This book so far has described the main ideas of NLP in a practical way. NLP did not develop by logical steps, and it is not easy to describe. Trying to describe NLP in a logical sequence is like trying to describe a hologram by pulling it apart bit by bit, but each part of a hologram contains all of it. Here are some final and more speculative thoughts on NLP and its place in our culture.
We believe that NLP is the next generation of psychology. It has been called the New Learning Paradigm and the New Language of Psychology. As a model of the structure of human experience, it may be as profound a step forward as the invention of language. At the very least it is a powerful process that will continue to generate ways of achieving excellent results in a wide range of different fields. Because it is about subjective experience and communication, it is in a sense about everything and nothing. Gregory Bateson described NLP as the first systematic approach to learning to learn; it is the first applied epistemology.
Learning is no longer enough; learning to learn is essential. There is so much to learn and so little time to learn it. Not only are we gaining knowledge and technology more quickly, but the rate at which we gain it is accelerating. We are on an evolutionary journey that is like a roller-coaster ride—it starts slowly, but the further we go, the faster it gets. And we have not yet found any brake. Unfortunately, mere accumulation of knowledge and technical know-how is not bringing with it the wisdom we need to use it well for the good of the planet, and everyone on it. We are clever, but not yet wise.
Huge changes are taking place. Ninety percent of all scientific knowledge has been accumulated over the lifetime of the generation born at the beginning of this century. They have seen the science fiction of their childhood become science fact. Paradoxically the increase in knowledge makes us feel more ignorant and impotent.
The more knowledge there is, the more ignorant we become, for the more we do not know, and the more we have to rely on experts to do the simplest things.
The science and technology that has led to this vast expansion of knowledge and power has had some unfortunate consequences that we are only just becoming aware of, they are what makes the rollercoaster ride so potentially dangerous. Events are moving so fast we can actually see our direction for the first time. We can actually watch the destruction of the Brazilian rain forests on television, and we can read of global warming in the newspapers. Scientists can monitor the holes in the ozone layer. Now it is not a question of whether the future will be different, nor even by how much. It is a question of whether we have one.
The world is now too dangerous for anything less than Utopia.
Buckminster Fuller
As we look around, how many of us are satisfied with what we see? Each one of us experiences the increasing pressure for change. And we each have a part to play if this roller-coaster of untrammelled technology and power is not to go out of control with disastrous planetary consequences. We have to control it, we cannot jump off. The question is how?
It is the individual that is the source of creativity that enables social evolution to happen; and it is the level of consciousness of the individuals in a society that makes up the level of consciousness of that society.
Social change begins with individual change. We face many social and ecological problems. If we are to develop a society that can deal effectively with them, we have to act now. As time passes and knowledge grows, two questions become more and more urgent: What is worth knowing? What is worth doing?
We have devastated the outer world with the products of science and technology. The attitude and world view that has given us this science and technology is deeply entrenched in our culture, and has had profound effects on our inner world.
Science has grown up through a series of controlled and repeatable experiments on nature in order to try to formulate mathematical laws and theories. Man no longer considers himself part of nature in any practical way. Man, the experimenter, must stand apart from nature, his experiment. And he does not admit that his very experiment changes nature or influences the result, for that would mean he forgoes his claim to objectivity. To try to get an objective result would mean another experimenter would have to monitor the first experimenter. This creates an impossible and infinite regress like a painter attempting to paint the whole landscape including himself. He can never paint the painter that is painting the picture.
We have come to treat nature as a machine, with laws imposed upon it from without, instead of as an organism.
A machine should be inherently predictable. In theory all you have to do is to find all the rules and discover all the bits. So the hunt was on to paint a more and more complete picture of nature, and the painter was forgotten.
Knowledge was divorced from experience. It became something you learned secondhand, an abstract body of theory existing independently of the knower and growing all the time. All that mattered was the final product, the theory, not the experience of learning it.
This way of objectifying knowledge severely limits the kind of knowledge you can deal with. At the extreme, emotions, art, and relationships are devalued, because they rely on subjective experience. Scientific laws no longer seem to relate to the real world of human experience.
Scientific theories are metaphors about the world, they are not true, they are a way of thinking about the world, in the same way that a painting is one way of representing the landscape. We are rapidly finding that our way of thinking about the world up to now has been useful in some directions and catastrophic in others.
The metaphor of a predictable, objective world has been shaken by the quantum theories of physics. The more deeply we investigate, the more it becomes clear both that the observer has an effect on what he observes, and that the observer is an integral part of any scientific experiment. Light will act as particles or waves, depending on what sort of experiment you set up. You can never exactly pinpoint both where a particle is, and when it is there. The world is fundamentally indeterminate. Quantum physics is displacing the clockwork universe as the prevailing scientific metaphor.
The new explorations and ideas of systems theory, and the study of chaos and order, are showing us that even in simple systems you cannot keep track of all the variables, and slight variations can change the whole system. It is the beginning of a revolution; it is changing the whole way we see nature.
Chaos is predictable randomness, which is epitomized by the so-called Butterfly Effect. This is named after a talk by the American meteorologist Edward Lorenz, entitled “Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” Lorenz had been using a computer model for tracking weather. He tired of typing in long numbers and thought it would make no difference if he arounded them off to a few decimal places. He was surprised to find that this threw the world's weather predictions completely out. A tiny change in the right place can have huge consequences. This underlines how the whole of nature is a system and not something apart from us that we can experiment on with impunity. As Gregory Bateson says in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, “Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished”.
These new scientific metaphors allow us to be part of nature again. In the same way NLP as a metaphor connects us back to our subjective experience, and expresses the systemic nature of our inner experience.
We now know about the complexity of the external world and we know something of the impact that we, the invisible observers, are having on the external world. The consequences of how we think are faithfully mirrored back by the outside world. The universe is a perfect feedback device. What we think is what we get. If we want to change the world, we must first change ourselves. We must explore and change our internal experience if we are to influence and shape the external world with wisdom.
NLP, as the study of the structure of subjective experience, enables us to explore ourselves. For it is a study of how we make models. It does not take the models we have made and confuse them with reality.
As a way of creating excellence it is infiltrating and influencing many fields. In a way, when this process is complete, NLP could cease to exist as a separate discipline. It would be assimilated into everyday life like the teacher who succeeds by making herself redundant, because her students can now learn for themselves.
NLP is part of a movement that is growing steadily stronger. A movement toward acting in the world more effectively, using the skills and knowledge that we have, with grace, wisdom, and balance. We can learn much from the Balinese maxim, “We have no art, we just do things as well as possible”.
We are discovering ourselves and our capacity for awakening in a beautiful and alluring world of endless surprises.
People travel to wonder
at the height of the mountains,
at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long courses of rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars,
and they pass themselves by without wondering.
St Augustine