Black Boxes
By Jonathan Jenkyn
When I was first introduced to NLP and hypnosis I was a sceptic. A huge sceptic! You see my background has been mostly in Maths and Computing. “If it can’t be counted, it can’t exist.” Wetware (as ‘people’ are known in the industry) are notably unreliable and unpredictable. Hard/Software is marginally more reliable but certainly more controllable and predictable.
I was working for a government organisation as the Head of the Cryptographic Systems working to secure their external communications and internal systems. This sounds like a very inflated title - and it was. Much of my time was spent jotting long complex formula on a whiteboards and baffling upper management in to giving us more funding to buy even more baffling hardware to ‘play with’. One of my practical roles within the organisation was to do with penetration testing and reverse engineering. (Geeks have the best ‘techniche’!) Often times this meant attempting to analyse and understand a given ‘Black Box’ system. A ‘Black Box’ can be anything from a lump of hardware through to a complex security system - it doesn’t really make much difference but the idea is that you don’t understand what goes on inside, or at least have little to no idea how it does what it does. You can send inputs and listen for outputs, but you can’t look inside the black box to see exactly what is going on under the hood.
The easiest and most thorough way to begin to understand and further compromise any system like this is by a laborious method of sending carefully constructed input parameters to the ‘Black Box’ and then monitoring the resulting outputs. More often than not this process was more fruitful if single input parameters were tweaked in sequence and the differences noted in the resulting output. By mapping and documenting the resulting outputs given the inputs that produced them it was easier to understand what the black box was doing and how it might be compromised and, further more, made safe.
As a security systems designer I became bothered that protocols were often circumvented not by hardware or software, but by this “wetware”. People would ‘lend’ their pass key, give out passwords to network engineers or simply sabotage the system for revenge. Since this was the weak link in the chain I began to research into the area of persuasion and suggestion for solutions and this is when I stumbled upon NLP.
After reading a couple of books on the subject and not being very impressed, I attended an NHR course in Edinburgh with Dr Richard Bandler and John La Valle. I was sold immediately! Not only could I answer all the questions I wanted answering but I got much more from that single seminar than I could ever have imagined. I quit my job 3 months later and have since focused on learning as much as I can about the field of NLP, and helping people change in ways that they never thought possible.
Suddenly the link becomes clear between Cryptography and Hypnosis. The brain is a ‘black box’; there is no way we can know what goes on exactly under-the-hood. I can change the parameters of the input I provide to a client (kinaesthetic calibration and my language) and acutely manage the resulting outputs (kinaesthetic calibration and their language). By tweaking the inputs, and constantly calibrating the outputs, I can change the system. It’s hacking, if you don’t mind such a crude term.
This mindset can be easily mapped to many ‘classic’ NLP tools. For instance - the premise being that we stand little to no chance to understand why a client is phobic but if we change the input parameters (Double-Disassociation, visual and auditory sub-modality tweaking) we suddenly get a particular change within the way the system reacts from then on. It’s like a software bug that can be exploited to make people do something they couldn’t do before.
So how does this all tie in with PPT? Well after the NHR course, I attended a short course on the Feldenkrais Method hosted by Michael Breen. This single introduction opened a whole new system of exploration. However it was evident that the Feldenkrais Method was slow and meticulous. I wanted to make the same rapid changes I was making with peoples phobias and restrictive beliefs using NLP but instead with frozen shoulders and clawed hand. I was having limited and temporary success with hypnosis/NLP with these physiological complaints and using the few Feldenkrais techniques I had was slow and very hit-and-miss. This was very frustrating… until I attended a 1 day taster in Patterns of Physical Transformation with Dr Ron and Dr Edie Perry back in 2006. From that single event I was able to glean enough techniques to begin an exploration in to the body/mind relationship that no other avenue had provided me.
It begins to make sense if you consider that about 80% of brain function is devoted to organising and running physiology. So this becomes a significant system to empower change in neurology. Why should your physiology just be an output mechanism to watch and calibrate? Why not use this as a starting point, and see if we can make changes by altering the physiology directly? What about directly communicating with the neurology by using the universal language of touch without the barrier of language?
I discovered by using PPT that in the same way the brain can be hacked so too can the physiology. Finger-magic (Taught on Day One of the PPT Foundation course) is an obvious example. What are the parameters of movement or manipulation for a single digit/finger? In and out of the palm and a little twitching from side-to-side… right? Check the finger ‘system’ parameters again and you’ll find much more variability in the dynamics we can use to talk to the neurology though this single segment of our physiology. By manipulating the body in distinct and methodical patterns it is possible for a client to gain increased sensitivity and flexibility within a few minutes. And it lasts! PPT complements my NLP toolbox and gives me more manoeuvrability as a therapist and change worker. This means I can help more people get rapid lasting changes efficiently and permanently.
I still have a lot to learn about PPT. But, I’m keen, and excited about the results I have been able to make with it thus far. Both Ron and Edie are constantly updating and researching their developments with their technology, and update their website and seminar trainings with these improvements and advances as they are made. If you are interested in broadening your own potency as a change worker I encourage you to attend one of Ron and Edie’s Foundation courses and discover for your self the latent magic in your own hands.
You can find out more about Jonathan at his website www.entrance.me.uk, or email him directly at jonathan@entrance.me.uk.
Jonathan can also be heard interviewing Dr Ron Perry about PPT in the latest PPT podcast. This podcast can be freely downloaded from http://www.patternsofphysicaltransformation.com/?p=35. Keep checking the site often as new podcasts will appear on the site regularly.
Ed: This newsletter was sent out on the 17th of December 2007. If you did not recieve this in your inbox, then please check your junk-mail folder. If you wish to subscribe to these regular mailings, then please follow this link and fill in your details .
