NLP Training Materials by Richard Bandler: Shamanic States, Part 1

This material is quite extensive, so it has been divided into six parts.

I’d like to welcome you this morning. You must be pretty unusual people if you signed up for a seminar with a title like this. It was a test to see how to pick out the most extraordinary people from the crowd. Honestly, I get tired of being around people who always come up and ask me the same questions. For example, they say, “I want to become a business consultant”—actually, that’s not the term people use anymore; now it’s “coach.” I’m not sure how this change made life better, but the term “advisor” was replaced with “coach,” and “consultant” became “group coach,” and so on. But whatever terms you use, there are always people thinking about how they’re going to make money.

Yesterday, I talked to someone who wants to change the whole world. If you think about it, that’s a pretty big project. I try to imagine if you could even get a few people to change, and how long that would last. I focus on smaller things. I’d like to give you a hint, because I’m reading the brochure and I can’t even figure out what it’s about, so let me tell you my plan. For years, people have asked me questions, because my goal has been to learn to recognize things. I started by modeling people who were considered real wizards in psychotherapy. One thing I noticed was that even the few who were truly successful had no idea what they were actually doing; they’d come up with wonderful descriptions that made no sense. There were also people who could describe things beautifully but couldn’t actually do anything.

I met a guy who was considered one of the leading authorities on Freudian psychotherapy—I’m surprised they even called it that. This guy had such complex descriptions—he could describe any patient he’d ever seen in minute detail for at least an hour. But in his entire career—he was about 60 when I met him—he hadn’t had a single patient recover. None at all. And he told me this—it was incredible to me! In fact, all he could do was describe how people got worse over time. He thought that was a natural part of the psychotherapy process.

On the other hand, my life started in New Jersey—but I don’t remember much, since I was pretty young. Then I moved to San Francisco and grew up in Chinatown, where there were a lot of very strange people. There were healers, people who taught martial arts, and those who practiced acupuncture—I started doing acupuncture when I was about eight years old. But, see, I didn’t know that was unusual. There was no Kung Fu on TV, nobody talked about these things—it was just what everyone did. If something was wrong with you, you could go to a doctor who’d stick a big needle in you, or you could go to one of the healers, who’d make you drink something disgusting, and you’d feel better.

There was an old man—a really strange old man—who didn’t speak English at all. His daughter sat at the entrance behind a small counter. You could come in and tell her you felt sick—had the flu or a cold, or you were just ill. Sometimes you’d come in thinking you had something like measles—I think I had measles once, but I’m not sure, because I never went to doctors. I’d come in, she’d take one look at me, and there’d be a whole line of kids with the same symptoms. You’d stick your hands through a wool curtain behind which the old man sat, and he’d measure your Chinese pulse. The Chinese pulse isn’t like the Western one—they have 12 pulses—six on the surface next to each other and six deeper. Moreover, they measure not just the intensity of all these pulses, but also the type—whether it’s stringy or a sharp bend, whether there’s a tendency to drop. It takes much more sensory acuity than just using a stethoscope to check if there’s a heartbeat. But after years of doing this, the old man was such a master that he’d start saying something to his daughter, and then she’d tell you all your ailments in order.

It was really impressive. Of course, at that age, it didn’t impress me—because I didn’t know it was supposed to be impressive, and the old man did it for everyone. But when I thought about it years later—I went back and found him, because now, when I was 30, I had some problems. At that time, I didn’t have as many illnesses, but even when I was four, he was able to tell that I had a broken collarbone. What’s more, he did it without talking to me—just by feeling my pulses, and his daughter told me I’d had a bad cough when I was little; I said I didn’t know about that. She continued, “When you were four, you broke your collarbone,” which I remembered clearly because my sister pushed me down the stairs. He told me about that—and some other things—that I’d had measles at school and had mumps.

I remember this well, because the doctor kept telling me there were no other cases of mumps in the area, and kept asking me if I’d traveled anywhere, but I really hadn’t gone anywhere. I mean, I never went anywhere, but I lived in a city full of tourists; for some reason, it never occurred to the doctor that I could have caught mumps from someone visiting from another part of the world. I’d say that at the time, about 70% of San Francisco’s economy was based on tourism—but for that doctor, it was just a myth. What I really liked was that he examined me so thoroughly that he caught mumps himself. I was very proud of that, because he was the local doctor most people didn’t like.

There was another interesting guy—I was afraid of him. He was Indian, and at that time there weren’t many Indians in San Francisco. At least I was pretty sure he was Indian—he wore a turban, but spoke very, very good English—better than any of us. And he was a doctor—he studied Western medicine, went to medical school in San Francisco, but he also went around the neighborhood doing his thing. There was one thing I saw him do that even impressed me as a young person. A child had a terrible fever, shaking all over, the doctor came, gave a shot, and said now the body had to fight the illness, the child was sweating, the mother kept bringing new cold things to put on him; but then this Indian doctor came, examined the child from head to toe, then stepped back, chanted something, threw something on him, walked around, put his hand on the child’s head, and started shouting something in a language I didn’t understand. Suddenly the child sat up, stopped shaking—he was healthy. Cool, I thought. I was too young then, but looking back years later, I wish I could find that guy, though, you know, he probably went to medical school and doesn’t do that anymore. He probably thought it only worked because he believed it would.

For several years, I studied placebos (biologically neutral substances)—some of you have probably heard of them—I was amazed to learn that all medicines are tested against placebos. We did research, and I learned a lot—for example, antibiotics work in some situations, but in others, they just don’t; there are also many cases where some people were given medicine, others were given lookalike placebos, and everyone seemed to feel better. And in some cases, people were given a supposed new treatment for a disease that actually did nothing. The people who took the placebo got better. For a long time, no one could understand this—for me, it’s very important; I believe it matters much more who gives you the medicine than what’s inside it. I spent quite a while teaching doctors, when they prescribe medicine, to convince patients as strongly as possible that it will help.

Over the years, as I started doing things besides psychotherapy, I saw there was something more to it. I read hundreds of books by 15th-century explorers—like Richard Burton, who traveled and found all these great cultures before they were touched by civilization and lived by their own natural laws. I visited areas near New Orleans and found people who practiced—I don’t know what to call it—Voodoo or something like that; these people did everything from the most exotic herbal medicine to summoning spirits. And for them, it helped heal people.

Now, I’ll say one thing that will be the rule for the next two days: I’m not claiming that everything I say is actually true. Your own experience will have to sort that out. What I’m going to talk about is whether there’s something in common among all these things and whether there are patterns. Because parts of what these people do fall into different categories. Some of these people used herbs considered to be drugs. Most of that is forbidden here, and it’s not our goal anyway. We could all get arrested for that. People use these herbs because they see that some help heal, others heal the soul, others expand consciousness. When I lived in San Francisco in the sixties, there were a lot of people into expanding their consciousness. They read books by Timothy Leary; you could also mention authors like Richard Alpert, who was a wild guy, he talked about traveling to India and becoming enlightened. I almost believed Timothy Leary, met Baba Ram Dass, even thought he was like a carefree leader, his whole life said, “Go there and be enlightened.” Nothing bothered him, he just moved from place to place giving lectures. Now I see this inexplicable plus, there was something about that guy, I just didn’t quite like it. You know, enlightened people—I’ve been among Lamas—not the animals, the religious people—religious people seem kind of sluggish. Although some of them really have energy, they look at you and you suddenly feel naked—but, you know, some of those yogis I met—I can’t even say the word “yogi” with a straight face.

Virginia Satir took me to this ashram near San Francisco, where a guy lived whom she really wanted me to meet. I asked why I needed to see him, and she said, “I think it’ll be very useful for you,” and added, “you grew up in a non-religious environment.” Most of the environment I grew up in said that if you want something, peaceful means won’t get you anywhere, use a baseball bat. Plus, most religious leaders were always somewhere collecting cash. On the outskirts of San Francisco, there’s a place called Glide Memorial Church, with a Black manager who manages to get money from everyone in the city, this guy wears a $3,000 suit, has a nice wife and family and three or four other families—but he manages to get cash from people—apparently, he’s pretty smart.

I remember as a kid there was a guy on TV named Reverend Ike and I kind of liked him, his whole rap was, “If you’re feeling bad, you need a little green,” that’s why God invented money. That’s a bit different from being in India, where there are beautiful temples everywhere and you meet these yogis—I met a young man, actually, he came to an NLP seminar, he was a cool guy, and if you looked closely, you could tell there was something special about him—he glowed, smiled—I just can’t imagine the Dalai Lama grinning at anyone. But I can imagine that guy doing it, his name was just Mr. Mellow. One evening I saw him on TV with Ted Koppel, Ted and his team were acting like hotshots, and that guy just sat there calmly, and you couldn’t tell if he was on national TV or in a field of flowers.

On the other hand, I met Baba Ji—a man who hadn’t spoken for 20 years—that was his way to enlightenment. He wore a little black board around his neck, people would come up and ask, “Teacher, we want to know the secret of life,” and he’d write something like “OK” on the board—because the board was very small. Someone told me he lived on two glasses of milk a day, meditated four hours three times a day, and slept two hours. I added it up, and it turned out he spent 12/14 hours a day repeating, “I’m hungry,” “I’m so tired!” But that was his path to enlightenment.

I found a lot of people doing all sorts of things. I’ve been to Native American settlements in Canada, Mexico, and South America, and they do things I’d never want to do. These South American Indians pierce themselves with big hooks, tie ropes, and people swing them around these poles like marionettes, and the poles are 40 feet high. It looks unbearably painful, and it probably is, but these people endure it—the secret to pain control is that before they start, they hand you something and tell you to drink it! I drank a cup of that potion and was ready to be swung on those hooks myself! Unfortunately for them, I didn’t have their concentration—I spent the whole trip to Arizona wondering if I remembered everything right. I thought about going somewhere more pleasant, because what those people did terrified me. There were people dressed in animal skins, who could suddenly start spinning in front of you and shouting “AAAA-AAA”; at times like that, you realize your nerves are shot.

I’ve been in mental hospitals—there, I noticed that psychotherapy can be effective; I used a rather strange approach (which, by the way, quite a few people know about), based on my theory—if a person doesn’t perceive our reality, you just need to change reality. It’s not that hard to do. If someone thinks the CIA is after them, I’d make it so the CIA really was after them. If someone thought evil spirits were coming to them, I’d use holograms to imitate them. But there were things people told me, and I know psychotherapy would never agree with that. As a physicist, I’m not very sure about reality. Most physicists aren’t the kind of people who can answer a question with a confident voice!

The more discoveries we make—the more we send research ships into space, the more we realize that almost everything discovered before is wrong, and you can safely say that everything we know today will be wrong in 50–100 years. Our understanding of things—I mean, it used to be thought that there was no water anywhere but Earth, but now they’ve found a frozen lake under the surface of the Moon. I think there’s one on another planet too—the one we keep trying to send things to—Mars! Millions of dollars on research ships one after another—and as soon as they get close to Mars, they “bam,” disappear. It’s very strange—especially when you have the Hubble telescope and can’t find it—it’s not like it broke—everything just disappears—it’s very hard to explain to Congress the disappearance of a $354 million project. In the end, they made something like a football and threw it onto the far side of Mars. It didn’t do anything, but it showed we could reach the planet. Now we’ve managed to send Voyager to fly by all the planets and some of Jupiter’s moons, even reaching Neptune—paradoxically, we can’t get to the planet closest to us. Some people think the reason is that every time we send a ship, something on Mars, like a face, knocks it down or something—saying, “Oh, a gift from Earth—what’s this? Looks packed with electronics. Let’s take it apart and see what it is—maybe something will be useful.”

Now, a bit about the category of people who talk about aliens and such—once I brought a Native American healer—a medicine man from a tribe on the edge of Nevada, I met him in an oasis. I was riding a motorcycle and stopped in the desert, with three or four other people; we were playing musical instruments in the oasis when suddenly some Indians showed up and said he belonged to them. Then they said, “Your music is good and interesting, but would you like to see something really interesting?” We said, “Sure,” they said, “OK, eat some of this,” we said, “Cool, what is it?” they said, “Doesn’t matter, just eat it.” Then we sat down, some Indians started playing flutes, others drummed—most of us were musicians, so we started drumming too, they smiled. The next thing I remember—whatever it was, it started working, the old man appeared on a hill, came down, looked at all of us, started approaching, laid us on our backs and started doing strange things—making sounds like the wind on top of a sand dune. Amazingly, we had no idea why he was doing all this, but who’s going to figure it out in that state. The old man didn’t hurt anyone, on the contrary, one guy had psoriasis on his hands, which embarrassed him, and when we woke up the next morning, we had a terrible hangover, but his psoriasis was gone, another guy’s ulcer was gone, and another’s migraine disappeared. “Cool,” we thought, “maybe that old man did it,” now we had something to tell people.

Years later, I went back, found that Indian, and took him to a psychiatric hospital to see a guy who claimed he was cursed. He said a gypsy had cursed him, and I knew nothing about gypsy curses, I’d never dealt with that. I knew nothing about gypsies and didn’t understand this guy or his idea of gypsy curses. The psychiatrist said it was just a mental disturbance, but when I explained it to the old Indian—he went in to see the guy with two or three friends, they danced around him, did some other things, and came out about six hours later (you know, they don’t use quick methods). Then the Indian told me the curse was lifted; I went in, and the guy was absolutely normal, as normal as a normal person can be. Before that, he’d been pretty strange.