NLP

[ti@lemonia.org]

Hi Chris.

>> [Expectation that experts should be able to explain stuff]

> My experience of psychology and spirituality is just that: experiential.
> If I told you some of the exercises we got up to at Tantra, I imagine (and
> that is my imagining, which may or may not be correct) it would both be
> open to being misconstrued and would lack the power of the experience that
> I had. I have heard other people on workshops say similar things.

> There's something in Zen buddhism about not being able to describe Zen
> without losing your own Zen nature. For someone like me, from an academic
> background - that can sometimes be a frustrating thing to deal with.

Douglas Hofstadter writes about Zen, logic, and paradox in his monumental
"Godel, Escher, Bach". I think he illuminates matters somewhat; however, I
may have lost my Zen nature by believing so. :)

> If
> you were in a Tantra workshop and you said the things you are saying NLP
> but swapping the word for Tantra, chances are the teacher would bring you
> back to your body and your feelings -

... but that's what Tantra, as I understand it, is about.

NLP, on the other hand, is described as if it's a scientific explanation -
perhaps in a more reductionist style than is plausible. The everything2
article, about how perceptions enter the brain and are then deleted, then
filtered, then distorted, sounds relentlessly sequential. To my non-expert
mind, there's a distinct aroma of cargo-cult science about it. It looks
very impressive, but quite possibly, the pieces don't do anything, or at
least, don't work like they say they do... which seems to agree with Ross
Jeffries's opinion ("NLP is all rubbish, it just happens to work").

As with Kake's cooking analogy, NLP may well not work for the reason its
practitioners think it does.

ti'