In his new book, Spiritual Partnership, Gary Zukav discusses the ways that conscious intent influences the long-term results of an action. The example he provides is a parent’s sending his or her child to college and the way different whys lead to different outcomes. Zukav ties the concept of the why beneath the why to the metaphor of the influence the flap of a butterfly’s wings can have on global weather systems:
- The sensitive dependence on initial conditions has come to be called the butterfly effect because the large magnitude of the change in predicted weather in relation to the minute variances in initial conditions is poetically analogous to a butterfly changing the weather on the other side of the world by moving its wings. (p. 37).
The intention behind a parent’s desire to send his or her child to college is the “minute variance” that results in a “large magnitude” of change for the child. Parents who send their children to college for essentially selfish reasons (family expectations, contribute more to financial well-being, support in old age) produce different consequences from those who send their children to college for the children’s sake (pursue personal interests, have more—and better—career choices). The what in both cases is the same: the desire to send the child to college. The why of intention, however, produces different consequences.
When I first read this in Zukav’s book, I was reminded of the what of the what questions in Core Transformations, by Connierae Andreas and Tamara Andreas. If you have a behavior that you find dysfunctional, the first step in changing the behavior is to find the positive intent of the behavior. The “what” of the behavior leads to a “what” of a reason. You then ask about the “what of the what” until you arrive at a core state. Andreas and Andreas list five:
- Being
- Inner Peace
- Love
- OKness
- Oneness
Debra and I have thought that these five are actually different names (metaphors) for the same feelings. This is, I think, a useful “archeology” of undesirable behaviors. The transformation comes with the recognition that the core state is always available. If you have been smoking as a round-about way of feeling OK, the recognition that you can feel OK without having to smoke makes quitting a lot easier. The “what of the what,” however, is not the same as Zukav’s archeology of the “why of the why.”
Why questions are often given a “bad rap” in NLP because of the way they often lead to a PEZ Dispenser of reasons. If your child writes on your freshly painted white walls with crayon, asking, “Why did you do that?” will produce reason after reason as the child attempts to find something that will get her or him out of trouble. Asking, “Why are you sending your child to college?” Will produce the same result. If the first reason doesn’t satisfy the listener, a second will pop up, and then a third and a fourth. And so on…. Even though it is possible that each of the reasons may be at least partially true, none of them may reveal the “real truth” of the parent’s intention, which is probably below his or her level of conscious awareness. If it is not known in consciousness, it won’t be revealed in an answer to a why question.
In NLP, the focus is usually on the what, how, when, and where of behavior. In some ways, this is similar to the black box concept of behaviorism, in which the brain is a “black box” in between “input” and “output.” We can measure or observe input, and we measure or observe output, but we can’t know what’s going on inside the box. Even with current scanning technologies, such as fMRI, what we see is more input and output rather than “reasons.” We can observe what’s “wired” to what, but that doesn’t really provide a reason for a behavior. It is also very short term. You show a guy a picture of a naked woman and watch the sensory input enter “processing mode,” and then you observe the physiological responses. That doesn’t, however, tell you anything about what kind of parent the person will be or whether his children will go to college, on to graduate school, and earn Ph.D.s in behaviorism.
The archeology of the “why of the why” is fundamentally a spiritual rather than a behavioral question, and the consequences are longer-term. In terms of the “what,” the behavior of “sending your child to college” should have the same result: a college-educated child. According to Zukav and many others who think in terms of what shamans often call nonordinary time and French philosopher Gabriel Marcel called The Ontological Mystery, the butterfly effect belongs in the realm of the Ontological Mystery rather than in the Problematical World, the world that consists of problems and their solutions. Even though we may not always know the “why” of a particular behavior, the underlying conscious intent is ultimately more important than the “what” of behavior. In linguistic terms, the “what” of behavior is surface structure, while the “why” of intent is the deep structure.
So … where does NLP belong? It seems to me that NLP has its “feet” in the Problematical World and its “head” in the Ontological Mystery. The more “what” problems we can solve in our daily lives, the more we will be able to understand and answer the “why of the why” questions.
