In the past seven or eight years, while traveling internationally and training Meta-States, I have been asked scores of questions about “logical levels.” It comes up naturally because a meta-state is a higher “logical level” than a primary state.  The questions emerge also because to understand and effectively work with our meta-state structures, we have to understand how “logical levels” work and the mechanisms that drive them.  There’s lots of questions also because muddled confusion abounds about the so-called “logical levels.”

What is a “logical level” and why do you put “logical levels” in quotes?

Before defining it, consider the kind of linguistic distinction we have in the phrase “logical levels.” What do we have?  Two nominalizations that have been strung together.  We have a nominalization phrase.   What we are in reference to is not a thing, but an action, or two actions.   But what actions?  Both terms, “logical” and “level,” are nominalizations, that is, noun-like terms that freeze some process and seduce us to imagine something static and objective.

So what are the processes to which we refer?

Answer: the activity is that of layering level of thought-and-emotion (or state) upon our thinking.   As we do this mental layering., we are creating a “logical” system of classification.   The “logics” of our reasoning is framing a way of organizing our world.

It’s seductive and deceptive to use this phrase as if we’re talking about an actual thing when we are not.   There are no such things as “logical levels.” You have never stumbled across a “logical level” that someone left at work or in the living room.   You can’t put a “logical level” in a wheelbarrow, or the refrigerator.   It’s not empirical.   It is not that kind of thing.

About “things,” we can distinction actual empirical things that we can see, hear, feel, taste, and touch; things that the tools of science can measure and quantify.   And then there are “things” of the mind—concepts, ideas, theories, models, and maps.   “Things” of the mind involve the processes of our thinking, mapping, and punctuating.

What is the referent for “logical levels”?

Answer: our mental-emotional activity of selecting elements and classifying them for a particular category, a way of naming and typing, of sorting out what’s in the world.

When asked what a “logical level or type” is, Gregory Bateson said, “The name is not the thing named, but is of different logical type, higher than the thing named; the class is of different logical type, higher than that of its members.”

I don’t understand.   What do you mean there are no such things as “logical levels”?

I mean they are not actual empirical facts that you can see, hear or feel.  They refer to how we think about things.  When we use the phrases, “logical level” or “logical type” we are using a generalization, a concept, and a theory to talk about how we layer our thoughts and feelings level upon level.  It’s something we do, what we mentally do, in our mind-body-emotion system.  It’s just a way of thinking and modeling the structure of our thinking-feeling system.

Is there a difference between “logical levels” and “logical types”?

No.  Throughout his classic work, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) Bateson used the phrases interchangeably.  The typing (“type” used as a verb) is what we mentally do as we punctuate and classify various elements and collect them as members of a group.  We type the elements as members of a classification that we invent.  In this way we categorize the world.  And inasmuch as we have to step aside or step back and name the entire group of elements, we move up to a higher level.  Watzlawick similarly uses the phrases interchangeably.

What does “logical levels” refer to, and how does the hidden process work?

In “logical levels,” mind replicates brain.  In our brain structure, we have various brain structures from lower to higher which process information and then send its transforms to the next level.  We have lower, middle, and top brain structures working over the information as it is transformed and transduced in the system.  So with mind.  After we think and feel something, we then entertain additional thoughts-and-feelings about the previous experience.  We reflexively think about our thinking, feel about our feeling, feel about our thinking, etc.

It is this self-reflexive consciousness that allows us to step back, as it were, from ourselves and re-think, re-feel and to do so repeatedly and without end.  This is the “infinite regress” that philosophers speak about.  We can operate at multiple levels of awareness.  As an infinite process, it never ends.  Whatever we think or feel at any level, we can always step aside, and engage the thinking-feeling process again.

Reflexivity as the infinite progress allows us to abstract about our abstractions, generalize about our generalizations, believe about our beliefs, value our values, decide about our decisions, etc.  This is the structure of mindfulness, higher level awareness, the transcendence of the human spirit.  In cognitive psychology, it has generated the field of Meta-Cognition and has much influence in the modeling and structuring of A.I.  (Artificial Intelligence).

You speak about our “psycho-logics”, is that the same as “logical levels”?

Yes.  Korzybski hyphenated “psychology” to speak about our psycho-logics and of psychologists as psycho-logisticians.  The inner “logics” or reasonings of our belief systems or embedded frames within frames within frames (the matrix of our frames) is “logical” only to the extent that we classify one thing as a member of some class.  Whatever results from this “makes sense,” and is “logical” within those psycho-logics.

How have you classified “an action that doesn’t reach its goal”?  Is that “failure”?  What category do you put it in?  Whatever classification or category, you have stepped aside from the first variable and put it in some category.  You have typed it as a member of some class.  In this way we create our psycho-logics.  The person who puts the activity in the category of “feedback” will have a different experience to the first person.  And the person who classifies it as a member of the class of “curiosity” —something to feel curious about and to explore, will have yet again another experience.

Doing these things create “logical levels.” We have rise up —in our mind—and created a structure that frames the class.  We transcend the first thought to a second thought.  We make a meta-move to think about the first.  We move above and beyond (“meta”) the first and set a frame-of-reference.  All of these terms describes the “logical leveling” that makes up the nominalization phrase that we call “logical levels.”

So is a “logical level” the same thing as a meta-level?

Yes.  When we set one thought or feeling in a meta-relationship to another, we simultaneously set a frame.  This means that the scope of the frame is higher and greater than the members of the class, that is, the elements within the lower state.

As we move up the scale from details to generalities (inductive thinking), the scope of our awareness enlarges.  We create summaries of things, classifications, generalizations, frames, frames-within-frames, etc.  This is feedback to ourselves.  When we take one of these belief frames and move down with it (deductive thinking), we meta-detail.  We feed the information and knowledge forward through ourselves, through the levels of our mind-body-emotion system.

Thinking systemically about “logical levels” enables us to see all of the moving parts of the mind-body-emotion system.  This allows us to see the “logical levels” as a system, and as fluid and moving, as dynamic.  And from that, we can then see emergent properties in the system.

How many “logical levels” are there?

There are as many as we have words and synonyms for these meta-level facets of our awareness.  In Neuro-Semantics we have a list of 26 of the most frequent “logical levels.” There are the Other “Logical Levels” beyond the first few identified by Dilts (see article on web site by this title).

What do you mean that all “logical levels” are at the same time all of the other “logical levels”?

We do better to think about these mental-emotional layerings as facets of the same thing.  That is, there is not “belief” as a “logical level” and then there is “values” or “understandings,” or “decisions,” or “identity,” etc.  Rather, every “logical level” is at the same time a belief, a value, an understanding, etc.

Do you believe that learning is valuable?  Then from one perspective that’s a belief, from another it is a value.  It may also from yet another be a decision, an understanding, a pleasure, an intention, etc.  These meta-terms offer us many everyday terms for the multi-faceted nature of “logical levels.” What we call it depends on how we look at it.

Since the layering of the mind is a process, we need fluid metaphors rather than static ones.  The dynamic structure of a tornado is much better for convey this energy and movement than steps, stairs, ladders, or pyramids.  There is a “hierarchy” but it is not a rigid one, it is more like a holoarchy (from a hologram), ever moving, and “alive.”

Hasn’t Steve Andreas or others proven “logical levels” are “brain dead”?

In Anchor Point Steve wrote the following:

“The theory of logical types (and any conclusions derived from it by Bateson, Dilts, Hall, and others) was declared ‘brain-dead’ by Bertrand Russell himself in 1967, as reported by G.  Spencer Brown.  …  Please let us hear no more about the ‘Theory of Logical Types.’” (March 2003, p.  11)

Actually Steve’s argument against using and working with “logical levels” is a particularly creative one, even though spacious.  In essence it amounts to this.

“Since mathematicians have stopped using the Theory of Logical Types to deal with mathematical concepts and paradoxes, and since the Theory would eliminate the branch of mathematics known as imaginary numbers, therefore it is ‘brain dead,’ totally worthless, and should not be used at all.”

Yes, I know that sounds pretty fantastic.  And yes, I know it is as if Steve forgot to meta-model his own argument and so violated the well-formed specifications for speaking with precision.  But I’m not making this up.  This is what he wrote.

“G.  Spencer Brown in the preface of Laws of Form (1974) has shown that Russell’s theory of logical types is not only unnecessary, but if accepted, would deprive us of the branch of mathematics dealing with imaginary numbers, which is very useful in electronics and in calculations involving sine waves and other trigonometric functions!” (Anchor Point, March 2003, p.  11)

Well that does it.  Now I have to make a choice, if I use the meta or logical level distinctions for modeling an experience I have to give up imaginary numbers.  What shall I do?  Giving up the mathematical field of imaginary numbers is going to be a tough choice since it is so much of NLP! If I use classes and categories and thinking in terms of meta-cognitive structures of frames to model the meta-levels of abstraction and mind, but have to recognize that it doesn’t work in mathematical imaginary numbers…  hmmmmm, what shall I choose?

As if that wasn’t enough, he adds more to his spacious reasoning:

“The theory of logical types would make impossible the many useful self-referential (and sometimes paradoxical) messages which people do, in fact, make and respond to.  It would also outlaw important and interesting phenomena such as the self-concepts, which describes itself recursively, including itself in its description.”

Let me see if I get this right.  The Theory of Logical Types “outlaws” various concepts?  That’s interesting.  This theory somehow sets up a regime and declares certain meta-level classifications “legal” and others are “against the law”?  I wonder how a theory does that?  Steve, of course, doesn’t explain, he just declares this as a fact.  He declares it so, so it must be that way, right?

Obviously I hold a different view.  The theory of “logical types” indicates that when we do not clearly distinguish levels, when we engage in a “typing error,” then we create paradox.  Simple.  There’s no need for laws or out-lawing of things here.  There’s only the failure to make critical distinctions.  Of course, that’s what Bateson noted as well with schizophrenia.  It creates double-binds—some malevolent, some benevolent.

As far as recursion goes, self-referencing, etc., this is precisely what Korzybski meant by the levels of abstracting, and multi-ordinality.  We can legitimately use a nominalization like “self” on itself.  When we do, we can operate at different levels of “self” with different levels of awareness.  “Self” at the primary state is just being a living breathing organism.  When we are aware of self, we have self-awareness.  Can we be aware of ourselves as a self?  Yes.  I have written about this in The Structure of Personality, Meta-States, and The Secrets of Personal Mastery.

So what’s the story about imaginary numbers and “logical types”?

Let me let Paul Watzlawick in his book, The Invented Reality speak to this.

“All numbers are either positive, negative, or zero.  Consequently, any number that is neither positive nor zero is negative; and any number that is neither negative nor zero must be positive.  Now what about the seemingly harmless equation x2+1=0?  If we transpose the 1 to the other side of the equation, we obtain x2 = -1 and, further, that x = % -1.

“But in a conceptual universe that is constructed such that any number can only be positive, negative, or zero, this result in unimaginable.  For what number multiplied by itself (raised to its square) can possibly yield -1?

“The analogy of this impasse with the above-mentioned paradoxical dilemma arising in a world based on the concept of truth, falsehood, and the excluded middle is obvious.  But, imaginable or unimaginable as the square root of -1 may be, mathematicians, physicists, and engineers have long since accepted it with equanimity, have assigned to it the symbol i (meaning imaginary), and included it in their computations just as the other three (imaginable) number categories (positive, negative, and zero), and have obtained practical, concrete, and perfectly imaginable results from it.  But for our lay thinking, the imaginary number i remains of a fantastic irreality.” (p.  253)

There you have it.  In the field of mathematics, and specifically in the specialized field of imaginary numbers, and what mathematicians do with the square root of -1, the theory of “logical types” is not all that useful.  Okay.  But what in the world does that have to do with the psycho-logics of the human meaning making brain that defines, evaluates, frames, classifies, categorizes, use metaphors, etc.?  That it may not be useful for one thing does not discount all of the other ways it may be useful, does it?  I think not.

Declaring the theory “brain dead” for the mathematical field of imaginary numbers, and solving the paradoxes around unimaginable numbers like the square root of -1, does not automatically exclude “logical types” from being very useful in other areas and domains, does it?  Of course not.

Where did the theory of “logical types” come from?

Russell and Whitehead came up with The Theory of Logical Types in 1904 in their book, in the field of mathematics, Principia Mathematica.  It was not about psychology at all.  It was about members of a group, how to classify groups, and how to work with groups.  It’s about grouping and organizing categories.  That was 1904.  Much later, Gregory Bateson used the basic concepts and axioms of this theory in his modeling of cultures and cultural phenomenon.  As he explored how people learn and the fact that we can learn about our learning, he created what we now call The Levels of Learning.  It was in this way that the Theory of Logical Types was applied to human functioning and to the strange or paradoxical experience arise.  For Bateson, this was central to his theoretical and practical work with schizophrenia.

Fast forward a few years and one of Bateson’s students began using the Logical Types to set forth a particular version of the levels of mind.  It was in this way that Robert Dilts created the NLP model of Neuro-Logical Levels.  While there’s been criticisms of it as a model of “logical levels” because, after all, it is not a “logical level” system, it has led to a great many NLP patterns and processes and has proven highly useful in a great many areas.

Alfred Korzybski similarly set for a model of the Levels of Abstraction to describe the ordered structure of experience.  He spoke of the levels in terms of orders—first-level order, second-order, third-order, etc.  This enabled him to articulate a theory of sanity and science.  He called that multi-ordinality.  This describes human function as multi-dimensional in its layering of ideas upon ideas.

Fast forward to 1994, and it was the combination of these understandings, along with studies in Meta-Cognition, Cognitive Linguistics, Reflexivity, etc.  that led me to organize the Meta-States model as a formalized model for rigorously dealing with our reflexive thoughts and feelings.

Summary

• As a modeling tool, the “logical levels” of our states upon states (i.e., meta-states) offers us a powerful set of distinctions about how our self-reflexive consciousness layers our thinking and feeling.  This process and activity challenges us to be cautious in using nominalizations which gives the impression that we’re talking about something solid and static.  We are not.
• It is the nominalizing of “logical levels” that begins the muddled thinking and leads to using static metaphors like ladders, steps, and pyramids.  When we put the verb back into the word, we use more dynamic metaphors like layering and swirling of the mind.
• As we go meta and transcend our own thinking and feeling we set frames and frames within frames and build semantic networks around events, words, ideas, and concepts.  This creates the psycho-logics of our matrix of frames and has to be mapped if we are to model the structure of complex experiences.

References:
1.  Bateson, Gregory.  (1972/ 2000).  Steps to an ecology of mind.    Chicago: The University of Chicago.

2.  Hall, L.  Michael; Bodenhamer, Bobby (1999).   The structure of excellence: Unmasking the meta-levels of “sub-modalities.”  Grand Jct.  CO: E.T.  Publications.

3. Hall.  L.  Michael (2000).  Meta-States: Managing the higher levels of your mind.  Grand Jct.  CO: Neuro-Semantics Publications.

4.  Hall, L.  Michael.  (2000).  Secrets of Personal Mastery: Advanced techniques for accessing your higher levels of consciousness.  Wales, UK: Crown House Publications.

5. Hall, Michael (2002).  The Matrix Model. Clifton, CO: N.S.  Publications.

6. Hall, Michael.  (1997/2001).  NLP: Going Meta — Advance modeling using meta-levels.  Grand Jct.  CO: ET Publications.

7.  Hall, L.  Michael.  (2003).  MovieMind: Directing the cinemas of the mind.  Clifton, CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

8. Watzlawick, Paul; Weakland, John H.; Fisch, Richard.  (1974).  Change: Principles of problem formation and problem resolution.  New York: W.W.  Norton and Company.

9.  Watzlawick, Paul.  (1984).  The invented reality: How do we know what we believe we know?  Contributions to constructivism.      New York: W.W.  Norton and Company.

Author:
L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D., Psychologist, International Trainer, and Entrepreneur who lives in the Rocky Mountains is the developer of the Meta-States Model, Frame Games, and the Matrix Model, he is the co-founder with Dr.  Bodenhamer of The International Society of Neuro-Semantics.  (P.O.  Box 8, Clifton, CO.  USA Tel: 81520-0008; 970 523-7877).

Beyond Logical Types

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

With Gregory Bateson’s wanton curiosity about how things work and how to create theoretical models for cultural phenomena, mental phenomena, and biological processes, he explored numerous fields C language, semantics, biology, genetics, cybernetics, mathematics, communication, and more. He began as an anthropologist but ended up as more of a cybernetican as he integrated systems thinking into everything he did. And it seems to me that it was his systems thinking more than anything else that enabled he to create new models and ways of thinking and which made (makes) his books and articles so rich with possibilities of new developments in Neuro-Semantics. I say that because with every reading, I discover ever new things in his writings.

Bateson’s Zigzag Ladder for Modeling

In Mind and Nature (1979), Bateson proposed the following ladder as a way of modeling “mental” phenomena in biology that takes into consideration the processes as systemic activities. He moves from description to process, that is from the typological labels given to something to the processes involved and then to the next level of labeling that defines that form to the processes that govern and determine it, to the next level, and so on.

In doing this, he uses the mathematical concept of logical levels from Russell and Whitehead to sort out the logical levels that arise or emerge from the processes. He first sorted these things out as his way of demonstrating the validity of his “Criterion 6” of “mind.”

The Description and Classification of the Processes of Transformation Discloses a Hierarchy of Logical Types Immanent in the Phenomena (p. 122).

That statement is loaded. It summarizes so much in Bateson’s thinking about “mind,” learning, levels, logical, types, experience, processes, etc. He begins with the coding of messages and that stimuli from one person to another are messages but that for person B to know what person A means,

“… there comes into existence another class of information … to tell B about the coding of messages or indications coming from A. Messages of this class will be, not about A or B, but about the coding of messages. They will be of a different logical type. I will call them meta-messages.” (123)

“The whole matter of messages which make some other messages intelligible by putting it in context must be considered…”

Bateson starts here in order to flush out the levels of experience. He says this explicitly.

“All this is premised on the existence of levels whose nature I am here trying to make clear.” (124)

To do that he separates out two kinds of actions. There is the primary state set of actions in a context, then there are those actions or behaviors “which defines context or makes context intelligible.” He calls the second “meta-communication” and acknowledges that he borrowed this term from Whorf (p. 124).

What does the meta-message do? How does it work? What is its function?

“A function, an effect, of the meta-message is in fact to classify the messages that occur within its context.”

In Neuro-Semantics we use this meta-level principle to talk about moving from one state to another state and using the second state to set the frame for the first. It classifies the first. Anger now becomes a member of the class of respect thereby creating a new gestalt, “respectful anger.” In this way, we transcend our first experience and include it inside of a higher state of mind-and-emotion. This allows us to texture our states and to create a new quality to our lives.

Bateson explains this in terms of how he took a mathematical concept and translated it to biology. This was the source for the term that he most frequently used, logical types. It comes from the field of mathematics.

“It is at this point that the theory offered here connects with the work of Russell and Whitehead in the first ten years of this century, finally published in 1910 as Principia Mathematica. What Russell and Whitehead were tackling was a very abstract problem. Logic, in which they believed, was to be salvaged from the tangles created when types, as Russell called them, are maltreated in mathematical presentation.” (124) logical

While Whitehead knew that we are amused and humored by “kidding around with the types” he said that he did not know if they had any idea that their work could be applied to humans.

“I doubt whether he ever made the step from enjoying this game to seeing that the game was non-trivial and would cast light on the whole of biology.”

But Bateson did. That was his genius. He did apply it to biology. He took events or actions at the primary level, and the classes of actions (meta-actions), and then meta-classification and showed how this applies to learning. We can learn what an action means, we can then learn to learn about how we do that, etc. His levels of learning resulted from this application of logical typing. In NLP and Neuro-Semantics we usually speak about this same things using the phraselogical levels rather than logical types. There’s no difference except that types comes from the formal mathematical theory and levels refers to the way we use it in biology and psychology.

Applying it linguistically to the phenomenon of “paradox,” Bateson writes,

“Epimenides was a Cretan who said, ‘Cretans always lie'” C I have presented this paradox here in the form of a quotation within a quotation, and this is precisely how the paradox is generated. The larger quotation becomes a classifier for the smaller, until the smaller quotation takes over and reclassifies the larger, to create contradiction.” (125)

Bateson’s conclusion from this is that “logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored.”

Confuse Logical Types and Reap Neurosis

When there are levels embedded in levels we have to keep them separate. There is a discontinuity between them. We have to discriminate levels recognizing that we are dealing with a different logic at each level. If we do not, the category error or the error in logical typing leads to pathology. This happens when we confuse map and territory, when we fail to recognize one message as classifying another and so don’t know what kind of message it is.

In his text, Bateson decided to illustrate using the clinical experiment with dogs. It was the experiment wherein dogs were taught to discriminate between two stimuli, between a circle and an ellipse (p. 127). First a dog is trained by positively rewarding him with food when he makes the distinction. Once the dog can tell the difference, the experimenter then pushes the limits of his perception. He makes the ellipse somewhat fatter or the circle somewhat flatter so the contrast becomes less. The dog has to “put out more effort to discriminate between them.” Eventually however he cannot. It is this that then leads the dog to experience experimental neurosis. Some of the dogs become agitated, nervous, and will become aggressive. Other dogs turn lethargic, passive, and give up. Some even become comatose.

What happens that creates this pathology?

How does this relate to the logical typing of messages at different levels?

Once a dog had learned to see the context as one of discrimination, he had come to expect there to be differences. It was as if in his “mind” he was expecting it and organized on the inside with an attitude that there should be a distinction and that he should be able to make it. But when he was consistently made wrong in that context, then he ceases to know how to operate there, hence the emergence of the neurosis. Bateson commented,

… he has been very carefully trained to expect a context for discrimination. He now imposes this interpretation on a context that is not a context for discrimination.” (128)

He is no longer a naive dog. Naive dogs who have not been so taught don’t have the problem, they just guess and leave it at that. But the trained dog has jumped a logical level.

“The naive dog has not been taught not to guess, that is, he has not been taught that the contexts of life are such that guessing is inappropriate.” (129)

But the trained dog had. Guessing is inappropriate for the trained dog. He cannot guess. He must discriminate … but he cannot discriminate. He sees and relates to that context with a higher level learning and having made that jump he cannot go back. To get out of the double-bind, he would have to jump yet another logical level. And yet he does not (cannot) jump yet another logical level to recognize what’s going on. Bateson writes,

“The dog fails to transcend the jump in logical type from ‘context for discrimination’ to ‘context for guessing.'” (130)

It is this shift of logical types or levels that has created the problem for the dogs. They do not deal with the stimuli as mere stimuli, but as “a context for discrimination.” But they cannot make the discrimination. They must, but can’t. Nor are they able to step “out of that frame” and recognize what’s occurring.

Yet dolphins are able to do just that, and do so (pp. 130-132). The dolphins also because very agitated and disturbed.

“The experience of being in the wrong was so disturbing to the dolphin that in order to preserve the relationship between her and her training (i.e., the context of context of context), it was necessary to give many reinforcements to which the porpoise was not entitled. Unearned fish.” (131)

When the dolphins were released back into the training tank after the fourteenth and fifteenth sessions, they were very excited and “put on an elaborate performance that included eight conspicuous pieces of behavior of which four were new and never before observed in this species of animal.”

So what happened?

The discontinuity is a jump between the logical types.

“In all such cases, the step from one logical type to the next higher in a step from information about an event to information about a class of events, or from consider the class to considering the class of classes.” (132)

Adding Systemic Processes to the Modeling

In all of this, Bateson acknowledges that he has approached the matter of hierarchy in mental phenomena from the aspect of coding.

How are things encoded?

He answers that specific actions are like members of a class. This distinguishes members from the classes that we put them in. He notices that Pavlovian conditioning through reinforcement and extension works very well at the first level of actions, but not on the classes of activities. This explains why primary level anchoring will not extinguish meta-level concepts and structures like “exploration.”

The specific activity of a rat sticking its head into a particular hole can be reinforced positively or negatively. Give it pleasure, it will continue. Give it pain, it will stop. But the class of activities that come under the more abstract label, “exploration” will not be affected by either. If the rat is rewarded or punished by looking into a particular hole, in both instances it succeeds in its discovery. It’s “exploration” activity worked. This general (or meta-state) is reinforced by either result.

Figure 1
Meta-Level

This led Bateson to linguistically recognize the difference between what we would call nominalizations and sensory specific language. “Play” is at a different logical level than the games of Chase or Hide-and-Seek. It’s a classification of activities and it points to no one specific activity. So with “crime,” “exploration,” and thousands of other meta-terms. These names describe how we organize or punctuate activities. They are more general than any particular activity that is a member of that class. View it systemically, Bateson says,

“The relationship between the characteristics of a component and the characteristics of the system as a whole as it circles back on itself, is equally a matter of hierarchical organization.” (134)

This brings in the reflexivity of the mind, the central mechanism in Meta-States. As an interactive system of multiple parts, our mind-body-emotion system is just that C a system. And as a system, there are components and then there is the-system-as-a-whole. And these also operate hierarchally.

Now linguistically we describe things using nouns and verbs. Using nouns, we think about things C the form, the structure, the type, the classification. Using verbs, we think about processes. This gives us a double-description of whatever we’re describing or modeling. It gives us form and process. Bateson noticed that he used both classification and description (nouns) and processes (verbs) when he was involved in his anthropological studies of the Iatmul culture.

“This typing of persons led back into the study of the processes by which the persons got that way. These processes were then classified into types of process types in their turn, were named by me. The next step was from the typing of process to study the interactions between the classified processes. This zigzag ladder between typology on one side and the study of process on the other is mapped in figure [2].” (pp. 209-210)

In this hierarchal figure, Bateson has sorted out the levels in his own theorizing and modeling and sorted out the difference between the labels he used to create his typology at each level and his awareness of the processes involved. He described this as “the zigzag sequence of steps from form to process and back to form and says it provides …

“… a very powerful paradigm for the mapping of many phenomena.” (210)

In other words, the procedures of inquiry into a subject are punctuated by alternating between Classification and the Description of a process. We proceed up an alternating ladder from Description to Typology. He noted that this paradigm for modeling reoccurs wherever mental process predominates in the organization of the phenomena.

“In other words, when we take the notion of logical typing out of the field of abstract logic and start to map real biological events onto the hierarchies of this paradigm, we shall immediately encounter the fact that in the world of mental and biological systems, the hierarchy is not only a list of classes, classes of classes, and classes of classes of classes but has also become zigzag ladder of dialectic between form and process.” (211)

Wherever we find a Form, there’s an underlying Process, and wherever there’s a Process, we can set it apart by naming it. We do this in Meta-States (the form) as we meta-state (the process) one state to another. From process comes form and within form are processes. In these two processes Bateson recognized a systemic difference that moved him beyond logical types.

“So far we can go with Russell and Principia. But we are not now in Russell’s world of abstract logic or mathematics and cannot accept an empty hierarchy of names or classes. For the mathematician, it is all very well to speak of names of names of names or of classes of classes of classes. But for the scientist, this empty world is insufficient. We are trying to deal with an interlocking or interaction of digital (i.e., naming) and analogic steps. The process of naming is itself nameable, and this fact compels us to substitute analternation for the simple ladder of logical types that Principia would propose.

In other words, to recombine the two stochastic systems into which I have divided both evolution and mental process for the sake of analysis, I shall have to see the two as alternating. What in Principia appears as a ladder made of steps that are all alike (names of names of names and so on) will become an alternation of two species of steps. To get from the name to the name of the name, we must go through the process of naming the name. There must always be a generative process whereby the classes are created before they can be named.” (201).

Noting that this is a “very large and complex matter” Bateson here speaks about how he thought about logical typing in the process of modeling any logical level system. This moves us beyond a simple logical typing that can be conveyed by ladders or steps in a hierarchy. We are now forced to add the process of how we actually move to a higher level C the process we call going meta, meta-stating, the meta-function, etc. After using Bateson’s illustrations, I will illustrate with the phenomenon of stuttering.

The Systemic Logical Types/ Levels in Heating a House

Bateson modeled his Levels of Learning on this sort of zigzag paradigm and suggested that we can model many other things on it. To illustrate and given meaning to the terms feedback and calibration, he illustrates with a house thermostat. He begins with the primary state of temperature.

“At the lowest level, there is the temperature. This actual temperature from moment to moment (a process) affects a thermometer (a sort of sense organ) that is connected to the whole system in such a way that the temperature, or expressed by the bending of a double metal plate, will make or break an electric connection (a switch, a calibration) that controls the furnace. When the temperature rises above a certain point, the switch will be changed to the state called “OFF”; when the temperature falls below some lower point, the switch will be changed to “ON.” The house will thus oscillate around some temperature between the two threshold points. On this level, the system is a simple, servo circuit.” (213)

If we have temperature at the primary level, what do we have at a meta-level that would control or govern the temperature? Bateson says that the simple feedback circuit is …

“… controlled by a calibration housed in the same small box that contains the thermometer. On the box is a know that the householder can turn to change the setting, or bias, of the thermostat to a different temperature around which the temperature of the house will oscillate Note that two calibrations have their location in the box: There is the control of state, ON/OFF, and the control of HIGH/LOW temperature around which the system will operate.” (214)

Primary state temperatures move up and down the scale as determined by the meta-state thermostat and sets the frame or bias. At the primary state level, the householder experiences temperature. At the meta-state level, the householder decides and chooses the range of temperature that he or she wants. And that comes from what the householder intends to experience and believes would be best (in terms of comfort, or cost, or some other value).

Above the frame or bias level, there is the level of evaluation (“This is too cold;” “This is too hot”) and above that is a person’s personal threshold governed by the person’s genetics and trainings and values governed by the person’s status, situation, and so on.

Thinking about the systemic nature of processes that reflect back onto their previous states led Bateson to notice the overall effect of going meta in how the higher levels govern the system and feedback into the system greater knowledge.

“With each zigzag of the ladder, the sphere of relevance increases. There is a change in logical typing of the information collected by the sense organ at each level.” (215)

“We note an alternating ladder of calibration and feedback up to larger and larger spheres of relevance and more and more abstract information and wider decision.” (216)

“From this paradigm, it appears that the idea of ‘logical typing,’ when transplanted from the abstract realms inhabited by mathematicological philosophers to the hurly-burly of organisms, takes on a very different appearance. Instead of a hierarchy of classes, we face a hierarchy of orders of recursiveness.” (218)

All of this describes many of the key features in how we experience our meta-states, our self-reflexive states-about-states and the recursiveness of the frames that we set that establish our bias in a given context. It also identifies a way for modeling the mental-emotional phenomena that can either enrich or impoverish our lives. As we recognize the recursiveness, the reflexivity, the discontinuity, the logical typing, and the element of “time” in a system’s functioning, we are more able to see how a system operates, its biases, and its leverage points.

Changing within a Level and Between Levels

We have two major feedback-feed-forward loops in all of our experiences. We have the primary state feedback/forward loop when we encounter any stimulus. This creates our basic stimulus-response pattern. X event occurs. As we input the messages from that event this feedback provides us information about the world. To this we respond with thought, emotion, speech, and behavior C and it is this which we feed forward back to the world. When that event next responds, we have more feedback about it. And round and round it goes.

Yet above and beyond that feedback/forward loop, we have a meta-feedback/forward loop. As we input information from the event (feedback at that level), we also feed back our own ideas, conclusions, generalizations, beliefs, rules, etc. to ourselves. We do that as we experience thoughts-and-feelings (a state) about that experience. This feeds back yet another message (a higher message) to a higher level of our mind. With this second message, we set new frames. We develop new biases. We draw new conclusions or reinforce old conclusions. Then from that, we feed forward these new frames and biases through ourselves and then out into the world to the event. And round and round that goes.

Bateson illustrates this with the difference between shooting a rifle and a shotgun and so describes two sorts of methods of perfecting an adaptive act (pp. 211-219).

In shooting a rifle, we use the first feedback/forward loop. We aim, align rifle with target, adjust, notice error adjust again and so on until we press the trigger and shoot. The ongoing actions of self-correcting goes on within the single act of shooting. Feedback describes this whole genus of methods of perfecting an adaptive act (212).

In shooting a shotgun or revolver held under the table where one cannot correct its aim, we have a very different situation. There’s no error correction in the single act. To improve, we take the previous shooting into account and make an adjustment, try again, and so on. “Correction must be performed upon a large class of actions.” So it is through long practice that we adjust the setting of nerves, muscles, seeing, etc. to the critical event. “This genus of methods Mittelstaedt calls calibration.”

“It seems that, in these cases, ‘calibration’ is related to ‘feedback’ as a higher logical type is related to lower. This relation is indicated by the fact that self-correction in the use of the shotgun is necessarily possible only from information derived from practice (i.e., from a class of past, completed actions).” (212)

From Bateson draws a distinction between feedback and calibration. Calibration is what he calls form or classification and feedback is what he calls process. He then says that while form-process and calibration-feedback are synonymous, higher and lower logical type is more complex due to the factor of recursiveness in the process (213). And it is this that calls for the separating out of levels because form or classification of the state and the process that creates it differs at each higher level even though it is an oscillation between form and process.

Within a primary level experience, feedback gives us the ability for immediately adjustments using error as our signal for adapting. But when we have to take a collection of experiences, a sample of events, then “time” enters into the formula. Then the discontinuous jump to the next highest level means working with samplesquality of how we jump to the higher level that governs the bias that we set, the frames that we construct, and the mental world that we invent.

Stuttering Application

When someone stutters in speech, is that a single sensory-based action or is that a class of activities? You might think upon first consideration that would be an easy question to answer. It is not. It all depends. It depends upon whether the speaker is referring to a specific stutter in speech or to a whole class of activities that now operates as a meta-frame, “stuttering.”

If the person is referring to a classification then that’s why reinforcement of smooth speaking will not extinguish that category. The General Semanticist Dr. Wendell Johnson noted long ago that first we have to create that category and that there are some language groups and cultures which do not have that classification. And without the classification (frame), the sensory based activities of stuttering cannot be punctuated.

Once we have the category as a frame matrix of beliefs, values, pain/pleasure, expectations, identification, social definitions, etc., then we have moved up many logical levels classifying and embedding the sensory level inside of many other classifications. This creates the Stuttering Matrix that holds the activities in place.

First, I stumble over my words as I search for the words to express myself (process at the primary state level), then someone (myself or a parent) labels that action “stuttering” (form). Then predictions are made (in my head or in the descriptions of others trying to help!) about all the problems and bad things that will happen if I “stutter” again (a higher level description, description2). As I hear this, I become afraid and threatened by those meanings and label those processes as part of my personal traits and identity (higher level labeling, “I am a stutterer.”), and so on.

Summary

• The zigzag approach to modeling neuro-linguistic processes or any system is a way of moving from Form (the labels that indicate solidified Structures) to the Processes that create those forms and which processes are within the Forms.

• Following this zigzag approach enables us also to flush out the logical types within our reasoning that classifies and categorizes reality in a certain way and creates the logical levels of our experience.

• This illustrates that levels are “logical” or psycho-logical (Korzybski) to the degree that they fit the definition of logical types.

• Sorting out levels in this ways saves us from double-binds, from setting frames that lock us in closed loops, and that allow us to escape the field (or context) of any frame that creates limitations and impoverishment of life.

• Recognizing at what level we’re working, thinking, reasoning, etc. also enables us to profile an experience and to work with it more elegantly. It gives us more clarity about how to reinforce or extinguish a behavior inasmuch as it enables us to distinguish sensory from evaluative behavior C single actions at the primary level or classes of actions at a meta-level.

• In this presentation Bateson has drawn a critical distinction between sensory-based feedback of actions in an error-activated context when we want to perfect an adaptive act and the higher level (meta-level) calibration from a class of activities that sets a full neuro-semantic attitude in mind-and-body.

References:

Hall, L. Michael. (2001). NLP: Going Meta C Modeling Using Meta Levels. Grand Junction, CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

Hall, L. Michael. (2002). Is there Any Difference Between Logical Levels and Logical Types? Website: www.neuro-semantics.com

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

I have recently been criticized as not knowing the difference between logical levels and logical types. Some in this field have taken me to task that Meta-States is inadequate and say that doesn’t work because it fails to distinguish logical types from logical levels. This raises numerous questions, questions that I will address in this article.

Is there a difference between logical levels and logical types?
Would such a distinction actually make any real difference?
How would it affect the Model of Meta-States?
Why would someone invent such a difference if it doesn’t exist?

Thesis of this Article

As an overview of this article, I have reviewed much of Bateson’s work on logical types and logical levels and I have found that Bateson did not make such a distinction but repeatedly used the terms interchangeably as I will show. Taking Russell and Whitehead’s work on logical types, Bateson spoke about the various levels at which messages, information, and communication occur.

The way we define logical types from the mathematical model of Russell and Whitehead lead to the acceptable definition of logical levels as given by Dilts, Woodsmall, myself and others. There can be no logical levels if the higher levels are not the classes and classification categories for the lower levels.

Where did this supposed distinction come from? Who created it? I do not know. My best guess at this moment is that it was a conclusion drawn based on assuming that the NLP “Neuro-Logical Levels” created by Robert Dilts is a true reflection of “Logical Levels” and since it does not fit the criteria for being a “Logical Type” system, there must be a difference between logical types and logical levels. Over the years, many trainers and theorists in NLP have showed that it is not a logical level system because it does not fit the logical type definitions that even Robert quotes from Bateson and argues for persuasively in many of his works. You will find this in NLP: Going Meta 2001) and in several articles on the Neuro-Semantics website (See References).

Definitions of Logical Types

In the index of Bateson’s book Mind and Nature (1979), he writes this under the list of “Logical Types.” A series of examines is in order:

1. The name is not the thing named but is of different logical type, higher than the thing named.
2. The class is of different logical type, higher than that of its members.
3. The injunctions issues by, or control emanating from, the bias of the house thermostat is of higher logical type than the control issued by the thermometer.
4. The word “tumbleweed” is of the same logical type as “bush” or “tree.” It is not the name of a species or genus of plants; rather, it is the name of a class of plants whose members share a particular style of growth and dissemination.
5. “Acceleration” is of a higher logical type than “velocity.”

In another place Bateson defined logical types in the following way:

Logical Type: 1) The name is not the thing named but is of different logical type, higher than the thing named. 2) The class is of different logical type, higher than that of its members. (Mary Catherine Bateson, 1987, pp. 209-210).

Robert Dilts on Levels and Types

In his writings, Robert Dilts speaks mostly about logical levels. This is the term that he most often uses just like Bateson most often uses logical types. In the following quotes, here is what Dilts says first about logical levels and then about logical types.

“In our brain structure, language, and perceptual systems there are natural hierarchies or levels of experiences. The effect of each level is to organize and control the information on the level below it. Changing something on an upper level would necessarily change things on the lower levels; changing something on a lower level could but would not necessarily affect the upper levels.” (Dilts, Epstein, Dilts, 1991, p. 26, added). italics

“Logical Levels: an internal hierarchy in which each level is progressively more psychologically encompassing and impactful” (1990: 217, italics added).

“Logical typing occurs where there is a discontinuity (as opposed to a continuity, as with the hierarchies) between levels of classification. This kind of discontinuity is exemplified:

1. in mathematic, by the restriction that a class cannot be a member of itself nor can one of the members be the class.
2. in logic, by the solution to the classic logical paradox, ‘This statement is false.’ (If the statement is true, it is false, and if it is false, then it is true, and so on.) The actual truth value of the statement is of a different logical type than the statement itself.
3. in behavior, by the fact that the reinforcement rules for exploration in animals is of a completely different nature than those for the process of testing that occurs in the act of exploration.” (1983: 24).

“The informational effects between levels and types is called feedback and is probably the major distinguishing feature of cybernetic systems.” (1983: 39)

“Differences of the same or different logical type interacting at different levels (hierarchical or logical respectively) will result in the modulation of the difference on the lower level.” (1983: 49)

Michael Hall on Meta-States and Meta-Levels

As a theoretical definition of logical levels and meta-levels used in defining meta-states, the following comes from the Meta-States Training Manual, Accessing Personal Genius.

1. Hierarchies of experience.
2. Higher levels organize and control information on lower levels.
3. The modulation effect of the system necessarily works downward.
4. The modulation effect of the system does not necessarily work upward.
5. Higher levels operate more encompassing and impactful than the lower levels.
6. There exists a discontinuity between the levelsC a break.
7. The relationship of logic between levels creates “paradox” if we don’t sort phenomena on different levels.
8. Hierarchical logical levels function as a system, the higher levels arise out of the lower and feed back information into the system to influence the lower levels. This creates recursiveness within logical levels.
9. As a cybernetic system, as information moves up logical levels new features emerge that does not exist at the lower levels. This emergence at higher levels involve, in systems language, summitivity. In other words, the emergent property does not exist only as the sum of the parts, but new properties and qualities arise over “time” within the system.
10. Reflexivity describes one of the new features that emerge in logical levels. In living organisms this results in self-reflexiveness or self-consciousness.
11. As a system with feedback properties, logical levels operates by self-reflexiveness, the whole system becomes cybernetic. It becomes a “system that feeds back onto and changes itself” (Dilts, 1990, 33). This makes it self-organizing.

Meta-States as Logical Types and Logical Levels

Operationally, the meta-stating process works as a logical type system so that each higher level classifies the previous level and thereby establishes a self-organizing system. When we go meta from one state of mind-body-emotion to another and set the first state as a frame for the second, something wild and wonderful happens. We create a meta-state and a neuro-semantic system of feedback and feed forward loops. This means that as we relate one state to other state our self-reflexive consciousness sets up a meta-relationship so that the first is about the second and classifies the second. We transcend one state and then include it inside of a higher level state. The state in a higher position is meta (above, beyond) the second and so operates as a higher Logical Level.

When we transcend from one state (anger or joy) to another state (calmness or respect) we set the second state as a frame over the first and include it inside it. This gives us “calm anger,” respectful joy, joyful learning, etc. It makes the first state a member of the class of the second.

“But that’s not logical.”

That’s right, it is not. It is psycho-logical.

“And what’s does that mean? What difference does that create?”

When we put a state like anger or fear inside another state (calmness, respect, gentleness, courage, etc.), we change the internal logic of our nervous system and way of thinking. Anger now becomes a member of the class of calmness, or the class of respect, or solution oriented thinking. This is new and different. Anger for most people would be a member of the class of threat, or insult, or “at threshold,” or something. This creates a new psycho-logic of our state and experience.

The Invisible nature of logical levels

One level becomes the higher “logical” level of another level of thinking, feeling, awareness, physiology when it operates in a meta-relationship to the lower level. This is what we mean by both “logical types” and “logical levels.” When we put one state in a “logical” relationship to another state so that one is at a higher level then the higher one is about the other. This about-relationship establishes the “logic.”

In the world, there are no such “things” as logical levels. They do not exist “out there.” You have never tripped over a “logical level” that someone left in your living room. They do not exist at the sensory-based or empirical level. If you go hunting for “logical types or levels” you have to look at how a mind is classifying, categorizing, or punctuating things. That’s where a “logical type or level” exists __in a mind that represents categories and levels or orders of abstractions.

Logical Levels as fluid processes of thinking-emoting

Logical levels are so not static, rigid, or solid. They are fluid. As processes of our thinking-feeling states, they move. So to understand meta-states we have to shift from thinking about rigid hierarchical levels to fluid levels … levels that are ever in flux, ever moving, changing, and in process. They are not things. They are mental and emotional energy expressions that result from how we represent and frame things. This means that the “logical levels” appear and vanish according to our thinking. That’s why they are so fluid and plastic.

These levels or layers of thinking-feeling-and somatizing are made out of the stuff of thoughts-and-feelings. While they are not “real” or solid, we do tend to call them by “names” and so use nominalization to describe them. When we do then we talk about the “logical levels” as beliefs, values, identity, mission, understanding, intentions, etc. Yet we need to remember, these are nominalization that cover up the processes inside.

We also need to remember that there are many, many logical levels, many more than the few listed in Robert Dilts’ original list. There are levels as Decisions, Understandings, Expectations, Domains of Knowledge, Pleasure, Intention, Non-Propositional Symbols, Metaphors, etc.

The simultaneousness of the “logical levels” C  all occurring at the same time

Each of the nominalization that we call the levels of our mind are included inside of each level. If you bring a state of confidence to your self, this operates as a belief, and because you treat this as important, you value it; you understand facets of some knowledge of that area, this leads to expectations, decisions, identifications, intentions, etc. Each level is simultaneously multi-layered with all of these levels.

Bateson’s interchangeable use of “Levels” and “Types”

In Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972/2000), Bateson defines “logical types” in terms of levels of abstraction and quotes Korzybski’s map-territory distinction (p. 180). In all that follows, I have added the bold print to highlight his use of levels and types. He says that

“… a frame is meta-communicative. Any message, which either explicitly or implicitly defines a frame, ipso facto gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the message included within the frame.

… Every meta-communicative or meta-linguistic message defines, either explicitly or implicitly, the set of messages about which it communicates, i.e., every meta-communicative message is or defines a psychological frame. (p. 188)

“No class can be a member of itself. The picture frame then, because it delimits a background, is here regarded as an external representation of a very special and important type of psychological frame C namely a frame whose function is to delimit a logical type.” (189)

In his chapter “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia” Bateson describes “how humans handle communication involving multiple Logical Types” (p. 203). In that section he writes the following:

“Multiple levels of learning and the Logical Typing of signals. These are two inseparable sets of phenomena C inseparable because the ability to handle the multiple types of signals is itself a learned skill and therefore a function of the multiple levels of learning.” (204)

From Mind and Nature (1979), Bateson defines “mind” as involving processes of transformation that discloses “a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena.” (p. 122).

“I shall try to drive home the importance of this criterion by exhibiting cases in which the discrimination of levels of communication has been so confused or distorted that various sorts of frustration and pathology have been the result.” (122)

He then speaks about signals that we emit and then about another class of information that tells us about the coding of messages or indications from the person. These he calls meta-messages (p. 122-123). In so explaining “logical types” he then says,

“All this is premised on the existence of levels whose nature I am here trying to make clear. We start with a potential differentiation between action in context and action or behavior which defines context or makes context intelligible. … I refer to the latter type of communication as meta-communication… A function, an effect, of the meta-message is in fact to classify the messages that occur within its contexts.” (p. 124).

“In sum, each of these disasters will be found to contain an error in logical typing. In spite of immediate gain at one logical level, the sign is reversed and benefit becomes calamity in some other, larger and longer, context.” (189)

In describing the “levels of control of house temperature” Bateson used arrows to mark the direction of control in the system. It zigzagged from Personal status to Genetics and training to personal threshold, to “too cold” or “too hot” to bias to oscillating temperature. To all of this Bateson commented:

“With each zigzag of the ladder, the sphere of relevance increases. In other words, there is a change in logical typing of the information collected by the sense organ at each level.” (215)

“To jump downward two or more steps in the hierarchy is likewise undesirable … the effect of any such jumping of levels, upward or downward, is that information appropriate as a basis for decision at one level will be used as basis for decision at some other level, a common variety of error in logical typing.” (216)

Summary

What shall we say to all of this?

• First, there is no difference between logical types, logical levels, or meta-states. These are three different models or descriptions of the same thing. Bateson used types synonymously with levels.

• Second, by definition, logical levels are an expression of logical types. The higher levels or classes are categories that provide meta-communicative information about the previous level.

• Meta-States work through the meta-function of transcending one level and including it within a larger classification. In our experience this changes the psycho-logics of our neuro-semantic system.

You Know About
The “Neuro-Logical Levels”
Now Discover–

The model of the “Neuro-Logical” Levels of Robert Dilts has so fully entered into the very fabric of NLP that most of us think about them when we think of “NLP” or “logical levels.” And rightly so. So, in spite of the various critical reviews and reassessments in the past year of that model (in Anchor Point, NLP World, and Rapport) by Woodsmall, McNab, and even myself, the Neuro-Logical Levels provides a very valuable and important model to NLP. The model was the first structure to begin to tie together many of the diverse domains of NLP: values, beliefs, identity, etc.

Even though the model is not strictly a logical level system, and has some flawed aspects, it provides the structural heart of many very powerful NLP Patterns that facilitates positive transformations in people’s lives. In this respect, it offers a good example of how a map about the territory doesn’t have to be perfectly accurate in order to lead us to new and exciting places. In spite of its flaws, when used in various patterns, it still can turn a person around and empower him or her to navigate life in an entirely new way. We can appreciate the creativity of Robert Dilts for that.

During the last couple years, we have used the Neuro-Logical Levels as a starting point in building many new Meta-State Patterns. The levels in that model provide us a great beginning place for thinking about the mental/emotional phenomena that occur at meta-levels and raises several questions. So, beginning with those levels, I will raise these questions in this article:

“Are there other levels?”

“What are some of the other higher logical levels?”

“What relationship exists between these levels?”

“Is there a rigid hierarchy between them?”

The Other Logical Levels

Let’s begin by operationalizing what we mean by “logical levels.” Robert Dilts has provided the following definition of a “logical level.”

“In our brain structure, language, and perceptual systems there are natural hierarchies or levels of experiences. The effect of each level is to organize and control the information on the level below it. Changing something on an upper level would necessarily change things on the lower levels; changing something on a lower level could but would not necessarily affect the upper levels.” (Dilts, Epstein, Dilts, 1991, p. 26, emphasis added).

“Logical Levels: an internal hierarchy in which each level is progressively more psychologically encompassing and impactful” (1990: 217, emphasis added).

John Grinder (1987) has added:

“an organizational structure is an example of logical levels. In any context of talking about the human being in a society, the family, the affinity group, and finally, the tribe, are logical levels of organization. So … relationships define logical levels.” (p. 75).

To have “logical levels,” we need a series of levels (two or more), wherein the items operate in a certain prescribed order with regard to each other (a hierarchical system). We have “logical” levels when the level above “inevitably and predictably” (“logically”) drives, affects, modulates, organizes, and controls the level below it. In true logical levels, the higher levels always and inevitably drive the lower levels.

This gives us two primary ways to create logical levels:

1) The inductive approach. Any “thought” that we can take and use as a classification or category about another generates, by definition, what we mean by a “logical level.” In “chunking up” in inductive thinking we have an easy route to generating logical levels.

2) The meta-relational approach. Any “thought” that we can put into a meta-relationship to another so that it stands in an “about-ness” relationship to another, that is, so that the thought relates to another thought as being about that thought, generates a “logical level.”

How “Logical Levels” Emerge in Human Development

Logical levels emerge over time. We create them … and we do so in the process of living, mapping, and being culturalized. We all start life with an incredibly complex bio-computer, equipped with a great many hard-disk programs already installed for running our autonomic nervous system that keeps us breathing, growing, self-healing, etc., but no guideline booklet. How do we run this brain? How do we run the set of highly advanced self-programming functions that it enables us to map and then to map our maps?

Our self-reflexive self-programming operations gives us the power to immediately adopt any of thousands of languages as our basic programming language. With this we begin the process of setting internal frames of references. The infant and young child, loaded with self-programming bio-computer that can engage in millions of computations per minute– the ultimate modeling mechanism, the map-making and map-engineering device par excellence begins his or her adventure in making a Model of the World.

Of course, we do not start with a fully developed brain. We have one that continues to grow over the years. It matures through numerous developmental stages, learning to engage in increasingly more complex levels of abstraction. First we have to model the given language of our culture. Then we have to use that language as the initial programming language for all later programs. Our hard-wired language acquisition devices only need to be activated by some symbol system.

Nor is this computational bio-computer located just in the head. It’s located, and operates from, the entire mind-body system. At the peripheral edges of the mind-body we find end sensory receptors that gathers data from the environment beyond the skin– the energy manifestations that involve electro-magnetic waves, sound waves, chemical, radiant energy, etc. From these input systems, our nervous systems (neurological computing) encodes the energy forms “out there” into a neurological map that we experience as “perception.”

We experience visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory phenomena as our first contact with the world. Our experience is not “real” in an absolute sense. “Out there,” apart from our abstracting nervous system, there are not sights, sounds, sensations. There are only energy manifestations– forces, structured movements, processes, etc. occurring. We make sense of such, given the nature of our sense-receptors and the kinds of bodies that we have, via our “senses.”

Watch the blades on a propeller plane sometime. At first you see 3 to 20 blades depending on the size and construction. Then the blades begin to move. At first you can continue to “see” four blades or whatever. But then as they move faster, the blades become blurred, and seem to run together. Then they disappear as something new appears to your eyes– a disk. At least that’s what we “see.” Our eyes summarize, delete, generalize, and distort the image of a disk. Even a camera records and registers a disk. Yet when the blades turn even faster, the disk disappears– and you see through where the disk was. The blades disappear. They vanish. They are yet there– but we can’t see fast enough to collect the data. So there exist many other forces and energies out there– that we cannot see or hear or feel or register as well.

From this level of abstracting (i.e., summarizing, concluding, evaluating, deleting, generalizing, distorting, etc.) or our neurological mapping of the world we create another map. We construct a map of a map. This appears to us as a representational map that presents to ourselves again the sensory based information that we constructed from our perceptions. Our representational mapping takes us one more level away from the stimuli to which we first mapped things. Now we have a phenomenological sense of things– of sights, sounds, sensations, smells, etc. That is, it seems to us that we inward “see,” “hear,” “feel,” “smell,” etc. on the inside– in our mind. The term phenomenological alerts us to the fact that this occurs conceptually, representationally, and mentally. It is not “real” in any external way. We only experience it as “real” internally.

And, given the nature and functioning of this self-referential bio-computer, we do not stop there. We then make a map of that map-of-a-map. All of this takes us into the world of concepts and conceptual mapping.

We then begin creating the higher frames that can govern the very way we think, learn, create, etc. We participate in our own evolution.

Modeling these Mind-Body Brain “Levels”

Korzybski (1933/ 1994), using his scientific and engineering orientation, modeled this very understanding of the interaction of our nervous system with the world using his now famous Map/Territory metaphor. From that modeling, he developed a model well-known in General Semantics and much-less known in NLP, called The Levels of Abstracting. He did this to provide a way for sorting and separating the various levels of mind and communication that we develop in responding to the world.

To simplify his Structural Differential model that he used as the basis and source for “Science and Sanity,” we can distinguish these levels of neuro-linguistic mapping.

1) Perception– Perceptual Mapping: “Awareness” of the world in terms of our sense receptors (eyes, ears, skin, etc.)

2) Sensory Representations– Representational Mapping: Remembered, retrieved and imagined or constructed “awareness” of what we have seen, heard, felt, or could imagine seeing, hearing, feeling.

3) Symbolic Representations– Language Mapping: Symbols and symbolic systems that we use to “stand for” and represent our sensory representations (language, words, mathematics, music, blueprints, diagrams, metaphors, etc.)

4) Concepts– Conceptual Mapping: Symbols about symbols, meta-symbolic terms, words, language, etc. referencing other symbols.

5) Etc.–  An ongoing process that never ends… The recursiveness of the feedback and feed forward loops makes it so that we can always say something about whatever we think or feel.

“Thoughts” at Ever Higher Levels

When we apply these Levels of Abstraction to the process of “thinking” itself, and to the products of that process (“thoughts”), we discover a way to operationalize our “mental” and “conceptual” terms. This fits the Meta-Model objective of de-nominalizing our terms so that we can more precisely and accurately specify what we mean.

Now we can speak more precisely about all of the mental phenomena that occurs at meta-levels. Starting at the bottom of the chart (see Figure 1), we have the following levels, each one reflecting back to become the frame-of-reference for the previous one. This feedback loop generates a system of embedded layers– each higher layer about the lower layer. As such, the higher feedback loop or frame governs and controls the lower levels. Each orders and organizes the lower and so operates as an attractor in a self-organizing system.

Level One: “Thoughts” as Sensory-based Representations. We “think” by using the language of thought, namely, the VAK Sensory Representational Systems. We encode and thereby construct our internal sense of reality by mapping the territory in terms of sights, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes, etc. (Senses, awareness, intuition, knowing, feeling, etc.)

Level Two: “Thoughts” as Words– Symbols of the VAK. We move up a level as we make a meta-move and encode our level one “thoughts” using words. Now the word “strawberry” stands for and refers to the sights, sounds, sensations, smells, and tastes that make up a strawberry. This meta-representational system is a secondary experience, a “thought” of a “thought.” It generates a domain that we describe as Sensory-based Terms (behavioral, empirical terms). (Ideas, knowing, understanding, representations, etc.)

Level Three: “Words” about “Words”– Generalized Terms of Sensory-based Terms. We can put the term strawberry into numerous higher level abstract categories (classes, concepts): fruit, food, plant, nourishment, organic life, red objects, cultivated plants, things that weigh less than a pound, squashable items, etc. The abstract category that we use, invent, or discover gives us additional ways to think about the item. As such, we map our previous map and generalize, delete, distort, conceptualize, etc. Common terms for “thoughts” at the level include: beliefs, meanings, understandings, knowledge, concepts, conceptualizations, abstractions, values, decisions, etc.

Belief: believing, thinking a thought of confirmation about a thought, a confirmed, a validated, “true,” accurate, or “real” thought.

Value: valuing, thinking thoughts of importance and significance about a thought. A valued thought.

Decision: deciding, thinking thoughts that choose, separate away choices, “cuts off” alternatives about a thought. Choosing to accept a thought, refusing to accept another thought.

Understand: understanding, a way of representing and thinking about something that conceptually stands under a frame of reference that offers a construct or way of thinking about something.

Idea: “seeing” (literally), a way to think about something.

Map: mapping, the constructing, formatting, framing, representing of one thing in terms of another.

Meaning: to give meaning, to link or associate one thing with another; to use one thing as a form (or format) for another (contextual meaning).

Level Four: Abstractions about Abstractions, Etc. Nor does this abstraction ever stop with humans. This leads to ever increasing levels of abstraction and complexity.

Convictions: beliefs about beliefs

Domains of Understanding: understandings of understandings.

Paradigms: models of models.

Model of the world: larger level conceptual structures.

Belief Systems: interconnected beliefs about beliefs

Frame of reference: conceptually referencing something and using as your benchmark or frame, framing a thought, belief, value, etc. using some format or construction.

Identification: identifying, personalizing thoughts about other thoughts, representations, and beliefs.

Figure 1 The Meta-Levels of Mind

Model of the world (Frames of Frames)
Frames-of-References (Paradigms of Paradigms)
Identifications (Identifying With Thoughts @ Rep.)
Paradigms (Belief Systems: Beliefs @ Beliefs)
Understanding (Formatting Thoughts about Thoughts)
Decisions (choosing Thoughts about Thoughts)
Valuing (Thoughts of Importance about Thoughts)
Believing (Confirmed thoughts about Thoughts)

________________________

Representational Screen

________________________

Person–
Using powers of representational thinking      –>          Events in the World

How to Avoid Linear Thinking about Non-Linear Processes

Within each level of “thought” we have each of these meta-phenomena. This means that

within every belief, we have “values,” i.e., we value something
within every decision, we find beliefs (explicit and implicit) and things we value as important
within ever understanding we have beliefs, values, and intentions
within every belief we have intentions, motivations, agendas
etc.

In other words, we have to be careful as we use such terms as we find in the “Neuro-Logical” Levels. This is just a way to talk about subjectivity. The actual referent, the dynamic, fluid, and ever-changing reality of mind processes at various levels, layering thoughts-and-feelings upon each other is far too alive and systemic to be reduced by such terms. Plus, each term only gives us one perspective about each layer. We can legitimately say that–

It’s beliefs all the way up
It’s frames all the way up
It’s values all the way up
It’s expectations all the way up
It’s intentions all the way up
etc.

This gives us a picture of the greater flexibility that our mind experiences at the higher levels. As dynamic patterning, knowing that logical levels gives us a way to map the referencing nature of mind expands our own flexibility. The Logical Levels are not “things” at all and certainly not static representations in spite of our nominalized language about “beliefs, values, etc.”

Mental Phenomena at Many Levels of Mind

With all of the terms available for mental phenomena, we now have a way to sort through them to more specifically understand the dynamic structure. Most of these are multiordinal in nature. Such terms mean nothing specifically, we have to specify the level of abstraction at which the word occurs to determine its meaning. Multiordinal refers to a linguistic distinction of Korzybski that helps us handle a special kind of nominalization (See The Secrets of Magic, Hall, 1998). With regard to the kinds and qualities of mental phenomena that we can use in mapping the territory, we can think, believe, value, know, understand, map, identify, decide, etc.

These mental or conceptual powers enable us to build thoughts at many different levels. Yet to not notice the levels, to confuse the levels, and/or to wish the levels would just go away– creates confusion and all sorts of category errors. All thoughts are not equal. They do not occur at the same level. “Thought” occurs at many different levels and we label such thought by different terms. This generates differences in emotions–

• primary level emotion (driven, determined, encoded, and structured by primary level thinking)
• meta-feelings (determined and controlled by meta-level thinking).

We can also discover and sort out meta meta-feelings.

This means that in running our own brain and in coaching someone else in running his or her brain, we need to take into consider both mind and meta-mind levels. They differ. And they operate by different set of principles.

Appreciating and Working with all of the Other Logical Levels

So what? What difference does any of this make? And how can we use this understanding of the dynamic levels of mind?

Appreciating the dynamic nature of these systemic processes first of all helps us to avoid the mistake of solidifying the levels and turning them into nominalized entities. In NLP, we already know about the ill-formedness of such nominalizations as “values, beliefs, identity, mission,” etc. We already know that we speak with much more accuracy as we map the territory using verbs: valuing, believing, identifying, planning directions, etc.

Such appreciation now opens us up to a new level of flexibility. If we become stuck within our own mind or in working with another person, we can use these terms to expand our perceptions. If we’re working with a belief, we can explore the intentions, values, and/or identifications within it. If we’re working on an identification, we can explore the importance, meaning, beliefs, and frames within it. This greatly increases flexibility in working with the higher levels of mind about anything.

And this more dynamic understanding of mind enables us to play with our self-reflexive consciousness. As we reflect back on previous thoughts and generate layers of thoughts in a hierarchy (holoarchy) that gives birth to meta-level phenomena, we know that the higher levels will always dominate. The higher levels always govern, modulate, and control the lower levels. And since meaning involves context, we know that a person’s conceptual context (or frame-of-reference) will determine his or her neuro-semantics.

As we can use the Neuro-Logical Levels to understand the meaning of a system, so we can also use the other logical levels to extend this understanding. This gives us an expanded understanding of the meanings or semantic system that a person operates from. It describes a person’s meaning system which, in turn, explains functioning, behavior, skills, etc.

The other logical levels enable us to also think more broadly about the emergent meanings and properties that arise as systemic properties in a system. This cues us in to the mind-body system and its feed back and feed forward loops. Now we can look for the self-organizing attractors in the system, namely, the higher frames and beliefs. This allows us to trace back a force to the “idea” that attracts to itself events, reasons, understandings, etc. to support it.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., researcher and modeler, international trainer and entrepreneur (P.O. Box 9231; Grand Jct. CO. 81501; 970 523_7877), developer of the Meta-States Model, co-founder of Neuro-Semantics®www.learninstitute.com], currently involved in several modeling projects: wealth building, selling/persuasion excellence, accelerated learning, etc.

References

Bandler, Richard. (1985). Ed. by Steve Andreas. Using your brain for a change. Moab, UT: Real People Press.

Hall, L. Michael (1995). Meta-States: Reflexivity in human states of consciousness. Grand Jct. CO: E.T. Publications.

Hall, L. Michael; Bodenhamer, Bobby (1999). The structure of excellence: Unmasking the meta-levels of submodalities. Grand Jct. CO: E.T. Publications.

People want to know. At least people well-trained in the NLP model want to know. I find it everywhere. Without fail wherever I present the Introductory workshop on Meta-States, “Accessing Personal Genius,” I am repeatedly asked about the relationship between Meta-States and the Neuro-Logical Levels model. Just this past month it happened recently in Monterrey Mexico, in Moscow Russia, in Sydney Australia.

“So what’s the difference between Meta-States and the ‘Neuro-Logical Levels’ of Robert Dilts?”
“Meta-States seems more inclusive and less rigid than the ‘Neuro-Logical Levels,’ is that right?”
“I find it hard to shift from what I know about logical levels, that is, thinking about them as fixed and in a hierarchical ladder to the more dynamic way that Meta-States presents them. How can I make this shift?”

The “Neuro-Logical Levels”

Those of us who love NLP know and have experienced the power and magic of the “Neuro-Logical Levels” model that Robert Dilts created. It’s a great model. It’s not a “logical” levels model, but it’s a great model that has many practical uses. Yes, there are problems with the model known as “The Neuro-Logical Levels”. Many NLP trainers have noted these and written articles about them, I have myself contributed to that dialogue in a couple NLP Journals. And yet, the list is a great and useful list. So even though the list may not formally be a list of “logical” levels, it has provided NLP a great many patterns and processes that are very effective. For that, we owe Robert Dilts much. I’m told that even Robert has recently acknowledged that the list is not “logical.”

What’s wrong with the list that it is not a “logical levels” list? Among them, the fact that “Behavior” occurs within an “Environment” not the other way around. “Environment” is not a member of the class of “Behaviors.” It’s not a behavior at all. It is a context. “Capabilities” is confusing. If it means “Abilities” then it is a primary level experience, so that it operates as a synonym of “Behaviors” and not as a classification of behaviors. if however if means “Possible abilities… those that could be developed, or potentialities” then we would classify it as a meta-level phenomena and put “Behaviors” inside that Category. “Values” and “Identities” are but “Beliefs in the value of something” and “Beliefs in Identifying with something” to make part of one’s self-definition. So with “Mission” and “Spirituality” these are “Beliefs in…” a Mission/Vision and in one’s understandings of being a spirit, etc.

Robert’s list of these levels provided NLP a great checklist of primary and meta-level mental-emotional phenomena.

Spirituality ¾ Why

Mission/ Vision ¾ Why

Identity ¾ Who

Values ¾ Why

Beliefs ¾ Why

Capabilities ¾ How

Behavior ¾ What

Environment ¾ Where

Robert has also provided an analysis of such in terms of indexing: where, what, how, why, etc. And he has taken much about logical levels and applied it to this list. Strange enough, Robert has generated numerous other models of Logical Levels, yet this one doesn’t make the grade because the items are not classes and members, “Environment” is not a member of the class of “Behavior.” (In NLP: Going Meta, 1997, I have devoted an entire chapter to the genius of Robert Dilts and the numerous Logical Levels models that he has created and an critique of this particular one.)

What do we mean by “Logical Levels?”

No one has provided more accurate or useful definitions of “logical levels” than Robert Dilts. Taking his cue from Bateson, Robert has clearly shown that for one level to be higher than another, the higher one has to be about the lower and the lower has to be a member of the class of the higher. When that happens, then the higher level will govern, modulate, and organize the lower. Robert Dilts (1991):

“In our brain structure, language, and perceptual systems there are natural hierarchies or levels of experiences. The effect of each level is to organize and control the information on the level below it. Changing something on an upper level would necessarily change things on the lower levels; changing something on a lower level could but would not necessarily affect the upper levels.” (Dilts, Epstein, Dilts, 1991, p. 26, emphasis added).

“Logical Levels: an internal hierarchy in which each level is progressively more psychologically encompassing and impactful” (1990: 217, emphasis added).

This quotation provides several crucial features about logical levels. Five of these components that enable us to begin to build an operational definition of logical levels, include:

1. Hierarchies of experience.

2. Higher levels organize and control information on lower levels.

3. The modulation effect of the system necessarily works downward.

4. The modulation effect of the system does not necessarily work upward.

5. Higher levels operate more encompassing and impactful than the lower levels.

Again, quoting Robert:

“Logical typing occurs where there is a discontinuity (as opposed to a continuity, as with the hierarchies) between levels of classification. This kind of discontinuity is exemplified:

a) in mathematic, by the restriction that a class cannot be a member of itself nor can one of the members be the class.

b) in logic, by the solution to the classic logical paradox, ‘This statement is false.’ (If the statement is true, it is false, and if it is false, then it is true, and so on.) The actual truth value of the statement is of a different logical type than the statement itself.

c) in behavior, by the fact that the reinforcement rules for exploration in animals is of a completely different nature than those for the process of testing that occurs in the act of exploration.” (1983: 24).

“The informational effects between levels and types is called feedback and is probably the major distinguishing feature of cybernetic systems.” (1983: 39)

“Differences of the same or different logical type interacting at different levels (hierarchical or logical respectively) will result in the modulation of the difference on the lower level.” (1983: 49)

Meta-States as a Model of Logical Levels

Now for those new to the Meta-States model, and to the emerging field of Neuro-Semantics, it is crucial to understand the NLP model of “states” (mind-body-emotional dynamic states) and “Logical Levels” to fully understand Meta-States and more especially to use Meta-States effectively. That’s why we always begin our trainings with some review on these two subjects. After all,

A meta-state is a state that we have applied to self at a higher logical level. It is a mind-body state (a neuro-linguistic process) applied to another neuro-linguistic process. It is the psychological (mind-body) energy that we use to react to our own reactions. It is the reflexive power of our mind-body in action layering and texturing thought upon thought.

When we engage in this process, we create a “meta” (above, beyond, about) relationship. The result is that we end up with one state being about another state: joy of learning, playful about being serious, flexible about being sure and confident, etc.

Awareness of our thoughts is a meta-state structure, running an ecology check to make sure that the way we’re thinking, believing, valuing, deciding, etc. is healthful, enhancing, and empowering is a meta-state structure. So is stepping back from our memories of old hurts. And when we bring a sense of “control” over the encoding of that old memory, we meta-state the old memories yet another time, and when we “run it in reverse from a place of comfort” we meta-state it even another time.

In fact, the greatest and highest magic of NLP occurs in meta-state structures. When you know that, you know much more about the very structure of magic and the secret of how it works¾ and how you can work it. That’s one reason that Meta-States has caught on like it has and has been revolutionizing the NLP model itself. Meta-States explains and expands the magic of NLP because the magic occurs mostly at meta-levels, that’s where “the difference that makes a difference” occurs. Many are saying that Meta-States is not merely the third meta-domain after the Meta-Model and the Meta-Program models, but a meta-domain that unifies the entire field. Of course, it will take time to see if it has that much explanatory power.

Bringing or applying one state to another also describes what we mean by a “Logical” level, because we have put at a higher level a thought, idea, understanding, feeling, etc. so that it becomes about another thought, idea, understanding. Outside of the field of NLP, this has led to the founding of the academic field of Meta-Cognition (1977) which studies the meta-cognitive devices that help with memory, learning, etc.

A Practical Example of Meta-Stating a Higher Logical Level

Consider what happens when I frame my thoughts about my fear and anger (primary state experiences) with the following thought.

“Just Emotions… just signals in my mind-body about the relationship between my Map of the World and the Territory (experience) of the world.”

When I bring this understanding as a higher idea and set it as a frame or state about my everyday experiences of fear and anger, this idea (concept, belief) classifies or re-classifies those emotions. It puts fear and anger into the category of “Just emotions..” . The Primary State (PS) experience of fear and anger now become members of the Class of the “Just Emotions…” Frame.

So what?

Much!

Doing this now allows me to play a new Game: The “Emotions are Just Emotions” Game. That lets me Stop playing the old Games of, “Emotions are the Final Word about Reality.”

Do you want to know the trick to all of this?

Here is the trick. As we move “up” the levels of our mental framing (what Bateson called “punctuating”) each mental-emotional move up creates a new Logical Level. Yet these “levels” are not things, not real in that sense, and therefore not rigid. They are fluid. They move. Their fluidity and movement occurs as we think, as we frame. That’s why there is no hierarchy to the Logical Levels. We cannot say there are first Environment, Behaviors, Abilities, Beliefs, Values, Identifications, etc. It does not work that way. It’s frames all the way up.

Actually, let me correct that. It is framing all the way up… because the so-called “levels” are just the way we punctuate or layer one thought upon another, the way we formulate our mental understandings and world. There are no things in the brain, just ways of framing. It’s our language that tricks us here. We name the framing: Beliefs, Values, Identity, etc. and then we begin to behave (and feel) that these are real entities. They are not.

It’s all process.

The immediate processing at the primary level comes and goes and is very, very fluid. That’s why our “states” come and go minute by minute, hour by hour. We never stay in the same state. States are not “static.” Not at all. They are dynamic… always moving, always responding to internal and external stimuli. “States” are our mental-emotional-body energy fields, so when we bring one energy field to bear upon or relate to another energy field… we do not create a new thing, we simply texture and qualify the first energy field. This represents a more systemic way to think about states and meta-states and about all of the mental phenomena of the mind: beliefs, values, identity, spirituality, etc.

The more we layer thought upon thought, feeling upon thought, a physiological response (calm breathing) upon a thought, etc., the “higher” we go. This allows us to set higher frames of reference and this higher framing gives us more of a sense of stability. That’s why we are able to carry beliefs, understandings, decisions, metaphors, expectations, etc. with us for years. These higher semantic states are more enduring than the primary states. We get them into our body, into our muscle memory and so the higher frame self-organizes our neurology. This creates what we call our neuro-semantics.

Meta-States as Systemic Consciousness

There’s another trick to creating higher logical levels, framing, or meta-stating. There is other trick that you need to know if you want to master Meta-States.

Every Logical Level is a belief, a value, an identity, a decision, an understanding, a mission, an intention, expectation, etc.

Take a moment and consider that. It is not trivial. Within that statement is hidden several secrets for working neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic magic at the higher levels. And in this statement also you will find one way that we have moved beyond the “Neuro-Logical Levels” model to offer a much more fluid and systemic model for NLP. This does not make the Dilts model wrong, it merely extends and expands it … and re-organizes it for greater power.

This secret means that not only are there many, many more logical levels, but each and ever level occurs at every layering, framing or meta-stating.

Here again language tricks us. So let me slow down and map this out carefully. Using these nominalizations (named verbs), all these terms sound like things, like entities. They are not. That’s why we do ourselves a favor (a big one) to always use them as verbs… believing, valuing, giving importance, identifying with, intending, expecting, etc.

Consider again what happens when I set the frame that “Emotions are just Emotions…”

I confirmed that thought and so believe it, and believe it is importantvalue it, and understand it, and decide to think this way, and perhaps identify with it, and intend to operate this way and so expect certain things to result …. and so

All of these facets of minding-emoting are true simultaneously … at the same time. As a mind-body system, our neuro-linguistics operate simultaneously, fluidly, as an ongoing process … and it is in the process of our systemic consciousness that we establish the framing of our mind-emotions-body…. that so run our neuro-pathways that it habituates and becomes what Bateson called “the ecology of the mind.”

What does all of this mean?

It means that in learning to think more systemically about our neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic states, we have to shift from thinking about our states as “static” and involving rigid structures, to thinking about it as involving fluid and dynamic processes. It means that “logical levels” are only a metaphor about the layering, texturing, and qualifying of our experiences. It means that every time we transcendinclude the lower levels and texture it with higher levels of resources. (See the article on the Texturing of States.)

And when that happens… all of these frames within frames that qualify our everyday experiences sets up the rules for the Games that we play. This means that we can communicate the NLP and NS models very simply¾ as Frames and Games, or Frame Games. The Games are the everyday actions and transactions that you engage in… and these are informed, framed, and controlled by your internal framing.

This also means that you have to get rid of the old “Jungle Gym” model that Robert and several other early NLP trainers created. You remember that one, don’t you? That model of the Cube that looked like a Borg Spaceship. Forget it. That is such a poor representation of logical levels and the meta-levels of the mind. Robert has created other models that are much more fluid and flexible, especially the work he has done with the energy sheets of attractors as he has described self-organizing systems. Think about those energy sheets and patterns of thinking as “balls” rolling around and falling into energy wells… that’s a much, much better metaphor.

To think about logical levels with any rigid metaphor ¾ ladders, steps, solid cubes, etc. will delude you from the fluid and flexibility of the way the mind layers things. Think more about the energy forms and shapes of a tornado… how it spirals up and down, how it creates energy wells and moves things and never stays put.

Think about a fluid matrix of spirals. Think about the difference between the Artificial Intelligence creates in the Terminator Movies. In the first you have an Arnold Schwartzneggar robot, stiff, solid, made with a metal cassie; in the second you have a robot made of fluid metal that could take any shape it desired, in a second or two.

Think about games… ever changing and playful games. The frame games that we play in our minds and bodies are processes. So as we play games for building wealth, slimming, demonstrating expertise in business, etc., we layer frame upon frame to construct an understanding of the rules, the set up, the players, the payoffs, etc. In NS, we are now using this new metaphor to extend our ability to model dynamic structures and we’re finding that it’s taking us to new places.

The meta-levels (leveling, layering) of the mind occurs as we punctuate and frame thoughts about thoughts, feelings about thoughts, thoughts about feelings, physiology about feelings, etc. The word “levels” is a metaphor, so is “logical” and so are most of the embodied ways that we try to imagine the functioning of the mind.

The bottom line? It’s Frames all the way up… that’s where the magic occurs and then it’s Games all the way down… that’s where the “reality” hits.

Notes:
See the article on the web site: “The Other Logical Levels.” Also, the book, NLP: Going Meta¾ Advanced Modeling Using Meta-Levels, in that work there is a chapter on all of the logical level systems that Robert has created.

References:
Dilts, Robert. (1983). Applications of neuro-linguistic programming. Cupertino CA: Meta Publications.

Dilts, Robert B. (1983). Roots of neuro-linguistic programming. Cupertino, CA: Meta Publications.

Dilts, R.B., Dilts, R.W., Epstein, Todd (1991). Tools for dreamers: Strategies for creativity and the structure of innovation. Cupertino, CA: Meta Publications.

Hall, Michael (1995). Meta-states: Managing the higher levels of your mind’s reflexivity. Grand Jct. CO: ET Publications.

Hall, Michael. (1997). NLP: Going Meta ¾ Advance modeling using meta-levels. Grand Jct. CO: ET Publications.

Hall, L. Michael; Bodenhamer, Bob G. (1999). The structure of excellence: Unmasking the meta-levels of ‘submodalities.’ Grand Junction, CO: E.T. Publications.

Author:
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., psychologist & international trainer (P.O. Box 9231; Grand Jct. CO. 81501; 970 523-7877; fax: 970 523-5790), developer of the Meta-States Model. The Institute of Neuro-Semantics® ¾ www.neurosemantics.com.

Becoming a “State” Connoisseur

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

• Suppose you could texture your mental and emotional states…
• Suppose you could add various tastes, feelings, qualities to your current frame of mind…
• Suppose you could make the way you move through the world richer and fuller and radiating with a delightful and fascinating aroma…
• Suppose that you’re not stuck or limited with just the plain vanilla states…

One of the things that we are able to do in Meta-States that extends and expands NLP is texture states. That’s important. It’s important first of all because the quality of our states directly influence the quality of our lives. It’s important also because it is really not what states we experience that matters most, but the quality, nature, properties¾ texture of the state.

The supposing questions above speak about the quality and nature of our everyday mind-body states and suggests that we have the power to actually design and engineer the very quality of our states. Imagine that! Imagine being able to texture the very quality of your states. When we do this, we move to one of the most exciting and captivating features of Meta-States.

Plain Vanilla States

Consider the nature and quality of some of the following mental and emotional states. Examine the following list of terms that summarize these common everyday states and take a moment to explore them in terms of how you experience the quality of these states. You could ask about their¾

• Intensity and Strength
• Accessibility and Development
• Features and Feel
• Ecology and Balance

What kind of texture do you experience with these states? What are some of the qualities and properties that characterize them? Perhaps you experience¾

• Hesitating confidence; courageous confidence; foolish confidence; playful confidence, bold confidence
• Slow Clarity; dull clarity; bright and brilliant clarity, developing clarity, curious clarity.
• Fear of commitment; total commitment; stressful commitment, playful commitment, miserable commitment.
• Aggressive curiosity, rigid curiosity, humorous and silly curiosity, serious curiosity.
• Hostile anger; dreadful fear of anger; shame about feeling guilty for being angry
• Shameful fear; bold fear; curious fear; playful fear

The Meta-State Flush Out

The fact that we have, and experience, our mind-body states in terms of other qualities and properties informs us that we have, and carry with us, meta-states. Typically, however, we don’t experience them as “meta.” It all seems part and parcel of one state¾ one experience. This means that the higher level thoughts and feelings that we have applied or “brought to bear” upon the plain vanilla state has completely coalesced into the state and now comprises it’s texture.

It is in this way that our higher or meta-states get “into our eyes.” They coalesce and percolate into our muscles. They become part of our muscle memory. Of course, when this happens, we cease to notice them as separate or apart of our regular everyday states. They become a part of the state and no longer apart. They enter into the state as the higher level qualifying and governing frames-of-reference. And in this way, our meta-states seem hidden and invisible to us even though we never leave home without them.

Yet we can easily tease out the higher levels. We can use the qualities of our states as a way to flush out meta-states (whether your own or those of someone else). Simple inquire about the quality of a state.

• When you get angry, what’s the quality of your anger?
• Would I like to receive your anger?
• Are you respectful and thoughtful when you’re angry?
• Or do you lose your head and go ballistic when you get mad?
• Can you maintain civility and patience when you’re feeling upset and angry?
• Or do you become impatient and insulting?

The answers and responses that emerge from the quality question about a state flushes out the higher frames. And typically, there are many of them. You can also ask about other meta-level phenomena.

• What do you believe about anger?
• What memories in your personal history informs you about this?
• What values or dis-values do you have about experiencing anger?
• What moral judgments do you make about this?
• How does this affect who you are?
• How does anger play into or fail to play into your destiny, mission, and vision?
• What do you expect about anger? About people when they get angry?

Understanding the Meta-Levels in our States

Far from exhausting the subject, these questions just get us started in this domain of the meta-levels in our Neuro-Semantics. Yet to fully understand what we mean by meta-states and their importance, we need to step back and think about our everyday states. At first reckoning, they seem ordinary, plain, and of vanilla flavoring. But they are not.

They are textured. They have properties and features and characteristics that go far beyond “plain vanilla.” Over the years, via everyday experiences, we come to qualify them. We set them inside of various frames-of-reference. And every time we do, we thereby create a meta-level state. And remember, we’re using the term “state” here as a holistic and dynamic term that includes state of mind, state of body, and state of emotion.

So, using “anger” as a prototype, we come to experience thoughts-and-feelings and neurological somatic sensations about the state of anger. We like it or dislike it. We fear it or love it. We dread it or long for it. We believe it can serve us; we believe it only turns things ugly. All of these are meta-states. Dynamic, ever-moving and changing mental and emotional states about other states.

Structurally, a meta-state stands in special relationship to our states. They relate to the primary state as a higher state of awareness about it. This makes them about the lower state as a classification of it. The junior state functions as a member of that class. The higher or meta-state functions as a category for understanding and feeling about the lower.

• That’s why “fear of our anger” (fearful anger) differs in texture so much from “respect of our anger” (respectful anger).
• That’s why “shame about getting angry because it only turns things nasty” differs so much in texture to “appreciation of my powers to get angry because it informs me that some perceived value or understand feels violated and allows me to respectfully explore the situation anger.”

As a higher logical level, the mental and emotional frames that we bring to our primary experiences represent the governing influence in our lives. The higher frame as a message about the lower experiences modulates, organizes, and governs. It functions like a self-organizing attractor in the mind-body system. That’s why meta-states are so important. In your meta-states, you will find all of your values, beliefs, expectations, understandings, identifications, etc.

The Systemic Nature of Meta-States

While I have teased apart the structure of our higher frames-of-references (or meta-states) from the primary experiences, we can only do that for sake of analysis and understanding. In actual practice primary and meta levels of experiences or states merge into one unit. Research scientist Arthur Koestler introduced the term “holons” many years ago to describe reality as composed of “whole/parts.” These whole/parts holons refer to any “entity” that is itself a whole and yet simultaneously a part of some other whole.

Consider our “states” as holons. We experience our “states” as a whole. Confidence, courage, commitment, playfulness, joy, flow, etc. We experience each as a whole within itself. And yet, they also all exist (and actually only exist as a part of some larger whole). We would have no state without a body, a functioning nervous system, a thinking brain, “life,” oxygen, an atmosphere, etc.

A mind-body state operates as a holon also in terms of all of the higher mental and emotional frames (beliefs, values, expectations, etc.) that support it. The state of confidence is a whole and it is also a part of many other higher level frames.

Ken Wilber speaks about holons in terms of agency and communion, and transcendence and dissolution. Each holon has its own identity or autonomy. It has its own agency or identity as a whole. Yet as a holon within a larger whole, it also communicates and has communion with other wholes (i.e., confidence with respect, within esteem for self, within possibilities, etc.). This allows it to transcend itself and to go beyond what it has been to become more of what it can be. It can add novel components to itself. Or it can dissolve. A holon can be pulled up or pulled down.

Yet when a state as a holon moves up and experiences a transcendent of itself (self-transcendence) something new emerges. This occurs, for example, when we develop a compelling outcome so that we’re empowered to boldly face a fear. In this case, courage emerges. And while the lower was transcended and included in the higher, this continuous process produces discontinuities. Yet the leap upward does not work in reverse.

In systems theory we say that the new gestalt is “more than the sum of the parts.” Some new configuration has emerged. And merely adding all of the parts together does not, and cannot, explain it. Emergence has occurred. There was a leap upward to a higher form of organization and structure. Wilber (1996) writes:

“So there are both discontinuties in evolution¾ mind cannot be reduced to life, and life cannot be reduced to matter; and there are continuities ..” (p. 24)

He also says that “holons emerge holarchically.” (p. 27) . This term, holarchically, also comes from Koestler and replaces “hierarchy.” Holarchically describes what we mean by a natural hierarchy, not the ones that we create which involve dominations. Natural hierarchies describe an order of increasing wholeness: particles to atoms to cells to organisms or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs. The whole of one level becomes a part of the whole of the next.

Each higher level embraces and engulfs the lower. That’s why when we take a primary everyday state like anger or confidence and set various frames on it, we create new emergent properties to nurture the mind-and-body on.

Imagine embracing your anger with acceptance, appreciation, and then wonder. Imagine engulfing it in love, respect, and honor. Imagine applying mindfulness, values, and patience to it. Imagine bringing ecology concerns, moral uprightness, and honor to it. Mix well. Put into the oven of your mind, let it bake for awhile…

Imagine embracing your power to take action in the world with acceptance and appreciation. Imagine engulfing it with ownership, excitement, and joy. Imagine applying hope, desired outcomes, willingness to take intelligent risks, love, and concern for others, to it. Mix all of these well in a state of contemplative relaxation. Let it bake as you learn and explore and develop…

Texturing occurs. With Meta-States, you can now take charge of the process and design the kind of quality states that will turn you on to life in new and exciting ways.

States Plus: Transcend and Include

To transcend any everyday plain vanilla state, we begin at the primary level of consciousness as we notice our thoughts and feelings about something “out there” in the world. This defines a primary state. Our awareness focuses on something external to ourselves. We fear driving fast, closed in places, particular tones of voices. We get anger at violence, insults, and threats to our way of life. We delight in and enjoy the beauty of a scene or a piece of music.

We transcend this experience while including it as we move up to a higher level of thought, emotion, and awareness. This creates a new level of organization. We have something higher that still contains the essentials of the lower plus something else.

In respect, considerate, and patient anger¾ we still have anger. We still have the sense of threat or danger to our person or way of life, yet the anger is now textured in larger levels of mind and emotion. That causes something new to emerge. We have the Anger State Plus something that transcends “mere” anger (that is, animal-like, brute anger). Now we have a higher kind of human anger, even spiritual anger.

We have hierarchy (levels) of states or holoarchy because as Aristotle first pointed out:

All of the lower is in the higher, but not all of the higher is in the lower.

Molecules contain atoms, but atoms do not contain molecules. As we move up levels, the higher level includes the lower and transcends it. As it transcends the lower, it adds new features, qualities, properties, and characteristics to it. In Meta-States this provides us the ability to engineer new emergent properties for our states. It gives us the key to the structure of subjectivity as experiences become more complex and layered.

When our learning is taken up into playfulness and appreciation, when we engulf it with passion and the intention to improve the quality of life¾ something new emerges. We have a passionate learning state that’s much accelerated and that’s a real turn-on. It takes on more of the qualities of “genius.” Each higher level has added new components that enrich the emergent gestalt. Now something bigger and more expansive arises. Now we have the Learning State Plus.

Meta-State Permeation

When I first wrote the text for the first edition of Meta-States in 1994/5, I made several mistakes in conceptualizing and theorizing about the structure of the model. These have been completely updated and the mistakes eliminated in the totally revised edition (2000). Among those mistakes was the idea that I had then that the higher levels could not be anchored kinesthetically. I now know better. In fact, today that’s one of the things we do regularly in our Meta-States Trainings. Yet at that time I didn’t understand how the higher levels operate as holons, how they not only transcend but also embrace and include the lower levels. I now understand how they permeate the lower levels giving what had been a plain vanilla state all kinds of rich textures, tastes, aromas, etc.

Accordingly, we have recently been developing a whole series of patterns and processes for “mind-muscling” the mind-body integration that fully allows the higher levels to percolate down through the levels. This completes the process by which we layer thought upon thought and feeling upon feeling so that in the end we have holons¾ whole/part states within a hierarchal or holarchical systems. These State Plus experiences then offer us top-notch high quality states that we have textured with the very best of resources. And when you get to this place, you have entered into the highest of design engineering with Meta-States. Now we have a powerful process for texturing our states so that they respond to our intentional designs.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., researcher and modeler, international trainer and entrepreneur (P.O. Box 9231; Grand Jct. CO. 81501; 970 523_7877), developer of the Meta-States Model, along with Dr. Bobby Bodenhamer, co-founder the Institute of Neuro-Semantics®, currently involved in several modeling projects: wealth building, selling/persuasion excellence, accelerated learning, etc. Look for Frame Games coming to the UK and Europe this year.

References

Hall, L. Michael (1995/2000). Meta-States: Managing the higher levels of the mind. Grand Jct. CO: Neuro_Semantics Publications.

Hall, L. Michael; Bodenhamer, Bobby. (1999). The structure of excellence: Unmasking the meta-levels of submodalities. Grand Jct. CO: E.T. Publications.

Hall, L. Michael (2000). Frame games: Persuasion elegance. Grand Jct. CO: N.S. Publications.

Wilber, Ken. (1996). A brief history of everything. Boston MA: Shambhal.