Mixed Messages, NLP & Collapsing Anchors

Armando Ianucci, writing in the Telegraph, noted that the first lines of the first stanza of Milton's "Paradise Lost," can be hummed to the theme tune of the cartoon series, "The Flintstones,"

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/jmilton/bl-jmilton_plost_1.htm

There's something I find really funny about that, like when I laughed last week about someone writing about economics on a forum, and wondering if at the Marks & Spencers AGM, they introduced the annual figures with "...this is not *just* a profit warning ..." (You need to have heard the sultry voice doing that on the M&S TV adverts, and even then you'll probably not find it that funny).

I guess it's the NLP student in my head, listening to those mixed communications, where the content and the delivery are completely diametric to each other. We humans are incredible things - a close friend told me this week that they'd been told of the death of a friend's small child on the same day they themselves became a grandmother, and were holding their new grandson. "I can now tell you I know," they said, "that it's possible to hold two completely opposite emotions in your head at the same time."

In NLP work with clients, I often get them to "collapse anchors" by imagining ridiculous music in their head at the same time as playing through an event they are concerned about, and repeat this (in a very particular way) until they cannot imagine the original event without laughing out loud and wondering why they were ever concerned about it.

Imagine then, for one moment, that you could imagine utter illumination and an answer to everything you ever questioned, a contentment beyond belief, for one brief second, being filled with and through the Universe now, your old self, everything you ever thought, collapsed, not being held in your head at the same time, the self held up against the light and truth ... but another anchor removed, leaving Nothing but Truth and Now ... and that's right, it could be that easy to know nothing but that ...

"This is not *just* an ordinary Blog ..." LOL.