I THINK, THEREFORE I WRITE

I do a lot of things as I live my life, yet at the core of everything, I write. And I’ve been writing for a long time. It began when I was 14. That’s when I wrote my first paper that had nothing to do with school. I wrote out of the sheer pleasure of writing and out of discovering what I thought. From hearing, learning, reading, studying, and talking, I began an adventure known as thinking.

Yes, I had superficially “thought” before I was 14, but mostly I was thinking the thoughts that were given to me to think. They came from the textbooks the schools provided, from listened to the teachers explain facts, ideas, principles, and understandings. Yet all of that borrowed thinking and learning. At first, the learning was not something I “thought up.” Someone else, or many others, had originally thought it, and then wrote it down. Eventually it had become the school curriculum. And that is how we all learned when we’re children. By learning we inherit the wisdom of our culture, our elders, our traditions. It grounds us in the various subjects. And ideally, along the way, we learn how to learn. We learn how to think.

My first thinking, as I remember it, began when I was 14. After I had learned enough about a particular subject, I was then able to reflect on it and actually do my own thinking about it. I did not know it at the time that I was engaging in the essence of thinking—“working an idea over in your mind” (John Dewey). As I considered the subject, I began asking questions about it. Then I did a most radical thing, I started doubting that things were exactly as I had been told they were. So as I dived into the subject even more, I was able to detail facets and make distinctions that I had never made before (the five essential or core thinking skills).

Now while I no longer remember the specifics of what I was learning, I do remember the experience itself. As I used my mind in that way, the effort of mentally turning an idea over and around, and upside-down and considering it from multiple perspectives, I felt like a little scientist exploring and experimenting in a lab. It felt great! It was as exciting and as much fun as physical sports or exploring in the woods or building a tree-house. And I wanted more.

From that first experience of engaging in some actual and true thinking, I began to write. At first I wrote everything out in “long hand.” But that was also the year I took “typing” in school and shortly thereafter I learned to write on a typewriter. But there was a difference. Unlike the typewriters at school, this was a mathematical typewriter with extra mathematical symbols (my dad was a mathematician). In that way, I began to learn how to think and write simultaneously.

Now if you have learned how to think and write at the same time, then you know this experience. You are writing about something and as you write, you discover what you thinking. It’s an amazing experience. I have often sat back and looked at a page in the typewriter, or today, on the

screen, and thought, “Wow! I didn’t know that I knew that!” Then sometimes, just sometimes, I’ll be writing and what comes out will be a string of words describing something that creatively came together as I was writing so that when I end the sentence and look at it— it is an entirely new learning. I didn’t just write what I knew, but didn’t know that I knew, I wrote something entirely new. As an act of synergy, somehow things come together in a way unexpected and that represents an actual discovery. If you’re a writer, you know what I mean. If you’re not, it is one of the real joys of writing.

Over the years I have always used writing as a method for learning. In college, I would take notes, type the handwritten notes, and use them for reviewing. I continued the same whenever I read a book—I would jot down notes and then use the book to type out notes. When I took my NLP training, I took notes on a small lap-top, and then would go back to write out the notes in full. That accidently is how I wrote my first NLP book, The Spirit of NLP (1996). Yet in 1989 I wrote that manuscript for myself! I did not write it to be a book, I was just consolidating the notes that I had written. It turned how others wanted to read it as well.

The same occurred for years as I published a monthly journal. It’s name changed over the 18- years. It began as Wineskins, then became Metamorphosis, and finally Meta-States Journal. After the Neuro-Semantics movement took off, I began a weekly newsletter or blog, Neurons, not to represent any official “word” for Neuro-Semantics, but simply as “here’s what I’m now thinking.” Often, I write articles to “test” ideas. I will put an idea out and see what kind of response I get.

Every once in a while someone will disagree and ask to write a counter to it. That happened with John Grinder and then later with Steve Andreas. I welcomed that. So I would publish their counter arguments and then write a reply to it. You can still find those “debates” on the website (www.neurosemantics.com).

That brings me to the writing I did when the Israel–Hamas War began. As a psychologist, I decided to write about a psychological solution. I studied the facts and perspectives from all sides and then presented my thinking. It was just my thinking. It was not an official statement of Neuro-Semantics. It was not a creedal declaration or a manifesto that others were required to accept. It was just my thinking at that time given the facts as I could detect them.

I state this because of the misunderstandings. Some thought I was declaring “God’s truth from heaven.” I have no idea where they thought that I, or anyone else, could actually do that! Some thought I was speaking for everyone in Neuro-Semantics. But given that we encourage everyone to think and decide for themselves, there is no “official” Neuro-Semantic press releases like that. Others thought that if I took such-and-such position, then they could no longer be associated with us. Some wrote to me stunned, “How dare I think such things!”

The truth is, we are all fallible human beings and thinking— real thinking and learning— is our only tool for relating to the world, to each other, and even to ourselves. So let there be thinking —lots of thinking, and diverse thinking. In the end, it is just thinking—a map and not the territory.