First I use language that generalizes, to establish the frame. Then I make sure it is anchored in. "Since we all agree about the outcome,... Then I challenge them to take the proposals they've been fighting over—now embedded in a context of agreement—back to the level of sensory experience. I demand that each of them give specific evidence to support that their proposal is more effective in achieving the outcome that they have both agreed upon. Now they will have useful disputes. And I will monitor their language to be sure that they are being specific enough to make a good decision. You can always figure out what would constitute evidence that one proposal is more effective than another.

Let me give you a specific strategy for doing this. You listen to both complaint A and complaint B. Then you ask yourself "What are A and B both examples of? What is the class or category that they are both examples of? What is the outcome that both of these two people will share? What common intention lies behind or underneath both these two particular proposals?" Once you discover that, then you interrupt and state the obvious in some way. You get an agreement between these two people, so that they can then begin to usefully disagree within the context of agreement.

Now that has the same formal properties of what I did with Dick in the six-step reframing. We found a point where his conscious mind and his unconscious mind could agree about a certain outcome that was useful for him as an individual.

Harry and George now agree that whatever they end up doing— either one of their proposals, both, or some alternative to those—the outcome they are working toward is to benefit the corporate entity as a unit. So I ignore the specific behaviors, and I go after an outcome that the two parts of the corporation—or the two parts of the human being—can agree upon. Now, having achieved the frame of agreement, it becomes trivial to vary behavior in order to find a behavior that achieves the outcome that both partners can agree to.

If you have more than two people involved—which is usually the case—you can simplify the situation by organizing the discussion. Just say "Look, I'm getting very confused by the way we're discussing things. Let me organize it a little bit in the following way: I want the rest of you to be exquisitively attentive. You have the job of watching and listening to exactly what these two people are going to propose, and assisting me in the process of finding what's common about what they want to do. You can reorganize it into pairs, and then work with one pair at a time. And as you do that, of course you are teaching the pattern to the observers at the same time.

People have strange ideas about change. Change is the only constant in my thirty-some years of experience. One of the weird things that's happened—and this is a really good example of natural anchoring—is that change and pain are associated. Those ideas have been anchored together in western civilization. That's ridiculous! There's no necessary relationship between pain and change. Is there Linda? Tammy? Dick?

There is one class of human beings in which you may have to create pain in order to assist them in changing, and that's therapists. Most therapists intrinsically believe—at the unconscious level as well as the conscious level—that change has to be slow and painful. How many of you at some point during the demonstrations have said to yourself "That's too easy; it's too fast." If you examine the underlying presuppositions that cause you to respond that way, you'll discover that they are associated with pain and time and money and stuff— some of which are really powerful and valid economic considerations. Others are just junk that have been associated—like change and pain. So you might examine your own belief structure, because what you believe will come out. It will be in your tone of voice, in your body movement, in the hesitation as you lean forward to do this work with someone.

All the tools that we offer you are very powerful and elegant. They are the minimum that I think you need to operate, no matter what psychotheology you were previously trained in.

If you decide that you want to fail with this material, it's possible to. There are two ways to fail. I think you ought to be aware of what those are, so that you can make a choice about how you are going to fail if you decide to.

One way is to be extremely rigid. You can go through exactly the steps that you saw and heard us go through here, without any sensory experience, without any feedback from your clients. That will guarantee that you will fail. That's the way most people fail.

The second way you can fail is by being really incongruent. If there's a part of you that really doesn't believe that phobias can be done in three minutes, but you decide to try it anyway, that incongruency will show up in your non-verbal communication, and that will blow the whole thing.

Every psychotherapy that I know of has an acute mental illness within it. Each one thinks that their theory, their map, is the territory. They don't think that you can make up something totally arbitrary and install it in someone and change them. They don't realize that what they believe is also made up and totally arbitrary. Yes, their method does elicit a response from people, and sometimes it works for the problem you're working on. But there are a thousand other ways to go about it, and a thousand other responses.

For example, TA has a thing called "reparenting" in which they regress a person and give him a new set of parents. And if it's done appropriately, it will work. The TA belief is that the person is messed up because when they were a kid they didn't get certain kinds of experiences, so you have to go back and give them those experiences in order for them to be different. That's the TA theology, and accepting that belief system constitutes the mental illness of TA. TA people don't realize that you can get the same result a thousand other ways, and that some of them are a lot quicker than reparenting.

Any belief system is both a set of resources for doing a particular thing, and a set of severe limitations for doing anything else. The one value in belief is that it makes you congruent. That part is very useful; it will make other people believe you. But it also establishes a huge set of limitations. And my belief system is that you will find those limitations in yourself as a person as well as in your therapy. Your clients are going to end up being a metaphor for your personal life because you are making the ultimate tragic mistake. You believe that your perceptions are a description of what reality actually is.

There is a way out of that. The way out of that is to not believe what you're doing. That way you can do things that don't fit with "yourself," "your world," etc. I recently decided that I want to write a book titled, When you discover your real self, then buy this book and become someone else.

If you simply change your belief system, you will have a new set of resources and a new set of limitations. Having the choice of being able to operate out of different therapeutic models is very valuable in comparison to only being able to operate out of one model. If you believe any of them, you will remain limited in the same way those models are limited.

One way to get out of that is to learn to go into altered states in which you make up models. Once you realize that the world in which you're living right now is completely made up, you can make up new worlds.

Now if we're going to talk about altered states of consciousness, we first have to talk about states of consciousness. You are at this moment in time conscious, true or not true?

Woman: I think so.

OK. How do you know that you're conscious at this moment? What are the elements of your experience that would lead you to believe that you are in your normal state of consciousness? I want to know what it is about this state of consciousness that allows you to know that you are here.