Hello, Mr Van Der Horst. I'm a guest of the "Whispering In The Wind" forum, here, and I read your online article, "An NLPrimer on Spirituality".  It's still posted, a decade later, yet I'd not read it until now.  It was quite interesting. 1.  In your online article, "An NLPrimer on Spirituality", you wrote, "3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit ... is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world..." and you wrote, "I submit the following equation: cognition may be to representational systems as spirit is to energy. It is the energy that passes from one human being to another to make a third. It is energy that animates our beings thoughout our lifetimes, and certainly the interface between whatever we can explore and whatever the greater realm of the spirit may be. Thus whatever processes we find that generate experiences that produce more energy are spiritual." In my experience of spiritual faiths, I've noticed multiple practitioners of those faiths talk about nouns that someone can have or emit or recieve.  Nouns such as "spirituality", "grace", "love",  and "energy" are portrayed as analogous in function to masses or light.  More than one person has critically commented on my energy.  Evaluating the prejudices of such spiritually-oriented people, I was led to appreciate the phenomenological significance of their comments about my energy.  The spiritually-oriented people that I've encountered are flexible in how they interpret language, but their interpretations have a certain structure.  The key is to know what to talk about, and what not to talk about, with them. To suit this forum, and its relevance to discussions of NLPer-related material, I think I'd like to share a short example of the participation by me in a spiritually-framed criticism strategy response scenario.  Here's the scenario example. ------------------------------------------- criticizer: "nj, you are giving off bad energy." nj: "what do you think it is?" criticizer: "I don't know, but you should change it." nj's internal processing (notated by perceptual positions): 1st: I need some kind of harmonious summation to this conversation, so that my criticizer and I can both resonate with reverence for our spiritual responsibilities, as part of our relationship.  But, if it's my emission of bad energy that's a problem, it's my criticizer's perception of that energy that makes him aware of it, so it's his problem, and HE should change his subjective experience.  3rd: Unless the collective unconscious has acted egotistically to force extra-sensory knowledge through any of the NLP-recognized hetararchically-organized senses.... 1st: yes, Inner God might have structurally alerted this person to my aura's collectively-known odor.  3rd: If that's the case, then your bad energy is really your problem.  And that could be the case if your criticizer has already reached stage 3 of modeling spirituality, so that the behavioral-functional processes of his sensorium operate to match the visual appearance of other's chakra_auras to his own, during his access of the external references significant to his frequent evaluation of phenomenologically-relevant auras.  Yes, and if he's reached stage 3, then he must also be evaluating the existential summation of his self-actualized neurological alignment.  1st: Oh, I might have found my guru! 3rd: So he might qualify as your guru.  He is talking to you about something you might be responsible for.  And he might have reached stage 3, so his summation will probably be longer than yours, since you have not reached stage 3.  Not only that, but his communications could be a wellspring of knowledge straight from the collective unconscious.  You should listen carefully to his summation, after yours ends.  1st: Wowie-zowie, only the collective unconscious could ever claim higher spiritual attainment!  Maybe I'll acquire stage 5 knowledge, and be able to skip stages 3 and 4 entirely! 3rd: Yes, then you could share collective unconscious wisdom with others, as a spiritual teacher.  Every spiritual teacher, including Rajneesh, would testify to the power of a well-aligned, self-actualized summation, as well as the contributions to discussion that one can make when god's energy (collective unconscious energy) is flowing through you.  But would you really want Rajneesh to criticize you in some synchronistic moment of collective unconsciousness acting through him?  No, definitely not at the vision-logic level.  But you'd model him, of course, to align your summation like his, thus participating in the Atman project.  Rajneesh was was a student of the world soul, just like Dr. Grinder.  Applying NLP techniques, you can do no better, at least at the psychic level. 1st: But if in fact the collective unconscious generated the energy that animate my criticizer's being, then certainly my beliefs would have already changed by now.  Maybe my bad energy is obscuring the unconscious message he has for me.  As someone in a state of grace, I would hope that my energy wouldn't land on him, and thereby create an undesirable personally-compelling reference experience for him.  If that interfered with the spiritual-level operative formats of his compassion, then he might be intentionally insulting me.  And that would be all my fault!  He can't be my guru, he's adding to my responsibility, but we've yet to resonate together.  This relationship won't allow me to enter true rapture!  Oh, I hope he's not my guru! Now I'll never reach stage 3.... 3rd: Wait, nj, calm down. Suppose this was a synchronistic event dependent on the action of the collective unconscious.  In that case your guru would be your guru only for the duration of his connection with the collective consciousness; he would have had no need to mismatch his subject of evaluation, because his energy chakras effect Learning II in all the people around him, thus ensuring his safety, and yours, from negative reference experiences.  1st: So I'm OK, because I always resonate with the collective unconscious....  and my criticizers energy won't become negative, so my energy won't become negative....  My errors are being corrected thanks to Learning II....  I feel safer from criticism already. 3rd: But now you're back to asking yourself that existential virtual question,  'If your critical guru finds you to have bad energy, does that mean you don't have to worry about your energy anymore, that your energy is aggravating him, or that you're threatening yourself with your energy flowing out through your guru?'  And in the context you share, NLP tells you that your guru is aggravated by you, whether you resonate with him or not.  At the core of all this is the collective positive intention of the cosmic bubble. 1st: Since everyone has a positive intention, I must believe that he, if he is acting as my guru, already accomplished internal Learning_III-level heterarchical realization, prior to his evaluating how to direct my attention to what is simply a neurologically-producable, commonly-known, yet rationally-opaque, production of bad energy. I have to remember that my negative energy production was a process that anyone could innocently perform, even a dilettante like Brian Van Der Horst.  We're all connected to the collective unconscious, always participating in an ongoing, intimate relationship. 3rd: But unless the collective unconscious was acting from its core state, when it called your attention to your bad energy, during its flow through your guru [my third position critic, the creative element in the action of the invisible collective unconscious, the third element in my emergent expression of Diltsian creativity, the para-Atman], the structure of this particular unconscious process would force you to create an undesirable self-concept, that is, to disalign your neurological levels, so that you retain eidetic modelling ability only in the case that you identify with a class system of both social and religious inequality.  Because the collective unconscious would be making another person your guru instead of yourself, resonating improperly with you. Therefore the structure of your criticizer's possessing archetype, while he's separated from any of his core states, would fall below the level of supermind. And where then would be your state of grace? 1st: Oh, that's bad.  I'd have lost my state of grace. 3rd: No, it can not be that, while you're a dilettante, your criticizer is your guru.  You are already in a state of grace, you can't possibly deserve criticism. 1st: Yes, that's right.  Considering my state of grace, it is OK that I believe that this critical person is not my guru, and so can't be animated by any of the core state energy of the collective unconscious.  On the other hand, if the collective unconscious achieved its core state first, I could forget those critical comments my criticizer spoke, knowing that the collective unconscious acts through me just as much as through him. Then my criticizer actually is animated by the collective unconscious, at least at the core state level, even though I lack belief-level memory of it. 3rd: And that's what I've been pointing to.  So until your memory reaches spiritual operationalization, disregard his meta-program operations vis-a-vis your claims of him being in a high-performance state of holy rapture.  Instead, take responsibility for your place in the Level_IV logical level of phantasmic-emotional learning.  Hopefully the para-guru, properly reflecting the collective unconscious at work, will do the same.  You might also start praying for summary parsimony, and for your work with the para-guru to entrain the energy of your guru's heart chakra, rather than the energy of his perineum chakra." 1st: Great, another opportunity to achieve universal rapport!  Thank you, 3rd, for this inner communion! 3rd: You're welcome, nj.  You know we're really manifest together, subtle parts of subjective experience. nj: "Ooommmmm...." Exploring the function of collective consciousness certainly adds some zest to my life, Mr. Van Der Horst.   But the cognition takes so much work that for me to even consider criticism, I psychologically feel like I'm pushing a material boulder up a phenomenal hill.  I wonder what spiritual insights and NLP-simplifying presumptions you have about criticized emitted energy?  -nj