Customer Reviews

Six Blind Elephants: Understanding Ourselves and Each Other, Vol. 1: Fundamental Principles of Scope and Category

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This is a brilliant and practical book. Most people are creating how they feel, how they behave, what and who they attract, and what and who they are attracted to, without knowing HOW thay are doing any of it. For such people, it seems as if life is "just happening." In Six Blind Elephants, Steve Andreas peeks behind the curtain (or, rather, inside the mind) to describe what we are doing--pretty much on autopilot--to create what happens in our lives.

As someone who teaches similar information, I though Steve's treatment of this material was inspired. If you're looking for a feel-good inspiriational book, this isn't for you. But if you want to understand a lot of what you automatically do outside your awareness, and how it generates much of how you feel, how you behave, and what and who you attract and are attracted to--and, you'd like to be more in charge of this creative process--this book is a gem.

Bill Harris,[...].

I'm taking Bill Harris' online class and bought this book partly upon his recommendation.

This review is for people like me, lay people, rather than practioners in the field which the currently posted reviews of this book seem to be written by. It's for people taking Bill Harris' class wondering what they'll get from this book.

While I am impressed with this book--it is dense and rich and provides a thorough grounding in NLP--it is not a fun, light frothy read. It reads like NLP for Practioners and Serious Students rather than Intro to NLP for the Casual Reader.

I must admit I was hoping for NLP for the casual reader.

I've worked my way through both volumes. For those of us taking Harris' class, my impression is that I don't think it's necessary unless you're really interested in knowing more about NLP and you enjoy learning on your own.

If you decide to do further studies in NLP then this book is excellent for providing explicit back ground and context that you can take w/ you to other authors' books.

Bottom line, you have to know what level of interest you have in NLP to determine whether a book written for professionals is of interest to you.

This 300 pg tome (part one of two) should be entitled "The Structure of Wisdom." It reads like a technical manual on the art of living. Probably the most remarkable thing about Andreas' perspective is that just when you think he has made a universal generalization, he provides a context for his statement and indicates a different context in which the opposite is true.

Clearly written, yet filled with difficult ideas that could be meditated on for a lifetime, I found myself feeling like the book was a mere outline for a vast library of wisdom to be found in the secret "volumes 3 through 1000."

Remarkably jargon-free, this book transcends and includes the field of NLP and lands somewhere in the intersection of Philosophy, Psychology, Therapy, Linguistics, and Cognitive Science. Also rare in NLP books, this work is written with what comes across as real humility--the kind that comes with earned wisdom from life experience.

This work covers a huge range--from the deeply philosophical to the imminently practical--leaving the reader with a sense that many human problems can be overcome more elegantly that we might have thought if we take the time to learn and practice the technical details of human understanding.

Steve Andreas' "Six Blind Elephants" is long overdue. It is a brilliant re-coding (or re-categorization) of NLP, and most of the cognitive sciences. Every teacher of NLP must find his own metaphor for the science of the structure of subjective experience, a story he can tell trainees for 24 days, and Steve has found one that is one of the most comprehensive yet. Bravo! My only disappointment is that it doesn't have a zippier title, like "Mental Mastery/ Verbal Power," or some other type of Mass-Market braggadocio, so that it could get the wide audience it so richly deserves. Remember, if it's true-- it ain't bragging!

''Six Blind Elephants: Understanding Ourselves and Each Other, Vol. 1: Fundamental Principles of Scope and Category'' AND ''Six Blind Elephants: Understanding Ourselves and Each Other, Vol. 2: Applications and Explorations of Scope and Catagory (v. 2)'' are written for you to start interpreting the world we view differently. These writings take you by the hand and help you understand the why we chunk (up/down), we put boundries around our scope, we catagorize the world in order to make it manageable.

I love books where every sentence or paragraph invites you to think about it. These books fall into this category. In a way it is - using other language patterns - the translation of Neuro Semantics. Thereby giving you te freedom to work with this NLP-information more freely.

These books make you think!

This is a really good piece of work by Steve Andreas. It's utterly amazing. It's kind of a challenging read at first though. And I do prefer the first volume over the second but the material in it is so good. I love it. It's gone so far to develop my understanding about the structure of people's internal world. How they categorize their thoughts, he explains logical levels better than from what I can tell Robert Dilts and L. Michael Hall ever have. And that's not meant to be a sleight to either one of them. They have both made important contributions to the field of NLP.

Before I read this book I thought Richard Bandler was the master of teaching about working with generalizations. I think Steve Andreas one upped him on this one. Definitely check it out! It's not always an easy read but it is definitely a rewarding read. That will pay you dividends for years to come.

the first book is great looking forward to finishing it where I can start the second book part two.

This book has way too much fluff. NLP is simple and like everything else you can take something simple and make it complex.