We once ate lunch with a retired army colonel who decided that he was going to become a communicator. He has two strategies. One is to give commands, and the other is designed to get agreement. Neither strategy has anything to do with gathering information; his entire strategy just simply ends when there is agreement. So no matter what he says, if you say "I agree with you," he can't function anymore. He's the kind of person whom you would never naturally agree with about anything, no matter what he said, because he's got a voice tone that gets you to respond negatively.

When we sat down, everyone went crazy, because they kept saying "Well, I wouldn't put it quite that way," and getting into arguments with him. Finally I stopped them all, and Leslie and I said in unison We agree with you." Whatever he said, we'd say "We agree with you." when we did that, he couldn't generate any behavior! He ceased to function. He would sit there quietly for ten or fifteen minutes, until he would take issue with something that the rest of us were talking about.

We would simply say "We agree with you" and he was gone again. His strategy to decide what he wanted on the menu was to get everyone to have anything off the menu. His strategy was not designed to get food that would please his palate; it was designed to get other people to have the same thing that he had. I guess that's a good strategy for a colonel in the Army. But it's a lousy strategy to get something good in a restaurant, or to pick a restaurant, or to have friends, which is something he didn't have.

Having total sensory experience is a life-long project, and there isn't any limitation to it as far as I know. I now see things, hear things and get information tactually that two years ago would have seemed like ESP to me. That's a statement about my willingness to commit some time and energy to training myself to refine the distinctions I make between internal and external realities, the refinements I can make in every sensory channel, and in every internal representational system.

A lot of our training in our ability to make visual distinctions we got from Milton Erickson, He is one of the most exquisite visual detectors in the world. He can see things that really are "extra-sensory" for other people, but they are there, and they are coming in through the same senses. In the exercise we did, many of you called me over for assistance, saying "Well, this person doesn't make any eye movements." And you finally admitted "Well, there's some slight movement of the eyes." When you say something is slight, that is a statement about your ability to detect it, not about what's going on with the other person.

It's like "resistance." If therapists would take "resistance" as a comment about themselves instead of their clients, I think the field of psychotherapy would develop at a faster rate. Whenever a client "resists," it's a statement about what you are doing, not about what they are doing. Out of all the ways that you've attempted to make contact and establish rapport, you have not yet found one that works. You need to be more flexible in the way you are presenting yourself, until you get the rapport response you want.

What we would like to do next is to offer you an exercise to increase your sensory experience, and to distinguish between sensory experience and hallucination. This exercise has four parts:

We want you to sit in groups of three. One of you we'll call A, one B, and one C. A, your job is detection. B, your job is to practice experiencing different kinds of experience. C is simply an observer, and can also help A and B keep track of what to do next. B, you select, without mentioning anything verbally, three different experiences that you had which were very intense experiences. They can be from any part of your life, but make them distinctive, one from the other; don't take three similar occasions. You can just identify them by dropping inside and finding representative examples, and simply number them one, two, and three.

Then hold hands with A and announce "one." Then go internal, drop out of sensory experience, go back to that time and place, and have that experience again without any overt verbalization. Take a minute or two or three to relive that experience fully…. Then announce "two" and relive it…. Then announce "three" and relive that....

Now there is one incredibly important factor. For those of you who are very visual, it will be imperative that you do not see yourself there, but see what you saw when you were there.

For example, close your eyes and see yourself from above or the side somewhere, riding on a roller coaster, just about to go down that first big drop.... Now step into that image of yourself inside the roller coaster and see what you would see if you were actually there riding it. Those are very different experiences. The kinesthetics come in profoundly once you break the dissociation of seeing yourself over there, and put your perceptual position inside your body on the roller coaster.

As you go back and find these three experiences and re-experience them, it is important that you do not do it dissociated. You may begin by seeing yourself; then get inside the picture. When you are inside the picture and you feel the experience in your body again as you did before, you begin to squeeze A's hand, thereby cuing them tactually that you are now having that experience.

A, your job is simply to observe the changes in B, as s/he goes through the three experiences. I want you to watch skin color changes, size of lower lip, breathing, posture, muscle tonus, etc. There will be many profound changes in B that you can see visually as B goes through this experience.

B will do exactly the same thing as in Part 1: s/he will announce "one" and re-experience it, then "two" and "three."But this time A will not only watch the changes but describe them out loud. C's job is to make sure that all the descriptions that A offers are sensory-based descriptions: "The corners of your mouth are rising. Your skin color is deepening. Your breathing is high and shallow and increasing in rate. There's more tension in your right cheek than your left." Those are descriptions that allow C—who is watching as well as listening to your description—to verify, or not, what in fact you are claiming. If A says "You're looking happy; now you're looking worried," those are not sensory-based descriptions. "Happy" and "worried" are judgements. C's job is to make sure that A's descriptions are sensory-based, and to challenge any utterance that is not sensory-based.