A C L M S

Analogue marking

Analogue marking are meaningful gestures that NLP practitioner make in their communication. As such it is part of the Miltonmodel.

Gesture and language. – Older than language is the mimicking of gestures, which takes place involuntarily and is even now, when the language of gesture is universally restrained and control of the muscles has been achieved, so strong that we cannot see a mobile face without an innervation of our own face (one can observe that feigned yawning will evoke real yawning in one who sees it). The imitated gesture leads him who imitates it back to the sensation which it expressed in the face or body of the person imitated. That is how people learned to understand one another: that is how a child still learns to understand its mother. In general, painful sensations may well also be expressed by gestures which in turn occasion pain (for example by pulling hair out, beating the breast, violent distortions and strainings of the facial muscles). Conversely, gestures of pleasure were themselves pleasurable and could thus easily convey their meaning (laughter as an expression of being tickled, which is pleasurable, again served as an expression of other pleasurable sensations). – As soon as the meaning of gestures was understood, a symbolism of gestures could arise: I mean a sign-language of sounds could be so agreed that at first one produced sound and gesture (to which it was symbolically joined), later only the sound. – It appears here that in earlier ages there often occurred that which now takes place before our eyes and ears in the evolution of music, especially of dramatic music: while music was at first empty noise without explanatory dance and mime (gesture-language), the ear was, through long habituation to the juxtaposition of music and movement, schooled to an instantaneous interpretation of the total figurations and has at last attained to a height of rapid understanding at which it no longer has any need of the visible movement and understands the tone-poet without it. One then speaks of absolute music, that is to say of music in which everything is at once understood symbolically without further assistance.

Human, All Too Human book 1, paragraph 216

Assertion

The use of the Miltonmodel consists of stating many assertions. People recognize an assertion by the tone of voice. With an assertion there is no change in the tone of voice. This fact can be used to hide commands or questions by tonality. Asserting something leads to less critical reception by the unconsciousness of the other whereas arguments make the other more critical. The point of the use of the Miltonmodel is to lessen this critical reception.

Assertion safer than proof. – An assertion produces a stronger effect than an argument, at least among the majority of mankind: for argument arouses mistrust. That is why public speakers seek to hammer home their party’s arguments with assertions.

Human, All Too Human book 2, paragraph 295

Change

Besides the basic NLP presuppositions, there are also the presuppositions of the metamodel and the Miltonmodel. The presupposition of change is one of them.

These divorces of doing and doer, of doing and being done to, of being and becoming, of cause and effect, belief in change already presupposes the belief in something which ‘changes’. reason is the philosophy of what appears obvious.

Notebook 2, autumn 1886 – autumn 1886 paragraph 141

Command

The most important language pattern in NLP is from the Miltonmodel the Embedded Command. People nowadays don’t like to be commanded. Nevertheless, the strongest form of suggestion is the command. People unconsciously still want to be led. You embed a command by putting at least one word in front of it. That way you overcome people’s dislike of being commanded while at the same time satisfy their desire to be led.

With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of logical argument. What really happened there? Above all, a noble taste is vanquished; with dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, argumentative conversation was repudiated in good society: it was considered bad manners, compromising. The young were warned against it. Furthermore, any presentation of one’s motives was distrusted. Honest things, like honest men, do not have to explain themselves so openly. What must first be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the logician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?

Twilight of the Idols, The Problem of Socrates, paragraph 5

Complex Equivalence

The complex equivalence is a language pattern of the metamodel (and due to the reversed metamodel also of the Miltonmodel of course). The complex equivalence is a distortion as it equalizes two things by stating “A = B”. It is important to note that A and B have to be two different “complexes”, i.e. things, activities or processes. If B is a property of A then there is only one complex and for that reason no complex equivalence.

Also it is a mistake to think of complex equivalences as being about “A means B”. Meaning something is quite different than being equal. For instance a specific rain can mean that the rain season has started, yet a single rain storm is quite something different than the rain season.

Complex Equivalences replaces reframing. Rather than accept multiple points of view as reframing does, using Complex Equivalence destroys the point of view you want to get rid of and replaces it with the one you want. You do this by using the formula: A is not a B. A is a C!

Judgment: this is the belief that ‘such and such is the case’. Thus, judgment involves admitting having encountered an identical case: it thus presupposes comparison, with the help of memory. Judgment 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 make 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 judgment 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

Logic

Many NLP language patterns work because they break the laws of logic.

We do not succeed in both affirming and negating one and the same thing: that is a subjective empirical proposition which expresses not a ‘necessity’ but only ‘a non-ability’. If, according to Aristotle, the principle of non-contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the final and most fundamental one upon which all proofs are based, if the principle of all other axioms lies within it: then one ought to examine all the more carefully what it actually presupposes in the way of theses. Either, as if it already knew the real from somewhere else, it asserts something with respect to the real, to what is: namely, that opposite predicates cannot be ascribed to the real. Or does the principle mean that opposite predicates shall not be ascribed to it? Then logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us. In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to the real, or are they measures and means to create for us the real, the concept ‘reality’? … But to be able to affirm the former one would, as I have said, already need to be acquainted with what is; and that’s simply not the case. The principle thus contains not a criterion of truth, but rather an imperative about what shall count as true. Supposing there were no A identical with itself, such as that presupposed by every logical (including mathematical) principle, supposing A were already an illusion, then logic would have as its presupposition a merely illusory world. And indeed we believe in that principle under the impression of endless experience which seems continually to confirm it. The ‘thing’ – that is the real substratum of A: our belief in things is the precondition for our belief in logic. The A of logic is, like the atom, a re-construction of the ‘thing’ … By not grasping that, and by making of logic a criterion of true being, we are well on the way to positing all those hypostases – substance, predicate, object, subject, action, etc. – as realities: i.e., to conceiving a metaphysical world, i.e., a ‘true world’ (- but this is the illusory world once again . ..). The most basic acts of thought – affirming and negating, holding-to-be-true and holding-to-be-not-true  are, inasmuch as they presuppose not only a habit but a right to hold-to-be-true or hold-to-be-not-true in general, themselves ruled by a belief that there is knowledge for us, that judging really can reach the truth. In short, logic does not doubt its ability to state something about the true-in-itself (namely, that this cannot have opposite predicates). Here the crude, sensualist prejudice reigns that sensations teach us truths about things – that I cannot say at the same time of one and the same thing that it is hard and it is soft (the instinctive proof’I cannot have two opposite sensations at the same time’ – quite crude and false). The conceptual ban on contradiction proceeds from the belief that we are able to form concepts, that a concept doesn’t merely name what is true in a thing but encompasses it … In fact logic (like geometry and arithmetic) only applies to fictitious truths that we have created. Logic is the attempt to understand the real world according to a scheme of being that we have posited, or, more correctly, the attempt to make it formulatable, calculable for us …

Notebook 9, autumn 1887 paragraph 97

Logic is tied to the condition: assuming that identical cases exist. Indeed, in order to think and conclude logically, the fulfillment of this condition must first be feigned. That is: the will to logical truth cannot realize itself until a fundamental falsification of all events has been undertaken. From which it follows that a drive rules here which is capable of both means, firstly of falsifying, then of implementing a single viewpoint: logic does not originate in the will to truth.

Notebook 40, August – September 1885 paragraph 13

Miltonmodel

The Miltonmodel
The Miltonmodel

The Miltonmodel is the model in NLP for influencing people. It is named after Milton Erickson, the famous psychiatrist who thought up hypnotherapy. It was named after him because no-one has so many publication where it clearly states that one shouldn’t manipulate other people while at the same time he manipulated so many people.  The Miltonmodel consists of the reversed metamodel, indirect elicitation patterns, metaphor and ambiguities.

That in the ‘process of the whole’ the work of mankind is of no account, because there is no total process (conceived of as a system -) at all: – that there is no ‘whole’, that no evaluation of human existence, of human goals can be made with a view to something which doesn’t exist … – that necessity, causality, purposiveness are useful illusions – that the goal is not the increase of consciousness but the enhancement of power, an enhancement in which the usefulness of consciousness is included, with pleasure as much as with unpleasure – that one does not take means as the highest measure of value (thus not states of consciousness, such as pleasure and pain, if consciousness is itself a means -) – that the world is not at all an organism, but chaos: that the development of ‘mental life’ is a means for the organisation to gain relative permanence … – that all ‘desirability’ is meaningless with respect to the total character of being.

Notebook 11, November 1887 – March 1888 paragraph 74

Not enough! – It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to sounds like folly!

Daybreak paragraph 330

The difference between the metamodel and the Miltonmodel

In the quote below, if you replace “science” with the metamodel and realize that the conjurer is the hypnotist using the Miltonmodel, you get a very good explanation of the difference between the Miltonmodel and the metamodel.

The conjurer and his opposite. – What is astonishing in the realm of science is the opposite of what is astonishing in the art of the conjurer. For the latter wants to persuade us to see a very simple causality where in truth a very complicated causality is at work. Science, on the contrary, compels us to abandon belief in simple causalities precisely where everything seems so easy to comprehend and we are the fools of appearance. The ‘simplest’ things are very complicated – a fact at which one can never cease to marvel!

Daybreak paragraph 6

To be Profound and to Appear Profound. — He who knows that he is profound strives for clarification; he who would like to appear profound to the multitude strives for obscurity. The multitude thinks everything profound of which it cannot see the bottom; it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.

Gay Science paragraph 173

More seriously. – One takes an obscure and inexplicable thing more seriously than a clear and explicable one.

Human, All Too Human, part 1, paragraph 532

Simple deletion

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