The idea within NLP is that if you can laugh at your problem your problems disappear. Only when people take their problem seriously problems remain. So many NLP techniques have an inherent ridiculousness on purpose. As soon as there is laughter in the room, things start to get better.
Taking Things Seriously. — The intellect is with most people an awkward, obscure and creaking machine, which is difficult to set in motion: they call it “taking a thing seriously” when they work with this machine and want to think well — oh, how burdensome must good thinking be to them! That delightful animal, man, seems to lose his good humor whenever he thinks well; he becomes serious! And “where there is laughing and gaiety, thinking cannot be worth anything” — so speaks the prejudice of this serious animal against all “Gay Science” — Well, then ! Let us show that it is prejudice!
Gay Science paragraph 327
In the field. – ‘We must take things more cheerfully than they deserve; especially since we have for a long time taken them more seriously than they deserve.’ – So speak brave soldiers of knowledge.
Daybreak paragraph 567
Within NLP we make a distinction between the surface and deep structure. The surface structure is where all the signs and symbols are.
Just as there are many things a general doesn’t want to know, and must not know if he is to keep hold of his overall view, so in our conscious mind there must be above all a drive to exclude, to chase away, a selecting drive – which allows only certain facts to be presented to it. Consciousness is the hand with which the organism reaches out furthest: it must be a firm hand. Our logic, our sense of time, sense of space are prodigious capacities to abbreviate, for the purpose of commanding. A concept is an invention which nothing corresponds to wholly but many things slightly: a proposition such as ‘two things, being equal to a third thing, are themselves equal’ assumes (I) things and (2) an equivalence – neither exists. Yet with this invented and rigid world of concepts and numbers, man gains a means of seizing by signs, as it were, huge quantities of facts and inscribing them in his memory. This apparatus of signs is man’s superiority, precisely because it is at the furthest possible distance from the individual facts. The reduction of experiences to signs, and the ever greater quantity of things which can thus be grasped, is man’s highest strength. Intellectuality as the capacity to be master of a huge number of facts in signs. This intellectual world, this sign-world, is pure ‘illusion and deception’, as is every ‘phenomenal thing’ – and ‘moral man’ will probably be outraged! Oust as, in his calculations, Napoleon considered only man’s most essential instincts and was entitled to ignore the exceptional ones, e.g., compassion – at the risk of miscalculating now and again.)
Notebook 34, April-June 1885 paragraph 131
The simple deletion is part of the metamodel and as such through the reversed metamodel part of the Miltonmodel.
The effectiveness of the incomplete. – Just as figures in relief produce so strong an impression on the imagination because they are as it were on the point of stepping out of the wall but have suddenly been brought to a halt, so the relief-like, incomplete presentation of an idea, of a whole philosophy, is sometimes more effective than its exhaustive realization: more is left for the beholder to do, he is impelled to continue working on that which appears before him so strongly etched in light and shadow, to think it through to the end, and to overcome even that constraint which has hitherto prevented it from stepping forth fully formed.
Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 178
Within NLP we make a distinction between the surface structure and the deep structure. The surface structure are all symbols and signs that we can perceive. Basically this boils down to our language. The deep structure is what the symbols refer to. Normally we would call this reality.
Only as Creators ! — It has caused me the greatest trouble, and for ever causes me the greatest trouble, to perceive that unspeakably more depends upon what things are called, than on what they are. The reputation, the name and appearance, the importance, the usual measure and weight of things — each being in origin most frequently an error and arbitrariness thrown over the things like a garment, and quite alien to their essence and even to their exterior — have gradually, by the belief therein and its continuous growth from generation to generation, grown as it were on-and-into things and become their very body; the appearance at the very beginning becomes almost always the essence in the end, and operates as the essence! What a fool he would be who would think it enough to refer here to this origin and this nebulous veil of illusion, in order to annihilate that which virtually passes for the world— namely, so-called “reality”! It is only as creators that we can annihilate! — But let us not forget this: it suffices to create new names and valuations and probabilities, in order in the long run to create new “things”.
Gay Science paragraph 58
Scientific precision is achievable first in the case of the most superficial phenomena, in other words where things can be counted, calculated, touched, seen, where quantities can be ascertained. Thus, the most impoverished fields of existence were the first to be fruitfully cultivated. The demand that everything must be explained in mechanistic terms is the instinctive idea that it’s precisely there that the most valuable and fundamental insights are first reached: which is a piece of naivety. In fact, nothing that can be counted and grasped is worth much to us: what we cannot reach with our ‘grasp’ is what we consider ‘higher’. Logic and mechanics can only be applied to what is most superficial, and are really only an art of schematizing and abbreviating, a coping with multiplicity through an art of expression – not an ‘understanding’, but a designating in order to make oneself understood. Thinking the world as reduced to its surface means above all making it ‘graspable’. Logic and mechanics never touch on causality.
Notebook 5, summer 1886 – autumn 1887 paragraph 16