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Applications and Explorations
of Scope and Category
by Steve Andreas
This two-volume book presents a detailed “unified field theory”
of experience, thinking, and personal change that goes beyond NLP to outline
and explain the structure of any experience or change of experience. If you
have ever found yourself out of choices - either in your own life, or in your
work with others - you know how nice it would be to have choices about what
tto do next.
The fundamental distinction between scope and category offers a way to describe
and track someone’s experience - from ordinary troubles and difficulties
to positive mystic experiences of union or oneness. The same knowledge provides
surprisingly endless possibilities for changing your experience when you want
it to be different. Rich examples gleaned from a variety of different therapists
and a lifetime of experience illustrate every aspect.
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
1. Implication: saying without saying
2. Negation: not this, nor that 28
3. Judgment: the trap of good and bad 60
4. Modes of Operating: basic attitudes 84
5. Self-reference: circularity 111
6. Self-contradiction: yes and no 137
7. Logical Paradox: self-reversal 159
8. Certainty: the unholy grail 178
9. Double Binds: narrowing choice 197
10. Metaphor: overlapping bundles 233
11. Reaching Forgiveness: a client session 265
Closing Note 293
References 295
Index 299
Introduction
“The great end of life is not knowledge, but action.”
—Francis Bacon
This book presupposes that you have read Volume I of Six Blind Elephants, which
explores the fundamental properties and functioning of scope and category, processes
that exist in all our thinking. A scope is the extent of what we attend to in
all our senses, and our internal images (remembered or forecast) of sensory-based
experience. Then we select and collect a group of scopes into what is called a
basic-level category, according to some criteria, in order to organize and simplify
our experience.
We also subdivide these basic-level categories into more specific categories,
and group them into more general categories, creating “logical levels” of understanding,
one of the hallmarks of human intelligence, and the basis of all its successes
in understanding and modifying our world. Scope and category also interact in
a number of different ways. A change in scope often changes how we categorize
it, and a change in categorization always changes the scope that we attend to.
Categories of events create meaning and significance in conjunction with context,
which is one example of a larger scope. Our values are categories of what is important
to us, interacting in a dynamic heterarchy, (in contrast to a fixed hierarchy)
guiding our attention in satisfying our many different needs. The category “shelter”
protects us from the elements, while the category “food” nourishes us. If we got
these categories mixed up, we would try to eat our homes, and find shelter under
food, neither of which would work very well.
These processes are mostly unconscious, and we usually act as if the result of
these processes are “truth” or “reality,” rather than the somewhat arbitrary construction
that it is. In most of our lives it works very well to ignore these processes
and assume that the world of experience that they create for us is real.
However sometimes we are led into understandings that are frustrating and painful,
and from which we can find no escape. At those times we desperately need to understand
how our process of understanding has led us astray, or into unpleasant or painful
dead ends. Without that understanding we are stuck, and no matter how hard we
struggle, we will be captives of our own misunderstanding. In volume I we explored
how we can change the scope of what we attend to, and how we categorize it in
a variety of different ways, in order to change our experience.
This volume applies the fundamental understandings developed in volume I to a
number of interesting problems that commonly occur in human communication and
misunderstanding, beginning by examining implication, a way of saying something
without actually saying it. Implication relies on categories of which we are usually
only dimly aware, and it can be used in both positive and negative ways.
Verbal implication is based on negation, a unique and fundamental skill in both
human thinking and mathematics, yet one that has dangerous pitfalls for the unwary.
Judgment splits the world into two halves, good and bad, a skill that is useful
in life-or-death emergencies, but which can cause enormous and pervasive suffering
in everyday life. Nonverbal or contextual implication utilizes the ways that we
unconsciously categorize and respond to things and events around us.
We divide our experience into different modes of operating, basic attitudes like
“having to,” “wanting to,” and “choosing to,” that are useful in categorizing
our activities, but which can also become traps that limit us and cause unhappiness.
Talking about ourselves, our understandings, or our relationships creates self-reference,
another uniquely useful human skill that can also cause confusion and difficulty.
Self-contradiction creates a puzzling situation in which we simultaneously must
and can’t do something, an impossible situation unless it is recognized. Paradox,
which has puzzled thinkers for thousand of years, is created by a combination
of self-reference, negation, and a universal statement in which “must” and “can’t”
oscillate endlessly. Although paradox often traps people in quandaries, it can
also be used to free them, particularly when they have too much certainty about
their categories. Since our categories are always uncertain, thinking that they
are certain will keep us from even considering changing them.
A double bind, like implication and paradox, can either create a horrible and
punishing trap, or can release someone from a trap that they are already in. Metaphor
is a unique way of understanding and communicating that has been used since before
the dawn of civilization. Metaphor is one of the subtlest and most powerful ways
of communicating, but like all our capabilities and skills, it can be used either
to poison us or nourish us, enslave us or liberate us.
Finally, I present a complete verbatim transcript of a client session, “Reaching
Forgiveness,” that illustrates many of the patterns of changing scope and categorizations
that we explore in these two volumes.
With understanding of all these different processes, and the choices and options
that they offer us, we can use them wisely and carefully to enhance our lives
and the lives of those around us. Without that knowledge, we are powerless, “wandering
about in a dark labyrinth.”
Read Exerpts from Several Chapters
Contingent Implication (excerpt
from chapter 1, Implication)
Hidden Negation (excerpt
from chapter 2, Negation)
Recursion
(excerpt from chapter 5, Self-reference)
What others have said about Six Blind
Elephants . . .
V.2 0-911226-42-7
Paperback, 294 Pages
$16.50
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