A few people who think mathematically have complained recently to me that the Matrix model isn’t a real matrix, a true matrix. What they mean is that they do not see the axes of the Matrix and so conclude that it does not have axes. Silly them. I hid the axes!

“You hid them?”

Yip, I hid them. I almost slipped up and revealed the axes in Frame Games (1999) as I kept talking about going up (the meta-move, the meta-state process) and setting frames for the inner game and then coming down incorporating and embodying the frames so that we can then go out with the outer game in action and performance. I also almost slipped up with some of the diagrams I created at that time —sketching out the vertical axes going up into meaning and the horizontal axes going out into performance. Opps. There I went and revealed the axes.

“So why did you hide the axes? What was that all about? Did you do that purposefully?”

Yes, I plead guilty. It was conscious, intentional, purposeful, and mindful. I knew I was doing it and did it anyway hoping not to get caught. Well, that’s only partially true, actually I was hoping to get caught, to see who was sharp enough and clever enough to put matrix, axis, up and out, vertical and horizontal, meaning and performance, etc. together. And there actually were several. But, of course, I swore them all to secrecy because if they spread the secret of the Matrix construction and the inner core of Neuro-Semantics, I would have to kill them (with kisses, of course!).

“So what are the axes of the Matrix model?”

The axes are the two key factors that define neuro-semantics—meaning and performance.

I began identifying that explicitly about three years ago when I first defined Neuro- in terms of performance and Semantics as meaning and then two years ago, this was made even more explicit in the Self-Actualization Quadrants (and axes).

But there’s more!

“There’s more? What more can there be? A matrix is comprised of two conceptual axes that then provides the semantic space for a concept, so how could there be more?”

Thanks! Glad you asked. You want to know what’s more? Well, let’s now put the developmental stages that I garnished from Developmental Psychology for the Matrix Model (2002) into the axes to create three axes thereby moving from 2-dimensional space to 3dimensional space. When we do that we have one of those boxes that look like a Borg Spaceship (another reason I’ve hesitated putting it in this format, especially after relentlessly teasing Robert Dilts about his Borg-like “Jungle Gym” construction which he uses for neuro-logical levels, the times zones of past, present, and future and the three perceptual positions).

“Okay, okay, so what’s the result?”

Great. Here we go. The diagrams here were created by Adrian Beardsley, a Neuro-Semantic/ NLP Trainer with Impact Solutions International in Australia. In the first one you see the two axes of meaning and performance from which I designed the Self-Actualization Quadrants. There’s a lot more to it than this, but you’ll have to wait for the book Unleashed (or get to the Ultimate Self-Actualization Workshop).

There you have it! Now you can imaginely see the matrix of the Matrix model. Personally, I prefer the more dynamic diagrams of the Matrix. I just really don’t care for this box-like structure over the dynamic forms of the Matrix model which we have put into the books and training manuals. But you now know the matrix of the Matrix Model.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. modeler and entrepreneur who sometimes writes, sometimes trains, does a tad of coaching, and is even known to jog around the block, give advice about NLP, and philosophize about politics. Recently he’s been modeling the structure of humor as a way to float above seriousness.

The Brain Game
How Do We Run Our Own Brain?

So you want to run your own brain? Good for you. What a wonderful objective! And so rare. Many people talk about running their own brain and taking charge of their own mind, but just watch them when criticized or insulted. They go to pieces. Let one of their closely held beliefs be questioned, and watch out. Sudden it becomes semantic reaction time. They explode with rage, anger, stress, fear, shock, etc. If they truly “run their own brains,” how is it that they lack state management skills in the moments when managing one’s reactions really counts?

Running our own brain, and thinking freely in independent ways apart from rehashing worn-out or spoon fed thoughts necessitates several things. It necessitates that we develop mindfulness about our brains (or more accurately, our minds) so that we actually develop state management skills. It means we learn to play a new Game, The “Running My Own Brain” Game. So, with that in mind:

• What do you need to understand about brains to be able to run yours?
• Would you like to play the Brain Game?

SEVEN BRAIN FACTS

Here are seven things about your brain. They provide a description about how brains work. They also establish an understanding of the Game of Running Your Own Brain and so lead to the Rules of the Game.

#1: Brains Follow Directions

Brains follow directions. They take the directions that you give them and they follow them.

“John, did you see that red, white and blue cat yesterday? Yes, red, white and blue― in fact, the American Flag colors were bright red, white, and blue. Someone in the neighborhood must have thought it would be a patriotic thing to do. Where did I see it? On Linda’s yellow car. It was being chased by a pair of French Poodles across the greenbelt by the swimming pool. That was just before King Kong climbed to the top of the school and beat his chest at the circling plane.”

Provide a little description and the brain goes to work representing the information on our internal mental screen. Like a movie director, brains use the information as instructions for our mental Cinema. This explains why the following are very important questions for our states:

What directions are you giving your brain?
What are the default instructions that you’ve learned to give your brain?
What instructions did your parents or teachers provide you about yourself, life, others, etc.?
How useful, ecological, healthy, balanced, valuable, true, etc. are those instructions?
Do those instructions create empowering states for you?
Would you want to give those instructions to your children?
Do they map out an exciting and loving life?

Why are these questions so important? Because the quality of our lives is a function of the quality of the information processed by our brain. The quality of that information flows from the quality of its instructions. The most important thing you do in life then are the instructions that you give your brain. Are the instructions those that you would use to create a world-class movie?

Recently a young man wrote to me.

“I’m an extremely shy person. When I see a social situation, I avoid it because I say to myself that I’ll have nothing to say and that I’ll be a complete idiot because they will find me boring, then I’ll feel depressed. So I just don’t go. Every time I make a mistake, I feel stupid, then depressed. And that’s what causes me to procrastinate. It’s really stupid, and I know better, and I see it causing me to produce sub-optimally. I feel like these are insurmountable problems….”

I copied the words from the email, cut and pasted them back into my reply. I then asked him to step back from the words and view them as brain instructions.

“Just pretend for a moment that these are instructions for your brain. Are these ideas healthy or sick ones? Would you recommend this way of thinking? Suppose the most popular kid at the university thought this way. How much of a party would these instructions make his or her life?”

There’s a principle in this. Namely, feed your brain toxic ideas and you enter into a toxic world. Your brain will go there because that’s what brains do. Brains go places. Just this week I caught a Brain (thank God it wasn’t mine) going to “Worst Case Scenario!” The person was talking about terrorism in the world. He then entertained unimaginable scenarios. Then he freaked out. Then he said, “This shouldn’t happen!”

And I can tell you, these instructions did not put him in a very resourceful state.

Brains use words, pictures, sounds, tones, volumes, smells, tastes, all kinds of things as the basis for swishing us places. Mention a word and off your brain goes. But where? It depends on your learning history, experiences, memories, imaginations, hopes, etc. Brains are phenomenal at linking things. They do so very, very quickly. Actually, this is one of the chief problems we have with our brains. The problem is not that they don’t learn, but that they learn too quickly. It’s just what they learn that often times is just not true or useful.

Brains are also incredible instruments that never shut down. Even in sleep, we dream as brain wave activity continues. This becomes a problem if we don’t give the brain lots of interesting things to process. The stimulus hunger of brains will trigger them to play the old B-rated movies or hallucinate freely.

#2: Brains Externalize Instructions

We can see a person’s internal world of ideas and frames by noticing the person’s external Games. External life reflects internal frames. The behavioral, speech, and action Games that we play on the outside are expressions of our internal frames of mind. They go together. Games and Rules of the Games.

The old proverb put it this way: “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” The Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius put this yet another way:

“As thy thoughts are so will thy mind be also; for the soul takes its coloring from thought.”
“If you are pained by an external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you―but your judgment about it.” (The Meditations, 160 AD).

Brains manifest internal representation into the external world so that we externalize our internal frames and representations. What does this mean? Namely, that our external world will only be as exciting, vibrant, dramatic, and powerful as our internal frames of mind. So, as you decorate your internal world of mind, imagination, and memory with hopes, desires, wonders, delights, etc., you alter the quality and content of the instructions that you give to your brain.

This brings up several excellent questions for those of us who want to run our own brain to create a quality life:

What kind of images, sounds, words, sensations, etc. do you have running on the inside of your brain?
What kind of internal movies are you showing in the Cinema of your Mind?
Who does your interior decorating?
Does your internal world of frames need some better interior decorating?

#3: Brains Run on Representations

The cognitive and neuro-sciences have discovered that brains represent our external sensed experiences. It is not that we literally have an internal movie screen in our mind, yet it seems that we do. This is how we experience thoughts and awareness’s. It seems that we internally recall what our home, car, work, friends, parents, dogs, etc. look like, sound like, smell like, feel like, taste like. This sensory awareness on the inside of our brain has led neuro-scientists to designate parts of the brain the visual cortex, auditory cortex, the cortex where we process smells, tastes, sensations, balance, etc. phenomena of consciousness

Korzybski and others noted that we operate upon the world, not directly, but via a map of the world. In NLP, Bandler and Grinder revolutionized psychology by putting the foundation of thought in terms of the sensory representations systems and using these modalities of awareness as the first “languages” of the mind. This facet of running our own brain seems so simple, yet it is so profound.

If we picture a beautiful day with blue sky and billowy white clouds and a green grass lawn facing the white sands of a gorgeous ocean view and imagine feeling the warm ocean breeze blowing through our hair and the smell of the salt water and the sounds of children playing and enjoy our favorite drink while getting a neck and back massage from our special loved one …

Well, it doesn’t take long before our body and neurology responds to those representations as if they were instructions about how to feel. Because brains run on representations, the more expressive, vivid, dramatic, and sensory-specific, the easier it is for us to tell our brains where to go and what to feel. Then the screen play is clearer and easier to follow.

Our brains represent things as it were on a mental screen of the mind. It’s like there’s an internal movie playing and we fill in the sensory details of that movie. Of course, we do not play out everything in that Cinema. We can’t. We can’t even input all that comes in. Our eyes only scan a very narrow part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our ears only receive a very narrow band of sound wave frequencies. So we have to be pretty selective, as a movie director, about what we play on our internal Cinema. Choose well. It’s your brain.

#4: Brains Transition In and Out of the Present Moment

With that last induction (three paragraphs above), did you leave where you are now and go somewhere else? If you didn’t, perhaps you could use the words to do that. Try it out. Because we represent things, we can represent realities that are not immediately present and go there. This is the foundation of all day-dreaming, night-dreaming, fantasizing, learning, creativity, invention, thinking, conceptualizing, mathematizing, theorizing, etc. This is what we humans do best. We can leave our current situation and travel to distance places, times, and worlds.

We call this thinking. It’s also hypnosis. It’s also trance. It’s many things: imagination, fantasy, creativity, and hallucination. This means that we are not stuck or limited to his present moment. We can represent things not present, never present, and even impossible things. What freedom of mind we have! It’s a freedom of consciousness that’s unique to our species. We have a consciousness that can transition from our current state to other states, hence the word “trance.” Anytime we shift our awareness to something that is not part of our current awareness, we enter a trance state.

This means that most of our states of mind are trances. We mostly live in hypnotic states not sensory aware states in this present moment. Hypnosis is the norm, our default situation, not present time sensory acuity. We call hypnosis or trance “downtime” in NLP because we are down inside ourselves thinking, feeling, and experiencing other times, places, people, and ideas. We call present time sensory acuity “uptime” because we are “up” and noticing what our eyes see, ears hear, skin feels, etc.

“Hey, Tom! Tom, Earth to Tom!”

“What?”

Our brains love to zone out. Doesn’t yours? It happens when you drive on long trips, it happens even when you drive to the grocery store. It happens when you wait in line, in an elevator, and when you’re listening to a speech. Brains do that. It’s no big deal. Well, it’s not unless you have no guidance or control over it. Then it is a big deal. If you lack awareness of when you are present and when you’re off on some mind-trip, then you are doing out-of-control hallucinating.

We all hallucinate. Those who do so mindfully and by choice are our greatest scholars, inventors, creators, designers, teachers, CEOs, etc. Those who don’t do it by choice suffer from under-achieving and the ineffectiveness of not being able to manage their own mind. They don’t run their own brains.

#5: Brains Induce States

Brains put us into neurological states. They affect our physiology, breathing, movement, and internal chemistry. To work up a good mad, we only have to think angry thoughts of injustice and violation. We only have to think about a dangerous threat and off we go into a fear state. And some representations of sexuality can induce our body to experience desire and lust.

Brains do this because they are part of the body. They sit at the top of the spinal cord and nervous system and bring in all of the nervous impulses processed by the end receptors. Out of the structure of our multi-layered brains emerge our sense of awareness we call “mind.” Mind is an emergent property in the neurology of our brain. So it is always mind-body or body-mind, and never one without the other.

This explains why we mostly think or represent ourselves into our states but why we also can act our way into states. This gives us two royal roads into a mind-body state of consciousness whether it is confidence and joy and love or fear, anger, and sadness. We can use mind and all of our internal representations and we can use body (breathing, posture, movement, activity, etc.).

What state are you in? What state do you go into when any given stimulus or trigger occurs? You need look no further than the instructions you give yourself at the mental dimension or what you do in terms of your posture, muscle tension, breathing, etc. at the physiological dimension.

#6: Brains Go in Circles

Not only do our brains represent the world, go places, and put us into states, but brains also do flips, they roll over, they flip back on themselves, they go in circles. As there are feed forward and feedback loops in the physical structure of the brain so that nervous impulses are sent to the thalamus and the amygdala they are simultaneously passed on to the escorted and after processing there back to the lower brain structures. It’s all inter-connected. We even have an associative cortex that keeps everything connected with everything else so that we have more cortical connections in the three trillion brain cells than atoms in the universe.

No wonder we loop around. No wonder we can worry about our humor and wonder if we are caring too much and then become afraid of our worry and then think something must be wrong with us that we are worry about something so silly as that. We get caught up in down spirals of negative thoughts and can become obsessive compulsive. We can get caught up in positive spiral of thoughts and suffer from insomnia due to our excitement.

Our brains are not strictly logical. To think in a straightforward way and to stay on that path for more than a few seconds is very difficult for our brains. That’s why mathematics and formal logic seem so foreign to us. It’s not the natural habit of our mind. We think in circles. Our brains go around in loops and spirals. We keep reprocessing the same tired old thoughts.

This reflexivity is what allows us to layer thought upon thought, feeling upon feeling, thought upon feeling, memory upon imagination, fear upon anger, dread upon worry, joy upon learning, etc. This creates the whole domain of our meta-states―our states of thoughts and feelings about other thoughts and feelings. And that’s what creates the layering effect of our awareness so that we can create great complexity in our experiences.

We begin with a reference experience, bring it in and represent it, then develop thoughts and feelings about that, and so on until what was “out there” becomes a frame of reference, a frame of mind and then the very frameworks of four personality and orientation. This creates the Rules of the Game, or our highest frames of mind.

#7: Brains Frame Things

This is one of the greatest powers of our brain for health and sanity and for insanity and destructiveness. Our brains frame. They do so to create contextual meaning. Things, events, people, even words do not mean anything in and of themselves. It takes a brain to create meaning, a “thing” that does not exist out there but is a production of the brain.

Actually, the brain creates two levels of meaning. Associative meaning arises when we link up one thing with another thing. What does a cookie mean? It depends on what you have associated with a cookie. It could mean a sweet or junk food. It could mean reward or lack of nutrition. It could mean delight and fun, it could mean threat to my diet. It could mean survival, it could mean fat.

Because brains link ideas, images, feelings, etc., things easily become associated. This creates triggers or anchors. One thing (a sight, sound, sensation, word, etc.) triggers another thing. Stimulus― Response. In this way we create structures of the mind that we call understandings or knowledge. These are not “things,” but organizations of associations―how we have sequenced or ordered the frames in our movies.

What does an “authority figure” mean? Where does your brain go when you think about an “authority figure?” What state does it evoke? Pleasant or unpleasant? Resourceful or unresourceful? Just thoughts … connected in your brain to memories, awareness’s, meanings.

Then there is contextual or frame meaning. Once we have linked up and associated things and bring that association into our mind as our frame of reference, we develop higher level thoughts about it. We call these ideas “concepts.” In this way we now look at things through a conceptual frame of mind. It becomes a filter. We call them meta-states and meta-programs. This establishes a mental context for thinking and feeling. This is how we turn associations into higher level maps. Doing so establishes the mental Rules of the Games that we then play.

We first associate a harsh tone of voice with being spanked. Later we develop ideas and concepts that people who strain their vocal chords are mean, hurtful, and nasty. Then we develop higher frames that “criticism is bad,” “confrontation always ruins things,” “I’m sensitive to criticism,” “I cannot handle that tone of voice,” etc. These thoughts create the higher frames of mind about an event and semantically load that event. So when someone strains the vocal chords, the meanings I experience in relation to that event puts me into very unresourceful states. All of this happens so quickly that on the inside it seems like and feels like “the criticism” (or harsh tonality) makes me upset, angry, or frustrated. This is how we set up and play the Games that we do.

Brains deal with data overload by making generalizations. They create categories for items; they organize things into groups. This allows us to develop contextual meanings from our frames, giving us an even higher way to interpret things.

“Oh, that’s just information. Good. For a minute I thought that was criticism.”

How we categorize a thing determines what it “is” to us― in our neurology. Yet as we frame, so we become. What we organize on the inside, in-forms us. We are all psychologically organized by our belief frame, value frames, identity frames, decision frames, etc. And the thing about the brain framing is that as we frame, so we play the frame games that we do.

HOW TO PLAY THE BRAIN GAME

Now that you know about brains (minds), what they do and how they work, you’re ready to play the Brain Game. This is the Running Your Own Brain Game, one of the original visions of NLP. With Neuro-Semantics we take this even further to run our own brain at the highest levels of the mind (The Secrets of Personal Mastery, 2000).

Rule #1: Quality Control Your Brain’s Instructions.

Consider anything that isn’t Top-Notch Quality for your Brain as Absurd.

Did I mention that brains are stupid? At least in one sense they are very stupid, in the aspect of quality. In that area, they are less intelligent than stomachs. Really. After all, if we feed our stomach garbage, it at least knows how to vomit. Not so the brain. Feed it garbage and it doesn’t think twice, it just processes the garbage. Feed it toxic ideas, poisonous thoughts, limiting beliefs, irrational conclusions, and inaccurate mapping and it doesn’t know any better than to represent it, assume it is real, and then believe it. Brains themselves are not discriminating about quality, at least not near as much as the stomach. Whether the information is accurate, useful, true, productive, hurtful, stupid, etc., it doesn’t seem to matter.

So, given this stupidity of brains, we have to take charge of the Quality Control of the information we feed it. We call this “running an ecology check.” Reality test the value, health, and balance of an idea in the whole system of your body, relationships, energy, etc. This is the first Rule of the Game.

If you don’t do this, prepare yourself for trouble because trouble, problems, ill-health, incongruent, sabotage, conflict, etc. you will get. This Brain Game Rule says,

“Anything that does not create personal power, health, balance, joy, compassion, wealth, love, etc. is absurd.”

Do you play the Game of Life by that rule?

I highly recommend it.

Consider anything that your brain produces in your body, emotions, speech, behavior, relationships that puts you in constant conflict, that keeps repeating patterns that don’t work, that creates incongruity, ineffectiveness, unresourcefulness, etc. as absurd. Then stop it! If you follow this first rule, your life will probably radically change and transform in a matter of weeks. This is an extremely powerful and pervasive Rule.

If what you are doing, whether in communication to yourself or others, whether in relationship to your work, career, relationships, health, etc. is not working as an ongoing pattern, STOP. To keep repeating long term patterns that don’t work while hoping for different results is a practical definition of “insanity.” It is absolutely ludicrous to keep replaying the old movies of hurt and pain in the theater of your mind. Wasn’t once enough? It’s ludicrous because while the first time it happen to you, after that first time you have been doing it to yourself! It’s your brain doing it. It’s not happening “out there” anymore. If you’re still watching that B-rated movie, and you are the director of the movie.

Quality control your thinking, higher frames of mind, beliefs, states, etc.

Does this enhance my life over the long-run?
Does this empower me as a person?
Does this make life a party?

This Rule will radically challenge everybody still whining over childhood aches and pains, feeling like a victim to a failed marriage or business, or blaming others for their lack of success. This Rule enables you to live in a different way and to play a different Game― a more passionate and ferocious Game, one where you move out into life looking for opportunities and taking risks and playing to your strengths.

Rule #2: Rise Up in your Mind to Become Aware of the Games

You Only Get to Run Your Own Brain if You have Meta-Awareness

Everybody does not get to run his or her own brain. There is one primary condition for getting to run your own brain, you have to know that you have a brain to run and awareness of how you are currently running it. The brain creates first level “awareness,” awareness of the world. This is the consciousness of animals and small children. Awareness of that awareness, meta-awareness, moves us to a higher level of mind. If you don’t know that you are running your own brain or how you are running it, then your unawareness will be unconscious. Then you won’t get to run your own brain. Your Brain will run you!

This Rule ought to scare the hell out of out you! Does it? Unconsciousness means that you are not mindful of what’s going on. Use that as a cue. Do you ever scratch your head wondering that? Do you have ask:

Hey, what’s going on here? Why do I feel this way?
Why can’t I seem to get ahead?
Why am I always running around in circles and never getting on with things?
I don’t know what came over me; I just flipped out?
I don’t seem to have control of my emotions.

When Rule #2 says that you only get to run your own brain when you develop meta-awareness of what you’re doing, it posits awareness as the key condition. This is a big challenge for many. Over the years many have asked, “Would you just hypnotize me and make this problem go away?” I played that Game for awhile. Then I realized the toxicity in that attitude. It’s the wrong attitude if you really want to have control over your own life. That attitude will not lead you on to personal mastery. That attitude indicates the failure to actively participate in your own life. And that’s why it has to be refused.

In NLP and NS we know that the magic is in the structure. The structure of an experience itself is the magic. That’s why we model. We model experts to learn how they do it. Do what? Run their own brain with regard to a specific area (selling, parenting, relating, communicating, wealth building, health and fitness, leadership, etc.). Once we know that, we know how to find the magic in any field or expertise.

This explains why we do the kind of trainings that we do. We seek to teach to the conscious mind. We want consciousness involved. So while we utilize processes for working with facets of mind outside of conscious awareness, we focus on empowering people to run their own brains without becoming dependent upon us. So we facilitate their self-awareness and ego-strength to look reality in the face, and laugh, and feel ferocious.

This rule leads to various questions and orientations.

What is the basic attitude that drives this experience?
What frame of mind do I need in order to experience this orientation?
How does he do that?
How can I adopt her frame of mind about that?

Rule #3: Beware of Your Frame Referencing

Just Because Your Brain Framed it Does Not Make it Useful

If your brain frames, and if the frames that you set create the Games that you play, take care what you reference and how. We all know people (perhaps we have been such) who experience one or more negative events in life and then (to make things worse), build their lives around that event. Talk about a program that sucks. This is the structure of sick magic: Center your life around a Tragedy, Misfortune, or Injustice! This violates Rule #1 for the Brain Game. It is failing to consider this way of representing and framing things as totally absurd.

Decided to build your life around great events. Find (or invent) wonderful references that you can center you life around.

What wonderful event could I build my life around?
What inspiring referent experience (real or imagined) would I like to commission at the center of my attention
and focus?
If I did, what else would have to change?
And what other supporting ideas or beliefs would enable me to frame things this way?

What you reference, how you reference in terms of the representation richness you encode it in and what you set as your governing frames makes all the difference in the world. It controls and governs the Games that you play. Are you playing the Games that you want to play? If not, then take a look at the entire referencing and framing sequence and design a more empowering one.

As everything habituates so do the neuro-pathways and the internal processing of the brain. When we habituate a way of thinking, an information processing style, or a direction for sending our brain, it eventually becomes our meta-programs or sorting styles. This defines our current trance that organizes our mind-body states. Frames become our software programs or default maps for how to operate in any given arena of life.

Rule #4: Lighten Up and Have Lots of Fun with your Brain

If you don’t enjoy the process, you will get stupid.

Here’s another rule in the Brain Frame Game. If you get serious about things, you will get stupid. Stupidity is the occupational hazard of getting serious about things. Getting serious typically undermines such graces as humor, laughter, enjoyment, playfulness, silliness, and ludicrousness. And yet these are the saving graces that keep us human. These are the saving graces for being real, being spiritual, and being authentic. Lose these and you will not be able to run your own brain with any dignity or grace.

Lose humor and laughter and you loose perspective. You’ll even begin to be seduced into playing the God Game, thinking you are perfect (or should be), know it all (or should), and be everywhere and do everything (hence, indispensable). If any of that seems legitimate, you are in danger of getting stupid very rapidly.

Now the stupidity of seriousness causes people to become stiff and rigid. They get “right” (or so they think), then proud of being right. That leads to stuffiness, arrogance, and the closing of the mind. It’s a pitiful thing to see. Yet it happens all too often. Many people pursue an advanced degree and then think the degree bestows upon them an All-Knowingness. They actually think that their every opinion is somehow sacred and should never be question. Doctors, educators, and bureaucrats often fall into this fallacy. All of this increases their stupidity because not only do they not know it all, but they cannot know it all, no one can, and if they did, it would make life less worth living. The fun is in the pursuit.

Rigid serious arrogance makes these people clowns when it comes to making a mistake. Talk about watching a fallible human being make an ass of himself. Watch one of these people do something wrong. The problem is that they can’t be wrong. It’s not allowed. Yet their pomposity won’t allow them to simply say, “Oops. Missed that one.”

This Rule in the Game of Running Your Own Brain says you have to enjoy and delight yourself in your complete fallibility. Your brain is fallible and that makes all you think fallible, all of your emotions, speech, behavior, and actions. It is all “liable to error.” Don’t just accept this, enjoy it. How easy is it for you to have fun with it? To poke fun at your own silliness? To be ridiculous, make a fool of yourself, blow it, and still maintain all of your dignity?

Serious people not only believe, they believe in their beliefs. This is what makes them dangerous. That leads them to being fanatical “true believers” who have closed their minds to the possibility of being wrong. Such serious people never see the high comedy of their ridiculous position. It’s their lack of humor that leaves them with no perspective. So it is humor that’s our saving grace, that frees us up, that allows us to lighten up and to know that all of our mental mapping is just that―fallible human mapping, at the best, the highest thinking we can do at the moment.

Lighten up and enjoy the ride especially when you get into a loop. Just flow with it. If you fight it, if you resist it, you add negative energy to the loop. The quickest and easiest way out is paradoxical― welcome it and enjoy the ride. It’s just a loop of the mind. Play with it.

#5: Keep Teaching Your Brain New Tricks

Yes, your brain can (and will) learn new tricks. Count on it. Brains are always learning, that’s the good news. The bad news is that if you don’t take charge of what they are learning, they will learn trash. So in playing the Brain Game, aim to constantly be teaching your brain more productive things. Feed it the best data available: inspiring ideas, awesome thoughts, empowering beliefs, and supporting understandings. Keep coding and recoding the Cinema in your mind so that your internal world is dramatic, exciting, bigger than life, full of grace and love, power and energy, make it alive and vital. Create one new empowering frame of mind every week―in a year’s time you’ll have 52 enhancing frames for the Matrix of your Mind.

Set out on the exciting adventure of discovering, unpacking and replicating the strategies of the experts. Forget “why” things go wrong and people are stupid, focus on those who are producing excellence and search out their strategy. Find out what movies are playing in the Cinema of their Minds. Find out all of the cinematic features that make that movie so entertaining and the states and higher level states it creates. After you do that for a year or two, you’ll have habituated the Movies of the Experts in your mind … and body and emotions and life.

Summary

There’s a new Game in town. It’s the Game of Running Your Own Brain. Nor does it take a rocket scientist to understand the Game. Mostly it takes self-awareness, meta-awareness, and the willingness to have fun exploring how the brain creates the Matrix of Frames that then governs the Games of our lives.

THE BRAIN GAME

References

Bodenhamer, Bob; Hall, L. Michael. (2000). Users manual of the brain. Wales, UK: Crown House Publications.

Hall. L. Michael (2000). Meta-States: Managing the higher levels of your mind. Grand Jct. CO: Neuro-Semantics Publications.

Hall, L. Michael. (2000). Secrets of personal mastery: Advanced techniques for accessing your higher levels of consciousness. Wales, UK: Crown House Publications.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., cognitive psychologist, international NLP trainer, entrepreneur; prolific author and international training; developer of Meta-States and co-developer of Neuro-Semantics. (P.O. Box 8, Clifton CO 81520), (970) 523-7877. www.neurosemantics.com.

CURING PHOBIAS WITH META-STATES

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

To meta-state means to reflect on a mental or emotional state with additional thoughts, feelings, ideas, and even kinesthetics. This power to rise up in you mind and have a second thought or second feeling about a previous thought describes the most wondrous power of self-reflexive consciousness. It involves what we call “going meta” in NLP, and yet it involves more than that.

“Going meta” refers to moving up the scale of specificity. It means generalizing to a higher classification. We go meta in our minds when we move from a specific thing (strawberries) to a higher classification (fruit). This gives us the ability to categorize things. We categories strawberries as fruit. We can categories fruit as food. “Conceptualizing” in this way by using higher levels of abstraction define the class of life we are a semantic, symbol-using class of life.

Meta-stating involves more. It involves not only going up and above our thoughts and experienced, but also reflecting back on them. When we do this, we can then create several new things. We set a frame– a new frame of reference and this than allows us to re-classify the experience. We can legitimately call an experience by a different term: “Raising his voice like that doesn’t mean he’s being insulting, he feels stress and that’s a sign of his insecurity.”

By meta-stating we can also texture and temper experiences. In Meta-States and Frame Games trainings, we describe this as the layering of higher levels of mind or frames. And doing that enables us to texture and quality our states in ways that can totally transform and revolutionize our lives.

A great example of this occurs in the Visual-Kinesthetic Dissociation Pattern or NLP Phobia Cure. After twenty-five years of using “The Phobia Cure” for PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), traumatized states and experiences, and phobias of all kind, this pattern has proven a staple for de-stabilizing old trauma reactions and giving thousands of people a new lease on life.

• How does this pattern work?
• What mechanisms actually govern its power to so pervasively effect memory, identity, and emotion?

With the Meta-States model, we can now explain the processes that allow the magic of this pattern to do its work.

Meta-Stating “Trauma”

As an overview, the Phobia Cure works as a guided imagery into a movie theater where we sit back in the theater to watch a showing of the old memory. After we pick a beginning snapshot, we even float back and up to the projection booth and there view the movie feeling the safety of the Plexiglas before us. At the end we forward the movie onto another experience something later wherein we were okay and feeling a sense of comfort. We freeze frame the comfort scene, step into it and then let the whole movie fast rewind in a second or two.

Simple.
Easy to guide a person through.

So where’s the magic? How can we explain the wonder and power of NLP in this pattern? What are the governing mechanisms of mind-and-emotion and meaning that explain the felt transformation which the pattern elicits?

As an overview of the meta-stating processes occurring in this pattern: we essentially layer, qualify, and texture the “thought” –the memory with multiple layers of resources that change the very feel of the memory as the other thoughts transform it.

The Levels of Resourcing

Level 1: Primary Trauma Thought. Begin with a “negative” thought that sets off all kinds of painful emotional reactions. Pick a “thought” of a memory that “rattles your cage” so much so that you can’t even “think” it in a calm and rational. This presents the primary state or experience. In it you find that you have become wired (so to speak) to react semantically to an “idea.” Just the idea of the trauma upsets you and your entire body and neurology becomes reactive. It is this thought, this representation, that we will be dealing with.

Level 2: Calm Distance. Imagine putting the “thought” that upsets you on a mental screen and stepping back from it as if in a movie theater. When you have located the memory, turn it into a black-and-white snapshot of a scene at the beginning of the traumatic event. Freeze-frame this scene and hold it there as you take your seat in the 10th row.

Here we are meta-stating the trauma thought with distance, stillness, and black-and-white coding. All of these higher ideas about (meta) to the first level thought induce messages of comfort about it.

In NLP we call this a “dissociation” step, yet it involves so much more. It certainly does have the effect of stepping back and out of a felt memory. And as a result most people feel some relief. Yet we have not so much moved to “not feeling” as we have to “feeling calm” and “feeling distance” about the memory. We have begun to layer thoughts and feelings upon the trauma memory that gives it a new texture a new feel.

But it doesn’t end there.

Level 3: Increased Distance and Protect and Control. Now imagine yourself and feel yourself float out of your observing self and up to the projection booth. From there you will be able to see the back of your current self watching the old memory representation as a black-and-white snap-shot on the screen. Touch the Plexiglas that separates you from the auditorium knowing that you’re safe here in the projection booth.

This so-called “double dissociation” actually brings all kinds of resources to bear upon the original thought that we have not actually “thought” about yet. All this is preparation (pre-framing) for thinking. Here we have continued meta-stating our old memory with more distance and protection behind a Plexiglas. And because in the projection booth we can edit the film we bring editing skill and power to bear upon the old memory, which gives us the sense of power and control.

Figure 1

Level 4: Controlled viewing & Fast Rewinding. Now you can turn on the movie (intentional control) and let it play out. Just watch it in this black-and-white movie of your past. After the traumatic scene is over, let it play until you find a scene of comfort where you’re okay, freeze frame that scene. Then, step into that scene of comfort (where you froze frame) and run it backward while you are inside seeing, hearing, and feeling everything run backwards. Let this happen so quickly that it only takes two seconds.

Here we layer onto all of the other layers of awareness cues like the images being black-and-white that we are observing “the past,” and that we’re in control of editing our memory. Then, after we meta-state the memory with comfort, we add a very strange layer of consciousness as we rewind the movie. Bringing backwardness or fast reverse to our memory really layers on some weird thinking and feeling. For some this will interrupt, for others it will spread comfort backwards through the past, and for yet others it will confuse and mess up the old strategy for trauma. Talk about more layers and frames that texture the old trauma. And yet we have not finished.

Level 5: Clean Slate and Directiveness. After the first backward super-rewinding process, do this 5 more times. Clear the screen of your mind, start with the Scene of Comfort, step in, rewind.

In this step, we layer onto everything ideas of a clean slate and we bring that to bear upon the memory. This interrupts things and it directionalizes our minds.

When a Negative Memory Doesn’t Stand a Chance

When my co-author, Dr. Bodenhamer and I talked about this recently, he noted that “the poor memory representation doesn’t stand a chance.” Too many layers of resources. With layer upon layer, the higher levels begin to govern and self-organize the lower levels. And yet we still have not finished with our analysis of the meta-stating involved in this pattern, there is yet another.

Figure 2

Level 6: Meta-Stating with a Coherent Metaphor. The whole set of the meta-level states that you have added one upon another in this process has all actually occurred inside of a metaphor the metaphor of a movie. In other words, you also brought a movie show situation to bear upon the thought– which enabled the other moves (stepping back and back, altering the visual and auditory components, running it backwards, etc.) to occur without really noticing.

True enough, a negative memory doesn’t stand a chance. We can’t track that many levels and so the first meta-levels begins to “collapse” or coalesce into the primary state thereby texturing and qualifying the memory in new and more resourceful ways.

Appreciating Your Meta-Stating

When you reflect back onto your thoughts and feelings, your states, you meta-state. And given the very nature of your consciousness (your self-reflexive consciousness), you do it all the time. If you have used the NLP Phobia Cure, then you can now appreciate your meta-stating powers even if you didn’t know that’s what you were doing. In running that pattern, you have performed an elegant and powerful set of meta-stating maneuvers to transform an old semantic reaction. And now that you know what you were doing, you can appreciate this higher level skill.

Author: L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., author, developer of Meta-States, trainer and entrepreneur living in Grand Jct. Colorado. You can reach him via   or www.neurosemantics.com.

References:

For the Swish Pattern —

Bodenhamer, Bob; Hall, L. Michael (1999). The user’s manual for the brain. Wales, UK: Crown Houses Publishers.

Hall, L. Michael; Belnap, Barbara. (1997). The sourcebook of magic. Wales, UK: Crown House Publishers.

For Meta-States

Hall, L. Michael (1996). Dragon Slaying: Dragons to princes. Grand Jct. CO: E.T. Publications.

Hall, L. Michael (1997-1999). Meta-States journal: Patterns. Grand Jct. CO. E.T.

If you would like to proceed anyway, click here.

If NLP is about “running your own brain” and Representation, then Neuro-Semantics is about the Frames and Frames-within-Frames that form the larger mental contexts within which the Representations occur. Represent a crisis event in your life and that gives us some information, but what does it mean to you? How do you interpret it? Frame it?

“Just an event that once happened.”
“A Cause that Determines my Future.”
“Something to learn from.”
“Something is wrong with me.”

We use frames to create meaning. Frames of reference give us an interpretative structure for evaluating the events and ideas we represent and so invite us into the governing meta-states. This distinguishes “meaning” at two levels.

At the primary state level where we experience the Stimulus ―> Response world, “meaning” arises from association. We call that anchoring. What is linked or anchored to what? To answer the questions, What does “work” mean? What does “saving” mean? What does “spending” mean? What does conflict mean? ― We find out what states, emotions, experiences, etc. are linked to those words.

At the meta-states levels we experience a different kind of reality, one above and beyond the Stimulus ―> Response world. We enter into a framed matrix of ideas, concepts, beliefs, and understandings that comprise a Matrix of our Mind. This gives us Contextual Meaning. What is classified as what in your mental world? What categories exist there?

Do you have the mental category of “failure” as a classification for some events? If so, then what does it take to put an activity into that class? How many things do you have in that category? Is it easy or difficult to classify something as “failure?” What about “happiness?” How does your frame that classifies events as members of that class work? Do you go there often or infrequently? What about “wealthy?” What about “feedback?”

We all live easily and naturally and unconsciously inside the Matrices of our Mind. Inside our frames we don’t notice the frames as frames. More typically we confuse our frames for “reality” and just “feel” the map as if it were the territory. That’s why waking up to the Matrix is itself like “taking the red pill” and falling down Alice’s Rabbit Hole into a Wonderland where mind creates our internal world.

Yet when we master this mechanisms of the Matrix and become a frame master, then these higher level meanings become subject to our control, rather than we being pushed around and dominated by them. That’s why in Neuro-Semantics we ask such questions as:

What meaning would you like to give to this event or idea?
What frame of mind would empower and enhance your response to X?
What frame of mind would you like to wake up in every day for the rest of your life?
And what frame of mind would support that frame?

It’s meaning all the way up … AND it is meaning all the way back down to neurology. That’s why we are neuro-semantic in our very nature and why meaning is not just a thing of the mind but inevitably becomes incorporated and embodied in our very muscles, perceptions, and actions. Neuro-Semantics is a model about how this works and it offers a set of processes for moving up and down the levels of mind, bringing Great Principles and Concepts down to the body as well as trancing all the way up to the highest levels of abstraction and trance to create Great New Inductions.

In Neuro-Semantics we mind-to-muscle great Ideas, we blow-out excuses, we develop better relationships to ideas, we jump logical levels in a single bound, we play with the fluidity of the levels as we layer new textures into our states, we open up matrix systems of beliefs and understandings, we tame the dragons that lurk in the dark corners of old matrices of pain that no longer serve to enhance our lives, and we take charge of the pleasuring that enriches the entire neuro-semantic system.

“Our national leaders are all human beings
who had childhoods and childhood experiences that shaped them.
What map was Hitler following,
and where did it come from?”
Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (p. 50)

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Hitler– we know what he did, and we sort of know why he did it, but how did he do it? We know that he deceived his countrymen and an entire nation and nearly brought about the end of Western civilization as it had developed in the twentieth century. He was legally appointed to power as Reich Chancellor and between 1933 and 1940 one of the most popular heads of a state in the world.

But how did he pull all of that off?

What tactics and strategies did he use?

What mental and emotional Games did he play?

What frames drove his own distorted vision?

How did he influence an entire nation to accept his mad tactics?

What Games were he able to recruit people to play?

We know that he was a deeply disturbed person with a genius of political savvy for persuasion. What we do not know is how could a destructive and demonic-like movement (the Nazi movement) so full of hatred and formalized prejudice gained such power and influence in one of the most advanced nations in the world? How could a man with such a pathological personality “lead” so many people? How could a minority opinion of an extremist right-wing group effect the politics of an entire nation and then of the world?

Neuro-Semantic Modeling

Over the past year and a half, since we have been developing Neuro-Semantic models for modeling cultural phenomena, I have been exploring the key political and conceptual frames that Adolf Hitler used. I began by reading the two massive volumes of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s own biographical propaganda written during his first imprisonment (1924). I then followed that up by reading a biography of him and then multiple books and works that offered various interpretations and analysis.

This is a presentation of some of the things that I have found, some of the key frames (political, economic, and personal frames) that governed Hitler’s mind and emotions as he took over the Socialist Worker’s Party and eventually swung a nation to go along with his ideas about race superiority and “blood purity.” And yet it is so much more than just about Hitler. Above and beyond what happened in Germany is the story of how personal frames play out inside of larger frames– political frames, economic frames, socio-cultural frames, etc. And these frames all occur within various historical contexts.

It took a great many things working together in a unique combination to create the monstrous disaster of Hitler. It was not just Hitler, it was not just Germany, it was not just the mishandling of the aftermath of the first World War, it was all of that and it was the economic disasters in the USA, it was the fears of Communism, it was the desperation of a people over a runaway inflation, etc.

Caveat about Germans and Germany

At the beginning of this presentation I think it necessary to set several frames for this study. First, what happened during the second and third decades of the 20th century that produced Hitler is not the fault of anyone living today. No person from Germany today or of Germany heritage has any connection or responsibility to what Hitler did 80 years ago or for that post World War I generation. No one today should hold anyone from Germany or of German descent responsible.

I know that there is a sensitivity that continues even into the 21st century of many of the younger generation in Germany, sensitive souls who continue to feel bad, some even feel guilty for what Hitler did. This is totally inappropriate. What people did in previous ages is not our responsibility. We are responsible for what we believe and do, for the responses we make today.

Overview

As an overview, when we look at Hitler as a man on the personal level, he had little going for him. Throughout childhood and young adulthood he suffered from a strong sense of inferiority and he coped with that by using denial, illusions of grandeur, and blaming. As a young man he was rejected repeatedly from the Art School that he wanted to enter. He blamed his dad, then he blamed the Jews, then he blamed the German authorities. These were some of the foundational Games that he played in his life.

Until he entered World War I (WWI) as a young man, he was a drifter and suffered the consequences of his own lack of purpose, dilettante, laziness, and grandiose schemes. It wasn’t until he became a soldier that he found a purpose. When that endeavor ended in defeat, he experienced the shame of that as a severe trauma. When he was sent home after Germany lost the war, he went home dejected, angry, bitter, and shocked. It was not only another trauma, but the biggest one and the most defining. Again, he coped with that one as he had the others, by blaming. This time he blamed the German authorities and government, he blamed the lack of spirit for the Fatherland, he blamed the superior propaganda methods of the British, he blamed the Jews for undermining German’s role in the War, and he blamed the intelligentsia.

It was then that, in the beer halls, he discovered that (as he expressed it) “I could speak.” He found that by formulating the angry expressions over the injustices and the bitter experiences that he could move a crowd. And this was his gift and our curse. As he turned to politics and to the use of propaganda, he found that he could persuade people. He found that he could capture the minds-and-hearts of the people in that age with his extremist ideas. And, of course, it was an age that allowed such extremist ideas to take root and grow.

His “persuasion” was fitting for that age in that time in that situation. It was not that he was charming, he was not. It was not that he was warm and compassionate, he was not. It was not that he could extend himself for the benefit of others, he could not. His was a sick and tormented mind. His was also a sick heart that suffered numerous psychological distortions. But he was able to put into words the feelings of so many people who had suffered in various ways and play upon their fears, hatreds, prejudices in just the right way so as to make his perverted vision of the future for them a legitimate hope.

Nor would it have happened in any other age or time. He was the result of larger forces than just his brutal home life, the prejudice of his hometown, the personal misfortunes his own lack of discipline created, he arose from the tragedies and injustices perpetuated upon Germany after WWI, he arose from the economic malaise felt around the world from the fall of the American Stock Market in 1929, he arose from the fear of the German people against the encroaching Communism of that age, and he arose from the political mistakes of the Weimar Republic which weakened democracy, and left the Nazi party the surprised beneficiary.

Hitler reeked his own revenge and hatred on those he blamed and impose his beliefs about race superiority upon his countrymen because of a great many contributing factors. The myth that he created in Mein Kampf, and which his party perpetuated in his lifetime pictured him as rising up as the new national leader due to his own force of will, strength of intellect, and more than human powers. That was the myth.

The key to Hitler, as the key to anyone’s life, lies in our frames.

• What were the frames of reference and the frames of mind that drove Hitler and that empowered him with his persuasive influential?
• What were the frames in others, in Germany, and in the rest of the world that somehow played into it all?

What I found was a mixture of good and bad, strengths and weaknesses, wise statements of incredible insight and the most perverse stupidity, political acumen and utter nonsense.

When I began reading Mein Kampf I really thought that I would be reading from a raving lunatic. That was not the case. Hitler may have been a bigot, prejudicial, hateful, cruel, a fanatic ideologue, extremist, and immoral, but Mein Kampf reads more like a Sunday sermon on the injustices perpetuated against Germany and a call for better housing for workers, a national welfare system, sweeping away the privileges of the past, modernizing industry, improving social conditions, and calling patriots of the country to care about the moral threats to their society. He sold his racism and hatred inside of a strategy for national recovery. That made it acceptable.

This surprised and shocked me. This is Hitler the monster, the tyrant, the dictator, the murderer of millions? It was in this way that he gained control. He paced, paced, paced. He paced the current situation and concerns. He gave voice to their fears, resentments, bitterness. This gave him credibility. When he finally won the 1932 election and the Nazi party actually won the majority of seats in the Reichstag, it was because, while the National Socialists were vulgar and distasteful, they at least stood for German interests in the face of the growing Communism threat. By finding an easy target in the Jews and blaming them for over a decade, he gave the people a target or scapegoat for their negative emotions. He also had a plan for a new and better Germany. Of course, he didn’t tell them all that he would do.

In modeling this madman, I still find it hard to credit him with being a “genius” in his powers of reading the political situation, in his opportunism, and in his powers of persuasion. And yet, I have to give that to him. Even though he terribly misused his powers of persuasion, he certainly had a “genius” (though in demonic form) for influence, political intelligence, and effectiveness. In pulling apart the facets and factors that made him who he was and that enabled or allowed him to do the monstrous damage he did, there are some frames that were very powerful and then those that were very sick and pathological. In fact, sorting out the sickness allows us to see wherein his genius lay and what we can learn from him.

WHY did Hitler Play Frame Games?

Hitler played Games, frame games, because he could not have forced the nation, he had to recruit them for his Frame Games. He used the trickery of propaganda to invite and seduced them to play his Games.

Eric Fromm described a common illusion about Hitler in the following way. He noted that this is perhaps the “most dangerous” illusion of all. The illusion is:

“… that men like Hitler had gained power over the vast apparatus of the state through nothing but cunning and trickery, that they and their satellites ruled merely by sheer force; that the whole population was only the willess object of betrayal and terror. In the years that have elapsed since, the fallacy of these arguments has become apparent. We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for.” (1969, p. 19)

What Games did Hitler have to play to facilitate an “escape from freedom” in people? Fromm said that he relied upon “the idea of the unworthiness of the individual, his fundamental inability to rely on himself and his need to submit” (1969, p. 54).

Recognizing that psychologically, a lust for power is never rooted in strength, but always in weakness, Fromm says that an authoritarian character is such that a person admires authority and tends to submit to it but really wants to be an authority and have others submit to him (p. 186). This is the nature of fascist systems and why the role of authority plays a dominate role in the social and political structures.

“The feature common to all authoritarian thinking is the conviction that life is determined by forces outside of man’s own self, his interest, his wishes. The only possible happiness lies in the submission to these forces. The powerlessness of man is the leitmotif of masochistic philosophy.” (p. 194)

“In Hitler’s ideology, the emphasis on the injustice of the Versailles treaty plays a tremendous role, and it is true that he was genuinely indignant at the peace treaty. However, if we analyze his whole political ideology we see that its foundations are an intense wish for power and conquest, and although he consciously gives much weight to the injustice done to Germany, actually this thought has little weight in the whole of his thinking.” (pp. 84-85)

Quoting L. Mumford, Fromm identifies the true sources of Fascism as “in the human soul, not in economics.”

“In overwhelming pride, delight in cruelty, neurotic disintegration– in this and not in the Treaty of Versailles or in the incompetence of the German Republic lies the explanation of Fascism.” (Quoted from Mumford, Faith for Living, Harcourt, Bruce and Company, New York, 1940, p. 118) (p. 232)

The Games that Hitler Played to Win Power

Hitler did not play a great many Games. He played a few Games really well. He played Games that pulled the wool over the eyes of people, including many of his own colleagues.

• The Blame and the Hate Game:

He recognized “hate” as the most powerful emotion and so played the Hate Game, arousing it, playing to it, stimulating it, and validating it. Once there was anger, hatred, and outrage about injustice, then he played the Blame Game to give the Hate a target for release, for a catharsis.

• The Moralistic and Injustice Games:

He stimulated hate, anger, and fear by playing, “But we’ve Not been Treated Fairly!” He campaigned for years to arouse a nation to play, “We’re as Mad as Hell and we’re not going to take it any longer!” He framed it as a moral duty, as a legitimate response from people who truly care.

• The Persuasion or Propaganda Games:

He set out to learn how the propaganda of the British worked so well and became a persuasion genius in reading the political times and opportunistically taking advantage of everything to persuade people to see things his way.

• The Opportunist or “Desperate Times Calls for Desperate Actions” Game:

Hitler’s genius of playing to the times and the events of the times arose as the socio-economic situation grew increasingly worse. Inflation became hyper-inflation, Government became less effective, then the Stock Market crashed, etc. He played the Opportunist Game.

• The Strength and Power Games:

“Power” was his drug and he became quite intoxicated on it. You can see him playing the power Games by the way he presented the Power and Right and Might of his party by the way marches, rallies, and force. He created the Storm Troopers as part of this Game. Even the way he talked and wrote, with the Dogmatism, the Black-and-White, no-bars hold approach was part of the way he played the Power Game.

• The “Be Bigger Than Life” Guru Games:

Hitler discovered and played out Games that invited people to frame him as a messiah, a savor, the coming great national leader, etc. As he learned the propaganda arts he learned how to stage things for effect. This led him to use pageantry and razzmatazz in the meetings, parades, and rallies to impress people. He used techniques to posture himself as the exciting and inexplicable “guru” that seemed more than and other than human that brought forth worship, adoration, and an unthinking following. He led by his idealism and vision for Germany, by his installation of fear and by his black-and-white blaming Game.

The Blame and Hate Games

When I began this project I sat down and read the two volumes of Mein Kampf to see what clues I could find there. That reading absolutely surprised me in how Hitler laid it all out. He pulled no punches about his attitudes, especially toward the Jews and about what he wanted to do to them. During his 13-months in prison for a failed coup, he laid it out regarding what he would do to the “inferior” races if he had the power. That hate-filled and paranoid book makes it clear how much he hated and treated with contempt the “inferior” races. He called parasites to the superior races that “carry culture,” the others are germs, infections, and diseases.

The backside of his intense hatred of the black races, the Jews, and others was his fantastical passion for the Aryan race. He set out his plans for how to get rid of, and exterminate, both Germans and non-Germans who interfered with his world-changing and history-molding plans.

Konrad Heiden noted in his introduction to 1943 translation:

“For years Mein Kampf stood as proof of the blindness and complacency of the world. For in its pages Hitler announced– long before he came to power– a program of blood and terror in a self-revelation of such overwhelming frankness that few among its readers had the courage to believe it….” (Hitler, 1926, p. xv)

Hitler play the Blood Purity Game. This was one of his most fundamental belief frames that drove the way he perceived people. It allowed him to feel superior. It also supported his actions to exterminate them.

“All great questions of the day are questions of the moment and represent only consequences of definite causes. Only one among all of them, however, possess causal importance, and that is the question of the racial preservation of the nation. In blood alone resides the strength as well as the weakness of man. As long as people do not recognize and give heed to the importance of their racial foundation, they are like men who would teach poodles the qualities of greyhounds, failing to realize that the speed of the greyhound like the docility of the people are not learned, but are qualities inherent in the race. People which renounce the preservation of their racial purity renounce with it the unity of their soul in all its expressions.” (Hitler, p. 327, italics added)

“The crown of the folkish state’s entire work of education and training must be to turn the racial sense and racial feeling into the instinct and the intellect, the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it. No boy and no girl must leave school without having been led to an ultimate realization of the necessity and essence of blood purity. Thus the groundwork is created by preserving the racial foundation of our nation and through them in turn securing the basis for its future cultural development.” (427-428)

Using what we would now call genetic determinism, Hitler assumed the superiority of the Ayran race and made that his creed. This was the frame that ultimately supported his racism. For him, the Jewish menace was a menace that threatened the very existence of Germany. It was also a moral crime, a crime against God.

“Peoples which bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence… (Hitler, p. 327)

When he looked at and analyzed the pre-war decay in Germany, he wrote it “can in the last analysis be reduced to racial causes” (p. 328). He had no tolerance for the democratic idea of equal rights for all people. All people, in his mind, were not equal.

“The present era is liquidating itself: it introduces universal suffrage, shoots off its mouth about equal rights, but finds no basis for them.” (435)

“Anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all summon up the courage to make clear the causes of this disease. And this should be the concern of the National Socialist movement: … becoming the vanguard fighters for a new philosophy of life.” (435)

Mein Kampf presents his contempt, disgust, and hatred for the Jewish people as something he learned from studying history and the causes of Germany’s defeat in WWI. Yet several historians have noted that he grew up in Vienna, “the most virulently anti-Jewish city in Europe at the time” (Kershaw, p. 65). His anti-Semitic hatred was justified so that he came to framed the socio-economic and political problems in Germany as the now infamous, “The Jewish problem.” It was out of his own personal hatred that he easily fell into believing a conspiracy theory that it was the Jews plotting and scheming that was at the source of all the woes of that age.

“He soaked up Viennese anti-semitism having experienced bereavement, failure, rejection, isolation, and increasing penury. It was personalized hatred–blaming the Jews for all the ills that befell him in a city that he associated with personal misery.” (Kershaw, p. 66)

“Without the clearest knowledge of the racial problem and hence of the Jewish problem there will never be a resurrection of the German nation.” (Hitler, p. 339)

So with that as a belief system, it only makes sense that he began to

“… take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna … Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity…” (56)

This was the Superiority Game that he played. The Game of “Blood Purity,” “You are a real somebody if you are of the right race.” This led him to hate and argue against the democratic idea of equality. He said that was “the idiotic bourgeoisie idea.” He accused the Jews of “trying to funnel [that idea] into the minds of the nations.” (Hitler, p. 430).

“It doesn’t dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture-race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a crime against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass…” (430)

Hatred is a very powerful emotion and Hitler played it to the max. He did so by blaming the Jews and others for the national defeat and all of the problems (economic, social, moral, and political) in the nation. Of course, the interesting thing in playing the Hate Game is that it encourages irrationality. When we hate … when we dislike … when we feel strong feelings of aversion, disgust, and rejection, it is extremely easy to access the primordial states of Fight/Flight of intense fear and anger. This puts us in survival mode so that blood is withdrawn from brain and stomach and sent to the larger muscle groups. This makes for black-and-white thinking and less finer distinctions and discriminations in our thinking. In the hate state, we become more susceptible to the irrational “mob mentality” state.

Hate and Blame Games are still with us today. The neo-Nazi ideas of race superiority powerfully influenced the two teenage boys who perpetuated the violence at Columbine High School in Denver. To try to booster their own feelings of value and worth, they used the toxic ideas of blood purity to degrade others. As with all who play the Hate and Blame Games, they felt inadequate and threatened, and so responded to their own dis-valuing by dis-valuing others. Their need to respond with hate led them at first to react by insulting and dehumanizing those who they feel caused the pain. Late it led to violence, planned revenge, and eventually to acts of terrorism.

These are the Games that Osama Ben Laden and his kind of fundamental Moslem extremists play. They revel in hate, they nurse old resentments that are not only decades old, but centuries old, and they brood on their hatred by visions of revenge. Forgiveness, grace, and unconditional love for all people have no place for those who play Hate and Blame Games.

The Moralistic and Injustice Games

Lots of factors contributed to the hatred that Hitler lived in and brooded upon. From his overly moralistic dad who apparently was extremely brutal with him, to the rejection of his peers, to some of his own personal resentments and inadequacies. These were the influence that made him susceptible to falling into states of hatred, resentment, bitterness, and frustration. Things didn’t go well for him in his early life. He wanted to be an artist and was rejected repeatedly from the academy. He apparently picked up that whinny, complaining, and bitter attitude. It’s the attitude of “Poor Me,” Entitlement, and Victimhood.

This is the attitude that, strangely enough, drives the “criminal mind.” I discovered this working with the Department of Corrections in the State of Colorado. As a psychologist, I worked with the court system in seeing those convicted of domestic violence and who needed anger control, I worked with a group of juvenile boys (14 to 18 years of age) convicted of violent crimes, and with the group of men being released from the federal pen at Canyon City.

Everybody, almost to a person, had an attitude of having been victimized. They lived in and perceived the world through an extreme filter of Fair/ Unfair, Just/ Unjust. And they also absolutely hated and refused to tolerate injustice.

“Haven’t you heard that the world isn’t fair?” I asked one day in a naive kind of way, assuming that they knew this and I just needed to remind them in order to put things in perspective.

“Don’t be give me any of that bull shit!” yelled a man who only the moment earlier was in a quiet demeanor. “I won’t put up with that crap! The world is going to be fair, by God, or I’m going to make it fair!”

Whoowwha. Guess I pushed a button with that one.

“So the world has to be fair?”

“That’s right! It has to be.”

“And if it’s not?”

“That’s not a choice. I am not going to be treated unfairly.”

I’ve written about this in other places. Paradoxically, it is the mind that accepts unfairness and the moral injustices in the world that gets along better and does not make a major moral issue out of every injustice. This mindset actually reflects the mind of a child. It’s children who sort for their cookie being a tad smaller than their mate’s cookie. It’s the child who throws temper tantrums because something isn’t precisely and immediately “fair” in just the way the child wants it to be fair. And it’s the child’s mind that doesn’t grow up, learn patience, tolerance, acceptance, ego strength, altruism, balance, etc. that becomes the mind of a criminal. The criminal is the person who justifies forcing his will upon others because he “wants what he wants when he wants it.”

As you can tell, this is what makes a moralistic mindset dangerous. To moralize is one of our highest and most spiritual skills. And watching children, it seems to be built into the natural and inevitable developmental stages of human development. Every child in every culture experiences it. We are a species who can represent, sort for, recognize, and care about moral values. The problem with this arises when we turn everything into moral issues. When words become moral issues; when the experience of a negative emotion becomes a moral issue; when how we dress is a moral issue, when any difference is a moral issue– then we are probably over-moralizing. It is an occupational hazard of every religion and every ethical stance. When the Pharisees did this in the first century during the time of Christ, Jesus made them comic examples of over-zealous and out-of-balanced religious nuts.

Hitler had this problem. Or he at least used the over-moralizing to play the Injustice Game and therefore called upon people who really cared to do something about it. So just as the medieval Christians fell into this trap and created Crusades against the infidels and inquisitions against unbelievers, and extremist fundamentalist Moslems today call for a Jihad, or Holy War, against America and send suicide bombers into the World Trade Center and right-wing extremists bomb abortion clinics, so extremists were called into the Game that Hitler played and seduced into it, ironically, by his moralistic diatribes against those who he blamed for the degeneration of that society.

Blaming is the primary sign of the moralizer who is unbalanced by love, patience, empathy, compassion, discipline, self-esteem, etc. Blaming is the sign of a sick mind.

Blaming however differs from firm assertiveness that holds people accountable. Holding someone accountable for their actions is not “blaming.” Asking someone to make amends, to make something right, to apologize, straighten something out, etc. is not blaming. Blaming is accusation that confuses person with behavior. This is what Hitler did. He didn’t just blame some Jews who might have held to Marxist theory, he over-generalized and identified all Jews as Marxists and then declared them all guilty, inferior, worthless, contemptible, a disease on society, etc.

Hitler was well trained in the art of Blaming. It was the Game that he knew best. He seemed to have never taken personal responsibility for looking at himself, re-examining his skills, knowledge, and applying himself. Taking every rejection personal, he blamed others for his problems. Of course, this is an excellent strategy for how to not improve and how to keep making the same mistakes for the rest of your life. Even the title of his book, Mein Kampf, tells about his blaming and whining attitude. The title means, “My Sufferings.” An apt title for someone detailing the injustices of his life for which he needs to blame someone.

So, when the end of WWI came and Germany was defeated, and Hitler went home a broken and depressed young man, the loss of the war because yet another emotionally significant event that he had to blame someone for. In the following quotation, Hitler reveals his min-_set and the Games that he was playing as he frames the National Defeat as a personal trauma and the validation of his move into politics. Here he plays the Justifying and Rationalizing Game.

“Since the day when I had stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept. When in my youth Fate seized me with merciless hardness, my defiance mounted. When in the long war years Death snatched so many a dear comrade and friend from our ranks, it would have seemed to me almost a sin to complain– after all, were they not dying for Germany? And when at length the creeping gas …attacked me, too, and began to gnaw at my eyes, and beneath the fear of going blind forever, I nearly lost heart for a moment, the voice of my conscience thundered at me: Miserable wretch, are you going to cry when thousands are a hundred times worse off than you! And so I bore my lot in dull silence. But now I could not help it. Only now did I see how all personal suffering vanishes in comparison with the misfortune of the fatherland.

“And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our duty; and in vain the death of two millions who died … The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of the indignation and disgrace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes compared to this misery? … I, for my part, decided to go into politics.” (Hitler, pp. 204-206)

What did Hitler say in his speeches that people found so convincing. This is fascinating. He repeatedly used the speech which he called, “Peace Treaties of Bres-Litovsk and Versailles.” He would make this presentation night after night in the rallies as he toured cities throughout Germany. By contrasting the previous treaties, he could present the Treaty of Versailles that concluded WWI against Germany as one of “the most shameful acts of rape in the world.” This was his theme. He would then set forth how that the Treaty and the treatment of Germany was one of total injustice, that it was shameless and monstrous. Here’s what he wrote:

“I contrasted the two peace treaties, compared them point for point, showed the actual boundless humanity of the one treaty compared to the inhuman cruelty of the second, and the result was telling.

At that time I spoke on this theme at meetings of two thousand people, and often I was struck by the glances of three thousand six hundred hostile eyes. And three hours later, I had before me a surging mass full of the holiest indignation and boundless wrath. Again a great lie had been torn out of the hearts and brains of the crown numbering thousands and at truth implanted in its place.” (Hitler, p. 468)

About all of this, Hitler was right. He was correct about the treatment of Germany after WWI. It was not just. Yet it was more than that. He had to connect the injustice with intolerance and a refusal to accept and as an insult to national pride and honor.

“[Hitler] was the typical representative of the lower middle class, a nobody with no chances or future. He felt very intensely the role of being an outcast. He often speaks in Mein Kampf of himself as the ‘nobody,’ the ‘unknown man’ he was in his youth. But although this was due essentially to his own social position, he could rationalize it in national symbols. Being born outside of the Reich he felt excluded not so much socially as nationally, and the great German Reich to which all her sons could return because for him the symbol of social prestige and security.” (p. 241-242)

From all of this Hitler was able to play the Intolerance Game. Having found the cause of the problem, he Blamed and Accused and called upon a Moral Outrage that demanded fanatical correction. By fanning the hatred, he provided the moral validation of the anger and of the “necessary” actions to correct the injustice.

The Intolerance Game has jut a few simple rules. Mostly it operates from, “Do things my way or else.” If you disagree with me, you are wrong, depraved, morally corrupt, and deserve to die. To play, you have to cultivate an intolerance to any difference. This means difference itself becomes a threatening moral issue. In this Game difference becomes morally wrong.

You can see this in the September 11, 2001 attack on America by the terrorists as they used civilian airliners as missiles to kill thousands of innocent men, women, and children. Why did they do that? Many tried to explain it in terms of the anger and hatred of people in third-world and under-developed countries against capitalism, western civilization, oil exploration, former grievances, etc. But all of that is symptomatic. All of that is surface. Long before the Fundamental extremists among Moslems did that, the same Taliban government used dynamite to blow up the 1500 year-old Buddha’s on the side of a mountain. Why? It certainly had nothing to do with oil exploration, capitalism, Western civilization, or Christianity. They did that out of their intolerance for difference. They didn’t want “graven images” and so even an old piece of art and architecture from the ancient world was a threat to their need for conformity.

In a similar way, Hitler was also intolerant of those who differed and so used power, military might, propaganda, and everything he could to create a monolithic conformity to his way of thinking. This violates the very foundations of democracy and the ability to appreciate differences. This also explains why those who play the Intolerant Game don’t play fair and can’t be reasoned with. Their basic Frame of Mind that differences are issues of morality and depravity prevent them from negotiating. This feeds the toxic fanaticism and makes them very dangerous.

The Propaganda or Persuasion Games

While a soldier in the trenches, Hitler recognized that the ultimate battle is always the battle for the mind and hearts of people. He knew that the primary frame game is winning the game of persuasion. In what follows, remember that in those days “persuasion” went by the term “propaganda.” Recognizing that the battle for the mind was where the real battle waged, he began Chapter 7, “The Revolution,” in Mein Kampf with these words:

“With the year 1915 enemy propaganda began in our country, after 1916 it became more and more intensive, till finally, at the beginning of the year 1918, it swelled to a positive flood. Now the results of this seduction could be seen at every step. The army gradually learned to think as the enemy wanted it to.” (187, italics added)

“The German press above all conducted itself with such miserable awkwardness, nay, criminal stupidity, that my wrath mounted by the day, and the question arose within me: Is there really no one who can put an end to this spiritual squandering of the army’s heroism?” (187)

The trauma of the war defeat blinded him to the causes of that defeat. Feeling disgusted with the statesmen and the press (which he concluded was Jewish or as he designated it, “Marxist”), he decided to study more the nasty “propagandist” activity of the enemies to understand how they infiltrated the Germans, captured their minds, and made them think according to their plans.

Modeling Propaganda– Hitler as a Modeler

Where did Hitler get his persuasion savvy? I was surprised, and even stunned, to discover that Hitler had modeled British propaganda. His persuasive powers began to develop as he developed a fascination with the “propagandist activity” which he considered “a true art.” This is the propaganda that the Socialist-Marxists used “with astonishing skill” (Hitler, p. 176). As a young soldier in the First World War, Hitler blamed German’s lost of the war upon the effectiveness of the enemy’s power of propaganda. It took the spirit out of the soldiers. It was the ‘seduction” of the enemy’s propaganda that defeated them. He wrote, “The army gradually learned to think as the enemy wanted it to.” (p. 197). On the British side:

“How they whipped the fever heat of national passion into the faces of the hastily retreating regiments in those countries! What propaganda and ingenious demagogy were used to hammer the faith in final victory back into the hearts of the broken fronts!” (Hitler, p. 188)

He viewed things in terms of the poison of the propaganda beginning to work:

“In the fall of 1918… though the battlefield was the same, the men had changed: for now ‘political discussions’ went on even among the troops….” (201)

For him, this was the central problem. The solders were thinking. They were not simply operated from unquestioning compliance.

Hitler put “the magnifying glass” to the speeches of Lloyd George, the munitions minister of England, and while the German intelligentsia thought they were “scientifically inferior products and hackneyed to boot,” he recognized them as “psychological masterpieces in the art of mass propaganda.”

“This man judged these speeches solely according to the impression they left on his own blase nature, while the great English demagogue had set out solely to exert the greatest possible effect on the mass of his listeners, and in the broadest sense on the entire English lower class. Regarded from this standpoint, the speeches of this Englishman were the most wonderful performances, for they testified to a positively amazing knowledge of he soul of the broad masses of the people. And their effect was truly powerful.” (476)

“Lloyd George proved that he not only the equal in genius of a Bethmann-Hollweg, but was a thousand times his superior, precisely by the fact that in his speeches he found that form and that expression which opened to him the heart of his people and in the end made this people serve his will completely. Precisely in the primitiveness of his language, the primordiality of its forms of expression, and the use of easily intelligible examples of the simplest sort lies the proof of the towering political ability of this Englishman. For I must not measure the speech of a statesman to his people by the impression which it leaves in a university professor, but by the effect it exerts on the people. And this alone gives the standard for the speaker’s genius.” (Hitler, p. 477)

Did you catch some of his fundamental frames in that passage? Hitler recognized the value of inducing very strong primitive states (primordial states) in people. He believed that such states were easily understandable by the common people and that such would give them a fanatical drive and obedience to him.

The last statement of that quotation by Hitler also reflects the principle that later came to be know in NLP as, “The meaning of your communication is the response you get.” And if you want to fire the soul of the masses, you judge your speech by the response you get.

Propaganda had convinced the Germans that the English people were basically cowards and would not stake their own blood for economic policy. They presented the British as “a business man as shrewd a personally he was unbelievably cowardly.” (144_145). But all of this was a delusion and an under-estimation “for which we would have to pay most bitterly. This falsification was part of their propaganda he said.

“It was then that I began my first reflections about the importance of the form of propaganda.” (Hitler, p. 145)

Regarding Hitler’s pragmatic side, he was very focused on results. To that end, he focused almost exclusively on arousing the emotions and forgetting the intellect. Having very little faith in the intellectual capacity of the masses, he discounted any attempt to “reason” with them. His was not a persuasion of the mind first, but of the emotions. He seemed to have an intuitive knowledge that once people were in a certain passionate state, they would find or invent the reasons to justify the feelings. This isn’t far from the tactics of most cult leaders today. And not a few in the field of marketing have adopted this approach.

“The whole art consists is doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity itself, since its function … consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated … its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be…

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. … It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided… The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. … all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. (181)

Hitler played to the emotions rather than to the mind, that is, to educate. It wasn’t about educating, it was about inducing strong primitive emotions to create a fanatical mob mentality. He would rather “harp on” his basic ideas until they became slogans in the mind. If he could do that, he would have them.

In his modeling of British propaganda, Hitler recognized several things that they did right that were superior in effect and result than what the Germans had attempted. Rather than downgrade the expectations as the Germans had down, he saw the need to make the call to battle a call that would challenge men to their greatest effort.

“It was absolutely wrong to make the enemy ridiculous, as the Austrian and German comic papers did. It was absolutely wrong because actual contact with an enemy soldier was bound to arouse an entirely different conviction, and the results were devastating; for now the German soldier, under the direct impression of the enemy’s resistance, felt himself swindled by his propaganda service. His desire to fight, or even to stand firm, was not strengthened, but the opposite occurred. His courage flagged.

“By contrast, the war propaganda of the English and Americans was psychologically sound. By representing the Germans to their own people as barbarians and Huns, they prepared the individual soldier for the terrors of war, and thus helped to preserve him from disappointments. After this, the most terrible weapon that was used against him seemed only to confirm what his propagandists had told him; it likewise reinforced his faith in the truth of his government’s assertions, while on the other hand it increased his rage and hatred against the vile enemy. …

“And so the English soldier could never feel that he had been misinformed by his own countrymen, as unhappily was so much the case with the German soldier that in the end he rejected everything coming from his source as ‘swindles’ and ‘bunk.'”

“And so the German war propaganda offered an unparalleled example of an ‘enlightenment’ service working in reverse, since any correct psychology was totally lacking. … What our authorities least of all understood was the very first axiom of all propagandist activity: to wit, the basically subjective and one-sided attitude it must take toward every question it deals with. (182)

“The function of propaganda is not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. .. (182)

Against we see the simplistic, black-or-white frame of mind that Hitler had and imposed on others. Forget pondering the rights of different people. He valued posing things in either-or terms to make his proposals more stark. He used a persuasion that rested on absolutism. That would crate more energy, more power, and more focus.

“English propagandists understood all this most brilliantly– and acted accordingly. They made no half statements that might have given rise to doubts. Their brilliant knowledge of the primitive sentiments of the broad masses is shown by their atrocity propaganda… As ruthless as it was brilliant, it created the preconditions for more steadfastness at the front, even in the face of the greatest actual defeats, and just as strikingly it pilloried the German enemy as the sole guilty party for the outbreak of the War…” (Hitler, p. 184)

By contrast, he talked about the inner ambiguity of the German propaganda created by the feather_brained statesman who tried to use “insipid pacifistic bilge” to fire men’s spirits.

“But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle in borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as is often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.” (184)

Today those in marketing, sales, communication influence recognize these principles as fundamental to the art of persuasion. We increase our persuasiveness through persistence, repetition, and focus. Persuasion, after all, ultimately aims at engaging attention in such a way that it captures and holds attention. Whatever does that has persuasive influence on the minds and hearts of people. To that end he played the Keep it Simple Game. He used simplicity so that the recipients would not think, would not question, would not doubt. He needed fanatics to carry out his program, obedience and submissive fanatics, not equals who would think, run their own brain, and question his ideas. Again, directly from Mein Kampf:

“It must be one-sided and clearly express itself in the propaganda. … If propaganda renounces primitiveness of expression, it does not find its way to the feeling of the broad masses.” (341)

“Among a thousand speakers there is perhaps only a single one who can manage to speak to locksmiths and university professors at the same time, in a form which not only is suitable to the receptivity of both parties, but also influences both parties with equal effect or actually lashes them into a wild storm of applause. We must always bear in mind that even the most beautiful idea of a sublime theory in most cases can be disseminated only through the small and smallest minds. The important thing is not what the genius who has created an idea has in mind, but what, in what form, and with what success the prophets of this idea transmit it to the broad masses.” (342)

“Propaganda must be adjusted to the broad masses in content and in form, and its soundness is to be measured exclusively by its effective result..” (342)

“If the folkish idea wants to arrive at a clear success from the unclear will of today, it must pick out from the broad world of its ideas certain guiding principles, suited in their essence and content to binding a broad mass of men, that mass which alone guarantees the struggle for this idea as laid down in our philosophy.” (458)

With regard to dialogue and discussion, Hitler feared such Games. He didn’t want his followers to be thinkers, but submissive. So he framed things in his rallies, parades, and party organization so that there was as little discussion as possible. For him, discussion only plants doubt. And that’s just one of the evils of discussion. Instead, he set out to frame his ideas and proposals so that they would be as solid as granite!

“With a doctrine that is really sound in its broad outlines, it is less harmful to retain a formulation, even if it should not entirely correspond to reality, than by improving it to expose what hitherto seemed a granite principle of the movement to general discussion with all its evil consequences. Above all, it is impossible as long as a movement is still fighting for victory. For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure?” (459)

As a Game of Persuasion, the “Blind Faith” Game works. People who believe in their beliefs and then feel proud of those beliefs, and who identify with their beliefs became fanatics. It’s the structure of fanaticism. It creates what Eric Hoeffer called, the “true believer” phenomenon. To achieve that he also presupposed the highest principles or doctrines of his beliefs without expressing them specifically. In doing that, it kept people from being tampered with or questioned those frames by presupposition. It actually made them blind to them.

“The truth is that the most essential substance must never be sought in the outward formulation, but only and always in the inner sense. This is immutable.” (p. 459)

He argued for this by quoting several examples. For instance, he quoted the way the Catholic Church obtained submissive obedience, by “rigidly holding to dogmas once established!”

In summary, Hitler described his model of effective propaganda in “War Propaganda” (Sixth Chapter) as a way to effectively persuade the masses. To do that, one needed to use the following techniques:

1. Keep the dogma simple: make only a few points. “Aside from a few changes in the form of presentation, their content was almost always the same.” (p. 189)
2. Be forthright and powerfully direct. Speak in the telling or ordering mode.
3. Hold forth an extreme either-or, black-and-white a call to action.
4. Make it emotional: Direct your words to the emotions and stir them vigorously.
5. Use lots of repetition: persistently repeat your point over and over.
6. Forget beauty, literary criteria, scientific reasoning, balance, and novelty.
7. Focus solely on convincing people and creating zealots.
8. Find slogans that you can use and drive the movement forward.

He considered these the guiding principles in rough outlines that he set down in his treatise on propaganda. His focus was to–

“Effect on the broad masses, concentration on a few points, constant repetition of the same, self-assured and self-reliant framing of the text in the forms of a apodictic statement, greatest perseverance in distribution and patience in awaiting the effect.” (p. 366)

The persuasion that he learned and developed in handling crowds, even large crowds of thousands, involved pacing the objections he knew that they would have against his argument and using them in the service of persuasion. He did that by pacing and leading.

“Even on the first day of our public appearance, we had a chance to experience this. Truly we did not ‘curry favor with the masses,’ but everywhere opposed the lunacy of these people. Nearly always it came about that in these years I faced an assemblage of people who believed the opposite of what I wanted to say, and wanted the opposite of what I believed. Then it was the work of two hours to lift two or three thousand people out of a previous conviction, blow by blow to shatter the foundation of their previous opinions, and finally to lead them across to our convictions and our philosophy of life.

In those days I learned something important in a short term, to strike the weapon of reply out of the enemy’s hand myself. We soon noticed that our opponents stepped forward with a definite ‘repertory’ in which constantly recurring objections to our assertions were raised, so that the uniformity of this procedure pointed to a conscious, unified schooling. … Here we had an opportunity to become acquainted with the incredible discipline of our adversaries’ propaganda, and it is still my pride today to have found the means, not only to render this propaganda ineffective, but in the end to strike its makers with their own weapon. Two years later, I was a master of this art.” (466_467)

In every single speech it was important to realize clearly in advance the presumable content and form of the objections to be in the speech itself.”

In Mind-Lines we call this Pre-Framing. This means that we set a frame ahead of time so that when an objection occurs later, it has already been dealt with and made irrelevant. Hitler knew that if he took the ideas that people would operate from and if he answered them during the presentation, he could use pre-frames to take them away from his audience as “objections.” This gave him an attitude of wanting to know objections so that he could make them irrelevant from the beginning.

“He himself will utter their objections, which he senses though unspoken, and go on confusing them and exploding them, until at length even the last group of an opposition, by its very bearing and facial expression, enables hm to recognize its capitulation to his arguments. … False concepts and poor knowledge can be eliminated by instruction, the resistance of the emotions never. Here only an appeal to these mysterious powers themselves can be effective…” (471)

Hitler also seemed to have a natural intuition about how to “read” a crowd and calibrate to their ongoing feedback so as to pace them for the purpose of then leading.

“While the speaker gets a continuous correction of his speech from the crowd he is addressing, since he can always see in the faces of his listeners to what extent they can follow his arguments with understanding and whether the impression and the effect of his words led to the desired goal– the writer does not know his readers at all.” (469)

“The speaker. .. He will always let himself be borne by the great masses in such a way that instinctively the very words come to his lips that he needs to speak to the hearts of his audience. And if he errs, even in the slightest, he has the living correction before him. As I have said, he can read from the facial expression of his audience, whether, firstly, they understand what he is saying, whether, secondly, they can follow the speech as a whole, and to what extent, thirdly, he has convinced them of the soundness of what he has said.” (471)

There were other facets of persuasion with groups of people. He knew that the best time for a public rally was in the evening, and the later the better. Why? Because people would be tired and therefore more susceptible the influence of his ideas. He also knew the power to “convince” people by giving them the sense that they are a part of something and that many others believe.

“The mass meeting is also necessary for the reason that in it the individual, who at first, whole becoming a supporter of a young movement, feels lonely and easily succumbs to the fear of being alone, for the first time gets the picture of a larger community, which in most people has a strengthening, encouraging effect. … The community of the great demonstration not only strengthens the individual, it also unites and helps to create an esprit de corps.” (478)

The Opportunistic or “Desperate Times Calls for Desperate Action” Game

Part of Hitler’s genius involved his skill in playing to the times that occurred and using them to his benefit. In this, he was extremely skilled as an opportunist. He was able to read the political and economic situation and exploit to his advantage.

After WWI Hitler found himself in a nation suffering from tremendous political instability, economic crisis, and social polarization. Without this backdrop to his own personal failures, he would not have had an audience. But he did. And that’s what made his narrow-minded, intolerance opinionism attractive in the beerhalls. To that audience in that day his fanaticism and populist style were absolutely compelling. Over the months and years from 1918 at the end of the lost war to 1921 when he took over the Social Nationalist party he slowly discovered simple slogans that kindled the angers, resentments, hatreds, and fears of people.

Yet he did more than just play with the negative emotions, he outlined a road to national rebirth. He not only fanned the emotions of aversion, he stimulated emotions of attraction to a better future. He gave hope. Kershaw (1998) described it this way:

“He could inspire an audience which shared his basic political feelings, by the way he spoke, by the force of his rhetorical, by the very power of his prejudice, by the conviction he conveyed that there was a way out of Germany’s light, and that only the way he outlined was the road to national rebirth. Another time, another place, and the message would have been ineffective, absurd even. As it was, indeed, in the early 1920s the great majority of the citizens of Munich, let alone of a wider population to whom Hitler was, if at all, only known as a provincial Bavarian hot-head and rabble-rouser, could not be captivated by it. Nevertheless, at this time and in this place, Hitler’s message did capture exactly the uncontainable sense of anger, fear, frustration, resentment, and pent-up aggression of the raucous gatherings in the Munich beer halls. The compulsive manner of his speaking derived in turn much of its power of persuasion from the strength of conviction that combined with appealingly simple diagnoses of and recipes to Germany’s problems. Above all, what came naturally to Hitler was to stoke up the hatred of others by pouring out to them the hatred that was so deeply embedded in himself.” (p. 132)

As the economic and political crisis mounted in the early years of the 1920s, most people joined the party out of protest, anger, and bitterness. In those years, inflation became hyper-inflation. Currency lost all of its value in the hyper-inflation of 1923. On the eve of WWI, it was 4.20 marks to the dollar. By 1923, it was 18,000 marks to the dollar. And that blossomed to 25,000,000 in September of 1923. This put the nation in a state of extreme emergency as lifetime savings were rapidly wiped out and unemployment led to hunger and poverty. No wonder people were angry, scared, stress, and in a mood to blame.

Is it any wonder that there was an attempted cue in Germany on November 8, 1923? Yet the putschists failed to carry off the coup. Even though the revolutionists put up placards proclaiming Hitler as Reich Chancellor and proclaimed a “national dictatorship” neither the army nor the state police joined in with the putschists. When that happened, the Nazi leaders repudiated the putsch. Hitler was arrested and imprisoned in the Fortresss at Landsberg am Lech, the party was banned and the volkisch movement split into factions.

In those desperate times, Hitler played his cards in just the right way as a skilled opportunist. How did he do that? What did he do?

With the rest of the leadership denying responsibility, Hitler stepped up at the trial to defend and glorify in his role in attempting to overthrow the Weimar State. This move overturned the leaders in the party and positioned himself as the bold and fearless leader. Knowing he was going to jail anyway, he gambled that this move would give him a new edge as the leader of the Nazi movement. During the trial, he turned the courtroom into a stage for his own propaganda. He called witnesses and presented his case__not to win freedom, but to promote his case and to be recognized as the leader of the Nazi party. Then during his 13 months imprison, he was nearly deified by fawning disciples. In late December of 1924 when he was released, he was the very soul of the movement.

This was the beginning of the Hitler cult. And he took full advantage of it, staging a dramatic re-entering of Munich’s political scene in Feb. 1925. Also, was while in prison he wrote Mein Kampf to create much of the mythology of himself and of the movement. Upon his release from prison, he was banned from speaking in public in Germany until 1927. Again, he used that to the full. He spent the following years building up the anticipation for when he would speak and what he would say. When that finally happened, the party scheduled it so that there were thousands in attendance and the mass rallies.

In spite of this, the 1928 election suggested the end of Hitler and his movement (Kershaw, p. 320). But then on October 24, 1929 came the Wall Street Crash. That was the crisis that Hitler needed. He used that to offer a simple explanation, he blamed the “Red” government and scapegoat the Jews. And because the sense of betrayal and exploitation was already acute, the desperateness of the people made it believable.

Simultaneous to all of these crises in the country was the Weimar Republic and some of the things that the Chancellor did that was so destructive to democracy. For example, after he tendered his resignation on March 27, 1930, he dissolved the parliament on July 18. Kershaw commented, “The Nazis could hardly believe their luck.” (p. 325). When the September elections came, the Nazis obtained 107 seats in the government making it the second largest party. Then two years later, July 31, 1932, the Nazis won 230 seats to become the largest party in the Reichstag. Hitler was offered the Vice-Chancellor, but his All-or-Nothing thinking caused him to immediately turn it down.

Nazi myth has it that Hitler rose from humble beginnings to “seize” power by a “triumph of the will.” But that is just the stuff of mythology, and mostly Hitler’s own propaganda.

“In fact, political miscalculation by those with regular access to the corridors of power rather than any actions on the part of the Nazi leader played a larger role in placing him n the chancellor’s seat. Democracy was far from healthy state when the Depression struck Germany.” (Kershaw, p. 426)

Hitler also played that the unethical and manipulative game, The Ends Justifies the Means Game. Propaganda was just a means to an end and therefore he felt that anything that would work in the fight for survival was justified (pp. 177-178).

“Humanitarianism and aesthetics would vanish even from a world inhabited by man if this world were to lose the races that have created and upheld these concepts. But all such concepts become secondary when a nation is fighting for its existence; in fact, they become totally irrelevant to the forms of the struggle .. where they might paralyze a struggling nation’s power of self-preservation. … And since these criteria of humanitarianism and beauty must be eliminated from the struggle, they are also inapplicable to propaganda.” (p. 178)

In part, this was the way he played, The Pragmatic Game. He set the frame that propaganda must–

“… be addressed always and exclusively to the masses. … the content of propaganda is not science … The art of the poster lies in the designer’s ability to attract the attention of the crowd by form and color. … The poster should give the masses an idea of the significance of the exhibition, it should not be a substitute for the art on display. … the function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses’ attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc…. ” (p. 179, italics added)

Kershaw wrote,

“The First World War made Hitler possible. Without the experience of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the upheaval of revolution the failed artist and social drop-out would not have discovered what to do with his life by entering politics and finding his métier as a propagandist and beer hall demagogue. And without the trauma of war, defeat, and revolution, without the political radicalization of German society that this trauma brought about, the demagogue would have been without an audience for his raucous, hate-filled message. The legacy of the lost war provided the conditions in which the paths of Hitler and the German people began to cross. Without a war, a Hitler on the Chancellor’s seat that had been occupied by Bismarck would have been unthinkable.” (p. 73)

“Hitler was able most signally to exploit the belief that pluralism was somehow unnatural or unhealthy in a society.” (p. 75)

The Opportunist Game means using whatever you can regardless of who gets hurt. In the years prior to the 1932 election and especially in those that followed, there was a general paranoia among the Nazi movement. Hitler engendered it and used it to keep everybody on their toes, suspicious, and ready to turn others in. The rule of this game is that the ends justifies the means so don’t worry about the morality of an action. The ends justifies it. This again was a call for fanaticism, for blind fanaticism.

You can hear his Opportunist Game in the way he strategized about how to take control of things.

“It will take a struggle, in view of the fact that the first task is not creation of a folkish state conception, but above all elimination of the existing Jewish one. As so frequently in history, the main difficulty lies, not in the form of the new state of things, but in making place for it. … first of all the negative part of the fight…” (453)

“First weapon … the probe of criticism in all its sharpness.”

The Strength and Power Games

“Power” wrote Kershaw, “was Hitler’s aphrodisiac.” So it should be no surprise to find to find that he played lots of Power Games– Games of intimidation, bullying, threatening, posturing of strength, and anything and everything that increased his sense of power. Hitler could have written the book, “Winning by Intimidation.” It was an art form with him. We can see it in the way he conducted the rallies and parades, the big meetings, his use of the Storm Troopers, and even in the way he talked. His absolute dogmatism was yet another expression of his “power” addiction.

In Mein Kampf he argued that his program needed to have a granite-like sound. It needed to be expressed dogmatically and in a creed-like tone.

“Since the so-called program of the movement is absolutely correct in its ultimate aims, but in its formulation had to take psychological forces into account, in the course of time the conviction may well arise that individual instances certain of the guiding principles ought perhaps to be framed differently, given a better formulation. Every attempt to do this, however, usually works out catastrophically. For in this way something which should be unshakable is submitted to discussion, which, as soon as a single point is deprived of its dogmatic, creed like formulation, will not automatically yield a new, better, and above all unified formulation, but will far sooner lead to endless debates and a general confusion.” (Hitler, p. 458)

He spoke dogmatically and absolutely to convey the power of certitude. He formulated his principles so that they had a “granite” like feel to evoke states of belief and conviction. He wanted his followers dogmatic and intolerant about those principles. That would create the fanaticism that he needed.

Because Hitler believed in the strength of fanaticism he sought to create and use it. He did not think the bourgeois population had the potential for being fanatical like the masses. Notice the meta-state structures in these words.

“They lack that great magnetic attraction which alone the masses always follow under the compelling impact of towering great ideas, the persuasive force of absolute belief in them, coupled with a fanatical courage to fight for them.” (p. 377)

In terms of the meta-states structure here, it wasn’t mere belief that he sought to instill in people, but an “absolute belief in an idea” and “fanatical courage.” He wanted people to close off openness to other ideas. He wanted them to believe in their beliefs and to feel sure of that.

Hitler needed people “to bear in their hearts fanatical faith in the victory of a movement.” He wanted people with an “indomitable energy and will, and if necessary with ruthlessness, to sweep aside any obstacles which might stand in the path of the rising new idea. For this only beings were fitted in whom spirit and body had acquired those military virtues which can perhaps best be described as follows: swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel.” (356).

“I saw my own task especially in extracting those nuclear ideas from the extensive and unshaped substance of a general world view and remolding them into more or less dogmatic forms which in their clear delimitation are adapted for holding solidly together those men who swear allegiance to them.” (385)

He also knew that strength would come from acting on such beliefs. To that end he spoke and worked against sterile knowledge of his principles. He wrote, “Creative achievements can only arise when ability and knowledge are wedded.” (p. 430).

Then it was a matter of calling upon the people to turn the ideas into practice. We recognize this as the Mind-to Muscle Pattern in Neuro-Semantics.

“When these principles enter the flesh and blood of our supporter, the movement will become unshakable and invincible.” (p. 352)

This is the Mind-to-Muscle principle. We speak about it in Neuro-Semantics when we refer to translating our highest principles into everyday practices. Hitler knew of this power and so he set out to create memorable slogans that would help with that translation. He sought to first obtain unconditional clarity with regard to the nature and essence of the ideas. This transformation of a general, philosophical, ideal conception of the highest truth into a definitely delimited, tightly organized political community of faith and struggle, unified in spirit and will, is the most significant achievement, since on its happy solution alone the possibility of the victory of an ideal depends.

“The greater and more essentially revolutionary an idea is, the more activistic its membership will become, since the revolutionary force of a doctrine involves a danger for its supporters, which seems calculated to keep cowardly little shopkeepers away from it.”(584)

To make knowledge living rather than dead, we need will power and determination (that puts it into muscle.)

“We Germans, by God, have never lacked scientific education; but we have been all the more lacking in any will power and determination. The more ‘intellectual’ our statesmen were, for example, the feebler, as a rule, was their actual accomplishment. … our statesmen and rulers were over-educated men, crammed full of knowledge and intellect, but bereft of any healthy instinct and devoid of all energy and boldness. It was a calamity that our people had to conduct its struggle for existence under the Chancellorship of a philosophizing weakling. If instead… We had had a robuster man of the people as a leader, the heroic blood of the common grenadier would not have flowed in vain.” (432, italics added)

“Every philosophy of life … will remain without significance for the practical shaping of a people’s life, as long as its principles have not become the banner of a fighting movement which for its part in turn will be a party as long as its activity has not found completion in the victory of its ideas and its party dogmas have not become the new state principles of a people’s community.” (380)

Hitler recognized that by using infallibility he could create more power for himself. To that end he admired the Roman Catholic Church and modeled their use of infallibility. He wanted the cultish role of being a pope to the Nazi movement.

“Political parties are inclined to compromises; philosophies never. Political parties even reckon with opponents; philosophies proclaim their infallibility.” (455)

“Since a philosophy of life is never willing to share with another, it cannot be willing either to collaborate in an existing regime which it condemns, but feels obligated to combat this regime and the whole hostile world of ideas with all possible means; that is, to prepare its downfall.” (455)

The “Be Bigger Than Life” Guru Game

To play this Game, he first of all presented an extremely big Vision. It was a Vision to restore the lost dignity of Germany. This was a Vision to gain new lands for Germany, to change the entire culture, and to oust those who were not German. He set forth his plan as a plan for the very survival and freedom of the Aryan race. He believed that it would take such a Vision to create the necessary enthusiasm– an intoxicating enthusiasm.

“It is an intoxication and must be preserved in this state. How, without this power of enthusiasm, should a country withstand a struggle which would make the most enormous demands?” (167)

“I knew the psyche of the broad masses too well not to be aware that a high ‘aesthetic’ tone would not stir up the fire that was necessary to keep the iron hot. In my eye it was madness on the part of the authorities to be doing nothing to intensify the glowing heat of passion…” (167)

Hitler knew that he would not be able to persuade the thinking populace, so he went after “the masses.” To win the masses, Hitler used several tactics. From setting his goal to “win the masses,” to setting out his big enough Vision, he wanted a German state “with its own sovereignty will have to direct its fight entirely to wining the broad masses.” (p. 333).

Tactically he realized that “the idea of an outward German liberation seems senseless as long as the broad masses are not also prepared to enter the service of this liberating idea.” (334). So he would have to “tear out of their hearts and brains” the international Marxist philosophy of life. This meant democracy and equality of people. Only then could they then win the masses for the idea of national independence (335). To do this, he called for sacrifice.

“To win the masses for a national resurrection, no social sacrifice is too great. … Only pigheaded short-sightedness … can fail to recognize that in the long run there can be no economic upswing… unless the inner national solidarity of our people is restored.” (336)

To that end, he linked national survival, safety and security, wealth and economic well-being, etc. as dependent upon developing a new National Pride. For this he could then call upon “a fanaticism and ruthlessness” for the fatherland. There were no “half-measures” for him “but only a ruthless and fanatically one-sided orientations toward the goal to be achieve.” (337).

This was the bigger than life vision and to play that Game, there would have to be a call to extremism and fanaticism. He argued that the German worker must clearly realize that economic sacrifices are of no importance whatever in comparison to national independence.

“A nation’s ability to form alliance is determined much less by dead stores of existing arms than by the visible presence of an ardent national will for self-preservation and heroic death-defying courage.” (333)

It was in this way that he played on the emotions of people. He aroused them in order to call them to action.

“The broad masses of people … The scantiness of the abstract knowledge they possess directs their sentiments more to the world of feeling. That is where their positive or negative attitude lies. It is receptive only to an expression of force in one of these two directions and never to a half-measure hovering between the two. Their emotional attitude at the same time conditions their extraordinary stability. Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect. Hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses, than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward. Anyone who wants to win the broad masses must know the key that opens the door to their heart. It’s name is not objectivity (read weakness), but will and power.” (pp. 337-338, italics added)

“The folkish state, a general picture of which I have attempted to draw in broad outlines, will not be realized by the mere knowledge of what is necessary to this state. It is not enough to know how a folkish state should look. Far more important is the program for its creation.” (452)

“It is not necessary that every individual fighting for this philosophy should obtain a full insight and precise knowledge of the ultimate ideas and thought processes of the leaders of the movement. What is necessary is that some few, really great ideas be made clear to him, and that the essential fundamental lines be burned inextinguishably into him, so that he is entirely permeated by the necessity of the victory of his movement and its doctrine. The individual soldier is not initiated into the thought processes of higher strategy either. He is, on the contrary, training in rigid discipline and fanatical faith in the justice and power of his cause, and taught to stake his life for it without reservation…” (456)

Hitler recruited people for the Idealism Game. To do that he had to evoke great Ideals and present himself as the coming Fuhrer. He offered something to his party members that was bigger than life. Ideals are one thing, but idealism goes further. What were the great ideas that became the idealism in the Nazi movement? The ideas included that of preserving the national organism and willingness to stake everything on it with all possible means. Hitler argued that such state-forming and state-preserving qualities have little connected with economics.

The idealism that grew in the hearts of the idealistic was that of a bold new future for the Reich– the beauty of the Germans, their courage, will-power, discipline, determination, the joy in responsibility (p. 416).

“They were all energetic young people, accustomed to discipline, and from their period of service raised in the principle: nothing at all is impossible, everything can be done if you only want it.” (356) “I, too, had forgotten how to say: ‘that’s impossible,’ or ‘it won’t work’; ‘we can’t risk that,’ ‘that is too dangerous,’ etc. (357)

“A man does not die for business, but only for ideals. Nothing proved the Englishman’s superior psychological knowledge of the popular soul better than the motivation which he gave to his struggle. While we fought for bread, England for for ‘freedom’; and not even her own, no, for that of the small nations. In our country we laughed at this effrontery, or were enraged at it, and thus only demonstrated how empty-headed and stupid the so-called statesmen of Germany had become even before the War. We no longer had the slightest idea concerning the essence of the force which can lead men to their death of their own free will and decision. (Italics added)

“In 1914, as long as the German people thought they were fighting for ideals; they stood firm, but as soon as they were told to fight for their daily bread, they preferred to give up the game.” (153)

“Any attempt to combat a philosophy with methods of violence will fail in the end, unless the fight takes up the form of attack for a new spiritual attitude. Only in the struggle between two philosophies can the weapon of brute force, persistently and ruthlessly applied, lead to a decision for the side it supports.” (172)

“By the principles of your parliamentary cattle-trading, you helped to drag the nation into the abyss; but we, in the form of attack and by setting up a new philosophy of life and by fanatically and indomitably defending its principles, shall build for our people the steps on which it will some day climb back into the temple of freedom.” (378)

“We may therefore state that not only does man live in order to serve higher ideals, but that, conversely, these higher ideals also provide the premise for his existence.” (379-380)

“But all these ideas, regardless how convincing they may be for the individual, are submitted to the critical examination of this individual and hence to a fluctuating affirmation or negation until emotional divination or knowledge assumes the binding force of apodictic faith. This, above all, is the fighting factor which makes a breach and opens the way for the recognition of basic religious views.

These words point out Hitler’s Game Plan of making his program visionary. He had to persuade them that everything was at stake and that “firm belief in the right to apply even the most brutal weapons” was legitimate. Fanatical movements always have to do this– legitimize their use of cruelty and hatred. And it is commonly legitimized by belief in a particular religion, ideology, or nationality.

“Care must be taken not to underestimate the force of an idea, I should like to remind those who become faint-hearted in this connection … of a time whose heroism, represented the most over-powering proof of the force of idealistic motives. For what made men die then was not concern for their daily bread, but love of the fatherland, faith in its greatness, a general feeling for the honor of the nation….” (437)

“The lack of a great, creative, renewing idea means at all times a limitation of fighting force. Firm belief in the right to apply even the most brutal weapons is always bound up with the existence of a fanatical faith in the necessity of the victory of a revolutionary new order on this earth.

A movement that is not fighting for such highest aims and ideals will, therefore, never seize upon the ultimate weapon.

The fact of having a new great idea to show was the secret of the success of the French Revolution; the Russian Revolution owes its victory to the idea, and only through the idea did fascism achieve the power to subject a people in the most beneficial way to the most comprehensive creative renewal.” (533)

Because Hitler proclaimed the idea of national pride and love of country as fundamental, he was able to call the young idealists to play The Sacrifice Game. At this point, the Guru Game was also in play. Here he presents the Rules of the Game that he calls Patriotism.

“In order that this national sentiment should be genuine from the outset and not consist in mere hollow pretense, beginning in youth one iron principle must be hammered into those heads which are still capable of education: any man who loves his people proves it solely by the sacrifices which he is prepared to make for it. There is no such thing as national sentiment which is only out for gain. No more is there any nationalism which only embraces classes. Shouting hurrah proves nothing and gives no right to call oneself national if behind it there does not stand a great, loving concern for the preservation of a universal healthy nation….” (426-427)

He focused on the spirit, the heart, the courage that would make it happen.

“The question of regaining German power is not: How shall we manufacture arms? But: How shall we manufacture the spirit which enables a people to bear arms? If this spirit dominates a people, the will finds a thousand ways, every one of which ends in a weapon! But give a coward ten pistols and if attacked he will not be able to fire a single shot. And so for him they are more worthless than a knotted stick for a courageous man.” (332)

“A national ability to form alliance is determined much less by dead stores of existing arms than by the visible presence of an ardent national will for self-preservation and heroic death-defying courage.” (333)

The Fuhrer cult

In the 20th century we have seen many cult movements rise and fall around a guru leader. The leaders, typically men, present themselves as a messiah or special messenger. They then build a cult organization around themselves by demanding total obedience. The total compliance they, at first ask for and eventually demand, becomes the structure of the organization. It is built around one person, around a personality, and so we speak of such as “personality cults.” It happened with entertainers like Elvis Presley, the Beatles, etc., it happens with religious leaders like Jim Jones and David Koresh. And it happens with political leaders, especially dictators and tyrants.

In running his organization, Hitler rejected committee decisions.

“In the place of committee decisions, the principle of absolute responsibility was introduced.” (588, 589).

Talk about a reframe! It wasn’t absolute power of the Fuhrer that he wanted, it was absolute responsibility. And for people not coping well, for people traumatized by inflation, unemployment, poverty, helplessness, etc., escaping from responsibility seemed nature, especially if they were playing the Victim Game.

“The movement decisively rejects any position on questions which either lie outside the frame of its political work or, being not of basic importance, are irrelevant for it.” (345)

“The future of a movement is conditioned by the fanaticism, yes, the intolerance, with which its adherents uphold it as the sole correct movement, and push it past other formulations of a similar sort.” (350)

I can’t think of a statement that better expresses or illustrates Aristotelian thinking. Here is absolutism, the excluded middle, black-and-white thinking. Here is Hitler’s call to a fanatical Intolerance.

“The greatness of every might organization embodying an idea … lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others. If an idea is sound and, thus armed, takes up a struggle … it is unconquerable and every persecution will only add to its inner strength.” (351)

Hitler made the integrating mechanism of the movement the cult of the leader. He consciously strengthened the Fuhrer cult and tied his leadership principle into the German mindset. He called “unconditional authority downwards and responsibility upwards” Germanic democracy. Then to further reinforce this he anchors the whole political movement with the city of capital itself.

“The geo-political significance of a focal center in a movement cannot be overemphasized. Only the presence of such a place, exerting the magic spell of a Mecca or a Rome, can in the long run give the movement a force which is based on inner unity and the recognition of a summit representing this unity.” (347)

He also pushed for the cultish use of blind obedience and discipline.

“They never understood that the strength of a political party lies by no means in the greatest possible independent intellect of the individual members, but rather in the disciplined obedience with which its members follow the intellectual leadership. …This is the basic insight which we must constantly bear in mind in examining the possibility of transforming a philosophy into action.” (457)

Part of his strategy to put himself into the role of a Guru was his unavailability. As the years passed, he became less and less available to any except his inner circle. Only they saw his pathology deepen and grow. He would appear at the rallies 30 minutes late up to 2 hours late, leaving the crowds waiting, in anticipation. He would use the most emotional symbols from bands to soldiers to vast numbers of people. All of this was to reinforce the illusion and the myth of the Fuhrer as being other-than-human, more than human, super-human.

Yet actually it was a very sick and twisted mind within Hitler. And it was those Frames of his distorted ideas about race superiority, blood purity, intolerance, etc. that took on a fanatical zeal. This ultimately led him to become ruthless in his fanatical commitment to eliminate anything and everything that got in his way.

In spite of that pathology, Hitler discovered that he could speak and became a powerful persuader. He also had a genius for reading the masses and developing political tactical approaches for winning the minds and hearts of the people to take over a country. In that sense, he was a man of his time who simply took full advantage of the political situation. Having lived in a desperate time of socio-economic change, of fear and poverty, of insecurity and powerlessness, of indignity and shame, he played on the sympathies of those who wanted to find someone to blame. In was in this way that he played the Injustice Game for all it was worth and used it to leverage his own sick “solutions.” What Hitler did makes perfect sense when we start with the Frames that drove his Games. They were just sick frames, and so were the Games. And the Frame Games that he played are not all that different from those being played as we enter the 21st century.

References:

Fromm, Erich. (1941/1969). Escape from freedom. New York: Avon Books.

Fromm, Erich. (1961). May man prevail: An inquiry into the facts and fictions of foreign policy. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Hitler, Adolf (1926). (Translated by Ralph Manheim). Mein kampf. NY: A mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Co.

Kershaw, Ian. (1998). Hitler: 1889-1936. Hubris. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Tuesday September 11, 2001 will live in all of our minds as a day that the world changed. Theterritory of reality that we woke up to that day revealed to us that life would no longer be “the life that we all had lived in the 20th century.” Probably it was not that the world had just then changed, it had already changed. We had not noticed. It was rather that we all, as a global community, woke up to the change on that day.

On that day we were challenged to change a lot of our understandings, beliefs, neuro_semantic definitions, and model of the world. After the hijacking of commercial jets, terrorizing innocent people on them, and turning them into weapons of mass destruction and then destroying thousands of people from nearly all countries of the world in the World Trade Center Buildings, we could no longer think of “war,” “terrorism,” “madmen,” “crime,” “criminal mentality,” etc. in the old ways. From now on we would have to change our paradigms.

In this sense Tuesday September 11 became a signal event designating an entirely new and different way of thinking about life in the 21st century. We even have to think about “patriotism” in a different way. No longer can we think about the people of our Country against the rest of the world, the people of our race against the rest of the races, the people of our religion against those of the rest of the religions, etc. The terrorists slaughtered Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Moslem, etc. They indiscriminately turned their weapons on people of all kinds of political persuasions. Theirs was a sick toxic fanaticism driven by hatred, anger, and insecurity … a political psychosis that had broken with the human shared reality that treats human life and dignity as basic.

• How shall we now live?
• How do we need to update our mental maps about these things?
• How can we use the modeling tools of NLP and Neuro-Semantics to empower us to live more effectively in this new century?

While none of us have all of the answers, we do have enough of the answers to begin to forge a map that will enable us to navigate in the unknown dangers that face us. I offer the following as suggestive.

1st We Have to Wage War
Against the Psychosis of Terrorism & Fanaticism

There are sick, toxic, and utterly destructive ideas. There are “wrong” ideas. We have to get over the political correctness of thinking that all ideas are equal. They are not. Some beliefs are sick. True enough, no “belief” is “true” or “false” in any absolute sense. Yet while there is a “relativity” to all beliefs in the sense that they are all human constructs, this does not make them all equal or equally useful or valid.

Some beliefs so wrongly map out the way to be in the world that they are utterly destructive. They are comprised of thought-viruses that undermine the well-being of all human beings.

There is a limit to free speech. In the USA we have made it illegal to yell “Fire” in a crowded building. We have taken away the right to express ourselves in that way. Why? Because we know that the symbolism of language is not neutral. Language carries neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic effects. Language signals our nervous systems, body, physiology, and motor programs to do things.

Perhaps now the media, especially the Entertainment Industry, will get over their toxic belief and P.R. delusion that what they present and represent in movies, songs, plays, books, newspapers, magazines, etc. is “just entertainment.” It is not. It never has been. It never will be. For a symbolic-class of life, a class of life that lives and breaths and has its being based upon symbols, symbols are never neutral. Symbols are always semantically loaded. And the media operates in the field of symbols.

The sick and toxic Games that Hitler played with the world was expressed in symbols–in the words and ideas that he wrote in Meine Kampf. He dispensed in words his psychotic thought viruses about race superiority and inferiority, about blood purity, about the right to exterminate the lower forms of life (the races he didn’t like). He also dispensed it in his speeches, mass rallies, and pamphlets.

More recently neo-Nazi groups influenced the boys at Columbine High School and played upon their anger, rage, insecurity, and shame. Through the use of language and symbols, they poisoned them with the destructive mental virus and invited them to play Terrorists Games to their own destruction.

In both instances there was the original sickness. Then there was the multiplication of that toxic thought virus by “believing in that belief.” This meta-state created fanaticism. It created dogmatism. It provided a validity for the infected persons to act out their psychotic delusions.

This is why any and every extremist position politically, religiously, and philosophically that comes to believe in its beliefs, and then discount any evidence or data to the contrary creates a sick and toxic mental state.

This is true for Christian fundamentalism and Moslem fundamentalism. It’s true for even right-wing conservative political fundamentalism and even for left-wing liberal political fundamentalism. It lies in the very nature of fundamentalism to believe in its belief, to close the mind to contrary evidence, to then arrogant its “rightness,” to feel proud about being right, etc. This opens people up to then jump yet another logical level and to actually begin believing that they have a “manifest destiny” to act on their beliefs and to impose them on others. This is where the thought-viruses become psychotic. This is where the deranged mental mapping now endangers innocent people.

It is at this point that the “believers” are no longer healthy, respectful, loving, humble, and open to reason in their believing. They have become what Eric Hoeffer called “true believers” –fanatics. They have confused their maps with the territory. They have forgotten that all of their thoughts and their “beliefs” are but human ideas and constructs– fallible and subject to error.

It is here that the NLP and NS models of human functioning, thinking, feeling, and acting offers an antidote to this sickness. As we enable people everywhere to recognize the Map/Territory distinction, we invite people into a more humane, sane, and scientific point of view. No one can be a Terrorist who knows and keeps refreshing this difference. The Map/Territory distinction keeps us humble, open to new information, receptive for how we could be wrong, and willing to question our own assumptions. The Map/Territory distinction keeps us from over-identifying with our ethnic origins, racial heritages, religious and philosophical beliefs, homeland, etc. It invites us into a higher patriotism– the patriotism of being a human being and of a higher racial point of view– being a member of the human race. [Patriotism literally refers to “love of one’s country” yet patrios and pater (father) can just as easily refer to the entire world, the entire human race.]

NLP and NS gives us the ability to more directly and mindfully quality control the thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and models circulating in the media. It gives us the ability to create a series of questions that we can ask about the content of the things that we write and the movies that we create:

• Does this idea support people as people?
• Does it enhance respectful conflict resolution?
• Does it enable people to be more thoughtful, questioning, less dogmatic, more sane, more scientific in their approach, more open to reasoning and dialogue?

Any belief or belief system that undermines human dignity, that creates barriers between people of different cultures and races, between different theological and philosophical belief systems, and that promotes hatred, distrust, rage, revenge, etc. should not be allowed to be expressed in a civilized world any more than we allow the yelling of “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

2nd We Have to Attach Massive Pain
To Those Involved in the Psychosis of Terrorism & Fanaticism

It is not only the right, but the sacred duty of Governments to protect its citizenry. Coming from the Judeo-Christian tradition, this principle is well-established in the Bible. We also find it in most other religions and philosophies. This means the right of the State to hunt down, punish, and even eliminate any and every threat to its people, to civilized life, to the freedoms and rights of the its people. This gives us the right to act as a body politic. This establishes the right for police and military action. And this is what preserves the life, liberty, rights, etc. of any nation.

We in NLP and NS know this is also true neurologically. From a neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic point of view, we know that it lies in the very our nature of our body and nervous system to move toward pleasure and away from pain. We don’t have to invent these mechanisms. They are wired into our bodies and minds. Attach massive pleasure and we move toward something; attach massive pain and we are out of there. Every one of us is wired to so respond.

In NLP/NS, we call these toward/away from energies a “propulsion system.” They simultaneously push and pull us; they create the attractions and aversions of life. And we even use this distinction as a meta-program distinction as we read people. We use it to recognize any given person’s first tendency (Toward / Away From) and the specific content items that a given person uses. We also know that if we play on the Desires (attractions) and Fears/Angers (aversions) of a person, we can increase our communications to make them maximally impactful. It’s just the way the neuro-semantic system works.

In terms of managing change, coaching, counseling, and psychological work with people, we use the distinction to bring about transformation. It’s what we do on a daily basis as we work with people. We attach massive pleasure and massive pain.

Yet we do not do this with those convicted of crime. We have the technology whereby we could “rehabilitate” them. But we do not. I say that from my experience over the years of working as a psychologist with hundreds of men going into and out of the Department of Corrections in the State of Colorado. With them I conducted more Anger Control Trainings than I can remember. I conducted trainings in “life skills” seeking to integrate men coming out of the Federal Prison in Canyon City and worked with individuals sent to county jail.

The “pains” that the State, local, and Federal governments attached to these men and their behaviors were not “massive.” Not by a long shot. And the men knew it. And a great many of them played that to the hilt. They took advantage of everything they could to file grievances, lawsuits, to blame, to accuse, to create a sense of security in their prison life, etc. All of this seemed to direct their attention away from what they could do to improve themselves. Very few seemed interested in that.

I have mentioned many times in Trainings that they most surprising Frame of Mind I found among the prison population was a high Moralistic Frame. They were so “sensitive” to injustice. Any “unfairness” and they would become outraged in a nana second. One fellow told his story of going through a red light, having a policeman come after him with red lights flashing, and by the time the policemen got to his car he was so worked up about being “treated unfairly” and “taken advantage of,” that he got out of the car and slugged him.

“That probably made things a lot better.” I said. And I said it as a joke, as a way to step back from it and evaluate it, to see if that short-term pleasure was really worth it.

But the man didn’t lighten up. With a serious and still angry tone, he said, “You bet your ass, it did!”

Usually I do not want to explore much content with people. But with him I couldn’t resist. Why? Mostly because his frame of mind was so foreign to mine. I really couldn’t imagine what “good” he thought he derived or could derive from slugging a policeman. So I asked.

“I’m not going to be treated unfairly. No one is going to pull that B.S. on me! Not me.”

“I suppose you’ve heard that the world is not fair…”

“Don’t give me that B.S.!” he quickly shot back, interrupting me and becoming enraged.

“A long time ago I decided that for me, and this is just for me,” I said, “… that I didn’t expect the world to be fair and that sometimes I would get a bum rap about this or that, but that I would do the best I could with what I have … and not get all that wrapped up about whether something was exactly fair or not.”

“Not me! I expect the world to be fair and I’m not going to take less and by God, I’ll slap anyone around who mistreats me.”

He just couldn’t help himself. His frame of mind was rigid and dogmatic about his need to be treated fairly. The Moralistic Frame had been elevated to a place where it was toxic for him. But he didn’t see it. Now his “moral” frame did not make him a crusader for the rights of others, he only crusaded for his own rights and so he was so quick to see mistreatment, injustice, and unfairness everywhere.

Did he experience jail time as “massive pain?” No way. In fact, I later discovered that he didn’t think of Federal Prison as all that bad. He spoke about it as a decent place. He didn’t have to work, didn’t have to worry about bills, didn’t have to “fool around with idiots.”

He and others taught me something else. They feared the Death Penalty. Prison was fine, but the Death Penalty, that was a different story. Two had moved to Colorado from some states that had the death penalty, saying that they didn’t want to take that chance. Several told me that they didn’t mind getting into fights and brawls, or even using knifes, getting caught would only involve a matter of time that they would have to serve. Using guns was out of the question for them.

For them, the “massive pain” of the Death Penalty was just too much.

There’s many other ways that we could attach “massive pain” to prison life that I personally think would turn our prisons into places where “rehabilitate” would actually become possible. It would undoubtedly not be nice. It would not respect all of their rights and privileges as citizens, but it would get their attention and create a mental image that would give others a pause about committing crimes.

For instance?

I would recommend that every man convicted of a sexual abuse crime: sexual molestation, violent rape, etc. be castrated. Make that the automatic penalty and watch the effect of what attaching massive pain to an activity. If he misused his sexual organs and violated innocent people, he can live without them.

As long as prison is not all that unpleasant of a place, as long as its a place where we mostly just warehouse people and let them learn even more “the ways of crime,” recidivism rates will be extremely high and the individuals will not be rehabilitated for living a different kind of life.

3rd We Have to Develop Political and Group Models
For Empowering Dialogue, Understanding, and Conflict Resolution

The way the media presents news and information is an utter travesty of the human mind in terms of accuracy, precision, and usefulness. I have found this true regarding the way the media operates in the USA and in many other countries around the world. The media operates mostly by presenting short sound-bites of information in formats that encourage dogmatic, black-and-white, linear thinking, etc. Seldom do we find programs where participates debating an issue ever ask questions and actually dialogue. They debate, argue, make speeches, lecture, moralize, and teach. Very seldom do they seem to listen or ask questions.

“Debate” programs have been growing in popularity on American television and radio programs. And the program directors know that the more extreme the speakers, the better for ratings. Yet this only models debate, taking positions, arguing, and snide remarks and insults. It does not model healthy conflict resolution based on respect, understanding, asking hard questions, saying “I don’t know,” and the sharing of perspectives.

From a neuro-semantics standpoint, if we “have to be right,” if we “cannot tolerate even the idea of being wrong,” if we are fearful of failure or even worse, embarrassment, then we cannot engage someone of a different opinion with an open mind. That in turn prevents learning. It prevents resolution.

You would think that after the Watergate scandal in the mid-1970s that Political leaders today, at least in the USA, would know better than to become defensive and engage in all kinds of cover-ups, that if they would just come out, own up to a flaw or mistake, they would experience a lot more resilience. But no. The need to protect their reputation and the fear of acknowledging even the slightest possibility of doing wrong still predominates. We saw this to the shame and even impeachment of President Clinton a couple years ago. From his “I did not have sex with that woman” to his confession of sin at the Prayer Breakfast, he could have saved a whole nation lots of grief, investigations, millions of dollars, etc. if he had just owned up to his misbehaviors and gotten on with it.

Political leaders need a healthy and appropriate models for being congruent, authentic, and ethical. And ethical doesn’t mean without faults, without human fallibilities. It means being willing to own up to being a fallible human being, acknowledge weaknesses, take appropriate actions to correct things and then to move on.

Leadership itself is the art of managing meanings and to manage meaning, as we know in NS is a function of the skill of framing. What a leader in any field mostly does is to provide a way to think, frame, interpret, and understand things. Yet if a leader does not know how to discern the current frames, then he or she cannot and will not be very effective in generating new meanings. The leader will not be able to discern what old frames need to be addressed, then deframed, reframed, or outframes.

4th We Have to Develop More Powerful Models & Tools
For Personal Mastery and Resourcefulness

What saved the fourth jet from being used as a weapon of mass destruction was the fact that at least 3 or 4 individuals on that flight rallied to stop the terrorists. Perhaps there were others on the other planes and they just didn’t have time or were just not successful. But on the fourth jet there were men and women, in the air and on the ground (their wives and loved ones) who tapped into the personal resourcefulness to take effective action at the critical moment. And that, perhaps even more than any and everything that governments can do, will enable us to win the War against Terrorism in the 21st century.

Here again, the NLP and especially the NS models provide the tools and technology for achieving this. NLP does this because it is all about getting men and women to “run their own brains.” And when we can run our own brains, we can then begin managing our own states. We can manage our negative states so that we do not do damage to ourselves or others when we experience them, and we can manage our positive states by identify the states of excellent that enable us to operate with love, compassion, passion, commitment, faith, perseverance, power, focus, etc.

Neuro-Semantics takes this even further by providing tools for creating the higher frames of mind that enable us to access states of personal mastery and genius, states wherein we live out of and for much higher intentional states. This creates a sense of power and resourcefulness. It enables us to handle the challenges with more resilience, un-insult-ability, commitment, focus, etc.

Already such technology can and does eliminate irrational fears and phobias, frees people from old traumas of the past, inoculates people against current traumatic events and enables them to resiliently bounce back into the adventure of life, live for purposes much larger than just themselves, to transcend selfishness and weak ego-strength. Already we have technology in NLP/NS that can transform old habits, break through to new skills of creativity and productivity, and rehabilitate people addicted by old toxic beliefs.

We already have technology that can transform the field of education, psychotherapy, and health. We already have technology that can transform people so that they are healthier, happier, more engaged in life, more proactive in their choices, more able to create wealth and productivity, etc. We now only need larger level models for creating a tipping point with NLP/NS so that it enters the mainstream of everyday life. This is our current challenge. And it does mean that we (the NLP/NS communities) get our acts together–stop the scarcity, the fussing, and the incongruency.

NLP and NS is not a substitute for theology, philosophy, or ethics. NLP/NS are just a model for how to encode, represent, and frame the great and awesome ideas of human dignity, the value of life, respect, love, compassion, cooperation, equality, democracy, spirituality, etc. NLP/NS is mostly about structure and process, not content. It’s a meta-discipline or domain that offers the structure of how these experiences work.

In the field of Neuro-Semantics, we are currently working on bringing NLP/NS to critical mass through the development of the Frame Games model (that makes Meta-States and NLP more user-friendly). To that end, there are several Societies of NS around the world, and dozens of Institutes of NS already established or in the process of being established. Come and join the NS revolution.

Summary

How Shall we Live in the 21st century?

We need to be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves” to quote Jesus in the gospels. We need to recognize that toxic beliefs can create great harm and “evil” in our world if misused … as it did on September 11, 2001 with the terrorist’s attack in America. We need to open our eyes to both the possibilities and the dangers of modern life … and preparing ourselves to fight such “evil.”

We need to take a tougher stance against fanaticism and terrorism and to use our stubborn intolerance to refuse to put up with morbid beliefs that threaten the well-fare of our world.

We need to develop better global, political, and national models so that we cut out all of the senseless waste of time and energy on minor differences and invite the human race to step up to new levels of cooperation, congruence, leadership, etc.

We need to get the NLP/NS models for resourcefulness into the mainstream consciousness so that we can rejuvenate the schools, governments, business community, families, etc.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is a psychologist turned entrepreneur who lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. He developed of the Meta-States model and has co-founded Neuro-Semantics with Dr. Bob Bodenhamer. Michael is an international trainer in Neuro-Semantics and prolific author.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

In the first movie, The Matrix, Thomas Anderson woke up to the Matrix that had him, took the red pill, and exited that computer-generated world. From there he began to re-enter other matrices to be trainedNeo, the “new” one and began to learn how to master the matrix. in how to master the matrix. Morpheus coached him through many programs, the jumping program, detecting Agents program, etc. In the process, he became Neo, the “new” one and began to learn how to master the matrix.

When the second movie opens, the Matrix had been reloaded—the sentient machines had upgraded their agents and sentinels to make them more powerful. From their point of view, the “matrix reloaded” meant that they had a stronger and more robust Matrix in which to live. But from the point of view of Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, Link, the hover craft captains and the entire counsel of Zion, it meant having to face a nastier and more determined dragon state. It meant facing a matrix designed to imprison them, pull down the world over their eyes, and more powerfully stop them from hacking in and freeing others.

In the sequel movie, Matrix Reloaded, the machines (or programs) and their agents view and talk of Neo as “the anomaly.” He is the one who is a deviation, an irregularity, one who doesn’t follow the conventions. He is the one who has risen above his programming and the programming of the Matrix. He is the law breaker, the one who doesn’t follow the rules, the one who doesn’t play the Matrix games as he’s suppose to. From our point of view, he is the one who was learning to mastered the Matrix and to read the structure of that experience in code.

When the upgraded Agents break into the building where Zion’s captains held a secret meeting on their strategy against the machines, the first line they utter when they encounter Neo is, “The anomaly is here.” Then together in unison they say, “He’s only human.” as if to reassure themselves that he’s no threat to them. It’s comparable to the way we discount when we say, “It’s only an animal.” Or, “It’s only a machine program.” But the anomaly kicked their butts anyway. Count that as one for the human!

Do you need your Matrix of frames of mind-emotion reloaded?

Would you like to operate from a more robust Matrix—one that gives you the kind of frames of mind that get you up in the morning with energy and vitality, that increases your effectiveness and focus?

“CONTROL” — IT’S ALL ABOUT CONTROL

In Matrix Reloaded, control continues to be a central theme. Who is in control? Who controls who? Is it man or machine? Can we take control of our lives apart from the machines? If so, how? How can we master the Matrix which is “a system of control?”

When the Zion counselor took Neo for a walk in the engineering level of Zion, he said he had no “point” to make because he’s too old to make “points,” yet he made a higher level awareness point about the subject of control. He posed a question, “What is control?” Neo said that the humans were in control because we could turn off the machines that ran the Zion, that purified the water, that provided clean air and electricity. Yet to turn them off and gain that kind of “control” would also cause the ultimate loss of control—death. Yet that kind of linear thinking about control really provides no solution.

Yet there was a solution. The rogue program called “The Oracle” had made an “intuitive” leap. She stumbled upon that solution which the Architect found so unacceptable and frustrating to his “harmony of mathematical perfection.” He said it took a lesser mind or at least one that would tolerate imperfection (read, “embrace ambiguity”) to stumble upon the solution, namely, “We need each other.” Perhaps the issue is not one of control, but cooperation—of respectful collaboration.

CHOICE — IT’S ALL ABOUT CHOICE

So the theme was not really control, as it is about choice. When Neo met the Oracle in Matrix Reloaded, she suggested he sit, so he declined. His mis-matching meta-program made that almost inevitable. But then he decided to sit. “I felt like sitting,” he said in explanation.

When she “predicted” his response, he asked, “If you already knew what I would choose, where’s the choice?” Her comment was as insightful as an enigmatic riddle, “You already made the choice, you are here to figure out why.”

Choice also explained why there are other programs like her, programs “not doing what they’re supposed to do.” Rogue programs. We find that the even the former Agent, Mr. Smith, would soon appear as a rogue program bruising for a fight with Neo. He would appear to pay back Neo for setting him free. About these rogue programs, the Oracle explained that some programs rather than choose deletion when they go wrong, they hide in the Matrix or return to the Source. Then with that, she said, “You have the sight now, Neo.” And then quickly added, “We can’t see beyond the choice we don’t understand.”

UNDERSTANDING — IT’S ALL ABOUT UNDERSTANDING THE “WHY”

With the statement, “We can’t see beyond the choice we don’t understand,” we shift to realizing that the Matrix Reloaded is about understanding. Actually, that’s how the movie opens. Neo sits in the over craft, the Nebuchadnezzar, with Trinity and says, “I wish I knew what I am supposed to do.” Ah, the meaning question, the question of significance and purpose.

Apparently, to master the matrix, we need to understand, we need to understand why. Former agent Smith, now just “Mr. Smith” explains that he saw Neo die. But then the impossible happened. He returned and destroy him. That was not possible. Yet it happened. So when Neo destroyed him, he said,

“I was compelled to stay, to disobey. It happened for a reason. Why we are here is for a reason. Purpose creates us, defines us, binds us.”

Back in Zion, when the counselors call for two of the captains to go to the rescue, one of the counselors acknowledged, “It’s hard for any man to risk his life if he doesn’t understand the reason.” That’s when one of the female captains took up to the challenge, Niboe.

So with the conversation with the Trafficker of Information who loved to curse in French greeted Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity, he asked, “Do you know why you are here?”

They replied to find the Key-Master. But he rejected that as a reason.

“That’s not a reason, that’s not a why. That’s a means to an end, an end to do what? To what end?”

He then taunted them as he threw it in their face, “You were sent, you were told to come, so you obeyed.” He taunted them with causality, with cause-effect, he said, “Choice is an illusion. Choice is an illusion created by those in power for those without power.”

If there’s only causality, then it does not matter. Then “the why” is gone. Then there is only the feeling, the feeling that makes us “completely out of control.” “Causality, we are slaves to it. To understand the why, the only real source of power, yet you come to me without power. I see no reason to give up the key-maker” and with that he dismissed them.

Later, the Key-Maker told about the special Building wherein there was “the door of light” which lead to the Source. “How do you know that?” Neo asks. “It’s my purpose. The reason I’m here. The reason we are all here.”

When they finally meet the Architect who created the Matrix, he knew that Neo had a question on his mind. He said that it was the most pertinent question, yet the one least important. Neo said, “Why am I here?” The Architect explained that the anomaly is systemic. That’s when Neo got it, “Choice —is the problem.”

So we also seek to understand. The unconscious of animals is not sufficient for us. Our self-reflexive consciousness will not allow it. We reflect on our reflections. We want to know “why.”

SYSTEMIC — IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MATRIX AS A SYSTEM

What we discover in Matrix Reloaded is that in a system of multiple interactive parts, the desire for mathematical precision is the problem, and it is impossible. Why? Because properties emerge in the system, things that cannot be controlled, that cannot be managed by rules. “The anomaly is systemic,” said the Architect. This gives rise to all kinds of rogue programs, not only Neo and Trinity, but Morpheus, the Trafficker of Information and then his wife, the Oracle, and even Mr. Smith.

This holds true for our matrices as well. We build our frames within frames within frames up from the ground level of our neurological “sense” of the world, represent it in the Movies of our mind, then build conceptual frame upon frame. So from our grounding state, we meta-state ourselves level upon level until we create a whole Matrix of frames of conceptual or semantic states. And it works systemically.

Information continually enters the system as feedback and we then feedback to ourselves at multiple “logical” or meta-levels to create our Matrix. Then we feed forward through that system information that becomes meta-emotions (meta-states), perceptions (meta-programs), language (meta-model) and the framing of our movies (“sub-modalities” or the cinematic features of our movies). This feed forward process also creates primary emotions and behaviors.

All of the most significant scenes of Matrix Reloaded of the ones that the characters enter with questions. (Well, “significant” unless you count the action scenes as significant!) That is, everywhere in this sequel, Matrix Reloaded, Neo is faced with questions—the why question about intention and purpose, the relevant and significant questions of choice and causation and destiny and identity. Questions provide the most critical variable for moving and transforming a Matrix. And in terms of our matrices, it is questions that empower us to become the Key-Master in our inner world.

If you want to enter into your own mind-body-emotion Matrix or that of another, then you will need questions for precision (the meta-model) and questions for Matrix exploration (the series of meta-questions). That’s why we put find them front and center in our Meta-Coaching and Matrix Games trainings. These are the questions that enable us to enter a Matrix, detect, and explore a Matrix. These are also the questions that empower us to re-wire, re-load, and re-organize a Matrix with new attractor frames. What question could you ask today that would begin a much desired transformation in your Matrix?

How do you trust anyone in such a system? “That’s the bad news,” said the Oracle, “there’s no way to prove it.” You just have to trust, just have to love. Love, in the end, is what creates miracles in the Matrix. It did in the first two episodes. Ready to reload your Matrix so that you have a more resourceful and robust Universe to live within? That’s what managing the levels of our mind is all about!

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is a modeler and international trainer, along with Dr. Bodenhamer, he co-founded Neuro-Semantics.

References:

Hall, L. Michael. (2003, 2nd ed). The Matric model: The 7 matrices of Neuro-Semantics. Clifton, CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

Hall, L. Michael. (2000, 2nd ed). Meta-States: Mastering your higher states of mind. Grand Jct. CO: Neuro-Semantics.

A Movie Review – of Sorts

Revolutions … going round and round.   We all know that, don’t we?  When we were children we used to play lots of spinning games.  Sometimes we played on a merri-go-round, sometimes we turned round and round until we became so dizzy that we fell down laughing, and sometimes we spined a roulette wheel and sang the refrain, “Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows.”

The Matrix is like that. The movie, The Matrix is like that; so is your Matrix of frames.  The Matrix of all of your embedded mental-and-emotional frames is goes round and round, does it not?  That’s why you can get into a spin and go round and round an idea, a memory, a fear, a worry, a musical ditty that you heard on some commercial.  It’s the way our minds work.

We do not just think, we think about our thinking, then we think about our thinking-of-our-thinking.  We do not just feel, we feel about our feelings, then we feel about our feelings-of-our-feelings.  The technical term for this is reflexivity.  We reflect back onto the very processes of thinking-and-feeling with our thinking-and-feeling.  We go round in circles.  That’s why our subjective experiences are circular—systemic.  And this is what Meta-States as a model describes, profiles, and offers a modeling tool for.

With each layering of thoughts-and-emotions we create “logical levels.”  This term is an award-winning misnomer.  They are not “logical” at all.  They are psycho-logical.  They only make sense from the insideThe Matrix. and from our meaning-making reasoning and associating.  From inside they are logical and rational.  From the outside they seem irrational, illogical, even crazy.  Yet as we classify and categorize our experiences with our thoughts and emotions and so frame things, we create an embedded matrix of frames that makes up our inner world.  In Neuro-Semantics we call this,

The trilogy movies of The Matrix also involves going round in circles.  This became clear in the second movie where Neo discovered that he was the fifth anomaly or fluke of the system.  The previous Neos had all played out their part in a mathematical system of computer programs, but this Neo was different.  Something happened to him that had not happened to the others.  A fluke occurred with the fluke.

In the movie, the Architect and the Oracle of the Matrix represent conflicting forces or powers— the rational and the intuitive; the logical and the non-logical; the mind and the emotional.  One sought to create perfect balance and harmony in the system (the Architect), the other’s job was to create unbalance.  It was itself an un-balancing influence, full of surprises, creativity, and wisdom.  Not unlike our own matrix system of belief, value, and understanding frames, which, of course, is what makes us so incomprehensible at times—even to ourselves.  No wonder the Oracle pointed Neo in two movies to the sign over her kitchen, “Know Thyself.”  That’s the pathway to mastering the Matrix.

But will the Matrix just go round and round?  Most of us hate it when we can’t get a tune our of our heads, especially some inane meaningless or stupid tune.  Most of us really dislike tossing and turning on our beds when some nagging worry keeps recruiting us to “play it again.”  Typically, as the insomnia worsens and we get more haggard and exhausted, we do the very thing that makes the circling, vicious spiraling of thoughts and emotions get worse—we try to order or command ourselves to not think of that anymore.

What can stop the Matrix revolutions?

What can empower us to step out of the out-of-control spinning and spiraling?

How can we move our spinning and spiraling from negative vicious spirals to positive virtuous spirals?

Matrix Paradoxes

This is where “paradox” comes in, both in the movie and in our lives.  We experience paradox when we do not cleanly sort out the psycho-logical levels, when we confuse levels.  This explains why “command negation” (“Don’t think of that worrisome thought of what you’re boss is going to say to you!”) doesn’t work.  The “do not” frames the primary thought—“worrisome thought about boss.”  “Negation” is not a primary experience.  It’s a meta-level category of experience. Now some negations do work.  With them we can negate things, make them go away, but not command negation.  I have a whole chapter in The Structure of Excellence about this, but that’s another story.

The classic paradox is summarized in two words, “Be spontaneous.”  When someone tells you to lighten up and just play your part or role “spontaneously” the frame by implication inside the verb “be” operates at a different level than the experience represented by the word “spontaneous.”  To comply with the suggestion or instruction violates the meaning of the word.

In experience we typically find paradoxes to be “contradictory, confusing, irrational, crazy, or counter-intuitive.”  Yet some paradoxes are curative, healing, and the solution to problems.  Of course, they are the last thing we would ever think of doing.  In Logotherapy Viktor Frankl described these healing suggestions as “paradoxical interventions.”  Way back in the 1930s for people who stuttered, Frankl recommended that they “practice stuttering.”

Bateson picked this up and NLP early learned the value of asking people who have panic disorders to show them what they can do.  “You have a panic disorder?  And it’s a real problem?  You’re sure?  Maybe you have forgotten how to panic.  No?  Then panic for me right now.”  I used this same process with the men and boys in anger control classes sponsored by the Colorado Department of Corrections.  “You have a problem with anger?  You can’t control it.  Really?  Show me.  Get as mad as hell about something right now.”

What’s counter-intuitive is that practicing panic, stuttering, or anger is the last thing in the world they would have ever thought of as helpful or leading to solution.  Most have spent their lives trying to avoid feeling those feelings.  And that’s the whole point.  Trying hard to go to sleep, to be spontaneous, to not panic, stutter, or lose one’s temper is most of the problem.  That’s why being with, accepting, and welcoming the emotion and intentionally turning it on is someone curative.  It interrupts the system.  It puts one in charge of the response.  Control comes from accepting what we dislike.  Talk about counter-intuitive!

The Matrix of Love

What does all this have to do with the movie, Matrix Revolutions?

Everything.  The fifth Neo was an anomaly of the previous anomalies because he fell in love.  We suspected this in the first movie when love reached into the matrix and saved Neo—resurrected him.  The suspicion grew deeper in Matrix Reloaded when Neo’s love brought Trinity back to life, another resurrection.

The third movie begins with a dialogue with some computer programs(!) about their child who they love.  Neo was surprised that the computer programs use the word love.  The program who is in the form of an Indian gentleman and husband explains,

“I love my daughter very much.  Every program must have a purpose or it is deleted.”

Neo: “I’m not used …

“To a program speaking of love?   It’s a word, what really matters is the connection the word implies. What would you give to hold on to that connection?”

Neo: Everything.

That’s sounds very NLPish, doesn’t it?   “Love is just a word, the reality is the connection it implies.”  He made the same comment about another term when he said that he had to do what he was doing because it was his karma.  “You believe in karma?”

“Karma is a word, a way of saying, ‘What I must do.’”

Neo says, “Everything.”  It’s the same with Trinity.  It is love in Matrix Revolutions that leads Trinity to offer her life, to offer everything to save Neo, and for Neo to offer his life.  When the group in typical Kong Fu kiss-ass action form entered the Frenchman’s home and confronted him with guns blazing, Trinity demanded he release Neo.

Frenchman: “To make a deal you have to give me something that I want.   Give me the eyes of Oracle, and I will give you your savior.”  Then he asked, “You really are ready to die for this man?”

The look in her face showed that she was.  To that the Frenchman’s wife commented, “She’s in love.”

Frenchman: “How similar is the pattern of love and pattern of insanity.”

This summarizes the counter-intuitiveness of love, that there’s an insanity to love, something irrational and unpredictable about it.  This was the surprise in how the first movie ended, there in the hovercraft after Neo had been shot and killed, Trinity is seen crying softly and whispering her love into Neo’s ear as he’s plugged into the Matrix:

“I’m not afraid anymore.  The Oracle, she told me that I would fall in love and that man, the man I loved would be the One.  You see?  You can’t be dead, Neo, you can’t be because I love you.  You hear me.   I love you!.”

Another paradox, love casts out fear and makes for a boldness and courage which to someone outside looks foolish, crazy, irrational.  That’s also how the second movie, Matrix Reloaded ended.  The story is told in the third movie, Matrix Revolutions.

Trinity: “On the roof, after you caught me, I said, ‘I’m sorry.’  I wish I had chance to say what really matters, ‘I love you.’   But then you gave me the chance, one more time to say what I really wanted to say.”

The Matrix of Meaning

When the final and ultimate big fight occurs in the third movie between Neo and Agent Smith (wouldn’t you know it, well after all, it’s an action film), the nearly all-powerful Mr. Smith just can’t understand why Neo keeps fighting, or what he’s fighting for.  “What’s the meaning of it all?” he asks.  Yet in the paradox of giving his life, he wins and saves “the whole.”

Smith: “I have already seen it.  I’m the one who beats you.  You taught me the purpose of life is to end.”

Then comes the fighting on land, on water, and in the air.  Neo will not quit.  When Smith crashes into the ground with such power that it creates a great crater, he still does not quit.

Smith: “Why Mr. Anderson, Why?   Why get up?  Why keep fighting?  Why? Why? Why?

Your survival?  For peace, for love, for truth?  Are you trying to justify your existence?  You can’t win.  Why keep fighting?”

Neo: “Because I choose to!”

We are the ones who ultimately create the meanings that we live by.  Meaning is not given, we have to find it or construct it.  And in the end we do so because we choose to.  The Oracle had hinted in this direction.  In Matrix Revolutions Neo met her yet again, now in a new form.

Oracle: “You can’t see beyond your choice.  It wasn’t time for you to know.”

Neo: “Who decided that?”

Oracle: “You know who … [then putting to the sign above the door in her kitchen, ‘Know Thyself.’]

Neo: “I did. …  How did I stop 4 sentinels just thinking it?”

Oracle: “You weren’t ready for it, you should be dead.  I guess you weren’t ready for that either. … You can’t see beyond a choice you don’t understand. … The purpose of the Architect is to balance the equation.”

Neo: “What’s your purpose?”

Oracle: “To unbalance it.”

Theological Framing

Is this series of Matrix movies “Christian?”  There are certainly a lot of Christian and Judeo-Christian themes.  From Neo (new man), Morpheus (transformation), to the one who is to come, we have scores of messianic ideas about a deliverer who will “save the world.”  We have lots of biblical names and references: the Nebuchadnezzar (with the words, Mark III, 11 which is a reference to casting out demons) , Zion, the Temple in Zion as the last refuge, a doubting-Thomas, a betrayer, Trinity, and Room 303 where Neo is restored to life by Trinity’s kiss.  We have faith, hope and love, the greatest being love.  Faith is the question of believing or not believing, accepting what we see with our eyes or believing that “there is no spoon.”  In Revolutions we have “ah, the prodigal son returns,” “my little Judas,” a ship called Logos (Word, Meaning) that they drive to Zion, the best gunner is Ghost, the words “It is Done!” “He saved us!” and “Will see him again?”  “Yes, some day.”  We have theological/ philosophical questions about destiny, fate, choice, peace, and freedom.

Actually, I think that’s all background framing for the movie.  I think the Wachowski brothers simply used such as archetype themes as a large metaphor.

What then are the trilogy of Matrix movies all about?

C           They are about waking up to the Matrix and living life consciously, they are about choice, about knowing oneself, about finding or creating meaning, about believing, hoping, and loving.

C           They are about true “control,” and having a big enough Why that makes a difference!

C           They are about the systemic nature of our mind-body systems.  All of that kind of reminds me of something.  But what?   Oh yes, of the “running your own brain,” modeling excellence, and mastering the matrix of your mind focus of NLP and Neuro-Semantics.

Author: L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is a modeler, researcher, entrepreneur and trainer.  See the website, www.neurosemantics.com for hundreds of pages of articles, patterns, reviews that are free for downloading.

References: See Frame Games (2000) and The Matrix Model (2003) for a NLP and Neuro-Semantic approach to human framing and matrix building.