I think I can see jihadreflection’s point about submodalities, although I’m not convinced by some of the manner in which that point has been put across.
No-one experiences the world. We experience the effect that the world has on our bodies. The experience we receive from the world processed via our in excess of nine senses which is already a kind of prioritisation of the information that evolutionary demands have deemed might be most useful to us. The NLP series of models gives primacy to that sensory experience… in fact at heart it really seems to argue that there isn’t anything that we capable of thinking or feeling that doesn’t have some kind of sensory origin at its root. Even people who argue for the existence of other subtle senses usually describe them in kinesthetic, meta-kinesthetic, proprioceptive or internal-kinesthetic language (if you use NLP to interpret what they’re telling you about their experience).
In other words it’s carrying on the work that Reich took up: restoring the body as the seat of life and wisdom. If there’s no other way of taking on board information from the world than via your senses and your body then you really suddenly see the urgency of getting a methodology that is specifically intended return us to sensory based work.
Most NLPers believe submodalities are the root building blocks of experience. I think these people are incorrect. Experience is what it is. Submodalities generally aren’t there until they’re noticed, because they consist of comparatives and value judgements about experience and will differ hugely from person to person. One person’s definition of fuzzy, pale and out of focus might be at the top end of clarity of what someone else is capable of experiencing, either due to sensory impairment or their singular relationship with their senses. You’re taught to bring out submodality distinctions by asking questions with a hypnotic command embedded by means of a binary pair of options: is the image in colour or black and white? Are the sounds central in your stereo mix or panned to either ear? Does it feel rough or smooth? What the questions pre-suppose underneath the apparent freedom that has been given to the person to make the description is that the experience is capable of being described in the first place. If it can be described as either one or the other the that it can be described already a assumed given.
I’m not necessarily going to place a value judgement on that process. I’m largely of the belief that beneath all our thoughts lies a deeper level of sensory representations that is the true treasure trove of our experience, above which our thoughts are formed and abstracted at so many levels of meta-remove. Thinking becomes more real and practical the closer it comes to the body and the senses. The more abstracted it is the less grounding and anchoring it has. Working with submodalities (and a few other tools, including but not limited to the Milton and meta-models that jihadreflection mentions) takes these sensory representations that are largely out of consciousness and brings them back into consciousness, I suspect as a combination of recalling the specific remembered experience to the best of conscious recollection and by using methods such as the binary-pairing hypnotic suggestion mentioned above to reconstruct other aspects of the experience, which may be very different to what was originally encountered and is probably a mish-mash of several different sensory recollections.
What’s important is that a user-interface is created, by which you can interact with experience and change it or your relationship to it where necessary. Submodalities are one means of doing this. I know from conversations with Illmatic that tantra has other means, I’m sure there are many other traditions that offer other tools. If you interpret and relate to your experience in terms of submodalities you’re likely to get results in accordance with those presuppositions, because the model itself is a hypnotic suggestion that orders your experience. It’s a good and useful model, but is a model nonetheless.
When jihadreflection calls them the words, images, sounds, feelings that make up thought. Well I suppose you could call them modalities and the sub-modalities are the nature of each modality ze has mistaken the map for the territory. They don’t make up thought. You shape your thought using them, bringing it closer to its basis in sensory experience. You can do this because of the plasticity of your experience. But the crucial distinction is that submodalities are not any kind of scientific statement about the structure of your experience. Indeed, many of them only exist because of the level of manipulation of sensory experience allowed by modern recording studios and film/edit techniques. The meta-separation essential for some trauma and phobia recoding techniques allowed by imagining high speed footage of your life played in sepia on a fritzy laptop monitor tilted slightly away from you and placed forty feet away behind a screen of plexiglass was unlikely to have been available to our ancestors in pre-history. Yes, they would have had other means at their disposal… but then I think we’ve come full circle to why people are disagreeing with jihadreflection’s emphasis here.
So in general I’m behind you in some of your praise of NLP for the things it is good at doing, and if I’m right about the way in which you respect NLP’s ability to add clarity to internal states then bravo! Draw attention to submodalities as an excellent way of doing this. There’s also breathing, posture, facial expression, body language and physiology that are key to depicting internal states, as well as the beliefs that go with certain states. I think all these things are essential to any decent magical practise. If you don’t have anything in your methodologies that can tackle these areas then you need to find something to fill the gap quickly. Your body is the only means you have of getting the sensory stimulus necessary to judge whether you’re achieving your results, after all.
There are a few things that NLP is shit at. The most important for me is the way in which it presupposes that everything can be easily changed, which is a useful presupposition (because change is often easier than you might believe), but a foul-nastiness if mistaken for the truth. Our personalities have a physiological root in our bodies. Much what makes us “us” is inextricably bound up not just in how we move our bodies, but also the shape of our bodies and how they’ve developed. As a result there will be certain personality constants that are occulted by our ego in its urge to defend us, the deeper and more accurate basis of our selves, our hidden motivations and needs that are occulted behind what our egos will justify to us as the real situation, because our body functions so much outside of consciousness, because we have been trained to spit on it and deride it rather than honour it as the essential physical root of who we are. These body-based personalities can be worked with over time but are normally so far out of consciousness for the average person that it can take a lot to make people aware of them, and its very rare to find a person who is aware of the deeper patterning this physical root adds behind all behaviour. In short – and to use a horrible computer metaphor – NLP is excellent with software, and it acknowledges the existence of hardware, it just does have any decent toolkit for dealing with it.
So there’s one thing off the top of my head that other types of magic will be able to add that NLP is crap at. Look to tantra, martial arts, yoga, some shamanic technique, bioenergetics, Reichian orgone therapy, massage… there’s another part of your toolkit you need to fill.
What else is NLP rubbish at? Well, while being a amazing toolkit when dealing with the structure of experience and changing your relationship to experience it can’t help you with the content of experience. It doesn’t make any claim to, to be fair. You could argue that altering submodality distinctions makes changes to content, but NLP can’t help with the analysis of that content, can’t help with making sense of it and bringing conscious understanding. That’s one of the distinctions that makes the best practitioners good at what they do: they’re all trained in other disciplines that provide a grounding in analytical technique. NLP will give you a set of tools, but it’s this understanding of people and why they do the things they do that will give a practitioner the wisdom to know which technique to use when, where, where, how and why.
You get taught a little bit of this in the trainings but not enough to be always be useful if NLP is all you’ve got at your disposal. In this respect some of the early minds of NLP were far too quick to denounce psychotherapy as ineffectual. In magical terms you find systems such as Kabalah, Tarot, dream interpretation and hard-won shamanic experience are the keys to interpretation of these things. They’re all excellent at providing an analytical framework through which phenomena can be understood. You could learn similar skills through analytical techniques taught to you in English Lit classes, or by watching loads of movies, or by being a keen observer of people.
Look at NLP parts integration and six-step reframing exercises, for example. You’re negotiating with yourself for the goal of reintegration and developing more options in behaviour, but there’s only so much that belief in positive intention will do for you in the interpretation of the actions and motivations of the parts that you’re negotiating with. NLP teaches you that negotiation is important. It doesn’t make you an expert in situations where dialogue and bargaining with dislocated parts of yourself (which is another model for a situation that it represents, another user constructed and defined interface for experience that has shaped that experience with its criteria) is more like hostage negotiation, or terrorist negotiation, or negotiation with someone attempting suicide. There’s more subtlety and nuance required here, more respect for ecology than a mere belief in positive intention will allow for. I’d be concerned that people lie to themselves that they’re resolving a genuine problem when all they’re doing is constructing a representation that matches their facile interpretation of that problem which they then resolve because of their slavish adherence to the NLP model. Try working with spirits here, it’ll give you a much better grounding in the rules of engagement. Work in a bar, or for the police, or do voluntary work, or really properly read the news and try to understand people’s motivations and grievances.
Is NLP only about changing yourself? Well, that’s overly simplistic. You are a part of everything else, change yourself and you change the living system within which you belong. Does NLP teach you wisdom in accounting for all the potential variables of this, the side-effects and secondary gains? It certainly teaches you that respecting ecology is essential (which is why NLP isn’t necessarily the toolkit devoid of moral compass… you’ll probably get better results with systemic interventions if you have an understanding and respect for morality, what really motivates it and how it operates). But does it teach you what ecological changes are likely to result from certain interactions? Does it fuck. Read about Transactional Analysis, again look to I-Ching or Tarot or Kabalah to give you ideas about how a change in one component effects the whole system. If you pay attention when learning NLP you’ll learn basic sigil technique, and although we’ve had the sigil conversation backwards and forwards and all over the place on this site could you boil that down to a simplistic response that it only effects the person casting it? What about rapport? It’s possible to create rapport with people and groups of people using body language, spoken language, breathing, posture, and all of Bateson/Dilts’s Logical Levels. Once you have rapport you’re simultaneously effecting change in yourself (allowing yourself to meet someone what you imagine their world to be like) and the other person or people (by giving the impression that you’re with them in their world). What about hypnotic techniques, embedded suggestions, persuasion skills, questioning techniques? These are all means of changing things that we perceive to be other than ourselves. I would humbly suggest that to sideline these things as not effecting the world in a magical manner is to be admitting that you haven’t really plumbed the full depths of what these things can do. Pacing and rapport are two key elements of NLP and they can be intrinsically magical with all sorts of unanticipated effects.
So many people involved with magic or NLP are so quick to create a straw-man out of the other. You could say the same thing about magic and religion, some people involved with either are always quick to poke sticks and manufacture caricatures of that-which-they-do-not-understand. If you’re primarily a magic practitioner reading this and you have nothing in your arsenal when it comes to basic sensory experience then my advice would be to learn yourself some NLP and do it quick. If you’re an NLP practitioner and you have no basis for interpreting dreams or realising how the development of your upper shoulders, defined jawline, penetrating stare and pedestal like legs might have deep-seated effects on your personality, strengths and character flaws then go quick and learn tantra or bioenergetics, read some Carl Jung and look into comparative mythology. There’s no need to set these things in opposition. Why would a decent NLP practitioner deny themselves options? Isn’t behavioural flexibility key? Whatever happened to the Law of Requisite Variety?
Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. |
