Submodalities - The Theater of the Mind

Submodality is an NLP term for the components we have available to construct and order our inner representations of experience. The following modalities carry the power of trance/delusion/confusion of your experience, in your inner and outer world.

1.) Inner sensory components (seeing, feeling, etc.).
 2.) Association and dissociation.
 3.) Color and black and white.
 4.) Motion and stills (as in pictures).
 5.) Location in space and time.
 6.) Backgrounds and boundaries.
 7.) Textures and tonality.
 8.) Speed: rate of change (fast/slow; everything changes).
 9.) Language: syntax, grammar, inflection, etc. 
 10.) Size, resolution, and what else? (Think about it!)

Being aware of this inner theater, you can begin to play with your own submodalities in order to change your experience in beneficial ways. When you understand this, you can be endlessly creative with technique in the most powerful way, spontaneously, because you will have grasped the nature of communication, experience, and trance structure. You will never be afraid of encountering an unknown challenge.

It can be disturbing to regard mind as theater. Some may resist using techniques involving visualization, imagination, notions of Inner Guides, etc. because something in them, in their experience, knows genuineness exists, sacredness exists, real contact exists, and intimacy exists. You react to these tools as deceptions, forgetting that when they are suffering, they are living in their own self-created deceptions. You throw away sacredness, just as you fear these therapeutic devices may make you settle for self-deception. On the contrary, these theatrical deceptions are meant to dissolve and break the density of the pre-existing prison of egoic trance deceptions, of habitual theatrical structures and procedures that you have mastered so thoroughly that you are unaware of them.

Think about your father. Think about your car. Think about a ham sandwich. How do you know you are thinking about your father? How do you know you are not thinking about a ham sandwich?

Is it not true that you know what you are thinking about because you have inner pictures, sounds, and sensations? You know its your father and not a ham sandwich because you see him!

Now, is he in a movie or a snap shot, is it color or black and white? There are no right answers. Just notice the qualities of your natural way of remembering.

Now change them to the other