Trainer

If you replace in the quote below “philosopher” with “NLP trainer” you get a lot of insight in the two different NLP trainers that are around. One who only cares about holding on to a vast body of knowledge and another who creates new things within NLP.

When I was younger I worried about what a philosopher really was: for I believed I saw contradictory features in the famous philosophers. Finally I realized that there are two different kinds of philosopher: those who have to hold fast some large body of valuations, that is, of previous assignments and creations of value (logical or moral ones), and then those who are themselves the legislators of valuations. The former try to gain power over the present or past world by summarizing and abbreviating it with signs. These inquirers are charged with making all events and all evaluations up to now easy to survey, easy to think through, to grasp, to manage, with subduing the past, abbreviating everything that is long, even time itself a great and wondrous task. However, the real philosophers command and legislate, they say: this is how it shall be! and it is they who determine the Where to and the What for of man, making use of the spadework done by the philosophical laborers, those subduers of the past. This second kind of philosopher rarely turns out well; and indeed their situation and danger is tremendous. How often have they intentionally blindfolded themselves to stop having to see the narrow margin that separates them from the abyss, the headlong fall: for instance Plato when he persuaded himself that the good, as he wanted it, was not the good of Plato but the good in itself, the eternal treasure that just happened to have been found on his path by some man called Plato! In much coarser forms this same will to blindness rules among the founders of religion: their ‘thou shalt’ must on no account sound to their ears like an ‘I want’ – only as the command of a God do they dare to discharge their task, only as ‘divine inspiration’ is their legislation on values a bearable burden which does not crush their conscience. – Once those two means of consolation, Plato’s and Mohammed’s, have fallen away and no thinker can any longer relieve his conscience with the hypothesis of a ‘God’ or ‘eternal values’, the claim of the legislator of new values arises with a new and unprecedented terror. Now those chosen ones, on whom the presentiment of such a duty begins to dawn, will try and see whether they can’t slip out of that duty, as if out of their greatest danger, ‘just in time’, through some trick or other: for example by telling themselves that the task is already solved, or is insoluble, or that they don’t have the shoulders to carry such burdens, or that they are already weighed down with other, more immediate tasks, or even that this new, distant duty is a seduction and a temptation, a diversion from all duties, a sickness, a kind of madness. One or the other of them may in fact succeed in evading it: the trace of such evaders and their bad conscience runs through the whole of history. Mostly, however, such men of fate have been reached by that redeeming hour, that autumn hour of ripeness, where they had to do what they did not even ‘want’ to do – and the deed they had most feared fell easily and undesired from the tree, as a deed without choice, almost as a gift.

Notebook 38, June – July 1885 paragraph 13

Truth

Critics of NLP often point that one of the ideas within NLP is that NLP practitioner don’t care about the truth, only about what works. Of course this is a misconception as these critics overlook the philosophical sound theory of pragmatism of which NLP is a part. NLP practitioners want to be practical and actually do something to test whether it works rather then discuss theoretical stuff that makes no difference in practice.

Sense for truth. — Commend me to all skepticism where I am permitted to answer: “Let us put it to the test!” But I don’t wish to hear anything more of things and questions which do not admit of being tested. That is the limit of my “sense for truth”: for bravery has there lost its right.

Gay Science paragraph 52

Unconsciousness

NLP works a lot with the unconscious mind. Although there is nothing more miraculous as our conscious mind, a lot of what we do and the patterns that we follow lie in our unconsciousness. Hence, if you want to optimize yourself or others you have to deal with the unconsciousness.

Everything which enters consciousness is the last link in a chain, a closure. It is just an illusion that one thought is the immediate cause of another thought. The events which are actually connected are played out below our consciousness: the series and sequences of feelings, thoughts, etc., that appear are symptoms of what actually happens! – Below every thought lies an affect. Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born of one particular drive but is a total state, a whole surface of the whole consciousness, and results from how the power of all the drives that constitute us is fixed at that moment – thus, the power of the drive that dominates just now as well as of the drives obeying or resisting it. The next thought is a sign of how the total power situation has now shifted again.

Notebook I, autumn 1885 – spring 1886 paragraph 61

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