Consciousness: The Real Neuro-Linguistic Programming (ePub)

In the arena of psychology, no branch is more bizarrely named than "NLP" - neuro-linguistic programming. It doesn't trip off the tongue and the meaning is, how shall we say, opaque.

One definition of NLP is that it's "the study of excellence". Another is that it's an approach to communication and personal development. Another is that it's about "how people organize their thinking and language and how this affects behavior". NLP doesn't seem to have a clear-cut definition and is often branded a pseudoscience. It still hasn't achieved mainstream recognition in psychology.

A significant difficulty lies in the term itself. What on earth does neuro-linguistic programming mean? It seems like something extremely technical, difficult and scientific rather than a practical means of helping people to lead better and more effective lives, as its proponents claim.

Amazingly, the term "neuro-linguistic programming" is ideal for something that seems drastically different from NLP but is the exact reason why NLP works. Neuro-linguistic programming is in fact the perfect way to describe the most baffling phenomenon of all: consciousness. It should become the standard way of referring to consciousness. It involves all the key ingredients: 1) the nervous system (neuro), 2) language (linguistics), and 3) programming (how we program our neural network with language to allow us to use consciousness - a new, acquired, cultural operating system - to override programmed instincts, the old, biological operating system).

Humans aren't born conscious. They become conscious as they learn language. Human thought is not conducted "biologically", it is conducted via language, something we were not born with and hence cannot by definition be part of our biology.

Consciousness is a humanly acquired new operating system - a cultural, not biological, operating system. It has nothing at all to do with Darwinism, with selfish genes, with random genetic mutations, with the laws of atoms.

Consciousness gives us an initial level of programming, and there's then nothing to stop us improving our consciousness, expanding our consciousness, refining our consciousness, altering our consciousness, all in the name of ultimately optimizing our consciousness so that we can lead the best lives of which we are capable.

It wasn't Darwinism that brought about a phase change in human evolution. It was language! Come inside and find out all about it.