Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Who has a pet? Can you see your pet sitting here on the chair? (Yes.) OK. Now, can you distinguish between the animal that you have here, and the chair that it is sitting on? Is there anything in your experience that allows you to distinguish between the fact that you put the visual image of the pet there, and the fact that the image of the chair was there before you deliberately put it there? Is there any difference? There may not be.

Woman: Oh, yes, there is.

OK. What is the difference? How do you know that there is a real chair and there's not a real dog?

Woman: I really can see that chair in my reality here and now. But I can only picture the dog in my head, in my mind's eye—

You don't see the dog over here sitting in the chair?

Woman: Well, only in my mind's eye.

What's the difference between the image of the chair in your mind's eye and the image of the dog in your mind's eye? Is there a difference? Woman: Well, one's here and one isn't.

Yes. How do you know that, though?

Woman: Well, I still see the chair even when I look away and look back. But if I stop thinking about the dog in the chair, the dog isn't there anymore.

OK. You can talk to yourself, right? Would you go inside and ask if there is a part of you at the unconscious level that is capable of having the dog there when you look back? Would you make those arrangements and find out if you can still tell the difference? Because my guess is there are other ways you know, too.

Woman: The image of the dog isn't as clear.

OK, so that's one way that you make a reality check. Would you go inside and ask if there is a part of you that can make it as clear?

Woman: Not while I'm awake.

I know your conscious mind can't do it. I'm not asking that question. Can you talk to yourself? Can you go "Hi, Mary, how are you?" on the inside? (Yes.) OK. Go inside and say "Is there any part of me at the unconscious level which is capable of making that image of the dog as clear as the chair?" And be sensitive to any response you get. It may be verbal, it may be a feeling, it may be something visual. While she's doing that, does anyone else know how they know the difference?

Man: Well, earlier when you hit the chair I could hear a sound. When you hit the dog, I couldn't.

So essentially your strategy consists of going to another representational system and noticing whether there is a representation that corresponds in that system to what you detected in another system.

Woman: I know I put the dog there.

How do you know that?

Woman: Because I can remember what I did.

OK, how do you remember putting the dog there? Is that a visual process? Do you talk to yourself? OK. Now I want you to do that same process for putting the chair there. I want you to put the chair here, even though it's already here. I want you to go through the same process you used to put the dog here to put the chair here and then tell me what, if any, difference there is.

Does anybody know the point of all this?

Woman: We're all schizophrenic.

Of course we're all schizophrenic. In fact, R. D. Laing is far too conservative when he talks about schizophrenia being a natural response. Evolutionarily the next step, which we're all engaged in, is multiple personality. You're all multiple personalities. There are only two differences between you and an officially diagnosed multiple personality: (1) the fact that you don't have to have amnesia for how you are behaving in one context; you can remember it in another context, (2) you can choose how to respond contextually. Whenever you don't have a choice about how you respond in context, you are a robot. So you have two choices. You can be a multiple personality or a robot. Choose well.

The point that we're trying to make that the difference between somebody who doesn't know their hallucination is a hallucination and yourselves is only that you have developed some strategy by which you know what is shared reality and what is not. And if you are going to have hallucinations, you probably have them about ideas instead of about things.

If one of you in the audience said "Well, wait a minute, there really is a dog there, anybody can see that!" then probably one of the other people in this room would take you away.

Now, when Sally used the word "pensive" earlier, she was hallucinating with exactly the same formal process that a schizophrenic does. For example, there was a mental patient who looked at us and said "Did you just see me drink a cup of blood?" He was doing exactly the same thing. He was taking input from the outside, combining it in an interesting way with a response he was making internally, and then assuming it all came from the outside.