THE ART OF THE DEEP DIVE

After releasing the first book on The Deep Dive, several people asked me about this frame in NLP and Neuro-Semantics. “Where did you get the idea?” “What does it mean?” “How do you do it?” The deep dive is an indepth exploration into a person’s mind—to discover what is there and how the mind works.

For that, however, we need a functional and workable model of the mind. When we have that, we can then begin to track the mind as it operates. Without an operational model, we cannot do that. But with it, we can and when we do, we can figure out how a person’s mind creates his experiences. And that creates a doorway so we can model her expertise. We can know how an experience works as we gain an insider’s view. Then we will know about what we can do to enhance and improve the quality of that person’s life.

Now in this, we are not talking about focusing on the brain, our focus here is on the mind. That’s why the neuro-sciences, for the most part, have actually very little to say about the mind. It’s only relevant to the extent that the physical hardware of the brain and its functioning influences mental capacity. And that mainly occurs when there’s neurological problems. If neurology is basically normal, and there’s no neurological damage, then functioning of the mind will have almost no need for neurological information. At that point, you don’t need information about the brain, instead you need information about how the mind works.

If a person has problems, they will be problems of how the mind is functioning—and that takes us to how a person has learned, how he uses his mind, how she has learned to think, and to what cognitive distortions, biases, and fallacies may be interfering with the person’s best mental functioning. For example, very seldom does ADD or ADHD have a neurological base; it is most often the result of failing to learn to focus by caring about the subject and being intentional.

Now apart from neurological damage, the quality of the mind’s functioning depends on the quality of one’s thinking. It depends on one’s ability for critical thinking and creative thinking. It depends on the person’s ability to think about this thinking (meta-thinking) which in turn, enables him to correct thinking errors in real time.

Previous Attempts at Going Deep There actually have been many attempts to get beyond the surface level of experience and to plummet the depths of human consciousness and experiences.

Freud used archeology as his mental picture of depth. He viewed the deep as “deep in the past,” burred in the unconscious. Then from that unconsciousness thoughts and beliefs leak out in the form of verbal slips, dreams, symptoms. His metaphor was that of an iceberg, with only a small percentage seen on the surface. Most are hidden underneath the water and out-of-sight. His solution was to do psycho-archeology. His assumption was that “the cause” was in the past.

John Watson had a different mental picture of depth in Behaviorism. He viewed it as “a black box,” one that you cannot penetrate. And because it is dark and inaccessible, he focused only on what could be seen, heard, or felt— the Stimuli that triggers responses, and the Responses that result, hence the S–R Model.

In Cognitive Psychology what is deep is “the deep structure” which Noam Chomsky said is accessed via the surface structure. To access it, you can infer the deep structure through Trnasformational Rules. Then as George Miller and others revisited the Black Box, they inferred that it was a TOTE process, and because of that, we could infer much about the internal testing and operating on one’s internal mapping.

Later the NLP’s founders took the Black Box and TOTE process even further. What is “deep” in NLP is hidden in plain sight. It is hidden in the representational systems and sub-modalities. There, what is unconscious for many people, can easily be brought into consciousness. They filled in the TOTE model with the representations systems to create the Strategy Model thereby making the TOTE more explicit. From Erickson they lkearned how to recognize and use hypnotic language patterns to access the unconscious.

In Neuro-Semantics, deep is in the thinking—conscious or unconsciously, which occurs in the “back of the mind” and in the higher, but hidden meta-levels which govern the framework of consciousness. What is deep is what is not immediately present or available. Yet it is deep inside as a person’s frame of reference. Haivng dropped out of awareness, it operates as a “way of thinking, feeling, speaking and acting” as a program for how to function.

It is hidden out-of-mind and therefore “deep” simply because it is an old program (or habit) that we learned. To some extent it worked in its original context—at least to some extent. But things have changed. We have grown up. The original habits no longer work, or only partially. Now what we need is to update the old habits/ programs.

Now you know why we do the deep dive exploration in Neuro-Semantics. We do so to find old habits (neuro-linguistic programs) and update them. We do so to identify the structures by which people create their experiences and in order to give them more choice. We do so to empower people to unleash their hidden potentials.