If you have read Psycho Cybernetics and understand it ...

Hi, Tim:

I haven't read Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz, M.D., for quite a few years, so I don't remember any specifics. I do remember enjoying it and benefiting from it. So, I will add it to my reading list and when I can get to it, I will read, review and respond here.

GT

Anyone out there actually read this thing?

What I just want is the cliff notes version and say here is the system in the nutshell, here is how you use it, etc.

Nobody?

Tim

There's an audio-book available. Maybe that would help you as an auditory learner.

I never read the book but I listened to the audio-book and I found it very interesting.
It seems like a slightly more rational and less fluffy approach to the whole intention manifestation thing.

Take the easier route...

Read/apply the "The Master Key" (ISBN 0900 604 050) by Charles F Haanel. You can get an "original" copy by phoning R & W Heap Publishing at this number - even if you're not in the UK:
+44(0)161 427 3513.

And, see if you can get a copy of the twin CD set "The Cosmic Ordering Service" by Barbel Mohr (ISBN is 1-84456-396-0)

I'm not really into books like Psycho Cybernetics anymore (or nlp, or tony robbins).

But one part about Pyscho Cybernetics that sticks out for me is a passage about identity. I'm paraphrasing, but he said, "your identity is rock solid. Violating what you think your identity is, would be like a law abiding citizen becoming a criminal and violating the law". That was very powerful for me.

You think about the line between a law abiding citizen and a criminal. That's a very clear line. So you better know what your identity is. Because you'll act in ways to support your identity.

MALTZ DID believe in a universal mind (God, source energy, etc...),
and that we are all connected just like what the "Secret" talks about.

Not just in "rational" metaphysics as you put it.

The reason is because a man as intelligent as MALTZ understood
that obviously we use the imagination to reprogram our brain,
but that doesn't explain what the imagination is or how it was
created.

So he realized there was another aspect to this than just
plain pyschology.

aniel

Dude, I've read Psycho-Cybernetics about 5 times. Awesome. I'd gladly talk to you about it. I understand how talking things through (with feedback) helps to enhance learning.

You can skype me: michaelgriswold

Once you get it, you'll love it. And, instead of feeling like its some sort of magic trick, you begin to understand that it's simply learning to take control of your thoughts.

As Winston Churchill said,

"The price of success is taking responsibility over each one of your thoughts."

Michael

Have to agree with John. I've been giving away copies of "The Magic Power of Self-Image Psychology" since the mid-70s. It has always seemed to me to be much more accessible and immediately helpful than "Psychocybernetics." However, I must say, an 8th grade reading teacher named Mrs. Clark possibly saved my life by giving me a copy of "Psychocybernetics" in 1966.

I was in an extremely depressive and suicidal state for some dumb teenage reason and the book turned on all the lights for me and turned my attitude around.

Maltz based his theories and teachings on the relatively new science of cybernetics and systems theory, as proposed by Norbert Wiener, Ph.D. in the 1940s.

Wiener's work led to servo mechanisms, feedback loops, self-correcting machines, and missile guidance systems.

Maltz applied these theories to the mind and to human behavior.

And Maltz taught that we think in images and that we don't respond to reality but respond to our limited images of reality. And so he taught how we can change the pictures and thus, change our responses.

For almost two decades now I've been writing that Richard Bandler and John Grinder and their various teams that helped develop NLP between about 1971 and 1981 borrowed richly from Maltz without giving him any credit.

Only recently have I become aware that I'm wrong. Or at least partially wrong. I don't know that they *didn't* borrow from Maltz. But what I have realized is that Maltz borrowed heavily from Gregory Bateson -- as did Bandler and Grinder and their teams. And Bandler and Grinder gave credit to Bateson for the borrowing. Maltz did not.

Anthropologist, semanticist and cyberneticist Bateson was the first to apply cybernetics and systems theory to human behavior and wrote and lectured about it extensively in the 1940s and 1950s. And continued to share wisdom and theories in cool publications like "Whole Earth Review" up until his death in 1980.

Interestingly, he was a professor at the experimental Kresge College on the UC Santa Cruz campus while NLP was being birthed there in the early 1970s, and knew Frank Pucelik and Richard Bandler and John Grinder at the time they were first working these things out. He even wrote the Introduction to Bandler's and Grinder's first co-authored book, "The Structure of Magic, Vol. I."

I'm now more inclined to believe that rather than appropriating huge hunks of "Psychocybernetics" outright, that the NLP founders and Maxwell Maltz both drew heavily from Bateson's theories and Maltz, in particular, made them accessible to the average person in a really easy to understand and follow self-help format.

(Maltz's language and examples aren't so accessible now, but that's only because the American language and culture have changed so much since 1960. The same is true with many of the early 1900s turn-of-the-century New Thought texts and psychology texts, some of which taught SOME of the same core principles that are at the heart of Psychocybernetics and NLP. The language and examples used in the books almost seem foreign now. The same will be true in 40 years of books on the bestseller list today.)

If you've ever done a workshop with Bandler -- or watched one on video tape -- or purchased any of his audios -- you're aware that much of the rapid change work that he does centers around having the clients examine the nature of the pictures in their minds at the moment they are experiencing unwanted behaviors.

"Psychocybernetics" does the same thing. And has you change those pictures.

Bandler (and his NLP teams) came up with more than a dozen aspects to examine in a mental picture. Or maybe it's more accurate to say, identified more than a dozen different ways individuals make and view mental pictures. They refer to these as "representational systems" and "submodalities." You can see a chart listing most of them -- though not in Bandler's specific and precise language -- on Wikipedia.org. Use the search term "Submodalities."

An NLP practitioner knows that each of those submodalities can be tweaked, manipulated, switched, etc. and that combinations of submodalities can be altered in one quick "swish". And that as the images are altered, so are the feelings and behaviors related to the image.

Maltz taught the same thing -- but he didn't have the extensive list of submodalities that NLP developed. Maltz would have you turn up (or down) the brightness, the colors, the size of the images. He might have you play them backwards, as in a movie running in reverse. He might have you change the soundtrack. All of that is valuable, when done with understanding of when how and why to do it and when it is done with precision.

And, interestingly, all of that was taught by Brown Landone as early as 1917 in several of his books. He called the process "Vivid Thinking."

And something similar was described by the remarkable genius and inventor Nicola Tesla as part of his creative process.

So, no, it's not all new. What matters is that you find someone who teaches it well and in a way that you grasp and can implement. And that you prove to yourself that it makes a difference in your life and effectiveness.

I haven't pulled out "The Magical Power of Self-Image Psychology" in several years. Think I will. And see if still seems as useful to me as it did the last time I gave a copy to someone who I thought would find it helpful. That was 12 years ago.

I'll mention as well that there is an audio book of Maxwell Maltz lecturing about "Self-Image Psychology." I bought it in a Glenwood Springs, Colorado, bookstore in 1989. Don't know if it's still in print, but is worth a search on Amazon if audio books appeal to you.

Best,
kwc

Please elaborate on your experience on that audio program. I've read the book and Max talks a lot about the Theatre -never in details though.