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.

I’ve got friends who paint, and who create prints and cards. And in addition to the usual round of art and craft shows that they get to exhibit at, something new has come up. Some enterprising person has taken it on herself to organise such events at venues and times they wouldn’t normally happen. In a pub of an evening. At a social club at a weekend. And they’ve carefully chosen a complementary gathering of some of the best makers in the area. As well as people who produce jewellery, bags, ceramics and so on, there’s a woman who makes exquisitely good food and does a pop-up restaurant that happens once a month or so. So, while you’re browsing and shopping you can eat some great food. And, there’ll be people to do Indian Head Massage, read Tarot cards for you, and play music while it’s all happening.

What’s interesting is how cohesive these events are. I’ve been to a few and made some new friends. In the process, I’ve discovered a community that I didn’t know existed. And Lindsey was telling me how it started…

There’s a school in these parts. One that’s got a bit of a reputation for doing things differently, or at any rate had for a decade or so with one headteacher in charge. People wanted their children to attend the school not just because it got good academic results. What mattered more was the ethos of the place. It was a school that had what’s called a child-centred approach. It’s a term I wonder about, as I do when I come across ‘flavour-grown vegetables’ in a supermarket. What other criteria would you use for vegetables than their taste? Who should be the focus of activities at a school if not the children? And I remind myself I live in a world where shops are pleased by the fact that they offer 3 or 4 sorts of apple when someone I know inherited a 3-volume encyclopedia illustrated with full colour plates of hundred of different kind of apple.

In this school, there were no doors. That is, there were holes in the wall for children to pass through freely, and they were not blocked. Toys and resources were shared between classes, and children would go from one class to another, mingling with children of other ages, playing as they did, to find what they were looking for, or enjoy something unexpected. Everyone agreed that there was something special about the place, and that explains why such a diverse group of parents wanted their children to benefit from it. There’d be the kids of middle class people in caring professions with a hippyish disposition. Sons and daughters of people in the local Asian communities. Children from the neighbourhood who’d heard what a great place it was and agged their parents into securing them a place there and not elsewhere.

Lindsey told me that the kids who’d been through that school when that particular head was there are now between their mid twenties and mid thirties. She’s heard that at least one of them is involved in human rights work. Others are doing something creative. A lot of them seem to be content, whatever it is they’re doing. And one of them is the woman who is behind the craft events that have popped up in the area, and which are gathering momentum with every new show.

All of this is further confirmation of something I came across a while back, and intuively seems right. The notion being that the most effective way to change your life for the better is to be around people who are likewise living in that way. Studies I’ve come across indicate that peer groups are just as much an influence on children as parenting, which will be a disappointment for those who love having their family histories probed and can’t get enough of dubious ancestors. Working with homeless people was confirmation that peer pressure can influence people…negatively more often than not in that sector, though I am aware of projects where the reverse is true. Really, who needs to spend thousands on personal development courses and paraphernalia when the simplest solution to a happier life seems to be to hang around with people already leading one?

What I have been up to this festive season is connecting with people who matter to me. Spent a lovely day in Sheffield with friend Charlotte and her awesome kids. There’s nothing like younger children for keeping you on their toes, and in this case Corben and Elijah were accompanied by older brother Warren. Oh what fun we had in Wetherspoons, as I told the boozers, “This is my lad. He likes it both ways. Anyone who’s got a problem with that can take it up with him.” OK, Warren isn’t actually my son, and is hetero as far I and his girlfriend know, but I feel that such playful goading will serve him well now that he’s of drinking age. And I had bought him a burger and Coke, so wanted to get my money’s worth.

We wandered round a windswept and water-featured town centre, and spent an entertaining afternoon ducking in and out of charity shops. My top buy was in a remainder bookshop, where for £1.99 I acquired a proper shop counter bell, the sort you’d ring to get customer service. It’s an absolute delight, and now sits beside me on my desk, ready to be dinged when I complete a piece of writing, have a brainwave, or want to exit a loop of checking emails and visiting websites. For those of you who want that to be translated into NLPese from English, consider this: submodalities happen on the outside, not just the inside. And having an awesome dinger that rings in celebratory fashion is a great way of polishing off a writing strategy with a cool and calorie-free reward. I’ve lost two stone in the last three months, and adding the dinger to my repertoire will give me even greater incentive to stay healthy.

Another night I got to catch up with pal Gavin, the oldest cybergoth in town, who as well as bringing fine cheeses was up for roadtesting some of the ideas I’ll be showcasing this coming Friday in the workshop I’ll be running at Antenna in Nottingham. That put me onto a track which has developed one of the concepts in an interesting new direction that I’ve been testing since. Please do check out the details, and get in touch if there’s anything you’d like to know. There’s a simplicity at the core of this new material that I like and trust.

One other change has been to find a new image for the screen of this computer. The one I did have was great, but I felt it was time for something new. I settled on a gorgeous image of Uluru, a truly magical place that was one of the highlights of my visit to Australia in 2009. One way and another, Uluru captures all kinds of feelings and concepts that are special to me, and I’m enjoying seeing it on a regular basis. In fact, I think I’ll have another look now…and then play with my ding-a-ling one more time…

On the other side of the coin, my book that was published in 2008 as “Meta-Magick: The Book of Atem” originally made absolutely no reference to “magick” and the working title was “The Book of Atem.” Having found a home at an occult publisher, the editors figured that it needed “magick” somewhere in the title (and NLP, as well). After a bit of editorial back and forth, the official title became “Meta-Magick: The Book of Atem: Achieving New States of Consciousness through NLP, Neuroscience and Ritual.” Similarly, my working title for “Brain Magick” was “The Way of Woohoo” (though I do discuss “magick” at moderate length in that one). There’s also an e-book, a popular item on my website and on amazon.com, called “The Book of Exhilaration and Mastery” that teaches invocation techniques without invoking the M-word.

So, I’m flexible about what we call this kind of consciousness technology. I’m happy to work with my publishers on different marketing strategies and I’m okay with title changes as long as the content of the book remains what I intended. Most labels that we apply will sell in some ways and limit in others, and that includes NLP, science, consciousness, and meditation along with much else.

While my bank account might benefit from mass marketing, I’m not at all sure that’s the best thing for these books. Some people are ready for these ideas – the books were written because there was an audience waiting for them – and a lot of people are not. Maybe that will change one day – one can hope – in the meantime I’m very happy indeed if even a few people get something useful from my work.

And with all of that, magick and NLP are just one part of what I do. I prefer to write fiction. I’m just now finishing up a (sort of) sequel to my novel The Great Purple Hoo-Ha (two volumes, Mandrake of Oxford, 2010) and have other novels in mind after that.

You don’t come across as someone who’s going to drone on about representational systems in front of a flipchart. What distinguishes your NLP trainings from those of Trainer X, or even Trainer RB?

I take the position that there’s not a whole lot to lecture about in NLP. You learn it by observing and practicing. There’s no substitute for that. When I teach an NLP course, it’s about the exercises and we start in right away. I put a lot of emphasis on calibration and sensory acuity skills and perhaps a bit less on learning techniques as recipes or knowing the names of every single meta-model or Milton-model case. I’m very concerned that, rather than getting their heads stuffed full of terminology and theory, participants come away with real skills that are anchored to real life situations.

Somehow, in my mind, having fun is inextricably mixed up with that process. I’m sure there are people who can come up with all sorts of reasons to learn things they don’t enjoy learning. Screw that. I think we all learn better and more permanently when it’s anchored to fun.

While I teach Meta-Magick workshops all over the world, I only teach the NLP courses here at my studio in upstate New York. We’re a couple hours travel time from the big city; it’s fairly rural here and as a result I probably get a few less participants that I might if I were in New York City or London. That’s a good thing. Working in small groups can be very intense and a lot of fun, too. In most NLP trainings you watch a demonstration of an exercise, then you grab a partner and go off to a corner of the room to practice. A trainer or assistant might or might not check in on you to see how you’re doing. With my smaller groups we do it a little differently, with some exercises practiced in a round-robin fashion where you get to observe not only my demonstration, but at least several other examples of practice, too. And I get to observe everybody, all the time. In short, participants probably get to experience a wider variety of individual responses to each exercise and they get quite a bit of personal attention from me.

The next trainings here will start in late March. Registration and info can be found here: http://www.hawkridgeproductions.com/events/nlptraining.html

A lot of your work is predicated on research of mirror neurons. To what extent are you using them as a convenient paradigm, a concept that helps get ideas across in the same way that you packaged a magic workshop as ‘metaphoric reframing’? And what would you do in the unlikely event of mirror neuron research being discredited?

In Brain Magick, I state up front that the neuroscience I cite is for the purpose of building operating metaphors. It’s no secret that I’m a science geek – but I’m the kind of science geek who understands that science is about theory, not immutable fact. The exercises in the book are designed as experiments that readers can perform for themselves. Test them out and decide for yourself if mirror neurons are a good explanation. I hope that readers will engage in the process of science themselves and draw their own conclusions and create their own theories.

Anyway, the theory that I outline in the book is based on what appears to be innate modeling functions of the brain. The research now implicates mirror neurons as well as the brain’s cortical midline structures and “default network” as areas that contribute to this modeling process. Mirror neurons help us to model motor function, while the cortical midline structures help us to model and predict psychological functions. However, ultimately it doesn’t matter to me if these are in fact the parts of the brain involved – just whether or not we can perform these experiments and notice that modeling process in action. We can easily replace “mirror neurons” with “motor function modeling” if we need to, though presently I think mirror neurons are a more compelling, interesting and fun idea. And the current theory allows us to design some damned interesting exercises – but I’ll encourage readers to test for yourselves whether the theory predicts the outcome that they get.

I’m really impressed with your proposal for raising the bulldog spirit here in the UK. What would be your dream consultancy job, and what ideas have you got for it?

You know, I did my share of corporate consulting and PR work back in the 1990s and these days I’m much happier writing my own books, working with individual clients and teaching classes. However, I’ve always been fascinated with Hakim Bey’s idea of Poetic Terrorism (http://sniggle.net/Manifesti/poeticTerrorism.php) and Robert Anton Wilson’s thoughts on Guerilla Ontology (http://www.subgenius.com/new4web/dynasormisc/ONTOLOGY.HTML ). So if some organization would like to fund a series of confusing and poetic acts, I would like to suggest a few.

Buying hookers for right-wing politicians here in the USA (or the UK, if it applies). Find out what they like and what services they prefer and set them up. There could be all kinds of fun and exciting consequences to this, including opportunities to expose hypocrisy. However there’s a more important reason to do this: I figure that if they’re busy with hookers, they’ll have less time to spend screwing the rest of us.

Flying military helicopters low over the homes of US Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske and Drug Enforcement Administration head Michele Leonhart and bombing their yards with fifty pounds of high grade marijuana. Okay, this might be a waste of good weed, but it would scare the pants off these people who order helicopter and SWAT team raids on their fellow citizens – and it would have a kind of poetic symmetry.

Here in the USA as we get closer to the holidays, homeowners compete to create the most elaborate holiday displays. These are mostly judeo-christian in theme (if we count Santa Claus as having religious affiliation). A major component of these displays are lighted plastic lawn figures, translucent, injection-molded plastic shapes of elves, saviors, wise men, reindeer, giant candles and crosses with lightbulbs inside. I propose the creation of a vast range of other entity-related lighted plastic lawn figures that might include deities from Hindu, Norse, and Haitian mythologies, as well as Lovecraft’s elder gods, J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, Looney Tunes characters, ridiculous politicians, religious leaders with big hats, and Lady Gaga, just for the hell of it. At first these would be distributed free of charge, but as the competitive nature of holiday decorations kicks in, lighted plastic lawn figures will increase in diversity, as hopefully will the thoughts and beliefs of those displaying and viewing them.

One piece of guerilla ontology I’ve promoted for some years is the QYFJ meme. The short version is that corporations have come to rule our lives in many ways. These corporations may provide employment for many people, but usually on terms that the people find distasteful. Most people hate their jobs and if they really examined what their employers were trying to do, in many cases they would find that the employers’ values and goals are contrary to their own. Some of these corporations are ruining the economy. Some are polluting and destroying the environment. Some are corrupting our governments with huge amounts of money. All of these corporations depend on employees being tricked to sell their time – parts of their lives they will never get back – for a finite amount of money, while corporate profits have no upper limit. The solution is – everyone who knows in their heart that the corporation they work for is in any way evil: Quit Your Fucking Job. If everyone did this at the same time, it would bring the corporations to a halt and, with some intent and effort, transform the way we conduct our business and our lives. This is explored more fully in The Great Purple Hoo-Ha. To further spread the QYFJ meme, please purchase and distribute many copies of these books.

The Prime Minister David Cameron recently called for a restoration of Britain’s ‘bulldog spirit’? If you were hired as a consultant to implement that project, how would you go about it?

I’m not very big on nationalism, but I’m happy to serve as a memetic mercenary and offer some suggestions.

The essence of using a symbol of this type is simple enough: create a state of excitement and then anchor it by showing the symbol. In the spirit of NLP, we might explore governments that have successfully used animal totems to influence national spirit. Here in the USA, for instance, our totem animal is the Bald Eagle, a large, contentious, well-armed bird that can hunt its own food but prefers to feed off carrion. I’ll leave it to your imagination to decide how successful the use of the eagle totem has been toward defining the national character and, rather, focus on how it has been anchored and used:

Official ritualization. The eagle went through a vetting process, being chosen in preference to Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion, the turkey, and was granted its status as National Symbol by legislative bodies of various sorts, via a variety of official rituals. Has the bulldog been similarly appointed and anointed? Figure that the more the big-wigs talk about the bulldog, the more apparent importance it may acquire. Even if it has been commemorated many times, there’s always room for more bulldog-themed statue dedications, charitable fund kick-offs and battleship launches. If big, bulldog-themed rallies can be arranged, so much the better. Pump up some woohoo and show the dog.

Images on money. In the USA, eagles appear on many of our coins and bills. Everybody likes money (except communists, anarchists and others who oppose the national spirit) and most people attach strong feelings to it (even communists). Adding images of eagles ensures that people will be looking at those images with feelings of longing, happiness, reward and so forth. Perhaps if you can replace the old man on your £50 note with a noble canine, it might raise esteem and desire for bulldogs.

Narrow focus. We usually don’t mention that the eagle feeds off roadkill and, instead, talk a lot about how majestic it looks flying overhead or posing for its portrait at the mint. Similarly, and I suppose this is largely understood but warrants a mention, you might want to minimize the ball-licking, carpet-soiling, drooling, leg-humping aspects of the bulldog and instead get a few good images of it behaving properly. These can be adapted to an official Bulldog/UK logo for use in:

Ancillary marketing. Specifically branded Bulldog/UK t-shirts, shopping bags, small cars, undergarments, and Bulldog-branded sex toys can lead the way. In effort to bring the bulldog image everywhere, stores and media outlets can be filled with bulldog-themed products and stories, both branded and non-branded. Stuffed animals, ribbon-winning bulldog photo calendars, bulldog holiday costumes, and so forth. Partnering with famous designers, artists and celebrities adds another level of woohoo to be anchored. Here in the USA, we love nature specials about eagles. I’m sure that nature and historical documentaries about bulldogs would also help raise bulldog awareness, especially if they can avoid too much drool footage.

Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a turkey for your national spirit? They tend to scratch their butts on the Persian carpet a bit less than bulldogs.

When people think of magic, they tend to go for the ookey-spooky images which popular culture has equipped us with. I’ve started to realise there are examples of invocation and evocation everywhere. Cheerleaders at football games are there to ‘raise spirits’. People gather to see a comedian, who is someone who invokes laughter from them. Much of what’s called magic is a way of changing state, often in groups. What are some of your favourite examples of this in everyday life?

Just as Erickson characterized hypnosis as directed use of our natural behaviors and tendencies, we can describe magick as conscious use of naturally-occurring behaviors. “Invocation” describes the techniques we use to draw qualities or entities into us; “evocation” is defined as the techniques we use to externalize/objectify states and entities. While these are classic operations in ritual magick and religion, we can easily notice them as everyday activities, processes that seem almost universal from individual to individual and across cultures. In magick they are used consciously as a means to understand, unify and integrate the elements of our psyches.

I think rock concerts are wonderful examples of invocation on a mass level. I covered the Woodstock ’94 festival as a journalist, an event which was a great big mess that bordered on the edge of “riot” for a couple days. On the last day of the festival, Peter Gabriel took the stage. When he arrived, 350,000 people were pushing and shoving each other, throwing mud, and being generally uncivil. Within minutes of playing “Biko,” Gabriel had the whole crowd calm, joyously singing together and lighting candles. It was a wonder to experience how one person (and his band) could shift state for that many people, that quickly. Awesome example of invocation.

In terms of evocation, I have a lot of fun watching how individuals and media sources perceive and describe various phenomena as entities and relate to them as such. Right now we’re having a showdown in the USA between “the 1%” and “the 99%” or “Wall Street” and “the people.” Of course, there are no such things as any of these entities – it’s really just a bunch of individual people – but they become useful delineations in the process of social change. We also have a related situation here in which we are debating whether or not corporations should be treated legally as individual people. If our courts continue to rule that corporations have the same rights as individuals, then the courts have performed evocation.

You got to know and work with Robert Anton Wilson, whose books have shaped my thinking in positive ways. What did you learn from your time with him above and beyond what he wrote?

Bob Wilson was always a treasure trove of information. He had encyclopedic knowledge on a wide variety of subjects and he had a very unique way of processing that information and drawing connections between diverse sources. In person, conversation could sometimes be very much like reading his books – full of “Wow! I didn’t know that!” and “Aha!” moments. Along with many personal conversations, letters, phone calls and e-mail, I got to attend a significant number of his lectures and workshops. As a result, I’d be hard pressed to list all the information that I learned from Bob that could not be found in his writing. Subject matter included, but was not limited to, psychology, physics, tarot, the eight circuit brain model, James Joyce, general semantics, ritual magick, hypnosis, books, movies, and secret societies.

One piece that he used to talk about in person but that I don’t think ever made it to a book was his idea about “the evolutionary value of stupidity.” In The Illuminati Papers he argued for the abolition of stupidity. In later years, he came to accept stupidity as having a function. In short, the stupid people force the rest of us to be much smarter. We have to adapt. A frequently-cited example was the stupidity that enacted prohibition against various drugs – which forced those with an interest in evolving consciousness and altered states to develop new and different means to change their brains, including electronic brain machines, hypnosis and meditation explorations, and new, legal drugs, among much else.

More important to me than the information (which was pretty important nonetheless!) was exposure to his attitude and behavior relating to various aspects of life. He embodied an attitude of curiosity, optimism and intellect. He lived with great humor and died with grace. The last e-mail I received from him, about two days before he passed away, was a joke. He never acquired much wealth from his accomplishments, but left us a legacy of paradigm-shifting wisdom.

Over dinner one evening in the mid-’90s, Bob told me about the presentations he was giving with Richard Bandler and how much fun he was having with that. He encouraged me to check out the show. Alas, I never did get to one of the events where both Richard and Bob did their shtick, but on Bob’s recommendation I went to a Bandler seminar soon after and re-entered the NLP world. I’d taken a practitioner course in the early ’80s and then didn’t go to any seminars for many years. So credit Bob Wilson, for good or ill, with my continued involvement in NLP.

There’s something powerful and deeply interesting going on in a comedy performance. A group of people gather in a darkened room in the hope that someone facing them will change their state in a particular way. They come to laugh. And in laughing, they release tension. Let down barriers and allow themselves to recognise commonality with the comedian, who will often be confronting taboos in the way they talk. And because the audience laughs along with their fellow gig-goers, there’s a recognition that – different as we are, perplexing as we may find one another – we are alike in this.

I attended the show with a couple of friends, and my mother, who was staying with me for a few days. It was lovely to introduce mum to a couple of the people in my life I particularly value, and I thought a comedy show following a curry together would make for a good night. And it did. And it did more than that. And more than that, too.

The first half of the show was a celebration of the word ‘cunt’. Not one that I’m given to using in my mother’s presence, or with some other people. Interestingly, some of the women I love can’t get enough of the word ‘cunt’. I know more men who have a problem with the syllable than women. Though, certainly where mum is concerned, it has never been something we’ve talked about. Call me stick-in-the-mud, but the subject has just never come up.

What was lovely though, was how mum – now 70 – enjoyed the show just as much as anyone else there. We guffawed, winced, howled, slapped ourselves, and otherwise showed all the signs of people having an interesting time. We had a fine old time, one and all. And it was lovely to know that it was an experience I could share with mum without it being difficult. It was something we touched on when we talked about it. Being English, it wasn’t something we dwelled on, but mum’s take on it was “it wasn’t like I hadn’t heard the word before”, which was reasonable enough. And no more needed to be said.

Out of the stories that Kitson told, a theme emerged, and at some point it crystallised just as in a Richard Bandler seminar there’ll come a point when he comes out straight and makes it clear what he’s talking about. For Daniel it was his observation that people have a way of looking for ways in which those who stake a claim to a particular belief or ideology fall short of living it to the full. You’ll have seen the sort of thing: a confirmed two Big Macs a day diner pours scorn on a professed vegetarian because the latter has eaten honey, thereby exploiting bees and demonstrating monstrous hypocrisy. I’ve done it, though maybe not in that context, and I’m pretty confident in stating that you have, too.

As Kitson rightly expounded, it’s pretty much impossible to be faithful to a given belief system because the belief system hasn’t been constructed yet that can cope with the variety of human behaviour across time. Which some of you will have already noted is essentially another way of stating, as per Korzybski, that the map is not the territory. Only – believe me – it was a much more potent experience hearing it from a deeply funny man who’d worked it out for himself than quoted by some smartarse who encountered it in a set of seminar notes.

There are times when being able to draw attention to the inconsistencies of a worldview are useful. I remember as a child being taunted by a couple of older kids, using that debating style favoured by the under-tens of “you’re the odd one out because…” — at which point some character defect is helpfully pointed out, all the better for you to surmount it with the assistance of therapy in adulthood. Having been exposed to a good few rounds of this second rate version of provocative therapy (I suspect my accusers weren’t trained by Frank Farrelly), I reeled from their character dissection before reversing the discourse, telling them “I’m the odd one out because I’m not picking on someone”. At which point they shrugged their shoulders, got back onto their Chopper bikes, and rode away. Result. I suspect this response owed less to youthful NLP expertise than my love of Mad magazine’s regular feature Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.

But the feeling of one-upmanship I experienced there, however useful it was in turning the tables, is a solitary thing. It’s about boosting the individual, setting them apart. And that’s a small victory compared to the feeling of unity that comes from allowing a comedian, or whoever else, to dissolve a group’s barriers and reveal the commonality that we share through exposing the fundamental frailties that we have, each and every one of us.