In the last month or so I’ve been pretty successful in acquiring some of the seminal NLP texts that are no longer in print. Titles such as Frogs Into Princes, Using Your Brain, Structure of Magic and Trance-Formations are easy enough to get… however for the most part you have to pay big bucks for them because demand outstrips supply and the fair price for many of these books is now £30-40. Indeed on Amazon you can get a brand spanking never been opened copy of Trance-Formations for a little over £300. The challenge then is not to find these books but to pay what I consider to be a reasonable price to uncover the jewels within.
I’ve also gotten hold of a few Richard Bandler recordings - State Of The Art is an excellent collection of his old McKenna \ Breen NLP Practitioner trainings, which I’ve copied over to MP3 so I can listen to them whilst gardening or taking the bairn for a walk. Most of the videos are of Bandler sitting on a stool doing his special brand of stand-up therapy, so they make for excellent listening whilst his multi-layered metaphors and embedded commands (hopefully) sink deep in to my unconscious.
It occurred to me as I cruised ebay, lost out on a few bids to people prepared to pay hundreds of pounds for some of these items, that perhaps NLP was becoming some sort of religion, and that perhaps one day, when the founding fathers have left their mortal bodies to become part of the great Unconscious, that NLP itself may resemble a religious faith more than a group of useful therapeutic and coaching technologies.
After all, most NLPers are evangelical about the topic in a way that you only experience elsewhere in those people trying to save us all in the market square on a saturday afternoon. Already the original scriptures of NLP are scarce and sought after by its followers, the truth behind much of the fall-out between Bandler and Grinder is now popular myth, and the whole premise is founded on the belief that there is something within us all that resembles the unconscious mind.
And perhaps that is the origin of religion - the point where fact becomes belief, I don’t know, theology is but one area I know little about. And of course all of this could a pointless wondering on a friday morning that does little more than give you a scary insight in to the stuff that I think about when most are asleep.
