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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W

Value

One of the more useful metaprogram is the hierarchy of value. On any topic you can determine which values are in the top 3. These are the values that the brain processes. All other values are filtered out.

The world which matters to us is only illusory, is unreal. – But the concept ‘really, truly there’ is one we drew out of the ‘mattering-to-us’: the more our interests are touched on, the more we believe in the ‘reality’ of a thing or being. ‘It exists’ means: I feel existent through contact with it. – Antinomy. To the same degree that this feeling produces life, we posit meaning in what we believe is the cause of the stimulation. Thus, we construe ‘what is’ as what exerts an effect on us, what proves itself by exerting its effect. – ‘Unreal’, ‘illusory’, would be that which is incapable of producing effects, yet appears to produce them. – Supposing, though, we put certain values into things, then these values have effects back on us after we’ve forgotten we were the ones who put them in. Supposing I think someone is my father, then much follows from that concerning everything he says to me: it’s interpreted differently. – Thus, given the way we comprehend and construe things, the way we interpret them, it follows that all the ‘real’ actions of these things upon us then appear different, newly interpreted – in short, that they exert different effects on us. But if all construals of things have been false, it follows that all the actions of those things upon us are felt and interpreted in terms of a false causality: in short, that we measure value and disvalue, benefit and harm, in terms of errors, that the world which matters to us is false. Fundamental solution: we believe in reason, but this is the philosophy of grey concepts; language is built in terms of the most naive prejudices now we read disharmonies and problems into things because we think only in the form of language – thus believing in the ‘eternal truth’ of ‘reason’ (e.g., subject, predicate, etc.) we cease thinking when we no longer want to think within the constraints of language, we just manage to reach the suspicion that there might be a boundary here. Thinking rationally is interpreting according to a scheme we cannot cast away.

Notebook 5, summer 1886 – autumn 1887 paragraph 19

One should at last put human values nicely back in the corner where alone they have any right to be: as personal little values. Many species of animal have already disappeared; if man disappeared as well, nothing would be lacking in the world. One must be enough of a philosopher to admire even this nothingness (- Admire nothing -)

Notebook 11, November 1887 – March 1888 paragraph 103

Visual

The visual system is one of the more important modalities within NLP.

Man is a creature that makes shapes and rhythms; he is practised at nothing better and it seems that he takes pleasure in nothing more than in inventing figures. Only observe how our eye occupies itself as soon as it receives nothing more to see: it creates itself something to see. Presumably in the same situation our hearing does just that, too: it practices. Without the transformation of the world into figures and rhythms there would be nothing ‘the same’ for us, thus nothing recurrent, and thus no possibility of experiencing and appropriating, of feeding. In all perception, i.e., in the most original appropriation, what is essentially happening is an action, or more precisely: an imposition of shapes upon things – only the superficial talk of,impressions’. In this way man comes to know his force as a resisting and even more as a determining force – rejecting, selecting, shaping to fit, slotting into his schemata. There is something active about our taking on a stimulus in the first place and taking it on as that particular stimulus. It is in the nature of this activity not only to posit shapes, rhythms and successions of shapes, but also to appraise the formation it has created with an eye to incorporation or rejection. Thus arises our world, our
whole world: and no supposed ‘true reality’, no ‘in-themselves of things’ corresponds to this whole world which we have created, belonging to us alone. Rather it is itself our only reality, and ‘knowledge’ thus considered proves to be only a means of feeding. But we are beings who are difficult to feed and have everywhere enemies and, as it were, indigestibles – that is what has made human knowledge refined, and ultimately so proud of its refinement that it doesn’t want to hear that it is not a goal but a means, or even a tool of the stomach – if not itself a kind of stomach! – –

Notebook 38, June – July 1885 paragraph 10

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