I had wondered for some time what it would be like when the long ordeal of getting myself firmly established as an academic was over and there were no more hoops for me to jump through. Now, when I came back from my sabbatical as a tenured full professor, I thought I knew what the answer to that question was, and it seemed so obvious that I was surprised that I hadn't realized it before. Namely, it seemed that it was now time for me to leave the academic world. (Finding a way to do that had been one of my goals for my sabbatical, after all, although I certainly hadn't accomplished much in that respect.)

I was now firmly convinced that 1984-85 would be my last year at the University of Hawaii, and undoubtedly in the academic world, although I still had no idea whatsoever what I would do next. I even put my condominium apartment up for sale.

However by the spring of 1985, my resolution had wavered. Things seemed not quite as bad as they had before. The Legislature actually made funds for merit raises available, and I was given one. (In my total of twenty years at the University of Hawaii, there have been two occasions where I was eligible to apply for a merit raise, and on both occasions I was given that raise. All the other raises I've ever had have been standard step increments given to all faculty indiscriminately.) There was also quite a bit of talk of considerably raising faculty salaries at UH in general. (In fact, in the period from 1984 to 1992, my salary would more than double. If these salary raises, or even a hint of them, had come four or five years earlier, they would have had a profound impact on the direction of my life, in that I would probably have continued being a serious mathematician. As it was, though, by the time they came about I had already changed direction. Between 1984 and 1990, I did write three papers, including one that was, in my opinion, one of the nicest I ever wrote. But my heart was no longer in mathematics.)

Partly because of this, and mostly just because of pure inertia (and cowardice), I did not sell my apartment and decided to remain at the University of Hawaii at least for the time being.

During my NLP training in 1983-84, one of the problems I had chosen to work on a whole lot could be summararized in the question, ``How come I never manage to accomplish much in my life?'' Some people would argue that getting a Ph.D. and becoming a tenured full professor were major accomplishments, but I had in mind more tangible things -- things that would extend beyond the range of my personal life. Basically, in this respect what I could count were a handful of mathematical papers, which admittedly do constitute a major contribution to my own sub-specialty. But this seemed to me (and still does seem) like a small thing to represent the efforts of a lifetime.

As for my students, I felt (and still feel) that very few of them gained more from my classes than a few units credit -- nor wanted to. I can't feel much of a sense of accomplishment about my teaching. Someone whose talents were far less than my own could have done the job quite as well.

One of the things I had gained from the initial course in NLP I had taken in 1983, though, was the impulse to question my own values, and the realization that there were many alternative values possible. Maybe, I now thought, accomplishing things was not really what I should want out of life. Maybe what I really wanted was simply to have an interesting life. So I set out to try to bring that about, and in some ways I think that I was rather successful in that respect, and I now have a sense of satisfaction about that.

Even just regularly going to a local bar, Anna Bannana's seemed like a major adventure at first. At that time it was a considerably wilder place than it has since become. A lot of bikers used to hang out there, and there was a great deal of drug usage outside in the parking lot and even in the bar itself. People accepted the fact that although, except for the very occasional toke on a joint, I don't do drugs myself, I didn't have any problem with other people doing them.

At Anna's I quickly met a guy named Bill R who was the sort of obnoxious alcoholic that Jack Nicholson plays so well (for instance, in ``Terms of Endearment''). Bill really liked me, probably because I would give him almost as much of a hard time as he gave everybody else. And since he knew absolutely everybody, I got to know most of the regulars at Anna's fairly well. I certainly had some very interesting crazy minor interactions with women there, some of which are recounted in the snapshots section of these web pages.

Many years later, Bill and I became not nearly such good friends, partly because of a couple of interactions I had with his girlfriends which he misunderstood and partly because he stopped working as a housepainter and went back to full-time drug dealing. (Not that I was ever overt in my disapproval of what he was doing, but he had become involved in a life that I could no longer relate to. In any case, he died a few years ago at the age of thirty-eight because of a heart condition aggravated by much too much use of cocaine.)

I started attending a seminar on human sexuality conducted by Dr. Milton Diamond in the Medical School at UH, and this led to my taking summer courses at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. Through the classes and the Institute and through becoming a member of The Society of Janus I gradually started getting to know the alternative sex community in San Francisco.

At first, I hoped that I might actually get some sort of certificate, if not degree, from the Institute and somehow manage to start a new career in the area of sexuality. This possibility strongly attracted me, until I began to understand how difficult that would be. And even so, I still think that in terms of my real values (which even now are something I struggle to understand), I made a major mistake in 1985 and 1986 in not pursuing that path.

I was also doing a lot of NLP with friends, with acquaintances, and essentially with anyone who would let me help them work on some personal problem of any nature. Eventually I met a young massage therapist who called herself Samardo. who came over to my apartment once a week for NLP sessions for a period of several months, working on a large variety of personal problems. None of her problems was especially severe, and she was a very quick client, so that after the first session or two we would be able to resolve two or three issues at every session. Her interest was more in learning the NLP processes than in resolving major problems in her life, and eventually my role became as much a teacher as a (for want of a better word) therapist. Unfortunately, she then moved on to some new age stuff that, in my eyes at least, was completely crackpot. (Not that I ever told her this.)

Through Samardo, I also met someone who came over to my apartment for nine sessions to work on essentially two, or maybe three, major issues. Unlike Samardo, working with him required considerable effort and creativity on my part. Eventually I believe that I was almost totally successful in resolving the issues that involved his relationship with his parents, and neutralizing some truly horrible memories from his childhood. With his other problem, though, which was to regain the complete use of an arm which had been injured several years before in an accident, I was not able to achieve the total success I had hoped for. However he himself was quite happy with our work, and said that he could now monitor daily improvement in the arm, and that I had helped him more than all the physical therapy he had tried previously (conventional orthopedics, chiropracty, Rolfing, just about every conceivable approach). In any case, I joked to myself that after having worked on one pair of problems with him for nine long sessions, it was time for me to either stop or else learn psychoanalysis or some other form of long-term therapy. (The joke, of course, was that the nine sessions I had done with him, constituted a course of treatment far briefer than what conventional therapists refer to as ``brief therapy.'' But I do think that it is about as long as an NLP practitioner should work with one client on one problem.)

As a way of practicing my NLP skills, I also started doing suicide prevention work as a volunteer. What proportion of the work I did with callers to the Suicide and Crisis Center constituted ``doing NLP'' is something I never could decide. It was quite rare that I used anything that could be identified as an NLP technique. But I believe that the kind of thinking I had learned during my NLP training was responsible for my ability to be sensitive to the true concerns underlying callers complaints, and my ability to find questions to ask callers that would be effective in bringing about a change in their internal state, if only a temporary one. (And I do believe, although I have no evidence for my belief, that in some cases I was able to make a permanent difference in a caller's life.)

I still count these three years of volunteer work in suicide prevention as one of the most worthwhile things I've done in my whole life.

Through the Rashneeshis I had met, I found out about a workshop called The Art of Being, based in large part on Rashneesh's principles and given by someone who at that time was calling himself Rajen who had been a fairly close associate of Rashneesh. (He later went back to using his legal name, Alan Lowen.) I went through several of his workshops.

The Art of Being workshops were the antithesis of the NLP trainings I'd been through. The NLP approach is extremely rational. Even those parts of NLP which some people consider mystical are a very rational approach to mysticism. Rajen's workshops, on the other hand, were rooted in spirituality (a word I have never been able to relate to) and emphasized meditation (which I have also never been able to relate to).

Rajen's workshops didn't turn me into a mystic, but they did make me realize for the first time that there are ways in which mysticism does make sense. The main message was that one should stop trying to figure out the world, stop ``working on'' one's problems, stop looking for answers, but simply be aware of the world, of other people, and, most especially, of one's own being. Then, instead of trying to do everything the right way, one should simply go out and ``do your dance in the world,'' as Rajen so often stated it.

Now for my part, I know that I will never stop trying to figure the world out. That is one of the most fundamental urges at the core of my being (and, in fact, is an essential part of my ``dance'' with the world). But being in Rajen's workshops, I did come to realize that often the incessant, never-ending attempt to figure things out, to find the solution, to find the right technique, mainly functions as a source of noise that distracts one from being aware of who one really is. It is important to give it a rest some of the time -- even to give it a rest most of the time. It gets in the way of one's really living one's life.

Rajen's workshops at that time had very little in the way of structure -- not much in the way of a explanation, almost no exercises, no techniques. (A few years later, he would start using more structure.) We simply sat in a circle without speaking. We didn't know -- especially the new ones, like myself -- what was supposed to be happening, what we were supposed to be doing. (If someone asked, Rajen might say, ``Whatever you're trying to do, stop trying.'') And eventually something would happen. Maybe someone would start crying. Or someone would ask a question.

Now even at the beginning, I was aware that some of the more experienced participants in the group had worked out a set of rules themselves in how the game was supposed to be played -- the ``right'' thing to do. For one woman (or man), crying might be the ``right'' response to the group. For another, it might be making a statement or asking a question -- maybe something as simple as, ``What do you have to say to me?'' In my opinion (for what it's worth), anything of this sort was essentially an avoidance mechanism -- a means of escaping from the unbearable tension of simply being with other people (and being with oneself) and being completely aware of them, without the relief of any of the usual social distractions. But such attemped avoidances were actually (again, in my opinion) a good thing, because it was these attempts to escape that enabled the group to go deeper.

In any case, anything a member of the group did to single him/herself out would make him/her a target for Rajen. And being Rajen's target was not always pleasant (although certainly not always unpleasant). He was not always confrontational, by any means, but for many members of the group, when confrontations came, they were readily accepted. This was familiar territory. This was group therapy, where confrontation -- even hostile confrontation -- is used as a means of breaking down someone's resistance so that they can solve their problems.

To me (again, for what it's worth), such moments of confrontation were the times when the group didn't work, when Rajen was unable to stay true to his own principles. What was fascinating to me -- and what seemed much more valuable -- were the times when Rajen was able to say something non-confrontational to one of the group members, something seemingly almost inconsequential, and have a deep impact.

I kept trying to figure out what was happening: how he could get such surprisingly dramatic effects from statements that seemed so innocuous. Finally it happpened to me myself. It was getting toward the end of a three-day workshop, and it became clear that I would not have an interaction with Rajen unless I sought one. So, in the group, I asked a question: probably just something like, ``Do you have any words for me?'' And he said, ``Lee, you have such a beautiful smile. And it's been very difficult for me to learn to distinguish between the times when your smile shows genuine joy, and those times when you use it to cover up your pain.'' And I started crying rather profusely without any idea why.

I thought about this, and things he had said to other people, for a long time afterwards. And finally I thought I understood what he did. By simply putting one's attention on someone -- opening up one's awareness to them without trying to figure things out, simply being receptive -- one can be aware of the pain within them. And if one makes a statement that acknowledges that pain, one can have a profound and very therapeutic impact.

This is the direct opposite of the NLP approach, where students are trained to be consciously aware of the ``minimal cues'' such as changes in breathing, muscle tension, and skin color which are the basis of such intuitions. And in a way, I feel that I have to outrage my NLP friends by saying that the NLP approach is more superficial. And yet at the same time, I think that this goes to the heart of what NLP is: namely, to take something that skilled people do without even conscious awareness, and to break it down into steps that an unskilled person can consciously learn. It would be foolish, in my opinion, to use NLP as a reason for discounting skilled intuition. But it can be useful in training intuition in those who do not have it as a natural skill.

Most of my friends were now people who were not highly educated -- at least in the conventional academic sense. Some of them had college degrees, but their education had not been important to them in the way that mine had been for me.

It wasn't that up until this time my circles of friends had always consisted of academics. But up until now, I had mostly got along well with people who were interested in abstract ideas and at least occasionally read serious books. With the people I was now spending most of my non-work time with, I didn't have this sort of commonality of interest. They had neither the interest nor the ability to step into my intellectual world. (When I went into some of their houses, I didn't see a single book.) I had to learn to be accepted on their terms. I found this a major challenge, and my ability to master it was a sense of real satisfaction for me.

I also found that I had a lot to learn from my new friends/acquaintances. They understood a lot of things about the world that I did not. I would look at them and think about the fact that I had gone through life following the rules, following the path everyone recommended: going to college, getting an education, getting a good job, being a responsible parent, being concerned about the future and saving money, not taking illegal drugs or using alcohol to excess, never being arrested. And most of the people I now socialized with had not followed these rules very well. For the most part they were concerned with living their lives now and having a good time, whereas in the past I had been mostly obsessed by living for the future. And as far as I could see, their lives didn't seem to be any worse than mine. In some ways, theirs seemed better.

It was only later, when I lived in San Francisco on my next sabbatical in 1990-91 that I started to realize how much I missed the sort of intellectual life which I had moved away from (something which is so common in San Francisco and so rare in Hawaii).

At the same time, though, I certainly did not learn to adapt to the single life very quickly. It was depressing to see the sort of women that seemed to be available. But what was even more depressing was to realize that I looked just as dreary to the available women as they did to me. When I looked through classified ads, all I saw were people who said they were interested in surfing, hiking, sailing, tennis, and maybe dancing. There didn't seem to be any place in that world for someone like me.

In retrospect, though, I can't feel now that very much of the time I spent with the women I knew during that part of my life was wasted. On the contrary, with one or two exceptions I felt that I got a lot of value from all of them -- even the ones who later left me feeling ripped off.

I think, though, that what really bothered me was the feeling that I could never be my complete self with any of them. With every woman I knew, there were parts of myself that I had to repress, usually not so much because I thought the woman would be repelled by them, but simply because I didn't think that she'd know how to relate to them. With many women, I had to completely repress my intellectual side, because I knew that that wouldn't make any sense to them. With other women, I had to deny my attraction towards sexual adventures and S&M. For others, my interest in going out to bars -- especially low life bars -- was totally alien. What bothered me was that a woman who knew me as, for instance, someone interested in NLP simply assumed that that was the totality of who I was. Usually she wouldn't even suspect that there could be other parts of me which were equally important.

My first relationship with after my marriage was with a woman I had started corresponding with even before I came back to Honolulu from Berkeley, a quadriplegic named Debbie who lived in Southern California. Being involved in a relationship with someone with a physical disability was a major challenge for me, and certainly not one which I would have ever sought intentionally. Our getting to know each other was an accident (it was her roommate Annette who had originally written to me), but there was something in her I responded to so strongly that I overcame my distaste for her physical problems. (Of course there was also the fact that I was able to help her enormously with some of her emotional problems when we first met, partly through NLP but mostly just by being myself. My friend Janet says that being a rescuer is one of the most basic components of my make-up.)

In some ways, Debbie was the best of all the women I was involved with after my divorce. Although her tastes weren't intellectual, she had an intelligence and an academic orientation similar to mine. (She was a law student at UCLA and also an elementary education student.) We found it easy to talk to each other, really liked spending time together, and because of the rather wild circle of friends she had, knowing her was a real adventure.

Unfortunately, she wasn't able to leave California and I couldn't see any way of leaving Hawaii. Eventually she moved to Florida and we mostly lost contact.

Several years later, she had come back to Southern California again and we were planning at spend some time together during my sabbatical in 1990-91. But before that could happen, she died on the operating table. During her thirty-six years or so, she'd survived roughly an equal number of operations, but finally there was one she didn't survive.

She went to both a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist every week, both of whom she was on first-name terms with, and spent several weeks each year in one of the local mental hospitals.

As with many other women I've known, I mostly played the role of a teacher for her, introducing her to many experiences that were far outside the world she knew. I took her to More University groups, to the First Friday singles group at the Unitarian Church, and to a weekend Tantra workshop with Charles and Carolyn Muir. (She later convinced her psychiatrist and his wife to sign up for it.)

I introduced her to Dr. Milton Diamond, and she came to some of the Thursday afternoon sex seminars. An odd thing about Sue was that she never seemed to have any feeling of not fitting in with any group, no matter how far it was outside her normal circle. (She did say to me, though, when I first started taking her to the Unitarian Church and to the More University evenings that she hadn't had much experience before with ``mixed'' groups -- meaning both men and women.) She was always herself, very straightforward and never worrying about impressing people. People could see that she was a little strange, but they could also see that she had a lot of expertise in various subjects, and almost everybody liked her.

I took her the kind of movies she'd never seen before. The first one was ``Nuts," the Barbra Streisand film about a woman who refuses to remain in a mental hospital. I think my response to it was more emotional than hers though. She didn't completely approve of the outcome. (The public defender, played by Richard Dreyfus, got his client free, of course.) ``It's not that simple,'' she said. ``Sometimes people just aren't capable of taking care of themselves.''

She cried at the end of ``Ironweed,'' a film about the depression with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, based on the book by William Kennedy. She also cried profusely at the end of ``Good Morning Vietnam,'' although she couldn't explain why.

When someone one of our friends once asked her, ``What's different about going to movies with Lee?'' her answer was, ``Watching all the credits until the very end.'' It was certainly not the answer I would have hoped for. But whereas courtroom lawyers have the adage, ``Never ask a witness a question unless you know what the answer will be,'' with Sue it was more, ``Never ask Sue a question unless you're prepared to hear an answer that will surprise you and you probably won't like.''

It's very hard for me to explain about Sue without giving a completely false impression. It's true that there were a lot of things that went with the territory when one knew her and one just had to accept -- the occasional suicide notes on my answering machine, the periods when she was completely non-functional, her inability to ever give a straight answer to a direct question, the time when she called at five in the morning and said, ``I'm in my room, but everything seems strange to me, and I don't know what's happening or who I am.'' (I had her describe the room she was in and the chair she was sitting in and the clothes she was wearing, to bring her back to sensory reality. She later said that she had had no idea that it was five in the morning.) But we had an enormous amount of fun together -- probably about as much fun as I've ever had with any woman in my life. (Partly this was because her mood swings were so extreme. When she was depressed, she was a rock bottom, and when she was happy, she was completely uninhibited in her happiness, without, however, being dangerously euphoric.)

When I think about our times together, part of me thinks I was foolish to ever break up with her. But for all the fun we had together, she just wasn't the sort of woman I was looking for.

It was never clear to me exactly when we did break up. When we had first met she asked me what kind of relationships I preferred. Not knowing how to respond, I said that I preferred short term relationships, and in response to her question I said that a short term relationship would last less then a year.

At the beginning of September of the following year (1998), Sue told me that she was growing anxious about the approach of Thanksgiving, the anniversary of our first date. I said to her, "Well, our relationship doesn't have to be over in exactly 365 days." Then she said that she'd rather not break up before October, because she had a lot of stressful things happening then, and I said that that would be fine.

Meanwhile we were getting along together just as well as ever, but she had an understanding that we would be breaking up soon, and I thought that this would be good, because I definitely didn't want to continue in a relationship with her forever. Finally, in December of 1988 I agreed to go on a short trip to Kaua'i with her, and although we never explicitly said so, I had the impression that that marked the end of our relationship. After that, for quite a while she still came over to my apartment and we still had sex sometimes, but it seemed to me that the understanding was that we were no longer in a relationship.

Even a year later, though, we still saw each other from time to time. She badgered me to spend a night in a sleep lab to find out why I'm half-asleep most of the time, although this turned out to be useless. (The way they had the sleep lab at Straub Hospital set up resulted in my not sleeping at all that night, which is unusual for me.)

I gave her some money to help her take classes at one of the community colleges in 1989 and 1990. (She had a bachelor's degree in biology already.) At first, she went into a paralegal program at Kapiolani Community College, as well as taking courses in things like "Career/Life Management." Later she decided to study medical-records technology.

She was tremendously helpful to me in making all the arrangements to store my things and sell my apartment so I could go on sabbatical in the spring of 1990. In fact, I stored a lot of my things in her apartment for the year I was on sabbatical. Some of them, like the VCR and the computer, were things she could use. (I found an excuse to let her keep them both when I came back.) Other stuff she just shoved against the wall somewhere. (I'd insisted, ``I can get a storage locker for $35 a month,'' to which she replied, ``Well, I could use the $35 a month.'' So I took her at her word and gave her a handful of money and forgot about the storage locker.)

In the spring of 1989, following my policy of teaching something new every semester, I was teaching Differential Geometry, a subject which I thought I knew fairly well in a general sort of way. It turned out though, that I found it enormously difficult to teach. It didn't help that I had a much larger class than I was used to in upper division courses, and although the students were certainly not excellent, a number of them were good enough to deserve a pretty good course from me. At some point in the beginning of the semester, I made the decision that I would do whatever it took to teach this course well, even if it meant neglecting all the other parts of my life. I was just starting to learn typesetting on the computer and put in a lot of work making handouts for my students giving answers to homework problems or covering material that I didn't feel I had presented adequately in class. In addition, I was working with a graduate student who was learning the basics in my own field, finite rank torsion free abelian groups, and I found myself getting more and more impatient with his constant need for help.

I started feeling intensely stressed, and as a result, I went for about a dozen sessions with a local psychotherapist by the name of Davé. He had been an assistant professor at some Georgia university for two years before going into practice (I've always suspected he was denied reappointment) and was delighted to relate to me as a fellow academic. At the end of my first visit, he said, "It's a pleasure to deal with someone intelligent for a while." He was puzzled when I smiled broadly, but I was not about to explain that the last person who had said that to me had been a professional dominatrix.

In seeing me as an academic, he missed all the most important parts of who I am. Furthermore, after my experiences with NLP, I found him generally clueless. He didn't seem to have any kind of strategy or game plan in working with me. Each week he'd start the session by saying, ``How it been going?'' I would tell him about some situation that had been troublesome for me, and he would suggest strategems that I'd already figured out for myself for avoiding such situations. He didn't seem to have any idea that it's possible to change one's response to a situation rather than just avoiding it. He certainly didn't know how to teach me to do it. And as far as I was concerned, the stuff he talked to me about just wasn't that important.

He was quite disappointed when I told him that I was terminating my therapy, but he didn't argue about it. I think he had already realized that I was always ahead of him and that he had no idea of how to approach me.

I also tried going to a couple of NLP practitioners in Honolulu. (At the time there weren't very many.) What they did made a lot more sense to me, but I can't say that either of them really helped me.

Even though Sue and I no longer considered ourselves as having a relationship at this point, she was still frequently coming over to my apartment and we still occasionally had sex. In any case, she convinced me that I should try Prozac, which was the main thing that kept her going. (At this time it was a fairly new drug.)

So I went to a psychiatrist at Straub Hospital named Desjarlais, and after first trying me on Desyrel (trazodone), he agreed to prescribe Prozac for me. Desjarlais was annoying because he couldn't accept the fact that he was just a pill pusher and kept trying to counsel me in a way that he called therapy -- something he had no skill whatever at. Mostly he was concerned that I was not in a relationship, and his therapy consisted of urging me to ask more women out on dates. (He didn't really understand my relationship that was not a relationship with Sue, because it was not something I wanted to talk to him about. In fact, I didn't care to discuss any of the really important parts of my life with him, because the conversations we had not led me to believe that there was any chance that anything about me would make any sense to him. So I talked about my job, which was what was causing my stress, and he assumed that that was a major part of my life, since his job was a major part of his.)

I suggested to him rather gently that what with the More University courses I'd been through, and a number of singles seminars, I'd already been exposed to much better advice on relationships than he was able to give, but he wouldn't let up. Eventually, before I went off on my sabbatical in the summer of 1990, I managed to score what turned out to be enough Prozac to last me for a couple years, so I didn't have to deal with any more psychiatrists for quite a while.

The effect of the Prozac at first was quite overwhelming. It was like taking speed (not that I have much experience with that). I would take it in the morning, feel very hyper, then come home in the evening and sleep for a while (which was usual with me in any case), and feel absolutely exhausted for the rest of the evening, feeling more depressed than I ever had in my whole life. Then the next day, I'd start the cycle again.

Fortunately after a couple of months things stabilized and both the initial hyper feeling and the total exhaustion and depression in the evenings were gone. Eventually I stopped taking the Prozac because of side effects, and that didn't seem to have any effect at all, although eventually I realized that it was a good idea to take at least one capsule a month as a maintenance dose. (This is totally contrary to what everybody had told me about the way to take Prozac, but it worked for me.)

But a while later, UNIX finally came to the University of Hawaii and in the fall of 1988 the Math Department put a Wyse terminal in my office. So I got myself a UNIX account, and then found that I could log on from home with my little Epson. A year and a half later, I bought an IBM clone from DAK. It wasn't even an XT, just a perfect clone of the original IBM PC, including the dreadful keyboard layout. But it did have an actual monitor, and I now bought a 2400 baud modem so that it didn't take forever to communicate with the campus mainframe.

Soon after that, I discovered newsgroups, in particular, one called sci.psychology. Most of the contributors to sci.psychology at that time were not psychotherapists or academics (the academics got disgusted pretty quickly) but net junkies who had some graduate training in psychology.

I tried posting a little bit of information about NLP to sci.psychology. None of the regulars had heard of it, but they were immediately sure that if there weren't any published studies on it then it couldn't be any good. Things soon reached the point any single article by me would provoke at least a dozen flaming responses.

It became clear to me that, without knowing anything about NLP, the sci.psychology regulars were quite sure that they knew what it was. Namely, they assumed that it was belief system, perhaps somewhat similar to est. It was clear to me that arguments about the value of NLP would not get anywhere, given that there was no available information to base such arguments on. So I decided that it would be more useful to publish some informative articles that would at least explain what NLP is.

These articles became the beginning of what years later would become my NLP archive. But that was something that happened mostly after my sabbatical in 1990.