yawn, OK, excuse my earlier post, I was exercising a complaint about lack of sleep. I’ll hold off today.
To put what I intended to say a little more calmly, a state of terror exists in people living day-to-day, sufficient to provide a consistency to their actions, leverage points from which to hang the thread of their lives, as it were. My strong belief is that as the loop between our humanness and our use of communication technologies tightens, we will extend our ability to maintain states through direct action upon our physiological means of maintaining our state, as I’ve written before, gaze patterns, brainwave states, affected without much training or effort, through our use of glowing screens and text, sounds, and more. Supporting our miserable lives is ongoing drug addiction of various sorts. Even overeating activates brain states comparable to those of drug addicts, wow. The terror of losing a job, community standing, or loved one’s approval, creates a psychological commitment to maintaining one’s opinions along certain lines. A secondary gain or two becomes obvious, and we are trapped in the success of our own making, devoting more than 80%, maybe more than 90%, of our waking hours to passive state training using media.
Putting aside whether intentional commitment of this sort is desirable, I believe that our technology supports the paradoxical exercise of freeing ourselves, ultimately, to be imprisoned. That is, if awareness and expression of the awareness are two different things, the medium traps the person against their awareness, as they express that awareness. What is awful to me is how sincere such complaints, based in awareness, can become, there are secondary gains so important that they _must_ be entangled for us first-worlders, first.
When I read about a person who keeps their state for a number of days, I become convinced, immediately if the person is a first-worlder, that a number of analogies apply. OK:
* the spiritualist describing their philosophy of self-reliant state management with one hand holding a coffee cup or soda can or even beer bottle.
* the television watcher guffawing at the superficiality of a fictional character’s efforts to express themselves
* the baby holding a piece of candy, still in the wrapper.
* the sweating, grumpy technician slumped over a computer screen.
A lot of the decisions people make include acceptance of states of discomfort or hopelessness, without any expectation of change. Our society, specifically, western culture, protects that ability to have (un)shared feelings about such states as if they are personal problems, personal issues. Some part of NLP shares that troubling effort to separate perception from our experience of it. While it is clear to me that people feed other people’s thoughts and feelings, you can spot someone who leads or follows by their acting within the protocols that keep concerns about the direction of a group’s movement, private to the person. That is western culture, too. It is almost shameful to have a voice or movement that is out of rapport, cultural rapport. A westerner can walk into a room, and decide from contextual cues and background information, numerous topics, perceptions, and choices that are disallowed from the get-go. One the one hand, this allows tremendous productivity of group action toward a goal, on the other hand, it squeezes life actions to a miserable few, unless the payoff from group participation is both: personally rewarding, and sustainable at a group level.
So if you walk into a room of computer users, what do you see? I see the endgame. How are these people amassing personal reward, and of what kind? How is their behavior sustainable at a group level, and what are the implications of sustaining that participation? They can go no further, soon their teamwork will be expressible without having occured.
You will find, from a quantitative perspective, just a count of hours of use, and a listing of contexts of use (learning, communicating, working) that information technology and its manipulation of state puts anything that NLP can offer at an individual level, to shame. What does this mean?
Well, for one thing, despite the personal potential of use of NLP, in the calculation of time spent using one form of state manipulation (inside channels of communicating, watching, and listening) versus another, media use, most likely, outstrips NLP, and will, forever, for NLPers. If these trends continue, at any rate. For another thing, NLP is contaminated with media use. My strong intuition is that screen and audio media train physiological states, with great effectiveness, mostly out of awareness, but with profound implications for human ability to make critical distinctions, particularly between:
* emotion and codes of emotional experience (whether the emotion is there or not, the codes can be produced)
* personal goals and secondary gains
(whether or not the goal is desirable, the practice of its production becomes increasingly desirable, and indistinct from producing any other goal)
* enabling activities and required activities
(we lost perspective some time ago)
The result is that NLPers become liars, their subjective reports become tainted, and their personal experience might as well have come from the buzz of a latte or a movie that they enjoyed. Reading their reports, you’d think they’re about to blast off into space, but, you could check in with the average kid or even american adult, and they’re totally blitzed too. For days,weeks, months, years at a time, and I don’t mean from drinking spirits, though that’s one thing I don’t share with them.
I do bring this up, I’ve kept it in mind for about 20 years of browsing NLP in its variety, but the more I apply these filters to myself, the more I recognize a trend toward effective state management. It’s corrupt, it’s choice-less, and it provides a strong acculturated facade of choice when I turn to self-help values or activities. Now, if the people around me were more positively interested in me than their computers or television set, the lack of choice would still allow a certain pleasure in life. However, without the drugs, the self-help, or the facade, life is dreary and empty, unless change happens in the world around me, or my own stoic interest in other’s feelings about me, changes somehow.
So meanwhile let me warn any travelers sitting at their keyboards to watch out for the potholes of information and their tether to your states as you use your media. Any reports of NLPer state change through personal , drug-free, non-media manipulation, might be just a little exaggerated. As for you NLPers, I don’t owe you any apologies, you’re just as full of it as I have ever been.
)
