Great set of question, Michael! Due to little annoyances like Dinner, this post will have to be quick, but please know that I will engange much more explicitly with your excellent post very soon. I didn't make myself clear about the not-knowing state at all.  You make a good point because it demonstrates very clearly that there is not a normalized standard not-knowing state (nks).  You point out that I wasn't in a nks when I said, "This is not the place for me to go into the details of what I anticipate Danny might begin experiencing".... You are without a doubt correct.  I wasn't in my nks at any point when writing back to Sherilla.  This gets back to my unclarity.  The type of nks I was referring to has to do less with a state from which we respond in operational contexts and more to do with an epistemological receptivity when engaged in the pursuit of cognizing cognition.  If one can make ones own thinking as the object of perception things become very interesting because all of a sudden a wedge is thrown into all the sets of presuppostions which place thinking outside of 'real' world phenomena.  We tend to assume a reality outside of cognition which gets translated into subjective representations which then become objects upon which our thinking dwells.  This chain is extremely useful and also very congruent with the standord scientific methodology of the last 150 years (at the least).  So I have no arguement with this placement of things to the extent that we are attempting to situate NLP as congruently as possible within standard methodological considerations. Epistemology should be the scientific study of what all other sciences presuppose without examining it: thinking.  However because we generally do not distinguish between the finished thought and the cognitive activity, or worse, we form conclusions about the cognitive activity which are based on already finished thoughts (this is when we place the cognitive activity in the unconscious or neurologize it- both elegent strategies), we always begin our epistemological investigations in a cloak of assumptions, many of which we honestly don't see.  I include myself in this group each step of the way.  The nks that I mention is a state that I achieve in flashes and it is always assoicated with my attempts to shift my attention to my cognitive activity as opposed to already finished, or given, states.  When we are talking about those nks's that we each individually go to in our attempts to reduce, or witness, our normal filtering systems, I am in full agreement with you.  In fact, I have to admit that except in very rare cases which always exist in contexts of quite investigation, I always have content (I like your definition of content in this context) attached.  For that reason I don't think you would be very interested in eliciting my strategy for moving from Y to X.  However if you are interested in the particular nks I am attempting to point to, I would be more than happy to share with you how specifically I try to achieve it. Needless to say, the implications of an epistemology that actually starts with thinking are HUGE.  IN GENERAL I have found that most people who are really involved with NLP are pragmatists (even our leading articulators of NLP are open about this) and therefore are either not very interested in this epistemological pursuit or deem it impossible from the start.  I have found that it is only through this route that I can identify those aspects of NLP that I consider seeds for the future.  Fortunately there are many others who can much better articulate this pursuit than I can and who are doing so quite beautifully. Sherilla, I suspect, just might be interested in a new epistemological tack, or she someday might be.  Because Danny's experiences do not fit snuggly inside a model which is based on the chain I mentioned above (REAL WORLD, representations, thoughts about/organizations of representations).  You can bend it around, but Occum's Razor isn't very fond of the results. NLP performs its own interesting form of logical positivism except NLP shifts our attention to the set of operations that we must engage in to speak usefully about inner experiences; these operations mostly involve variations of denominilization.  This is useful to an extent, but I believe that it begins with the assumption that our experience is entirely the results of different kinds of transforms and it does not recognize the primal role that cognition plays in constituting a world.  Grinder does so well to take Korzybski's motto a step further, but I feel compelled to question it altogether because the map metaphor includes a map maker which is a silly notion within this methodology, and the territory metaphor brings with it the metaphisical division of subject and object that is the place from which we start.  Sorry for the mess and the waste of time, but I'm hungry and dinner is just ready; the kids are cooking tonight. Basically, John Edwards, for as cheezy as he presents himself, is not tricking us with his psychic abilities.  There are so many people who see in that way. Unfortunately most of them embrace new age epistemolgies which are embarrasingly incomplete and naieve.  But for those people like John, Danny and myself who are stuck with knowing that information is not simply the transformation of goo coming into the sense portals, it is necessary to articulate a different description of 'reality'.  And like I said earlier in this mess, thank heavens there are those who can actually present these ideas with clarity. So to sum up: I do not use a nks except in very specific investigative context.  The nks I use as an  NLP practioner is useful but full of assumptions I don't see or don't step outside of... JR