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A cookbook is essentially a list of techniques, and someone can follow the instructions and get the result without any understanding of the processes involved. A number of years ago I listened to an audiotape of someone teaching and demonstrating the Forgiveness Pattern that Connirae and I developed along with the participants in a modeling seminar in 1990. (An article about this process can be found on the NLP Comprehensive web site.) The presenter's theory about how the forgiveness process worked was very complex, but had no resemblance to our understanding of it. Nevertheless, he led the demonstration subject successfully through all the steps of the technique and into the experience of forgiveness. In one sense, what he did is the highest compliment one can pay to a technique—that the instructions are sufficiently detailed and precise that someone can use it without any understanding (or even with an inappropriate understanding) and it will still work.
“The term science should not be given to anything but the aggregate of the recipes that are always successful.”
—Paul Valery
All of us are surrounded by technology that we use, but do not understand. When we use a cell phone, an automatic transmission, or an antibiotic, most of us don't have the vaguest idea of the physics or chemistry involved. No human being lives long enough to understand even a small fraction of existing technology, even if s/he spent a lifetime studying it.
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