...or neurolinguistic reprogramming

Something else Wilson mentions when talking about the mesopotamian use of dream interpreters is that the process of breaking down dream symbology may have been very similar to that of unpacking meaning from their newly created pictographic written language, which radically cahnged the way they approached the world. One might even wonder if their language came from an attempt at trying to represent their interpreted dreams in a more readily communicable form. The shift from dreams to memes, perhaps.

Sifting through lj, I came upon these presuppositions of neuro-linguistic programmingin an article about trance induction and biurnal beating in the chaosmajik community, which basically seeks to identify and pass on skill sets based on modeling "patterns of excellence," in the same way that high end memes operate. These suggestions reminded me of some of the guidelines we were trying to come up with today for providing radical health care that takes into account the subjective nature of people's expereinces, and the desire to pass on the skills necessary to enable others to take care of themselves in the way best fit for them.

"The fundamental presuppositions of NLP are:
1. The ability to change the process by which we experience reality is more often valuable than changing the content of our experience of reality. (i.e. Changing the structure of our communications and/or sensory
representations tends to make much more difference than changing the
content.)
2. The meaning of your communication is the response you get. (i.e. It's the responsibility of the healer/magi/communicator to change
their behavior if they're not getting positive and effective results, not the client's.)
3. All distinctions human beings are able to make concerning our environment and our behavior can be usefully represented through our visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory senses. (i.e. Everything we're able to do is driven by a corresponding set of
neurological processes, and can be modeled and understood in terms of how we're using our five perceptual senses.)
4. All of the resources an individual needs to effect a change in their life are already within them. (i.e. Human beings are whole and complete by nature, and all of the states and strategies we need to learn and do anything are already possible by recombining and/or restructuring what we already know in new ways.)
5. The map is not the territory, but the territory is the map. (i.e. Sensory perceptions are representations of our experience, not the
experience itself, and words are not reality, but merely subjective representations of reality. Although we create and change reality by
deriving behaviors from our internal models and resources, it's very valuable to have an open mind and the willingness to learn constantly from new experiences.)
6. The positive worth of the individual is held constant, while the value and appropriateness of internal / external behaviors is questioned. (i.e. There is no such thing as a "bad" or "evil" person, and all human beings are inherently good / spiritually perfect by nature. However, within most contexts, some behaviors get better results and/or tend to be more socially acceptable than others.)
7. There is a positive intention motivating every behavior, and a context in which every behavior has value.
(i.e. Even behaviors that seem overtly negative on the surface are still being driven by positive values and worthwhile motivations, although these may well be out of awareness for the person performing the behaviors in question. Correspondingly, most "problem" behaviors tend to represent past adaptations to challenging or incongruent environments that ensured survival and success for the individual, but have been overgeneralized.)
8. All results and behaviors are accomplishments, whether they achieve the desired outcomes within a given context or not.
(I.e. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback. Every strategy produces whatever results it does consistently within any specific context, even if the results are not the ones desired. In addition, the ability to do anything and get any set of results represents an act of neurological learning for the individual; thus, with appropriate restructuring and contextualization, negative content and ineffective strategies can be transformed into positive and functional resources.)"

Of course, I imagine these techinques could just as easily be called metaprogramming, or cultural deprogramming, as the word programming itself at least in my mind carries with it some severely mechanistic interpretations, and NLP itself fell from its original intentions to become a toolkit for marketing agents and ad creeps. Like the sumerian me if you had the instructions in your hand for how to get people to do things and wanted money or power, what would you do with them? If I'm not mixing my myths, isn't hoarding this knowledge why babel fell in the first place?

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