Samuel Please note what I write below is not representative of John Grinder and is based solely on my interpretation of WITW and seminars I have attended with John and Carmen. I have no idea of the precise steps John and Richard took to enter the know nothing state when conducting their modelling of Perls, Satir and Erickson. I was about ten years old when they began and at the time entering my own know nothing states causing lots of laughs while simultaneously getting in trouble at school for mimicking teachers. The weird result of doing imitations is that I unconsciously adopted handwriting very similar to the teacher I was mimicking.  As I entered my teens the skill of mimicking handwriting came in useful, from a school boy’s perspective of course. I noticed to get the handwriting just right (write) I had to do the full imitation. That of course is another story and does not directly address your question directly. If you read Whispering you will see mimicking, DTI, clean second position, whatever you want to call it was the first key to the modelling. My perspective is it went something like this.... 1. Bandler and Pucelik mimicked Perls, so successfully that when JG watched videos of Perls doing his work and then watched Bandler’s and Puceliks's performance, he calibrated Bandler and Pueclik were capable of being as proficient and more proficient at Gestalt therapy compared with Perls. 2. John insisted that he be capable of the same performance as Bandler and Pucelick before he conducted any conscious break down of the patterns. John G did the same or similar process of unconscious uptake with Pucelick and Bandler as the models mimicking Perls.  When he was successful they began coding the patterns. 3. Then Richard and John (and a lot of info is not presented in the book) did the unconscious uptake with Virgina Satir. 4. John and Richard then presented the coded patterns of Perls and Satir with additional patterns from transformational grammar in the form of the meta model. 5. Milton would in my opinion been different as his (Milton's) philosophy, was primarily centred on 'trusting your unconscious mind' and he  had no inclination to tell people what he actually did. Also Erickson conducted his work in an alerted state of trance  which one could say has the same or similar characteristics as the 'know noting state' creating a situation where when PP2/DTI the modellers entered a know nothing state. My guess is Perls and Satir also conducted their work in some form of a know nothing state which may well have been a key for the modellers.   In WITW John states that he and Richard resisted the urge to consciously interrupt their unconscious assimilation of the Milton. Also, John as linguist would have realised that the way a child learns his native language is from a perspective of 'know nothing' and he may have modelled this in learning new languages. He would also value from his undercover work the importance of 'totallly' being someone else' in order to be totally convincing. In summary, if the people  John and Richard modelled were in states of ‘know nothing’ and other altered states and the fact the first modelling project ( Perls) began with imitation seemingly by chance, then  know nothing  was inherent  the early phase of the first modelling project and then carried across.  So I don’t know for sure, how they discovered what they discovered about know nothing states and the value of DTI/PP2. Maybe it was past experience; a bit of luck combined with intuition but I am making guesses. Regards Michael Carroll PS. John and Carmen are now teaching modelling courses around the world which have an emphasis on the ‘know nothing state’