Chapter Twenty Four. Mind Reading

On one evening in the Santa Cruz mountains, Richard and John began developing some techniques for what was later called "mind reading" a technique not often referred to in NLP workshops. The mind reading workshops were held at Richard's house at Acorn Hollow. Virginia Satir was present on the opening night which thrilled us to no end.

The idea of mind reading is a pretty weird topic to teach mostly because it is so difficult to verify. Richard and John were introduced to the idea thru doing different workshops and groups in the San Francisco Bay area. They were doing some interesting mind reading on the group participants, commenting on ages, dates and places people had been, in the normal course of their presentation. They were commenting accurately on individuals' personal history, their ages and their partners, without prior knowledge. They decided to do some experiments which could possibly reveal the structure of mind reading which would then give them a model from which to teach it.

To mind read was to be able to pick up internal dialogue, sounds, pictures and words which are generated inside someone, or to be able to see a visual representation of something a person is thinking about. The simplest example is circles, squares and triangles. Having a person think of a circle, square or triangle and then being able to pick which one it is they are thinking of. Most people can choose approximately seven out of ten after twenty minutes of training.

Some of the techniques which were tried out were pacing, having two people pacing each other to see if they could read each others mind. David Gordon and myself, having similar body shapes were chosen for this task. We walked around the seminar room for half of the night looking like Mutt and Jeff, with not much happening to either one of us.

Leslie, Debra and a few others were in another office doing age regression to access memories and trying to figure out what someone is thinking. Richard was working with two people in another room doing some specific programming in trance giving them instructions to read each others' mind and last but not least, using the phenomenon of stopping the world to become accessible to reading someone's mind. The most successful group was Leslie, Debra and a few others in the lower office.

David and I joined them as they were doing some trance work and trying to identify the subjects favorite toy as a child. It appeared like a little hologram suspended in space, just above and to the right of the top of the persons head. Pretty wild stuff.

We learned several things from these exercises. Colour and skin shade changes occurred in one or the other cheeks of the sender which would form a representation of the object of which they were thinking and the highly kinesthetic people could get the same quality information through touching the person, as information is also transmitted thru body temperature.

The visual people could see the thoughts as three dimensional holograms and the auditory people experienced mind reading thru their own auditory internal dialogue.

The mind reading exercises were very successful if they were done when the sender was able to fix solidly on one thought and the receiver could stop the world.

Other peoples' minds are difficult to access if you are busy paying attention to your own experience, don Juan called it self indulgence and said that the prerequisite to "personal power was to stop the world!".

The applications of the mind reading skills are pretty profound. The immediate application that I found to be useful was my work with clients. It was useful to know what was troubling them before they did. Strange images began to appear when I was practicing stopping the world when seeing clients. After a few subtle questions to my client to verify my information, we were off on a change technique to solve their problems.

Richard and John would use the skills in the teaching context. They would go about answering questions before they were asked. John did a pretty slick trance induction on the night of the mind reading trials. That night stands out as one of his brilliant moments. I encountered him as I was walking from one room to another and asked him a question about the work that we were doing. He simply said, "You can't see behind you", and large holes of space began to appear in my immediate surroundings as I went into a trance............

We used age regression and anchoring often in these groups as a resource to enable us to recover the creativity and playfulness of the child, which are both useful tools for the therapist. The resources of the child were also instrumental in developing the deep trance phenomenon. We were taught several induction stories that focused on age regression and there was a strong emphasis on play throughout the training groups.

A significant event that occurred during these groups was the publishing of Structure of Magic Two. I always thought of Magic Two as a transition phase. After it came out, NLP started to blossom in its own right. (Chapter 1 on representational systems is definitely the most useful part of the book, unless you like comparison studies in communication.)

Chapter Twenty Five. Tieing It Together

One of the techniques that was a thread thru most of the development process was the use of therapeutic metaphor. We learned to use therapeutic metaphors embedded in a story. However a therapeutic metaphor can be fashioned in a psychodrama or in still picture form as in an icon.

Our most commonly used metaphor was patterned after Dr Erickson's use of an isomorphic metaphor woven amongst the many stories he would tell his clients. An isomorphic metaphor is a story where the sequence of events of the metaphor match the sequence of events of a person's problem.

The therapeutic part comes in when an additional resource is strategically placed in the metaphor which directs the person to a different result. Many experiments were done using anchoring and metaphor in trance, and thru this evolved the understanding of submodalities which was later refined into the swish technique.

The understanding of tautologies was also a pattern we experimented with. The main way we dealt with tautologies was to search out both ends of the loop and do a change history on each end of the loop. For example I could be happy if I stop smoking and would stop smoking, if I was happy. This is not a recommended approach as systematic as it was. It was too long and arduous a task.

The very early beginnings of the six step reframing model could almost be thought as a send up of the parts' party model. It began something like this. Each individual was given a quantity of ten parts and also a meta part to supervise the decision making process. The ten parts of the individual were made up of characters which they designated themselves. Very similar to the part in Virginia Satir's parts' party model.

The meta person or the meta part would facilitate the interaction or the negotiations between the parts to get a specific outcome. Later on the idea of ten parts was dropped altogether and a person could have no parts, or one part or two parts and it was open ended.

Robert Dilts was attending quite a few of these groups at this time. Robert was a fourth year student at Santa Cruz and was known as a good trance subject. Robert is a keen observer and his creative talents in writing and drawing were called upon numerous times in the NLP development years. Virginia Satir would also drop in from time to time to have a look at what John and Richard were doing in regards to anchoring and hypnosis techniques.