Part of the day was about exploring the futures that S wanted to be part of his life, and I realised that – on the basis of our existing conversations – I had a good idea of what places would be good to visit with him. They also happen to be some of my favourite places, since…well, let’s get on to that. First up was Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies, which I chose because of the field S currently works in. True to form, we were offered a tour even though we’d turned up out of the blue, and S came out of the place buzzing on what we’d seen – big name computer game pros running workshops for children, older students with access to professional audio and video technology.

We discussed what the principles guiding Confetti had to be for the place to look and function as it does, and did so as we drank Earl Grey tea at Edin’s, a comfortable cafe in which its Bosnian owner has captured what matters to him about family and culture. What can’t be captured concretely can sometimes better be painted with metaphor, and S had some valuable insights into what connected the two places, and what made each unique, as he considered how they’d be expressed in musical form.

We wandered through the city for a while, then took a bus to The Kiosk, where we were presented with amazing home cooked food and wondered what it was about the place and proprieter Beth that meant customers are willing to sit outside even in the chill and wind of late October. Insights came quickly as S investigated how this new model of excellence sat alongside the others we’d visited, and that led a consideration of his own situation, and the influences on it, which presented new ways of being with colleagues through seeing how his beliefs created what he felt was happening. Regarding this particular aspect, S later communicated to me that “I’ve noticed an ease with people around me…me not persuading but them being readier to follow…”

Heading back into town, we came across somewhere that’s not especially on my map but proved perfect; Jamcafe, where guitary indie rock played, the first song’s lyrics synchronistically tuned into where S was in his contemplations. I sensed this was the time for another element to round off the day, and since the theme was stepping into the unknown it was only right I do so myself, and find out what happened with the random influence of a card deck I’ve devised, themed around the comic heroes known as the Fantastic Four.

As has so often been the case, the cards pointed to something of significance that we hadn’t uncovered until now. I like the double-take some people do when they see cards with artwork from 60s Marvel comics, and like it even more when they provide useful insight. One of the stories I tell myself about them is that each of the characters featured represents a different element – Human Torch being fire and Thing earth most obviously – which connects them with Tarot, itself ripe with elemental and planetary symbolism. Who knows? All I can tell you is a new space opened up, that allowed something special to happen.

I suspect it’s my work as a scriptwriter that leads me to approach place in the way S and I did. In a film, many of the elements in the environments you’re creating for the characters to interact and change have a symbolic as well as a literal role. And of course, that is only the case because it’s just as much so in the lives we lead that inspire the stories we tell, whether or not we call ourselves writers. Consider some of your favourite places where you live, what it is about them that works, and how the choices that the people who live and work in them – about colour and light, music and decor – shape the behaviours that emerge in the space, creating the experience of those who spend time there.

Which is why I’d like to run an anti-alcohol abuse campaign using the slogan ‘Are You Queer For Beer?’. Using the same kind of all-lads-together imagery and music that drinks companies use to promote their brew, it would subvert the usual blokiness by pointing to a gay undercurrent to this bonding. Better yet, you could do the same for drug users, with a slight tweak to ‘Are You Queer For Gear?’, showing bud-buddies instead of Bud ones.

Problem being, of course, that such a campaign would rightly be accused of being homophobic. At which point, all that can be said is ‘but that’s why it works!’. What’s the use of society having weird and arbitrary taboos if you can’t use them to constructive ends? Many stand-up comics have careers predicated based on their ability to identify and question the ridiculousness of cultural mores, and something very interesting happens when people realise just how bizarre they are: laughter is a whole-body reaction that releases floods of chemicals to make people happy. Happier indeed, and more safely so, than they’ll get by self-medicating in most cases.

Some years ago I attended a computing course at the sort of place that called itself a community resource. They did some fantastic work there, but I noticed that there was a real mismatch between the people doing the trainings and those receiving them. Many of those being trained were women who’d worked in office settings and were new to this kind of setting where there were posters stating that some forms of language were forbidden. Suddenly, they were somewhere that people had ponytails instead of suits, and where the boundaries of acceptable behaviour were unclear because they were unstated.

Wanting to stir things up in a constructive way, I started to act as a provocateur to poke fun at the people running the course and make the game rules more apparent for the benefit of those who felt alienated, which conversations revealed was very much the case for some. One of the staff realised what I was doing and why and became an ally. The breakthrough came when one of his more serious colleagues encouraged us to use our computing skills on behalf of community groups we were associated with, and I excitedly said I wanted to make a poster for a Territorial Army event. For American readers, this is pretty much like declaring NRA membership at an encounter group. Cue laughter from the group at large. After that, the tutor started to loosen up and not take for granted that he was dealing with people who shared his penchant for veganism and peace campaigning.

Taboos are marker points, lines that an assumed groupmind embeds within its members when they conduct themselves in public – and private. Notice people are clamming up as you start to raise a subject – in culture at large or in whatever subcultures you deal with – and you’re treading around a territory that has power if you can tap into it. Salman Rushdie knew just what he was doing when he pressed buttons in The Satanic Verses, and claiming as he now does that the book is a fantasy novel is somewhat disingenuous – I’ve not seen Conan the Barbarian books get the response he did with his Muslim-baiting text. (My response when a fatwa was declared on the author was to issue friends with a hastily created Ayatollagram, which itself crossed boundaries when I faxed one to a friend working at a research establishment. The fax machine was used only for serious business communications, and this clearly wasn’t one. But it was a fax, so it had to be delivered because…well, because.)

If you’re doing any kind of coaching or consultancy work, these are precisely the areas that you can learn the most from. The more serious people become – which is precisely what happens when you’re in the area of a taboo – the less flexibility they have. And it’s through liberating that potential for flexibility that change becomes possible once more.

I know a family where the teenage daughter has been self-harming for a while, and with the aid of a counsellor learned to do so in a safe and controlled fashion. But still, she’s harming herself. Or was, anyway. Since starting a job that’s allowing her control of some of her own money for the first time, and being told that she can’t allow her wounds to be seen by customers, she’s shown no inclination to damage herself. Presented with a stimulus which supports her independence, a behaviour which was damaging her has stopped. No need for months of therapy, a coaching intervention, or for her to be asked to love herself.

Change is the natural state of things. A lot of the time, we blinker it out. We have a calendar that is organised in cycles to encourage the idea that life happens in repetitive chunks, and perform the same activities in the same subdivisions to confirm that notion. Monday at 11, time to schedule the coming week. Tuesday at 4, Skype chat with a client. Thursday at 8, open bottle of red wine with spouse and watch The Shawshank Redemption on DVD.

There was a guest on Desert Island Disks recently who had a very different notion. Simon McBurney founded Theatre Complicite, and has built a worldwide reputation for daring and innovative live experiences for audiences. To the extent that he can, he approaches every minute with the attitude ‘You spent your while life preparing for this moment’…which sums up his outlook in a quote from another theatre great, David Mamet, in his screenplay for Spartan.

This sometimes means that McBurney cancels business meetings to spend time with his children, for instance. Meetings are a lot easier to schedule than kids. And it seems to help empty his head for more important matters – like recognising on first sight that the woman he was looking at was to be the one he spent his life with, at a point when he’d put aside the notion of a life partner. It’s a good example of my inclination to believe that the more effectively you sort out your mental hygiene, the easier it is to recognise a genuine intuition when one comes along.

Stories can help us realise that we’re misattributing the cause for the ills that afflict us, or mesh us within their comforting order. Get past a certain age and we’ll fess that our imaginary friend was absent when those biscuits were eaten, that we weren’t actually looking when we shut nan’s hand in the car door. Some linguistic spooks remain to haunt our thinking: we acted thus because of the recession, the way she looked at me, because someone was obsessed with Batman.

Cause and effect really isn’t that simple, and is always partial. That example earlier, about the teenage girl who no longer self harms? Many of those who really would advocate that therapy, coaching, or self-love is the answer are likely to believe that somehow their solution-of-choice was mysteriously administered, in some sort of implicit way. Same as there’s implicit meat content in communion wafers and wine, whether it’s believed to be really really there, or just sort of symbolically present, regarding which options there was a lot of argument a few centuries back.

Change happens constantly. Like Heraclitus said, you can’t step into the same river twice. And along with that it may be helpful to realise that, a lot of the time, what we’re doing doesn’t actually make a difference – and that if a difference is sought, then maybe best to look at what would naturally bring about the desired result and help that happen, whether or not we can claim credit for it, or present a bill when ‘it’ happens.

A new acquaintance, involved in professional training, related her sense of being scanned in a machine-like way by some of the NLPers she’s come across. I know what she means. ‘Checking signs of congruence. Mismatch alert! Reject output of this humanoid and proceed to next one.’ I’ve felt the same, when someone has attempted to reframe a sentence with no respect for the decades of personal history that made what was offered something appropriate to share. When I’ve seen a married couple on a DHE training express their desire to become Borg, the robot drones featured as bad guys in one of the Star Trek spin-offs. When a Bandler apprentice declares that he’s 86% of the way to downloading his mentor (he’s probably up to 93% since another NLP trainer shared that one with me…in an attempt to influence how I felt about the guy he was talking about).

And no, it doesn’t have to be like that. I know people with NLP expertise who go beyond dissecting someone’s language patterns and watching their eyes dart about and in some cases really do grok what others are about. Grok, you may or may not be aware, is a term from Robert Heinlein’s science fiction classic Stranger In A Strange Land, from which this definition comes: “Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience.”

There are times I’ve had that experience, before and after NLP training. And I’m conscious that NLP can often be an obstacle to it happening: it has been for me, anyway. While you’re noticing patterns of whatever sort, you’re some kind of dissociated. And yes, that is ‘some kind of’, since contra to much received wisdom, association and dissociation aren’t either/or options; they exist in a continuum. It’s possible to note what’s happening and how it’s unfolding while being part of the ongoing experience. And there are times when we are part of something larger, and resorting to toolkits from NLP or wherever else takes us away from the magic of the moment. Interestingly, two of those experiences are those that artists of all sorts often have difficulties depicting in whatever their medium is: sex and prayer. What’s happening subjectively and what goes on externally are out of synch. Both can be ‘about’ a sense of union that defies description or analysis.

This mismatch cropped up on my first NLP course, when we were invited to have a pretend meeting using a format called PEGASUS. I think there was a cheesy strapline involved, to the effect that your meetings would soar away. Flying horse, see? Anyway. We started – in the traditional group of three – sans any kind of format, and got on swimmingly (a word that popped up spontaneously, and again points to immersion). As soon as we used PEGASUS, the whole thing fell apart. So much so, that we laughed about it, and kept a good positive attitude about what we were being asked to do that PEGASUS was inhibiting.

That connects in another direction. I was hired to have input into the marketing of a training organisation. After I came out, someone asked ‘Was that the marketing meeting you were in? I could hear laughter.’ She said it in such a way that implied the marketing meeting was somewhere you’d not encounter such a phenomenon. Good thing I didn’t know beforehand. And the same applies with NLP. By suggesting (through inept training) that people ‘are’ visual or auditory etc; that there really are distinctions between capabilities, beliefs, identity and so forth, as laid out in a particular hierarchy; we condition people to experience arbitrary facets of others and not their rich wholeness.

The more you focus on those things you’ve been trained to spot (whether they exist or are fantasies), the less you pick up what’s actually happening in any situation. I’ve been working with someone lately, an amazing woman who has seen off two coaches – one of them retiring from the field after experiencing my client. It wasn’t until I pointed it out that she realised she wasn’t a coach herself, despite having spent a good wedge of money on finding out how to do that. Sure, she’s got some skills and knowledge that come from that world – but shoehorning them into the coaching model she was trained in distorted her natural brilliance, took away some of what makes her so wonderful in the first place.

I know, incidentally, that there are a lot of talented NLPers and coaches out there. Some of them are friends of mine. And I know too that you’ll find what you pay attention to. Increasingly though, I’m inclined to suspect that it’s an abuse of the core of what attention is – if that can ever be defined – to treat it as a tool that you point at happy things to make sure you’re happy. Along with that goes a notion that paying attention to what’s not working is indicative of negativity. To me, that’s a facile understanding of attention, treating it as just something else that can be programmed. And I’m interested not just in what’s good and what’s bad, but what’s there and especially in what doesn’t fit in any categories that I’ve come across. It’s through that exploration that my own story becomes a more rewarding one.

This reminded me of the principle of elegance that was an important part of one friend’s life. He’d have liked what I did in that situation: a small niceness that made the day a little better for someone without there having to be any big deal about it. (Whether he’d say the same about me devoting a blog to the non-incident is another matter.) Elegance as a consideration of conduct is interesting, and in that friend’s case manifested itself in a myriad details of the way he did things. It’s less about being thoughtful, than simply of going with the flow, when that flow is taking you somewhere pleasant.

Another instance cropped up when I visited friends living in a basement flat. We sat in the lounge, a hole showing through in the ceiling. It was only when I was readying to leave that my host asked why I didn’t draw attention to it. I told him I figured he and his wife were doubtless aware of its existence, and didn’t need me to remind them of it. Seems I was the only person who managed to refrain from commenting about the matter. Had they introduced the subject, I dare say I’d have joined in. But when we having a pleasant chat, why take a detour that in all likelihood would leave my hosts on a down?

All of this comes to mind with regard to something I learned from Michael Breen. People often talk about, and sometimes even demonstrate, the law of requisite variety: that is, the principle that behavioural flexibility gives you more choices within whatever context you’re operating in. Michael figured there was also something that he calls the principle of requisite intensity: a state can be so strong that it deflects any attempt to change it. He says that he ran this thought past Richard Bandler, who agreed with him.

Well now. Instances of this are common enough. Walk down a street and you can see people with their attention fixed on a glowing screen. Never mind the content of what’s on that box, it has a more potent presence in the environment than the people watching it. That’s pretty much the same situation Bandler recounts when he was working with catatonic patients: despite being silent and immobile, they had the power to influence the doctors and nurses around them, who lowered their voices so as not to wake up…the very people they wanted to shift from their comas.

OK, but where can we see this in practice? Well, one place to look is when behaviour changes naturally and spontaneously. Think, for instance, of what happens when people enter a cathedral or other sacred space. It’s not just received notions of spirituality as expressed by a particular culture that lead people to silence. Some speak of sacred architecture. It doesn’t have to exist in the form of a building. The same can happen in a forest clearing, by a mountain stream. Something draws out a particular response from us, and it’s pretty much universal.

I wonder if ritual is another context in which the intensity of the event itself shapes the response of participants. Which is paradoxical of course, since it’s those very participants who are performing the behaviours. Only…is it always that simple? There’s something about going to see a play, or a comedian, or a music gig, that helps determine how people act, above and beyond the quality of the performance itself. The presence of a stage and lighting is part of the picture – but only part. How people respond comes from somewhere we don’t often act. You could call it collective consciousness, Big Mind, whatever. What’s interesting is the universality of the experience, something shared.

Such communal experiences are fundamental to being human. A reminder that we are as one, despite our differences, egos set aside. And that’s valuable. NLP and other approaches to personal development are, well, about the personal. The individual will. And many approaches have methods of allowing the individual to explore the influence that others have, whether by exploring language patterns, family dynamics, social conditioning or whatever else. All well and good: we can learn a lot from that. Only, in doing so, I’ve seen people who like to believe that having…seen how The Matrix operates, to use one particularly grotesque version of this stance (watch out for those using the term ‘sheeple’ too)…they are somehow evolved beyond the need to be a member of a tribe, or even species.

Well, they’re not. And I can’t find a better way to parcel up these thoughts than with one borrowed from Robert Anton Wilson. Encountering a small group of people who were due to see him speak later that evening, he told them this was their chance to ask any question they liked. There was silence, until one of their number ventured to ask what Robert thought the purpose of life is. Hey, let’s get the small talk out of the way, huh? Unphased by the question, Wilson simply replied “To be the eyes and ears of God”.

Oh dear, there I am being judgmental again. Only…am I? Is it really the case in seeing others that I am perceiving my own shortcomings? Broadly speaking, I’d go along with that interpretation. Not wholly though: there are times you can just see something for what it is, through having been there yourself: recognising that a toddler is having trouble walk is merely an acknowledgement that they’re going through a developmental stage. Besides, that’s one of the functions mirror neurons serve: in giving us insight into how others are, some degree of recognition is inevitable, and who’s to say whether that’s perception or judgement?

There’s something I’ve been puzzling over for a while, and it’s tricky even to define what the issue is. Bear with me. Much of the literature of personal development is concerned with individual liberation. And that’s fantastic, and something I’d applaud. Until we recognise what we’re capable of individually, how can we truly say that we’re making free and informed choices about our lives?And that’s where we come across the flipside of this increase in personal capability…if we’re all self-determined souls going about our business, what happened to society?

We are social creatures. Have never been anything but. Only, when people set out after whatever they think they’ll find when they discover NLP, Osho, Druidry or whatever it might be, there’s a tendency to emphasise the self. There’s a reason it’s called personal growth and not anything to do with family or community. And that concerns me.

There’s a paradox here, or so it seems. You sign up for a course, and learn about how you’ve been conditioned by family, by society, by language. Whatever your paradigm deems to be the oppressor in this equation. And you acquire some tricks for spotting how that conditioning works. Lo and behold, you declare yourself free. At any rate, until you find out there’s another course offering even greater levels of freedom, since now you’re more aware you can perceive deeper levels of conditioning.

Rinse and repeat a few times, and what have you got? Something like this classic Life Of Brian scene. Typically, you don’t get the en masse experience of the ‘We are all individuals’ chorus. But after a few dozen people give you essentially the same riff…one that they’ve come across through having their previous conditioning partially exposed and some new beliefs and weirdness stuck in there without any indication that there’s more to it than a philosophy you can put on a t-shirt…

My most recent experience in this regard was with an outfit called The Template who are an offshoot of what was The Emin Foundation. Genuinely sweet people, but with a particular form of social pressure exerted that brings to mind Timothy Leary’s declaration he’d seen the same games being played in prisons, universities, and terrorist groups. First, a belief that the group is somehow apart from the population at large. In this case, there was a consensus that those in the room were ‘switched on’ in ways that people at large are not. Second, the use of techniques to exclude individuals within that group, and penalise them for behaviours which do not match the norms of this allegedly more evolved bunch. So, one guy’s contributions to the group, though superficially welcomed, were distanced by the others from the ideas that they put forward: clearly not as evolved as the others, in unspoken ways.

Same old same old. I’ve seen a particularly funny variation on the theme in a Quaker meeting. The idea there is that you remain in silence until God moves you to speak. So, ten minutes go by. Someone pipes up. Four minutes later, God speaks through someone else. And this time, He’s subtly disagreeing with what He said earlier through that first person. And so on. Rinse and repeat. I caught a gruesome version behind the scenes at a Bandler event, where someone in charge of the assisting team was belittling an older assistant for falling short one way or another.

Not all communication follows that pattern, thankfully. There are moments for all of us, when with particular friends, or at certain moments, the layers are peeled back and something else happens. Call it connection. You can’t bottle it though there are maybe some things that make it more likely to happen. Interestingly, they don’t include many of the rituals of NLP. The paraphernalia of matching and mirroring, of pacing language patterns and so forth, all of that is if anything more likely to create distance between you, if only because you’re going to be partially dissociated in your interaction wondering what technique to bung in next.

The terminally ill woman I met didn’t have any of that. Her disease had stripped her down to her essence, and what I found most powerful about that was how others were encompassed in her world and priorities. At a time when her own resources were depleted, she chose to lavish attention on those close to her. Which is something I’ll hold onto the next time I come across someone who claims to have achieved enlightenment but has left humanity in the process. Not, in such cases, that they’ve left humanity behind. No need to intellectualise about it though. Let Aretha put you right if you haven’t got it yet…

It’s an incident that I suspect I’ve recounted before, and it came to mind again thanks to the direction my meditations have taken me lately. Right now the meme that’s growing among the various communities who are partial to weekend workshops, retreats and the books and audio sets that accompany all that activity is love. Quite often it’s expressed as loving kindness. And I’m all in favour, while at the same time wondering what the people engaged in it all will be doing in five years time, when there’ll be a new hot meme – one, I hope, that’s just as beneficial as the love bug is.

And that’s where the incident with the biking bullies comes in. What motivated me to act as I did was not love, but a sense of injustice. And that starts to open up a way of looking at life that I believe has real value. Certainly, in looking through my own life I can see that justice is a thread running through the way that I feel, think, and respond across many contexts.

Justice is a domain that exists separate from love, and alongside it. I’m sure that with sophistry it’s possible to say that justice cannot exist without love, that it is merely a reflection of the reality of loving consciousness, and so forth. I’m not convinced. And if you go back in time, you’ll discover that other belief systems approach the matter similarly. Justice is one of the classical virtues according to Plato, and crops up in early European thought a lot. But careful: justice in those contexts often refers to the constraints of a given society’s legal framework, and I’m looking at something going beyond that.

Me as an 8 year old kid in Birmingham knew nothing of classical virtues, but felt the wrongness of being singled out and (in a small way) victimised. OK, so wrongness can be felt? Yes. And it’s a feeling that can prompt action to change the situation you’re experiencing to a more equitable one. Jazz innovator Miles Davis experienced a real shock when he started to play with touring bands. Like his fellow musicians, he was black. Unlike them, he had grown up in a wealthy family. Being barred from some southern venues, and restricted to using a side door for others, was something he’d never experienced before. His response to segregation earned him a reputation for arrogance.

When Rosa Parks got on a bus and took a seat that her colour excluded her from, who knows whether what she felt was injustice, the justice of what should have been, or simply that she saw the reality that a white man’s words could not physically prevent her from sitting down. Whatever the truth, the consequences of her simple action led to major changes for the lives of black Americans.

If love is something that’s eternally present, maybe a sense of justice and the experience of injustice is what draws us to a better future.  This is where I suspect I differ from the fully loved-up: while I can and do perceive love in many forms here and now, I also acknowledge that for many people on the planet we share, life falls short of the experience it could be. You know the litany: more food than people, institutionalised sexism and racism and other oppressions, and so forth. Those experiences change when people respond to the call of justice, or the feeling of injustice.