WHERE DID THE IDEA OF “MAGIC” COME FROM IN NLP?

A week ago, Bob Bodenhamer sent me a link to listen to a podcast of three “experts” in stuttering talk about NLP. Now Bob warned me that I would hear “a lot of ignorance,” but I had no idea that three people with advanced degrees could wallow in as much ignorance and create as much mis-information about NLP as those three did. Afterwards I went to their website and wrote a response giving them some feedback on the depth of their mis-understandings and while I was at it, I chastised them a bit for talking of things of which they knew nothing! Their exploration of NLP actually contributed to a significant increase of misunderstanding and confusion!

Now to their credit, they repeated over and over, “I have not studied NLP,” and “I don’t know if this is correct.” So where did they get their sources on NLP? From the internet! From websites where people “sell” NLP. So no wonder they were so ignorant!

Now one of them did know about the first book of NLP, The Structure of Magic. And they mentioned that one of the author’s name was Grinder, but they didn’t have a clue as to what that book was about. They did not indicate that they even knew it was a book on linguistics and based on Transformational Grammar. All they could focus on, and for an hour they focused on it again and again and again, was the word “magic.” And from that term they then went on a rampage against “magic” cues for stuttering using NLP, quick “magic” formulas, “magical thinking,” fast “magic” solutions without depth, etc. Hearing their rants, I told Bob later that I was about ready to swear off ever using that term again!

When I awoke from the negative hypnotic trance the stuttering experts had induced I realized that here were three people, supposedly “experts” in an area, who were willing to do an hour program on why NLP was dangerous or ineffective in helping stutterers who had not even taken the time to learn about NLP! So much for their credibility! So in part, I wrote the following to them: “It is interesting that instead of looking at the success rate that Dr. Bob Bodenhamer has had with people who stutter, moving them to the place where they are fluent, you focus on such irrelevancies as the word “magic,” other “new” terminology, and out-of-context references. If you really want to understand the Neuro-Semantic approach, I’d recommend you approach Dr. Bodenhamer with the attitude of a learner to find out how he has done what he has done.”

“Ten years ago Bob and I modeled ‘stuttering’ as a neuro-linguistic process. We worked with numerous people and took writings from General Semantics. Out of that process, Bob wrote the book, Mastering Stuttering and Blocking Using NLP and Neuro-Semantics (Crown House Publications). Out of that process also both we and many, many trainers and coaches around the world have helped hundreds and hundreds of stutterers become fluid.”

As a Post Note: the book is now being reprinted by Crown House Publications in paperback under a new title: Mastering Blocking and Stuttering: A Cognitive Approach to Achieving Fluency.

So what is the story about the word “magic?” Where did it come from? Why did Bandler and Grinder use that term in the first NLP book? Most people do not know. So let me let you in on the secret.

In the book, The Sourcebook of Magic, Volume I, I wrote about the the metaphor that’s involved in the term “magic.”

“Why the word ]’“magic?’ What’s that all about? In NLP, we typically use the term magic in a special way. It does not designate external magic or any kind of actual magic that changes the laws of physics. “Magic” here means none of that. The term rather refers to the seemingly wild and wonderful and magical effects (the changes and transformations) that occur when we know the structure of subjective experience.” (p. 13)

“As an uninitiate to the secrets—such wild and wonderful ideas and experiences can only seem like “magic.” And yet knowing what we know today about gravity, aero-dynamics, the electromagnetic spectrum, artificial intelligence, information processing via parallel processing units, etc. we no longer think of such as magic. The magic has been transformed into knowledge and science.” (p. 20)

Then in the book, Meta-States, Mastering Your Mind’s Highest Levels, (2007, p. 288) I wrote about the original source of the term “magic. It came from a wonderfully provocative piece by Gregory Bateson (1972), The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia, where he described "the world of communication" and how it radically differs from “the world of physics and forces.”

“The ‘world of physics,’ he said, innately involves the cause-effect processes of Newtonian dynamics. In this world, actions and things are energized by the transference of energy from other actions and things. Here billiard balls move entirely and exclusively according to the physics of impact and gravity. You hit the ball with your cue stick and the ball moves according to the energy transfer of that force.

“An entirely different set of "dynamics" occurs in the world of communication. When we kick a dog, the movement of the dog in response to your kick is only partially explained by a "Newtonian trajectory." To predict the trajectory of the dog, the intensity of his response, etc. not only involves the amount of force applied by the kick, but also by the dog's own metabolism, internal energy system, learning history, relationship to the kicker (!), and so on. In a word, it depends on the dog’s inner psycho-logics (the meaning of the person kicking to the dog).

“Bateson commented that while we may use the word "dynamics" when referring to psychological processes, we must remember that we use it in a different sense from the way physicists use the word in the domain of physics. In distinguishing these two realms,

“Bateson wrote, "This, I think, is what people mean by magic. The realm of phenomena in which we are interested [psychological, mental, communicational, etc.] is always characterized by the fact that 'ideas' may influence events." (p. 229, italics added)

In so introducing the word "magic" into realm of communication, Bateson may have unknowingly provided some of the inspiration for Bandler and Grinder's book, "The Structure of Magic" (1975).6 If we inquire as to what precisely Bateson meant by using the term "magic," and keep it within the Batesonian context, we come to this statement: "It might well be sufficiently confusing to be told, that according to the conventions of communication in use at the moment, anything can stand for anything else. But this realm of magic is not that simple." (p. 230, italic added) "All communication has this characteristic—it can be magically modified by accompanying communication." (230, italics added)

In this Batesonian context then, the term “magic” refers to the realm of communication, and specifically to the cognitive-neurological understanding about how ideas may influence events. In the realm of symbolization, Bateson contented that words and language is sometimes so plastic that "anything can stand for anything else." Yet, as he noted, it is not that extreme. It just feels that way sometimes. Yet this does describe the fluid and complex arena inside the human nervous system that transcends the laws of physics. And now you know the source of the term “magic.” May the critics be silenced by information!