Richard plays the drums, jazz guitar and piano and has a satisfactory jazz voice. John was relatively new in the music scene. His appreciation of music was very high, though his skill level on instruments had not been fully realized at this time. With his brilliant modelling skills he was able to learn to play the bass guitar from Richard very quickly.
They were rehearsing some songs that they would be playing at a workshop in Lake Tahoe. Several years previously, Richard had played drums in a band at a nightclub in the Lake Tahoe area. During a session break he just picked up and left, never to return to the dregs of a musician in a nightclub in Lake Tahoe. The music that he and John were rehearsing was to symbolize Richard's return to the beginning of the road that led him to his current path.
I temporarily interrupted their practice session. John taught me how to use hypnosis to solve my problem about seeing and at the same time and in the same trance, I learned how to construct a therapeutic metaphor.
During the period of time that I was practicing my hypnosis techniques in trance, John and Richard continued to play their raucous music, jamming away oblivious to what I was doing. I guess they weren't going to let me spoil their fun. It was these kinds of experiences that made the novice appreciate the subtlety and skill level that they achieved when they were able to carry on multiple tasks at one time.
Chapter Eighteen. Leslie and Virginia
The groups in the Santa Cruz mountains at the retreat lodge had primarily to do with hypnosis and the investigation of deep trance phenomena, positive and negative hallucination, time distortion and deep trance identification. Richard and John operate on the premise that modelling skilled people in your field of interest was a way to learn but becoming them was even better. Several experiments were then developed to do deep trance identification with people like Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls and Milton Erickson. To begin to associate in the first person with these people and to be able to identify and utilize the communication patterns that made them so powerful.
Leslie began to blossom. In one of the group sessions Richard taught her to do deep trance identification with Virginia Satir. I heard that for awhile Leslie was Virginia. She even developed amnesia for the group members and the results were that Leslie became a better Virginia than Virginia.
Her acquired skill appeared to increase dramatically after that evening. I can safely say that I was instrumental in some of her changes. At one group session on the meta model she was the "people helper" and I was her client. Atone point in our session she took me and thru me up against the wall. She said that it was the first time that she realized her personal power.
The Santa Cruz mountain group and the groups that were held at Richard's house were the development of NLP. During this time period which was in 1974 the next experiments were taking place concerning what was later called anchoring, which is the pairing of a stimuli with a highly predictable set of responses.
Ivan Pavlov gained fame with his experiment involving the study of the buzzer associated with a dog's salivating response. Anchoring is a technique which was originally brought about thru the discovery of classical conditioning. What is unique about this in NLP terms is that John and Richard developed techniques on how to utilize this information in a unique application, that was talked about in some psychology circles as cognitive behavioural therapy; which in the context of anchoring is an accurate description.
Anchoring is used to create or access resources and problematic states in clients. Another way to use the idea of anchors is to identify existing anchors and change their experiential significance and to be able to use them in a more meaningful context.
Chapter Nineteen. 5-Tuples
The fundamental basis of NLP originated as a five-tuple A-K-O-V-Ad. Very shortly after it was changed to the current representation of a four-tuple (4-tuple). Simply meaning multiple representations. We first practiced with anchoring of polarities (opposites) and in using visual, auditory and kinesthetic anchors. We experimented with tests for integrating the anchoring techniques which was called "Jamming Anchors".
As early as 1974, individuals in these groups were not only anchoring entire 4-tuples, but they were anchoring portions of 4-tuples and submodalities and applying it to pain control and creating amnesia and pattern interruption.
Richard and John developed pattern interruption into a systematic technique for interrupting automatic behaviours for the purpose of creating leverage to enable a person to direct a client into an altered state of consciousness. We were also using various components of anchoring and 4-tuples for hypnotic phenomena such as age regression, amnesia and deep trance identification.
The primary patterns which developed out of the association with Dr Milton H. Erickson was the model of communication called the "Milty Model". The Milty Model is the inverse of the Meta Model. In contrast, the Milty Model provides the user with the ability to speak directly to the unconscious mind and in the hands of a skilled user, doing so without the conscious minds awareness.
The Milty Model consists of embedded questions, embedded commands, conversational postulates, direct quotes and presuppositions, collectively termed "junko logic". In association with nonverbal pacing and leading and selective use of sensory predicates, it provides a very powerful vehicle for trance induction and utilization of an altered state of consciousness. Richard and John turned the "magic" of hypnosis into learnable procedures.
In association with Milton's work, Richard and John also came across Castaneda's books, The Teachings of don Juan, The Yaqui Way of Life, A Separate Reality and Tales of Power. From there it was an integration of don Juan's use of metaphor and hypnosis and Milton Erickson's language patterns and metaphor to induce an altered state of consciousness to create deep trance phenomena.
One of the most dynamic techniques which evolved out of the hypnosis programs was the use of the double induction. The double induction is a trance induction carried out by two people. One person speaks into one ear using complex words and language patterns to occupy one brain hemisphere and the other person speaks into the other ear using childlike grammar and language to occupy the other brain hemisphere. The feeling sensations are experienced in the same half of the body as the auditory input.
This technique was used in conversations that Carlos Castaneda had with don Juan and don Genaro. This technique was used frequently during the summing up of Richard and John's training programs as a forum for review, post hypnotic suggestions for future applications and learnings.