Harry Knox

"Listen, my child," said the prophet, "there is one God, and he created everything, including you and the world. He made you by a miracle out of nothing at all. You must pray to him, worship him, and serve his every whim, or he will send you to hell."

"Listen, my child," said the guru, "there is one Cosmic Consciousness behind everything. It created the illusion of the world. No one has ever explained why it wanted to delude itself. It's a mystery for you to meditate upon."

Here's the actual truth. What proceeded the Big Bang was a Hive-Mind God, made of countless individual minds (immaterial singularities outside space and time), each individually capable of generating subjective holograms - dreams - and all collectively capable of generating a group hologram, which is none other than the objective universe itself.

In the arena of psychology, no branch is more bizarrely named than “NLP” - neuro-linguistic programming. It doesn’t trip off the tongue and the meaning is, how shall we say, opaque.

One definition of NLP is that it’s “the study of excellence”. Another is that it’s an approach to communication and personal development. Another is that it’s about “how people organize their thinking and language and how this affects behavior”. NLP doesn’t seem to have a clear-cut definition and is often branded a pseudoscience. It still hasn’t achieved mainstream recognition in psychology.

A significant difficulty lies in the term itself. What on earth does neuro-linguistic programming mean? It seems like something extremely technical, difficult and scientific rather than a practical means of helping people to lead better and more effective lives, as its proponents claim.