I never meet a book I didn’t like. I often choose titles I have never heard of after rambling around a used bookstore for hours. I came across a copy of The Structure of Magic at a used bookstore near a local university. The cover had a drawing of a wizard so I was totally unaware of the true contents of the book, I imagined it more along the lines of how the mind imagines and perceives.

After the Preface is a section titled “Warning to the Reader” in which it warns the reader not to attempt to read this book as a novel but to treat it as a manual to teach you a set of tools that will increase your effectiveness as a therapist. As I am not a therapist, and I don’t take direction easily, I read it as a novel and not a manual. In this regard the book opened my mind not just to theories of communicating, but also to a deeper understanding of the self.

The author’s, Richard Bandler and and John Grinder, selected "The Prince and the Magician" from "The Magus" by John Fowles as a Preface. The prince did not believe in princesses, islands, and God, as he was raised not to. He sets out on a journey to find out these things do exist, but he couldn't see them because he was under his father's spell. He returns to confront his father:

When he saw his father, he looked him in the eye.

"Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?"

The king smiled and rolled back his sleeves.

"Yes, my son, I'm only a magician."

"Then the man on the other shore was God."

"The man on the other shore was a magician."

"I must know the truth, the truth beyond magic."

"There is no truth beyond magic," said the king.

The prince was full of sadness. He said, "I will kill myself."

The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.

"Very well," he said, "I can bear it."

"You see, my son," said the king, "you, too, now begin to be a magician."

The magician’s magic is contained within the language an individual uses. It becomes the basis for their "Map of the World," a phrase often used by Bandler and Grinder. The individual's Map of the World then forms the basis for their choices, behaviors and level of performance. It is the link between perception and cognition. When the language a person uses to represent the world is "ill-formed," generating a misrepresentation, their behaviors and performance will subsequently be ill-formed as well. By re-representing the world in language that is "richer," more complete, specific and precise, the Map of the World the individual is acting upon will be closer to what they have actually experienced and are experiencing. This results in behavior and performance that is more well-formed, leading the individual to generate outcomes more in line with and closer to what they want then could ever be realized when acting upon with an ill-formed representation of their experience.

Chapter 1. Reveals a prime source of our enchantment: the maps and models through which we operate on the world.

Chapter 2. How we use language systems to create these maps and models of the world.

Chapter 3. How language systems are typically used as tools for therapy.

Chapter 4. Procedure for learning and incorporating these tools in one's therapy work.

Chapter 5. Transcripts with commentary using these tools.

Chapter 6. Integrating these tools with established techniques.

In the Norwegian Boy Scout Handbook in the section on map reading, there was a caveat: "When the terrain differs from the map, believe the terrain." What Bandler and Grinder illustrate is that we operate within the world using our individual maps, which are actually at odds with the terrain. My individual 'map of the world' could lead me off a deadly cliff when I lack the ability to stop and readjust my map to the terrain.

The three general ways people have of skewing their view of the world and then mistaking that view as the world are: "Generalization, Deletion, and Distortion." In short, generalization is seeing something that isn't there, deletion is ignoring something that is there, and distortion is accepting only what you want to.

A person's generalizations or expectations filter out and distort his/her experience to make it consistent with those expectations. As he has had no experience challenging his generalizations, his expectations are confirmed and the cycle continues. In this way people maintain their impoverished models of the world.

It is also a way that people maintain their enriched models of the world: by creating expectations of what they want happening in their world and remaining sharply aware of those events which can lead those expectations into fulfillment. This is the flip side of the impoverished model.

The "Structure of Magic" is more than a tool book for therapists -- it is a guidebook for the layman as well.