcome any distance between you and your audience.

The inhumanity of the sage. – Since the progress of the sage, who, as the Buddhist hymn says, ‘walks alone like the rhinoceros’, is heavy and crushes all in its path – there is need from time to time of a sign of a conciliatory and gentler humanity: and by that I mean, not only a swifter progress, a politeness and companionableness, not only a display of wit and a certain self-mockery, but a self-contradiction and an occasional regression into the nonsense currently in vogue. If he is not to resemble a steamroller which advances like fatality, the sage who wants to teach has to employ his faults as an extenuation, and when he says ‘despise me!’ he pleads for permission to be the advocate of a presumptuous truth. He wants to lead you into the mountains, he wants perhaps to put your life in danger: in return he is willing, before and afterwards, to let you take revenge on such a leader – it is the price at which he purchases for himself the pleasure of going on ahead. – Do you recall what went through your mind when once he led you by slippery paths through a dark cavern? How your heart, beating and discouraged, said to itself: ‘this leader might do something better than crawl about here! He is one of those inquisitive kinds of idlers: – does it not already do him too much honor that we should appear to accord him any value at all by
following him?’

Daybreak paragraph 469