The Invisible Ventriloquist

By Author: Harry Foster
Total Articles: 34
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"He's blind in one eye and can't see out of the other." - Michael Hester
What's in a word, or a set of words?
For some it's love. For others its anger.
And there are many variations along the way.
But is it the words themselves or is it something else?
Like the emotion behind the words.
On the surface you see the duck. Under the water you see what's driving the duck forward.
In language there's a surface structure and a deep structure.
Now while none of this may be new to you what you'll read next might be.
And that depends whether you believe NLP is real or just some made up collection of a variety of disciplines.
There's the story of the King who went riding in search of a mythical archer.
As he ventured into the forest he noticed a clearing.
On further exploration he saw a long row of trees.
He soon noticed several arrows sticking out of each tree.
He dismounted and walked over to the trees.
The brightly coloured targets stood out in the green forest.
On closer inspection he saw each arrow was in the centre of the bull's eye of ...
... each target.
The King stood there in silence.
He wanted to meet this archer right away.
He had a group of his finest men track him down.
When they found him he was sharpening his arrows.
He walked into the Kings private tent.
The King stood up, immediately walked over to the man and asked him to be his royal archer.
"You know nothing about me," Said the archer.
"I know what I saw." Replied the King.
"What you saw was the result of me firing arrows randomly into trees."
My boy paints the targets around them for fun.
And that's like poetry.
Poetry has a certain artful vagueness to it.
"We dance round in a ring and suppose but the secret sits in the middle and knows". - Robert Frost
In that vagueness you fill in the details.
All language is like that with certain structures, certain word choices and certain patterns.
And these affect us in different ways.
If a stranger tells you they love you it has a totally different meaning than someone you're intimate with saying the same words.
But what if someone could speak just a few sentences and change a belief you hold dear?
Not because of what they said, but rather what they didn't say.
From among the many words you're read so far can come a realisation that there's a sequence I'm using to lead you to your own conclusion about what all this means.
And when you reflect on these words you'll discover within their meaning a deeper structure.
Like the structure of poetry.
And when that happens you'll recall the story of the archer and the king.
And you begin to be like the boy who paints targets around arrows in trees.
Completing the picture that looked incomplete until you thought about it later on.
Time is a mental construct. And so are words.
And that's why you can use both to help others find answers, but those answers are the ones you direct their consciousness towards.
Now are you beginning to see how all this fits together?
Or are you still dancing and supposing?
When you want higher responses you do things differently.
You can swim in the sea of sameness or you can fly in the face of conformity.
Your choice.
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