Stone Age NLP - from Connect Magazine

Neolithic folly
Twelve thousand years ago, in what is now the Middle East, a band of diminutive hunter-gatherers made a profound observation. The realisation that animals could be domesticated and plants propagated. The implications would have terrifi ed them if they could have foreseen them. Agriculture and pastoralism heralded a sinister set of destructive value systems unknown to the huntergatherer ethos. Power, greed and possession would now dominate and subjugate humanity, transforming the beautiful world of nomads, dreamers and story-tellers into the senseless drudgery of the plough, the assembly line and the PC.. It was to transform the very identity of the human species.
Stone Age NLP swims against that tide. Twelve thousand years is a flicker in an evolutionary sense. Ancient hunter-gatherer bands are plunging in to extinction, an entire culture lost every two weeks. But this is not the end. Deep within our psyche the campfire of the hunter-gatherer still flickers in us all, albeit faintly. Stone Age NLP is regenerating the identity of the huntergatherer in a meta sense. In a sense that the values, beliefs, skills, behaviours and even the physical environment as it is perceived by hunter-gatherers can be seamlessly and magically integrated into our modern world. This is not a rallying call to don the loin cloth but a profound realisation that it isn’t too late to admit that our forebears made a mistake and that we can re-take possession of our hunter-gatherer ancestry and the cognitive and behavioural tradition that took three and a half million years to perfect. NLP provides a potent and effective framework to achieve that.

Hunter-gatherer map of the world
The co-founder of NLP, John Grinder and his partner Judith DeLozier are fascinated by the map of reality shared by the hunter-gatherer clan. In the seminal NLP text, Turtles all the way down : Prerequisites to personal genius, they cite a number of delightful examples. The Mbuti Pygmy who, when first taken from his equatorial African rainforest home out onto the open savanna, refuses to believe that the buffalo in the distance are not insects. In NLP we show how the map (our perception of reality) is not the territory (reality itself).
John also cites the Kalahari San. When a San hunter is asked who the kill belongs to, he replies “to the owner of the arrow”. On the surface the words indicate that the kill belongs to the hunter who shot it. Closer investigation reveals an entirely different reality. The arrow could belong to any clan member; it is unusual for a hunter to “own” any of the arrows. John suggests that this system ensures that the hunter is not burdened with distributing the meat. The reality is far more complex and goes to the centre of the San value system. Arrows are gifts and no gift is held for too long, especially sought after gifts like arrows. They pass perpetually from person to person. The person who, at the time, “owns” the arrow is responsible for distributing the meat. Passing the arrow lies at the heart of the San egalitarian value system, preventing individuals from rising in prominence over others and avoiding jealousy, greed and possession. Consider the transformational power in the modern world of this value system.

The Kalahari San
Stone Age NLP focuses on the San people of the Kalahari Desert. These are the Earth’s fi rst people, the oldest surviving culture on the planet and they use the most complex language on Earth. The language of the !Xo San of southern Botswana has 80 click consonants, 39 non-click consonants and some 44 vowels. English is grunting by comparison and for a non-linguist listening to the San speak, the complexity of the click sounds is like mesmerizing music, in sharp contrast to our own guttural tongue.
Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic fi eld has strong resonance with the San’s perceptive capacity in their desert world. They seem to possess a sensory acuity beyond the Aristotelian senses of sight, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting. This can be awe inspiring when witnessed first hand. My wife, Anne and I once accompanied a San tracker into the southern Kalahari Desert in pursuit of a coalition of three male lions. With 150 lions in over 20 million acres of desert, fi nding them without a San tracker was not an option. After three days without success we came across a half a toe print in the mud around a waterhole. From this the tracker told us which of the three males had drunk there at what
time, that he had killed and eaten a large antelope that night, and pointed to an exact spot on a high dune where he suspected the lion would have crossed to rest under a shade tree. All in the total absence of any further tracks. After a long detour to get behind the dune we found the lion, stuffed full and resting under the shade of a tree. Could he have read all that from a half toe print ? What is going on?

Stone Age economics
There is the great myth perpetuated by our Neolithic ancestors, that we were better off with agriculture. That had more leisure time and that we are best off today in our modern world. Nothing could be further from the truth. The San spend some three hours a day making a living, and this in one of the Earth’s toughest deserts. The rest of the time they sit under trees telling stories. The same applies to hunter-gatherers across the planet. Agriculture is very hard work and the modern industrialised world is the toughest yet, demanding most of our waking life.

Child rearing and learning
Then there are the children who the San love above all. Anthropologists are mystified that the women conceive only every four years. My wife Anne is convinced that it is because they breast feed their children until they are three, preventing ovulation. The San women have a delightful explanation of their own. It is because their God, Gao Na, loves children deeply and prefers to keep them for himself!
The San would never leave a child awake in a crib let alone lying on its back. The child is kept in a sling on the mother’s side with a full view of the world, in skin to skin contact and within arms reach of the breast at all times. These children have cognitive and motor skill development far advanced of any modern society. They talk and walk earlier and master complex hand-eye coordination months ahead of our western infants.
San learning is different to Western learning. The young male San are not taught to hunt. Indeed for a hunter to put himself forward as a teacher would bring scorn as he would be seen to be elevating himself into a position of power. Instead all men tell stories of their hunts which the young listen to and watch. The scientific rigour with which the story is told is impeccable, better than many of our “objective” scholars. When the time is right the young man will go and try it for himself - a fully experiential learning. Aversion to power and prestige is carried through to the hunt. If a hunter successfully kills a large animal he will tell the clan he has killed a miserable creature and they will agree, asking him whether he actually expects them to eat such a thing!

Death and dying
It has been said that the most profound event in our evolutionary development was the moment when we fi rst perceived our own mortality. With this realisation was born the quest for the meaning of life, or more pertinently, the meaning of any afterlife.
San spirituality is beautiful. The ancestors simply want us to join them. They miss us. We would rather keep our clan members here thank you very much. The shamanic ceremony where this plays itself out is the trance dance, under the expanse of the desert sky around a raging campfire. Here we dance around the fire, raising the energy in our beings, vaporising it until it boils, spreading from the pit of our stomachs up the spine to our arms, fingers and brain. With this healing energy or Num, we can see the illness and pull it out, arguing with the ancestors and casting it out beyond the fire. There is the acceptance that death is inevitable and that one day we will pass into that realm and then hang about the edges of the desert fi re to encourage our mortal brothers and sisters to join us.
Spirituality was the element most corrupted by power, greed and possession. It locked onto fear as the lever for power, with absurd fables of hell, damnation and religious fundamentalism. Guilt and fear kept the hamster firmly on the wheel in an ungodly alliance between the preacher and the fat cat. What a beautiful perception of the spirit world the San have in comparison.
Stone Age NLP draws upon the ancient wisdom of our ancestors and fits this within the framework of NLP. A delightful metaphor from NLP for our perception of reality is that, it is as if we walk through a dark world with a fl ashlight, sampling but a small fragment of the reality out there. In Stone Age NLP the sun is beginning to rise once again.

Greg and Anne Laws run Internationally Accredited NLP training courses that incorporate the ethos of Stone Age NLP with the option of completing NLP Practitioner training with full accreditation in the Kalahari, in the presence of the San. For more information contact: Openmind Training Ltd., Tel: 01794 399979 www.openmindtraining.co.uk