[Neurons] 2011 Meta Reflections #7

[L. Michael Hall]

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Meta Reflections 2011 - #7

Feb. 14, 2011

 

                        

NLP PRESUPPOSITIONS FROM KORZYBSKI

Alfred Korzybski Series #4

 

 

One of the first things I sought to understand when I first studied NLP was
where did the NLP presuppositions come from and who contributed which
presuppositions.  So early on, I began reading all of the sources that NLP
began from to find who contributed which presuppositions.  And most of them
go back to Abraham Maslow, Alfred Korzybski, and Gregory Bateson ... and
then from them, to Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson.

 

What are the official NLP presuppositions and how many are there?  Well, if
you want to start an argument, ask that question!  You will have people at
the extreme like John Grinder who rejects most of the NLP presuppositions
and others who have tried to bring in various New Age ideas.  But in most of
the early NLP books-the following are recognized as the NLP Presuppositions.

 

1. The map is not the territory.

2. People respond and act according to their internal maps, not according to
reality.

3. Meaning is context dependent.  What something means depends on the
context.

4. Mind-body are parts of the same system and so affect each other.

5. Individual skills result from the sequencing of representation systems.

6. Rapport is created by respecting each person's model of the world.

 

7. Person and behavior are different logical levels. A person is more than
his or her behavior.

8. Every behavior is useful in some context.

9. Behavior is to be evaluated in terms of its context and ecology.

10. Behind every behavior is some positive intention.

 

11.  You cannot not communicate.

12.  The way you communicate influences your perception and another's
reception.

13.  The meaning of your communication is the response you get.

14.  There is no failure, only feedback. 

15.   Check the ecology of a system; systems can be ecological or
non-ecological.  

16.  The person with the most flexibility will have the most influence in
the system. 

17.  Resistance indicates the lack of rapport.  There is no resistance, only
the lack of rapport.

 

18.  People have all the resources they need to be able to succeed.

19.  People are response-able persons.

20.  Humans can sometimes learn through a one trial learning. 

20.  People make the best choices that are open to them. 

22.  We seek in increase choice, not limit choices.

23.  If one person can do something, then it is a human ability which can be
modeled and replicated so that most people can improve their own skills.

 

Now ask any informed NLP-er the question, "What NLP Presupposition did
Alfred Korzybski contribute?"  And they will immediately tell you.  "The map
is not the territory."  We all know that one.  But what most NLP trained
practitioners, master practitioners, and trainers do not know and cannot
tell you is the full significance of that premise in General Semantics and
how that statement establishes the very epistemology of NLP.  And why not?
Mostly because it was taken on as an assumptive understanding of human
nature, human mind and consciousness, and epistemology.  I guess that's why
it is called a presupposition!

 

This is also the case because most writers and trainers in NLP have not gone
back to the source, read Science and Sanity for themselves and simply do not
know the incredible importance of this profoundly simple statement.

"The map is not the territory."

            "The menu is not the meal."

            "The sex manual is not the sexual experience."

"The photo in your wallet is not the person."

            "The brochure is not the holiday."

 

These statements of negation reveal and announce a distinction, which if not
understood, creates the foundations for unsanity and if left uncorrected,
can set the stage for insanity.  It invites the unaware to identify two
things that exist on different dimensions, different logical levels, and as
different phenomena.   If you identify your mental maps or mapping about
something as that something, you create a distortion that in some
circumstances can be disastrous.  It would have the kind of results if you
confuse the menu for the meal and began chewing on the menu (!) or if you
confused the photo for the person and tried to hug and kiss the photo.
Probably not very satisfying!

 

Identifying and identification, in fact, in Korzybski's work of General
Semantics, is the big problem in human thinking, consciousness, speaking,
and responding.  To the extent that you identify (or over-identify) you are
confusing map and territory.   Infants and primitives confuse their maps of
reality with reality and so are superstitious and engage in magical
thinking.  You then will suffer word-phobias and be reactive to words,
descriptions, and not take the time to ask:

"What do you mean when you say those words and use those symbols?  What do
they stand for?  What are you referring to?"

 

Whenever you make a map you are using symbols, and the symbols, whether
pictorial or linguistic or by gestures, do not refer to themselves, but to
something else.  That's what a symbol is.  It works its magic by enabling
you to use the word "mountain" or "river" or "road" or "dangerous bear"
without having to go there and point to it.  You can point to it
linguistically.  And while that is true for sensory-based referents as just
mentioned, it is a hundred-times more true for ideas, concepts,
understandings, descriptions of processes, etc.

 

Are you wondering about building a system on a negative premise-on a
negation?  The power of this is that if it is not so, then all you need to
do to contradict the system or show where and how it breaks down is to
produce one example of the opposite.  What symbol is the thing itself?  This
"denial of identity" as Korzybski called it distinguishes "objects" that
appear to us in our neurology via our nervous systems and the "events" out
there in the world (the territory, reality) that we cannot know and
experience directly.

 

Yes, it seems to us that grass is green, water is wet, rocks are hard,  yet
if we are to accept the discoveries of modern physics during the past
hundred years, these modifiers and adjectives describe how we experience
certain events in our neurology.  The greenness is in our rods and cones,
the wetness is our kinesthetic sense of touch, and the hardness is the
macro-level that we live on, not what is occurring at the level where the
electrons dance.  We are actually describing our reactions, not the world-
our maps, not the territory.

"In the era which is passing, positive premises were supposed to be
important, and we did not know that a whole Non-Aristotelian system can be
built on negative premises.  The new era will have to revaluate these data,
and build its systems on negative premises, which are of much greater
security." (p. 50)

"Two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human
experiences: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2)
There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.  These two most
important negative statements cannot be denied."

"If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then,
obviously the only possible link between the objective world and the
linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone." (pp. 60-61)

 

Negative premises makes difference fundamental, it makes structure the link,
and so it requires us to think in terms of the relationship and the system
(p. 93, 399, 426, 476).   If you want to know more about this foundational
NLP Presupposition, see pages 58-59, and pages 10-11, 28 in Science and
Sanity.

 

More Presuppositions

There are other NLP presupposition in Science and Sanity.  Here are some
that I have found and locations in the book where you can find them.  If you
have found others, let me know.  

People communicate from their model of the world (p. 419).

            The human nervous system works perfectly well (p. 466).

People have all the resources they need.   "His [the average man] nervous
system works continually, as does that of a genius.  The difference consists
in that its working is not productive or efficient." (p. 485).

You can learn to solve your own problems (p. 529).

There's a structure in every experience, so search for that structure;
structure is the only source of knowledge (p. 544).

 

So Alfred Korzybski not only established some of the language of NLP-
neuro-linguistics, neuro-semantics, human engineering, states, etc., but
also some of the basic NLP Presuppositions as well and he did so back in
1933-1941.  Pretty amazing, don't you think?

 

 

Who is Speaking at the First International Neuro-Semantic Conference

            And what are the subjects??

            Find out --- go to www.neurosemantics.com 

            See the photos of the speakers and read a description of the
Workshops!!

 

 

 

 

 

L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Neuro-Semantics Executive Director  ----   <http://www.neurosemantics.com/>
www.neurosemantics.com

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA                             ----
<http://www.self-actualizing.org/> www.self-actualizing.org

1 970-523-7877                                               ----
<http://www.meta-coaching.org/> www.meta-coaching.org

 

     

For a free subscription to Neurons--- the International  egroup of
Neuro-Semantics, go to the front page of  <http://www.neurosemantics.com/>
www.neurosemantics.com.   You can  subscribe and unsubscribe there.   Meta
Reflection articles by Dr. Hall are sent out every Monday (Colorado time).
Trainers' Reflections are on Tuesdays and Meta-Coach Reflections on
Wednesdays.   Contact Dr. Hall at  meta at acsol.net  

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://eight.pairlist.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20110214/6d3def9f/attachment.html>