Sleight of Mouth Volume II: How Words Change Worlds

Preface

It has been almost 25 years since the publication of the first volume of Sleight of Mouth. Much has changed in the world since then, including an explosion of new technologies and the birth of new generations (X, Y, Z, etc.). And yet, the way in which people build beliefs and use language to influence one another has remained essentially the same.

I have been planning and collecting material for a Sleight of Mouth Volume 2 for more than two decades. I felt compelled to complete this volume at this time because it seems to me that we live more and more in a world where Sleight of Mouth necessarily forms the basis for people’s decisions and actions. In the late 1990’s the Internet and social media were not nearly the force in shaping people’s opinions that they are today. Access to news and other information was much more limited. Today, we are bombarded with automated messages and spam, fake news, conspiracy theories and extreme views of all types. As a result, the level of political rhetoric and social divisiveness has greatly increased in the past decades. The power of language to shape our world, for better of for worse, is stronger than ever.

Sleight of Mouth is about the power and the magic of language and, as always, there is both white magic and black magic. Magic of all types also has a structure; and that is what this book is about.

The Fabric of Reality

Of course, words themselves are surface structures that both reflect and influence deeper cognitive structures through which we create, update and change our inner maps and models of the world. In this preface, I want to present some of the key principles and patterns (the epistemology) that govern those deeper structures and that determine the effectiveness of the Sleight of Mouth patterns and interventions that I will be describing in the coming chapters.

David Hume’s Three Fundamental Assumptions

We unavoidably build our maps of reality based on beliefs and assumptions. Even science is based on deeply held assumptions and beliefs that we make about our perceptions and measurements. Enlightenment era philosopher David Hume identified three of the fundamental assumptions through which we build our models of the external world.

1. The present and future will behave like the past.

2. We can observe cause and effect.

3. We can reason from effects that we perceive to the causes that produce those effects.

While these may seem to be irrefutable and common sense, they are still assumptions not facts, and can lead to fallacies and errors. In many areas of our lives, for instance, the present and future do not always necessarily behave like the past. Contexts and conditions evolve and transform. In the external physical world, things like technological advances, climate change and other global forces create conditions such that the same behavior no longer produces the same result it used to. On an individual level, as we age, learn and grow, our present and future responses to the same situation can diverge significantly from those of the past. It is important to keep in mind, as we build our maps of the world, that it is indeed an assumption that present and future will behave like the past, and that the past is not necessarily the best predictor of the future.

Similarly, Hume pointed out that we cannot directly observe cause and effect. All we can actually observe is contiguity – i.e., that something happens and that something else follows. We infer that the first thing has caused the second thing. He uses the example of a white billiard ball striking a red billiard ball. We see the white one hit the red one and the red one moves. We infer that the white one has caused the red one to move and that, if we see the white ball strike the red ball again, the same thing will happen. This makes sense, but it is not always accurate. For instance, if we substitute a hollow white ball that is the same size as the first one and send it at the same angle and speed at the red one, the white ball is more likely to bounce off the red one as opposed to causing the red one to move.

The deeper cause-effect principle, then, becomes about energy transfer. Transfer of energy related to mass is what causes the movement. And we cannot directly observe this transfer of energy, only its consequences.

The situation becomes more complex when dealing objects that have collateral energy (i.e., their own internal source of energy). The illustration of this, given by systems theorist Gregory Bateson, is that if you kick a soccer ball with a certain force in a certain direction, you can with some accuracy predict where it will end up. If you kick a dog with the same force and in the same direction, there is no way you can accurately determine where and how far the dog will go before it stops.

We observe a person say something to another person and that person begins to cry. We infer that the first person’s words have caused the other to cry. Yet, in different circumstances, the same words spoken by the same person could lead to the other person laughing or becoming angry. What causes the reaction in the other person is something deeper that we cannot directly observe.

As Hume also maintained, observing a particular effect does not necessarily presuppose a certain cause. Seeing a dog running, for instance, does not necessarily mean that someone kicked it. There could be many other reasons. Similarly, seeing a dent in a car does not necessarily mean that the driver has been reckless. A person’s cough or sneeze may not necessarily be caused by illness.

The Foundations of Illusion

Much of the time, we unconsciously operate from the types of assumptions that Hume has identified. When we do not question such assumptions, they can become the basis for fallacies and illusions. For example, we see the sharp edge of a knife touch a person’s skin and then we see a red liquid emerging from where the knife has touched. We immediately infer that the knife has cut the skin and caused it to bleed. But there are other possibilities. These are precisely the types of inferences that magicians use to create illusions.

We see a woman getting into a long wooden box with holes at either end. We see her head emerge from the hole at the top of the box and her feet extending out of the hole at the bottom of the box. The magician saws the box into two pieces such that the woman’s head is coming out of one piece and the feet out of the other. Aghast, we infer that the woman has been sawed in half like the box. Yet, the magician then puts the two pieces of the box back together, opens the lid and the woman emerges healthy and whole. The magician has leveraged our assumptions about cause and effect to create an illusion.

Similarly, we perceive a particular effect and assume that it must have been produced by a corresponding cause. We watch a witchdoctor pulling a mass of bloody tissue from the body of a person sick with cancer. We infer that the witchdoctor’s hand must have somehow entered the person’s body and removed the cancerous tumors. Later, we may discover that the bloody tissues are actually chicken guts that have been hidden up the witchdoctor’s sleeve.

The types of assumptions that create these illusions are precisely those that are both utilized and examined in the applications of Sleight of Mouth. In fact, around the time I was first formulating the various Sleight of Mouth patterns I learned to do a number of card tricks and several other types of sleight of hand illusions, like making a coin disappear and then reappear. All of these tricks involve leveraging the types of assumptions that Hume described.

In addition to the ones identified by Hume, there are some other, generally unconscious, assumptions about reality and the relationship between map and territory that are at the foundation of the effective use of Sleight of Mouth. These are best summarized by Francis Bacon’s four idols of civilization.

Francis Bacon’s Four Idols of the Mind

In his classic work Novum Organum (1620), English essayist, lawyer, statesman, and philosopher, Francis Bacon identified another set of typically unquestioned assumptions that we make while building our maps of the world. He termed these assumptions idols, implying that they were like objects of worship; accepted and adored, often blindly or excessively. Bacon organized these sets of assumptions into four successive levels, each of which built upon the previous level, using the metaphors of the tribe, the cave, the marketplace and the theater.

The Idols of the Tribe

Bacon’s first group of idols were what he called the idols of the tribe. As he described it:

The idols of the tribe are inherent in human nature and the very tribe or race of man; for man’s sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things; on the contrary, all the perceptions both of the senses and the mind bear reference to man and not to the universe, and the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects, from which rays are emitted and distort and disfigure them.

The idols of the tribe relate to the fact that, as human beings, we can never know reality directly. We have to experience reality through our sensory filters, and those filters are limited. We can only make maps of the reality around us through the information that we receive through our senses and through how we connect that information to our own personal memories and other experiences. Our sensory organs are filters in that they have a limited capacity to pick up information. A bee looking at this page would perceive it very differently than we do because the whole sensory organization of the bee’s eyes are different.

The Universe is a massive bundle of energy and information, a quantum stew of vibration, particles, and waves. The way we experience this bundle of energy is through the filters of our senses and nervous systems. Our perception of the world begins as what psychology pioneer William James called a humming-buzzing confusion that we organize based on the structure of our own filtering mechanisms.

As human beings, we perceive about one billionth of the stimuli that occur around us. Possessing a unique nervous system is one way reality is filtered. Different species of animals, having different sensory modalities, experience reality in extraordinarily different ways. A honey bee sees reality through the lens of 20,000 separate eye-cell clusters. Each one responds either to a very specific wavelength of light or to certain chemicals floating in the air. As a result, the picture of the world processed by a bee’s nervous system is inconceivable to us. A porpoise’s brain is almost as large as a human one, but 80 percent is devoted to processing sound. Hearing to a porpoise is a kind of sonar, like a bat’s, that brings back three-dimensional images closer to sight than sounds. A porpoise can hear how large a shark is and in what direction it is moving. A bat can hear which way an insect is buzzing through the air. And to see the world as a chameleon, whose right and left eyes rotate independently in their sockets, would be an adventure through a whole new reality even if the territory being explored was exactly the same.

Thus, we perceive only a portion of the world determined by our neurological and genetic limitations. Even our sense of touch is influenced by the distribution, location and type of nerves in the receiving surfaces. The fact that we can’t see the molecules of a chair moving does not mean that they are not moving. We just do not have the apparatus to notice.

At the same time, our perceptual filters are what allow us to experience the universe in a unique and special way. Without the limitation of the eyes to experience a certain frequency of light, viewing a sunset or a rainbow would be impossible. Without the filter of our eardrums, the sweet sound of music would be impossible to hear. Filters are designed to take in useful information and leave out what we do not need.

English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley referred to our brains as a great reducing valve preventing us from being overwhelmed by the potentially massive amounts of information present in the universe around us. Our perceptual abilities are what Huxley called the doors of perception. It is easy for us to forget that the order and the structure that we perceive in the world is as much a reflection of our own nervous system and perceptual assumptions as it is information about external reality. Consider the case of the pygmy who had never been outside of the forest canopy. He had never experienced seeing the horizon. His nervous system was built to register the relationship between the size of an object and its relative distance, but he had never before been in an environment in which he directly experienced that relationship. When the pygmy was brought out of the forest and shown the vast plains of the savanna, objects that were far away looked tiny to him. When buffalo appeared on the horizon, he asked, What kind of bugs are those? When he was told that they were buffalo he said, You’re lying.

We succumb to the idol of the tribe when we forget that our perceptions of the world are not the world, even what we consider to be the most immediate and concrete perceptions. Movies and animation, for instance, are based on fooling our perceptions. We see movement where there is none. A moving picture is not really moving, rather it is a number of individual still images. When there are enough images presented quickly enough, our eyes are no longer able to distinguish and register the separate pictures. So we think we see movement. Our entire perceptual world is based upon such illusions of the senses.

In a very real way, all reality is virtual reality.

The idols of the tribe come from our belief that our perceptions are, in fact, accurate mirrors of reality, rather than uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects. As a result of this belief, we tend to ascribe more regularity to the world than is really there; a regularity that is produced by our own nervous systems. World renowned physicist Albert Einstein went so far to maintain, Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by the external world. As he pointed out, Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think. He claimed, Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says. The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Einstein even asserted, Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.

According to Bacon, the idol of the tribe also creates blind spots and biases in which we think our way of perceiving is more real than others. There is a revealing story told about the groundbreaking artist Picasso in which he was riding on a train. The passenger sitting next to him, upon discovering who he was, told Picasso that, while he knew Picasso was famous, he had to admit that he really didn’t appreciate Picasso’s art. When Picasso asked why, the passenger replied that he liked realistic art that looked just like reality. Picasso asked the man what he meant by looking just like reality. Annoyed by the ridiculousness of Picasso’s question, the passenger reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph of his wife saying, I mean like this. This picture looks exactly like my wife. With a twinkle in his eye Picasso said incredulously, My but she’s awfully small and flat!

Our cognitive and perceptual filters reject some distortions but are oblivious to others. The idol of the tribe is clearly the deepest and most influential of all the idols. Until we are able to fully realize and understand that our perceptions are not in fact accurate mirrors of reality, we won’t even have the hope of recognizing and transcending the other idols.

The Idols of the Den/Cave

Bacon called the second type of idol the idols of the den or the idols of the cave.

The idols of the den are those of each individual; for everybody (in addition to the errors common to the race of man) has his own individual den or cavern, which intercepts and corrupts the light of nature, either from his own peculiar and singular disposition, or from his education and intercourse with others, or from his reading, and the authority acquired by those whom he reverences and admires, or from the different impressions produced on the mind, as it happens to be preoccupied and predisposed, or equable and tranquil, and the like; so that the spirit of man (according to its several dispositions), is variable, confused, and, as it were, actuated by chance.

The idols of the den result from generalizing one’s own limited experience of the world and projecting it onto the rest of the world. It is easy for people to forget that their own personal experiences, education and culture are not shared by everyone else. Not everyone thinks the way we do, shares the same cultural background, or has learned what we have learned.

Our individual personal experiences and our unique personal history are filters which influence our perceptions of the world, and the way we choose to experience the world. Each of us has a personal history of our interaction with the living and non-living world around us. We build internal models and maps based upon our life experiences, many of which are unique to us. We each develop unique interests, habits, likes, dislikes, and rules of behavior. The actions and responses we choose to make at any given moment will reflect the learning we have acquired as a result of previous personal experiences.

A camera records an event by taking in light signals and filtering them into a literal image. Our filters are much more complex than that of a camera – we perceive, which means that we add meaning to every signal coming our way. It does not matter to a camera if a bus is painted yellow, but when we see it, we infer that it is likely a school bus, children could be aboard and certain precautions must be taken. Perception is the first and most important step in turning the raw data of the universe into reality. Seeing the world is far from the passive act it appears to be, for when we look at something, we see it colored by our own set of unique experiences. If I am looking at a sunset and feel depressed, my mood seeps into the sunset, making the whole appearance of the scenery sad. If I am joyful, the same sunset reflects my joy back to me. This fusing of me and things out there is what makes the lens of perception magical. The state we are in is a major filter to how the world is represented to us. Just by listening, looking, smelling, tasting, and feeling, I can turn the world into my world.

As an example, there was a man who was growing older and becoming bald. The wispy thin hair on top of his head sometimes distressed the once-dashing young paramour. When he was in his late sixties, he resigned to wearing a wig. To try to cheer him up, the man’s son invited him to a party where many distinguished guests would be present. The company was sparkling, and the older man seemed greatly impressed. Weren’t all those people fascinating? the younger man asked his father. Remarkable, the older gent replied, and did you see how much hair they all had?

All of us see the world just this subjectively. When we walk into a room, we see what is important to us, screening out what is indifferent. We give significance and meaning to our experience based on our own personal history. Psychoanalysis founder Freud’s notion of transference, in which we project onto authority figures the characteristics of our parents or significant others, is a good example of the idol of the den.

Cultural filters, which we begin to learn from birth, influence where we place our attention, how we describe the world, the patterns and relationships we learn, and what our culture/subculture emphasizes. In today’s world of social media and increasingly virtual reality, this idol is greatly exaggerated by so called filter bubbles or algorithmic editing, which display to individuals only information they have shown interest in and are likely to agree with, while excluding other views.

The idol of the den arises when we begin to think, All intelligent people think and act like me/us. My/Our values and ways of doing things are the ‘right’ ones. Our interpretations are better than theirs. The idols of the den cast their shadow when we begin to make judgments about people who are different from us, rather than embrace diversity and learn from it.

The Idol of the Marketplace

According to Bacon, a third type of idol emerges from the interaction of human beings with one another, rather than their interaction with nature.

There are also idols formed by the reciprocal intercourse and society of man with man, which we call idols of the market, from the commerce and association of men with each other; for men converse by means of language, but words are formed at the will of the generality, and there arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind. Nor can the definitions and explanations with which learned men are wont to guard and protect themselves in some instances afford a complete remedy; words still manifestly force the understanding, throw everything into confusion, and lead mankind into vain and innumerable controversies and fallacies.

The idol of the marketplace relates to our assumptions about our verbal communication with others and is, in many ways, at the core of Sleight of Mouth. Language is a fundamental way that we make maps and descriptions of our experience and communicate that experience to others. According to Bacon, the idol of the marketplace emerges as a result of two fundamental assumptions we make with respect to language.

1) Words refer to real entities, and

2) People share the same interpretation of words

The belief that words refer to real entities is probably one of the most pervasive idols of humankind. Bacon’s comment that words are formed at the will of the generality implies that the idols of the marketplace are most related to the filtering mechanism of generalization. A major problem with words is that they become detached from the original experience to which they refer and become isolated from the context in which they were established. As psychologist and researcher Julian Jaynes poignantly pointed out:

Because in our brief lives we catch so little of the vastness of history, we tend too much to think of language as being solid as a dictionary, with a granite-like permanence, rather than as the rampant sea of metaphor which it is.

Anthropologist and early NLP influence Gregory Bateson liked to say that the name is not the thing named. When we use words to describe experience, not only are the words themselves not the experience, but the experiences these words are describing may not actually be in the real world.

Language is what is known in NLP as secondary experience. It is a map of our perceptual and personal maps. In their book The Structure of Magic, NLP founders Bandler and Grinder asserted that language itself is a type of meta model. It is a way that we make and share models of our perceptual and personal experiences. As such, language is a map of a map more than it is a map of the territory. As Albert Einstein pointed out:

The first step towards language was to link acoustically or otherwise commutable signs to sense-impressions. Most likely all sociable animals have arrived at this primitive kind of communication – at least to a certain degree. . . In [this] early stage the words may correspond directly to impressions. At a later stage this direct connection is lost insofar as some words convey relations to perceptions only if used in connection with other words (for instance such words as: is, or, thing). Then word-groups rather than single words refer to perceptions. When language becomes thus partially independent from the background of impressions a greater inner coherence is gained.

Only at this further development where frequent use is made of so-called abstract concepts, language becomes an instrument of reasoning in the true sense of the word... But it is also this development which turns language into a dangerous source of error and deception.

What Einstein is claiming is that it is only when language becomes sufficiently disassociated (or generalized) from the sensory experience that it was initially designed to represent, can it become a tool for reasoning and creative thinking as opposed to a mere descriptive device. For instance, the sentence, The man rode the horse, fits the grammatical rules of English and will most likely correspond to specific memories and impressions that most of us have had of observing a person on a horse. Sentences like, The horse rode the man, or The man rode the light beam, however, fit grammatical rules but require one to use creative imagination in order to make sense out of them. They stimulate us to go beyond the limits of our memory.

But language is a double edged sword – one edge allows us to create new models independent of the sensory content of our life experiences and to give a greater coherence and order to our experiences, but the other edge severs the all important connection between our conceptual maps and the sensory experience they are intended to organize. This leads to what Bacon referred to as a wonderful obstruction to the mind. Wonderful in its ability to stimulate creativity, but obstructing in its tendency to throw everything into confusion, and lead mankind into vain and innumerable controversies and fallacies.

In The Structure of Magic Vol. I Bandler and Grinder echo Bacon and Einstein’s attitudes and concerns about the use of language when they write:

The most pervasive paradox of the human condition which we see is that the processes which allow us to survive, grow, change, and experience joy are the same processes which allow us to maintain an impoverished model of the world – our ability to manipulate symbols, that is, to create models. So the processes which allow us to accomplish the most extraordinary and unique human activities are the same processes which block our further growth if we commit the error of mistaking the model of the world for reality.

It is the assumption that people share the same interpretation of words that creates many communication problems. There are many variations in the ways that people give meaning to the same words. If someone says, Yesterday I had an accident, people will believe they understand what that person is saying. But what exactly was the accident. The person may have stumbled down the stairs, tripped into somebody, cut a finger, been in an automobile accident, or even had a bowel movement. One can make sense out of a phrase such as that in many different ways. We understand the verbalization, I had an accident, but we may each have different representations. To give new twist to an old saying, A word is worth a thousand pictures.

This is because words are developed according to the placement of attention. For example, an Eskimo’s number of words for snow are much more varied than that of an English speaker. [Contrast this with the extensive number of words Americans have for money.] From this perspective, as Julian Jaynes points out, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.

The idol of the marketplace comes, again, from confusing the map and the territory—from confusing the name with the thing named— and assuming that everyone else is using the same name for the same thing. We listen to somebody say they had an accident, or they are in trouble and we make sense of it for ourselves without really knowing the other person’s representation for it. When we forget that not everyone shares the same representations for words, we fall prey to the idol of the market, and our chances of misunderstanding and miscommunication become dramatically increased.

The Idols of the Theater

Bacon’s final class of idols were the idols of the theater.

Lastly, there are idols which have crept into men’s minds from the various dogmas of peculiar systems of philosophy, and also from the perverted rules of demonstration, and these we denominate idols of the theater: for we regard all the systems of philosophy hitherto received or imagined, as so many plays brought out and