Well-Organized Unconscious

Excerpt from a seminar by John Grinder in Moscow (2004), dedicated to questions about the conscious-unconscious interface.

Audience Question: How can we tell if our unconscious is well-organized?

Answer: This person has a good sense of language. They have a good bullshit detector. They’ve identified the phrase well. The unconscious: when is it well-organized? Until we define it, this statement means nothing. I suggest developing such linguistic patterns.

What does this symbol mean? (Draws) A frame. And what is a frame? I am the leader of a group and I begin a presentation. If I don’t set a frame, you don’t know how to participate reasonably. We are in a frame, and the frame is that we are talking about modeling. This frame creates a certain space and determines what is important and what is not. If you ask me a question about Milton Erickson’s personal life within this frame, if I’m in a good mood, I’ll answer, “It’s hard for me to see how this question relates to the frame we’re discussing.” If I’m in a bad mood, I’ll say, “That has nothing to do with the matter at hand.” The frame determines what we define as important.

[Here follows another richly illustrated example, which I’m omitting as I consider it less relevant in this frame.]

Now I can answer the question. And I’ll use what I told you when you asked how to protect yourself during modeling. If you have a good relationship with your unconscious, there’s no problem—you just ask a question. But if you’re just starting out, if you’re just beginning this crazy venture, if you’ve just made this pact for perfection between the conscious and the unconscious, then before you step into the second position, you set a frame for your unconscious.

“Unconscious, my inner brother. I want to model using unconscious assimilation. My genius is so-and-so. I know that this man or woman is perfect in one context. And who knows if they’re worth modeling in other contexts? I don’t want to find that out. I ask you: I want you to help me filter out anything that could be dangerous to my health and well-being. And I ask the first question: ‘Do you understand my request?’ And I get an answer, ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ And it only matters if this answer is unconscious. If the answer is no, I go into further explanations until I get a ‘yes.’ If the answer is ‘yes,’ I ask the next question: ‘Will you take responsibility for using this filter to protect us?’ We set the frames, and then we send the request.

Using intensive definitions (i.e., criteria-based descriptions of contexts), as I described earlier, is one way to properly ask the unconscious a question. There are many others, but this seems to be the simplest. It all depends on whether there is rapport between the conscious and the unconscious. If you have a history of conflict between the conscious and the unconscious, if you have experience ignoring the advice of the unconscious, you’d better be on guard—you need to do serious work to organize an effective team of conscious and unconscious. And this is a fairly formal task, and you use unconscious signals for it.

It seems that this procedure is available to anyone with enough discipline to follow the steps. And it’s a natural way that leads to ever-increasing rapport between the conscious and the unconscious. If you go down this path and do it well, you’ll eventually realize that the procedure I described is an artificial ritual. Once you reach enough rapport, you can get rid of it.

Any pattern that exists in NLP has two problems: first, it’s all a lie—they must be lies, they are symbolic representations of experience, not the experience itself; and the second problem is that they’re all traps. The most dangerous trap you can encounter as a person is success. And as you know, NLP works, so you’ll be successful in using the patterns. If we’re in Siberia, with a magnificent landscape, snow, a full moon—I see it, but you don’t. I’ll point to it. And you have a choice. You can look at the moon, or you can look at my finger. Your job is to follow this artificial ritual until you reach competence, and then get rid of it.

Many years ago, I had a bad experience—I fell off a cliff and broke my ankle. I had a cast, which was needed to fix the bone so it would heal well. And I had a cane to walk with. But now the bone has healed. Do you see the cast? Do you see the cane? If you’re still doing the ritual patterns you originally learned in NLP, you’re still walking with a cane and in a cast. We have a technical term for this: it’s called stupidity. But you’re much smarter than that. (Applause)