I feel I am beating a dead horse. I believe what I believe, and others believe what they believe, and that is the long and short of it.

The basis for a lot of this material has its origin in the discovery that what we are convinced is truth is actually simply the result of our perceptions.

What we consider limitations are often just perceived limitations, and instead of giving up on those areas, we should simply experiment and lift the limitations by exploring possibilities ... and that begins by having a sense of possibility.

I am all fine and dandy with that. But the methods and philosophies involved with the abundance for life course and the people who have enthusiasm for it appear to me to move closer and closer to religion and ritualized responses. Frankly, that scares and irks the hell out of me.

It's all about perception. When you start talking about truths and deeper truths, well, you're moving away from what provided the magic of NLP in the first place.

You know ... if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

It seems to me that people find something really magical, and then they end up missing the point and doing the same old crap everyone else did. You have something great and ultimately end up with a dead system that doesn't work and creates the kinds of limitations it was supposed to create alternatives for in the first place.

What is happening here is that a sort of "privileged view" is being proposed. It's labeled as truth. This is the same old nonsense. Don't give me truth, give me possibility. Don't try and tell me the way things are, give me a new possible way of looking at things that is just as good as many other ways. Don't lock me into not having choice by trying to have me believe in a so-called "truth."

Paul Scheele talks about freeing people from trances. But, really, what he is doing is creating a new trance for people that he probably thinks is better. By definition, it's *not* better. Just different. Labeling something "truth" however, locks it into a privileged status. It also locks people into stupidity.

There are alternative views that work just as well. Just because something works does not mean it or the offered explanation for it is "true," it means its a viable approach to a given set of problems or goals. Our explanations for how things work are not true just because they make sense. It simply means that the explanation fits some well-formedness criteria. That's it. Our explanations for things are not necessarily the magic in them that makes them work. The work with modeling in NLP at the beginning made this abundantly clear. How soon we forget.

When you asked people to explain how they did what they did, they'd give you their beliefs, which usually was a bunch of crap that had nothing at all to do with what they did consciously and unconsciously to produce results. This is why a system of modeling was necessary. How do you model? Perceptual shifts. Not into truth, but into an experience that, hopefully, will more and more closely resemble the activity that goes on within the subject being modeled. Observation. Actually using your senses to get good data ... not free associating in a trance and thinking you're receiving direct wisdom and truth from God or whoever. Separation of interpretation from sensory specific data. Realizing when you are "explaining" something or adding useless info vs. being sparse and accurate. This is the difference between "the subject is breathing in for a count of 4 seconds, out for a count of 4 seconds and has a lack of muscle tone in the face and upper body" and "the subject is in a calm, spiritually transcendent state."

What I see here is a movement away from all the good practices and skepticism that are simply prudent and into sloppy and fluffy thinking. I see a sort of religion developing, and it is both irritating and sad.

[This message has been edited by babayada (edited October 11, 2004).]