This page provides the links to the backnumber issues of the newsletter written in Japanese by Taiten Kitaoka, a Japanese NLP trainer/facilitator. Note: This "provocative" title of the newsletter is meant to suggest that Taiten Kitaoka's NLP work is the first attempt for the integrated NLP in the Japanese market. It is not meant to claim that his NLP work is genuine in a more general sense. ************************************************************************ Issue #11: 2004.2.25 (translated in May 2004) 'This is the Genuine NLP!' ************************************************************************ The author, who has been formally trained by the four most important co-developers of NLP (Grinder, Bandler, Dilts, and DeLozier) will send newsletters containing a variety of information concerning the advanced communication psychology/ pragmatic psychology known as NLP. ************************************************************************ "Free Thoughts on NLP #1" Hello everybody! I am Taiten Kitaoka, a Japanese NLP trainer/facilitator. In this issue of the newsletter, I would like to freely discuss NLP related matters: 1. About John Grinder I have been recently communicating by email with Dr John Grinder, the co-founder of NLP, and a few interesting matters came to be known. First, I wrote the following at the beginning of the fifth issue of this newsletter. "First of all, I participated in a one day workshop held by Dr John Grinder, one of the two co-founders of NLP, in London around 1995; he made the following statement at the beginning of his workshop (this is not verbatim): " 'I and Richard Bandler created a totally new system called NLP some 20 years ago, on the basis of our inductive work [NB: meaning that the co-founders of NLP had managed to discover the formulas or behavioural and thinking patterns of a number of great therapists, after studying raw data again and again by repeatedly watching them interact with their clients in recorded videos], and I am quite glad that NLP has already penetrated many social layers, such as education, therapy, business, presentation, sports, arts, law, etc., and will continue to spread deeply and widely into the whole spectrum of society. But, I have been quite disappointed that there have only been applications of NLP since I and Bandler co-founded NLP, and that, unless NLPers do a "quantum leap" of work similar to what we achieved to create NLP, NLP will certainly die out in 20 or 30 years' time.' " With regard to my above statement, I received the confirmation from Dr Grinder that it is indeed a correct representation of his lecture in London. However, I need to point out that Dr Grinder bears in mind "Modelling as the core activity of NLP" as something opposed to "NLP Application", and that his definition of "modelling" is to create "an advanced and very efficacious model of human behavior - specifically, excellence in human performance". Also, his definition is a very narrow one, which is related to the methodology used by the co-founders of NLP when they modelled such excellent therapists as Fritz Pearls, Virginia Satir and Milton H. Erickson in their "Structure of Magic" and "Patterns of Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson". That is, the two co-founders first put themselves in a deep hypnotic trance, and, in that altered state of consciousness, enabled themselves to unconsciously achieve the same level of performance as the persons they were modelling in the same time scale as the persons modelled (by the way this method is called Deep Trance Identification, or DTI). They then started to consciously drop all parameters (of the behavioural modelling) irrelevant to the effects of the achieved performance, and finally packaged the minimal number of parameters required for achieving the performance, to create an explicit set of consciously learnable procedures or tools, which enables other people to achieve the same performance level in the same time scale as the persons thus modelled. The implication of this is that Dr Grinder thinks that it is a person's unconscious mind that decides to increase the number of behavioural alternatives of that person, and that, because our conscious mind is intrinsically limited, the behavioural options which a person's conscious mind can think of is per se very restricted. From this point of view, it appears that Dr Grinder still appreciates such initial techniques of NLP as "Meta-Model" or "Six Step Reframing" based on the communication with the unconscious mind, and that he may not put too much emphasis on such techniques as "collapsing a negative and a positive anchor" in the sense that a positive state can be imagined only by the restricted conscious mind. Also, according to Dr Grinder, a technique can be recognised as part of NLP, only when it fulfills the two conditions (1) that it is "useful" and (2) that it is a process pattern and not a content pattern. From this point of view, Dr Grinder seems to question Robert Dilts' models like "Neuro-logical Levels". I myself succeeded in completely overcoming my past traumas and in thoroughly changing my own personality as well as behavioural and thinking patterns, by having been seeking the outcome which my tiny conscious mind had decided and by continuing to consciously practice a certain number of NLP Personal Editing techniques every day for several years, after having been certified as Master Practitioner by Dr Grinder and Judith DeLozier in 1989. I thus feel that the position to "leave everything to my unconscious mind" means to go back to the roots, and sounds paradoxically very fresh. (Incidentally, Dr Grinder congratulated me for my long-standing "self-application of NLP" because there are very few NLPers who can commit themselves to thoroughly applying NLP techniques to themselves.) This "hypnotic" orientation to put oneself in a deep altered state of consciousness, and to leave the task to expand one's behavioural alternatives to our unconscious "demons" (or parts), is indeed very close to my own mind set which I had when I was experimenting with nearly 2,000 hour long sessions of psychotherapy (this atmosphere reminds me of a few books written by Stanislav Grof, a transpersonal psychologist, which feature a number of pictures and drawings related to the unconscious "dark side"). I subsequently began to consciously seek only "healthy growth" (mainly because I had had too many heavy traumatic experiences, and, once I had freed myself from them through NLP, I decided not to want to look back on them again), but I still now am willing to go back to hypnotic orientation, for the sake of the expansion of my own identity. To initiate this orientation again, I ordered from a bookstore in the States as a second hand book a copy of "Advanced Techniques of Hypnosis and Therapy: Selected Papers of Milton H. Erickson", which Grinder and Bandler brought with them as their "bible" at that time to Phoenix, Arizona, when they met Erickson for the first time. This book apparently has been out of print since its first edition in 1967. Much later, "Milton Erickson's Collected Papers, 4 Volumes" edited by Ernest L. Rossi were published, but I think that this rare book is highly valuable, in the sense that it compresses Erickson's very best work. (Also, it has a historic value in that it was practically through this book that Erickson's name was introduced widely to the whole world.) Incidentally, there is a very interesting episode related to Jay Haley, who edited the book considered to be a bible by the co-founders of NLP. When they wrote a draft of their first book "Structure of Magic, I", the future publisher which received the draft from them asked for a professional opinion from Haley about the book. He advised the publisher not to publish the book because it was too naive, and ignored Gregory Bateson's 20 year long work. However, Bateson himself wrote the Introduction in the actually published book and gave his compliment that Grinder and Bandler had achieved what he and other researchers had wanted to achieve 15 years before and that they had the tools which they hadn't had. This situation must have turned Haley's face red, and Grinder and Bandler have never heard from him since. (Haley was of course a student of Bateson, because he was a member of the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto guided by Bateson.) 2. Brain Reverse Engineering and Activation of the Corpus Callosum In the tenth issue of this newsletter, I wrote: "When Grinder and Bandler were dealing with patients suffering from severe phobias, they were more than amazed to find that they were like geniuses, in the sense that they had been continually able to achieve or exhibit a consistent performance level of mental and physical behaviour, whatever the outer environment was, just like a pitcher of the baseball game who can achieve constant excellent results on the mound of whichever playground. (This way of looking at the same reality from another point of view is called "Reframing" in NLP.) They then were able to help these patients, who had been "sequencing" and "contextualising" (i.e., using the three universal human modelling processes) in an "inappropriate" way, to use those very same modelling processes in an "appropriate" way to overcome their phobias, become more creative and get what they wanted to have in their life. That is, they were able to transform a vicious circle into a "virtuous circle" by using exactly the same mental or behavioural patterns." What the above paragraph means is that all human beings are living in the same reality, and indicates a very philanthropic attitude that, as far as they build their own models of the world by being restricted by the same neurological constraints as other human beings, everybody can become either geniuses or fools. This situation can be compared to the fact that the difference between genius cooks and ordinary cooks using the same ingredients can be found in nothing but the recipes specifying in which order and how these ingredients are used. As for myself, when I was a child and an adolescent, I continued to have the self-image that I had fallen into "the ant-eater's hall of which nobody ever has succeeded in coming out". I then was from time to time encouraged to hear that there had been a very tiny number of human beings who miraculously had come out of this inescapable hell by their own power (that is, human beings who achieved enlightenment), but had no idea about what the methods involved were. In other words, when human beings are born, they are like a "tabula rasa (a blank slate upon which experience imprints knowledge)". I therefore had sort of consciously entered the ant-eater's hall when I was a child, by learning new thinking patterns (programmings) myself, whether this learning was a choice of myself or was imposed by my parents, but, once I was in the hall, I had since made the self-learning unconscious, and had not been able to remember how I had got there at all. This was the very and sole reason why I have not been able to escape from the ant-eater's hall. Since my adolescence, I have invested massive amounts of money and time to study and experiment with "human consciousness", and have come to the experiential conclusion that nearly all of the existing methodologies related to therapy, hypnosis, meditation and altered states of consciousness turned out to be insufficient as a "method for escaping from an ant-eater's hall", and have arrived at NLP, as a truly revolutionary methodology for self-transformation. When I looked back at the mechanism of how this revolutionary communication psychology alone has enabled me to finally creep out of the hell on my own and to completely get out of it, then it turned out that NLP made it possible for me to do the "reverse engineering" of the process of how my brain had learnt the new programmings when I entered the ant-eater's hall on my own for the first time, when I was a child, and therefore to "reset" myself back to the state (the tabula rasa) I was in before entering the hall, while consciously selecting and learning only the behavioural and thinking patterns for NOT letting me go into the hall again. That is, it can be said that everybody can become either a genius or a fool as they like, if they use NLP, which enables them to reverse-engineer (or, of course, engineer) their brain. From ancient ages, great spiritual teachers have indicated (without being able to show the feasible solutions) that whether one becomes happy or unhappy depends solely on oneself, and that it is ourselves that create our own situation. It is NLP that has showed to humanity for the first time the concrete and explicit methodology for that cerebral reverse engineering. It is true that NLP is a "panacea", but certain efforts are needed for one to learn it, or to acquire the new behavioural and thinking patterns involved in NLP. However, because NLP does indicate to us the way where we cannot help but succeed, the efforts paid by the people who have begun to follow the pathway of NLP are bound to be paid off. (In a sense, we cannot make any excuses any more, because, in this field, the degree of our efforts are exactly proportional to the degree of our self transformation.) I myself was a person, when I was a student, who had had entered the left brain (the digital world), and chose to go into the middle of the real world by going to live in the Sahara Desert when I graduated from the university, instead of choosing the possible future in the ivory tower by becoming a undergraduate student. Since then, I have been keeping my left brain orientation (you may easily understand how I am left brain oriented, only if you read these issues of the current newsletter), but the most important criterion for me to judge the true value of a certain thing in my study of human consciousness has been "Whether that thing can truly and practically transform my behaviour and thinking". (Incidentally, I think that this value criterion seems to be almost the same as the "utility" criterion which Grinder uses when he decides whether a technique can be included in NLP.) This value criterion is one found on the totally opposite side of intellectual or cerebral understanding, and can possibly be defined as right brain oriented, but I myself have been subscribing both to the theoretical left brain orientation to the end and to the right brain orientation seeking REAL transformations of my personality, behaviour and thinking. I, in the process of learning and practicing NLP, have been successfully making my inner states always exalted, by means of self-generating such "naturally occurring in-brain drugs" as dopamine and endorphin in massive quantities. I further feel that this process has been thickening the bridge-like organ connecting the left and right brains, i.e., the corpus callosum, in me, enabling the mutual exchange and integration of the information coming from the left brain and the right brain learning to be more and more smoothly made. (It is said that women's corpus collosums are usually thicker than men's, and therefore are much better at multi-task processing.) I recently was told by someone that I may be very theoretical and very left-brain oriented, but that I could also become extremely right-brain oriented, if I decided to want to become in that way, to the degree that nobody else could emulate me. I think that her comment is not far off the target. 3. VAK Predicate Preference I have moved my base partially to Japan from the UK a year and a half ago, but, as I pointed out in the second issue of this newsletter, I have begun to be more and more aware of the inaptitude of the Japanese nation's command of their own language and of how they express themselves. (My conviction that what modern Japanese people urgently need to acquire as skills is NLP as a communication psychology has been therefore more and more deepened.) Especially, when I hear ordinary people speaking Japanese on the TV, I cannot fail to pick up meaningless redundant expressions like "Nanka", "Yappari", "Chotto", "Toiunanade", etc, almost always used by them - in fact I have not yet encountered anyone who DOES NOT use such ambiguous words (I can understand to a certain degree that someone living in the Japanese society has the mentality to avoid any definite expressions). Also, they almost always use predicated preferences related to the kinesthetic (K) system, such as "Mitaina Kanjide" or "Toiu Ki gasimasu". ("VAK Predicate Preference" is a NLP term, meaning that, by being aware of which of the three (visual, auditory and kinesthetic) main representational systems other people frequently use in their predicate expressions, one can identify whether they are of the visual, auditory or kinesthetic type. A person of the visual type tends to prefer predicates like "I can see it very well as an image", "We have to focus on the subject", while a person of the auditory type may say "I can hear it well" or "The rhythm it has is good".) This may mean that Japanese people, when they are to think over matters or make decisions, have the extremely strong tendency to rely on their somatic sensations as to how they "feel inside", instead of using their logical mind, like in the case of Western people. Presently, I often hear that young Japanese people's Japanese has become terrible, but I think that this has been happening for all the ages. I find that a more fundamentally critical issue is, as I pointed out in the seventh issue of this newsletter, whether Japanese people can express themselves on a par with Western people in this age of global communication of the 21st century, which is a very pressing question related to even the survival of the Japanese people as a cultural identity. Incidentally, it is quite interesting to point out that Japanese announcers on the TV are well trained not to use these ambiguous redundant expressions or a too heavy kinesthetic predicate preference mentioned above. That is, it is suggested that any Japanese person has a potential to be able to speak "proper Japanese" if they are so trained. It appears that what prevents them from speaking proper Japanese is not their lack of "capabilities" to do so, but rather their restricted "value/belief system" letting them be convinced that "definite and logical expression must be avoided by all means". (For the details of the neuro-logical levels including "capabilities" and "value/belief system", devised by Robert Dilts, please refer to the seventh issue of this newsletter.) For instance, in the West, for better or worse, almost all people interviewed on the street, and especially (contrary to the politicians in this country) all politicians are trained to, or at least try to, speak their own language as if they were TV announcers. (Incidentally, in the UK, people who cannot speak English smoothly and logically cannot become a politician in the first place.) 4. The Fastest Way of Controlling the Inner States I have been telling in my workshops: "The fastest way of controlling our inner states is through using the eye scanning patterns. That is, when you are feeling 'down', you are likely to be looking down to the right (when a person's eyeballs are in this position, he or she is accessing his or her inner feelings (K)), so if you then move your eyeballs up to the right (when a person's eyeballs are in this position, he or she is accessing a constructed image (Vc)), you will be able to instantaneously get out of the state of feeling down. However, I have recently come to the recognition that there is a still faster way of achieving the same outcome. That is, this method is based on the distinctions of 4T (4 Tuple), discussed in the FAQ32 in the last issue of this newsletter, i.e., 4Ti (internally generated 4T) and 4Te (externally generated 4T). (For the details of this distinction, please refer to the last issue of the newsletter.) This extremely simple, but deeply meaningful concept can be a basic ABC technique for those who meditate, but, if it is viewed from the point of view of the "elusive obvious" that "all possible problems for human beings are impossible unless 4Ti's as information coming from the past are presupposed, while no problem can exist in the 4Te's as raw information coming to oneself living in the here and now from the external world at real time", the instantaneous method for inner state control can be born. This method is based on the mechanism that, when we have problems, we are necessarily having inner experiences of 4ti's, and enables us to make these 4Ti experiences disappear from our consciousness by consciously shifting our awareness from 4Ti's to 4Te's as what is happening in the here and now at real time, whenever we feel that we have problems. This method seems to be the fastest, because the shift between 4Ti and 4te can be made instantaneously even without spending the minimal time required for moving our eyeballs from the low right position to the high right position. How did you find this current issue of the newsletter? If you have questions and feedback, please contact me at magazine@creativity.co.uk. Go to Taiten Kitaoka's Official Web site. Go to the site in English: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter: "This is the Genuine NLP!". Go to the site in Japanese: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter:"". (c) Copyright 2004, Taiten Kitaoka. All rights reserved.