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From The Maze Where Realities Converge - the psychedelic encyclopedia of reality from The Ultimate Comment
With neuro-linguistic programming, the scientific mainstream seems to have uncovered wisdom that has been utilised in occult magickal sciences for a long time. The insights of NLP, hypnosis, memetics, Jungian psychology and other schools allow a rational, systematic understanding of what has often been considered 'supernatural': things like psychic influence, mind-reading, transformative rituals and magickal symbols.
Contents |
Reification
In both NLP and magick, one gives names to parts of oneself and addresses them in the second person. In NLP, this take the form of talking to "the creative part" or "the critical part" of oneself. In magick, these things are externalised as gods or spirits.
Synesthesia and correspondences
NLP uses multi-sensory, synesthetic language to amplify the impact communication has on consciousness. When you overlap sensory representational systems by saying things like "feel the colours pressing against your skin", you communicate with more parts of the mind. Now a standard practise in magickal symbolism is 'correspondences'. Body positions, compass points, elements, senses, colours, musical notes, astral bodies, types of breathing, numbers, sounds, smells, types of stone, seasons and other categories are said to correspond with one another. Here is an example. Nearly all esoteric symbolic systems do this kind of bullshit, which is, of course completely arbitrary and not as cosmic as they claim. However, it serves the purpose of creating a greater impact in the psyche through synesthesia. Baudelaire said it better. (See also: symbology)
Anchoring
If you only use a certain language, certain clothes, a certain place, certain smells (e.g. incense used in rituals), certain body postures or movements when you perform magick, then they become portentous and when you use them, your subconscious mind expects something special is happening.
Imagination and visualisation
NLP 'patterns' like the past trauma cure are guided visualisations, in which you imagine something in a certain way, paying attention to how submodalities and association/dissociation affect the impact of these imaginings. The same is true of most magickal rituals, like The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. (Note that to engage in NLP/magick, one required ability is the ability to visualize vividly. This can be acheived by image streaming as described here.)
Hallucination and divination
In NLP patterns such as 'six-step reframing', you ask parts of your subconscious to communicate with you by sensory signals or hallucinations. For example, you might say to the part of your mind that's responsible for a bad habit, "If you're willing to communicate with me in consciousness, make my chest feel tight." Using subtle imagined cues like this is also the principle of hallucinatory divination methods like scrying (crystal ball gazing) as described by Peter Carroll here.
Pattern interrupts and koans
Pattern interrupts are basically surprises used in NLP to break somebody out of an unresourceful state. Richard Bandler, co-founder of NLP, once said that if a client walks into his office and says, "I'm depressed", he reaches out his hand and says, "And I'm Richard!" This is a pattern interrupt, an absurd, unexpected shock to the mind. The handshake induction is a good example of a pattern interrupt. Koans used in Zen higher magick are a lot like this, absurd statements and questions that defy ordinary thinking patterns.
Breaking state
Laughter is often used to end a session of NLP or a magickal ritual.
Effects
According to Frogs Into Princes (a transcript of one of the original NLP seminars) NLP has successfully been used to make people invisible to others. Of course, they don't call it 'invisibility', they call it 'negative hallucination', but it is the same thing.
NLP also allows pretty sophisticated mind-reading. This is not extra-sensory perception, just acute sensory perception.
