By Joel Bowman, on July 15th, 2011% Previously—”I Read the News Today (Oh, Boy),” 4 June 4 2011—I lamented the need for greater understanding and appreciation of the essential premises of Alfred Krozybski’s Science and Sanity, which evolved into the metamodel of NLP. Those premises are basically a cry to pay closer attention to reality, known in both Korzybski’s work and NLP as “territory,” which is distinct from “maps,” which are human beliefs. The problem is that beliefs too often argue with—disagree with—reality, and, as Byron Katie (Loving What Is) has said, “When you argue with reality, you lose. But only every time.”
If you want . . . → Read More: Arguing with Reality
By Joel Bowman, on July 4th, 2011% It has been almost a month since my last blog entry. I have been busy with radio interviews, a visit to see my grandchildren, working on the SCS and ImagineHealing websites, preparing the July Beyond Mastery Newsletter, and planning for two major presentations with my co-author, Debra Basham, at the Healing Touch Program Annual Conference in San Antonio, Texas, this next August. Within the last month or two, I read a column by a “behavioral scientist” who, among other things, said that “we are what we are doing.” At the time it struck me (recall my previous blogs on metaphors) . . . → Read More: You Are What You Are Doing
By Joel Bowman, on June 9th, 2011% About a month ago, I blogged about metaphors we die by (and for). That blog entry barely scratched the surface of the subject (metaphorically speaking). One of the subjects that has been in the news a lot lately is the growing problem of obesity. Have you ever thought about the way language contributes to the size of that problem? The most obvious example is, perhaps, the now-defunct option at McDonalds, which invited customers to say, “Supersize me.”
That is just one example. For one reason or another, one of the meanings of the word “healthy” is “big” or “generous.” . . . → Read More: Metaphorically Speaking
By Joel Bowman, on June 4th, 2011% With apologies to the Beatles and “A Day in the Life”:
One of my daily habits is reading through the major online news sources to get a sense of what is happening here in the U.S. and in the world. I often find it fascinating to see what subjects are drawing the most media attention—and the kind of attention they are attracting. Here’s a brief round-up of recent “stuff”:
Placebos are in the news (again): One of the things I find most interesting about placebos is that articles about them written by medical doctors studiously avoid the word . . . → Read More: I Read the News Today (Oh, Boy)
By Joel Bowman, on May 21st, 2011% Way back in the pre-Internet days of 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published Metaphors We Live By. This landmark study of the metaphors we use in daily conversations illustrates the ways common metaphors shape our thinking and behavior. One of the examples often cited is “argument is war.” Ideas are attacked, defended, and shot down. We may even “destroy” someone’s theory or “kill” his or her idea.
A few weeks ago, while watching political commentary on TV, it occurred to me that we not only live by metaphors, but also die by them. This is a broader, and . . . → Read More: Metaphors We Die By (and For)
By Joel Bowman, on May 9th, 2011% Most readers of the Beyond Mastery Newsletter and this blog already know what the letters stand for: Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and most have some idea of the meaning behind the term. Our use of language, our mental “programming,” and our neurology are interrelated. When one changes, the others change as well. The interrelationship is dynamic and ongoing. A standard definition for the term is, “the study of the structure of subjective experience,” which means that those who “study” NLP are studying the various ways subjective experience is structured.
This concept presupposes that our subjective—internal—experience differs from objective—external—reality. In Korzybski’s famous . . . → Read More: What Is NLP?
By Joel Bowman, on April 23rd, 2011% If you’ve been paying attention for the past 20 or 30 years, you’ve probably noticed that “Science” keeps changing its mind about a lot of things. Also, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ve probably noticed that Galileo’s “problems” with the Catholic Church have been a recurring theme. It seems to me that the conflict between “science” and “faith” is at the center of a number of what might be called “modern problems.” Problems of the sort that Galileo had with the Church have, of course, occurred in a variety of ways over the years. In general, . . . → Read More: What’s the Deal with Science?
By Joel Bowman, on April 15th, 2011% The “Bell Curve” is the common expression for what is otherwise known as Standard Normal Distribution. The concept basically states that in any category, most members of the category will be grouped in the middle, with fewer members at the extremes. Wikipedia provides a fancy definition:
In probability theory, the normal (or Gaussian) distribution, is a continuous probability distribution that is often used as a first approximation to describe real-valued random variables that tend to cluster around a single mean value. The graph of the associated probability density function is “bell”-shaped, and is known as the Gaussian function or . . . → Read More: The Bell Curve Theory of Life
By Joel Bowman, on April 5th, 2011% Richard Bandler, who has often been called “the best hypnotist in the world,” is fond of saying, “Hypnosis isn’t the exception…. It’s the rule.” The fact is that people—you, me, and everyone—tend to be in one trance or another most of the time. It is more a matter of which trance you are in rather than whether you are in trance. What we think of as “normal consciousness” is just one kind of trance with a particular set of beliefs.
The more neuroscientists examine the way the human mind works, the more they discover that unconscious processes—processes operating below . . . → Read More: The Secret of Hypnosis
By Joel Bowman, on March 26th, 2011% The term “American Exceptionalism” has been much in the news lately, primarily because President Obama has frequently been accused of not believing in it. It is a strange expression, as is referring to the United States of America as “America,” as though the “of” wasn’t part of the deal. North America, Central America, and South America are also part of “America.” In saying so, I am probably guilty of having denigrated the concept of “American Exceptionalism.”
But that’s not really the case. I agree that the United States of America is exceptional in one sense of that word. In . . . → Read More: American Exceptionalism
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Metaphors We Die By (and For)
Way back in the pre-Internet days of 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published Metaphors We Live By. This landmark study of the metaphors we use in daily conversations illustrates the ways common metaphors shape our thinking and behavior. One of the examples often cited is “argument is war.” Ideas are attacked, defended, and shot down. We may even “destroy” someone’s theory or “kill” his or her idea.
A few weeks ago, while watching political commentary on TV, it occurred to me that we not only live by metaphors, but also die by them. This is a broader, and . . . → Read More: Metaphors We Die By (and For)
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