NLP Values and the Evolution of Consciousness Part 1

This article is the first in a series of articles dedicated to the understanding of individual values in relationship to the evolution of consciousness. If aside from just learning NLP you’re interested in recognizing what is implied in the process of evolving your own consciousness, I invite you to read these articles and ask more relevant questions on our blog. I will be posting more articles on this topic. Stay tuned, this will be a very important series of articles.

First I’d like to clarify one important issue. There are no set values that are good or bad. There are no “right” or “wrong” values, although depending on which culture you’re living in, the society would like to tell you that some values are good and some are bad. Understand that I am not talking here about behavior which could be good or bad, right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, I am talking about values which are quite different from behaviors, beliefs or attitudes. We will define values in a moment.

Values are individual and run mostly at the unconscious level and each individual has different values.

The idea that there are people without values VS others who have values is a clever psy-op used in marketing and political campaigns. You hear a lot of talk about the “right” values, “we _____ (insert your favorite corporation or politician name here) have values and they _____(insert here the opposing or competing corporation or politician) do not! Ha! If people would understand values they would laugh themselves silly at the meaninglessness of that sentence.

Everybody Has Values

So all that talk about “we have values VS they don’t” is a lot of gobbledygook because everybody has values. Yes, everybody.

Oh, other people’s values may not be your values, therefore they may seem foreign to you, they may seem even wrong or inappropriate, however, everybody has values. Therefore let’s define values. What are they? (In NLP some people call them ˜criteria’ however in our NLP Coaching Trainings we call them values.)

Values Are What Is Important To Us.

Not what we like or what we dislike, but what’s important to us. If you hate paperwork but you do it, it means it is important to you and therefore it is a value for you. If you go to church every Sunday, it means it is important to you, so it is one of your values – it may be called spirituality, it may be called salvation of your soul, but it is one of your values. If you organize family meetings where relatives are coming together and you cook a good meal and enjoy seeing them all together it means that it is important to you, and this is one of your values. If you work overtime to do more real estate sales, making sales it is important to you and so it is one of your values. These are all examples of different values.

Are you telling me that are people roaming around for whom nothing is important? Maybe drinking beer? Maybe fishing? Maybe having sex? Tweeting? Nothing at all? Hard to believe!

But, since people are individual entities, their values are different – although there is a systematic push to uniformity in values in our society, a push toward making all people have the same values. This has not and will not work as long as human beings remain human beings and are not micro-chipped entities (see this article here) from the BBC for the beginning of the micro-chipped era).

Of course there are common values among people, however the first things to remember are the following:

Values are not what we like but what is important to us
Every person has values and
Every individual set of values is different from another individual’s

Our individual values are organized in sets of priorities – some values are more important than others – in a sort of a hierarchy of priorities. But more important for our present article, depending on what values are present we can gather valuable information about what kind of thinking is prevalent for that person according to their life concerns (or their individual values).

I wrote in a previous article titled “Do This, And You’ll Be Stuck Forever” (see it here) the brief description of seven different types of thinking prevalent in our world today. This description comes from the industrial psychologist Dr. Clare Graves. Here a quote from one of my previous posts regarding Graves.

‘Industrial psychologist Clare Graves. Graves was a professor of psychology and originator of a theory of adult human development. In his work he showed how humans develop new coping mechanisms all geared towards solving existential problems and cope with their worlds.’ we teach his system since it is vital for the understanding of yourself, your family, community and the entire world around you. A very important point which is directly linked to NLP and Time Line Therapy® is what Graves postulated, which is that

“man’s nature is not a set thing, that it is ever emergent, that it is an open system, not a closed system.” This open-endedness set his approach apart from many of his contemporaries […]

In other words, he realized something extremely important: that there is no end to human perfection. There is no “final state”. Human beings are destined to perpetually further develop. This is why NLP and Time Line Therapy® come in handy as tools for this development.

And herein lies the whole secret: there is no end to human “perfection” therefore there is no set of values that is final in its “goodness”, or “rightness”.

That being said, in Part 2 of this article we’ll proceed further in our analysis and see how values are related to the development of one’s consciousness.

Until then, be well