NLP Timelines- Mapping your journey

NLP Timelines- Mapping your journey

Before we start a journey, we need to know where we are going! What is our direction? Where are we starting from? At some point in the past our ancestors named the directions; North, South, East and West. Directionality eventually became unified and standardised. So as a thought experiment, there was a time before the directions were named and someone made a magical decision to invoke directionality, and later into two dimensions as a drawing, to have power over it; in other words a map was created.

The NLP timelines are process developed by Tad James in the 1980s, they used the concept that we store memories in a linear fashion. However, things get really interesting when we use techniques such as dowsing or shamanic journeying, on these timelines which is not part of NLP.

If making a map is a magical act where you are going is also magical, NLP timelines create an imaginary map in time. To discover the directionality of your time think of something that you did yesterday, where is it situated as a memory? Is it behind you to the left? Or is it directly behind you? Now think of something that you plan to do tonight and then something for tomorrow, then connect those thoughts. Where they are situated to the thoughts of the past? This becomes the timeline that you can walk.

While you walk your timeline , experience the feelings of success with every achieved landmark this really adds something to the experience and the potency of what you’re doing. Now I have classified this as an NLP technique, but it is a magical evocation of time, space and events.

When you are walking your timeline, visualise and put the emotional data into the experience. Do not think about how long it’s going to take, just focus on each step of the way, with no thought to why or how it can work. Again putting yourself into a state of in-between-ness, or non-attachment to a result is very effective. I have no scientific reason for this only my own experience and the experience of others. As well as including the things that will ‘happen’ on your journey, I  also like to charge these things up by doubling the feelings in my imagination. I find this works very well; the process for this is very simple. Think of something you can easily imagine like being happy, think of an event that made you happy, and focus on the feeling. Has it a physical sensation? Where is that sensation? Could you estimate the ‘amount’ say on a scale of 1 to 10, and then in your mind double the feeling. You could even just say to yourself I feel twice as happy, it really is that simple. (You may go beyond ten in your happiness scale, all well and good!).

Recap

So the process is to ‘walk’ the memories and place them on the timeline. Think of things in the past to give you an idea of where that lies, and then think of some things that you are going to be doing in the future this gives you the trajectory of the line.

Memory Mansions

The Greeks used something similar to a timeline as a memory system for remembering complex details in order. The idea was to imagine something like a mansion or a large building that you can walk around in your memory. Take a mental journey around the building; placing triggers to memory on objects and walls will help you to organise and remember your thoughts. So, think of a place that you know and as you enter the front door imagine a notice pinned by the door handle, this could be the category that you want to file the memories under. Now walk through the door into the hallway and the first object that you see will contain the next memory that is required in that category.

You could use this memory system on your timeline to deepen your experience, placing events that are also symbolic as well as just visual. So as an example, you are going to be taking a guitar exam in the future leading up to you achieving your degree. So as well as imagining taking the exam and visualising the examiner writing excellent remarks on his report, you could imagine the number of the grade, let us say grade 8, as an infinity sign floating in the air, and printed certificates floating down like tickertape with cheering, marching bands playing outside.

Now if the Greeks had that memory system in place it is reasonable to assume that they learned it from somebody else. Like any  number of things that have been accredited to the Greeks, for example their mathematics, much of it came from Egypt and older civilisations such as Babylon or even earlier cultures such as the Sumerians.

Much of our understanding of ancient culture has been slanted towards the Greeks and the Romans as the West is a classical influenced culture. Much of this is based on Victorian and Edwardian ideas that the Greeks and the Romans were the originators of many innovations; of which they were not. It is becoming abundantly clear now that cultures such as the Sumerians and Babylonians set up the number systems that the Greeks used, and I would guess what we understand as psychology, that is usually ascribed to Classical Greece (even the word is Greek) probably was understood by their earlier Mesopotamian counterparts. Let’s face it they organised massive cities, and of course we must mention the Chinese, as they were at least the equal of anything from Mesopotamia and they would fill another book on the subject.

Cost analysis

Writing something down was very complicated particularly if it had to be embossed into clay, or one had to create papyrus or velum. Even then only a few people could write or read, therefore storing masses of data in your head was a good idea and cheap.

We know that the Homeric tales such as the Iliad were originally memorised and then transmitted orally. It was a few hundred years before they were written down. We also are not sure that Homer existed as one person, like many people in the ancient world, particularly if they were slightly mythical, may never have existed. Blind storytellers however did, having prodigious memories to remember massive sagas; we know this is to be true because good storytellers even now have the capacity for many hundreds of tales in their repertoire.

So the concept of the map and the timeline may be more to do with our cognitive processes in regard to how they work than about the map itself, just as computers reflect our memory, this reminds me of the biblical term’ God made man in his own image’. This is true when it comes to humans, as well as God, that we create the concept of journeys and time and distance, maybe these things actually don’t exist as such, that’s just how we perceive the world. A little while ago it was inconceivable to think of time as being ‘unreal’, but now with the scientific exploration of quantum physics we realised that time isn’t as we think it is, and space isn’t what we think it is either. I think a lot of people understand that time is strange; we haven’t quite got around to the thinking of distance being strange yet. Apart from walking in a straight line around the world you would actually end up back at the same starting point. If we consider the universe as a hyper sphere not only are we unknowingly moving in a circle in directionality, maybe we are moving in the circle of time as well. Therefore our relationship of time and space are truly a function of our minds, and not reality as such.

Reverse Time

Think of all the self-help books who talk about visualising what you want in the future as if it has already happened. Many of them use the NLP process of working back from the future to your position now, a sort of ‘reverse time’.

So the question here is if they are all using a similar concept can they all be wrong, considering many are involved successfully in sport psychology, and in the case of Anthony Robbins(love him or hate him), who is active in coaching successful sports stars and business people; he has a great following who can attest to the effectiveness of his ideas.

So for the sceptics there are many people who have highly successful results using these methods.

One case in point is Robbins’s work with Andre Agassi, who had dropped from in the seedings to lower than 200 to return to the top five seeds within a year after being coached by Robbins.

So within a thought experiment lets name all this ‘magical thinking’, although psychology shies away from this label, an NLP only masks this, although Bandler and Grinder published a book on NLP entitled ‘The Structure of Magic’, and Garner Thompson’s book about using language within the medical profession was called ‘Magic in Practice’. Understanding that words are magical and we use them to cast a spell, whether that is in advertising, politics or courtship is exactly what using words is doing, we are spelling them. Magical thinking is free, therefore try it because if it works then that is fantastic, and if it doesn’t work you haven’t lost anything.

So continuing our thought experiment, let’s look at a typical map and see what it contains. Now think of your time with those map elements added to it like hills and valleys shown as gradients. Think of the land marks that you can place on your timeline to represent things that need to be reached on your journey. Draw it out and make it real, then in an open space walk your timeline. Be creative, place signs which you have written out on the path to represent the places on the map that you have drawn. Feel the hills and valleys and places that you have created.

This brings to mind the rock art of the San people of South Africa which dates back thousands of years. They were possibly drawing out the spirit world, there are ladders leading to the other world drawn on to the rock. It looks like it is the place they go to call for rain and for the Shaman to talk and be at one with the spirits, similarly the Sami people of Scandinavian lands drew the map of the spirit world onto the drums that they used for their shamanic journeying.

Ritual

This is an aspect of human consciousness that goes back into the mists of time. We ritualised many things that we do, from how we get dressed in the morning, how we clean our teeth, to how we do the washing up, or who goes to the bathroom first, it is all a ritual, it is more or less the same every day, why do we do that?

Firstly we need patterns we are pattern creators, and pattern finders. Again this says something about us, but if we make a ritual in the fullest sense it really kicks us into another gear.

So if you ritualised what you’re doing, it seems to have a multiplier effect on your consciousness. The ritual can be anything you want, you could create the spirit of the map in your mind that you make an offering to. The offering can be a glass of water, a piece of bread with some salt. A glass of whiskey or a glass of vodka, anything that you feel has some potency to your ritual. If you are inside a house you could light a candle, burn some incense, put some flowers out, offer prayers, sing a song or dance wildly. But most of all use your imagination.

When I was doing my NLP Master Practitioner training in London many years ago, I was talking to a young Sikh about Muhammad Ali, that he would tell the story of the fight that was coming up. Muhammad Ali would go through each round saying when he was going to knock his opponent down and that he was the greatest. Even as a kid I noticed that the fight would often go exactly the way that he had said. It transpired that Muhammad Ali was future pacing the event by imagining the fight in advance. My friend who was on the course said that was exactly what the Sikh Warriors used to do before battle. They would go into the future and fight in the spirit world to ordain the outcome of the conflict.

When Muhammad Ali was beaten by Joe Frazier his explanation why he lost was that Joe Frazier had dreamt the fight better on that occasion.