interview with richard bandler in ireland 2005 1€¦ · volume 1 or "frogs into...

interview with richard bandler in ireland, 2005

© RICHARD BANDLER & www.nlp-institut.chlättenstrasse 18 ch-8914 aeugst am albis

t +41 (0)1 761 08 38 f +41 (0)1 761 08 09 [email protected] and quoting from this article only with written permission from RICHARD BANDLER

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IF IT IS IMPOSSIBLE YOU HAVE TO DO ITHYPNOTICALLY …

In 1973 "The Structure of Magic" was published.

RONNIE: Was that the first book that had NLP in the title?

It actually didn’t have NLP in the title.

RONNIE: Oh yeah, I mixed it up with something else.

THE NAME NLP

I think NLP volume 1 was the first book with NLP in the title. Either NLPvolume 1 or "Frogs into Princes", I forget which. I did lots of workshops be-fore that and called them NLP. It’s funny, but initially most people didn’t likethe term NEURO LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING. I, coming from a back-ground of working with computers liked it just fine. Because I like the ideaof programming things. Too many people associated it with brainwash, thatwould say I brainwash computers for a living, I don’t. Every time you write aprogram for a computer you give him greater capability. It has greaterfreedom. Some computers are capable of developing photographs andprinting them, but if you don’t have a program for that you don’t have thechoice of doing that.

With human beings that have programs that are like to spell well and makeart and over the years I demonstrated hundreds and hundreds andhundreds of times, you can take somebody with no artistic capability andno belief in themselves and their ability to do art, and hand thempaintbrushes, put them into trance, stick a few strategies in them andsuddenly they’re painting like somebody that’s been painting for years. Andthe same thing is true about playing music.

PROGRAMMING AND TEACHING CHILDREN

The same thing is true with children about learning. They hand me childrenwith learning disabilities and then I hand them back half an hour later andthey can spell and do math.

Even JOHN LA VALLE's son who is now a very good mathematician, whenhe was in school, they couldn’t teach him to do long divisions. I rememberwhen he was a kid, I spent 15 minutes with him and he turned around andlooked at me and he said “do you realize that you taught me in 15 minuteswhat they could not teach me to do in years?”. And I said “well, yeah, Iunderstand that quite well.”

RONNIE: Do you remember how you did it or what exactly you didwith him?

Well, what I did with him is, I taught him to begin with there is no suchthing as long division, that’s an artificial concept. That it is really multiplica-tion and subtraction. Those are real things, there is no such thing as longdivision, that’s an artificial concept. It’s the name of multiplying and sub-tracting. As soon as you understand it, it becomes a lot easier to do it.There’s lots of concepts in math that are really conglomerations of things.And some things are done consciously and some are done unconsciously.Multiplication is an unconscious activity. Addition is a conscious mind




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activity. And once you understand those, the way in which you approachthem is entirely different.

SPELLING

Like spelling is a conscious mind activity, you have to make pictures of theword and copy them down. If you don’t make pictures of the word then youcan’t spell words that aren’t spelled phonetically. Most things in Germanare pretty phonetic but most things in English aren’t. You can’t spell theword "caught" phonetically. C A U G H T? I don’t think so, it’s just not gonnahappen. In fact you can’t even spell the word "phonetics2 phonetically.

RONNIE: A friend from the United States sent me a letter air male MA L E. And it wasn’t just a joke.

Laughing

RONNIE: He was an Oceanographer at Scripps Institute in San Diego.He was just kind of weak with his orthography.

NAMING THE FIELD – THE BEGINNINGS OF NLP

RONNIE: But at what time did you decide that you wanted to givewhat you did a name like NEURO LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING? Iunderstand that at first you didn’t … you just started modellingpeople.

Well, originally I was almost against the idea, because I saw that there wereall these different schools of psychotherapy. And the last thing I wanted tobe was a school of psychotherapy. I took things from everybody that wassuccessful and modelled them and put them in the same bag of tricks. Tome it was what worked worked and what didn’t work wasn’t worth defen-ding. 35 years ago all everybody worried about was who had the rightapproach. Now, the crazy part about this is that none of them could predictwith any one whether they would be able to help them or not. I mean, if aphobic walked in the door, the odds of somebody not being able to helpthem were astronomical. If people were depressed, it didn’t matter what theproblem was, odds were you wouldn’t get any help at all. In fact they did a10 year study and found out that people on the waiting list had a betterchance of being helped than people that went through psychotherapy.

So it was not important to me initially. Initially I was resisting the idea ofnaming things, because I knew that as soon as I did that people would go"I’m a this" or "I’m a that". Eventually I hit the point where I decided that Ifound my own field. Having come from a background in philosophy I knewthat at one time there weren’t a lot of fields, it was just philosophy. Prettysoon there was biology and then there was mathematics and all these fieldsgrew out of it. And then they started combining them together and thenthey had molecular biology and organic chemistry.

THE DIFFERENCE TO PSYCHOTHERAPY – A LEARNING MODEL

My approach of things is not an illness approach. And most of psycho-therapy is based on a medical model where you first diagnose what’swrong with somebody. And then once you justify what’s wrong with them,you can justify not being able to help them. And the model that I use isentirely different, it’s a learning model. I figure the reason we can’t helppeople is because we don’t know what to do. And if we find anybody that’s




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gotten through anything, we can help other people to get through it. And itdoesn’t matter whether it was done by a therapist or if somebody just stum-bled on it accidentally, that in so far as we can get people to do the samemental activities, we can get a lot of the same results.

DEVELOPING THE PHOBIACURE

When I started out and I did the phobia project, the main reason I pickedphobias was that it is so measurable. You know, you took somebody thatwas phobic of an elevator and you stuffed him in an elevator and theyscreamed bloody murder. And if you sticked him in the elevator and hewent "ho hum" it seemed to be immensely demonstrateble. And this aimedto me that that’s where we should start. A lot of psychiatrists told me that"you shouldn’t mess with phobics because you really can’t help them andit’s based on their childhood and yada yada yada yada…" But my approachto things was very simple, I just put an ad in the newspaper. Anybody thathad a severe phobia and got over it, no matter how they got over it that Iwould pay them 100 bucks and sit down and talk with them. The first thing Ihad to do was to weed out the liars. And that’s not that hard to do, therewas just a lot of people that wanted the money. But there was a lot of peo-ple that you could tell that they had been immensely afraid of somethingand they all told roughly the same story, where they hit the point that theyjust got fed up with it. And they looked at themselves and they decided theway they looked, was foolish. They were tired of being foolish and it alwayshad the domain of where they saw themselves. And when they saw them-selves being stupid, and they still would see themselves in an airplanebeing stupid, or in an elevator being stupid, suddenly the stimulus wasthere but the response was different. So the very first approach to dealingwith phobias was based on that.

THE UPGRADED PHOBIACURE – NHR-STYLE

Then I found out that there were cases that I really had trouble with. Forexample if someone is afraid of making pictures of themselves, the wholething would fall apart. And the first time I had someone who had a phobiaof seeing themselves in a mirror, I went "ooooh". I know a psychologistwould have gone "oh no, this is terrible, cause we don’t have a cure for it".But to me it asked a really good question and the question is if the way inwhich you’re approaching helping somebody isn’t gonna work, then youhave to open up a whole new domain.

So when I asked them where their fear started, you know where was thefirst part in your body the fear started, they said it started in their mind. Isaid I’m not talking about mentally, I’m talking about physically. And theysaid it started at the top of their head and it went down in their chest, andthen I said: "And then what happened?" – "And then it just keeps building."And when they said building, they turned their hand in a gesture rotatingforward. So I literally told them, I said "alright, what I want you to do is todo the same thing, just start at the end. Rotate the fear in the opposite direc-tion. And then spew it out at the top of the head where it went". And I hadthem do that five or six times, and then they were physically unable to beafraid. Now since then I worked with tons and tons of fears, phobias are myspeciality.




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CHEMISTRY - THE BASIS OF EVERYTHING

Being able to make fear go away is not that hard a thing when you ap-proach it from a mechanical standpoint. To me at the end everything boilsdown to chemistry. Chemistry is the foundations of all mechanics. And themechanics of human beings are that we do certain mental activities and weproduce certain chemical effects. Some of those effects are called depres-sion, some are called schizophrenia. But even schizophrenia’s a big wordthat covers a whole bunch of topics. Some of the schizophrenics I hadcouldn’t tell the difference between fantasies that is things that they createdin their mind and things that actually occurred. And the answer to how todo that is I just asked people that could do it, how did they do it? And Ifound out the difference and taught the schizophrenics how to do it andthen they weren’t crazy anymore.

THE BASICS OF RICHARD'S CAREER

My whole career has been really based on two things:

1. One I have an intrinsic belief in human beings and their ability to learn.Almost every single client I had over the years had been given up on byeverybody. Nobody comes to me first, just one person yet. One person andthey watched their boss going to therapy for years and getting worse everyweek and had read one of my books in college and decided they didn’twanna get worse. But other than that one woman, everybody else had beenthrough everything. They had been through psychoanalysis, electric shocktreatment, drug treatments. They’d been to rehab clinics, they’d been toeverything under the sun. And in the end, when everybody gives up onthem, that’s when they send them to me.

2. But the one thing that I have that other people don’t have is that I’malways willing to try whatever it takes. And with some schizophrenics I hadto be crazier than they would to get them out the wood. The story thateverybody tells of how I took the Jesus Christ person and dragged them outand nailed him to a cross, actually I didn’t even have to take him outside, itwas the sight of the hammer and the nails it really took. I had a couple ofbig black guys dressed up as Roman soldiers that started dragging himoutside and I did it on Good Friday, just to be sure. And he kept saying"what’s going on?" and I kept saying "well, it’s Good Friday, good for mebut not so good for you". Cause in the end, when you want people to besane and in touch with reality, the easiest thing to alter is reality. And ifpeople are talking to the devil, I’m getting a laser and making a devil.People hear voices out of a wall, I put speakers into the wall sockets. And ifpeople are depressed, I wanna know how they do it. Cause if I find out howthey do it, I can get them to do anything else and they won’t be depressed.And it does in fact change their biochemistry.

LABELING INSTEAD OF HELPING

We used to call manic depressives manic depressives and now we call thembipolar. I’m not sure why we changed the name of them, but it’s still thesame phenomena. Well, psychologists were looking for a better name sothey knew what to identify. I’m still looking for a way to getting these peo-ple happy. I found out that most people end up in mental hospitals becausethey’re miserable. And their misery takes on all kinds of forms. From hebo-phrenia where they hallucinate floridly reality that doesn’t exist, to peoplethat are just miserable, full of depression or afraid of all kinds of things. Ithink that agoraphobics are much worse off than schizophrenics cause at




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least schizophrenics can go outside and terrorize people. Obsessive com-pulsives can call their therapists on the phone and aggravate them, butagoraphobics have to stay home. And it’s a very horrible thing. Some ofthem get to the point where they can only stay in one room in their house.And if all we can do is get a name for these people and tell them how hope-less their life is gonna be, I don’t think we’ve accomplished anything.

I think the most important thing for people in the business of education tobe is courageous. And look at the worst case scenarios as the best chancefor us to learn. That’s why I’ve always taken the worst clients, the oneseverybody has given up on, educationally handicapped kids, these are whatI want. I want the ones that nobody can teach. Give me your hyperactivekids, and I’ll have them meditating inside of an hour.

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

To me whatever it is that’s supposed to be impossible, usually turns out tobe simple, if you approach it in the right way. You have to ask the rightquestions, and you have to provide the right opportunities. Thus given theright context, every human being will learn. If people could survive theholocaust, people can get through anything. I mean people lived in horrible,horrible situations, of depravity and starvation, watching their friends beingslaughtered, and came out the other side. Certainly we should get peoplethat are a little depressed to come out the other side. To me, I always putthings in that perspective. I worked with holocaust victims. And the storiesare terrible.

But what we have to realize is that the best thing about the past is that itis over. And the best thing about the future, we have no idea how good itcan be.

LICENCED TO HELP – LEGALLY OR ILLEGALLY

RONNIE: Did you work a lot with schizophrenics and depressives?I thought in the United States there are a lot of laws and if you arenot a therapist you’re not even allowed to see those kind of clients.

The funny thing about people that have been given up on, and I have tocome straight out and tell you that my greatest allies when I was workingwere psychiatrists. Because with a lot of them their heart was in the rightplace. They may not know what to do, but at least they knew they didn’t. Somost of the clients I got were referred to me by psychiatrists. Or the psy-chiatrist would drag me to where they were. And under their supervisionyou can do just about anything. I have to admit sometimes what I was sug-gesting scared the hell out of them. Because they were "Jesus, I could losemy license."

But if you’re gonna lose your license, I think, you should lose your licensefor not helping people. This is the crazy part. The crazy part was, that all thepeople that had the licenses couldn’t help these people. Having a licensealmost defined you as the last person that was gonna be able to help.

I’m sure there were times in my career where people could come after mefor practicing medicine without a license, except for one thing: I never saidthere was anything wrong with anybody. And I don’t take histories. I don’tcare about your past. I don’t do the things that psychologists do. So theycan’t accuse me of being a psychologist.




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FOUNDING A NEW FIELD

The reason why I founded my own field was that I could do whatever I wan-ted to do. One of the nice things and the reason I shared it with others is,once you are a Neuro Linguistic Programmer, you are free for all of thatstuff. You don’t have to spend time finding out about people’s childhood, allthis nonsense about Freudian and stuff – "Did you want to sleep with yourmother and do you have penis envy?" I mean, that stuff is psychotic. It be-longs on the garbage heap with all the square wheels.

And sure I could have gotten in trouble for it but I’ve never been a personwho lives in fear. I probably could have bad things happen to me and be-lieve me I took a lot of shit from a lot of people. But mostly they were afraidof me, so they stayed away from me. Some of them criticized me, but typi-cally from a distance. And that was probably smart on their part …

As long as they don’t mess with my clients, I don’t care what anybody saysabout me. But I have a very strong thing about protecting my clients. Oncesomebody becomes my client, the last thing in the world I let anybody do isscrew around with them. And I’ve gone to great lengths to make sure thathappens. There are still a few psychiatrists out there, wandering around,trying to find out what happened. While I was putting clients in a trance, thepeople in the room would probably go, too. Especially when I started out,they didn’t even believe in hypnosis. I mean, I kept hearing that hypnosisdidn’t exist and that it was bad, which seemed to me to be contradictory.It’s either one or the other. It can’t be both. But it seemed to me to be justthe outcry of people who lived in mortal fear of everything.

You know, you give somebody a license that says he’s an expert in some-thing, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re an expert. If you have any que-stion about that, think of how many people get drivers’ licenses who can’tdrive. I had an aunt, who literally wouldn’t make a left hand turn or back thecar up. When I was a kid, we got pulled over by a policeman and the police-man said "please back up over here" and she looked him straight in the eyeand said "I don’t back". And then he said, "well, then pull up around thecorner". I mean me, I would have said, "If you don’t back, you shouldn’t beallowed to drive". Because I was in the car and I was only eight years oldthinking that. The worst case scenario is that we are giving licenses topeople to be psychologists and psychiatrist and all of these things, and itdoesn’t guarantee that they could help a single soul.

When I started out, there wasn’t a single thing that they could be sure ofhelping people with. 35 years down the road, pretty much everybody thatwalks into my office with a phobia can walk out without it. I’ve trained peo-ple all over the world how to deal with learning disabilities, how to dealwith phobias, to have to deal with depression, obsessive compulsives, andall kinds of people, because I’ve had great success. It does require that youput your self on the line. You have to learn to be good at what you do. Andanybody that professes to be a psychologist and doesn’t know how to dohypnosis isn’t really trying. I mean it’s one of the great skills that as a com-municator we should have.

As much as my approach is almost antithetical to psychology, psychologyis looking for what’s wrong with you and I’m looking for what works. Theyare looking for what your doing is wrong and I’m looking for what you’renot doing. Cause most of the time when they have difficulties it’s somethingthey’re not doing. And it results in their having symptoms. People that cantell their fantasies from reality don’t have a mental way of sorting out me-mories from fantasies. So if you build one in, and sometimes it is as simple




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as putting black borders around the fantasies, at least then people have away of telling.

Over the years I’ve had all kinds of people, who were diagnosed as beingmentally ill. And in every case it turned out to be something that they justdidn’t know how to do. And if I can teach them how to do it, if I can do it,they can do it. And if I didn’t know how to do it, I’d find somebody whodid.

They have told me many times that I don’t have a good grasp of the limi-tations of human beings. And that’s something that I’m proud of, becausemost of my clients have better lifes. I got people out of mental hospitals,back with their families, and back with their jobs. Sometimes they’re stillpretty crazy, but there is no reason why people should go to jail for beingnuts. If they’d put everybody in jail that’s nuts, there wouldn’t be any planetleft. I think of all the politicians in the US, I don’t see a lot of sanity there.And you think of all the people that are terrorists, strapping bombs onthemselves and blowing up children. There is nothing sane about that.

CHANGING THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

To me it’s obvious that the educational system on the planet has got to dosome serious changing. We gotta teach people to make better choices. Myjob is just to add more choices for people. They asked me one time if Iwould work with pedophiles and I told them no and I consider it a waste ofmy talent. I don’t consider pedophiles that it’s my job to save. Maybe some-where out there someone decides they wanna help pedophiles but that’s …To me people that hurt children should be punished. And if they left it up tome the punishment would be a lot worse. I tried to help the people that hadbeen given up on, who didn’t do anything bad to anybody, you know. Theonly person they have ever tortured is typically themselves and theirtherapists. And the therapists I can understand. Themselves I have a littletrouble with.

THE CLASSIC NLP CURRICULUM

RONNIE: How did you get the idea of starting to teach practitionercourses or master courses? Was it that after you had enoughtechniques you just wanted to share with the world?

Well, I used to do programs. It started out that we took people for a week inthe summer and we called it Camp NLP. But then people kept coming backand I ended up sorting people into the first year’s group and the secondyear’s group. All that kind of grew, for me there’s a real body of knowledgethat’s for PRACTITIONERS. And practitioners learn sort of formula techni-ques. It’s how you deal with a phobia, how you do reframing and this ishow you do this and this is how you do that.

And then there seems to me to be a more advanced level where you under-stand how to make up techniques. And that’s a real understanding of whatwe call strategy. The sequences of internal events that produce success atcertain things. The difference between people that are highly motivated andpeople that have difficulty in motivating themselves. Between people thatmake good decisions and bad decisions. Some people even have sets ofdecisions that are good and some sets of decisions that are bad. And some-times they have two different ways of approaching it. And learning to sortthose things out, and how to streamline them, is what we call a MASTERPRACTITIONER. To me it even goes further than that.




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Over the years the body of knowledge has grown so much that I don’tthink that in a matter of a couple of weeks you can really learn that muchabout it. Lots of my apprentices have studied with me from anywhere bet-ween 10 years and 15 years. And when I stopped, that’s the time that theycould. Every year I keep discovering better ways of doing things, fasterways of doing things, and more things we can do.

There is not a major corporation in the world now that doesn’t use NLP init’s training. There’s not a major sales training course that doesn’t use NLPtechniques. Real estate trainings use NLP, nurses training. I was in a barand stopped to use the telephone and there was nobody in the bar exceptthe woman tending the bar and she was reading a text book. And I walkedover to get change and I looked down and there was my name. And I saidwhat is this book? And she said I’m taking philosophy 101 in college. Sonow they are teaching me as a philosopher. Which is kind of funny becauseI don’t really have a philosophy.

THE BANDLER PHILOSOPHY

My philosophy is very simple, it says if things don’t work, they’re notworth doing. If they do work, they are worth teaching other people. That’sabout all the theory that I have. You know, approaches to psychology haveelaborate theories of personality. I don’t really have an elaborate theory, Ithink people learn things that are useful and people learn things that arereally stupid. And the more we teach them other things the less stupid stuffthey will do. It’s not a very sophisticate theory but it’s paid off for me in thelong run.

Because when I find that people are doing things that don’t work in theirlife, if I can get them to do something else, typically their life will get better.The body of knowledge called NLP is really based on my trying as manydifferent things as I can.

And keeping in mind, that the easier and faster you can teach peoplethings, the more likely it is to stick with them. So most of my techniquesdon’t take very much time.

I was on the radio two days ago, and there was a psychologist there. Wewere supposed to talk about phobias. And he kept talking about how ittakes years do desensitize someone from having a phobia. And I said, wellactually it only takes minutes if you do it right. His approach was to exposepeople, he said if you’re afraid of bugs, then every day you step on a bug.And actually if people are afraid of bugs, getting them to step on one is outof the question until you get rid of the fear. And then the trick is to figureout, do you really need to step on it or can you step around it? Because thatpoint is not gonna matter anymore.

There are some things that have too much importance to them and somethings that don’t have enough. And being able to sort those things out isan important part of being a human being.

And I think people put far too much emphasis on things like politics andnationalism and worrying about who’s from what country and what religionthey belong to and not enough on what I consider to be more important.Which is just getting through each day and being as nice to the people asyou can. I think what’s really important for people is to care about theirchildren as opposed to strapping bombs on them and sending them out. It’svery rare to see a mother strapping a bomb on their child and sending themout. It’s typically some religious leader that’s doing this.




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To me what we really need to do is to switch the emphasis of things andrealize it really isn’t gonna be that long before we do something more im-portant with space flight than putting out cellular phone satellites. That weactually need to go somewhere and create enough space that everyonecould have their own planet if they wanted to. And then the rules will chan-ge. Instead of people fighting over territory and housing prices going to theceiling like they are everywhere. I’m surprised that anybody can afford tobuy a house anymore, they’re so expensive. Pretty soon it’s gonna besomething, it may not be in my lifetime, but certainly it’s gonna be in thenext lifetime. My grandson is probably gonna see a world where spaceflight is not that uncommon.

A VISION

All the things that were science fiction when I was a kid or when my grand-dad was a kid … When my grandfather was young, they thought it was im-possible to fly. And now you look up in the sky you can’t look up more thanfive minutes without something flying over. Sometimes at night I see lightsflying over here and I know there is people inside those planes flying backand forth in ways that would have never been dreamed of in my grand-fathers time.

And I wonder when we’re sitting around, what we’re not dreaming of.Instead of people questioning whether I should be arrested for havinghelped people, they should really ask the question, how many peopleshould be arrested for taking money from people and not helping them.

Just the other day I was talking to PAUL MCKENNA and one of his clientshad paid the psychiatrist thousands and thousands and thousands ofpounds to try and get help. And Paul had seen him for just about 30minutes and the guy was fine. And my response was, well is the guy gonnaget the money back? Sometimes the word refund would be really good.And not because I want psychologists to get mad at me but because I wantthem to set higher standards for themselves. They should really think andbelieve that people can get help and can get it right away and learneverything that they could. I would like nothing better for them than put meout of business. It’s not that I’ll run out of things to do. There’s all kinds ofthings, I work with architects, I work with the military, you know. Anywherewhere people are learning things, there is many of gainful employment. I’mnot really worried about running out of lunatics. As long as there aregovernments there will be lunatics out there. The governments do anythingthey can to make us crazy.

RICHARD IN THE HOSPITAL

I just went through the process of being in the hospital. And I couldn’t be-lieve some of the nonsense that they were telling me. It was just absolutelyludicrous. I mean they kept coming in and they were giving me every badposthypnotic suggestion they could think of. And this is one of the betterhospitals in the United States. I asked the doctor and I said "Where is yourcrystal ball?" and he said "What?" and I said "Where is the crystal ball?" andhe said "What do you mean?" and I said "You’re sitting here predicting thefuture". He was telling me that I would never walk again and that I wasgonna have heart trouble and just going on and on and on with all of thisstuff. Then he told me that he is required to tell me these things. And I gotup and walked over to him. And I said "Obviously one of them is wrong".And he said "well yes".




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RONNIE: Did he notice?

Yeah, you would think that would be convincing. But he actually looked atme and said "Yes, you can take a few steps, but eventually you won’t beable to walk" and I said "Eventually I’ll be dead." I walked with a cane for acouple of months and now I don’t even use my cane unless I’m on reallyrough terrain. Everything that he was taught medically defined that thisshould be the limit of what I could do. Fortunately I had been through itbefore.

My wife was once told she would never walk again. She had some crip-peling neurological disease. And I just didn’t believe them and I made herget up and walk. Actually I did it by pissing her off so much, she tried to killme. She took something and tried to hammer me on the head with it. Forthat she had to chase me across the room. And she was pissed off and ranacross the room and then I said "You’re walking…" and hoped that shewouldn’t crown me but … When they told me, and I asked the guy where isyour crystal ball, he looked at me as if was being unreasonable. And I’mgonna continue being as unreasonable as possible.

FUCKING LIMITS

One of the guys I worked with about a year ago was told by the doctors thathe had a degenerative disease. And I had another doctor check it out and infact he did have a degenerative disease. But by the time I found out, he real-ly had the degenerative disease, he's gotten up out of his wheel chair andwas walking just fine. Now, eventually whatever this disease is it will proba-bly overcome him. But there is no reason for it to do it any sooner than itneeds to. He started going to the gym every day and working out. First I gothim to push his sister around in the wheel chair for a little while. Then hegot the notion that if he went to the gym and started strengthening all of hismuscles, this would be the way to be able to have the kind of mobility thathe wanted. Next time I saw him, he didn’t even have a wheel chair. He waswalking around and he had a pair of crotches and he was doing quite well.

And instead of the doctors giving him hope, they were required by law totell him all the worst case scenarios to protect the insurance companies. I’mnot in business to protect insurance companies. I’m in business to protectthe enduser. Most of the techniques I developed are to protect endusers sothat they are as teacherproof as possible so that when people apply them,people get better. I’ve done a lot for the educational system. I’ve done a lotfor people that traditionally would have gone through years of therapy andhave nothing happen. In fact a lot of them would have gotten worse.

Because I believe that people either get better or they get worse. So if theyare not getting better, they probably are getting worse. And sometimesreally rapidly.

I tried everything that I could in my lifetime to make it so that peoplewould have the most important thing, which is hope and tenacity. Becauseif you can teach people to just stick with it, eventually you’ll get throughthings. Bad things happen to human beings, and they do get through it.And if you can teach them to get through it as fast as possible, then theywill be better off.




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BEYOND MASTER LEVEL

RONNIE: You said before that traditionally there are stillPRACTITIONER COURSES and MASTER COURSES and you saidespecially with your apprentices there is so much more advancedstuff to learn. If there was a new level of NLP, what would youinclude there, that goes beyond practitioner and master track?

Well, to begin with, I think that the people that I’ve seen who’ve gotten real-ly good at NLP haven’t just done a PRACTITIONER COURSE and a MASTERTRACK. In fact they’ve gone through them a number of times, cause it’s alot of information. And especially with the MASTER TRACK, it’s importantthat people go through it and then they spend time doing it.

There is no better teacher than experience. And especially when you talkabout eliciting strategies. If somebody is only a psychologist and all they dois deal with people, who have problems and a particular kind of problems,some psychologists even just specializing, helping people to quit smokingand they don’t do anything else.

I think it’s important that you expand your horizons, that you meet lots andlots of people. I didn’t just study VIRGINIA SATIR and FRITZ PERLS andMILTON ERICKSON. I met all the smartest people I could find on the planetearth. BUCKMINSTER FULLER, MOSHE FELDENKRAIS, LINUS PAULING,every genius I could get my hands on. I spent as much time as I could withthem. Guys like ROBERT ANTON WILSON, who is probably one of thesmartest human beings. In fact he is the only one of the people I workedwith that is still alive. ROBERT ANTON WILSON is such a genius, he haswritten probably 35, 36 books. And they are all on different subjects, someare science fictions, some are about psychology, and some of them don’teven fit in any category. And I find that people that are like him are the kindof people that you really have to go out of your way and meet.

GREGORY BATESON

I bet there are a lot of smart people on this planet. Some people are onlysmart at one thing. But then there are guys like GREGORY BATESON, whenI first met GREGORY BATESON, I had read some of his work. And he hap-pened to move in just across the driveway. I went over and knocked on thedoor, and I looked him in the eye and I said "I’ve read your work, you seemto be one of the smartest people" and I said "So I wanna know what elseyou know". And he said "what do you mean what else I know?" and I said"well, obviously you didn’t write down everything you know". And he said "Iwrote down a lot of it" and I said "Yeah, but you’re holding out on me". Andhe just laughed and sat down and I talked to Gregory probably for fivemonths straight. Given that the two of us had to go to work now and then.

With Gregory you could almost raise any subject, and he knew somethingabout it. Oddly enough he taught me more about genetics then I learnedfrom biologists. He had a better understanding about what genetics couldexplain and what it couldn’t explain. His last book "Steps To An Ecology OfMind” is really laying out a different theory of genetics. And he worked witha guy named BOB EDGAR who is a geneticist. I knew BOB EDGAR and BOBEDGAR was a clever man. But when he was exposed to Gregory Bateson,he became a lot more clever, because Gregory understood how knowledgeworked.




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EVOLVING INFORMATION

And guys like ROBERT ANTON WILSON and GREGORY BATESON andpeople like VIRGINIA SATIR and a lot of these people, what they shared incommon was that you could expose information about anything to themand they would evolve it. To them it wasn’t that you tried to be almost asgood as the people teaching you. They all had the theory that you take whatpeople teach you and then you take it further. And I’ve made a big careerout of that. To me, anything anybody has ever taught me, I always tried totake it further, because I think it is the greatest compliment.

And I know that a lot of my students had done things that I think are fanta-stic. And a lot of them haven’t done anything. I’m fond of saying there arelots of people stuck at various levels of my development. Don’t be one ofthem. I’m more interested in the students that I talk to that have done otherthings. Things that I would have never approached. And I think that it’s im-portant that if people want to become good at this, that they expose them-selves to lots and lots of different people.

The reason we set up the Society of NLP was not so that people would justgo to a PRAC COURSE or a MASTER PRAC. That’s so that they could findthe top people in the field. People who are still learning. Not people thatstopped ten years ago, twenty years ago, but people who are still doingnew things. You can always contact JOHN LA VALLE at PureNLP.com andJohn knows what everybody is up to. He probably knows better than I do.

And if you wanna get involved in the field of education, there are peoplelike KATE BENSON, that are doing a lot more with the field of educationthan I am. Kate and I have a project that we started together, because Ithink, ultimately where we get this kind of stuff is in elementary schools.That if we really get in elementary schools we’ll probably put all thepsychologists and me out of business. We could probably do it in a coupleof generations. It's very difficult to get things done, because they have somany rules. Especially in the US we have stupid rules about what’simportant for kids and it’s not the really important things. The mostimportant thing that we could teach children is how to make gooddecisions and how to become self motivated.

I meet all these people who are just flaming geniuses and incredibly suc-cessful, who did terrible in school. Didn’t go to college. You meet peoplelike BILL GATES, who is obviously a guy who understands money. Heshould be designing courses on economics. Not these old farts sitting in anoffice somewhere where everything is theory. People who should teach youhow to design and launch businesses, should be people who have done it.We need to move a little bit towards the apprenticeship program.

And this is what I’ve done. I’ve taken on a small group of people and try toteach them as much as I can over the years. But I also try to teach them thatthey are not gonna get it all from me. They have to get it from themselvesand they have to push their own limits. And they have to find smart peopleand they have to look for things that they don’t know how to do, that no-body knows how to do and have that belief that says "it’s gonna be easy,it’s gonna be quick, it’s gonna be obvious". MOSHE FELDENKRAIS’s book"The Illusive Obvious" I named, because he used that phrase in his bookand I loved that phrase, the illusive obvious.

And so much of what I’ve done when you look back seems obvious: thingslike accessing cues. Everybody knows about it now. But originally it’s abso-lutely mystery, how everybody missed it. How I noticed this thing that eve-rybody else overlooked. It’s even in cartoons. In BETTY BOOP cartoons shegoes "let’s see" and booom, a light bulbs up here. Her eyes go up into the




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left and she remembers things. Her eyes go up into the right and there’s alight bulb there with a new idea. Cartoonists knew about it unconsciously.But where were psychologists? Well, they were busy with penis envies andthey found them. And the penis they envied was SIGMUND FREUD. But wehave to realize, SIGMUND FREUD did not cure his patients. And part of thereason was, he thought of them as needing to be cured rather that needingto be educated.

The biggest part of my work is to get the idea that if you teachpeople the right things they will be able to do them. The reason that

people are not artistic is not because there’s an art gene, but because theyare not given the right mental strategies and the right kind of enthusiasmand the right kind of motivation. In terms of the techniques of the painter,you can take these things out of books and take classes. But if you don’thave a real sense that this is the creative outlet, people won’t paint, theywon’t play music. I was told when I was young that I was not musicalbecause I could not play yankee doodle dundee on the flute. And it wasn’teven a real flute, it was a plastic song flute. And I’ve written the equivalentof over 35 albums of music. And I write music and compose music all thetime. Especially now. When I was a kid, there were no synthesizers. Nowthat there are synthesizers, anybody should be able to play.

RONNIE: What other things than eye accessing cues could lie outthere undetected?

You can tell which submodalities are shifting. I mean obvious things thatpeople focus forward and backwards, that when they’re not looking at theoutside, they’re typically moving images forwards an backwards. There’s allkinds of things like that. I would'nt say that they haven’t been discovered.

Certainly since the advent of accessing cues and studying on verbal signalsthere’s been a lot of people that have discovered stuff. I recently just read abook, where this guy goes through and outlines all this stuff about facialfeatures and how you could tell whether people are lying or not by theirfacial expressions and stuff. And I don’t agree with everything this guy says,because it doesn’t match my experience. But the fact that people are tryingto do things like this, where they are actually looking at physical characteri-stics and how they change. I think it’s an important step.

So that time the psychologists started looking outside of their theories andstarted looking at human behavior and saying we can see these consisten-cies in behavior and then finding out, do they tell us anything?

MIND MIRROR RESEARCH

I’ve spent tremendous amount of time measuring brain wave activity withmind mirrors. Originally I was hired to do this by a government agency in……. may not be named, but even after that I became fascinated becausethe mind mirror is a device that tells you about the frequency of the humanbrain. Either hemisphere that measures two locations, the magnetic reso-nance and so you can get a pretty good read on what’s going on. And I star-ted measuring lamas and people doing healing and people meditating andall kinds of different things. And while I was doing it, I started realizing I al-most didn’t need the mind mirror. I could tell by looking. And having donehypnosis for over thirty years, I know what a trance looks like. And I knowwhat it looks like when somebody is in alpha, as opposed to low epsilon.

RONNIE: You know what you’re looking for? How you recognize it?




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Absolutely, I know exactly what it looks like. It’s years and years of havingdone it with the machine and knowing what it looks like on the machine andwhat it looks like on their face that now I almost don’t need the machineanymore. I almost have one built inside my mind.

One of the projects that’s going on, I’ve been hired to program a light-sound machine. I programmed one probably fifteen years ago. SharperImage made medical claims about theirs. And in the US they pretty muchoutlawed them all. I guess that’s changed in the past few years and nowthey’re selling them again. The same people have come back to me andasked me. They gave me all this equipment and asked me if I would pro-gram the thing. It’s one of those things, where if I’d known then what I knownow, fifteen years ago, I would have been able to do a much better job.

Unfortunately my computer malfunctions, so I have to get another com-puter to do this. But I know this time when I get done doing it that they’regonna be that much more effective. I think that light-sound machines areimportant. The frequencies of changing light patterns is important. But interms of sound they usually don’t use much of the technology. Like theneurosonics, when I did the neurosonics, taking full advantage of theranges of resonating sounds to get people into altered states. That there’smuch that’s on the neurosonics that could only be heard by a whale. Thatthe subsonics are so low, they’re way below human hearing. But they stilleffect human beings. This time the technology that I have at my fingertips isso much greater than what we had 15 years ago.

What we know about neurochemistry is so much more advanced. Even theway they train psychiatrists now has changed. We now train psychiatristsmore about neurochemistry than we do about behavior. And I think that’s agood thing.

RICHARD AND THE PSYCHIATRIST

When I was in the hospital, it was a training hospital. So all these youngdoctors drop by and act like you’d never seen a doctor before. It’s kind ofamusing, because they don’t tell you that that’s why they’re coming by, butthis young psychiatrist came in and she was cute, I have to admit, a cutelittle thing. But she had no idea who she was dealing with. She obviouslywasn’t that well read, but she came in and she said "are you doctor Band-ler?" and I said "yes" and she said "so how are we feeling today?" And I said"I’m feeling pretty crutty, but I have no idea how are you feeling. What doyou want, dear?" And she goes "I’m a psychiatrist." And the way she said itwas like Minnie Mouse telling you she was a psychiatrist. And I said "andhow long have you been a psychiatrist?" And she goes "I’m not a psychia-trist quite yet. I’m at my residency." And I said "so are we playing a pretendgame? Because I can do any emotional illness you want me to, I’m prettygood at them. For example megalomania. That's my forte. I can do that."And she said "No, I’ve gotten your test back." And I said "test back? I didn’tknow I took any tests." And she said "oh yes, we ran blood tests". And sheproceeded to tell me about all these things that were in my blood test. I hadvitamin B deficiency, and I had a B6 deficiency and something else. Ad shestarted telling me how they would manifest themselves psychologically.And I have to admit I was pretty impressed, cause it matched my expe-rience.

And usually when psychiatrists talk to me they’re talking things that nevermatch my experience, you know. They explain to me, I remember when Iwas in college about SIGMUND FREUD. That’s when I came up with theterm "sick man fraud" because they were talking about that people had




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emotional problems because they wanted to sleep with their mother. And Iremember jumping up and saying that’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard ofand the guy is going "exactly, that’s my point." He literally said to me"everyone fantasizes about having sex with their mother". And I said "Idon’t, I would never think of that. That’s crazy." You know, to think thateveryone has the same fantasies is nuts, absolutely nuts and then I said "doyou think about sleeping with your mother?" And he said "well, my motheris in her seventies" and I said "did you ever think about it?" And he goes"Well, when I was a young resident and they started bringing it up …" and Iwent, "so when you went to school to learn to be a psychiatrist, and theyrecommended you do it you started doing it. But other than that I don’tthink people think of their mother that way, you know." It’s some kind ofnutty thing. It just goes to show you that an idea can institutionalize a thingthat is just crazy.

Like the idea of interpreting dreams. I can’t seem to see anything more use-less than taking time and trying to understand your dreams as opposed tomaking really good dreams that are worth having. Human beings have ac-complished so much. You take a guy like TESLA, and all the patents that heholds and guys like EINSTEIN, and EDISON and all these people. I meanEINSTEIN was a patent clerk and his hobby was mathematics. This wasn’teven his job. He was like a guy working in an office, writing down littlepatents before they had copy machines. And his hobby was mathematics,trying to come up with a theory which explains the most advanced conceptsin mathematics. And he wasn’t even a mathematician. He didn’t even dowell at math in school. But you couldn’t stand in the way of a dream ofsomebody who dreams his biggest universe. I think that it’s important tostart teaching people to let their dreams go wild instead of worrying aboutthe bad things that will happen to you.

I’m sure the field of psychology has regrets that they didn’t put me in prisonwhen I was young. But before they could have done that, there was a lot ofvery very sincere people, that knew that I was getting results. And they hada lot of patients that worked. And that’s why I got so many referrals frompsychiatrists.

Oddly enough while I believe that the basic foundation of psychiatry andthe basic foundation of psychology are intrinsically wrong. I don’t believethat it is caused necessarily by what happens to you as a child.

I think that two people can have identical experiences and it will produceabsolutely diametrically opposed results. One person will say "I was beatenby my father so I’m gonna beat my kids", and somebody else will be beatenby their father and they’ll say "I will never lay a hand on a kid cause it wasso horrible for me". And to try to reduce things to such a simplistic thing isfoolish because it has more to do with the neurochemical responses of hu-man beings and how much they’ve been educated in their lives if they haddifferent responses.

I’ve taken people that have been through 16 years of therapy and they’vehad electric shock treatment, they’d been drugged beyond belief, all becau-se of one simple problem. And in less then an hour I managed so that theydidn’t have it anymore. I had more trouble dealing with the hard work of thepeople around him to reinstall the problem than it was to get rid of it.




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CHANGE AND AFTERCHANGE (ECOLOGY)

And a big part of what people should realize that it is not enough to justdeal with the problem. Very often you have to deal with the fact thatpeople have to cope with the fact that it’s gone. Those films I made at theMarshall University years ago, there was a guy that had a phobia of drivingout of town. He was a very cute, very sincere man but he had a psychoticepisode if he got near the edge of town. In fact if I asked him to even thinkabout driving out of town, you could see the beads of sweat pouring off ofthe guy. I mean, just the thought of it scared the crap out of him. And I tookhim through pretty standard same way as I’d treat a phobia. And we stuckhim in a car and he drove out of the state.

And when he came back to the studio, and I sat him down, and I said "howwas it?" He said "well, it’s enough to make you a believer." And I said "nothanks, but now we have to deal with the big problem." And he said "but theproblem is solved" and I said “no, the problem is not solved, you can’t goback into your life and tell everybody that you don’t have this problemanymore. So what is it? Has it been 8 years that you have taken your familyon a vacation? What are you gonna do, go home and say, oh I was justkidding?" And he went, "well, I never thought about that." And I said "look,this is a very religious community, it’s time for you to have a religiousexperience." And he went "what?" and I said "on your way home, I want youto pull over, and I want you to pray to God to be cured. And then I want youto have God come to you and tell you YOU HAVE BEEN CURED. And goback and tell all".

This is a very religious community, and if he tells everyone that God curedhim, nobody is gonna argue with him, but if you tell them that Richardcured you, everybody is gonna argue with you.

SNAKES

So it is important for people to find a way so that they have an excuse tochange their behavior. Because he was having psychotic episodes and hewas oscillating between absolute catatonia and screaming psychotic episo-des. And the episodes were all about there being snakes. So I brought rub-ber snakes, a whole barrel full of them in the hospital and filled the showerfloor, so it seemed like Raiders From The Lost Arc. I even brought a coupleof real snakes, a boa constrictor, nothing serious. And this guy was kind ofin his catatonic phase and we rolled him in and he screamed and screamedand screamed. And I came in and said "can I help you?" and he was going"snakes, snakes, snakes" I said to him, "look, I’m gonna leave you in here allnight or you are gonna tell me which snakes are hallucinated and whichsnakes are real" And the guy looked across the room and went "hallucinatedsnakes", looked down and said "rubber snakes" looked up a the real snakeand went "real snake". And it was amazing, how quickly he sorted it all out.

RONNIE: So basically you say, they can sort it out.

Well, they just need the proper motivation. And there’s no better motivationthan a few thousand snakes to motivate you to do just about anything. Imean, with the water and the shower and it all looks so real, it scared me towalk in there, to tell you the truth. I was probably more nervous than hewas.




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ECOLOGICAL CHANGE

But once I got him out, I’m not done yet. Now I have to prepare him toguess just the right thing to convince the doctors to let him go. He has tohave a psychological explanation to tell the psychiatrist. And I fed him and Isaid, "all you have to tell him is that it’s all based on a childhood experienceand now you’ve remembered the childhood experience so you feel muchbetter. And when you get home, you can’t just tell your wife that you justwent nuts. You have to tell her that you had this traumatic experience butthe whole time you were locked inside yourself, all you did was think abouther and how much you missed the children." And by laying all the rightthings out, cause it is not enough to go out and say I was crazy, causeeverybody is gonna look at you and go "when are you gonna go crazyagain?" You have to go, although I was crazy I was thinking sane thoughts.

Having gotten enough people out and go back in, because everybody drovethem crazy again. I learned that you have to prepare people with all theright things to say. So when they do go back to their life, it doesn’t makepeople crazy to know that they got well. Part of educating people is educa-ting them in everything they need. A part of what they need ist to knowwhat to say to everybody.

RONNIE: It’s interesting that you mention that, because I think innone of the basic NLP books this is really stressed. You always readabout the technique and you think, this is it. But how to frame it andtake care of how people readjust in their surroundings is nevermentioned.

Well, let’s keep in mind, NLP is a new field. So like you said, most of thebooks that I‘ve written are introductory books. They give people choices sothey have new things to try. The delicacy of all the things that you have todo in the end to make it so that its lasts. Cause I know people that went outand did the phobia thing and got people over phobias and thought that thatwas it.

But of course what’s gonna happen is that the same machine that built thephobia is gonna build something else. That’s why we have a MASTERPRAC, to start to look at the underlying processes, that are capable ofproducing fears, capable of producing compulsive behaviors. See, it’s notabout the compulsive becoming compulsive. It’s about relaxing that they’reout of it. Otherwise they will just stop washing their hands but they startsome other nonsense. And everything has to be kind of turned on itself.

A PARADOXICAL INTERVENTION

In the structure of magic there’s a case of a woman. The woman couldn’tsay "No" because when she was young she said "No" to her father andwhen she came back, he was dead with his hand reaching just for thetelephone. And all he had asked her to do was to stay home with him. Afterthat she swore she would never say no to anybody. At least that’s what apsychiatrist got her to believe. Whether it happened or not I don’t know. ButI just looked at her and said "you can’t say no to people?" And she went"No". And I figured I was done.

But the truth is, she missed it. And I finally looked at her and said "tell meno". And she went "NO, I won’t". And she missed it again. So I said "tell meno". And she said "NO" and I dropped on the floor. And that scared the crapout of her. And then I turned over laughing. Looked at her and went "got-cha". But see, sometimes what looks like it should be obvious, isn’t.Because people have spent so man years of widding (?????) things that




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sometimes you have to go to great lengths to make the obvious obvious.Because the obvious is more illusive than it should be.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

RONNIE: When I was at the Trainer Training 1990 in San Diego youcame up with DESIGN HUMAN ENGINEERING and recently, a coupleof years ago you came up with NEURO HYPNOTIC REPATTERNING,is something new in store?

Well, DESIGN HUMAN ENGINEERING was basically as a mathematicianwhat I did, I took all the things that were NLP and I made a calculus forthem. And then said, ok, what would the opposite of it be? Causemathematician do that. And lo and behold there were a few things that justdidn’t fit anywhere. There was no explanation for where they went.

RONNIE: Like what for instance?

INVENTING INTERVENTIONS – IMAGINARY VS REAL

I had someone that were dizzy all the time. Having dizzy spells and fallingover. And the doctors told me there was no physical base. Now I don’t be-lieve them, because you could watch the person. They got up and walkedacross the room and they’d start swaying back and forth and they’d fallover. Now, to say that there’s no physical base for that sounds crazy to me.Now, what they really are saying is "we can’t find a medical explanation forwhat’s been manifested physically."

Now that’s a comment on what they know. That’s not a comment on what’spossible. I imagine someday, if we had the neurochemical things, we couldfind the neurochemical basis for this. But this guy didn’t have 50 years towait for us to figure this out. So what I did was … I built - I had seen Cirquedu Soleil, there was a guy that walked across this big wire with a seventyfoot pole and balanced himself on the wire with the pole. And I rememberafterwards going up and I asked this guy and I said why did you need thepole? And the guy said "well, I don’t really need the pole, but it’s easier withthe pole." And I said "why is it easier?" and he said "well, if I use my arms,they are only six feet long. But if I use a pole, I can feel just the slightestshift before it would be where even my arms are. If I walk across with myarms, I still have to stick my arms off, cause you wanna feel it before it’s toolate. Cause if it’s too late you fall".

So I stuck a big long pole hypnotically through this person. And I stuck onethrough them sideways and one front ways. And I even put buzzers if itstarted to tilt one way or the other. The buzzer would go off and would putyour back up straight. And I had them walk around in my yard. And my yardwas out in the country and there was orchards and all kinds of stuff. And itwas kind of hilly and there was graveled driveways and it was not like flatconcrete at all. And they walked around outside for about an hour and theycame back in and they experience no vertigo whatsoever. And I said, "sohow was it?", he said "well, it was very difficult to get between the trees."And I explained to him, I said "you know these are imaginary poles, youcould just walk right through the trees and the trees will pass throughthem". And the guy looked at me like I was nuts. I mean I will never forgetthe look on his face and he looked at me and he goes "If I can walk throughtrees with the poles then the poles wouldn’t work". Like I was absolutelycrazy. So I shrunk the poles down so they stuck out only a few feet on either




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side and made them more sensitive. And I made them so that they hadthings that could stick out further if he needed them to.

But they were basically a hypnotic construct to take care of something thatwas physical. And whether or not there was a physiological base for this, orwhether there was a chemical base for it, I don’t know. I only know thathypnotically we constructed something that would compensate for it.

And when I stopped and thought over the years, of the times that I had todo something similar to that. That was the point that I decided that weneeded something that was not something already known. Because NLP isabout eliciting strategies from someone and sticking them in another.What we really needed was something where we could construct strate-gies and hypnotic devices, if you will, so that anything that could be donewith a machine we could learn to put the machines inside people’s minds.

TESLA, AGAIN

Tesla had a set of tools inside his head, he would construct realities andthen measure things that didn’t exist. One of the things he imagined wasbeing able to get in a plane and fly before there were airplanes. And he gotout of the plane and sat there and took the engine off and measuredeverything in the engine. And constructed the first jet engine. Now it didn’twork because he had one idea wrong. They believed originally, thatpressure, like gravity pushed down. And that pressure pushed straight infrom the sides. So his equations were off because it was not true, pressuredoesn’t come sideways. It would be nice if it did, but it doesn’t. And sotherefore his calculations were off when he calculated. The jet engine thathe actually built would have worked if he hadn’t made that mental mistake.In fact the engine the way he saw it in his fantasy was slightly different andif he would have built the one he imagined, rather than the one that wasmathematically correct, we would have started out with jet engines insteadof propeller engines. To me taking guys like Tesla as a model, Tesladecided, the easiest way to deal with magnetic fields was to be able toactually see them. So he achieved an altered state, where he could actuallysee magnetic fields. That’s why he probably holds more patents than anyother human being.

RONNIE: Was he aware of creating altered states?

Absolutely, he was very much aware of it. And in fact they got out of con-trol. It got to the point that the sound of a bee in the next room would drivehim crazy because it would be so loud. And one of his friends took him outand made him exercise regularly to get his senses back under control. Hewould hear thunder anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes before anyone else. Hishearing was so sensitive. Just when you’re in a crowded room, you couldlisten to one voice and not others. He had extended his hearing so much,but he had forgotten to put the controls on. If somebody wrote a biographyabout him, will they describe his going nuts? But he didn’t really go nuts, hejust chemically altered himself. And the chemicals in our brain that controland suppress our symptoms, are sensory acuity so we are not overwhel-med by things - our double edge sword. Because it means of course, whilewe’re not overwhelmed by things, it also means we’re gonna miss a lot. Sobeing able to alter that chemical structure is done through meditation andaltered states and self hypnosis. And that’s why DESIGN HUMAN ENGI-NEERING puts such an emphasis on hypnosis. See, then after a while therewere certain things that simply didn’t fit .




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NHR

To me I decided that we needed to have another domain and the domain ofAPPLIED HYPNOTIC REPATTERNING is really where you start with the alte-red state. And instead of trying to manifest behaviors originally, what youtry to do is to manifest the chemicals by going so much into a particularaltered state, that you literally inundate yourself with the chemical basis onwhich whatever behavioral change you want is based on. So whereas withphobias we usually do visual dissociation with the stimulus in mind, insteadwith APPLIED NEURO HYPNOTIC REPATTERNING what you do is you startby putting people into the chemical state. You have them take the state offear and find out which way things move through the body and you literallyreverse it like pulling it out and putting it upside down. Putting it back in,spinning it even faster than it spins so that you change yourself chemicallyand neurologically and it has a tendency to flatten the neurons out. Neuronshave a tendency to go to the next point in size. So that the things that welearn become automated and through the billions of neuro cortical path-ways that are possible. The reason that you run one as opposed to another,is that they run to the next one in size. When you run things backwards, ithas a tendency to flatten those neurons out and stop the automatic respon-se. So where somebody is automatically terrified every time they see a fly,when you run the physical experience of fear of flies backwards, it doesn’twork automatically anymore. And so you then have to learn a new respon-se.

So in that case you're really creating a void and filling it with somethingnew. One of the big mistakes people make, they don’t fill it with somethingnew and then it has the tendency to rebuild what was there. So they wouldget over their fear and then over a period of months it has a tendency torebuild it. And so it’s important to stick something else in its place. It doesnot have to be something overwhelmingly important, it could just be thesensation of "I don’t care". But you have to build up a very strong "I don’tcare" and to be able to look at the stimulus and to run the new set of fee-lings.

And again it’s a much more mechanical approach than a psychologistwould take. They would wonder why you are afraid of flies and does thiscome from a traumatic experience or is the fly really a metaphor for zipperor some nonsense like that.

What we’re trying to do is to create the experience of neurological freedom.All of the work that I have done over the years could be summed up as justabout giving people freedom. To me the chains of the free are their fears,their phobias and their compulsions. You give people enough freedom andthey have the tendency to box themselves into some kind of stupidity.Either that or they have help from preachers or teachers and parents andrelatives and neighbors. All with good intentions they don’t realize.

PUBLIC SPEAKING PHOBIA

And public speaking is probably the largest single phobia and its primarilyrelated that people learn to be afraid when they were in school. Cause tea-chers suddenly turn around and they go "YOU, get up in front of the class"and people go "WUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH" and then they go "now reaaaad"when you can’t read. So people learn later in life that when you get up infront of an audience to be afraid. But it’s a very easy thing to change. Causeall you have to do is to get strong enough other feelings there and you haveto do it before they get up in front of an audience.




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FEAR OF HEIGHTS

All to often people try to overcome their fears by forcing themselves intothe situation. I remember once going to a seminar and they were teachingpeople to get over their fear of heights by hanging them off of balconies.And afterwards they would ask the people "how was it?" And they go (highpitch voice) "it was fine" it sounded absolutely terrified. And I raised myhand and I said "it still sounds scared" and they said "yeah, but they did it."And I said "yeah, but what good does it do if they’ll never do it again?" And Iasked the people "would you go up there yourself and hang yourself fromthe edge?" And they go "No" and I’d say, "well, you know, then it seems tome that you didn’t make any great headway."

The fact that people can force themselves to do things when they’re terri-fied isn’t really the answer. The question is really what should they feel?And one is they should feel cautious when they are near the edge so thatthey don’t jump off. So that people don’t go "I’m not afraiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid" splat-ting on the ground.

You want the people to go in the state of caution and be careful and test theedge and make sure it’s not gonna fall off. I remember walking out of ahotel once and putting my hands on the balcony and the whole railing felloff. And if I had been holding on to it, I would have gone with it.

Sometimes you just have to test things and make sure they’re safe. That’sthe sort of thing that human beings have to do in a lot of situations. To methere are fears that are more justified than others. Snakes … if you don’tknow which ones are poisonous and which ones aren’t, you have to becareful around them, because some snakes that look really friendly could bepoisonous. The same thing is true with spiders. Some spiders could reallyhurt you. And if you know which ones are which you know which ones tostay away from. Plants are like that. You go to California, one of the prettiestplants makes you sick as can be. It’s called poison oak. Certain times of theyear it turns beautiful red and people come from all over the world and pickit. Put it in jars and next thing you know their hands swell up. And then theirarm breaks out. And its based on ignorance. It’s not that the plant is dange-rous. It’s that you shouldn’t touch it. And you should know before you touchthings which things you should touch and which ones you shouldn’t.

There is no replacement for having information. When you’re so afraid, youdon’t get information, that’s typically when people get into trouble.

MARRIAGES

And this isn’t just true with snakes, this is true with everything. Its true withmarriages. They always talk about the divorce rate. To me what we shouldbe talking about is the marriage rate not the divorce rate. I think a lot ofpeople marry the wrong person to start with. And they don’t educate peoplein what a good couple should be like. Even on TV all you see is unhappycouples. You don’t see that many couples that are really happy. I think weneed good examples. I know when my wife was alive, constantly I heardfrom people, even people we didn’t know would come up and they wouldalways ask, "how long have you been together?" And when I’d say 20 yearsthey’d go "oh, you look like you just fell in love". And I said “isn’t it suppo-sed to be that way?" And they’d go "not usually".

But it’s one of those things that if you focus on what makes things better,they keep getting better. And if you focus on what makes them worse,they keep getting worse.




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RONNIE: This morning I read again in the “Wild Days“ and it tells alot about how this first group of NLPers, how you were just goingabout with trial and error experimenting… like whith parts party

You also mention that experimental hypnosis was something thatyou practised and a lot of the NLP was created out of experimenting.

RICHARD'S FIRST EXPERIMENTAL GROUP

Well, yeah, after Gregory sent us down to see MILTON ERICKSON, when Igot back, I wanted to try to do everything that Milton had ever done. Fortwo reasons. One was I wanted to sort out what was nonsense. And also Ithought a lot of his articles were interesting but they were kind of incomple-te in the sense that while he studied synesthesia, he never really did any-thing with it. And he studied time distortion but the applications he usedtime distortion for, I thought were very limited. Like he used time distortionfor weight control, you know, he made it seem like an hour between eachforkful of food and that just seemed like a trite application of those things.

So I put together a group of about 30 people. And we met once or twice aweek and there was no real purpose to it other than I was gonna explorewhatever I wanted to. So when the people would arrive, initially what wedid is we made sure that everybody became a good hypnotic subject. Andof course some people were very easy and with some it was a slowprocess. To me hypnosis is a learning process. And a lot of the techniqueslike originally reframing came out of finding people that could do certainhypnotic phenomenas and not others.

POSITIVE HALLUCINATIONS

I can remember there was somebody that couldn’t do positive hallucina-tions. They could do just about any other hypnotic phenomena but seeingthings that weren’t there if they even attempted to do it they would becomevery frightened. So originally what we did is, we set up the fears just like ayes/ no finger signal. Super amount of fear for yes and no fear for no. Andliterally said is there any reason why a person shouldn’t see a six footFrench poodle, sitting there. And of course we got a yes signal and we said,look is it because you think that a person is gonna lose their mind if theysee things that weren’t there, we got a Yes. So I said ok, how about we do itfor just five minutes? So that they won’t just randomly start make up stuffand acting as if it were there like getting into cars that don’t exist or seeingstoplights that aren’t there. Unconsciously it obviously is an attempt to pro-tect somebody so that they’ll only see a French poodle for 5 minutes andwe got a yes signal and bang suddenly somebody that couldn’t do ahypnotic phenomenon became very good at it. They just said to make surethat they did it under controlled things which is a good idea for everybody.

To me whenever you’re dealing with real serious hallucinations, most of thereal creative people that I met did this sort of thing anyway. They couldimagine realities and I wonder what a guy like TESLA would have been ableto do if he had been able to do time distortion. He did everything in realtime. He would construct an engine or motor in his head and then let it runfor a literal month and then go back in his head and dissect it and measurewith tools and he would build one on the outside, run them both and thewear and tear would be identical. But if he was able to have done that in thestate of time distortion so that he could have done a literal month in a literalminute he probably would have been able to create thousand more thingsthan he actually did. He still created more than most people.




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TALKING BACKWARDS

Out of those experimental groups we started doing all kinds of things likefor example once GREGORY BATESON came over and I had this youngchap in a deep trance and I said: "Gregory, is there anything you want tosee in particular?" and Gregory looked at me and he said “make him talkbackwards”. And I went “backwards?" This never dawned on me thatsomebody would do that. So I just set up finger signals and I said "I wantyou to make all the adjustments for that. When this guy comes out oftrance, he’ll speak backwards. Can you do that?" I got a yes. "I will count tothree, you come out of trance and you talk backwards" and the guy cameout of trance and looked at me and went "hjkdsufudsfdsjk" and Gregoryanswered it backwards. Gregory went "hjkdsahfdjs" and they both wentback and forth like that and I was looking at the two of them.

I put him back into trance and I said how were you able to do this? And Isaid “when you come out of trance you’re just gonna sit up and tell meexactly how you were able to talk backwards”. The guy said "I only thoughtof what I wanted to say. I saw it written out phonetically. Not spelled rightbut literally phonetically." And he said he pulled the letters off and put themin reverse order and just sounded it out. And of course as soon as he said it,it made perfect sense.

A PAINTING STRATEGY

Things that began NLP were things like the spelling strategy, learning thatpeople made pictures of the words rather then spelling phonetically. And asI began to take people, like I had a client who was an artist. And he droppedby the experimental hypnosis group. And he was a very very good artist.But he was incredibly detailed in his paintings. He painted portraits. Theylooked more like the people than the people did. They were very, very vivid.

So I put this guy in a trance and I said, when you paint, you may not be con-scious of how you do it. So I want your unconscious to just tell me exactlyhow you’re able to paint and make it look so much like the person. I said"I’m gonna count to three" and I said "in your conscious mind go way inyour memory and I want you to unconsciously tell me exactly what you do."And this guy opened his eyes and began to describe what sounds verymuch like what we call today an NLP strategy. He literally said “I look at theblank canvas, then I look at the person, and I shift my eyes back and forthuntil an imagine forms on the canvas. And the first thing I do is, I trace thelarger lines. And then I move to smaller lines and smaller lines”. And thenhe goes back and he lights up one colour. Everything in that picture, that’sone shade and he mixes up the shade and then he dots just that part. Inessence his strategy reduced painting to almost painting by numbers. Sothat he painted one shade, then another shade and another shade. And heliterally started with the face, with the darker shades and moved towardsthe lighter shades. And literally described that, when he did the eyes, hemagnified each eye. So that it looked absolutely huge. And he had a handinside the image and one on the papers. So that his hand was connected toone in the picture, so when he drew that line it would stay there.

So I took 3 or 4 other people who didn’t paint at all, literally shoved canvasin front of them, gave them the instructions that this guy gave and hadthem all paint portraits. I have to admit, that I was probably more surprisedthan anybody there, how vivid the portraits were. I mean we had peoplethat couldn’t draw a straight line and suddenly they were drawing picturesof people that were very, very vivid. Each one was different, but to me that’s




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one of the things about artistic expression, that it’s always gonna be effec-ted in the way you see things that are different from other people.

RONNIE: Did you give them the instructions in consciousness oralso in trance?"

I think just in trance.

RONNIE: Because it’s an interesting approach modelling someone intrance and then installing the strategy in someone else…

CONSCIOUSNESS AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS

I don’t make that much distinction between consciousness and uncon-sciousness. If someone is conscious of what’s going on that seems to mesometimes to help and sometimes it gets in the way. But I don’t worryabout that much. If their conscious mind knows about it, and doesn’t get inthe way, that’s fine. I find that most conscious activity is directing uncon-scious activity. To me it’s like the question about who you’re gonna paint. Iasked the guy “Out of all the people you see, how do you decide who’s faceyou’re gonna paint?” And he would go, "oh sometimes I look at somebodyand I get this really strong feeling and then I start looking closer." If youlooked at the people that he painted, they were all very distinctive some-how, there was something … it wasn’t necessarily that they were the pret-tiest people on the earth. But they were all people that had characteristicsthat were very distinctive. And with most of them it really started with theeyes. And given that he magnified the eyes so much, that makes sense. Bythe same token, it’s not necessarily the part of the strategy that I’m gonnainstall in somebody else. I like for people to make their own decisions aboutwhat’s important to them. I find this is where I think that creativity reallyswells in human beings.

THE SPIRIT OF EXPERIMENTAL HYPNOSIS GROUPS

What I liked about doing experimental hypnosis is that we would start withsomething and find out where it would go. Instead of trying to fix problems,and overcome fears and get people out of depression and this or that. Wewould take characteristics of what the brain was capable of and then ampli-fy them. And sometimes the same machine that could manufacture over-whelming fear, could manufacture overwhelming curiosity instead. Andonce people become very curious about something, it opens all kinds ofdoorways. And when we started looking what made it so that people coulddo art and music, and what makes it so that a close up magician could sitand practice for hours and hours and hours with little pieces of paper tocreate super precision, and enjoy it as opposed to – you know, I know lotsand lots of people that are very good at things but hate practising.

A MOTIVATIONAL STRATEGY

I had a friend who was a magician. He would sit day and night and do thesame thing over and over and over again. And he had a very, very goodstrategy for it. It was unconscious, he didn’t know what it was. But once Ifound out what it was, it was that he made an image in his mind and thecloser he came to matching the image, the better he felt. As opposed tofeeling bad about not being there. If he did it badly he would just start overand attempt to get closer. Almost like this experiment with a pelican which




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pegs the button and fires off the pleasure centre in the brain. Well, thecloser he got to perfection in his art form, the better he felt.

To me, as a motivation strategy, I think that that was something I would usewith lots and lots of people. I discovered that a lot of people that I workedwith over the years had great difficulty because they were always measu-ring themselves against other people, and coming up with how disappoin-ted they should be. Rather than finding out, how much better they are thenthey were yesterday. A lot of techniques that I used over the years to helppeople with remedial problems, have come from experimental groups.

We did one whole set of experiments that were all based on synaesthesia.What happens when you literally knock out the sensory things. We did awhole other thing that was just on time distortion and finding differentways of applying time distortion to find out … cause MILTON ERICKSONliterally in his book on time distortion there were certain things you couldn’tdo under time distortion. And one of them was mathematics. And that turnsout to not be true. So that if I didn’t test everything that Milton believed, Iwould never have been able to go further than he did.

Milton had a very limited set of understanding what it meant to be cured.To be cured meant you got out of the hospital, you got a job, you gotmarried, had children and send him presents, that was it. And I happen tothink that life is bigger than that.

Even when I do the personal change workshops, what people put on theirwish list is not what I’m after. I only have them write the wish list so I canfind out about how they make decisions. Because to me one thing thathuman beings always do is making decisions. And those are alwaysinfluenced by all the unconscious processes. That are either at work or notat work. And it’s what we don’t do that makes life less interesting.

When you run an experimental hypnotic workshop, what you're reallytrying to do is to get people to be able to use as many different ways ofusing their brain as possible and there’s no way to predict what theoutcome of that will be. Sometimes it manifests itself in artistic expressions,and sometimes it changes people in ways that are absolutely unexpected.But always it comes out in some way that’s beneficial. And that’s one of thenice things that you’re not taking choices away from people. When you addchoices with human beings, they always have the tendency to take the bestone. When you look at human beings, you always say, well God, there’sgotta be a better choice than hanging yourself in the closet. But actually inmany cases it’s not true. If those people had better choices they wouldmake them.

Most people’s greatest fear - I heard this psychologist say on the radio theother day, there were several of us interviewed in this thing and this psy-chologist said the ageold thing that the greatest fear is fear of death - andthat is absolutely not true, because people kill themselves.

So if the greatest fear was fear of death, that would never happen. Thegreatest fear that people have is the fear of the unknown. And rather thanface an unknown universe, people would kill themselves. Their wife leavesthem, they can’t imagine living without her, and they look at the future andit’s completely unknown. And rather than going: Well, I find a better life,they go and hang themselves in the closet and kill themselves. And that’sbecause they don’t have enough choices. And part of the reason why somuch emphasis of my work is on opening creative avenues for people.Getting people who have never painted to paint, getting people who havenever played music to play music, getting people who have never drummedto drum and getting people that have never written to start writing poetry –




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is because I believe, that artistic expression is a chance for us to start firingoff neurocortical pathways that we didn’t have.

When you start asking people what sound does red make, well, you’regetting people to use synaesthesia patterns that they haven’t used. Andwhen you ask somebody to do it in a waking state, they look at you con-fused and go "what do you mean by that, I don’t understand". When youhave somebody in a deep trance, they never ask that question. They just go"duuuuuuuuuuuh" "it feels wide" "it feels hot"” They just try things, thatthey wouldn’t normally try.

A BENEFIT OF HYPNOSIS. SINGING

One of the greatest things about hypnosis is, it removes the barriers ofbelieves and inhibitions. Every stage hypnotist will tell you that there’ll bepeople that would never even speak in front of another human being, andthey’ll get up and sing. And amazingly enough, they sing in ways that areimpressive.

One time in an experimental hypnosis group, I had a woman she asked me,she said "can you teach somebody to sing?" I said "I’m not that great asinger myself, but what do you mean by that?" And she said "well, I alwayswanted to be able to sing". And I asked, "do you sing in the shower", shegoes "no, because I’m afraid, every time I try to sing it just sounds terrible".And I said "of course if you’re frightened and you're critical it will sound thatway." But I put her into a deep trance, and I told her what would happenwould be for a few minutes that she wouldn’t be herself. That she would beall the things that she is not. Now that’s a really vague instruction, if youthink about that. And it’s kind of silly, because you’re always gonna be whoyou are. But when you give somebody in trance an instruction, basicallywhat you’re doing is giving them the right to give up their fears, to give uptheir inhibitions, and to try something new. And all of a sudden she got upand she started singing. She had a lovely voice. And she sang some songfrom her childhood, from beginning to end. And when she stopped, I lookedaround the room and there was like 80 people and I was seeing, there weretears in their eyes. And I looked at these people and I said "why are youcrying?" and they said "oh, it was such a sad song". And I realized, I didn’teven listen to the song. I was too busy listening to the fact that here was ahuman being doing something that they thought was absolutelyimpossible. And she didn’t even go in such a deep of a trance. And theinstructions I gave her were not specific, I didn’t teach her anything aboutnotes, but somewhere in the back of her mind was this song from herchildhood and it just came pouring out.

Kids play in trance all the time. They imagine things that aren’t there, theyhave imaginary playmates, they hear helicopters, where there aren’t heli-copters and little boys play with army men and hear shootingsounds. I re-member when my kids were young, I used to find these little things in theplanters with little robots and army guys and then I go in my daughter’sroom, there’ll be dolls, sitting at tables with cups of tea and stuff. The abilityto let your mind go wild and to build beautiful realities is something thatkids have. But unfortunately as we grow up we have to learn to live inshared reality.




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EXPERIMENTAL HYPNOSIS

Sometimes I think that people go way overboard in terms of restrictingthemselves. Experimental hypnosis is a really good way of opening up theavenues that have been shut for no reason. And if there is a reason, thenthere are safeguards to make sure that people don’t go crazy. Building inthose safeguards is something I have done for years. The greatest toy of allis the human brain and being able to use it in that way, so it becomes thebig toy that it is. And it doesn’t run risks or dangers. Whenever you startfooling around with reality, strategies, the way people tell the differencebetween real memories and constructed ones, things that are really thereand imaginary friends. The only important part is that people tell the diffe-rence. Some people sort them out by eliminating all the possibilities. And Ithink that’s a real shame because I don’t think you should give up yourimaginary friend, I just think you should keep them private.

RONNIE: When I was in your training with "DESIGN HUMANENGINEERING, I always thought it has a lot of this experimentalhypnosis approach in it, like when we imagined this crossheir or theglobe around people, was that also something that came out ofexperimental hypnosis?

DESIGN HUMAN ENGINEERING

Absolutely. Again it was just like TESLA had a methodical set of tools in hisimagination, by which he could measure things, and then verify that themeasurements would be the same as on the outside. While he had micro-meters in his mind they were as accurate as real micrometers. What I triedto do in DESIGN HUMAN ENGINEERING, was to make experimental hyp-nosis so that it was methodical. So that people could see a pair of cross-heirs, move them around, and move them into the distance and knowexactly how far away it was. That we taught people to do things thatnormally have to be done with very sophisticated machines and instead tobe able to increase your hearing, while people can use listening devices inorder to hear, most people haven’t extended their ears to the point of whatthey’re capable of. Since we have to shut down an input, in order to listento one sound in the crowd, some people shut their ears down so much thatthey don’t use them to the extend that they can be used.

And DESIGN HUMAN ENGINEERING was to get people to be methodicalabout the use of what’s possible. Whether it was positive hallucinations,such that you can imagine measuring aids so that you actually couldmeasure as accurately with a tape measure in your mind as you could withone on the outside. I built for myself a glucose meter. I had this little thingand I had to prick my finger and measure how much sugar was in myblood. And after a while I decided I would just build one. And the one in myhead is as accurate as the one on the outside. I still go back and calibrateevery once in a while to make sure that it’s right, and every once in a whileit’ll go off a little bit but it’s pretty much as accurate as the one on theoutside.

I think most people underestimate what human beings are capable of. Weput too much faith in external machinery instead of using it to train themind. MOZART and BEETHOVEN could hear every instrument in a sym-phony and write down every part. Such that when all these musicians gettogether they would play. Now we have synthesizers, we can literally sitdown and write a whole symphony with 900 parts to it. But if you can’t hearthem in your head, then ultimately you’re gonna be limited when you’re onthe machine. You should be able to construct as much inside your mind as




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you do with the machines on the outside. The artist that can’t draw in hishead is gonna have a lot harder time drawing on the outside.

Being able to imagine art doesn’t mean that every art that you create isgonna look exactly like the one in your head, but it definitely gives you agood place to start. If you don’t have the ability… … there are some peoplethat can’t even see any of their pictures. That’s really gonna be limiting inthe end. That means that you’re gonna be making pictures of frighteningthings and they’ll scare you. It’s like phobias. A lot of people don’t realizehow their phobias work. So they have no ability to alter it. Well, the samething is true, not just about fears, but about capabilities. That if you don’tstretch the mind, and have it try all the permutations of things, all thesynaesthesia patterns…

Years and years ago there was something called autogenic training. Peoplespent months trying to make one hand warmer than the other. And I alwaysfound it kind of humorous that they would spend so much time doing it, be-cause everybody’s already had the experience of one hand being warmerthat the other. And it is easier to go back and remember what it is like, orliterally to imagine an ice cube in your hand. I’ve used it to do pain control.

PAIN CONTROL

One time there was a kid that fell down on the street. He tore his hand up,something horrible and he was in an agony and I didn’t have anything. So Ihad him close his eyes and I told him that I had a big ice cube and I put theice cube on his hand. Now there was no ice cube. But it’s funny how peoplewhen they are in pain they’re motivated. I had him touch it with his otherhand to feel how cold it was and then put it on the part that hurt. And whenthe ambulance got there, and the guy would start giving him stitches, I toldhim his hand was too frozen to feel the stitches. The kid sat there and staredat the needle going in his hand and not whimper at all. And I remember theambulance driver kept looking at me strangely cause I kept saying "can youfeel the ice?" and he kept on saying "yes, I can feel it." And the ambulancedriver would say "what ice, what are you talking about?" And I said "it’s justa game we’re playing." Afterwards he came up and he said "I wanna knowabout this game, I see a lot of kids and we can’t do stitches on thembecause they’re in too much pain." And I explained to him, I said "I had himimagine an ice cube and put the ice cube on his hand." And the guy lookedat me and says "that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard."

CRAZY PEOPLE – CRAZY IDEAS - PROGRESS

And I said "yeah, but most of the really important things that havehappened on this planet were done by crazy people like EINSTEIN, TESLA,EDISON. All of those people were crazy. Can you imagine how nutty it was?You know they told Einstein there would never be another use for electricityother than the ticker tape. And to think that there would be other uses forelectricity was completely insane. And look at how many things run off ofelectricity now."

The guy that invented the first IC chips had this idea that instead of runningthrough all these electronic components that you could do it just like thediagram and that you could etch this in silicon. In fact the first one I thinkwas done on a piece of copper and he actually made the same things thatwould happen with electricity at a big level, the micro electronic level, andgot it to imitate the same thing as a whole bunch of electronic components.And even when he showed somebody the first device that he built which I




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think was a calculator, they looked at him and they said we already have acalculator. "Why would we need another one?" And he was trying to explainto them, "Look, we could build anything. Not just calculators, radios, televi-sions, computers, anything that had electronic parts in it we could take allthe parts and put them inside of a single chip." And they looked at him andsaid "you’re crazy" and they fired him. And they just said "you’re too nuts,this is the craziest idea I’ve ever heard of."

EDWARD LAND, when he came up with the idea of the Polaroid picture,everybody looked at him and said that the fun of making pictures is waitingfor them. Who would ever want a picture right away? And of course Pola-roid became one of the biggest companies there was, I think they make 300Million a year in instamatic cameras alone. Now with the advent of digitalphotography the idea of having to wait for pictures is out of the question,nobody wants to wait for pictures anymore. And now we have digital equip-ment that does recording. This little device in front of you, if you wouldhave 30 years ago described, you could record on a little tiny machine likethat, with optical data, they would have looked at you like you should haveyour head examined, be put in a strain jacket and fed lollipops for the restof your life.

PIONEER SPIRIT OF EXPERIMENTAL HYPNOTIST

What I’m trying to do is to get people to just go ahead, pull the barriersdown, and find out what comes out. Because everybody who was in thoseexperimental groups, did different things for a living. I had guys that werearchitects, we had people that were psychotherapists, we had hypnotiseurs,we had linguists, we had an anthropologist, we had a guy that worked atHue’s aircrafts and he was doing engine design. Over the years I had every-body from astronauts, designing engineers at NASA.

Every time you enter new things in the world, there’s gonna be new capabi-lities and also new problems. I mean think about it, somebody had to inventthe weightless toilet. For NASA that was a big problem. Because when yousend astronauts up there for a long time, they couldn’t shit in their diapersfor days, this wasn’t gonna work out. It’s funny that the solution turned outto be something that somebody thought of because they were vacuuming.And suddenly they looked down at the vacuum cleaner and they went hmmand pretty much that’s what you do, you piss into a vacuum cleaner, youknow. And when you sit on a weightless toilet, it seals on your but andsucks everything down. And that’s a good thing, otherwise it would be areally dirty space capsule. All of these things they say are impossible, therewere always found solutions. And once we find the solutions, everybodygoes, uuuuh, it was so easy…

Well, what made it hard wasn’t the solution, what made it hard was theway we thought about it. So to me the nice thing about experimentalhypnosis is the chance to change your mind first and then find out whatcomes out of it rather then scratching to try to find one solution untilsomeone randomly changes their mind and sees what’s been obvious allalong.

RONNIE: The more I hear you talk about it the more I think it’s abouttime to offer a training in experimental hypnosis.

Every group is gonna be different. It’s the kind of group where you have tohave people have a pioneer spirit. A lot of the groups I do a lot of the peopledon’t so much come for the training, they come because there’s somethingwrong with them. I always try to sort out the training programs from pro-




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grams that are about fixing yourself so I can either teach people how to doit, or I can just do it to them.

But this is really a third category. This is a category for people that have thatpioneering spirit. Where they just wanna know what their brain is capableof and they’re willing to try anything. I grew up in the sixties, when peopletried everything and I think that spirit has stayed with me. I don’t necessari-ly think that taking mescal and LSD is right for everybody. But your brain isfull of LSD already and all kinds of other chemicals. And our ability to chan-ge our state of consciousness is going to effect how we think not just cog-nitively but chemically at the bottom line. In order to be afraid you have tomanufacture all the right hormones and all the right chemicals to manufac-ture the state of fear. And to manufacture the state where you go AHA, andunderstand things in new ways, is no different. And to me that’s the mostimportant thing that comes out of experimental hypnosis groups is thatpeople begin to look at problems as opportunities and begin to look at thepossible and the impossible as not being that different. It’s just asynapse away.

pause

It doesn’t make sense to me, why should a NEURO LINGUISTIC PROGRAM-MER see someone for two years? If they don’t know what to do the firsttime why would they have them come back unless they try other things.Some people, it’s like they go to one seminar, they learn a little NLP, andthey put it on the brochure and then they tell people that they are doingNLP when they’re not.

The difference is to understand the techniques or coming up with whateveris suitable or makes sense or is experimental.

PHOBIAS

A lot of times people will come to me and they’ll say "I have a phobia" and Isay "How do you know you have a phobia?" and they’ll say "I’m nervous"and I say, “so you are nervous then, you don’t have a phobia.” So doing thephobia treatment isn’t of any help. But sometimes I get people and I will dothe stuff right out of "Frogs into Princes". With no variation, and the personwill be fine. And I’ll ask them and I go "Didn’t they do this with you?" yousaid you went to a Neuro Linguistic Programmer and they go "no, they didnot do anything like this".

THE ORDER OF THINGS

I don’t know exactly what everybody does, but I try to get my students to trythe simple stuff first and if that doesn’t work, then you just start asking que-stions because most people will tell you what you need to know. If youlisten, it’s not that big a mystery. If somebody can generate a problem morethan one time, they’re pretty good at it. And if you find out how they do it,you just have to get them to do something else. I know it’s a simple philoso-phy, but it has always worked for me. I can’t think of the number of timesthat I had referrals from other people and it only takes me a matter of minu-tes to do it. And I think the biggest part is, that I really believe that humanbeings can learn. And I don’t accept diagnosis. That all this diagnostic non-sense about I’m bipolar and all this crap it’s just an excuse to not find outwhat’s going on with this individual. Everybody is a little bit different, andyou have to find out, how this person does it. And it makes a big differencewhere the picture is and how big it is and which ones scare them and which




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ones don’t. You can find out, how to switch things. I think, one of the mostintense cases was, I worked with someone that was a bulimic.

A BULIMIC

They were approaching 40 and they had been bulimic since they wereseven. Their mother literally taught them, cause the mother wanted her tobe a model and taught her how to eat food and throw up and her teeth wereruined from all the acid that gets on the inside of the teeth and stuff. But theworst part was, she was absolutely obsessed. Her whole world revolvedaround food, and throwing it up or not throwing it up, being anorexic andthen being bulimic and binging on alcohol and drugs and then going to AA,everything was extremes. As I listened to her talk, it just suddenly dawnedon me that this person just does not know how to not give a shit aboutsomething. How to make something unimportant. So I started asking her, Isaid

"What is really unimportant to you?""How do you feel about American baseball?"She said "I don’t really think about it""Have you ever seen a baseball game"and she goes "yuh"and I said "do you care about it?"she goes "not really".And I said "Good. Take that feeling and amplify it."

I put her in a trance and I had her take the feeling that it really doesn’tfucking matter, spin it round and round and round and then I had a piece ofchocolate cake appear in front of her. Started running through all thesedifferent kinds of foods that she binged on. And then literally took her into arestaurant, walked up to the desert tray and I said"Do you want one of these things?" And she looked at them and she goes"Huh, not really"And suddenly she looked at me and she said "I can’t believe I said that".And she looked at it and she said "I can’t care about it. It’s just notimportant."

And the truth is, a lot of these things with people, they’ve made somethingthat’s not important too important. I mean to let your life revolve aroundwhether or not you’re eating food and if you throw up enough food andlooking in the mirror and seeing yourself fat when you’re skinny… that’sjust nonsense. People have to really stop distorting things, I mean some ofthese poor anorexics are just, I mean they look horrible. And yet they’vegotten to the point that they are completely phobic about food.

RONNIE: And some even don’t notice how skinny they are, they stillthink they’re overweight and they are like skeletons.

Oh yeah, but it’s not that hard to put them in a trance and make it so toscare the piss out of them. And then I have them look at themselves and seehow skinny they really are. I mean, I tell them what they look like to me.And I don’t have to lie, they look like crap, you know. And making themhungry. Because they’ve forgotten how to be hungry, they’re so wrackedwith fear that once you get rid of the fear, you have to replace it with somegood solid hungriness. And you have to put food cravings in. I fill them withposthypnotic suggestions for stuff, you know, middle of the night cravingsand stuff and I give them phobias for throwing up. Make them think that ifthey throw up they’re gonna choke to death and all kinds of stuff. Causethese people will die if they’re left alone.




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I remember, I met KAREN CARPENTER many, many years ago when herband played in a place where my band played. It was a pizza parlor south ofSan Francisco somewhere. And I remember she was just a sweet younggirl. And then years later when I found out she dies of anorexia, I wasactually angry. I thought here are all these fucking therapists in Los Angelesand they know that I could have fixed this woman and nobody told meabout it. Nobody said anything about it. They just stuck her in a hospitaland let her die. I guess they were afraid of looking bad or something. Butwhen it gets to the point that somebody is gonna die, that’s the point whereyou got to put your believes aside and just try anything. She shouldn’t havebeen in a hospital, she should have been in a restaurant. And they shouldhave locked her in a restaurant until she ate her way out. They should haveput her in a big cake and tight her hands behind her back and made her eather way out.

AGORAPHOBICS

This nonsense about food… like agoraphobics. You’re locked in your houseforever. I had one person shop in a seminar one time and I was askingpeople what they did for a living and this lady raised her hand and said shewas an agoraphobic. And I said, "excuse me mam but if you were an agora-phobic, you wouldn’t be here". And she said "Actually I came here to thankyou." And I said "why you wanna thank me?" And she said "you taught mypsychiatrist. He went to a seminar and you taught him how to get peopleover phobias and he came over to my house and he got me out of the hou-se and he got me downtown" and she goes "now I can go anywhere." Iasked her who her psychiatrist was and it was this guy in Georgia. And Icould remember him coming in and literally coming up and saying "whatdo you do with a agoraphobics, is it different than regular phobics?". And Isaid, "yeah it is, cause you have to do it over the phone" (laughing) "or youactually have to go over to her house." Since a lot of the people that call meare really far away, I’m not gonna fly 3000 miles. You gotta get them a cellphone and talk them out of the house. Get them to the point where they’renot afraid. You gotta start making them being afraid of staying home in-stead of afraid of going out.

Fear can be a good thing. It just has to be aimed in the right direction. Toomany people are afraid of the wrong thing. And there is nothing worse thanlosing your whole life over a single problem.

DABBLE IN EVERYTHING

It’s like the experimental hypnosis thing. I think of how much people don’teven imagine they’re gonna miss out on. Because they never try stuff. Andthey don’t try it because they don’t have interest in it. Just because they’renot firing a few synapses. They’ll never paint, they’ll never play music,they’ll never be this, they’ll never be that. They’ll never garden, they’ll neverdo this, just because they don’t know how to look at it and go "hmm, thatlooks interesting, let’s try it." Most of the great minds I’ve met in my life doeverything. GREGORY BATESON played jazz, he played music, you know.He wrote, he sang, he went and danced with nadas. He was interested inanthropology, archaeology, chemistry, genetics. I mean, Moshe Feldenkraiswas the same way. Seems like every great mind I met has done a little bit ofeverything. And I think that it’s important that you dabble in a lot of stuffbecause it means that when you do come up against difficulties, you don’ttry to break through everything consciously. Some times you just sit backand let it come. And it will. If enough synapses will fire in your brain, solu-




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tions will come to you. I find the more things that I’ve developed over theyears, the easier it is to develop more things. One of the sort of discoura-ging things that Gregory told me, he said "well, you’re in a real period ofcreativity in your life, enjoy it while it lasts, cause it will probably only go onfor six months. And then you spend the rest of your life talking about it."That’s not happened to me, because I made a conscious effort to constantlydo new things and to try new things.

THE WILD DAYS

I’m fond of saying there are lots of people stuck on various levels of mydevelopment. And in this book "The Wild Days" talking about all thesethings that happened years ago. Most of the things I don’t even rememberthat are in here.

RONNIE: Especially when they’re written in German ;-)

Especially when they’re written in German ;-)

RONNIE: But maybe the pictures… here he also writes about yourChristmas presents to people, putting someone up on a cross,

She had been on a cross her whole life (laughing)

RONNIE: What was that?

I just made what they were doing come true. She was one of those peoplethat was always torn between everything. I can’t do this and I don’t… Shenever just did anything. And she never just stood up for herself, and shenever just went: enough is enough. So we tied her on a cross and lit a fireunderneath it. Be surprised, I gave her a knife, she cut herself down andwas mad as a wet hen. Screamed and yelled at me, so I pointed out to her,"if you can yell at me, you can yell at anybody." I was probably the mostdangerous person she’d ever meet. If she could yell at me, she could standup for herself… for other things. And it wasn’t just about getting angry, itwas just about getting down the cross and stop whining about your life andstart doing things. Actually her and Terry would sit in a room and competewho is the most pathetic. I said I have only time to help one of you thisweek and the two of them would sit there and Terry would always losebecause Deborah was more pathetic than Terry was. It was just ridiculoustrying to be… There is too much reward in psychotherapy for people youknow, it’s like the squeaky wheel gets all the grease. And I wanted people torealize that what you really need more than anything else is a sense ofhumour. And most of the Christmas party was to get people to just stopdoing what they were doing and start laughing about it. That’s why they gotcream pie in the face and all kinds of funny things. It was a funny thing butwe just decided to go through a Christmas party and give everybody anexperience that would last for the rest of their life. We did a pretty good jobof it.

RONNIE: They even wrote books about it 20 years later.

Yes, they wrote books about it. Me I’ve tried to move on, that was just a onetime event, just for the fun of it. A lot of the things that I do, I do just to findout what will happen. To me it’s all been about experimentation. And tryingto find results where everyone says its impossible. I just don’t think it’spossible that things are impossible.

RONNIE: I remember in Ascona you said, if it’s not possible, then wedo it hypnotically.

(Laughing) I like that phrase.




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BELIEF IN MAGIC

Yeah, if it can’t be done then we’ll have to do it hypnotically.I know that ultimately everything that was impossible now is possible. Firstit was impossible to fly, now there’s planes all over the bloody place. It’sbeen one thing after the other. You keep hearing it in medicine, you keephearing it in science, you keep hearing it in chemistry. Energy can’t be crea-ted or destroyed, but yet it’s all over the place. Obviously it was created, weeven know the direction. Now the universe is expanding, so we know whereit started from. If people can conceive and talk and understand about thesize of the universe, then it really puts into perspective all this little janglyproblems people say they’re so overwhelming.

If people had some perspective, on how magical the universe really is, andhad a stronger belief in magic - I don’t mean hokus pokus magic – I meanreal magic, like chemistry. I mean chemistry is the most magical thing of all.The fact that you can put things together and they stay together. That youhave things that are solidly together and because you subject them tocertain kind of chemical process, suddenly they fall apart at the molecules.You know that solids can turn into gases, and gases can turn into solids. Imean this is all really magical stuff. And the way in which minerals areformed, and I mean when you start thinking of all the amazing things thatgo on in the human body. For a doctor to say "this is impossible" is reallysaying "I don’t know how to do it." And rather than saying "I don’t knowhow to do it," they say "it can’t be done". And there is just miracles all thetime, there are people that have huge tumours and they just disappear.And instead of people trying to figure out what happened, at the biologicallevel, they always go "weeeeeeell, it’s just this, it’s just that, it didn’t reallyhappen. It probably will never happen again." It’s always something. Ratherthan looking at those exceptions, as something that could become the rule.

THE RICHARD METHOD

My career, a lot of it is based on finding people that got over something, fin-ding what they did and teaching other people to go ahead and do it. AndI’ve had great success with it. And a big part of it is that I have a reallystrong belief in human beings and what they’re capable of. Kind of thefoundation of psychology is believing that people get screwed up in the firstfive years. And they never really get to change and get out of it. And that’svery foolish, cause if you can scare the crap out of somebody, with a nearair accident and give them a flying phobia for the rest of their life, then whycan’t you do something that effects them in a positive way for the rest oftheir lives? I’ve had too many experiences of the impossible becomingpossible. For me there’s no way I’m willing to accept these kind of limita-tions. Ain’t gonna happen…

NLP AND DHE

The real difference between NLP and DHE is that NLP was based on the ideaof modelling elegance. Modellers were always looking to find the smallestnumber of variables to create the widest range of results. Cause that’s whatyou wanna do, when you design a machine. But human beings are not ne-cessarily machines. This is why in DHE we’re trying to find the system thatcreates the result, which is the most fun. And the most fun is not neces-sarily the simplest. Because the simplest usually is the most boring way todo something. Whereas in DHE the reason that we put in big sounds andbig lights is so that through people’s internal representations, we get them




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to create and to manifest more creativity in every part of their living, notjust in the way they do art but in the way they do everything.

They keep talking about life is art and art is life. I think a real good exampleof that is the difference between NLP and DHE. NLP is about getting peopleto recapitulate by taking the simplest most basic things that they share incommon. So that you can listen to a strategy from one painter and give it tosomebody that does not paint and they’ll be able to paint a little bit. DHE iswhere you start taking that strategy and flowering it up with myriads ofpossibilities so that they end up doing something that’s better than thatone’s artist. So rather than trying to imitate one thing getting everyone tospell the same way, we're also trying to get people so that they enjoy theprocess of doing things so that they do it more often.

DIZZINESS

The example in your list, the guy - what’s his name - Gary, yeah, while hehad dizziness, and he couldn’t drive up and down the hill cause he couldn’ttell up from down. In my Jeep there’s a little ball in the dashboard that tellsyou whether you’re going up or down and to what degree. By sticking thisin his head, it not only solved the problem, it also makes it more fun.Because now instead of your internal representations creating fear, yourinternal representations become something that tell you whether you’regoing north or south or up or down. It didn’t just solve the problem ofbalance, it gave him the sense of direction. Rather then trying to getoutcomes, trying to build good directions, for people to go in. And not justphysically but in all kinds of things. It’s to me never enough to just solve theproblem. I think you have to send people in better directions in life. And thathas to do with changing the way in which they make decisions, and howthose things are manifested in the consciousness.

There’s a tremendous emphasis in DHE placed on the conscious processesand getting the unconsciousness to automatically create internal represen-tations which are big and bold and fun.

NHR really emphasizes the unconscious chemical change by creatingmassively intensive states internally. You can change the neurochemistry ofsomeone and create states of consciousness that would be otherwiseimpossible. To me all of these things are important. It’s important to havemodelling elegance, so that you get the pure parts of things, so that we getthe ability of one human being to be the ability of another human being.

Especially when it comes to things like remedial change. But where NLPruns out, is where we don’t have good examples. In Gary’s case for surethere were lots of people that knew if they were going up or down, but notthat many that knew how they did it consciously. Most people do it with thevestibular system which is a whole other sensory organ in the body thattells you whether you’re going up or down and whether you’re falling overor not. And since he was obviously desensitized of these things, it becomesimportant that we create a different chemical state.

SMELLING AGAIN

In the same seminar that he was in there was a guy who had lost his senseof smell. Remember that guy? Hadn’t smelled anything in years and yearsand years and years. And that’s a big sensory system. Lots of what peoplecall taste is actually smell. Tastewise there’s actually only 5 distinctions, butsmellwise there’ billions. And for somebody to loose that sense … I don’t




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know if it had a physiological or psychological base but I do know that if hestayed in the same state of consciousness, that he was gonna have thesame problem.

So what I did with him was to create a massivly different chemical state inhim. And then give him posthypnotic suggestions that he’d be able tosmell. And of course it was a new state that he hadn’t been in, thelimitations did not exist in that state. And that state was so powerful, itbegan to leak over to all the other states of consciousness that he had. Andthat’s also what I did deliberately. Once he could smell onions and flowerand this and that, then it’s going to become something where once thosedoorways are open, and those neurosynaptic passways, because I don’tbelieve they weren’t fired. I think the smells were actually going on, but Idon’t think he had access to it. And once we opened the doorway, then it’sgonna be open to all kinds of states of consciousness. But I think it wouldhave been almost impossible to open it in his normal waking state. Becausehe believed that he couldn’t smell and probably there were physicalblockers, that made it so that he couldn’t access those neurosynapticpathways.

The olfactory system is the only one that has direct access to cortical projec-tions. So it’s not like there’s any thalamic intervention, not a thinking acti-vity. It’s a purely unconscious activity. So trying to approach it consciouslydidn’t make any sense. It’s something that you have to do almost entirelyunconsciously.

And whereas DHE is a very conscious activity, this is where we build thelittle ball that tells him whether he is going up or down, or north or south,just like there is in my jeep, NHR is a very unconscious activity. If we built ameter and told him that smells were going on, it isn’t nearly as much fun assmelling a rose. Making it so that he had this whole other part of life, I thinkis important. He’s not the first person that I met that lost their sense ofsmell. I had somebody that had a stroke and they lost their sense of smell.And the doctors just told them they will have to learn to live with it. And asfar as the doctors knew, that was true. But then doctors don’t do deeptrance hypnosis like we do.

And when you put people in a very very altered state, then the ruleschange. That’s the great statement that you have on that piece of paper.When reality says you can’t do something, then you have to go into deeptrance and do it, because you’re then no longer in the same reality.

IF IT’S IMPOSSIBLE, YOU HAVE TO DO IT HYPNOTICALLY …

If it’s impossible, you have to do it hypnotically. Those are some of thebeliefs that carried me through many things where I think everybody elsegave up too soon. Lots of the clients that have come to me over the years,have been absolutely given up on and have been told that what is everwrong with them, either has a physiological cause or it’s neurological, orwhatever. But that’s like saying that we know everything that the brain iscapable of.

There are too many things that we can’t explain. We can’t explain sponta-neous remission. I mean there are people that have serious cancer and justget over it without any medical help. And there are healing things that goon in native tribes, where doctors have gone down and documented it. It’svery very serious conditions, for which there’s no cure and somebody dan-ces around them and sings a song and "capingo" it’s gone. And they’regoing, "because it doesn’t always go away, it has nothing to do with it". And




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I think that’s kind of naïve. I think the times the song works is because theperson is in the right state. We don’t know which chemical state.

Obviously some time in the future we’ll probably build a machine that canchange people’s neurochemical state to just the right state to be healed.Right now we do it by filling people full of drugs and then shooting themfull of radiation but there’s gonna be a point in time where we’re gonnarealize that people are a neurochemical package. And the new answers tothe neurochemicals are what drugs are changing and what radiation effects.And that, when it gets down to the subtlety of healing, it’s gonna become areal art form where former cardiologists and neurologists and people whodesign machines are gonna design brainmachines that get the mind to gointo the right state, produce the right chemicals to dissolve cancer and to doother things.

And in the meanwhile then lunatics like us are just gonna have to take acrack at it. There are some people that are willing to accept the beliefs thatsay that things can’t be done, and there are some of us that say if every-body else gives up on you, drop by and we’ll take a shot at it. Because if itcan’t be done, you don’t have to worry about it. It won’t be done. But overand over and over again in my career I would have never imagined 30 yearsago that the results that I’ve gotten would have happened. Blindly I justforged ahead, and whenever I ran into a barrier, you go into a deeper tran-ce. The bigger the barrier, the deeper the trance and the more amazing theresults. Nobody is more stunned by the things that people have done thanme. Even though I sit there and say with total confidence, "oh yes, we’ll goahead and we’ll do this, no you haven’t smelled anything in 30 years, closeyour eyes" and bang bang bang bang, the guy is smelling flowers androses. And while he is dancing around and saying "isn’t this great?" I’mgoing "WOW". What this teaches me is that all these neurologists that saidhe would never smell again.

And all this guy did, was change his state of consciousness and the ruleschanged. And what that means for all the rest of us is so important. Itmeans that we don’t have to wait till we lose something. It means there arethings that we can’t do yet that we probably could if we learned to manifestmore altered states.

FIT FOR TEST

I remember when I first started doing hypnosis, literally after an experimen-tal hypnosis group, looking at my partner and saying "why can’t we dothis"? I took people I had them controlling their heartbeat, their bloodpres-sure, manifesting positive hallucinations. One of the first things I did, a guyhad to take a real estate brokers exam, and when he’d go in to take a test,he’d go blank. And he’d been an interior decorator, so I had him make wall-paper with all the answers on it. And when he went in the room, he’dwallpaper the room with all the answers, took the test and looked up theanswers, and he got a hundred percent on his test. And when he came backand told me about it, I thought of all the tests I took in college, that I didn’tknow the answers to. If I had to work with that guy before I went to college Iwould have gotten much better grades. To me I don’t think the importantthing is getting good grades on tests. The important thing is knowing thatyou can. And knowing that it’s not about being smart or stupid. Its about away of providing your conscious mind the answers that you have uncon-sciously. Just like the guy that learned to smell and the other guy wholearned to balance himself. All of these things are just good examples ofdifferent approaches. Some things are better done consciously, some




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things are better done unconsciously. And other things are better done wayunconsciously.

A PARKINSON CASE

I want the people in the seminars to try things. I want them to look at thisand go "nothing can happen" and then 5 minutes later this person is doingthings. When I was in London, I took a gentleman with Parkinson’s disease.And literally someone came in the back room and PAUL MCKENNA and Iwere sitting there and they said "this guy with Parkinson’s disease hasnightmares. And the drugs that they give him produce the nightmares. Andhe wants to see Paul privately." And I said "bring him on the stage." AndPaul said "wait a minute, what if what you want to do doesn’t work?" and Isaid "well, then it won’t. But if it does, think of what a great example thiswould be to the 500 people sitting in the audience. If they can see some-thing that’s never been done being done right in front of them." So Ibrought the guy up and I had him explain to me exactly what it was. And ashe explained it to me, all I could think of was how much money we spent inthe 60’s trying to get drugs that make us hallucinate. And I looked at the guyand I literally said to him "Look, imagine that you were RICHARD BANDLER,in the 60’s, and the government came and said here is free drugs, they’llmake you hallucinate. Would I have been afraid of the hallucinations?" Andthe guy looked at me sheepishly and went "no". And I said "the problem isnot that the drugs make you hallucinate it’s that you’re scaring the crap outof yourself." So I put him into a trance, I had him see the same darkshadows that he saw when he took the drugs but to start to play with them.And make them into things that were fun. Now while he was doing this hewas doing the thing that Parkinson people always do whether their hand isshaking, you know, the left hand shakes involuntarily. And to tell you thetruth, it just bugged me. And so when I brought him out of trance, I lookedat him and I said "you don’t have to do that". And the guy said "yes, be-cause I have Parkinson’s disease". Now, what I know about neurology isvery simple. Movement doesn’t come from the lack of nerves, movementcomes from the fact that you have nerves. So the fact is, it is not that therewere no nerves, it’s that they were doing the wrong thing. The reason thatthere is paralysis is not there because it is saying nothing but because itsays "yes, no, yes, no" very fast and it gets frozen in space. So to create thatshaking movement, had to mean that the appropriate set of signals weren’tsending "this is what’s still", instead when it was moving, it was sending thesignal "this is still". So the information had to be coming from the wrongplace. So literally all I did was touch the guy at the end of his finger and said"don’t think about where your arm is, think about the feeling of my fingeragainst yours." And I touched his finger and I went "one" and I touched thenext finger and I went "two". Every time I touched his finger, the shakingstopped. Because he was paying attention to the feeling of his skin. Not tothe feeling of the position of his arm. And as soon as it stopped, I said thisis something that can be controlled. So I kept going "one, two, three" and Ikept looking at him and I dropped into a deep trance and he of course wentright with me and I said "look, when you wanna stop this shaking, all youhave to think to yourself is stopping is as easy as one, two, three." Andbang, it just stopped shaking. And then the guy asked me the question thatpeople always ask, "is this gonna last?" And I asked "are you gonna be ableto continue to count to three?" I said "once you learned to count to three,you never forgot it, did you?" And he went "no", and I said "now that youknow where the surface of your skin is, instead of the feelings inside yourarm, how could you possibly forget it?"




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There is lots of people that have problems like this, and nobody just triesthings. I mean, maybe it wouldn’t have worked, but if it wouldn’t haveworked, it wouldn’t have cost me anything. What would I lose? A littleprestige? I got enough of that to last for the rest of my life. I’m not worriedabout that. What I’m worried about is that if you can show people inseminars that what it’s all about is trying things. And if you can’t get thereconsciously then you gotta get there hypnotically.

It was a great problem to build a window into the Apollo system. Now theyhave windows all over the place in a space shuttle, cause they have all thispolymer plastics that are heat proof and everything else. But it’s gotta beone of the most amazing things, that we can actually take pictures of theearth from a vehicle from outer space. I mean that would have been so farout of the scope of study when I was a kid, to think that people would justbe riding in space, shooting up and fixing things and satellites, you know,they flew over and fixed the Hubble satellite, then they updated it and putnew stuff in it, it’s definitely an amazing world we live in.

RONNIE: I think if you’re rich enough, they also take tourists to outerspace.

They aren’t taking you very far. They just take you a couple miles up, that’sok. If you have 20 millions to spare, they’ll give you a seat and shoot you upin a dumb rocket and let you float around the earth two or three times andfall down. I think going up in a space shuttle and hanging out… and even-tually they’re gonna build a decent space station there, I think the onethey’re building is a piece of junk, but once they built that one, maybe theycan go to a few asteroids back and maybe build a better one. It’s kind of agoofy thing if you’re thinking that they are building a space station, whenthe moon is up there. You would think it’d be easier to build something onthe moon than just floating around, but I guess they have their reasons forsuch things.

If they build a plastics factory on the moon, I mean they really planned itout, and melt it down and get the raw material up there to build things,better than transporting everything back and forth. And eventually they’llstart doing stuff like that. I mean there’s unlimited resources floating aroundup there. I’m not really sure why they didn’t, I guess too many things hit themoon. I mean if you build something on the moon, it doesn’t have an atmo-sphere to protect it. But I don’t think it would be too hard to build big CO2lasers, you probably burn anything up. Take all that Star Wars stuff and turnit to industrial use. There is not too much that you can’t melt with a CO2laser. Just have to be very careful, it has an invisible beam. I mean, youcan’t see a CO3 laser like you can a light laser, it’s completely invisible. Butit’ll burn through metal (snaps finger) like this. They use them as cuttingtorches. I bought one one time. it’s funny that you can just buy stuff likethat, but I bought a cutting laser and it wasn’t even that expensive, I think itwas 1500 dollars. But dangerous, man, oooooh, weeee. And I could dropsomething and it would just savour it in half. And given that you can’t see it,I actually put a helium laser next to it so that I always knew where the beamwas. Because it is absolutely invisible, it doesn’t even blur your vision. Itwould cut through a human being so fast, or light them on fire, you know,The guys that worked for me in those days would always light themselves afire up with matches along the CO2 laser

RONNIE: Would people even be injured by it or would it just cutthrough?

No it would kill them (snaps his fingers) just like that. I mean you could killyourself so easy with a CO2 laser. That’s part of the Star Wars thing, where




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the two big devices were a real gun and the CO2 lasers. Because lighttravels faster than the middle pallet. So if someone shot a ballistic missile,we’re gonna fry it with a CO2 laser. I remember when they did tests, theymounted a laser on a 747 and they shot a missile on the coast of Seattle.And then depending on the curvage of the earth, they took the plane uphigh enough and they shot the thing down with a CO2 laser and they justevaporated it. Because CO2 Lasers are just very, very powerful. I saw whenthey did a test at Livermore once, I saw on TV, they put this big giant shellof a ballistic missile down and they just shot the CO2 laser and heated it upso much, it exploded. I mean it didn’t melt it, it just exploded. Because it gotso hot so fast, just like a can of water, if you heat up a can of water with agun it’ll just explode. It doesn’t poke a hole in it, it just explodes, becausethere is nowhere for the air pressure to go. And I guess that’s whathappened. Some mighty weapon. And a rail gun is nothing but an air pistol.It’s just a big train car filled with compressed air, and it shoots a big rail outof it. The reason they have them on railroad tracks is because the recoil onthe miss is like 500 yards or something. But they can just shoot one rail andchop the missile in half. They’re deadly accurate because there’s so muchair pressure. But I don’t know if they ever put those things up, those werejust designs they had years ago. I remember reading about it in magazinesthinking that it’s kind of funny that the ultimate weapon would end up beingan air pistol.

My poor little birdies are outside with no bird seed.

interview with richard bandler in ireland 2005 1€¦ · volume 1 or "frogs into...

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