THE PERSONAL GENIUS PATTERN

In 1994 Neuro-Semantics introduced what we called “the personal genius pattern.” It is a pattern for accessing and integrating a mastery state as a state wherein you are totally committed and engaged in an activity that you’re developing competence with. In this state, you become so focused that various facets of everyday reality just vanish away— the world goes away, your sense of self goes away, time vanishes, etc. Your focus becomes so highly intentional it seems like you have a laser beam focus in what you’re doing. The “genius” state is an engagement state, flow, you are in the zone, and you are experience what Maslow called a peak experience.

The original idea for this genius state came from the NLP modeling that two of the founders did in Turtles all the Way Down: Prerequisites For Personal Genius (1987). There Grinder and DeLozier explored the use of “logical levels” (i.e., meta-states) to protect and govern the state. In this way the higher meta-levels allow a person to get lost in their first-level attentions.

What are the prerequisites? A “genius” state involves focus, clarity, commitment, engagement, getting lost in the moment, at one’s best with all of one’s resources available, “in the zone,” and synergizing an important meaning with a developed competence in your performance. Now to protect such a state, we need to set some higher level frames. In that way the state will not get contaminate or dilute when we move in and out of the state.

The process of stepping in and out of the genius state is the technique which, in turn, allows you to find the differences that make a difference in your physiology. You can then use those distinctions for ecological boundaries of the genius state. Each distinction in your physiology informs your neurology for when and where to cue the state. By stepping cleanly out of the state, and shifting the focus of your mind and body system, you learn to separate from this intense flow state so that you can leave it cleanly behind. Do this repeatedly until you can do so impeccably . . . with no residue left over. My recommendation: do it 12 to 20 times.

Another technique that we use: practicing interrupting the state. This enables you to learn to trust yourself, namely, that you can always get the state back. In this way, you change your relationship to any experience that would otherwise interrupt you. By inviting a person to be interrupted and having him or her handle it effectively, namely, stepping out and taking care of the interruption, and then matter-of-factly stepping back into state. Now you are becoming un-interruptible. Begin by practicing responding to an interruption and then take charge of it by interrupting yourself so that you step out of state with a minimum overlap, and then back into the state in a moment’s notice.

The brain/ nervous system will learn this pattern quickly and achieve the desire level of competency of state shifting. When you carry over no mental or emotional residue from one state to the other, but cleanly separates and breaks between them and can then step back in and re-access that state with a strong intensity, you are making an impeccable state shift.

Now it is best if you have someone who knows the pattern, a Meta-Coach or a Neuro-Semantic Trainer to run it with you. You can do it by yourself, but that’s more difficult.

Distinctions:
∙ The primary level of competence or expertise and the protection by the meta levels.
∙ A dedicated state for a specific purpose versus a free flowing state.
∙ Having a basic understanding and strategy for an activity, how to do it; and the optimal state that makes the activity come alive.

Elicitation Questions:
∙ What optimal state would you like to create and experience that will give you a single minded focus when you are engaged in something very important to you?

Creating a New Genius Pattern

1) Access the new desired focus state.
What engagement state do you want to build so you can do something that’s important for you to do? What do you call that state?
Where do you want this state of full engagement? When?
Have you ever had a little bit of it? [Yes] Good. Access that bit seeing what you saw, hearing what you heard, and feeling what you felt. Go there and be with it fully. Do you need to amplify this state?

2) Access a simple state of innocent witnessing and/or observing.
Step out of that state. Let’s access a discreet state of “just observing.” Step into this position and just notice some of the colors and sounds, etc. in the room. Are all of your muscles relaxed so that you are just observing?

3) Practice stepping in and out to develop impeccable state shifting.
Step back into the desired genius state and be there as fully as possible. How much are you in this state? Tell me what it is like? Posture, breathing, perspective, etc.
Step out again. How much of that state did you bring with you?
Repeatedly step in and out of this new genius state, practicing a clean state shift. Do this to make distinctions in your neurology which will allow you to know how to have it upon cue. Contrast the two states— posture, muscle tension, face, breath, internal dialogue, etc.
Step back in. Let’s set up a sphere that will protect your genius state. When you step out, take a moment to snapshot where you are— what you are seeing, hearing, saying, doing. Then step out.
Step out again until you can do so cleanly, leaving the genius state intact. Take as little of it as possible. Ready, go. Step out to your observer position.
Would you like to imagine a bubble that protects and secures this genius state? (You could use a wall, a door, the Stargate picture of liquid space, etc.)

4) Use your executive mind to further develop the genius state.
Step back in. There’s a part of your mind that makes decisions, that decides when and where to have this genius state. As you are in this state, let that part of your mind rise up from the focused state to an executive level state. This is the state that will be able to take charge of things when you are fully engaged in this state. Would you like that?

Would you like this executive level of mind to run the choices you make so that you can be cued about when the appropriateness of staying in this state or coming out? Would you like your executive mind to determine when to make the switch in and out of the flow or genius state and to determine the contexts for the boundaries of this state?

Re-access the state and then rise up in your mind to the part of your mind that makes decisions and answer the following questions. [The experiencer does not need to speak the answers, but simply nod when he or she has an answer.]

World:
Place: Where should you have this state? Where not?
Contexts: In what context or contexts? In what contexts should you not?
Time: When should you have this state? When should you not?
Intention:
Criteria: According to what other criteria and qualities?
Value: Why should you have this state? How would it be valuable to you?
Emergencies: For what will you be interrupted? What emergencies will you allow to bring you out?
Power:
Style: How should you? In what way, with what style? How should you not?
Resources: What other resources would you like to add to this state that would even more fully express the quality and efficiency that you want? Any other resources to add to the genius state? Love, respect, daring, fallibility, balance, etc.?
Others: Relationship: With whom? With whom not?
Meaning:
Meanings: For what significance or meaning? What meanings to not give it?
Reasons: Why should you? Your reasons, agendas, motivations? Why should you not?
Any other considerations that you would like to determine the boundaries of this engagement state?

5) Commission the executive meta-state.
[The person still in the state] “The part of your mind that makes decisions—are you willing to take full responsibility for setting these parameters for this commitment state so that this person [say his or her name] can fully experience this commitment state? [Yes!]
Are you willing to take responsibility for letting this person fully experience this intense and passionate state? For knowing the limits and boundaries, when to have it and when not, how to have it and how not, will you signal X when to step out?

6) Future pace to install.
As you imagine moving out into your future, are you fully aligned with this? Any objections?

Welcome to Your Personal Genius State!
This state can change your life! Really. For anything (or everything) that requires an intense focus where a laser-beam concentration would serve you— reading, writing, speaking, presenting, parenting, negotiating, and on and on—develop a genius state. Learn to step in and out of it so that the life situation or event itself will trigger it. Do that and you’ll find that you can more easily achieve your goals, that you’ll be more effective, productive, and efficient. And as an extra bonus, being ‘in the zone’ will enable you to experience more your skills as just flowing and yourself in multiple ‘peak experiences’ everyday.

References
You can find this pattern in the book, Secrets of Personal Mastery (1997) and in the APG manual (which is on the Shop, www.neurosemantics.com).

One of the perennial questions of philosophy and psychology (as well as theology and perhaps some other disciplines) is that of the self. This is also a major concern for Self-Actualization Psychology. After all, it is the self that we seek to actualize, make real, and unleash for its full potentials. This raises lots of questions.

• What is the self?
• Is there a real self within?
• Is the self born a blank slate so that we can make anything of it that we desire?
• Or is there a real self with its own unique tendencies and predispositions to be actualized?
• Is the self real or entirely a matter of human construction?

Philosophically, Behaviorism and many philosophers accepted the blank slate idea believing that they could take a child and make it whatever they wanted. The founder of the school of Behaviors, Watson put it starkly as did Skinner when each said that they could take a child and make it an engineer or psychologist, teacher or farmer, technician or nurse, etc. They believed that human development and expression was entirely a matter of learning, social conditioning, and environmental fashioning.

As a trained Behaviorist, this was the beginning point for Maslow.1 But then he changed his mind. How did that happen? When? What trigger it? He tells about the change in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.

“Our first baby changed me as a psychologist. It made the Behaviorism I had been so enthusiastic about look so foolish that is could not stomach it any more. It was impossible.” (p. 163)

As he recognized that babies come with an inner self or inner nature, the over-simplicity of the Behaviorist model would no longer do. As this new understanding gew, he later wrote the following as recorded by Edward Hoffman his biographer in The Right to be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow (1988).

“Man is ultimately not molded or shaped into humanness. . . . The environment does not give him potentialities and capacities; he has them in inchoate or embryonic form, just exactly as he has embryonic arms and legs. And creativeness, spontaneity, selfhood, authenticity, caring for others, being able to love, yearning for truth are embryonic potentialities belonging to his species-membership just as much as are his arms and legs, brain and eyes.” (p. 232, italics added)

Finding the Real Self

If there is a real self within each of us, how do we find this self?

• How do we allow this self to develop, grow to its full potentials, and unleash it?
• And if there is this inner real self, what are the things that hurt it, violate it, squelch it, or diminish it?

Maslow called this exploration “the search for identity.” And, tapping into what others in the human potential movement were writing and discovering, this became one of the key principles or premises of Self-Actualization Psychology. And in the measurement tool of the POI (Personal Orientation Inventory) for measuring self-actualization, the very first and most important variable was being inner directed rather than outer directed.

In Neuro-Semantics and NLP we talk about this in terms of a meta-program.2 We speak about this using the language of internally referencing with an external check. This means that there is within you an inner gyroscope of awareness and “sense of self”—your values, beliefs, understandings, etc. so that you move through the world true, or congruent, or authentic to and with yourself, rather than living vicarious off of the visions, values, beliefs, etc. of others.

The phrase “with an external check” balances the inner directedness of your real self with the ability and orientation to check outside with others to see how your inner directedness relates and connects with others. This enables you to receive input from the outside, feedback about what works and what does not, and to be able both to learn from others and to care for others.

Inner directedness, or being internally referent, means that as we grow we bring the “locus of control” (our circle of power for choosing and responding) inside ourselves rather than keep it outside. This locus or circle of control refers to where we look for “authority.” At first, authority is outside. After all, at birth we don’t know anything. We can’t even speak. We have no ability for abstract thinking. So we look outside for support, learning, instruction, etc. We look outside to discover what things are, how things work, what we need to do, etc.

Over time, with growth, development, learning, we slowly bring the circle of control as our inner responsibility and authority within. We call this process individuating, becoming autonomous, and assuming increasingly more responsibility for ourselves. Instead of living dependently off the thoughts, ideas, decisions, values, visions, etc. of others, we develop our own. And this creates our own sense of self and right to be us. We accept the right to decide, to use our mind to believe, to use our voice to speak and assert our views and opinions, to exercise our responses to act on our values and to be responsible for what we say and do. We become the author of our own lives.

Now the adult who is not able to do this lacks a strong sense of self, and may even in an extreme instance lack any sense of self. This is not good. It will undermine self-value, self-esteem, self-confidence, ego-strength to face the world, adult responsibility, independence, and many other positive traits and qualities of developing and maturing. Without this ability we end up experientially empty—dependent, needy, insecure, unable to cope, etc.

Maslow described such individuals as “experientially empty people” and described their kind of life in the following way:

“In experientially empty people . . . people who do not know what is going on inside themselves and who live by clocks, schedules, rules, laws, hints from the neighbors— other-directed people—this is a way of discovering what the self is like. There are signals from inside, there are voices that yell out, ‘By gosh this is good, don’t ever doubt it!’ This is a path, one of the ways we try to teach self-actualization and the discovery of self. The discovery of identity comes via the impulse voices, via the ability to listen to your own guts, and to their reactions and to what is going on inside of you.” (1971, p. 171 italics added)

When we do not know what’s going on inside ourselves, we are in unresourceful state and one in which we are “lost” about what to think, what to do, how to be, etc. Of course, this arises from the one and self-same exciting and disturbing fact: as human beings we do not have content instincts as the animals do. We do not have content information in our genes telling us how to be human. That’s something we have to learn.

Yet while we do not have content information in our genes, we do have instinctoid impulses. These are left-over or remnants of “instincts” or what Maslow called “our inner voices.” What we do have are tendencies, predispositions, potentialities, and preferences. Yet the “voices” of these factors are very quiet and soft voices. These are voices so soft, in fact, that they can easily be drowned out by the voice of culture, religion, education, parents, teachers, media, and so on.

The outer-directed person lives a life, experientially empty on the inside, by focusing on the voices outside. The outer directed person looks outside and so lives by “clocks, schedules, rules, laws, hints from neighbors,’ etc. The right or authority to live, to act, and to be is posited as outside rather than inside.

Finding and Unleashing the Inner Voice of your Real Self

Maslow said that if we turn inward and listen to our inner voices we will slowly discover what our self is like. We will discover our real self. We will discover our real identity and as we then follow those voices, we learn to become real, authentic, and fully ourselves.

“What do we mean by the discovery of identity? We mean finding out what your real desires and characteristics are, and being able to live in a way that expresses them. You learn to be authentic, to be honest in the sense of allowing your behavior and your speech to be the true and spontaneous expression of your inner feelings. Most of us have learned to avoid authenticity. You may be in the middle of a fight, and your guts are writhing with anger, but if the phone rings, you pick it up and sweetly say hello. Authenticity is the reduction of phoniness toward the zero point.” (1971, p. 176)

There’s a force that we have to resist in the process of discovering our real identity, and that is the force of culture. So while we become human through being culturalized so that our mind, emotions, speech, and behavior is cultivated to the values of our parents and teachers, to develop to our full potential we have to simultaneously learn to wear our conventionality lightly so that we learn to choose what parts of the outer world to bring in and what to merely adapt to, and what to reject. If we conform blindly and unthinkingly to the cultural rules of family, religion, school, media, business, etc., we dull our individuality and avoid authenticity.

Maslow had another word for this which I really like. He called this “human domestication.” If we do not personally integrate what we choose from the offerings of our culture, education, and development, and just blindly conform, we become domesticated humans—slaves to whatever cultural system we happen to be living in. And this will make us less human, less real, less authentic, less congruent, less ourselves. We will be merely clones of some system of thought. It’s not a very pretty perspective, is it?

So how do we individualize within our cultures and learn to become ourselves, our fullest selves to actualize our highest and best selves? The key to this are a number of things:

1) Use your self-knowledge to discover your real self.

2) Choose your own values, beliefs, visions, etc.

3) Resist blind conformity to the external voices that pressures you to conform.

4) Quietly listen for your inner voices.

5) Discover the facts of what you are so you can know what you ought to do.

6) Bring your locus of control inside.

1) Discover Your Real Self

Self-knowledge is the ability to know yourself, to hear clearly the signals from inside. It is the ability to know your own inner preferences about things. Do you like this color or that? This food or that? What fits best for you? We often lose this awareness because parents or others confuse us when they tell us that we really do like spinach or other things. We then become confused. We conform to get along, to stay out of trouble, to make things go better, but if the conformity is too blind, too unthinking, we end up losing ourselves.

To move toward full humanness, develop more awareness of your identity as a member of the human species and your identity as your unique form of this species. Here you need to become aware of what you are—biologically, temperamentally, constitutionally, as a member of a species, of your capacities, desires, needs, what you are best fitted for vocationally, and so on.

2) Choose Your Way

Are you willing to choose your own way? When you find it, when you sense it, when you hear your inner voices—are you willing to step out, to be different, feel weird, feel the risk of launching out to be you? This is required. Without the willingness to choose and act on the hearing of your inner voices and the things that best fit your constitutional self, there will be no discovery and no becoming your real self.

“People whom we describe as healthy, strong, and definite seem to be able to hear their inner-feeling-voices more clearly than most people. They know what they want, and they know equally clearly what they don’t want.” (Maslow, p. 176)

Many people lose the ability to hear their inner voices of their own impulses. Maslow wrote about some non-creative high IQ children who seem to have “lost their impulse voices and become domesticated.” He said that they look to parents and teachers for guidance and inspiration and don’t know how to provide their own guidance about what they want or inspiration about what can inflame their dreams.

So, given our weak “instincts” we have to listen carefully for our inner voice. Here free association can enable us to begin hearing our small, delicate impulse voices. So, for Masow, to discover your real self, you have to first discover your subjective biology. This means to answer the questions: What fits best for you? What do you prefer? Now while these are very simple steps, they begin you on the path to actualizing your best self.

This is our intrinsic education. And unlike external education, it essentially involves learning how to be a good chooser. And this is something you can teach yourself; you can teach yourself to choose for yourself, what you like, what you want. Using a glasses of wine, Maslow said, simply take a taste and make your own choice, “I like it,” “I don’t like it,” “I like it a bit,” And make this choice without looking at the label! (p. 184). This will help you become the authority of your life’s script.

3) Resisting Blind Conformity

Conformity to one’s culture, one’s surroundings, one’s friends, family, colleagues, school, church, etc. is blind if you do not consciously and intentionally choose your responses. And most of us have blindly conformed to so much. Living in multiple cultures (family, school, church, education, language, “racial” group, business, economic status, etc.) means that so many of the choices that we have made were blind choices. We were blind to them when we made them and we are still blind to them.

So in resisting this we first have to wake up and notice the forces and influences for conformity. They are everywhere. They pervasively intrude into every aspect of our lives. Nor are they bad per se, they are often good. Yet being unconscious of them puts us in a position of passivity rather than that of active choice. It means that our life script was written by others.

4) Quietly Listen to Your Inner Voices

The inner voices of your biological impulses are not loud voices. In fact, they are very quiet and soft— very soft. That’s why it requires that you quiet yourself. You have to take the time and effort to quiet yourself in order to hear that inner voice. That’s why to discover your real self you need time to reflect, meditate, and contemplate.

5) Move from Is to Ought

Maslow said that discovering your real nature is simultaneously both an ought and an is quest. (1971, p. 107). What is this ought—is distinction? How are we to understand it? Here are some of Maslow’s words of explanation:

“The questions that people ask in search for identity, real self, etc. are very largely ‘ought’ questions. What ought I to do? What ought I to be? How should I solve this conflict situation? Should I pursue this career or that one? Should I get divorced or not? Should I live or die?”

“Most untutored people are quite willing to answer these questions directly. ‘If I where you . . .’ They say, and then proceed with suggestions and advice. But technically trained people have learned that this doesn’t work or is even harmful. We don’t say what we think another ought to do.”

Ought and is speaks about the requiredness of life. What is leads to and builds up the oughts in our lives. This fits with one of the Being-needs that Maslow mentioned, “necessity.” Now many think that once they get rid of the “necessity” language of childhood and culture, and become their own person, there will be no more “necessity,” no more “musts.” Not so. In fact, the freedom from the superficial, unconscious, and imposed necessities allows us to welcome the true necessities. Again, Maslow:

“What we have learned is that ultimately, the best way for a person to discover what he ought to do is to find out who and what he is, because the path to ethical and value decisions, to wiser choices, to oughtness, is via ‘isness,’ via the discovery of facts, truth, reality, the nature of the particular person. The more he knows about his own nature, his deep wishes, his temperament, his constitution, what he seeks and yearns for and what really satisfies him, the more effortless, automatic, and epiphenomenal become his value choices. . . . Many problems simply disappear; many others are easily solved by knowing what is in conformity with one’s nature, what is suitable and right.” (p. 107).

6) Bring Your Locus of Control Into Yourself

When you think about doing something new, creative, out-of-the-ordinary, where do your thoughts go? When you think about having the right or getting the authority to do something, what comes to your mind? How do you represent the idea of authority? If you were to point to it, where is it?

If your thoughts go outside of yourself to an authority figure—to a parent, spouse, boss, ex-partner, or to statistics, books, etc., then there’s a strong probability that you operate from a meta-program of externally referencing authority rather than internally referencing it. If you are ready to change this, notice where you seem to put “authority.” It is often good to think of several instances involving different kinds of authority and/or people that you use for externally referencing.2

As we all tend to put “time” outside of us so that we can literally point to where the past seems to be and the future. So with “authority.” If you were to point to the source of authority, where do you point? Somewhere in front of you, above you, behind you, inside you, or where? When you have a sense of where it is, reach out and grab it and then slowly bring it into yourself.

Now, where to you want to put your own sense of personal authority? In your heart, stomach, head, or where? How well does it settle there within you? If it doesn’t settle well, check your permission frame. Do you have permission to be the authority of your own life? If not, then give yourself permission repeatedly, integrating any objections that might arise as you create a permission that is resourceful and that fits for you.3

Summary

Finding and becoming your real self is a lifelong adventure. Being real and being your real self is not a given and does not occur easily or quickly. It’s a matter of discovering, experimenting, time and error, etc. May the adventure of becoming and unleashing your real self be more exciting and rewarding with every day!

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is a cognitive psychologist, best selling author in the field of NLP, and developer of Neuro-Semantics, co-developer of Meta-Coaching, and a leader in Self-Actualization Psychology.

End Notes:

1. Abraham Maslow earned his Ph.D. in Behaviorism and worked with leading Behaviorists during the first years of his work.

2. Meta-Programs is a model and domain of NLP. They are perceptual filters that govern how we see and color the world. See Figuring Out People (2005) for an entire book on metaprograms.

3. See the article that I wrote about this on the website, the title is, “Owning Your Own Authority,” on www.neurosemantics.com.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

What is a belief? It is a thought which is embedded within a reality-confirmation frame. When we embed a thought inside a confirmation of reality, we create a phenomenon of the mind that we call a “belief.” And when we create a belief, we not only think of something, but we treat our thought as real. We attribute a meaning of reality to it.

So with a belief, with any belief, we frame our first thought as real. And to do that we frame it within another thought, a higher thought, so that it becomes a context (a mental context) for how we interpret the first thought. Then, having done that, we then begin to experience the content of our belief as being real so that from the inside-looking out, it has and gives off us all of the sense (and senses) of being real. What is the heart of beliefs? We construct “reality.” We create our inner sense of what’s real and what is not by the beliefs that we invent and adopt.

Reality-Endowing Perspective

It is in this way that beliefs are reality-endowing perspectives. In the creation of beliefs (e.g., in believing) we meta-state our thoughts with a higher level thought-and-feeling of various aspects of reality. That is, we bring the following states (mind-body states) to our basic idea:

• “This is real.”
• “This is actual.”
• “This is the way it is.”
• “This X is the meaning of Y.”
• “This exists.”
• “Things work this way.”
• “This X leads to this Y.”

It is in this way we create beliefs about what is (what exists), how things work, the way we and others work, and the meaning of things— what is important (values), what to go for (intentions, outcomes), and how to feel or experience things (emotions).

These reality frames about ourselves, others, the world, what exists, what causes what, etc. describe how we confirm our thoughts. We confirm that our thoughts are legitimate, real, and actual. And it is this process of confirming that engages and elevates our thinking to the level of beliefs. Thoughts are at the first level— just representations in our mind of things. Beliefs are second thoughts about those first thoughts. Then we create beliefs about our beliefs.¹

Mere thought only gives us ideas—content information about things. But we may or may not interpret such thoughts as real or valid. We may think that our thoughts are untrue, unreal, fantasy, wishful thinking, science fiction, myths, lies, and so on. These second thoughts about our first thoughts prevent us from treating them as something to direct our lives. We don’t act on such ideas. They do not refer to anything real. Or, just as equally we could say that these frames stop us so we do not “believe.”

Action Oriented

It is when we “believe” in an idea that we then act on it as a legitimate map about reality. We frame it as real—actual—legitimate and so we respond as if it is. All beliefs have this as if quality precisely because beliefs are not empirical thoughts, but operate at a second level to our first thoughts about the empirical world. That’s why beliefs do not have to be true, real, actual, or empirical to be believed. We all have, and do, believe things that are not true. Some of them hurt us; some help us.

Did you catch that? Beliefs do not have to be true, real, actual, or empirical to be believed. This is incredible!

Also, we can and do believe lots of things that we can’t “prove” to the satisfaction of all fair-minded people. In fact, this provides one way to determine if a thought is a belief or a first level representation of what you can see, hear, feel, smell, taste, etc. (empirical).

• “Do all fair-minded people accept it?”
• “Do non-believers accept it?”

If not, then you are working with a belief and not empirical information. And this is true regardless of the strength of your belief.

We do not “believe” in things that are empirical— things that we can see, hear, touch, and measure. At the primary level empirical things are the brute facts that all fair-minded people agree upon. Empirical things are simply accepted as existing. Even an unbeliever will acknowledge such. We study them so that we can more fully understand them. If the subject is not empirical and cannot be seen or measured, it is not a brute fact, but a belief fact.

When we believe, we think that we have enough or sufficient “proof” to go with our belief and to act upon it. We live our lives by thousands of beliefs simply because we have to assume that many things are so in order to take action. Otherwise we would be paralyzed from acting. Otherwise we would never get out and do anything.

Everyday we take actions believing that we will be able to do something, that what we do is important, and that our actions will bring forth the results we want, results that will make a difference in our lives and the lives of others. We don’t know that for sure. We act in belief that probability is on our side.

All of the Multiple Layers of Beliefs

• All of this highlights that in believing we can have different degrees of evidence, different levels of beliefs that some are only one level away from the empirical things of brute facts and some are many levels away. We also have beliefs about our beliefs. We believe our beliefs are more sure, or less, more valid or less valid. This speaks to the strength of our beliefs.

  How strong do you believe that?

• Do you have any question or doubt about that?
• Do you have some doubt? Will your doubt stop you?
• Is your belief strong enough to get your through?
• What else do you need to believe about that in order to step forward and act on that belief?
• Do you have any limiting beliefs about that belief stopping you?
• What would be the most powerful belief that would empower your first belief?

Beliefs are higher level frames or meta-states about our thoughts and ideas that embed our thoughts within the content of what we believe conviction that it is valid and legitimate. Beliefs then create our validity-frames. With them we see the content of the ideas that we believe as valid, real, and true. Beliefs govern our mapping of what’s true. We never believe what’s not true for us. If you think that something is not so, does not exist, is not true— you cannot believe it and you cannot believe in it. It will not govern your actions or mobilize your mind-body system. On the contrary you may dis-believe it— believe that it is not so. And we dis-believing you prevent it from commanding your neurology.

The Magic of Self-Fulfilling

All of this combines to create the self-fulfilling prophesy nature of beliefs. Whatever you believe, you will tend to see, hear, and experience. If it is possible to bring something into reality, then it is belief that mobilizes your mind-body to do so. Of course, not every belief can do that. You can believe all day and night that you can fly with your arms like superman but without that mechanism for flight in your neurology (unlike a bird or bee), your mind-body system will not be able to actualize that belief.

Beliefs create a self-fulfilling prophesy because a belief is a “command to the nervous system” abut what’s real.² If you believe something is dangerous to your well-being, that belief will command your neurology to make the threat-to-your-being real and actual to you on the inside. It will organize the messages of your thoughts and ideas so that your nervous systems are informed about what’s happening and to mobilize your skills and resources to cope with that threat. That’s why your whole fight-flight system (the General Arousal System) is activated with all of the corresponding responses in your brain stem and body.

Creator Powers

The self-fulfilling prophesy nature of beliefs create both powers and problems. Beliefs that we can learn, that others have resources, that people are basically good, etc. enables as to call new realities into being. Whether things were that way originally, they become that way by our beliefs. But we can also believe in things that undermine us and sabotage the quality of our lives. If we believe that we are worthless, scum of the earth, that we will never amount to anything, that we don’t deserve to success, that others are cruel and want us to fail, etc., we similarly call those toxic experiences into existence.

Jesus noted this self-fulfilling nature and principle of beliefs when he said, “Be it unto you according to your faith.” Psychologically, the general principle is that life will work for you as you believe it will work for you. And that becomes even more true of your beliefs-in-yourbeliefs, for your higher level beliefs which comprise your belief sytems. It is by our beliefs that create our inner sense of reality, our inner maps about things, and then from there we create our our experience of reality. Beliefs endow us with creator powers for good or ill.

The Structure of Fanaticism

Beliefs are important at every level. And this becomes especially important if or when we believe in the validity of our beliefs. Do that and you have a command inside your Matrix of frames that will close your mind to seeing counter-evidence to your beliefs.³ You then become so sure of your beliefs, so confident, so convinced, that you may not even recognize your that your thinking at this level are beliefs. You may even say, “That’s not a belief, I know that.” And of course, at this stage you have moved into fanaticism.

In this, believing is one thing, but believing-in-the-rightness-of-your-beliefs is an entirely different thing. This is what does semantic damage to us because it shuts down the mind. It closes our minds. It sets a belief bias that colors the world and prevents us from detecting errors and making corrections. And this is true for every theological belief, philosophical belief, even for scientific beliefs about things.

Breaking through Beliefs

So can a strong absolute, even fanatical belief, be broken through? How could that happen? It typically happens when life does not work according to our beliefs.

Now generally, life operates according to our beliefs unless or until something intrudes into our life to rock our world in a way that prevents our beliefs from fulfilling themselves. It’s at those moments that reality hits and we crash and we begin to reconsider things.

At the same time, most of us actually work hard to protect ourselves from such. We insure that reality will not intrude by avoiding encountering experiences and people and books that would question our beliefs. That’s why we hang around people who believe as we believe, we read books and magazines that agree with our viewpoint, avoid experiences that would require a different belief, turn off TV programs we dislike, etc. We seek out people, books, and information that will reinforce our current beliefs. The self-fulfilling nature of beliefs drives this kind of behavior.

No wonder those who believe in something can become so sure, so absolute, and so fanatical. No wonder they close off any possibility that they could be wrong. That’s the question I ask people who knock on my door or come into my life who are so absolutely confident.

“Could you be wrong? Is that a possibility? If you could be wrong come in and let’s talk; if you can’t be wrong, please go and get some more life experiences.”

Confirmation Bias

If there’s no possibility that one could be wrong, then the person has shut the door of his or her mind to disconfirming information. Why is that? As they have become “true believers” to use Eric Hoeffer’s term, they have become fanatics. They can only see what their beliefs allow them to see. In this, beliefs create blindness of the mind so that a person can become blind to any information that differs from their understandings.

Belief Creation

It is because a thought does not have to be real or true or even legitimate to be believed that we can, and do, believe things that are wrong, false, untrue, hurtful, toxic, limiting, unsane, and even insane. This makes the quality of our beliefs of critical importance. It highlights our responsibility for choosing good, healthy beliefs that support our self-actualization, enhance our life and relationships, and empower us for continual development.

Ultimately no one is responsible for our beliefs, but ourselves. That’s because you and I only have the power to create them for ourselves. And what is the power that creates a belief? It is the power of confirmation. We confirm thoughts so they become beliefs. We confirm beliefs into existence— we call them into being, and when we do, we commission them to become commands to our nervous system, to set self-organizing attractors so that the belief will then create us in its image.

How is your power to create and to destroy beliefs? How skillfully competent are you at decommissioning limiting beliefs that do not serve you well? How easily and gracefully can you identify a limiting belief and pull it apart so that it is undone as a belief? So that it becomes a mere thought that does no semantic damage to you? How skilled are you in catching less-thangreat beliefs as you think and speak and reframe them on the spot? To do so is true mastery.

The Structure of Beliefs and Proof

Once you recognize the structure of a belief —a reality-confirming frame of a thought, then disconfirming the old and confirming the new gives you a quick, elegant, and powerful way to change beliefs. How? Say “No” to the old that de-commissions it and “Yes” to the new that enriches your responses. “Yes” and “No” make up the structures of the frames that generate reality-validating and dis-validating.

Yet merely saying “Yes” once to a thought will not suddenly transform it into a life-enhancing belief. We have to say “yes” to it repeatedly.

• “Yes, I want to believe that! Yes, that would enrich my life. Yes, that would be nice.
• Yes I am beginning to believe that. Yes I have some ideas about how that could be true and valid.”

Yes confirms. Yes welcomes an idea into our mind and enables us to begin to believe it. As we then say Yes to it for more reasons— this engages the higher levels of the mind to come up with understandings, explanations, and reasons for the belief.

Beliefs are like that—they need reasons for validation. The slow way to create a belief is to work with content, that is, to identify specific content information about something that enables us to make sense of the idea and to validate it. We can validate an idea with content by giving another person reasons to believe it. Yet this approach puts the belief at the disposal of the quality of the reasons, the logic of the reasons, and how the belief fits into the person’s networks of beliefs. If the new belief fits into the existing Matrix of beliefs makes sense (is meaningful), and matches the person’s way of reasoning (his or her logic and use of logic), then the new belief will go in and be accepted fairly easily.

Conversely, the less it fits into the person’s philosophies of life, basic understandings, and current belief systems and the more it differs from one’s way of thinking, the less it will make sense and so the more difficult it will be to take on and install as one’s belief.

That’s why the long, slow, and hard way to change beliefs is to argue, persuade, or reason ourselves or another into the belief. This content approach is how most people primarily attempts to alter beliefs, change beliefs, and take on new beliefs.

The Structural approach is to dis-validate the old with a No to clear mental-and-emotional space filled up by the old belief and to then validate the new belief with a Yes. Once this is accomplished, then the person’s own higher understandings will self-organize to find and invent supporting reasons and philosophies. And this mostly occurs outside-of-our-consciousness awareness. Because of this, the structural approach makes the process smoother and more elegant.

What is the FBI within the structural approach? It is that our beliefs lie embedded within higher frames, level upon level. So where ever there is a belief, there are higher frames-by-implication or FBI frames holding it in place. These are the premises, presuppositions, and assumptions that we operate from, mostly unconsciously, that support the belief. So when we confirm a new thought so it evokes a new belief, the higher levels, the presuppositional levels of our understandings, philosophies, etc. go to work to come up with acceptable explanations for our new belief. You can see this in others when they begin “justifying” their beliefs with legitimate and illegitimate reasons. It is not the content of the justifying that creates the belief, but the process of justifying— the process of finding and/or creating reasons.

“Proof” is in the mind of the beholder — in the mind of the believer. What “proves” a belief for you? What confirms it? ?What gives it validity and credibility for you? What makes it worthy of your trust? What do you use? For many people, credibility arises from the number of times they have heard something, or the emotional intensity, or if they read it in a book, or if an expert said it, or if there were numbers and statistics connected to it, or if they read it in a book, or if it seems practical, or if it fits into one’s referent group, etc. All kinds of things can be used for “proof.” Again, it is not the content of the proof, but the fact that we are “proving” to ourselves its validity and giving ourselves some reason to say Yes to it. It is the proving process that creates the “proofs.”

What convinces you?⁴ Are you easily convinced of things or do you tend to resist being convinced? Are you automatically convinced and give everything the benefit of the doubt? Are you that naive and trusting? Or are you never convinced and have to be continuously convinced to consider same new idea at every moment? Are you that skeptical?

Because “proof” can consists of all kinds of things, what convinces one person will not convince another. What is proof for one person doesn’t persuade another in the least. What is proof for one leaves others empty and totally skeptical. It’s not the content of the proof that does the magic of creating a belief, but the presence of something that serves for a person as “proof.”

Believing and being a Believer

The bottom line is that we are all believers. Some believe in a higher intelligence called God; some believe that there is no God. Both are believers. No one has proof; each calls upon all kinds of evidence that for them are convincing. But both believe. Either is a choice. What is not a choice is whether to believe or not to believe. We don’t have that choice. Believe we must — and believe we do about a thousand things. So being a believer, the choice is whether you bring an absolutism to your belief or recognize that they are human maps— fallible, liable to error, and make them open to correction and refinement.

Summary

Beliefs are magical things —they are thoughts and yet they are more than thoughts. They are awarenesses and yet they are more than just awareness. Beliefs make up the construct of the Matrix of our minds—how we come to know and understand things, give meaning to things, and work inside our mind-body system to create energy, emotions, and actions.

The “magic” of beliefs is that they command our Neuro-Semantics thereby incorporating our ideas into our very neurology. The “magical” of beliefs can also be seen in their self-fulfilling nature—how they color our world and blinds us to what doesn’t filter the beliefs.

Author

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is a cognitive psychology who has turned his attention to the structure of experience through studies in NLP and Neuro-Semantics. For more about “beliefs” see his book, Sub-Modalities Going Meta and Mind-Lines.

End Notes

1: This is the structure of a meta-state — a state about a state, a thought about another thought, a feeling about another feeling, a thought about a feeling, a feeling about a thought. In this all beliefs are meta-states and so it is beliefs or meta-states all the way up in the Matrix of our mind.

2: Beliefs are a “command to the nervous system,” Richard Bandler, Using Your Brain for a Change (1985).

3: This refers to the Matrix model, see the book, The Matrix Model (2002).

4: These are meta-programs. See the book, Figuring Out People (2006) for a full development of meta-programs.

June 4, 2007 to August 27, 2007

L. Michael Hall
Meta Reflections #27
June 4, 2007

15 THROUGH 26

Note: The following Meta-Reflections were sent out to Neurons from March of 2007 through May.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #15

March 5, 2007

THE SPIRIT DIMENSION

OF META

PART I

Meta-Land is the land of spirit. That’s why the four meta-dimensions of Neuro-Semantics are also the “spirit” dimension. And while this involves what we call philosophy and religion— Neuro-Semantics is not religion or philosophy. Neuro-Semantics is a model of human functioning, it is a model that models how we operate and experience our life with an eye on developing the processes and tools for mobilizing resources to facilitate full self-actualization so that we can perform our highest meanings.

If that’s what Neuro-Semantics is about, how does it relate to “spirit?” What does it mean that there is a “spirit” dimension in the higher levels of our mind-body system? Over the years, I have received a great many questions about Neuro-Semantics and the “spiritual” dimension of life. In this and the next Reflections, I’ll attempt to address some of these questions.

Modeling “Spirit”

The experience that we call “spirit” and “spiritual” is obviously part of subjective experience.

Yet, what does this mean?

How should we think about “spirit” and “spiritual?”

If we were to model “spirit” as in the human spirit or the qualities and experience of being “spiritual,” how would we go about it?

What is the Neuro-Semantic take on this dimension of life?

Since “spirit” and “spiritual” are nominalizations, noun-like terms that falsely imply some kind of thing, then what are the actual processes (verbs) that we are referring to? Similar to the nominalizations, “mind” and “thoughts,” when we de-nominalize these terms we come back to the non-specific process of “thinking” which we can then specify as representing, editing an image, creating a context by setting a frame-of-reference, etc.

In a general way, the idea of spirit efers to that which is higher in us— the meta-levels of our mind-body experiences. This is one of its meanings, something that is “above and beyond.” And where does this come from? The simplest explanation is that we have a sense of spirit based upon our ability to transcend to higher levels of awareness. We call this higher sense of ourselves spirit. Neuro-Semantically, we are of course describing the experience of reflexivity— reflecting back onto ourselves with additional thoughts-and-feelings. So it is in the process of reflecting back, stepping back, meta-stating, rising up and applying our mental-and-emotional responses to — that creates our sense of transcendence and spirit.

If we are biologically wired with levels in our brain anatomy (which we have) which, in turn, allows us to experience reflexivity so that we can step back from ourselves (in our mind-emotions) and transcend our current experience and move to higher levels of awareness—then “spirituality” is part and parcel of the human experience. This makes it a legacy for all of us, which probably explains why all humans are “spiritual” and have to invent some “religion” to explain this transcendence. Most literally “spirit” means “breath” hence, in-spirited, hence energy.

It is in this sense that all of Meta-Land, all of the meta-dimensions, is what we might call “the spiritual dimension” of life. Here we experience the higher life above and beyond mere survival. Here we move into concepts, meanings, and understandings of things “not seen, not heard, not felt, not smelt, not tasted.” We are at a conceptual level that defines and qualifies our “spirit.”

And these higher frames generate our attitude, which, of course, is another use of “spirit.” Sometimes, when we talk about someone, we say things like, “What kind of a spirit does he have?” “What’s her spirit today? Is she still down?” Spirit in this sense works as a synonym for attitude, for a person’s disposition of mind or of emotion. We even use this language to describe a group attitude, a cultural attitude. We speak about a victimhood spirit, a depressed spirit (disspirited), an inspired spirit (full of spirit, inspirited), a joyful spirit, a playful spirit, etc. We even talk about the “atmosphere” of a business, home, group in terms of spirit. “I like the spirit of that restaurant.” “They have a good spirit there.”

As we use our reflexivity to transcend our current state and include it within a higher attitude, belief, perception, understanding, value, etc., the “spirit” dimension of Meta enables us to ask the “spiritual” or existential (existing) questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is this all about? What’s the meaning of life? Asking such existential questions has been the domain of religion, philosophy, and psychology. Here we enter into the semantic states of “time,” “meaning,” “purpose,” “destiny,” and a hundred other abstractions. And it is regarding these abstractions that we develop various beliefs and belief systems.

Spirit and “Time”

“Time” as another nominalization does not exist except in meta-land. We create “time” as we represent things that have happened, things that are happening, and that will happen. This gives us a flow of events “through time” and so a time line or time channel. Then, as we step back, reflexively contemplate “time” itself, we ask additional temporal questions, the big questions. When did it all start? How? By whom? These are also spiritual questions. Only we human beings are able to enter “time” as thoroughly as a “spiritual” dimension.

Maslow used another facet of time to define spiritual. He said “spiritual” means seeing life “under the aspect of eternity.” It involves being able to take a long-term perspective of life and actions. Animals, who do not live in “time,” do not do this. Nor do children. Nor do people who only live in the concrete world. It is an unique experience for us as we rise above the immediate, here-and-now and think in terms of what shall be.

The Sacred

We also use of the words “spirit” and “spiritual” to convey the conceptual idea of the special, the sacred, the holy, the sense of awe, the feeling of being touched by something that’s more than the human, what we create. This takes us back to the original meaning of the world holy, it literally refers to what is whole, integrated, all-of-one-piece, not dichtomized. Holy refers to what is whole, well, and healthy. Psychologically, it is operating fully, being a“fully functioning” person (Carl Rogers).

So what is the spiritual life is the life of love, compassion, empathy, and care. It is the life of self-awareness, self-control, and self-discipline (emotional intelligence). It is the life of proactivity, responsibility, and accountability. It is the life of openness, honesty, and truth. It is the life of vulnerability, forgiveness, and healing. It is the life of abundance, giving, and extending oneself for the benefit of others. It is the life of goodness, altruism, and virtue. In all of this, are we in the realm of psychology or theology? Or, could it be both?

In Neuro-Semantics, the “spiritual” life is the higher or meta-life. It is the life of the grown-up or mature person who thinks in an integrated, holistic, and systemic way about things. The spiritual life is one of transcendence, peak experiences, and higher values. It is about being able to embrace the unknown and mystery. It is to feel appreciation and gratitude, to embrace the creaturely feeling of being limited, ignorant about so much, humble, to stand in awe before the mysterium tremendum.

To be spiritual is to be god-like in accepting life and reality as it is. It is the sense that life matters, that it is ultimately meaningful, that the universe is friendly (Albert Einstein), that there is good and evil; healthy and unhealthy, that we are ultimate responsible for our choices and actions, to experience self-transcendence in a peak experience. Theologian Paul Tillich defined spiritual and religion as “one’s ultimate concerns,” and “concern with ultimate concerns.”

In all of this, “spiritual” is part and parcel of being human. So, the question is not whether we are “spiritual” beings in search of meaning, purpose, identity, and love. The question is rather the quality of our spirit and of our spirituality. Is our spirit healthy, beautiful and clean? Or is it unhealthy, ugly, and distorted?

In all of this, I have not spoken about “religion” at all— about the specific beliefs and belief systems that characterize the historical religions which have emerged to address our spirit and spiritual quest. So here is the Neuro-Semantic distinction— “spirit” and “spiritual” is built into our biology and nature. We are spiritual to the extent that we can “go meta,” use our self-reflexive consciousness to enter into the higher life. “Religion” inevitably follows as our beliefs and belief systems about our spirituality. It is how we form and construct our understandings and maps about what we experience.

The next Meta Reflections will explore beliefs, ethics, values, and meaning as part and parcel of the “spirit” dimension.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #16

March 12, 2007

THE SPIRIT DIMENSION

OF META

PART II

Neuro-Semantics, as a field, is about performing our highest and most exciting meanings. To perform our highest meanings speaks about our beliefs. It speaks about the beliefs that inspire us, the meanings that energize us with excitement. So as a discipline of modeling experience, we use the tools of Neuro-Semantics to understand our beliefs about the higher dimensions of life, what we call the realm of “spirit” and the “spiritual” state. We can do that because we know that it is beliefs all the way up, beliefs about beliefs.

In this Neuro-Semantics has no commitment to any one form of spirituality; it has no alliance with any religion, although people of many religions and beliefs do use the models and processes. Conversely, we can also use Neuro-Semantics as a modeling tool to evaluate the health or unhealth, the accuracy or inaccuracy, the quality or lack of quality, the value or lack of value of beliefs, belief systems, forms of spirituality, and religion.

How do we go about doing that? First we establish our criteria and make them explicit. Of course, as we do, we acknowledge that whatever we set as our standards, values, and understandings are our maps about such. There is no infallibility although popes of all sizes and shapes are constantly attempting to claim infallibility. No map is the territory. Maps, even invisible mental ones in our heads are just maps. And a map is only as good as what it enables us to do things and facilitates the journey that we want to make.

This distinction enables us to identify the primary thing that turns any belief toxic. Namely, believing in our beliefs. Believing and even having layers of beliefs about our beliefs is one thing, but believing in the ultimate reality and absolute rightness of our beliefs is another. That’s what creates fanatics and fundamentalists. And a fundamentalist fanatic is a very different creature from a person whose beliefs keep him or her opens, curious, explorative, in dialogue, fallible, and modest. It is not belief or believing that separates people, that separates a scientist from a religious person, that separates an atheist from a religious person. We are all believers. The scientist believes in the scientific methodology, the atheist believes in the presence of no God.

When it comes to beliefs and belief systems, we all have them. In fact, we have hundreds, even thousands of beliefs. We have beliefs about ourselves, others, the world, business, wealth, health, criticism, fun, holidays, etc. Whenever we confirm a thought about anything, we begin to believe. We believe that such is “the way it is.” [see Sub-Modalities Going Meta]

We do not just make pictures in the theater of our mind and then add sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations, we have higher level ideas about those images— what they mean, what they suggest, what they demand of us. Beliefs don’t even have to be true to be believed. How about that? How many things have you believed that you now know were not true at all? How many stupid, false, and limiting beliefs have you experienced? What have you believed that stopped you from following your vision, from being true to yourself, from taking chances, from speaking up, etc.?

And because we all believe, we are all religious. We all have ideas about life, about the universe, about purpose and destiny. And those beliefs, those assumptions, guide the way we live our lives. Do we believe in values, morality, ethics? Do we believe in being fair, loving, good, and kind? Do we believe in responsibility, choices, consequences? Beliefs can be ferreted out in behaviors. That is, we can start with a list of our behaviors, the things we do, the way we spend out time, energy, and money. The way we relate, talk, run our business, exercise, eat, etc. and we can backtrack to the beliefs that drive our lifestyle.

Beliefs are not only confirmed thoughts but are also the things of importance that we value. Do you exercise and eat heathy? I bet you not only believe in health and fitness, I bet you value such as a critically important facet of life.

When begin believe in our beliefs, our beliefs become toxic. Believe your beliefs and you close your mind, end the exploration, and become a fanatic. Now, you may even refuse to use the term “belief,” and just say, “I don’t believe that, I know it.” This has been and continues to be one of the greatest dangers facing mankind— politically and internationally. It was bad enough that Hitler believed in his racist ideas. But worse, he believed in his beliefs. That’s what made him a fundamentalist and impossible to work with.

The belief system of the fanatic then has this structure: he believes in his beliefs. This is true for Moslem fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, science fundamentalists, political fundamentalists, environmental fundamentalists, etc. It is the attitude or spirit of assuming one is absolutely right and that being right gives one the right to impose it on others.

Now something else tragically occurs. As the believer is no longer believing so much in the object of the belief, but the belief itself. The person now believes in his ideas, creed, mental maps than the object of the belief, even God. This is a form of idolatry. The belief is valued more than anything else, more than love, compassion, responsibility, ecology, kindness, equality, dignity—for the fundamentalist nothing is more important than the survival and expression of his belief.

Fundamentalism used airplanes as missiles on Sept. 11. Fundamentalism bombs abortion clients to kill doctors for killing. Fundamentalism fed the intolerance of Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam, and every other dictator. Fundamentalism ruins marriages, destroys businesses, and sabotages communication.

What frees us from that kind of fanaticism is the realization that our beliefs are beliefs— fallible maps conceived in a fallible brain. When you know that, instead of believing in your beliefs, you’ll keep an open mind to exploring the foundational facts, exploring with a humble attitude that you could be wrong, and dialoguing with others to discover what others know that you don’t.

I learned a trick for separating the fanatics some years ago. I lived in town where almost weekly someone was knocking on my door wanting to share their beliefs, to give me their pamphlets, and show me the truth. “Great!” I’d say. “Come right on in, if you can be wrong and are willing to have an open-mind and dialogue with my truth as well. I’ll be open-minded to your truth to the extent that you could be wrong. So, if you could be wrong in your beliefs, step across this threshold.”

Talk about a way to stop a fundamentalist cold in his steps! Typically, because I set the frame, if you could be wrong step across the threshold and let’s explore, they would stay outside and argue that they are right, no question about it. “Absolutely?” I would ask. “Totally and completely and you know the absolute truth and you could not be wrong?” Some would hesitate but eventually nod yes, others were ignorant enough about their own ignorance and fallibility to say, “Yes, of course.” Ah, they believed in their beliefs!

I would then dismiss them. “I’m not interested in talking to an infallible god this morning, I was kind of hoping for a good fallible human being. If you ever step down from being an infallible know-it-all pope and embrace you own ignorance, come and see me.”

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #17

March 19, 2007

THE SPIRIT DIMENSION

OF META

PART III

If, in the dimension of spirit, there are beliefs and belief systems, and beliefs all the way up, and beliefs about all kinds of things. For example, there are beliefs about values, beliefs about ethics, beliefs about origin and source, beliefs about ending or teleology, beliefs about God or Intelligence or the Ultimate concern, beliefs about human nature, and so on. And these are the kinds of beliefs that make up the “spiritual” facet of our lives and that make up the content of our “religion.”

What is the Neuro-Semantic position on all of this? There is a two-fold position. And this two-fold focus leads to two very different responses.

First, the area where we take no position. As we consider this dimension of life where all these beliefs operate, we are dealing with beliefs, concepts, understandings and do not have access to the actual references. So, without any actual referent, there’s nothing to model or study.

Second, the area where we can take a position. Yet because these are beliefs, we can model the beliefs themselves, we can model the people who hold such beliefs, and we can model out the result of these beliefs.

First, No Actual References

In Neuro-Semantics we take no position about the content of beliefs about God, or any given belief about any given religion. All of that belongs to theology or philosophy and is not the focus, direction, or purpose of Neuro-Semantics. We respect that the mapping and modeling tools of Neuro-Semantics (including NLP, General Semantics, etc.) is for mapping human experience—the subjective experience of people. We leave it to other fields to figure out as best they can the content of these domains.

Second, Modeling Belief Experiences

What we can model are the beliefs and experiences of people —the beliefs that enrich their lives, expand their choices, and enable them to be loving, joyful, healthy, creative, informed, contributing, etc. And we can also model the beliefs and experiences of the beliefs that reduce the quality of life, limit possibilities, induce negative states that undermine sanity and health. Then, from those modeling experiences, we can deduce that there are beliefs about such “spiritual” things that support and enhance life, are ecological for relationships, and those that do not. Yet even when we do that, it’s important to remember that this does not establish the truth or validity of those beliefs, only their usefulness, their effectiveness in human personality, and whether they tend to support health or to be toxic.

We can model peak experiences— when men and women are at their best, when they feel that they are living at their best, being their best, having a sense of transcendence over time, space, culture, others, etc. And from modeling these peak experiences, we can identify the things that seem to support a “spiritual” way of life, that is, living with a sense of meaning, purpose, direction; living to create, contribute, and leave the world in a better way; living with passion and joy that enriches others.

We can even model people of “high ethics” to identify how they think about ethics, what they believe about how to treat others, what particular criteria and standards contribute to an ethical lifestyle. Does honesty, openness, flexibility, care, empathy, respect, etc.? Which are the highest in priority when there’s a conflict between these values? We can model how our self-reflexive consciousness that creates our ethics, levels of ethics, growth and development of ethics, cultural ethics and development, and how they are effectively languaged.

We can model the ethical beliefs that seem to create the best kind of social relationships, that lead to an entire society being supportive of human life— creating respect, honesty, responsibility, etc. We can model the relationship between psychological growth and ethics, religious beliefs and ethics, ownership of personal responsibility and ethics. We can model ethical decision-making, how it works, those who seemed skilled in it, those who do not. We could model the ethics of the “criminal mind” and those with little sense of others, empathy, and “conscience.”

We could model ethics in the light of self-actualization and the being-values. We could model those who have a healthy sense of “ought-ness” within them (as in, What ought I to do? How ought I to live?) and compare that to those who have an unhealthy sense of “oughtness.”

In all of these ways, Neuro-Semantics, as a tool and set of models for discovering the inner structure and process of experience, could offer a contribution. But in itself, Neuro-Semantics is not a “spirituality,” not a religion, not a philosophy, and not an ethical code. We have an ethical code that we have accepted about operating from a spirit of inquiry, abundance, professionalism, openness, responsibility, accountability, etc. But again, that’s not what Neuro-Semantics is.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #18

March 26, 2007

THE SPIRIT DIMENSION

OF META

PART IV

In the current Meta Reflections I’ve been attempting to answer the question about the relationship of Neuro-Semantics to “spirituality” and “religion.” As most people notice in Neuro-Semantic trainings, because we invite people to rise up above and beyond the primary state to their higher mental-and-emotional states, many of the processes feel like a “spiritual” activity. This is especially true of the intentionality pattern, but equally true of meta-pleasure, exploring a matrix, meaning enrichment, opening-up a belief system, etc.

I’ve been referring to this as the spirit dimension of meta (Reflection #15). It is the dimension of in-spir-ation—passion, hope, dreams, purpose, destiny, direction, intentionality, etc. It is also the dimension of “beliefs”— those mental maps that we map about the meaning and purpose of life, who we are, what we’re up to, etc. And it is in this sense that in the dimension of spirit, it is beliefs all the way up.

Now in this dimension of spirit, intention, and belief, there’s another factor at work—valuing. That’s because at the heart of the good life, the “spiritual” life, is “values.” Why? Because it is in valuing or having values that we become “spiritual” persons. Recognizing and living by values raises our lives above the lowest levels of just surviving to living for something more, for something higher. Here we map out “the good life” and how to create a life well lived.

Of course, this sounds like “values” are things when they are not. The false-noun of “values” is actually a nominalization and is derived from the verb, to value, to treat as important, as meaningful, to see the worth and significance of something. So what we label as “values” actually is a state— a state of mind, of emotion, and even of body. Consider that. If it speaks about a particular state of mind, what is the mental state of valuing?

If it speaks about a sate of emotion, then what is that emotional state?

And if it speaks about a state of body, what is the physiology and neurology when we are valuing?

The answer may seem strange at first, but that’s only because we so overuse the vague nominalization “values” and don’t map valuing as a dynamic and living process. The answer is that the mental, emotional, and neurological state is that of appreciating, sacralizing, seeing and feeling the everyday world in the aspect of eternity and so, seeing and feel gratitude.

How about that? Actually this gives us a way to find our true values. What do you appreciate? What does your mind and heart feel grateful for? Where do you invest your time, energy, and money in? What do you treat as significant and important? What do you sacralize? What do you worship? Is it money, sex, power, things, status, approval, acceptance, no conflict, health, fitness, superiority, being ‘right,’ putting others down, growing, seeing others grow, etc.?

Values are not things, but processes. Given that, where does the process of seeing and investing with significance show up in your life? What magazines do you spend money on? What television shows do you invest time in? What activities?

It is in valuing that we express ourselves as “spiritual” beings. It is in seeing wonder and worth that we are inevitably worshiping beings. Worship doesn’t just occur in Churches and Mosques. It occurs wherever a human heart admires, adores, appreciates, and feels the joy of significance. So we worship leaders, movie stars, athletes, the rich and famous. So we worship money, status, and power.

We even “worship” models, beliefs, and ideas. We are a worshiping species. That’s because we inevitably look around to search for value, importance, and significance. It is part and parcel of our passion for meaning. If nothing meant anything, if we didn’t need to do what’s meaningful, we would not feel the call to the special, the sacred, the holy, the glorious, the admirable, and the awesome.

Valuing then is the heart of spirituality. It is the essence spiritual thing you do. When you value, you look to find what matters, what makes a difference, what makes life and experiences special. And this is what drives every form of celebration. The heart pulse of celebrating is that of acknowledging value. It happens whenever we acknowledge, complement, and praise someone. It happens when we throw a party for winning, returning home, having a birthday, and just about any other occasion we can invent!

And if valuing, seeing value, adding value lies at the heart of spirituality, then even business, enterprise, and commerce can be spiritual. After all, what creates “wealth” other than adding value? It is when we create something that solves a problem, adds a benefit, invents a new tool or process, gives a service, etc. that we are doing what builds a successful business. Here, even capitalism, as an economic process, can be performed as a spiritual act. If we are adding value through our products and services, through the information, innovations, and experiences that we are offering— we are doing something spiritual— adding value to people and making the world a better place.

How then does Neuro-Semantics relate to “spirit, spiritual, and spirituality?” We do so by de-nominalizing what actually occurs in our mind-body-emotion system when we believe, value, intend, that builds up our sense of inspiration and that addresses our higher self-actualization needs for hoping, believing, intending, contributing, making a difference, creating value, etc.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #19

April 2, 2007

THE SPIRIT DIMENSION

OF META

PART V

Your Being-ness — Your Spirituality

There is doing, there is having, and there is being. The first two of these are easy to understand and experience. The third one is difficult. In fact, doing and having is where our minds, our consciousness normally and naturally go. Our brains go outward to the outside world to detect the environment, and to scan what’s happening around us. We notice the results we’re getting from what we are doing and the things which that allows us to have. And that’s how we determine if we’re succeeding or not, achieving our outcomes or not.

Being, that’s where the challenge comes. Being refers to existing with what is, and so implies first witnessing what is. That is, just observing and noticing what is and being with it without defending against it or seeking to escape it. Being with also implies acceptance. That is, just welcoming it into our awareness, our world, our life. Now acceptance is not resignation. It is not condoning. It is not permission. It is just acknowledgment of what is. Because this ends the internal fight, it takes a lot of ego-strength.

Ego-strength, the ability to witness and accept what is, what exists, without falling apart, without caving in, and without activating the defense and escape mechanisms to protect a fragile ego that would prefer to live in a world of wishful thinking, magical thinking, and childish thinking. Ego-strength is a sign of development, actually meta-development of one’s inner world, and enables us to face reality so that we can then deal with it and take effective action.

Being begins with witnessing and accepting, but does not end there. To truly enter into the meta-realm of being, we also have to use our meaning-making skills to appreciate, or to use Maslow’s terminology, to sacralize all of life. What does this mean? Sacralizing is the state of being where we can find value, wonder, awe, significance, meaning, and importance in anything, in everything. That is, to see things in the aspect of eternity and to give it rich significance so that we sense and feel its meaningfulness.

This is spirituality. When you can do this, you are no longer living in a meaningless universe, a secular world that has no more significance than doing and having. You have moved to a higher realm, a higher dimension of experience, a higher realm of being. And from this higher place, you are able to feel inspired (in-spirit-ed) in living.

Maslow described this realm as the realm of being that describes the “growth” motivation of self-actualization. He contrasted it with the realm of deficiency which describes life at the lower needs. In the higher or being-realm we experience the being-needs and so think and feeling using being-cognition. This contrasts with the deficiency-needs and deficiency-cognition of the lower needs.

The being-values also reflect what every major religion and most philosophies have argued for over thousands of years: truth, goodness, beauty, unity (wholeness), dichotomy transcendence, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, necessity, order, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, self-sufficiency, meaningfulness. This also is the place where we become more truly human.

Another contrast with being-ness is instrumentality. When we operate in an instrumental way, we are looking at the instruments (tools, processes, patterns, models, technology) that enables us to reach our end-goals. Instrumental goals are the steps and stages that enable us to get there. Instrumentality, we go to work, make money, pay our taxes, follow the rules about driving, etc. Generally we do these things not for the experience itself, but for the results we obtain.

Now thinking instrumentally and operating instrumentally is part and parcel of being successful, of achieving our objectives, of making things happen in our lives, and of being human. But being human involves so much more than instrumentality. The person who makes instrumentality the purpose of life becomes a “human doing,” rather than a human being. The person who does that then evaluates and judges life in terms of instrumental goals. That then becomes a very toxic thing. Then, if a person isn’t succeeding in terms of goals, one feels like a failure as a person.

Yet life is not only about instrumental goals. Yet at the lower need levels, at the level of our survival, safety, social, and self needs—we have to achieve certain things. If we are not effectively instrumental at that level we suffer physically, economically, and psychologically. So we need to be instrumental, yet life is also about being-needs. It is about learning how to be within ourselves and with others. When we move to this level, the “modal operators” change from necessity to possibility. This is part of spirituality as defined by almost every theology and philosophy. At being-ness we experience “peak” experiences that are typically characterized by a purpose-lessness, a pure being-ness.

The external context of these experiences hardly matter at all. We can have these peak experiences at any time and in any place. That’s because the quality of the experience is a being-experience. Inside, we transcend time and space, even self, others, environment, causality, etc. We enter into an eternal moment, a perfect moment and whatever the engagement—we are totally present. If it is holding a newborn baby, if it is enjoying a sunrise, if it is having a fierce conversation, it it is walking on a beach, if it is playing tennis, if it is holding a loved one, if it is being quiet in the presence of another person. The event that we’re engaged in is not the key. The key is being there. It is being present—fully and completely present as we are being with the people and activities that we’re engaged with. Such makes life spiritually meaningful.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #19

April 9, 2007

META-DEVELOPMENT

Life is the adventure of development. At every age, whether 21 or 50 or 100, we are never finished. There’s always more to learn, to experience, to discover, to contribute, and to become. Isn’t this exciting? Of all species, we of the human species are the most incomplete, not only at birth, but throughout our lifespan. It is because we are born without instincts, without the specific content knowledge for knowing how to be human, that human life is all about learning and changing. Being human is what we have to discover and invent. And becoming fully human, fully alive — this is the drive within all of us that we call self-actualization.

Self-Actualization theory, as developed by Maslow, recognizes that we are born to develop, to unfold, to actualize our potentials, and to become what we are born to become. We are born with an inner drive for unleashing more and more of our potentials. How do you experience this drive? How fully do you embrace this? What is your next level of development?

In fact, we now know that we can continue to grow, learn, develop, unfold, and actualize more and more of our potentials throughout all of the stages of life. Yet while we can, this is not inevitable. With our powers, we can also ignore this inner call. We can deny it. We can repress it so that it goes away.

If it is our nature to develop and we lack the specific instinctual details, then a great deal of the human adventure is about discovering how to fully develop and what to more fully develop. Yet what do you think about the idea of always being unfinished? What do you feel about the fact of all of life being about ongoing development? Does this intimidate or thrill you? Does it put you off or does it turn you on?

One secret about life is that life, as development, occurs on levels. First there is the development of our life style. This concerns how we live, what we do, who we associate with, and all of the first level of development that takes care of our lower needs (survival, safety, social, and self needs). Most of us live all of our lives on this level—getting by, finding work that we enjoy, figuring out how to get along with others, etc.

Yet there is more. There is our meta-development—developing our inner world of meanings—the beliefs that empower and enhance us as we move through life, the meanings that give us direction and purpose.

Meta-development is the ability to reflect on our experiences, to edit our inner representations, to examine our inner perceptions, to detect the frames that we operate from, and to step back to the choice point where we can truly choose how we want to live. This is the place of true human freedom—the freedom to choose, to assume responsibility, to architect our future, and to become the author of our own experiences. NLP speaks about this as “running your own brain.” In Neuro-Semantics we speak about it as developing our highest executive self and states, the states that facilitate our full self-actualization.

How highly developed are your meta-abilities? What is the next step in your own meta-development? What are you seeking to actualize in yourlife at this stage of your development? What new possibilities are you awakening to that you will work to unleash in the coming months?

Our meta-development involves the higher levels of change beyond merely enhancing our performances. They involve our developmental changes and our transformational changes. Developmental changes involve changes in your beliefs, meanings, understandings, decisions, etc. Transformational changes refer to changes in our direction, orientation, and purpose. It refers to when a paradigm shift occurs and we begin living for something new.

This is the realm of “spirit” and is related to what I’ve been writing about as the dimensions of “spirit.” If the terms “spirit” and “spiritual” refers to feeling an inspiration about life, self, others, growth, etc. (in-spirit-ed), then this is the passion that drives spirituality. It is the high drive to find meaning so we can live meaningfully. Maslow used these words (menaing and spiritual) synonymously.

“If there were no joy in life, it would not be worth living. … Life has to have meaning, has to be filled with moments of high intensity that validate life and make it worthwhile. (Journals, p. 180)

“The higher nature (or higher life-spiritual life) emerges to be seen clearly. Was it there all the time? Yes, as a universal potentiality. That is, every human being has within his nature a yearning for truth, beauty, goodness, justice, order, humor, completion, etc. (or a preference for the true rather than the false, or to see rather than to be blinded, etc.), but this emerges only as lower basic needs are satisfied — i.e., under the very best conditions.” (Journals, p. 47)

How’s your meta-development? Are you developing your at your highest levels? As a meaning-maker, are you living and experiencing some really rich meanings, robust meanings, and inspiring meanings that pull you out of bed every morning ready or the day?

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #20

April 16, 2007

META-TRANCE

When people first experience a meta-state process, it’s not uncommon for them to comment about how much it feels like a trance. “Wow! That was kind of hypnotic.” “I feel like I’ve been somewhere else.” And no wonder! As a state-about-a-state, meta-states take us inside and so we naturally transition from the outside world to the inside world.

It gets even more trancy as we move up the levels. Consider one of the key patterns we have in Neuro-Semantics, the Intentionality Pattern. With this pattern we essentially meta-state ourselves with intentionality all the way up. Here we begin with the real world—the world of physics where our experience is grounded in the empirical qualities of sights, sounds, sensations, and smells. Then we ask a series of meta-questions:

“Is that important to you? Why is that important? What are you doing that for? What’s in the back of your mind about that?”

To answer these questions, we go inside. We move into the world of symbols and communication, the world of representations and codes. Here there are no pickup trucks and fast food, no tree or yards that need mowing, no coconuts or snicker candy bars, no bosses or jobs, no faxes or reports, no gyms or court houses. These things do not enter the inside-world. This is a world of maps, ideas, thoughts, and facsimiles of the things “out there.” Into this world tangible objects cannot enter. In this world there are only messages and messages-of-messages. This is the world of hypnosis. It is the world of meta-states.

We enter this world by thought, by re-presenting to ourselves the sights, sounds, sensations, and smells of the real world. This is the inner world of our minds, of our Matrix where we give birth to our sense of reality, our model of the world. It seems real and it is real-to-us when we are in there. It is also real to our nervous-system-and-brain that creates it and that will attempt to real-ize the messages that we send to ourselves. Yet it is not the real world of physics, it is the invented or constructed world of meaning —layers and layers of meanings.

We can go further into it. When we ask the meta-questions of intention repeatedly,

“So that is important? Great. How is it important? What’s your intention in wanting that? What will that get you? And when you get that fully and completely in just the way you want it, what will that give you that’s even more important to you?”

When we then begin to answer these questions, we transition to a yet higher level of consciousness as we go into more of a trance state. Our answers even become trancy— vague, general, conceptual. We want peace, oneness, connection, purpose, fulfillment, authenticity, contribution, etc. To move up the meta-state levels is to enter into a hypnotic state. In this, all meta-states are hypnotic structures and facilitate hypnotic experiences. This means that the Matrix also is a hypnotic state. And when we complete the communication loop to bring the meta-state back down to the primary level so we can interface the world with it —our meta-state sets up hypnotic suggestions, commands, and post-hypnotic behaviors for us.

Given this, every state of hypnosis is actually a meta-state. It involves layers of meta-states that have been built up in our mind as we have gone inside and created various ideas, images, and suggestions. The depth of the hypnosis is the height of our meta-stating frames. Knowing this about meta-states now enables us to examine our states and behaviors that have a hypnotic feel to them and that do not serve us well and re-formulate them so they do enhance our lives in releasing our highest potentials.

Trance states are meta-states and meta-states are trance experiences. Knowing that, you probably won’t be surprised to know that one of the things we often do in some of our trainings (Master Practitioner) is to have people take their genius meta-stating process from Accessing Personal Genius (APG) and write out the genius state as an induction. Ah, an induction! As in “a hypnotic induction” that creates and facilitates the meta-state structure.

So in the Intentionality Pattern, when you meta-state yourself with intention upon intention, it takes you to your highest frames of purpose, destiny, identity, legacy, etc. This generally induces a very deep hypnotic state, or shall I say, a very high hypnotic state. You go higher-deeper within your inner world, internally seeing your highest meanings, highest purposes, and feeling inspired by the inner vision. Then with all of that in mind, when you bring it to the interface point and see your everyday activities with those eyes— you set up a post-hypnotic suggestion for how to move through the world. It creates a higher level way of being in the world.

That’s meta-trance. That’s trancing out with your highest and best meta-states. That’s more up, up, and away from the first primary state to the levels of your meta-mind which is generally outside-of-consciousness. How are you at meta-trance? What are your best meta-trances for work, relationships, health, exercise, creativity, wealth, etc.? What is Neuro-Semantics about? What will Meta-States do for you? It will create great meta-trances— trances of genius, of love, of passionate commitment to things that matter to you, and of unleashing potentials!

May all of your trances this week be positively empowering ones that unleash more and more of your potentials!

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #21

April 23, 2007

META-CONSCIOUSNESS

Several years ago I wrote an article that I titled, Which Unconscious Mind Do You Train? In it, I distinguished several references that we call by the same term, “the unconscious mind.”

1) Conscious dropped into unconscious awareness as our storehouse of knowledge

2) The autonomic nervous system

3) The sub-conscious mind processing information below the threshold of consciousness

4) The forgotten mind of stored memories

5) The repressed mind

6) The meta-consciousness of assumptive frames

The design of the article was to warn against a sloppy use of the vague phrase, “the unconscious mind” and to warn against positing the unconscious mind against the conscious as if it were god —always right, infallible, all knowing, etc. and the conscious mind was inferior. I argued that “the unconscious mind” should no more be implicitly trusted than the conscious mind. Every aspect of our holistic mind is human and therefore fallible.

Yet “mind” as reason, consciousness, and meaning-creation is our primary survival mechanism. And it is through developing a mindful awareness that we are able to monitor and regulate our consciousness and use it in thinking with clarity, precision, and understanding. And this is what makes us most fully alive/ fully human and so actualizing our best. And this applies to our whole mind in both conscious and unconscious forms.

This, in fact, was part and parcel of the original NLP vision about “running your own brain.”

It is mindful awareness that allows us to recognize the movies that we’re playing on the theater of our mind and begin to edit them in terms of their cinematic features.

It is mindful awareness that enables us to discover the perceptual filters (meta-programs) that govern what and how we sort for information as we move through the world and expand those perceptual filters so that we don’t create a self-impose blindness by over-relying on a particular meta-program.

It is mindful awareness that empowers us to recognize the states we apply to our states that create our higher and more complex meta-states by which we create our sense of personality and identity and the textured qualities of our states.

And what is mindful awareness but the ability to access and use our meta-consciousness? How well are you able to do that? Now to read some authors and some disciplines, you would think that consciousness is the central problem of human life. You would think that being mindful, having the power of reason, and being aware is the source of all evil. It is not.

True enough, there are forms of consciousness that are very problematic. If your consciousness is full of judgments, harshness, demandingness, rules, and punishment— well, you would experience that as a really big problem. You could hardly “think” or be aware without experiencing immense pain. A consciousness like that would make you your own worst enemy. A consciousness like that would be so hard on yourself. A consciousness like that would tempt you to try to avoid thinking and avoid awareness itself. And that, in turn, would undermine your cognitive efficacy.

Timothy Gallwey calls that kind of consciousness Self-1 and identifies it as the reason so many people sabotage themselves and prevent themselves from taking their performances to new levels of expertise (The Inner Game of Tennis). That’s why we use acceptance, appreciation, awe, love, support, empathy, etc. so often in Neuro-Semantics as resource states to meta-state ourselves and others with. Doing so changes consciousness. Doing so gives us a kinder/gentler meta-consciousness whereby we are able to live more graciously with ourselves and then, in turn, with others. For this reason also we use the “Releasing all Judgment” pattern in Neuro-Semantics to shift out of a critical demandingness state of mind to one of simple witnessing and noticing.

As one facet of our “unconscious mind” is our meta-consciousness which includes all of the assumptive frames that we have absorbed from the numerous cultures that we live in. These higher outside-of-consciousness frames make up the content of our overall “model of the world” that we live within as our mental-emotional atmosphere. And while we are unconscious of it, we can bring these frames into awareness so that we can quality control them and choose those that enhance our self-actualization.

To further develop a rich and robust meta-consciousness, we explore our matrix of frames. If we aren’t able to detect the assumptive frames that govern our everyday experience, then the matrix has us. To become a master of your own matrix and to be able to change it from within at will, we have to be able to detect and explore our highest presuppositional frames. That’s where the Matrix Model offers us a useful tool.

How open are you to your meta-consciousness? How skilled are you in exploring your assumptive frames? How often do you run a meta-cognitive analysis to quality control the self-organizing frames that structures your life? How able are you to create a new matrix of frames to tap into potentials yet to be released?

It is within our meta-consciousness that we can set “standing orders” as policies of our executive level of mind. Here we can establish self-organizing attractors at the higher levels and automatize a frame. And that will be the subject of the next Meta Reflection.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #22

April 30, 2007

ATTRACTOR FRAMES

There is a part of your mind that makes decisions. It’s at a meta-level. Now it is true that at the primary level you can make a simple choice. You can choose to go toward something attractive that you like and that gives you pleasure. You can choose to move away from something aversive that you dislike because it creates pain. At the primary level, our neurology is designed for this and so it comes equipped with toward and away from energies (one of our meta-programs). That happens pretty much automatically and without thought.

But decision generally involves thought. Lots of thoughts. Thoughts this way and thoughts that way. We go back and for as we weigh the pros and cons of a choice. We alternate back and forth, saying yes one minute, and then no the next as we weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the choice before us. At this point we are in-decisive. We are in a state of doubt. We don’t know what to choose. Yet eventually we “make up our mind” and so we say no to one side of the choice and yes to the other. It is this cutting off of some alternatives that allows us to make a decision. And the word de-cision speaks of this. We cut (-cision) off and away from (de-) one thing from another thing. Ah, within a decision we use our primary states of validation (yes) and dis-validation (no).

The executive part of your mind that makes up your mind makes a choice, chooses, decides, says yes and no and so cuts a pathway that will determine your actions and orientation. When that part of your mind does this, it terminates the indecision, throws its energy one way, and so sends messages to your mind-body system to make the internal and external changes that the decision formats.

Actually the executive part of your mind is a pretty high level facet of your meta-consciousness and one connected with the part of your mind that creates and sets intentions. In fact, to intend to do something, believe something, feel something, identify with something, etc. is part of the decision process. In this way the conative part of our mind and personality operates as one of your key faculties. That’s because, you get to choose. In fact, without the programming of instincts with content-information like animals, you have to choose. You don’t have a choice about not choosing!

Yet when you choose, when you make up your mind, you formulate the content of your meta-consciousness. You set the higher frames of your mind which operate like self-organizing attractors in a system. What does this mean? It means that the decisions operate as your intentions and these intentions as beliefs (after all, it’s beliefs all the way up) operate in a way that we typically describe as a self-fulfilling prophesy. That is, what you believe and expect to get is precisely what you are set to see, perceive, and receive. If you decide to believe that you live in a friendly universe and that positive intentions drive what people do, so you will find that in the world. You attract friendliness and positive intentions to yourself. You attract it inside yourself — as your way of seeing, processing information, interpreting, creating meaning. You attract it outside as it invites those who agree to befriend you.

The attractor that you set by your decision, intention, and belief operates like the “rules of the game.” That if we think about it as a “game” —an inner game, these are the rules of the game which set in motion the way you play the game of life and the game that you invite others to play with you. Yet because all of this comes from your meta-consciousness, most of this is outside-of-consciousness. It’s part of your “unconscious mind” and to the extent that it is, it operates automatically and without your awareness. No wonder frame game analysis then becomes such a powerful Neuro-Semantic tool for gaining control over this facet of your unconscious mind.

The decision-intention-belief that you set through your yes-ing one choice and cutting off by no-ing the other choices also sets a “standing order” in your mind. This offers another way to think about an self-organizing attractor. The attractor is a standing order about what to sort for, pay attention to, notice, respond to, and punctuate. That standing order may be a taboo — what you have decided to prohibit and forbid, or it may be a command — what to welcome into your consciousness. So, given all of this:

C What self-organizing attractors have been set in your meta-consciousness as standing orders, executive policies for coping and mastering things, and the rules of the games you play?

C What patterns do you find keep repeating in your life?

C What do you keep attracting time and again, year after year, in your life, in your finances, in your relationships, in your health, in your business, in your fitness?

C And even more important — what new policies would you like to establish?

C What standing orders would you like to executively make and set in your meta-consciousness?

Your self-organizing attractors do not absolutely create your “reality.” Oh that things were that simple! But they are not. Your self-organizing attractor frames (as meta-states) interact with “reality.” In fact, we could say this, your self-organizing attractor frames is the inner “reality” that you create as you map things from your experiences. You then use them to test out how well those maps work on external reality.

So attracting things to you is not an absolute process, but a relative one and dependent on the accuracy and usefulness of your maps. If you map out something totally irrational and erroneous, you only create a very un-useful map that will put you at odds with reality as it exists beyond your nervous system—physical reality, social reality, political reality, etc. To quote from Korzybski, a map is only as good and useful as it has some correspondence to the territory, at least enough so that you can use it in navigating to the places that you want to visit and experience.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #23

May 7, 2007

LEVELS OF REALITY

We set higher level attractor frames in our mind (Reflection #22), to influence our own inner reality and we do that, in turn, to affect our outer reality. It’s the inner game/outer game dance! This gives us minimally at least two dimensions of what we call “reality.” There is the inner reality of your matrix of frames of meaning. This defines your inside reality; it also creates a great deal of that reality. Then there is the external reality of the factors and constraints that we have to deal with “out there” beyond our own skin.

So even before we ask the fundamental questions about reality there is a step. And that step is to define what we mean by “reality.”

C What is real?

C What is reality?

C How can we determine our reality?

C To what extent do we contribute to creating our reality?

C How do the inner and outer realms of reality relate to each other?

C Do we create our reality?

So the question before all of these questions is, “What reality are you speaking about?” We have to ask this because there are different dimensions and levels of reality.

The external reality has been the subject and focus of science. Once upon a time, with the discovery of the atom we thought we had gotten to the bottom of it all. But there’s now all kinds of sub-atomic factors of neutrons, electrons, quarks, etc. and the quantum world. But since none of us take our cars to a quantum physicist for repairs! For the mechanics of a car, we need a Newtonian physicist— someone who knows how to deal with the Newtonian world of physics where the macro-level of mass, energy, and movement interact.

Yet that is not the only external reality “out there.” We also have the external social world—social reality. This is the reality that we find and encounter “out there” made up of the relational interactions of other people. Here we have families, groups, colleagues, movements, corporations, etc. Here we have external facts about people and the cultures they create. And these cultures contain both lots of external things (rituals, environment, architecture, schools, clubs, etc.) and lots of internal things: values, beliefs, understandings, identities, etc.

Then there is another external reality—the external political world, political reality. This is the reality that’s “out there” that govern how groups of people relate for decision making and leadership that creates various political structures – socialism, bureaucracy, democracy, etc.

These are some of the dimensions of external reality. And in addition to these, there are the dimensions of internal reality. There is the level of representational reality— what we represent in our mind that creates the beginning of our inner reality. Above that is the linguistic reality of how we use words and language to define and call into existence the landscape of our inner world. Above that are the higher and more abstract concepts that give birth to our conceptual reality. These are some of the levels of inner reality within the meta-dimensions of our mind-body system.

Given that we can now begin to specify different realities, how do these different inner and outer realms of reality relate to each other? And, do we create our reality?

Obviously we create some of our reality. We create ideas in our mind as representations, words, and concepts and then translate those creative inner concepts into objects for the outside world as we innovate new inventions. But we do not create all of our reality. There are givens and constraints with which we have to learn about and adjust ourselves to. There are neurological constraints of our nervous-system-and-brain constraints regarding what our sense receptors can receive and how our nervous system create transforms of physical phenomena. There are external constraints of time, energy, money, intelligence. There are social constraints even in the language we use to think and encode our understandings of things. Each language also establishes categories of reality for members of a social system. This creates the socially agreed upon fictions in that culture.

“One way in which our models of the world [inner reality] will necessarily differ from the world itself [external reality] is that our nervous system systematically distorts and deletes whole portions of the real world.” (The Structure of Magic, Volume I, page 9, John Grinder and Richard Bandler)

So while we participate in the creation of our subjective reality, we do so while living within the givens and constraints of other realities—social, political, linguistic, and physical realities. Given that some NLP people are now assuming that we create all of our reality, this seems to be a overlooked or forgotten part of he NLP Communication model. Yet you can read about these “constraints” in the first volume of The Structure of Magic (pages 5-13).

Do we create our reality? Yes, in part, but not the whole; reality is also a given. This means that “reality” is both objective and subjective and they interface with each other. Our subjective reality influences objective reality and objective reality ought to influence our subjective reality. When it does, we map the territory and create “our model of the world.”

Ah, now we are back to mapping. We map reality in order to create our inner “model of the world” so that we can navigate reality with more skill and elegance. We also map new possibilities for reality so that we can then create and innovate new influences in the world. And as we do this, our inner mapping and framing thereby attracts skills and resources to ourselves. So with our skills, resources, communication, responses, and interactions we attract new external possibilities to ourselves. But the so-called “law of attraction” is not absolute. Nor does it operate apart from the givens and constraints of the real world. And, more about this in the next Reflection.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #24

May 14, 2007

LEVELS OF ATTRACTION

In the last Reflection I wrote about Levels of Reality to distinguish the dimensions of inner and outer reality and some of the multiple levels in each of those. The term “reality” is not a monolithic term referring to a singular thing. What is real depends on the dimension in which w are referring. The two primary dimensions are within our nervous system-brain (inner reality) and “out there” beyond all of our interpretations, understandings, information processing, communication about it (outer reality).

To fail to make this critical distinction confuses map and territory. Some people who confuse the two are fanatics. For a fanatic, his or her map is the one, the only, the true, the only true map. It is real. It is the territory, and woe be unto the person who questions it! Eric Hoffer called this kind of person a “true believer.” For the fanatic the primary purpose in life is imposing the maps on others and even on the world.

There are others who confuse map and territory. One group doe so by assuming that whatever they map is real or is going to be real. This is a delusion however. The delusion is that they have that kind of power in their mapping and that the only possible thing that could be wrong in life, in the world, is that they are just not mapping enough— believing enough, imagining enough, intending enough, etc.

The problem in this is that they think that they can map anything, and that whatever they think, they make it so. This over-simplistic understanding of reality forgets that we are mapping a territory and that the territory has to be taken into account in the mapping. It’s the old thing of taking a map of London and trying to navigate around any other city on the planet. It won’t work! Sure, there will be a few streets with the same name, perhaps a similar river or mountain, but for the most part that map is not designed for any territory other than London.

Mapping does not create external reality. By mapping we create some of our internal reality —our subjective reality so that it calls our beliefs, identities, hopes, dreams, intentions, etc. into being. And as our mapping interacts with the constraints of our body, our context, our mind, our nervous system, we are able to tap into the predispositions, talents, and potentials and create something new from all of those components.

It was on this note that I ended Meta Reflection #23 regarding the givens and constraints of the world. Yes indeed thinking makes it so to quote Shakespear, but thinking does not make everything so and it does not dismiss or automatically over-ride the givens and constraints of reality. Mostly, the thinking that “makes it so” refers to our self-reflexive thinking, the thinking we engage in as we create our inner models of ourselves, our world, our place in the world, etc.

It is on the inside, in that inner world of our subjective reality made out of the thousands of belief frames, intention frames, decision frames, understanding frames, identity frames, permission frames, etc. that “as we think, so we are.” This is the domain of psychology, of your inner psycho-logics. As you map things with your thinking, believing, and framing— so your brain and nervous system attempts to “make it real.” It does this first and foremost inside your body as your representations on the theater of your mind which then, in turn, sends messages to your body and all of your higher belief frames sends commands to your body.

No wonder it’s so critical to learn all you can of your Movie Mind—becoming conscious of your representations and how to edit the cinematic features with as much skill and elegance as possible (see MovieMind or any good NLP Introduction). And no wonder it is even more critical to learn all you can of your higher self-reflexive mind —your meta-states so that you can become conscious of the frames you have set and continue to set. Awareness of that level of your mind puts you at choice point in your psychology. Then you are able to elect what to set as your desired frames (see Winning the Inner Game).

Think of these first two meta-dimensions as levels of attraction. Attraction at the first level, the level of representation is pretty powerful. What you picture in your mind and all the qualities of sound, sensation, smell, etc. that you edit into those images powerfully influences what you create in yourself and your world. This is the place of imagination— images, inwardly “seeing” your goals, hopes, dreams, or fears, dreads, worries, angers, resentments. Twenty some years ago in Dallas, Texas the cancer researchers discovered the power of images and imagination. And for longer than that, athletes have known the power of “seeing” their best practices in their minds from Jack Nicholson’s famous quote about only hitting the golf ball after he creates a little movie of a perfect shot.

Yet if that level of attraction is power, the meta-state level is a hundred times more effective. This is the level of belief. It is the level when we take our representations and step back and confirm them with layers of validation so that we say to ourselves “This is real,” “This is the way it is.” “This is true.” Say that about anything and you will convince your nervous system that it is real and so you will feel and then act and try to bring into creation.

At this level we have to be careful, because as Jesus noted, “Be it unto you according to your belief.” Whatever you believe— true or false, heathy or sick, invigorating or dis-empowering, life-enhancing or morbid and neurotic — whatever you believe you will see the world in terms of it and attract things into your life to try to make it real. I say “try to make it real” because you may or you may not. It depends. If the map is really delusional, you won’t be it real at all. If the map does not take into consideration the facts of reality— physical facts, empirical facts, political facts, social facts, etc., then the map probably will not empower you to actualize it. You will end up frustrated, angry, confused, disillusioned, etc.

It is at this higher level also that we have the attraction of our intentions. Our intentions govern nearly everything. This is the executive level of consciousness where we get to decide, set our direction, choose our beliefs, choose our thoughts, behaviors, even our emotions. Of course, it does have to be acknowledged, appreciated, and owned. And when we do that, then we can align our attentions to our highest intentions. When it is not, we will suffer from IDD— intention deficient disorder and, living attentionally, be pushed to and fro by everything in our environment and head that grabs our attention. But, more about that next time.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #25

May 21, 2007

THE ATTRACTION LEVEL

OF INTENTION

From the Levels of Reality arise our levels of attraction. These levels move from representational attraction (images, inner movies) to the attraction power of beliefs and intentions. Today most people recognize that beliefs operate as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Beliefs operate so that they attract to us the very things that we believe. That’s what we mean by the phrase —a self-fulfilling prophecy. And yet this process is not absolute. It is not an infallible “law of attraction,” rather it is a basic tendency at work in our psychology.

This process works relative to constraints of external reality and the constraints of our mind-and-body. Beliefs, no matter how irrational, toxic, or morbid will attempt to get our body to actualize it. That’s why above and beyond the state of depression are depressive beliefs about self, life, and the future.

So also with numbness. Above and beyond the state of numbness and a sense of being “out of the body” are fearful beliefs about it being unsafe to acknowledge and own one’s physical sensations. The person may even believe that he or she is not in his body. But they are. There’s no such thing as dis-embodied persons or consciousness. The depressed person is in his body, and his mind in all of its dimensions is running the person’s autonomic nervous system, immune system, heart and lungs, memory, imagination, body temperature and a million other things. The person just doesn’t believe that it’s safe or okay or right to be “in” their body and that belief is attempting to actualize that idea of dis-embodiment. There is no actual “disassociation,” only the feeling of it — numbness, strangeness, weirdness, etc.

[Understanding this should give us pause about the glib way many in NLP talk about and use th word “disassociation.” I’d recommend to avoid using it when you are simply speaking about stepping back from one state and accessing or stepping into another state. These are relative terms. Every time you step out of one, you are stepping into another. We are always in some state.]

What’s the point in this? First, that there’s an attraction of beliefs and second, that it’s good to become picky about the beliefs we feed our mind. Ultimately, as you believe, so you will tend to become. Beliefs work as commands to the nervous system and that’s part and parcel of how they organize us.

All of this is even more true of intentions. Set an intention and, pow! that intention will begin assuming an executive role in your personality. I like to say in Meta-States that “All consciousness is motivated.” Take any piece of consciousness — conscious awareness or unconscious unawareness and within it you will find three strands— content of something, context which then gives that content meaning, and intention. Content is the details and specifics, context is the frame (frame of reference) and intention are all of the thoughts in the back of the mind about it —motivation, agenda, objective, outcome, etc.

Animals and small children live entirely in the world of attention. They responded to any loud noise, bright light, strong smell, touch, etc. — the sensory based facts of the world that gets their attentions. And typically their minds are full of attentions. This and that, then this other thing. They notice this voice, then that music, then those actions. In this there’s hardly any focus, but lots of shifting and changing. An abundance of attentions— yet we call it attention deficit disorder!

Then, when a person gets lots of things in the mind, there’s even more to distract from a focus and more to attend to — this thought, that memory, this fear, that joy, thousands of them! Without taking charge of intentionality, we are doomed to live in the world of attention. We live attentionally highly receptive and response to all of the stimulus around us and in us. Whatever intentions we have are outside-our-awareness and so driving us unconsciously.

To step back and access an intention, then an intention of that one and so on all the way up the reflexive levels until we get to some of our highest and most expansive intentions enables us to then choose to energize those intentions and then deliberately align our attentions to that intention. To do that is to live intentionally, to move through life on purpose, and to enter into the human domain.

And, to do this also is to set an self-organizing attractor in place in our mind that will send out messages to our body and commands to our nervous system that will enable us to attract our intentions. This is powerful. Very powerful. Not absolute power, not divine power. It can be interfered with, but it is nevertheless, a very powerful process.

For most of us, while we have this power, it operates unconsciously within us. We have not consciously set our intentions. Our highest intentions emerge through experiences outside-of-our-awareness and often involve intentions that, while driving, are not all that useful. Our intentions are to always be right and never wrong; to be on top; to avoid criticism at any cost, etc. So the power is there and it participates in creating our experiences, yet it is mis-used and untapped as a resource.

The solution? First, becoming aware of this power and how we are now using it. Then from awareness we can choose to stop the old unconscious intending and set new self-organizing intentions. And of course, this is what we do within the Accessing Personal Genius training as well as other Neuro-Semantic trainings.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #26

May 28, 2007

META-ATTRACTIONS

In the last two Reflections I’ve described what we call a self-organizing attractors. In the human mind-body-emotion system, we can set frames of beliefs and intentions which, due to the lack of genetic content information about life or “instincts,” and the information that we set send commands to our nervous system to make the content of our beliefs real in our lives.

This basic mechanism is powerful. And yet in saying that, it is also not an absolute power. To be explicit— this does means that not everything you think, believe, or even intention will be attracted to you or that you will be able to make real. For one thing, fallibility is built into the system. Your thinking, believing, and intending is fallible and variable as it is influenced by numerous other things.

The system is also relative to, and dependent upon, the constraints of reality. It is required in all of our internal mapping through thinking, believing, and intending that we map things that are within the realm of possibility and that our maps be accurate enough to the territory so that we are not living in delusions and fantasies. The map must accord at least somewhat to the territory. It must have a similar structure to the territory. If it does not, we start to create and live in a fantasy world of make-believe that does not allow our neurology to actualize our content.

It is true that “as we think so we are,” that “thinking makes it so,” that believing is a powerful mechanism for health and success, but such thoughts (at whatever level) must be thoughts that can be actualized. That the thoughts send messages and commands throughout our mind and body and enable and empower us to act on them.

Thoughts are not magical. They do not “create” reality in some magical way. And this means that calling upon “the quantum dimension” doesn’t suddenly endow thoughts with supernatural power. Yes, I know that “quantum”is a sexy term and that using “quantum” as an adjective is very popular these days, but creating that label does not make it so. That’s why there are no such things as “quantum linguistics,” “quantum psychology,” “quantum understanding,” etc. And because these sexy-sounding PR phrases are captivating, but totally empty of actual references, they are meaningless goobledygook.

Yes, the ultimate bottom line of reality may involve the quantum world, but we do not live there.

We do not drive quantum cars, we do not ride on quantum elevators, we do not go to quantum mechanics for car repair, or quantum builders to add on an addition to our house, or quantum interior decorators, or quantum doctors when we’re not feeling well or need surgery. With the bodies we have, we live at a much higher macro-level of life.

We do not even live our lives at the molecular level, let alone the sub-molecular level. That’s why we cannot and do not put our hands through solid furniture, cannot walk through walls, and cannot fall off a skyscraper without getting hurt. Stones crush our bones, speeding cars rip our fragile bodies apart, and spoiled food turns our stomachs. And even the best thought, the most powerful beliefs, and even the most innocent and focused intention, cannot prevent or stop these things. Think quantum thoughts all you want. But if you jump off a skyscraper or out of an airplane without a parachute, you will fall and you will suffer and probably kill yourself.

In the small book that’s now in bookstores, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (2006) quotes John Assaraf who says, “A thought has a frequency, we can measure a thought.” (p. 9). Again, a fascinating and even sexy kind of thing to day, but it is just not so. The author has confused levels. A “thought” exists at a macro-level of our phenomenlogical experience. What occurs at the level of the brain processing is the exchange of chemicals (neuro-transmitters, peptides, etc.) and the charging of protons and electrons as a bio-impulse moves along the neuro-pathways and the ions are exchanged in the cells. We can see and measure and somewhat understand these mechanisms, but these are not “thoughts” or “emotions” — those terms do not apply at that level, they apply as a much more macro-phenomena.

All of these bio-electrical and bio-chemical processes are the sub-strands and sub-layers that comprise a gestalt that we call “thoughts” or consciousness. So “thought” has no frequency. The overall functioning of the brain has frequencies and within those operations of the brain, we experience different kinds of thoughts.

The author Assaraf has also forgotten that the idea of “frequency” applied to thought is a metaphor — a metaphor! — not an empirical description. This is similar to the metaphor that is used throughout the book of magnetic attraction, “Thoughts are magnetic.” Yes, metaphorically. But no, not empirically. And this confusion of levels has led to non-sense and ignorant statements like the following, statements asserted without any evidence:

“The law of attraction simply gives you whatever it is you are thinking about.” (p. 13)

“Quantum physicists tell us that the entire universe emerged from thought!” (p. 15)

“Nothing can come into your experience unless you summon it through persistent thought.” (p. 28)

Such over-simplistic explanations create several toxic thought viruses. The last statement implies there are no other factors, no other variables in the world except thought which, of course, is blatantly false. The first statement is indistinguishable from the magical thinking stage of cognitive development that occurs in children from 3 to 5 years of age, again implying that thought is the only creative factor and that there are no constraints of reality to interfere. If only! And the second statement is completely undocumented; I have never read a legitimate book on the subject that even comes close to asserting anything like that. Yes, the indeterminacy factor means that we tend to observe what our assumptions and premises prepare us to observe since the observer influences the field. But that’s a very long way from saying that the universe emerged from thought!

There’s several dangers in this. Exaggerating, confusing levels, failing to index statements, failing to include the other multiple contributing factors etc. leaves the impression that people are “gods” or at least almost all-powerful in creating reality. Not so. Where is fallibility in all of this? Where is mortality? Where is social reality? Where are the constraints of reality?

So to ameliorate all of this, the truth is more balanced. We do create ideas and meanings and as we hold them in mind, we send messages and commands to our neurology to try to actualize them in our bodies. Try to make them actual and real, however, is a very different thing from thought absolutely creating your reality. If it did, the people in the back rooms of psychiatric hospitals would be some of the most powerful people on the planet instead of some of the most sad and pathetic.

Yes, thinking, feeling, believing, and intending do create and set up self-organizing “attractors” or attractions within us, but this is mostly a way of talking about the mind-brain relationship, the reflexive communication processes within us, and should not be taken as an empirical description. There’s still much mystery about all of this, and anyone even slightly educated acknowledges.

Yet there are a few people in NLP who have taken this exaggerated and unbalanced view and created the toxic non-sense that therefore everything that happens to you— you are responsible for it. You brought it into your life. Ah what power! There were no other factors. No other variables. No other influences. You and you alone are totally responsible for everything that happens to you. Now, that’s about as toxic an idea as they come. It implies that other people cannot be responsible for what they say and do. It implies that you do not live in various family, cultural, social, political, economic worlds. It implies that you are like a “god” who makes everything happens.

If only! But it is not so. There are constraints in all of those dimensions that we have nothing to do with. We did not create the world. We were born into the social, cultural, political, and economic worlds that we now live. Our responsibility is to first map out these territories and then develop the knowledge and skills for coping with such. So here’s to your effective mapping as you set belief frames, understanding frames, and intentional frames that will bring out your highest and best!

Meta Reflections #1

UP YOUR META

I’m not sure who first introduced the term meta into English as it is now used, but from my research I would guess that it was either Gregory Bateson or Abraham Maslow. They were certainly the two individuals who popularized the term in the fields of anthropology, psychology, and linguistics from which it was then adopted in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Brief Psychotherapy, Solution Focus Therapy, and Neuro-Semantics.

What does meta mean? Sometimes after a glass of wine I will playfully answer, “I don’t know, it’s over my head!” Or, “I don’t know, it’s above me!” Or, possibly, “I’m not sure that I’m up to defining it yet.”

But if you catch me during the day, I’ll say that the term from Greek and literally means “above, beyond, about, over.” When we put one experience at a meta-level to another and create a meta-relationship, the meta experience is above and beyond the referent experience: meta-communicating is communicating about our communications, meta-thinking is thinking about our thinking, meta-feeling is feeling about our feelings, a meta-analysis is an analysis regarding an analysis.

Because of this, we can use the term meta to refer to one thing at a higher level to another thing. Metaphysics refers to the physics that are beyond the field of physics. So a meta-state refers to a higher level state, a state that is above and beyond the first state.

Now in NLP, there is a point of confusion about this. I think Richard Bandler initiated it and that various people have picked it up. It is the erroneous idea that meta means to dissociation. Have you heard of that one? Of course, that’s pure non-sense. When you access fear about your fear, does that dissociate you from fear? Does that decrease your fear? Of course not! When you access an intense state of love of curiosity, does that reduce the curiosity or dissociate you? Of course not!

Yes we can access a state of “just observing” our love or fear or any other emotion, and then “just observe” that observing and access a gestalt experience of being less and less emotional and more and more objective. Yet even that is not “dissociation.” That term, in psychiatry refers to an unhealthy state trigger by trauma plus lack of ego-strength, and occurs as a defensive maneuver that we use to avoid representing and feeling ourselves fully in our bodies. That’s why I have argued for years that we ought to abandon the use of a psychiatric term (“dissociation”) for a resourceful state like witnessing or observing another state.

The bottom line is that meta does not refer to dissociation. And the process of stepping back from our immediate experience to rise up in our minds and our emotions to set a higher frame about it does not create dissociation. Moving to a meta-position is what Bateson called the meta-function and t his refers to creating additional thoughts-and-feelings about previous thoughts-and-feelings whether those “thoughts-and-feelings” were beliefs, decisions, values, intentions, understandings, memories, imaginations, and so on. In the meta-function we layer, level upon level, additional thoughts-and-feelings about something.

Actually, there’s no way to not do that. That’s because it is simply the way our kind of human consciousness works. We call this special kind of awareness, self-reflexive consciousness which means that we have the ability to step back, in our mind, and notice and reflect on ourselves and on the products that we create as well as the processes that we use in such creations. Now some of the higher intelligent animals can do the same, at least a level or two. Yet that’s it. Bateson’s work with the dolphins indicated two or possibly three meta-levels.

Yet with us humans this stepping back to reflect upon ourselves, this “going meta” to the products and processes of our consciousness, this meta-stating of our experiences is an infinite process. It never ends. Whatever we think, whatever we feel, we can always step back to think about it, feel about it. Korzybski described this as “an infinite regress.” He took that from the philosophers who for centuries that recognized this quality about human consciousness. In Neuro-Semantics, however, we call this the infinite progress. Why? Because it is this meta-process that allows us to continually progress. Practically, this means that there is always another step; that we are never stuck!

So given that we are forever rising up in our minds to create thoughts and feelings about thoughts and feelings, what does this moving up the meta-levels do? It creates the layers of our thinking or our meta-thoughts. And meta-thoughts are more “solid” and stable than the flow of thoughts-and-feelings through our minds. They are the kind of thoughts that we “hold in mind” and carry with us as our basic frameworks of understanding. We call these meta-thoughts by various terms: beliefs, understandings, knowledge, intentions, memories, imaginations, decisions, etc. In Meta-States we now have over 70 of these levels and using these we have meta-questions and the Matrix of our frames.

Going meta we draw conclusions, create abstract ideas called concepts, principles, premises, etc. and these become the meanings that govern how we read and interpret things. It is in going meta and “holding in mind” our frames (belief frames, value frames, understanding frames, etc.) that we generate the meanings and meaningfulness of our lives. And as we repeat these, the repetition transforms them into our habitual ways of perceiving and experiencing the world. This activates the part of our brain that translates our meanings into our physiology and hence performances.

Given that we are born without “instincts” and have to make sense of the world through the use of our self-reflective mind, we are inevitably meaning-makers. And it is this that makes the meta-levels of beliefs, values, intentions, etc. so important. We inevitably live in and from the meta-levels of our mind. This explains why the quality of our lives directly reflects the quality of our beliefs, understandings, intentions, decisions, identity, etc. It explains why our “problems” are primarily problems with our frames and why the solution involves recognizing the constructs we’ve built and which are limiting, sabotaging, and sometimes even toxic.

So, how’s your meta-life? How competent are you in rising up to make a meta-move that can frame and reframe your inner game so that you can enhance your outer game? In a word, that’s what Neuro-Semantics is all about and why the term meta lies at the heart and soul of what we do. Ready to clear out meta-muddles and master your meta-powers? Then stay tuned for the series of Meta Reflections.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #2

THE FUNCTION OF THE

META-JUNCTION

In the first Meta Reflection I defined meta, addressed the myth that it refers to dissociation, and briefly mentioned the meta-function, and our unique kind of consciousness. With that in mind, the key to understanding your mind and working with self-reflexive conscious is recognizing what the role of the meta-function and how to use it for taking charge of our brains in serve of our self-actualization.

Now the meta-function is one of the key concepts that Gregory Bateson introduced as he went about modeling various anthropological, sociological, and personal expertise. In modeling the complexity of communication, Bateson used meta to designate “about” and then presented what a hierarchic series of messages would look like.

“Our hierarchic series will then consist of message, meta-message, meta-meta-message, and so on.” (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 248)

He used this to model change, change-of-change, first level change, second order change, etc. He used it to make explicit the structure of schizophrenia. Regarding the complexities of communication, he wrote that

“. . . by noting that messages may be about (or ‘meta’ to) the relationship between messages of different levels. The smell of the experimental harness may tell the dog that the buzzer will mean meat powder. We will then say that the message of the harness is meta to the message of the buzzer. But in human relations another sort of complexity may be generated, e.g., messages may be emitted forbidding the subject to make the meta connection. . . . The hierarchy of message and contexts thus becomes a complex branching structure.” (248)

He wrote this in the context of working out his Levels of Learning model. In this he was looking at the meta connection. That is, the connection between the different levels. He was looking for how one message modifies another message. He called this the meta-relationship and spoke about the “infinite regress of such relations.” (250)

All of that is pretty abstract, so let me illustrate. Let’s start with a primary experience of your bodily energy, health, and fitness. What do you think about fitness? What immediately comes to mind when you consider exercise? What do you feel? Whatever your answer, your thoughts-and-feelings about health, fitness, and exercise set your personal mental and emotional frames.

Suppose your first thought is, “I know I should, but it’s a lot of trouble to go to a gym, it takes a lot of time, plus it costs money that I could invest in other things.” And suppose that the emotional feel of it is a sigh indicating a state of feeling bothered by it all. Then with that state, you have reflexively set an emotional frame of being bothered with a dash of “should-ing.”

And just about the time you identify that this is your state about the state of exercising, you have yet another thought in the back of your mind about it, “When I have more time and money, I’ll d it.” Ah, yes, procrastination with good intentions about the bothered-should-ing state about exercising. That should reduce some of the negative energies and create a sense of relief from the first negative meta-stating as it lets you off the hook a bit.

But then your reflexivity kicks in again! “Am I just fooling myself or what? I don’t have the energy or vitality I once had; I really should exercise. I just wish it wasn’t such a bother.” Now you’ve meta-stated or framed yourself with some reality testing, some realistic questioning and some wishing. So this sets the next level of your mental-emotional attitude to this frame of mind.

In each of these moves, and the others that will arise, jumping a level and layering more thoughts-and-feelings creates the relationship of one state upon another. This is the meta-function of your reflexivity. Your meta-jump functions as setting a frame. It functions as modifying and modulating what is embedded within it. Each time you jump another level, you reflexively apply understandings and meanings to what you are experiencing. This makes your consciousness more complex, more layered. In the Meta-States Model, I have called this meta-stating. In Frame Games (Winning the Inner Game) I have called this framing, setting a frame, and creating your inner game. These are but different ways of talking about the meta-function.

Here I have described each of these in a linear way, as if we have one thought, then another, and so on, but your mind and mine is much more dynamic than that. What seems to happen in actuality is that our thoughts-and-emotions go round and round simultaneously and almost instantaneously. In the meta-function you circle an experience like health and fitness as if each iteration of your reflexivity was a planet circling a sun or electronics circling an atom.

Consciousness is that dynamic. No wonder the resultant state is an energy field, an energy field that creates a magnetic pull for whatever you have created. The primary state included and transcended by the circling thoughts now interact so that it invests various energies into it. If you have taken the APG Meta-States training, then you have been introduced (at least briefly) to the 16 interfaces of state-upon-state. These speak about the junctions of the meta-functions, how various states interface with other states.

Another metaphor that I’ve been using recently is of an onion. When you meta-state using your reflexivity power, you put layer upon layer of meaning. You create a Meaning Onion. Sometimes this is great, sometimes it is not. Sometimes it creates genius, expertise, and excellence. Sometimes it creates dragons, demons, gremlins, pathology, and disease. In either case, if you want to get to the core of your experience, you have to unpeel the layers. In The Ultimate Self-Actualization Workshop you will experience an process for this kind of unpeeling. Then you can get to the core of an experience.

As a therapist, getting to the core of a person’s meaning onion allows you to see how the client has misused his or her reflexivity to turn their energies against self. As a coach or modeler, getting to the core of meaning empowers one to see the structure and processes of meta-stating genius and enables you to replicate it or enhance it with even more resources.

In either case, you are working with the meta-function of the relationship of one state upon another. This is the vertical structure of self-reflexive consciousness that creates a whole matrix of frames about things. And when you know that, you have a process for quickly getting to the heart of things where you can unleash new possibilities.

December 1, 2006

NEURO-SEMANTIC NLP

This year’s NLP Conference this year in London was a tremendous success with 450 people attending the two-day event. Not only is that one of the few remaining NLP Conferences, it is certainly the largest. And it is primarily due to the faith and vision of one person, Jo Hogg. Here’s a head’s up for next year’s conference, it will be at Regis College again, November 25-27 2007.

This year I presented an introduction to the Wealth Creation modeling and training of Neuro-Semantics; next year I will present some facet of the Self-Actualization model on Unleashing Potentials.

While there this year, I had a dozen or so people come to the presentation, not so much for the content of Wealth Creation, but because they wanted to know more about Neuro-Semantics. The same thing happened in Avignon in southern France this past weekend, a couple people there told me about the same thing verbatim. They had read books and/or articles on the website and wanted to know more about Neuro-Semantics as a model and field.

Yet one person who I spoke with in London had a very unique way of describing his interest. He said that hewas interested in “Neuro-Semantic NLP.” “I’ve read the Matrix model and Mind-Lines and I’m just really fascinated by what you’re doing with Neuro-Semantic NLP.” I like that. Prior to that it was always Neuro-Semantics and NLP or Neuro-Semantics taking NLP to a new level. This was new, “Neuro-Semantic NLP.”

That evening I thought about it a lot and the next day I asked him what “Neuro-Semantic NLP” meant to him. “Well, it’s a new kind of NLP. What you’re doing with the idea of frames, levels of frames, multiple-levels of frames and how these dynamic frames are the logical levels and the higher states, it not only takes NLP to new places, but it gives NLP a whole new quality— you are dealing with meaning directly without getting it mixed up religion.”

Since that conversation, I’ve thought a lot about what he said. “Neuro-Semantic NLP” certainly acknowledges the dominate source of Neuro-Semantics, namely NLP. “Neuro-Semantic NLP” also says that what we are doing in Neuro-Semantics is giving NLP a new quality and focus, one focusing on our neuro-semantic nature. As a class of life that incorporates meaning neurologically in our mind-body system, meaning is not just a phenomenon of language and concepts, it is a holistic embodied experience. We know things in our body, in muscle-memory, and we use all of our biological senses and processing levels to generate meaning.

In London, I ran the Mind-to-Muscle pattern and talked about embodying meaning and several individuals who had very moving experiences with it, especially one sports coach, were thrilled about the power of closing the knowing-doing gap and taking what’s conceptual and installing it as procedural knowing in the body. He commented “this puts the K back in NLP” referring to K for kinesthetics. I think I’ll be making the comment from now on,

“This is Neuro-Semantic NLP. We make it meaningful from the conceptual level all the way down to the kinesthetic level.”

For years, we Neuro-Semanticists have been saying, “This is coaching the body to feel an idea. It is enabling you to know in your body what you know and even believe in your mind.”

At the London conference I noticed that some of the directions that different branches of NLP are going really differs from our direction. Some are focusing on more esoteric and mystic things; some are focusing on the enogram and using that model over the Meta- Programs, others talk about “pure” NLP as if its not allowed to develop and evolve.

Then there is Neuro-Semantic NLP.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #3

December 11

META-STATING

META-MUDDLES

— What is the heart-pulse of the Meta-States Model?

— Why is that so important?

The heart-pulse of the Meta-States Model deals with how your self-reflexive consciousness works and how you can work it to your health and effectiveness. It is about how you constantly, inevitably, and forever reflect back onto yourself. It is about how you reflect back onto yourself with more thoughts, emotions, and physiology. It is about how you apply one state to another of your states. Yes, I know. Stating it in that way doesn’t sound very sexy. Stating it in that way, in fact, sounds boring. But I promise you that it is not.

Reflexivity is the most peculiar feature of human consciousness and it is the very essence of our consciousness that causes it to differ from that of every other creature on this planet. That’s because when you reflect back, you move to a position above what you just thought or felt and as such, this means you have just stepped up to a meta-position. Now you are no longer in reference to the world, you are in reference to your state. You are in reference to your thoughts, to your beliefs, to your understandings, to your memories, to your imaginations, and so on. You have turned inward. And because of this, whatever you think and feel at this higher or meta-level sets a frame about whatever is below it.

Ah, and with that, the magic begins. With that, you classify the lower. You catagorize the lower, you embed the lower thoughts and feelings inside of a higher frame that defines the lower, that positions the lower, that determines what you will feel about the lower and how you will respond. And with that you enter into the magical land of framing and reframing.

An example. Say you have an experience wherein you worry about someone or something. You know that one don’t you? Recall a time when you worked up a good case of worrying. Shouldn’t be too hard to do. Most of us are pretty skilled at worrying, especially about things that never happen.

Now to create a meta-muddle out of worry. To do that, worry about your worrying! That’s right, worry that your worrying is irrational and that maybe you’re losing your mind or perspective, and that if this continues you’ll create an ulcer. Now fear that this may happen. Now dread it. Now hate that this is happening to you. How’s that for a sick, morbid, and very, very un-useful meta-state which is a real meta-muddle!

So far you have categorized your worry in the class of Worry (Worrisome things). Then you classified your worry-of-your-worry in the class of Dreadful Things. Then you put all of that inside of the frame of Things to Hate. Do that and you will create some black magic. You will create a complex meta-state that will undermine your health, peace of mind, and effectiveness. And with it you just might send enough messages to your nervous system to actually create an ulcer.

But what if you want to create some white magic? Okay, let’s start with worry again. Got it? Now step back and bring a state of Witnessing to the worry so that you categorize worry in the class of Things to Observe and Witness. How’s that? Now given that most worry is silly and un-useful and an unrealistic exaggeration, bring Exaggeration to the Witnessed-Worry. Exaggerate it to the most extreme situation that you can. Doing that you categorize witnessed-worry in the class of Humor. How’s that?

This describes how frames work, how meta-stating works, how reflexivity works. And it is magical. Yet, you ask, How can I say that? What does that mean?

It is “magical” in the sense that you can put almost anything in any category that you want — no matter how unsane, insane, crazy, irrational, stupid, idiotic, etc. that it may be. Consider fanatics who take a fundamentalistic attitude to whatever they believe in. They are great examples of this. A fanatic fundamentalist is someone who forgets, or doesn’t know, that “the map is not the territory” and so a fundamentalist actually thinks that his or her belief is true. So above the meta-state of a belief (a validity thought about a first thought), they believe in their beliefs. And they believe in their belief of their beliefs. All of this, of course, closes them to new or different information. It doesn’t matter if the person is a Christian fundamentalist, a Muslim fundamentalist, a Science fundamentalist, etc. The structure is the same.

So a fanatic fundamentalist might believe that they way to honor God is to kill people. They have to kill the abortion doctor who kills babies to show him or her that they are not supposed to kill. Right! The Muslim extremist has to kill innocent women and children as the 19 did on 9/11 because they are infidels and that will teach them to believe correctly. Right! The liberal fundamentalist wants free speech except where a Christian, Jew, or Moslem believer wants to speak up at school or have a rally on a state-supported university. Right.

The problem with these examples is not that these people have beliefs. Having beliefs is fine. We all do. The problem is that they believe-in-their-beliefs which leads them to assume that they cannot be wrong, cannot be corrected, and cannot have an open explorative conversation. In their meta-muddle, they cannot simply believe. Having over-loaded their beliefs with so much meaning and significance, even a question about their belief triggers them to feel attacked and so they get defensive about ideas in their heads or the heads of others.

The process of meta-stating involves bringing thoughts-and-feelings to an experience, to a state, and that creates categories of the mind —classifications, frames, contexts, meaning structures, etc. And when people do this without awareness that they are not even dealing with the world, just their own layers and levels of thinking-and-feeling —they confuse their internal mappings with the territory. Then they think their meta-thoughts and meta-feelings indicate what’s real. And when they get to that point, they are very deep in meta-muddle.

So what is the solution? First and foremost is to become aware of this. What categories have you created as you have meta-stated some primary experience that has become semantically loaded in a way that creates limitations and problems? Second, it is to dis-identify with the map (or belief). You are more than what you believe. Your beliefs are just human maps trying to map out something. The problem is never you as a person, the problem is always your frames. So stop identifying yourself with your frames and categories — dis-identify yourself and that will begin to give you some perspective.

Now most meta-muddles build up and get created in lightning quick speed. Really. In a nano-second you jump logical levels and bring various thoughts-and-feelings to your experiences (to your primary states or to some level of a meta-state). And just as soon as you do, the next thought —there you go again. Again, this is your reflexivity at work! And if you can begin to just observe it, you will be able to catch the process without judging and evaluating. And with that, you begin to develop an incredible skill that few humans have, a meta-skill that will enable you to unleash potentials like no other skill. Why? Well, that will be in the next Meta Reflection. See you then.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #4

Dec. 18

THE META-PERSPECTIVE

If you want to really see the power of a meta-move, consider the ability to step back from yourself. Step back from your thoughts, your emotions, your beliefs, your ego, your ego-investments, your history, your future, from all of your internal movies, fears, hopes, and dreams. When you do this, you are using and experiencing your own reflexivity. And while we may not understand all of the mechanisms involved in this, there is something amazing. Just asking you to do it facilitates it and suddenly, magically, wonderfully, you step back and begin thinking-feeling-experiencing-believing, etc. about it.

Stepping back from ourselves is reflexivity at work. And it is the very quality within our unique human kind of consciousness that reveals such a wonder within us. We can respond to our own responses! We can, as it were, step back from ourselves, or rise above what we have just created and think-and-feel about that. Philosophers have called this the infinite regress. No matter how far back you step, you can always step back yet another time. And then another. There’s no end to it. Noting this in Science and Sanity, Korzybski described it as part of the structure of multi-ordinality. And in Neuro-Semantics I have been describing this infinite regress as the infinite progress.

Infinite progress means that no matter what meta-muddles you or another create, you are never more stuck than your framing. It means that there is always yet another step you can make out of the muddle! Mark that down. No matter how deep your meta-muddles, there’s always the next step. You can always step up and gain a broader and more expansive perspective. And when you know that, when that is in your muscles as the knowing of muscle memory, then you will lose all fear of yourself and your insides. You will launch a whole new style of self-awareness and self-discovery so it becomes a truly exciting adventure.

Over the years, I’ve tracked with a person ten jumps, fifteen, even twenty as I explored with someone their “dragons,” their layers and layers of unresourceful states. I do that first to track, to understand the meta-muddles. And yet, no matter how dysfunctional, how toxic, how morbid, a simple meta-question or two and they can step out of the whole mess.

“So do you like all of that? Is that the way you want to live your life?”

“How empowering is all of that? Would you like to continue living that way for another five years?”

Simple questions, yet suddenly, they step back from it all, take a good look at it, view it through the lens of ecology, the frames of empowerment, the belief about life’s purpose, etc. and suddenly the pull of the meta-muddle loses all of its attraction. Suddenly the person is out in the clear with a larger meta-perspective.

The important thing about going meta to yourself and your experience is that you make that meta-move with acceptance and appreciation. It must be done without judgement. If you do it with judgment, then you bring threat and danger inside and that will result in self-abuse. Then, your “conscious mind” will not serve you well. Then, you might even make the unfortunate mistake of concluding that the problem is your “conscious mind.” Many in NLP have made that mistake, including the two co-developers.

Yet the conscious mind is not the problem. The problem is only that you have that misused your reflexivity, your infinite progress, and your power to meta-state. You have thereby made your conscious mind a problem. But you don’t have to. To avoid that and to fully access the power of your conscious mind, all you have to do is bring love, compassion, wonder, curiosity, appreciation, and such like to the products of your thinking-and-feeling. Then making the meta-move takes you to a whole new level of consciousness. Do that and you will begin to understand and feel how transcendence is built into us.

And we all feel it. People of all cultures, times, and places have known and experienced it and have tried to come up with an explanation for it —from magic, to religion, to aliens, past lives, parallel universes, etc. For me, I prefer to think about it more simply, as simply a psychological mechanism within our multi-layered brain. When Ken Wilbur found it, he recognized it as the holon structure that reflects our holographic brain (Karl Pribram) and so popularized the language of “transcending and including.” That is, when we meta-state ourselves with love, appreciation, wonder, etc., we transcend whatever state we’re in and move to a higher state, a state about the first one which now becomes our basic state. As we do that, we also simultaneously include the base state inside of the higher state.

Transcend and include. In transcending we rise up, access new resources of thought and emotion, and set those as our frame about the lower. In including we embed what was a problem inside of a solution. And because with each move, with each level of meta-stating, we keep transcending and including, this gives us the feel of something higher, something more, something yet to reach for, and because it is infinite – unending, the sense of transcendence inside of us feels like something divine, something spiritual. No wonder we all have a touch of the divine, of the sacred, of a higher intelligence.

And no wonder the meta-skill itself is such an incredible skill and experience. And when you develop it so that it is within your control, your meta-skills will powerfully enable you to unleash your potentials. The meta-perspective that evolves from this will enable you to keep growing long, long after childhood. So while every animal grows during childhood, we humans have the ability to keep growing in our mind, our emotions, our relationships, our hopes, our creativity, our learning — throughout all of our life.

Our meta-perspective enables us to see the larger picture of things literally, symbolically, with regard to time, with regard to consequences, with regard to morals, etc. The meta-perspective also empowers us to stay calm and cool under pressure. It enables us to keep our head when circumstances, events, environments, immediate stimulate would distract us or hook us.

The meta-perspective also puts you at Choice Point, the point were you can truly choose the direction and quality of your life. Have you been there? Have you stepped up to that place? This is the place where you become self-directed and the director of your experience. Here you bring in the authority from outside so that you can author the script that you’ll play your life by. So did you know that there are so many benefits in accessing a meta-perspective? Well, now that you do, may you transcend and include your states with the very highest and best resources in your own adventure of self-discovery!

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #5

Dec. 25

WHAT THE OLD NLP GUARD

DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT META-STATING

If you’ve been following these Reflections on Meta here on Neurons, then you already know several things that “the old guard” of NLP (Richard Bandler, John Grinder, Steve Andreas, etc.) doesn’t. In writing this I don’t mean to pick on them, just to highlight where they are stuck and explain why they are now arguing for “pure NLP,” and discounting new developments and evolutions of the model. While I find that sad, I guess it is inevitable since it seems to happen with every organization and movement. I had assumed that perhaps it would be different in a field like NLP that’s supposed to recognize the difference between map and territory and that’s supposed to be a discipline of creativity.

Anyway, Steve, as John Grinder did before him, has now written a book in his attempt to discount, discredit, and explain away the “logical levels” within the Meta-States Model. Grinder did the same in his book on whispering in the wind (or was that whistling in the wind?) questioning “the proliferation of meta-states.” I’ve written several reviews about that which you can find on the Neuro-Semantics website. More recently Steve Andreas, less elegantly has done the same. And again, I have written two articles that you can find on the website. Andreas books are on “category and scope” which he doesn’t know involve the very processes within Meta-States (See “Blind Elephant’s Confusion #1 and #2).

Now, given that any and every meta response to yourself, to your thoughts, emotions, experiences, memories, imagination, and a hundred other things is a meta-state, and that if you don’t take charge of the process, you’ll create meta-muddles, I will here contrast Neuro-Semantic NLP from the old classic NLP of those individuals who haven’t come into the twenty-first century.

So what’s the difference? The difference lies in the confusion and non-sense of the idea of Sub-Modalities. Now if you are new to NLP, sub-modalities is the term used to describe the quality and the properties of our mental movies— the cinematic features that we use to code our movies. For example, in the visual system, we can edit our movies in a wide variety of ways: close or far, bright or dim, panoramic or narrow, snapshot or movie, are some of the sub-modalities. In the auditory or sound system, we can do the same: close or far, loud or quiet, coming from one side or the other or panoramic, etc.

These are the cinematic features of our representations. They are not sub to the visual or auditory modality. Want proof? Okay, good. Here we go. Think about your fifth or sixth grade when you were in elementary school. Go back there and imagine it again. Got it? Good. Now, is your picture of your childhood school days in color or in black-and-white? Is there any sound in that school? How big or small is your picture?

Do you not have to step back from the picture (yes, go meta) in order to answer these questions? Do you not have to move your head or body back so that you can get some perspective to notice the cinematic features? Ah, yes, you have to go meta to notice sub-modalities! Well, try this. Make the picture bigger (or smaller), make it brighter (or dimmer), put in some circus music in it, etc. Didn’t you also have to step back, and go meta, to shift or change the sub-modalities?

How large is your picture? What if you doubled it? What if you shrunk it to half-size? With each cinematic question, you are invited into a higher frame of mind about your representations. These questions invite you into the editorial level of your thinking and feeling so that you can then make changes to the cinematic features. It’s as if you are in the creation room of a movie editor and you have all the tools at your disposal to alter the film. You can delete all of the noise and irritating sounds. You can put into the movie the sound track of a great piece of music. You can put a sub-script on the movie to explain things.

At this editorial level to your movies, these cinematic features are not sub to the movie. They are the editorial features that you can alter and manipulate at will. From this higher position you can do all kinds of things to your pictures, sounds, and sensations. That’s why you can step back from any mental representation and alter it with a change of these qualities.

Also, what you are essentially doing when you do these cinematic alterations is meta-stating. Think about the cinematic distinction of making an image bigger or smaller. To make it bigger you are zooming in so that one facet of the picture totally fills the screen of your mind. Zoom in on the person’s face who is criticizing you. Zoom in further. Further! Zoom in until every tiny pore is the size of a baseball so the face looks poc-marked.

Dif you do that? If so, then you have just meta-stated a primary experience (an image of a face) with the conceptual idea (a meta-state) of “zooming in” so that it telescopes the skin of the face with “big, bigger, bigger yet.” You have brought the state, frame, category, and classification of “bigger” and applied it to a previous thought (image) of a face. Congratulations on some elegant meta-stating!

But don’t tell the old guard. Don’t tell Steve Andreas. Don’t let John Grinder know. You’ll just get shot down and insulted. Is it that they don’t know that every sub-modality shift is a meta-state process? Can they really not know that? Or is it that they don’t want to know that? Their linear reasoning goes like this, “A sub-modality is a ‘finer’ distinction in the rep. system, therefore if it is ‘finer’ it is smaller, and if it is smaller it is sub to the rep. system.”

While I don’t know the answer to that, I do know that Steve Andreas thinks that because bigger /smaller are members of the class of Visuals, they are “smaller” to the class and therefore a “scope.” To him, a scope is different from a category. And because of that, it has to be sub, hence sub-modality. He can’t even imagine meta-stating with something small or tiny and setting that as a new category as you just did.

“I did? When did I do such a thing?” Just a moment ago when I invited you to start with the representation of a face and to zoom in on the face until it fills the entire screen in your mind, then zoom in again until a one inch area fills the screen. Doing that is meta-stating the idea of “big” (make it bigger, and bigger yet). Okay, do the opposite, zoom out of the face and see the person’s entire body, zoom out to see the person in a house, in a city, in a country, zoom all the way out to see the planet the person is on, then the solar system. Good. You just brought “small” (make it smaller) and applied it to the base representation.

Now what Steve Andreas really doesn’t know or understand is that the size or scope of something does not absolutely, and for all time, lock it into that category. Bright is a small unit in the visual category and is on a continuum with Dim on the other side. Yet though “smaller” to visual, we can meta-state bright or dim and bring it to a visual representation so that the visual representation is now a member of the class of bright or dim.

“Impossible! Couldn’t happen!” One of the old guard says. Okay, then consider the optimist, the over-optimistic person who sees everything around him and into the future as bright. Hasn’t he put all visual representations into the category of bright? Consider the die-in-the-wool pessimist who knows that it is all futile, meaningless, that she is ineffective and helpless, and so has dimmed all pictures and representations of her world and her future. Hasn’t she put all visual representations into the category of dim even dark?

If you don’t know about meta-stating, about making the meta-move and that you can meta-state any piece of “thought” or “emotion” with any other, then you don’t know about our human psycho-logics and how we set frame upon frame of meta-levels to create our mental maps about reality. Sure it is not logical. And that’s the whole point. It is psycho-logical.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #6

January 2007

META-STATING

NEW PSYCHO-LOGICS

FOR YOUR NEW YEAR

With the arrival of the new year our thoughts naturally turn to what the new year holds for us and what we’d like to do or accomplish in it. Given that, how can you use the meta response, meta-perspective, and meta-function for making 2007 a fabulous year? Is there a way? If there is, how can you take charge of your psycho-logics so that your own meta-stating truly enriches and empowers you in the new year?

I ended the last Meta Reflection mentioning our “psycho-logics.” This key concept in Neuro-Semantics refers to the “logic” that you create and which makes you and your life experience psycho-logical. By putting a hyphen within the word psychology, Korzbyski introduced this as a way to distinguish logics from psycho-logics. The first deals with the kind of logic (reasoning, understanding) that maps the external world. The second addresses the kind of logic that maps our internal world.

So what are our psycho-logics? How are we psycho-logical? We are because we are so free on the inside to set any state, thought, feeling, memory, imagination, decision, etc. as the frame for our states and experiences. I’m of course speaking again about the meta-stating process itself. Whenever we bring one mental state, emotional state, even physiological state to another, we thereby create a particular kind of logic to our own experience.

For example,

What is your particular logic about the new year?

What is your particular logic about new year’s resolutions?

What’s your particular logic about setting goals, raising your expectations, dreaming big, and inventing audacious visions?

To find out simply reflect about what do you think and feel about these ideas. What do you think and feel about the idea of a new year? This means that your thoughts-and-feelings about (i.e. your meta-state frame) any of these ideas functions as the category and classification. And because it does, its makes up your inner “logic.” Your psycho-logics. If you think, “I don’t like goals setting, it just sets me up for disappointment” then you are meta-stating yourself with “anticipated disappointment tinged with dislike” and so that becomes your frame-of-mind about it. It becomes the “logic” (your reasoning and meaning-making) about it.

What do you think about charting your future with some fantastic new goals?

What do you think about yourself as someone who acts on and makes your goals real?

What do you think and feel about the goals you sat last year?

This means that you have been proliferating meta-states all over the place (which answers John Grinder’s question about that! Hope you’re reading, John). And, depending whether your thoughts-and-feelings about these things are positive and supportive or negative and limiting— so are your frames, beliefs, decisions, attitudes, and state of mind. And that’s the thing about the meta-levels. When you go meta, rise up and set some thought, feeling, belief, category, decision, etc. at a higher level— it becomes your frame as in frame-of-mind or frame-of-meaning. In other words, your attitude.

Have you ever wondered how you create holistic “attitudes” that set your mind, body, habits, lifestyle, etc. in a certain way? The answer is simple: You meta-state those attitudes into existence. The stuff out of which you do that is the same stuff that make up all meta-levels: thoughts, feelings, and physiology.

This gives us the Neuro-Semantic definition of an attitude, namely, the composite of your multiple frames of mind about something. And knowing that, you now probably know how you can de-commission an old attitude and build up a new attitude. This is what lies at the heart of the pattern in Living Genius, Super-Charging Your Attitude.

So back to the new year —what’s your attitude? What’s the psycho-logics of your attitude? What would you like it to be? What attitude would be truly a new frame of mind for you that would support you in unleashing more of your potentials this year? In fact, what if you spent 2007 focusing more on setting attitude goals than you did on the traditional goals of more time at the gym, more time reading, more time with your loved ones, etc.?

You undoubtedly already know the reason. To win at the outer game of health, fitness, job, relationships, etc. you first have to win the inner game. And that’s what attitude is all about, isn’t it? Win at your attitude, super-charge your attitude, custom design the kind of attitude that you want to empower you through the challenges before you, and as you win the inner game, the outer game becomes a cinch. (This, by the way, is the theme of the book, Winning the Inner Game.)

That leads to some very different questions as you begin the new year—

What inner game am I not winning?

What inner game do I need to win in order to really succeed outwardly in the external game?

What frame of mind do you have about effort, discipline, patience, long-term commitment, mastery, problems, and the other facets that make up character and a winning personality?

There’s no escape from your own psycho-logics. Everywhere you go, everything you say, every emotion you experience is a result of your inner psycho-logics. Whatever reasoning, reasons, ideas, states, thoughts, feelings, etc. that you bring to your states sets the next level of logics for your mind and your emotions. The real question is this: What is the quality of your psycho-logics? And that’s critical because the quality of your psycho-logics is the quality of your life. Your life, in fact, can be no better than the quality of the frames that you set through your meta-stating.

As we all begin a new year, realizing more fully than ever before that you are entirely psycho-logical, do you like your psycho-logics? Do your psycho-logics enhance and empower you? If not, are you ready to engage a Neuro-Semanticist for updating and enriching your psycho-logics? We have lots of coaches and trainers who can do precisely that.

So, I raise a toast to you as you begin your new year —

Here’s to the most ecological and robust psycho-logics for you so that you can live the life that fulfills your inner dreams and passions!

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #7

January 8 2007

HOW HIGH CAN YOU GO?

CAN YOU GO DEEPLY HIGH?

Within the word meta is the height metaphor that implies going up, going higher, ascending, and transcending. That’s what gave me the idea originally of creating a consistent diagram of meta-relationships as higher and higher states that embed the lower states. I say “consistent” because prior to that not a single person in the field of NLP did so consistently. At the time (and still today for that matter) there was lots of mixing and confusing the depth and height metaphors.

Depth and height metaphors— let me say a bit about these. Knowing about them and their history helps to understand the meta-domain and the Meta-States Model.

The depth metaphor is the oldest metaphor in psychology. Sigmund Freud even called his modern invention of psychoanalysis “Depth Psychology.” Originally Freud wanted to grow up to become an archeologist. That was his first love—history, and especially Greek and Roman history, hence all of his use of mythologies to explain human experiences. So, as a frustrated archeologist, he decided to delve into the depths of human consciousness, to go deep down into the “primary processes” of the Id, and to unearth the instincts of sex, aggression, greed, and death. He delved into the depths of the unconscious latent meanings of dreams in his classic The Interpretation of Dreams (1905) that launched psychoanalysis as “the second force” in psychology (Behaviorism or Learning Theory being the first force and the Human Potential Movement the third).

So the idea of going down, which was already a predominant way of talking about the “deep” things within us (lots biblical passages in Proverbs uses it), became even more so as it was popularized by psychoanalysis. It’s no surprise then that most of us have grown up with the depth metaphor and use it to speak about our psychological forces. Yet the height metaphor is also one that we naturally use. We speak about our highest values and beliefs, developing our skills to a new and higher level, getting over things blocking and interfering our growth, and transcending to new heights.

This led Viktor Frankl to designate his psychology, “Height Psychology.” Prior to his imprisonment, Frankl had actually been trained in psychoanalysis and had published a paper in the Journal of Psychoanalysis. But in the concentration camp he found himself thinking more about meaning and purpose, about spirit and faith than about the dark forces of the id. From that he created Logotherapy, the first Height Psychology (Neuro-Semantics being perhaps the second).

The biggest example of confusing the depth and height metaphors to model human experience is in Connaire Andreas’ Core Transformation. There she uses the word “meta” and asks a powerful meta-question at the heart of the process. Yet she pictured it as going down deep to the “core” of things. The “core” process is actually a meta-stating of intention. “What do you want?” “And when you get that fully and completely in just the way you want it, what do you want that’s even more important than that?”

When I first re-modeled that using the Meta-States Model, I presented it in Houston Texas in a Master Practitioner training. As I did, I diagramed it so that with each higher state I put it above the previous one, and the next above that until we got to the top where we would access the highest and most transcendental state of all. Several people were there who had just learned Core Transformation and who with each new “core” state had, in their minds, gone down deeper and deeper. They later described the difference between the two metaphors. They said that the depth metaphor made them feel increasingly claustrophobic, even trapped into a smaller and tinier space, things seemed darker the further down they went. But the height metaphor took them up to a sense of greater expansiveness. It opened up more for them and created a sense of freedom.

That’s the funny thing about metaphors. Metaphors come with entailments. Mark Johnson wrote about this in Metaphors We Live By (1980) and then again with George Lakoff in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987). Entailments refer to the unspecified implications that come along with the metaphor. Often it is one of a metaphor’s entailment that prevents us from taking a metaphor very far and have to abandon it at a certain point.

When I decided to use the term meta in mapping out the meta-levels of states, I decided to do so consistently in the diagraming and formatting. So in speaking about one state above and beyond another state, all of the diagrams show the rising up above one state, transcending it, and then including the former inside of the higher state. This enables us to diagram the layering of thoughts-and-feelings, the evolving embedding structure of the systemic complexity of our mental-and-emotional states and our own reflexive feedback loop on the inside. That is, how you feedback to yourself more thoughts, more feelings, more memories, more anticipations, etc. whenever you reach one conclusion.

Yet in Meta-States, we do not only use the height metaphor. We also use the depth metaphor. We use it to describe the feed forward loop. That’s because have we have transcended a state and included it in a higher frame, we then feed that forward into the lower state and into our bodies. Feedback is information into our system, feed forward is the transformation of that information into energy which shows up as emotions, feelings, sensations, actions, speech and all of our external responses.

So the full loop of information in as feedback and energy out as feed forward maps the dynamic complexity of our mind-body system. Now we can follow the processes through the system. Now we can intervene in that system anywhere along the communication–energy loop.

This also means that we go up with information from the world and back to ourselves to create meaning, meaning as states and frames (the inner game). We then go down with energy to actualize that in performing the outer game. We go higher deeply so that we can feel the new meanings (Mind-to-Muscle) as deeply higher. All this is because of coalescing. Ah, coalescing— another mechanism that the Meta-States model introduced, and the subject for the next Reflection. Meanwhile, here’s to your powers of meta— may you always take the high road to self-actualization!

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #8

January 15 2007

MAY ALL YOUR META-STATES

COALESCE

At a certain level, meta and meta-states is all about coalescing.

“Did you say coalescing? What in the world is coalescing? What does it have to do with the word meta and what does it have to do with the Meta-States Model?”

As a bit of a review, I ended the last reflection describing the systems loops in the Meta-States model. This is critical for anyone who wants to learn how to “follow the energy” through a human system. This is something that we teach in Meta-Coaching and in Matrix Games. And this involves a different kind of thinking than strict linear thinking, it is systems thinking.

Feed back — information that we get back from the world and others “out there” beyond our nervous systems that we bring into ourselves. We feed it back to our mental representational movie. Then we feed back to ourselves our thinking about it as we reflexively think and feel all the way up the levels.

Feed forward — the transformation of the information into energy that we experience as we metabolize our thoughts, ideas, and meanings. We feed this energy forward level by level as emotions and then feelings which then activates the motor cortex to translate into speech, behaviors, skills, and all of our responses back to the world outside of ourselves.

Feedback is the information we bring in and that we create as we draw conclusions up the levels. Feed forward is the experience we have of that feedback as it becomes energy within our mind-body system. Every time you draw a conclusion and feed that conclusion back to yourself at the next higher level, you create more meaning for yourself. You thereby set a yet higher frame of meanings. In doing so, you extend and expand your meta-mind about the subject. Feedback takes you up the levels of beliefs and abstractions.

Feed forward is bringing the higher level thoughts, beliefs, and meanings back down. The best example of it in Neuro-Semantics is the Mind-to-Muscle pattern. Here we start with a high level concept or principle that we “intellectually” know is true, valid, and useful, something that if we could just get ourselves to do would make a positive difference in our lives. But we don’t. We know but don’t do. To therefore close that knowing-doing gap, we linguistically drive the principle down the system and layers of meta-levels so that we code it as a belief. Then we drive it down to become a decision, then a feeling state, then an action that engages the real world out there.

In the Mind-to-Muscle process, we are feed forwarding into our mind-body system information that we know at higher levels. Now it’s time to feel it. That’s why in the process of bringing that knowledge down, we coach the body to feel it. That’s why we have a specific process for engaging more and more neurological activity and processes, why we encourage exaggerating and gesturing. We are seeking to feed the information forward and in doing so let it transform into energy— physical energy in our bodies.

I like to describe this as how we metabolize our ideas. We do metabolize ideas, you know. Yes, we also metabolize food and transform what we call food into fuel. We eat fish and chips, pizzas and tacos and somehow the fish in the river and the potatoes in the garden become part and parcel of Michael, or you. It becomes part of our skin, eyes, fingernails, internal organs. We masticate the food, tear it apart, digest it, and then assimilate it so that what was other now becomes part of self. Metabolism describes a basic transformation process for how stuff “out there” comes in and becomes a living part of our biology.

There is also another kind of metabolism, a metabolism of ideas, thoughts, beliefs, understandings, experiences, and so on. We also bring in “mental” stuff out there in the world from the conversations we have with others, from the books we read, from the symbols we receive from our various cultures and we similarly masticate them as we think and reflect, as we tear the ideas apart and as we digest them and assimilate them into ourselves. For a century Gestalt psychology has been using this metaphor.

To take the metaphor to the next level, I’ve used it more explicitly to describe how we integrate ideas and make them ourselves. And this is where coalescing comes in. When we apply one state to another (joy to learning; calmness to fear, respect to anger, abundance to relating, etc.) and bring the two states together and allow them to become linked— they eventually coalesce. They eventually “unite or come together in one body or mass” so that the two become one. They two now operate as one.

That’s why a coalesced meta-state feels like a primary state. From the inside, we experience it as if it were one thing. This is what we mean by the word gestalt in Neuro-Semantics, the two have become a whole. And that whole emerges in the mind-body system as something more than the sum of its parts.

Coalescing is like the percolating of coffee. You take two separate things, coffee beans and water, heat the water and pass the water through the crushed beans and, presto!, Coffee. The coffee we then drink is something other than, more than the sum of these parts.

When we meta-state another thought or feeling to our current experience, what is high or meta to us doesn’t always stay as something separate and distinct. It often coalesces into the lower. From this emergence something new that’s a whole, a gestalt. The emergence of this gestalt creates a new kind of state, a gestalt state.

So when we feed our states, ideas, meanings, beliefs, etc. forward and texture or percolate our previous thoughts and feelings with it, we metabolize our meanings in such a way that we commission our body to feel them. We commission our neurology to experience them. We close the knowing-doing gap and incorporate (put into the body, corpus) or embody what we know in our mind. This creates the personal power of congruence. It enables us to get ourselves to actually do and perform what know and believe in our mind. This unites meaning-and-performance, neurology and semantics, and knowing-and-doing. It gives us the synergy of the whole. And this is what lies at the heart of self-actualizing our potentials. Are you ready to coalesce? Great, then here’s to your positive coalescing in 2007!

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #9

January 22 2007

THE META-LANDSCAPE

OF YOUR MIND

Part I

In Neuro-Semantics we have long been speaking about the land of Meta —Meta Land. This is the space within your mind where you go when you use your self-reflexive consciousness. This is where you go when you “go inside.” It is where you go when you experience the hypnotic state of trance. This is the space that’s very, very special to us humans— the upper decks of your consciousness, the place where you “store” your conceptual framework about reality, and all of your beliefs about yourself, others, time, and the world. It is the space that we call your Matrix. It is all the thoughts “in the back of your mind.”

In fact, while the two co-founders of NLP have completely ignored this region of consciousness, it has primarily been Robert Dilts who attempted to do so. Studying the “logical levels and types” of Bateson, Robert created an elementary model some twenty years ago that he designated, the Neuro-Logical Levels. With it, he offered a list of belief distinctions along with how much each level affected one’s neurology. The biggest problem with the model is that it has not evolved, grown, or developed over the past twenty years even though Robert has.

Within the Neuro-Logical levels, the first three distinctions occur at the primary state level. 1) The ability or capability to act, 2) the behaviors that result and 3) the context of some environment are all primary state distinctions. Above that we get to the meta-level distinctions: 1) beliefs, 2) values, 3) identity, and 4) spirit.

Over the years, numerous writers in NLP have shown that the Neuro-Logical levels is not actually a “logical level” system, and certainly not hierarchical. Wyatt Woodsmall was the first to do so, showing that Environment is not a a member of the class of Behaviors. Inside the class of behaviors, we do not put environment. Behaviors are not more psychologically “encompassing and impactful” than Environment.

Environment is a larger phenomenon than Behaviors. Even though behaviors may effect environment, behaviors do not drive or modulate Environment as the term “logical levels” suggests. Yet this model did encourage the thinking of many other NLP trainers about the meta landscape.

The Dilts’ list does provides a useful laundry list of items as a checklist regarding beliefs. After all, in Meta Land it is beliefs all the way up. And Robert Dilts has structured the levels to correspond to the basic indexing questions of where, when, who, what, why, etc.

6. Why? (big) Spiritual God/Universe Transmission

5. Who? Mission Identity Mission

4. Why? (Small) Motivation/ Beliefs/Values Permission/

Meaning Motivation

3. How? Process/Strategy Capabilities Direction

2. What? Actions/Reactions Behaviors Actions

1. Where? Opportunities/ Environment External context

When? Constraints

Robert (1990, Beliefs) has also noted the relationship between the landscape of Meta Land and what occurs at the lower levels of our neurology. “These different levels each bring a deeper commitment of neurological ‘circuitry’ into action.” (p. 210). That’s due to the feed forward communication loop (as noted in Meta Reflection #8).

Given this we can now step back and explore the contributions that Robert Dilts has made to our understandings of Meta Land. Not only did he initiate the first NLP mappings of this area, but he relied heavily upon Gregory Bateson’s work on logical levels. Robert highlighted that this is the land of beliefs —beliefs about our abilities, behaviors, and environment; beliefs about our values, beliefs about ourselves, our identity, our sense of self, and beliefs about our purpose and mission.

This means that the landscape of Meta Land is the landscape of beliefs. No wonder this area of mind works so differently from the outside world. Bateson contrasted the two as “the world of physics and the world of communication.” And in the world of communication, what you “believe” and say has tremendous influence unlike the effect of words and beliefs in the world of physics. Here the mechanism of a self-fulfilling prophecy works. Here we metabolize our ideas so that our ideas become self-organizing frames. This refers to how our mind-body system is always seeking to actualize what we think. It may or may not succeed at it, but it seeks to “make real” inside us and then outside us the messages we send our neurology.

No wonder we have to be careful what we believe. If we get a thought-virus installed in our thinking or live by old antiquated beliefs, especially beliefs that are limiting, diminishing, or even toxic and morbid, this can create all kinds of things, from illness, diseases to self-sabotaging behaviors and even destructive and pathological states.

Meta Land — the place where you live most of your life. There’s more to write about it, so till next week, may you assume the full powers of your creativity and make the landscape of meta in your mind-body system a wonderful place to live!

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #10

January 29 2007

THE META-LANDSCAPE

OF YOUR MIND

Part II

In the last Meta Reflection , I began describing the landscape of Meta Land. There I focused on it being the space of beliefs, where we create our sense of reality and so invent belief-frame within belief frame to create our beliefs systems. This makes Meta Land a place where our beliefs become self-fulfilling prophesies as they seek to self-organize our mind-body system to create externally the ideas and understandings.

Because of this, the landscape is a space of layers of belief frames and when we put all the belief frames around any given idea or experience, it makes up a matrix. A matrix refers to a “womb.” That’s because within a matrix things are given birth. It may be that we give birth to a concept by creating two axes. Then, inside of the quadrants or space of those axes we can give birth to the concept of the “flow” state or “the synergy of self-actualization.”

In Neuro-Semantics, I have used the metaphor of a matrix to create the 7⁺¹ matrices of the Matrix Model. In doing so, I was able to combine all of the cognitive-behavioral factors that make up our reality into three process matrices and five of the developmental and lifespan factors that make up our construct of “self.” This gives us the five content matrices. When combined, it gives us a systems approach to thinking about, and working with, the mind-body-emotion system of a person or of a society.

This also is part of the landscape that makes up the meta territory. In this landscape you will discover the multiple matrices that you and others build around various experiences, ideas, and even words. Once we build these matrices and live within them, they become our reality. And that’s precisely why they feel so real. That’s why they become the very fabric of our sense of reality, why they become our assumptive reality, and why they feel so solid and unchangeable.

Sometimes I’m asked if there is or could be a third axis for the Matrix model. The first two are meaning (semantics) and performance (neurology) which also constructs the Self-Actualization Quadrants. And the answer is, “Yes, there is a third axis. It is self.” After all, when we ask “In Developmental psychology, what is it that develops over the lifespan?” The answer is the same—our mapping and sensing of our self, that, is our identity, how and with what we identify ourselves. Developmental psychology maps this in terms of our cognitive development, our psycho-social development, our sexual, cultural, moral, etc. development.

And what are all these factors, but facets of our self. For a fuller development of this idea of the third axis, see the article, The Matrix of the Matrix on the website. This means that the five content matrices are five facets of the development of self over the lifespan: my sense of self as a person (Self), my sense of self in terms of competencies, skills, and performance (Power), my sense of self in relationship to others and to various cultures (Others), my sense of self as existing in temporal space (Time), and my sense of self in the larger environment and in all the universes of meanings (World).

This is the landscape of Meta Land. And because the Matrix model presents this as a systems model which encourages systemic thinking, to work with this facet of Meta Land, we have to shift from linear to non-linear, from either-or to both-and, and think in terms of our mental-emotional energy moving through the Matrix as a system. This is where the communication loops of feed back and feed forward also come in enabling us to follow the energy through the system.

What is the space where you live, in your mind, when you use your self-reflexive consciousness? It is the Marix of your frames of meaning that you construct about all kinds of things. And now we can follow the energy that is incorporated in it and the energy that follows through it. We can follow the cognitive energy by which you can transform your inner reality so that it begins to exist externally. And with the Marix model, we can now follow that motivational energy as you metabolize and embody those meanings.

Meta Land is the place of your meaning matrices, all of them, the thousands of them. It includes the positive ones which enhances you and your self-actualization. It equally includes the negative ones which imprison and diminish you. In all of this, you like me, are a creator. Because you are by nature a meaning-maker, you have some incredible powers to create meaning— to call meaningful worlds into existence. You can also misuse these powers and create worlds of trivial or bland meaning, or worse, meaningless worlds. Knowing this is one thing, knowing how to effectively use your creative powers that will enable you to self-actualize, that’s another. That is the theme of Day 1 of the Ultimate Self-Actualization Workshop and the theme of the next Meta Reflection.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #11

February 5, 2007

THE META-LANDSCAPE

OF YOUR MIND

Part III

As we continue exploring the landscape of Meta Land, there’s another structure, or to be more precise, “structuring dynamic” to mention. I’m now referring to what we call in NLP, Meta-Programs. Ah yes, meta-programs. There are numerous ways to speak about this dimension. In various NLP writings these are described and labeled by a wide variety of terms:

perceptual filters

thinking patterns

neuro-filters

neuro-sorts

Metaphorically, we think of meta-programs as the kind and color of glasses that you wear as you see and perceive things. This is the most common metaphor for a meta-program. What kind of glasses are you wearing?

The simplest of all meta-programs is the classic optimist / pessimist filter, “Is the glass half empty or half full?” Which ever you see, it is just that, a way of seeing things. And in either case, the amount of liquid in the glass is the same. Yet precisely because the way you see it differs, then so does your reality. If you see it as half empty, then you are looking for what’s missing, what is not there. If you see it as half full, then you are looking at what is there. This gives us the classic pessimist and optimist in “personality.” That is, the way we filter, sort, and think about the same object creates different ways or styles of feeling, relating, talking, and behaving— the components of what we call “personality.”

Now as part of the meta landscape of the higher regions of your mind, your habitual meta-programs play a dominant and even a determining role in how you experience yourself, others, and the world at large. No wonder we often relate our meta-programs to our sense and experience of ourselves as “persons,” hence “personality.” I put these terms in quotes because they are highly liable to misled us. Without quotes, we easily fall into the seduction of to think of them as externally real, as objective things. They are not.

“Personality” is not what you are, it is how you function. It refers to how you do “personality.” This separates Neuro-Semantic NLP from all of the “typology” models (Myers Briggs, Taylor Johnson, the MMPI, the four Greek personality types, etc.). Typology assumes that people come in types or kinds. “She’s X type of person,” “He’s got Y personality.” Assuming that people are a certain way, typology presupposes that personality is fixed, determined, fated. This is actually a case of over-generalizing. We take some way of operating, turn it into a “trait” and then assume that that is all the person is and that they cannot be otherwise.

The typology approach pretty much locks out change, especially personality change or transformation. In Neuro-Semantic NLP, we start with some very different assumptions. As with classic NLP, we start with the fact that people operate in states and operate from states and that when we keep repeating a state, the habituated state becomes a way of being in the world, a way of functioning. This solidifies things so that we then operate through the lens of that state consistently and regularly.

And, when we do that for months and even years, we essentially meta-state that state with all of its ways of thinking and feeling so that it becomes our gestalted meta-state or meta-program. For example, if you keep accessing the state of looking for sameness and do so repeatedly for years, you may meta-state the sameness state so that it becomes your glasses by which you filter and sort for everything. Then the perceptual lens you use to process the information from books, conversations, work, hope, dreams, fears, etc. will be the sameness lens. We could say that you then become a sameness person. You live consistently in the sameness state and always talk about how things are “the same” or similar. Doing so makes you good with people and quick to get rapport. And personality-wise, you would probably dislike, even hate, conflict, differences, and disagreements.

Or, you could use the opposite end of that continuum, and always be access the state of looking for differences. If you meta-state differences in the meta landscape of your mind so that you only and always sort for differences, then you would develop difference glasses and that would put you in a state of differing. This would make you good at seeing what’s left out, what’s not accounted for, and how thing are not right, how people are wrong, what’s missing, etc. It’s this state that supports creativity and innovation and conflict, disagreement, and lack of rapport.

Each meta-state that has solidified into a meta-program has its strength and weakness. And each operates on a continuum. In Meta-Coaching, we have made this the very heart of self-actualizing new potentials. We do that by focusing on expanding meta-programs. This differs from merely changing a meta-program or trying to become the opposite. In expanding the meta-program in the meta landscape, you expand your perceptual range and that activates a wider range of states and possibilities.

And as a consequence of this, the expanding of meta-programs expands your sense of self and personality. At the lowest level it develops your personality and at the highest it absolutely transforms your personality. And it does so, not by eliminating any meta-program or state, but by expanding and transforming such.

In Meta Land, your meta-programs represents the ultimate coalescence of your meta-states. That is, as you set states as your frames of mind, they become your very perceptual lens so that you see the world in a certain way. With each, you thereby create strengths and competencies and limitations. That’s why expanding to the full range of a meta-program is such a generative and transformative experience. That’s why also, in the Self-Actualization Workshop one of the key ways we facilitate actualizing our highest and best is through the expanding of our meta-programs. And that’s one of the key benefits of the Ultimate Self-Actualization Workshop, the transformation of personality so that you can reach your full humanness and experience more peak experiences.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #12

February 12, 2007

THE META-LANDSCAPE

OF YOUR MIND

Part IV

In the beginning of NLP, Richard Bandler used the following example of a belief as he proposed changing beliefs with sub-modalities:

“Think of a strong belief like ‘I believe the sun will rise tomorrow.’”

But is that really a good example of a strong belief? I don’t think so. Are your beliefs like that one? Do your strong beliefs follow that format? Aren’t your strong beliefs more emotional and personal than that? Are they not more like the following:

“I believe that people are human beings who should be treated with respect.” “I believe that continuous learning is a key to success.” “I believe that in loving my children and spending quality time with them.”

These are strong beliefs. Believing that the sun will rise tomorrow is not a strong belief. Come to think of it, it’s not even very much of a “belief” at all. It is more of an understanding. It is conceptual knowledge. The sun coming up tomorrow is something that we know, not that we believe. After all, what would be the opposite if you didn’t believe it? That the sun will not rise? Do you believe that? Does anyone? How much emotion goes into that? How personal is that?

The idea of the sun rising is a metaphor regarding how we experience the beginning of a new day. It actually does not rise. Since the earth circles the sun, the earth “rises.” But even if we take the phrase about the sun rising at face value, this is knowledge content about the everyday life on this planet. It is not a strong personal belief about what you can, or cannot, do. That’s why, as an understanding or fact of knowledge, “I believe the sun will rise tomorrow” is an inadequate comparison to a belief.

Bandler would then use that phrase to invite a person to notice how he or she represents the sun rising, notice all of the sub-modality features and then to use them to encode a belief that the person wants to strongly believe with the same cinematic features. But beliefs are not just representations vividly encoded with the qualities of reality. Today with all of “the movie magic” that’s available through computer generated images we can see and encode all kinds of things as real. Yet no matter how many times we repeat the “real” representation, that in itself, will not turn our representations into a belief.

To turn a representation into a belief we have to make a meta-move to a higher level and set a frame of confirmation about the representation. We have to confirm what we are representing as true, real, factual. We may even need to layer our evidences upon the representation so that we have proof that we have the right to confirm it as true.

All of this highlights the different dimensions of our mind. We begin with the representational level and then move up to the levels. The first level up is the meta-state level. At this level we bring various other thoughts-and-emotions to our first ones and this begins to layer our consciousness making it richer and more complex. With regard to beliefs, we bring confirmation thoughts-and-emotions to our representational thoughts-and-emotions.

It is at the meta-state level that we qualify and texture our states. The quality of our beliefs, the quality of any of our states, the quality even of the coding of our representations are all state-about-states or meta-states. This explains why the Meta-States Model is unique in being able to explain the structure of “magic” in NLP. All of the “magic” of NLP are meta-stating processes. Meta-Programs are coalesced meta-states. All of the Meta-Model distinctions about language and linguistics are meta-stating processes regarding the meta-representational system (language). All of the cinematic features that enable us to add finer distinctions and textures to the movies in our mind (sub-modalities) are meta-stating processes.

Above and beyond the meta-state level is the gestalt dimension. Something holistic occurs when we meta-state. As mentioned in Meta Reflection #8 (January 15), meta-states coalesce. They do not stay “meta” but as a systemic process facilitate the emergence of systemic processes —gestalts. Something “more than the sum of the parts” emerge, a whole, a larger phenomena that cannot be explained by adding all of the parts together.

At the gestalt level, we experience the layers of states and frames and all of the multiple meta-levels as one thing. As one state. As one experience. Courage, as a gestalt state, is experienced as a single focus and state and not in terms of all of the ingredients that go into it. So with self-esteem, proactivity, responsibility. These complex states are a holoarchy made up of multiple holons (wholes that are parts within larger wholes) yet which we experience as a single phenomenon.

There is, however, yet another dimension of the mind. As human beings, we can also create, process, and operate from concepts. At the highest level of the mind, we have conceptual models, paradigms of reality, intellectual and abstract understandings about things. These are often highly abstract conceptions— hypotheses, premises, presuppositions, computations, etc. They are things like “the sun will rise tomorrow.” “E = MC².” “Relationships depend on respect.” Intellectually we know, understand, accept, go with, and operate from these high level abstract principles. But emotionally these do not seem to have much if any somatic affect in our bodies.

So these are not beliefs so much as they are concepts and conceptual reality. They describe another dimension of mind. In the meta-landscape of your mind are these dimensions.

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #13

February 19, 2007

META-PLEASURES

It was early in the days of the development of the Meta-States model that I got interested in meta-pleasures. Why? How did that come about?

Strangely, it arose from the study of resilience. I say strangely because the state of resilience arises when there is pain, when there is a disappointment, a set-back, a trauma. I researched the literature of people who had been through hell and yet bounced back to participate fully in life, to contribute, etc. What I found was that they were able to enjoy life as part of the resilience process.

This was the surprising thing to me. The great majority had learned to find pleasure and joy even during the time when they were in the process of bouncing back. That is, it was not the case that they bounced back to life and vitality and then rediscovered joy in their life. It was rather the case that while in the midst of their pain, trouble, trauma, set-back, knock-down, they had rediscovered pleasures.

The most radical example that I can give you is that of Viktor Frankl. Even in Hitler’s death camp, he and his colleagues were able to find and enjoy humor. They were able to take pleasure in the smallest of things, to appreciate, and to acknowledge value. By grim jokes, small acts of human kindness, the smallest delights they were able to experience a kind of meta-pleasures even in the concentration camp.

Nor was this the exception. The people with the most robust strategies for resilience, for bouncing back to life with vitality, those who were able to powerfully return to living with purpose and passion, were those who were able to experience pleasure even in the midst of their pain. As they were able to keep the hurt, pain, or evil out by refusing the three p’s of learned helplessness (personal, permanent, pervasive), they were also able to bring in joy, pleasure, and value.

It wasn’t enough that they could protect themselves from taking a distress and making it about themselves (personal), forever in time (permanent) and about every facet of life (pervasive). They were able to do more. They were able to positively fill their minds, hearts, and lives with joys. And in doing this they were able to take the simplest of things and endow it with rich and robust and significant meaning. And that is the structure of meta-pleasures.

That led to the Meta-Pleasure Pattern that we run in the Meta-States training, Accessing Personal Genius. We begin with a simple pleasure: walking on a beach, listening to music, baking break, walking, running, reading a good book, enjoying a conversation, watching a sunrise, etc. and we begin asking the semantic questions as meta-questions: What does that mean to you? How is that valuable to you? What pleasure do you get from that? How is that enjoyable?

Meta-pleasures are the pleasures that we get from our pleasures. For example, with taking a walk in nature. People typically will say that the pleasure, meaning, value of that is time alone, relaxation, renewal, in touch with nature, etc. And when we take each of these as a meta-state of pleasure about the first level pleasure, we get even higher level pleasures: connection, rejuvenation, sense of purpose, alignment, etc.

In APG we typically encourage people to run this pattern on ten activities that they find easy to do, for which they are naturally motivated, and which create positive results for them. The reason? To model out their own unique meta-pleasures, meta-motivations. We say that this is a motivation pattern in that it uncovers the person’s intuitive and natural higher values and how he or she can add semantic pleasure or value to something. The significance of that? If you know how to meta-pleasure yourself around some activities, you can take charge of this process and begin to spread the pleasure around in your life.

We do this in accessing personal genius because genius is characterized by joy. The totally absorbed state is one of “flow”—delight, fun, enjoyment. And when you semantically load an activity with meta-pleasures, you answer the motivation question. That is, you don’t have to “work” on your motivation. Motivation is built in.

Long before I came up with that using Meta-States, Abraham Maslow described meta-motivation as the level of motivation that naturally occurs when we gratify the lower needs and move into the growth or self-actualization level of experience.

“Once we’ve solved the lower problems, the material problems, empirically I insist on the tremendous role of the meta-motivations— the search for truth and excellence and perfection and beauty and justice and ultimate order and ultimate simplicity and harmony and species-hood and brotherhood and the like.” (A Memorial Volume, 1982, p. 37)

What Maslow specified as the specific meta-motivations that enable to be at our best and unleash our deepest potentials are the very things that most people naturally talk about when they explore the pleasures-of-their-pleasures:

Truth, excellence, perfection, beauty, justice, order, simplicity, harmony, love, compassion, cooperation, collaboration, etc.

Interesting enough, these are also our values, our highest values. Maslow called them the being-values. He used being for the realm of life that operates by abundance, growth, self-actualization, and non-insrumentalism. That is, we seek such for themselves. They are not mean-values, but end-values. They are valuable in and of themselves; they are inherently desirable and delightful. They are their own reward.

So, how’s your meta-motivation? What have you semantically loaded with so much meaning, significance, value, and pleasure that you naturally and inevitably and intuitively give yourself to it and it’s “no problem?” What would you like to meta-pleasure so that you have more pleasure in your life, more vitality, more enjoyment? How’s your pleasuring and meta-pleasuring skills? How competent are you at meta-pleasuring yourself and keeping yourself in a delightful and appreciative state even when things aren’t going your way?

Here’s a key secret about unleashing your potentials —load it up with lots of robust meta-pleasures. Do that and you’ll have all the motivation that you’ll need because it will be inherently fun, enjoyable, and delightful no matter how much effort and energy you have to put into it!

For more about Unleashing your own self-actualization — check out the following:

L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #14

February 26, 2007

META-MOTIVATION

If your levels of meta-pleasure define the joy, delight, and basic happiness of your life, then do you know how to uncover the meta-pleasures that you already have? And do you know how to begin to spread the pleasure around? That’s what the Meta-Pleasure Pattern in Meta-States is all about, which was the subject of the last Meta Reflection (#13).

Let me unpack that a little further. What this means is that there is a logical level in your mind that we can call pleasure, joy, enjoyment, delight. After all, you have the ability to delight yourself in things, do you not? And that’s a cognitive-affective response. And if you can bring thoughts-and-feelings of delight about something, then you can use this to meta-state many other things with delight. You can access delight as a state of thoughts, feelings, and physiology and set it as a frame on lots and lots of things.

When you come to think of it, isn’t this one of the meta-differences between us? Look around at your family and friends and make a list of all of the things that they delight in which you do not? Does someone delight in jogging every day? In cleaning the house to make it impeccable? Do you have anyone in your family or friends who loves mathematics? Puzzles? Working in the garden? Cooking? Handling receipts? Being licked in the mouth by a dog?

— What pleasures do they have which are your tortures?

— Which of their pleasures would be your distress?

— And vise versa, which of your pleasures would turn them off and be their stress?

Meta-pleasures also show the principle that all of our higher logical levels are but “facets of the same diamond.” What I’m calling pleasures and meta-pleasures can also be viewed through the lens of values, meanings, significances. This explains why Neuro-Semanticists will often use the Meta-Pleasure pattern to uncover a person’s “values,” that is, what a person values as important and significant. Your meta-pleasures are the experiences and meanings that you value; they are your values.

When I now tie this to Self-Actualization Theory as developed by Maslow, we begin with the fact that we humans experience levels of motivation. In the area of the lower needs, our motivation is mostly an away-from motivation. At this level our “needs” are deficiencies. We need, and are motivated, because we lack something essential. If you’ve ever been without food for two-weeks, then you truly know about hunger. It only takes a couples days to feel the need for water. And only seconds for air. We experience these survival deficiency needs with desperation. And when the need it gratified, it goes away.

So with our lower needs for safety and security, love and affection, and esteem and regard. When we don’t have what we require, our whole organism desperately reaches out to get it. And when the need is gratified, the need goes away. This describes deficiency motivation.

This, by the way, seems to be the motivation that most managers, business owners, politicians, economists, etc. operate from. Assuming Theory X about human nature, they build structures in business, economics, society, etc. that assume people are motivated when they experience a lack or a threat and lose their motivation when there’s no lack or threat. [Douglas McGregor (1965, The Human Side of Enterprise) introduced Theory X and theory Y of human nature in management and business, Maslow later added Theory Z.]

Yet there is a higher motivation. At the top of the hierarchy of need prepotency, Maslow put the growth needs which he also called self-actualization needs, expressive needs, and being needs. These describe a different kind of motivation, abundance motivation. Here we do not “need” in the sense of deficiency, we “need” in the same of expressiveness— we need to express ourselves, grow, self-actualize, and to “be.”

The difference of this motivational level is that here gratification of the need does not make it go away. Gratify the self-actualization needs and you want more! Needs at this level cannot be satisfied. Instead, satisfaction increases capacity! This is a toward-motivation, toward all that we value and toward all that fulfills our highest nature. So unlike the negative addiction that occurs with the lower needs, here we experience a positive addiction that makes us better, more resourceful, more creative, more of who we can be. This is meta-motivation.

And it is meta-motivation, as a high level toward motivation, that truly drives and facilitates the unleashing of potentials. Certainly, we unleash capabilities via deficiency motivation. After all, “Necessity is [still] the mother of invention.” Yet above and beyond it is curiosity, play, experimenting around, stumbling upon fortunate accidents, etc. that unleashes our highest potentials. The fact is that those who persist in creativity and innovation in continuing to create year after year are not those driven to it by lack and need, but those who create for the fun of it, for the curiosity of it, to just explore what is there and what’s possible. At this level, you can never lose your motivation.

Meta-motivation describes living for and pursing the being-values for the sheer joy and experience. When we move to this area, we begin to experience end-values. We experience and enjoy things, events, and people for themselves, without any other motive. Rather than experiencing something as a means-value, as a means to get to somewhere else, we enjoy the experience for itself. In fact, we can then even develop the ability to sacralize anything, that is, transform mean-values into end-values.

At the level of the meta-motivations, the more you devote yourself to one of the being-values and gratify that value, the more you want it. The motivation does not go away. It does not weaken. In fact, it grows stronger. You grow stronger. You develop more capacity for it—truth, love, beauty, synergy, cooperation, collaboration, peace, excellence, goodness, etc. Now your unleashing not only creates a sense of fulfillment, but leaves you with the sense of goodness, “The world is good.” “Life is good.” “Life is meaningful.” At this level, what we call motivation is no longer a problem. It is just the way we move through life. Whereas once we might have had to “work on our motivation,” motivation is now a given. Now we experience it as life passion, vitality, meaningfulness, inspiration, even “spirit.” So, how’s your meta-motivations? Are you ready to tap and unleash your mea-motivations?

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
“I admit to being dizzy and confused.

What on earth could it mean…?”
Steve Andreas (Six Blind Elephants, 2006, p. 116)

At least he’s honest!  I have to give him that.  In his new book on Fundamental Principles of Scope and Category that he titled, Six Blind Elephants, Steve Andreas at least acknowledges that he just does not understand the Meta-States Model.  Of course, he makes that admission as he is seems to feel free to criticize and argue against it.

At first, I hoped he would provide a solid critique wherein he might point out some weakness or some area that actually needed more refinement.  As you know I am constantly updating and correcting the models that I’ve created.  That’s because I know any and every model is just a map and as such, is limited and can always be improved.  But no.  What Andreas argued against and critiqued turns out to be only a “straw man” presentation of the Meta-States Model.  So I felt disappointed.  The criticism reads more like Don Juan fighting vigorously against the windmills imagining they were knights.  Against the straw man that he created I could have given him even more arguments.  I would have equally disputed it as unworthy and inadequate.

Andreas says that neither I nor Robert Dilts will “provide a clear operational definition of how we determine logical levels.”  That’s not exactly true.  I have repeatedly sent him that information and, for that matter, he can find that on the Neuro-Semantic website.  It’s been there for years.  If Steve would visit the website, he would find that there are plenty of articles there about Meta-States and Logical Levels.  As far as I can tell, he has not even read Meta-States, Secrets of Personal Mastery, Dragon Slaying, Frame Games, or Meta-State Magic to understand the Meta-States Model.  The one and only book he even references in his bibliography is the first edition of The Matrix Model.   So, given that, I’ll give him a break that what he has written is just the lack of study and information about Meta-States.  Yet isn’t that funny that he would do his review and criticism before he would do his research?

In his book he quotes me saying, “Meta-States necessitates a different kind of thinking” than linear thinking.  But then he tries to put the Meta-States Model on a procrustean bed to fit the linear thinking of his ideas of category and scope.  Interesting.  Generally, when scholars offer a critique, they will put that which they critique in context and evaluate it on its own merits and up against the contexts in which it has been designed.

What Steve Andreas doesn’t seem to understand is that when it comes to human thinking-and-feeling as a dynamic, non-linear system, we do not follow the rules of Socrates and Aristotle’s rules of logic as we create our mental categories.  Instead, as Alfred Korzybski noted, we are not logical, nor even psychological, but psycho-logical beings.  When it comes to the way we categorize things, since categories and categorization is the central subject of his book, in human experiencing and meaning-making through thinking-and-feeling, we can categorize just about anything as a member of any category.

Andreas quotes me about “playful seriousness” and “playfully and compassionately kind in our seriousness,” but then he declares (as if this is absolute and divine truth) that playful as the modifier is a sub-category of seriousness (2006, p. 115).

Yet is it?  That’s the question.  What if we thought about the state and quality of being serious (which Steve seems to be well practiced) and brought some playfulness to it?  What if we brought some kind compassion to it?  What if we brought some win/win thinking to it?  Those are the qualities I typically frame and meta-state seriousness.  I know it’s not logical.  I know is does not fit the way he presents category and scope, but what if we did it anyway?  What if we did that just for the fun of it?

If we applied playful to serious we would embed serious inside of the larger context of play.  That would make “seriousness” a member of the category of playfulness.  Yes, I know, it is completely psycho-logical.  And if we did that then this would reduce the scope (extent) of seriousness making it a smaller thing to playfulness.  Simultaneously it would extend the scope of playfulness, making playful the bigger thing.

Reading Blind Elephants makes me think that Steve has been completely blinded by the old sub-modality model.  That model thought that because sub-modalities are “smaller”and “finer” distinctions, they must be below and sub- to the basic representation systems.  My hallucination is that he has taken the size or scope of things (smaller to bigger) to be equivalent to the construct of any and every “logical level.”  And if that’s what has blinded the elephant, then no wonder he cannot understand Meta-States.

Andreas also does not like the word “meta” (and meta-position) because he thinks it is too vague.  So his solution is to get rid of the word.
“The easiest solution is to simply not use these terms at all.” (p. 154).

Yes I guess that would be easier to than reading the books and articles on Meta-States.  So what does Steve Andreas know about the Meta-States Model and/or the process of meta-stating?  What he writes is pure fiction.  It is certainly not what I have said that Meta-States is, and I should know a bit about that.
“When someone applies one vague and general ‘state’ to another ‘state’ to create a ‘meta-state,’ that compounds the ambiguity and uncertainty about what is actually happening.  If this ‘meta-state’ is further ‘meta-stated,’ the confusion deepens exponentially.” (p. 188)

Hmmm.  So I wonder if Steve meets someone who says he is afraid of his fear (or anger, excitement, confidence, etc.), if instead of dealing with the fear of some other state, he will first make the fear of that other state more clear and precise?  Of course, that generally will increase and amplify the fear and so set a more intense frame of fear about the first state and make things much worse for the person.

Interesting enough, on the next page in Steve’s book (p. 189), he writes, “What is important is the quality or appropriateness of the resource state to the problem” Hmmm.  Isn’t that meta-stating?  Isn’t that bringing a vague and general “resource state” of quality or appropriateness to the problem state?

This is again the elephant’s blindness, meta-stating and not knowing it.
“‘Meta-stating’ applies one poorly defined state to another, compounding the ambiguity and confusion in the term ‘state.’” (p. 203)

Yes Steve, I would also complain and criticize if that’s what I meant by meta-stating or what I presented anywhere about meta-stating.  Thank God it is not.  In fact, in Meta-State trainings (APG, “Accessing Personal Genius”) I focus entirely on accessing very precise states (not poorly defined ones) to very precise contexts and situations in order to create richer and more robust states like resilience, self-esteem, ownership of one’s response-powers, the “flow” state of mastery and scores more.

The kind of categorizing we do in meta-stating creates new and more effective frames of mind, frames of reference, frames of meaning for a new psycho-logics.  Obviously doing so does not fit Andrea’s limited definitions of category and scope, and involves our psycho-logics which I’m sure he would not like.  Given I had hoped he would have taken some time to do some research on the Meta-States Model, and he did not, I here announce an open invitation to Steve Andreas— you can attend any Accessing Personal Genius training that I do anywhere in the world at no cost. [I still have a standing invitation for this also for John Grinder given that he also has written that he does not understand “the proliferation of meta-states.”]

Paradoxically, Steve uses the meta-stating process throughout his entire book and doesn’t seem to know it.  In his Introduction he writes,
“If someone says to you, ‘That’s an interesting way to do that,’ and you categorize [meta-state] that statement as a ‘criticism,’ you will tend to feel bad, and then think of other unpleasant experiences in that category, and feel even worse.  But if you categorize [meta-state] that statement as a ‘compliment,’ you will feel pleased, and then tend to think of it in the context of other compliments, and feel even more pleased.” (p. x)
Meta-stating involves setting a context about some other experience.  We can meta-state a statement as meaning either criticism or compliment.  We can bring the state of criticism or compliment to our first state of receiving those words.  In doing so, we frame it, set a context, and create a meaning.  Steve calls this a category and categorizing.  I call it a meta-state and meta-stating.  Strange that he has to misrepresent my model and put it down as he attempts to put forward his model.

In Meta-State Trainings, a Neuro-Semantic trainer will talk about the power of a simple adjective to qualify one state with another state.  That’s why “joyful learning” is a meta-state, so is playful seriousness, etc.  Similarly, Andreas writes
“Soon after learning about cognitive qualifiers, I had a depressed client who began almost every sentence with ‘sadly,’ or ‘regrettably.’ [Aren’t these vague and poorly defined terms?]  As a first step, I asked him to start every sentence with ‘happily’ or ‘fortunately.’  This felt very strange and inappropriate to him, but it stabilized him to the powerful impact that his words had on him, and it began to restore some balance.” (p. 271)

Well, of course.  You meta-stated him with new modifying states —happiness and fortune.  So it is possible to be using the structure of meta-states and not even know it.  Come to think of it, the “strange and inappropriate” feelings that the client experienced was probably that his mind had been invited to create some new psycho-logics and went around in a few loops and got dizzy from the strangeness of that experience.

Since Andreas doesn’t know this, when we apply one state to another and create a meta-relationship so that the second state stands at a higher position to the first, it sets a frame, it establishes the mental context, and it generates a construct of meaning.  To use his words, it sets a new category, it re-categorizes, it expands scope, it contracts scope, and it can even nest categories so that they overlap.  All of that is entailed in Meta-States.

Andreas recommends asking, “What kind of X would you like?”  (i.e., general, divorce, etc. p. 264) to match the current category and nest yet another one inside it.  In Meta-States, we ask, “What is the quality of your X?”  “What is the quality of your anger?  Your grief?  Your confidence?  Your learning?   Does it have the kind and quality that you want?”  On second thought, maybe he has been reading Meta-States and is just using my materials with his new term “category.”  Is that what you’ve been doing Steve?  No?  I didn’t think so.

He uses this book to present the NLP reframing models (and gives no indication that he has ever even read or researched Mind-Lines).  There he presents frame (context and category are his words) after frame as a higher frame— same as out-framing in Mind-Lines, the meta-stating of our frames with yet higher frames.  He also uses many of the NLP presuppositions as frames that one could use.

In addition to still being under the illusion that the cinematic features by which we can edit our internal movies are “sub”-modalities and at a lower logical level, Andreas is also tricked and blinded by imposing the idea of “control” upon hierarchies.  He argues for a “heterarchy” because the meta-program of preference (people, things, time, activities, location, and information) is not a hierarchy of control or importance (210ff).  This is convolutioned reasoning because who has ever said that the meta-program of preferences is a control hierarchy so that those most important govern those less?  I have not and I don’t know anyone who has.  Another straw man that Andreas then effectively demolishes.

When Steve quoted me describing the non-linear nature of meta-stating, the nature of human reflexivity which sends our brains round and round, turning it over, upside down and at first generating confusion and dizziness, Steve wrote,
“Many years ago, someone said, ‘All writing is either biography or autobiography.”  In this case, I think it is definitely autobiography.”

While I’m sure it often applies to me, it surely applies to him as well, does it not?  I wonder if he is really dizzy and confused or if he just does not want to understand the Meta-States Model in the first place?  Definitely, if you want to understand the Meta-States model which models the workings and processes of our self-reflexive consciousness, do not depend on Steve Andreas.  He doesn’t have a clue about what it is or how it works.  So Steve, the invitation is open to come and learn about Meta-States to cure the blindness of the elephant.

In the next article, I’ll provide multiple examples of Steve’s use of meta-states and meta-stating even though he claims to disbelieve in such.

Author:
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is a modeler of positive psychology who has developed the seven models of Neuro-Semantics including the first model, Meta-States.

References:
Andreas, Steve.  (2006).  Six Blind Elephants, Volume I, Fundamental principles of scope and category.  Moab, UT: Real People Press.

Hall, L. Michael. (2000).  Meta-states: Managing the higher levels of your mind’s reflexivity. Clifton, CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

Hall, Michael. (2001).  NLP: Going meta—Advance modeling using meta-levels. Clifton, CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

Hall, L. Michael; Bodenhamer, Bob G. (2005). Sub-Modalities: Going Meta.  Formerly, The structure of Excellence. Clifton, CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

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

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Steve Andreas says is it all about scope and category.  He says that it is about how we create categories in our mind to understand things as well as how we bite off various sizes of information to deal with— how big or small the scope of our focus.  Yet the two volumes of Six Blind Elephants involve Meta-States and the meta-stating process as much as it involves anything else.

And why should it not?  A meta-state after all is a higher logical level phenomenon created by how we step back from whatever we are experiencing at the primary state level of sensory-based experience and rise up, transcend the immediate and then include the immediate inside of a higher frame, context, or category.  So when Andreas deals with “categories” of the mind, he is referring to the same subjective experience as when I speak about meta-states even if he has yet to acknowledge such.  I wonder what category of his mind creates that?

Meta-Stating Problems
Steve writes,
“When solving a problem it makes a huge difference whether we think of wrestling with it or dancing with it, attacking it or thinking of it as challenging.  Categorizing [read, meta-stating] it one way can make any process difficult, unpleasant, and arduous, while another description can make it an exciting adventure.” (Volume II, p. 84)

Here “categorizing,” is putting the primary state of “solving a problem” into a category of one of these four frames.  This is the very same process when we meta-state the problem-solving state with one of these four mental-emotional states.  Andreas speaks as if this is some new thing in NLP when actually it’s been a part of the NLP Meta-States model since 1994.  The good news is that he has finally seen the process which I’ve been addressing in Meta-States all these years.

Meta-Stating using Cognitive Qualifiers
Andreas speaks of John McWhirter as having provided —
“. . . a fascinating and subtle example of how our minds can be pre-set to respond in a particular way, that sadly, others have not previously noticed.  A ‘cognitive qualifier’ is a ‘commentary’ adverb appearing at the beginning of a sentence or phrase that refers to an emotional or cognitive state, such as the words ‘happily’ or ‘sadly’ in the previous sentence.” (Vol. II, p. 84)

Did Andreas just say that a cognitive qualifier “refers to an emotional … state?”  That’s amazing!  Isn’t it?  Whatever it is, it is at a higher level and “refers to an emotional state.”  Though Andreas has sadly not noticed it before (years and years of Anchor Point and NLP World articles that I have written about Meta-States) this is precisely part of the description of a meta-state.

“Cognitive qualifiers direct your mind to think of an experience in a way that is specified by the kind of qualifier used.” (85)
That sounds like what I wrote years ago in an article on Texturing States describing how we qualify a state via the meta-stating process.  Noting that the words sadly, luckily, and happily refer to “emotional states, and most emotions are evaluative” he then writes.
“An attitude of interest or fascination is an excellent positive resource state for learning and change, because it redirects attention from the evaluation of the problem to interest and curiosity about how the problem works, a shift to a more specific logical level of categorization. (86)

If Andreas had done his homework in studying the Meta-States Model, he would have known that we define a meta-state as an “attitude” and that, as such, it sets an evaluative frame at a higher level so that we redirect our focus.  He would know that I have often described a meta-state as a shift to a more specific logical level, a higher concept or category.

In his fourth chapter Modes of Operating (Volume II), he uses Venn diagrams to illustrate how one of the motivation or option modal operator states relate to another, sometimes embedding one inside of the other.  He has Impossibility as the largest level, then Possibility and inside of Possibility there is Necessity, Choice, and Desire states.  When we do this in Meta-States, we talk about one state embedded inside of another.  We even do this intentionally as a meta-stating process.  We begin with a highly resourceful state and then embed within it less resourceful states.  In that way the higher state, the meta-state, becomes the category for the lower.

Andreas even begins playing with state upon state, having to choose, choosing to need, etc.
“When you are totally congruent, it is possible to, you want to, you choose to, and paradoxically, you also have to, because you really couldn’t do anything else!” (108)

His fifth chapter, Self-Reference deals with circularity.
“Self-reference inevitably occurs whenever we think about ourselves and how our minds work.” (111)

Ah, a meta-state again!  When we say something about ourselves, the thoughts we generated are “both made by the self and describe the self, so they refer to themselves, in a circular process.”
“Whenever the criteria for a higher logical level are the same as the criteria for the members of the included logical levels, it will be self-referential.” (114)
“In order for a statement to be self-referential, it has to either:
a. refer to itself directly, or
b. refer to itself indirectly, by including itself as a member of a more general category that it describes, and
c. the description must apply to all members of the category.
To discover self-reference, the key question to ask is, ‘Is this communication an example of what the communication describes?’” (116)

In Meta-States we also make these distinctions.  We do so recognizing that our thoughts and feelings (i.e., states) can be expressions of our state and can also just as equally be the frame of our state.  “Is that thought or emotion your expression or frame?  Are you using it to move up to the frame (category) or to expression yourself (member of the class)?

Andreas speaks about the Meta-State structure of worrying about worrying which then creates hyper-anxiety.
“In worrying, the process may continue to occupy your mind for some time, as you recursively think of one possible scenario after another.  However, if you find yourself in an unsatisfactory loop, and the results of the future event are very important to you, you may find that the loop escalates at every step, creating what has often been called a ‘vicious circle’ of increasing anxiety.” (125)

Reading this makes me wonder if Andreas has been reading my articles about the circular loops of the mind.  I have two or three of them on the website, so her could have.  Sure seems similar.  In speaking about a paradoxical intention, Andreas notes that to try to deliberately do what you typically experience as a spontaneous symptom gives you a counter-intuitive way to interrupt the escalating loop and reduce the symptoms.  He says that the reason is that it reverses the direction of the escalating loop (127).
“By deliberately creating fear, you can find out exactly how you do it—what kind of images you make, what you say to yourself, etc. — and this can transform what you previously experienced as involuntary into something voluntary.” (128)

This is precisely why we use Meta-Questions to explore a person’s matrix of frames and why we dance with dragons in order to find the structure and begin to play around with it as a means of transformation (see Dragon Slaying, Meta-Coaching, Volume I).

Andreas then quotes Virginia Satir’s question for the depressed person was, “How do you feel about feeling depressed?”  In Meta-States (1995) I also quoted this as a meta-stating process.  Andreas quotes it and comments:
“Since they are already attending to their feelings, this is a good match for their experience, it asks them to categorize [meta-state] their feeling response at a more general logical level, instead of cycling back to their depressing thoughts, changing the loop.” (130)

“Although occasionally a client might reply, ‘I feel depressed about being depressed,’ usually they will respond with a different feeling.  ‘Well, I feel sad about feeling depressed.” [sad about depressed meta-state] . . . These new feelings will take them out of the old loop, and they can be utilized as a starting point for making future changes.  If you get stuck, you can always ask the recursive feeling question again at any time.  ‘How do you feel about feeling depressed about feeling depressed?” (130, italics added)

When I use this process in Meta-States, I acknowledge that it is the dynamic of multi-ordinality that Alfred Korzybski invented.  That is, “depressed about depressed” is taking one nominalization, applying it to itself in a self-reflexive way.  This makes “depression” a multi-ordinal term (see Communication Magic, 2001).  Here is another meta-state structure:
“Often people don’t enjoy learning to do something new, because the early stages of learning are often confusing and awkward, and they naturally would like to avoid this unpleasantness, and the unpleasant evaluative feelings about their confusion and awkwardness.  It is one thing to realize that the beginning stages of learning are often inevitably difficult and uncomfortable.  It is quite another to use that discomfort as a reason not to learn anything new.” (131)

What is the structure here?  It is the higher state of unpleasant feelings about the primary state of confusion and awkwardness.  That’s a meta-state structure.  Unpleasantness has been brought and applied to confusion.

“Self-contradiction exists at the logical level of categorization, and at that level there truly is no solution.  In order to escape from a contradiction, you have to shift logical levels.  You can either go to a more general level, or to a more specific level.” (150)

As far as I’m concerned the logical level of categorization is just fancy terminology for a meta-state.  Steve isn’t introducing anything more than what I presented in the Meta-States model in 1994.
“‘Feel free to restrict yourself to the information that is relevant to the problem’ nests restriction inside freedom.   ‘Take as much time as you need to quickly review those past events in order to come to a new conclusion about their relevance to your present life situation,’ gracefully nesting speed inside slowness.” (157)

Later he writes about negation and says,
“Negation is either at a lower or higher logical level than existence, depending on how we think about it.” (173)

I described that very thing in an entire chapter in 1999 in Structure of Excellence which is now in a second edition under the title, Sub-Modalities Going Meta.

Conclusion
Well, I could go on and on in identifying numerous meta-state structures that Andreas quotes and uses in Blind Elephants to illustrate the category distinction that actually comes from Cognitive Linguistics, which by the way Charles Faulkner, has distinguished himself for years in presenting in workshops.  The whole idea of our mental categories is what we describe in Meta-States as our frames of mind.

I find it interesting that Andreas uses “category” to describe concepts, generalization, criteria, rule, name, association, etc.  In Meta-States, my work on the so-called “logical levels” revealed that all the terms we use for mental phenomena are just different facets of the same thing.  To model that, I began talking about experience and consciousness using the metaphor of a diamond and all of our meta-levels as facets, each giving us a different perspective.  From this we then created a list of Meta-Questions, now up to 70 and counting.

Where Andreas goes wrong with it all is how he seeks to impose his linear thinking about what is dynamic and non-linear and tries to sort things out that occurs simultaneously in different domains and at different levels.  What he needs is a systemic model like Meta-States and then he would not be so constrained by the way he creates his two linear directions of scope and category.

Author:
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is a modeler of positive psychology who has developed the seven models of Neuro-Semantics including the first model, Meta-States.

Cartoon violence —talk about an oxymoron!  Violence over cartoons!  Aren’t we getting a little too serious?  Violence and riots and even death over sketches!  Sketches —maps about a territory and not the territory.

Yet that’s what has been dominating so much of the news in the first two weeks of February (2006).  When I first heard about the cartoons of the prophet Mohammad which portrayed him as a terrorist and some of the uproar about it from those who didn’t like it, I remembered that there had been controversy over some insulting and degrading images of the virgin Mary and images of the Cross a few years back.  But hardly riots and certainly nobody died because of it.

At one level all of this certainly highlights the power of humor and cartoons.  Positively, cartoons, jokes, and humor enable us to lighten up and laugh at ourselves.  When I present APG, I use a lot of the Peanuts cartoons as a way of exposing the silly ways we humans have of getting into states and meta-stating ourselves.

Of course, anything powerful can be mis-used and so it is with humor.  So negatively, we can “hurt” each other’s feelings by mocking and teasing and laughing at each other.  We only need to watch children to see both how much fun they can have with cartoons and jokes and how much it can “hurt” them if they are laughed at and mocked.  They don’t like it.  It is this kind of aggressive humor which seeks to make fun at another’s expense and portrays something or someone that we value and appreciate in an insulting way.

And yet if we rise above and beyond the specifics of the current insults and all the debate over which value is most important, freedom of speech or honor of religious sentiments, western societies and Arab societies, the current controversy certainly highlights the role that meaning and its performance in human affairs.

First of all we have meaning.   This is the inner game that we play inside our heads as we make representations and then frame those representations layer upon layer.

What does the cartoons mean?  What did the creators of the cartoons mean by their portrays of Mohammed?  What did it mean to the people who published them in newspapers and televisions?  What did it mean to the clerics who rallied people to riot?  What did it mean to the Danish government?  To various European governments?  To various Arab governments?

Then we have performance.  We have the actions and behaviors and responses of everybody involved in the drama expressing their meanings externally.  This is the outer game.

Is it just a cartoon?  Is it insult?  Or perhaps it is blasphemy that deserves death?  Or perhaps it is just freedom of speech?  Is it the right of people to hold and communicate their beliefs and opinions?  Is it the right of people to riot and destroy?

In Neuro-Semantics these go together.  Meaning describes the inner game, our semantics.  Performance describes the outer game, our neurology, physiology, emotions, expressions, and actions.  That leads us to ask many more questions:

What are the neuro-semantics of the situation?  What inner games are some people playing?  What outer games does that create and generate?  How productive, empowering, useful, ecological, empowering, etc. are these games?

Wherever there is a performance of human expressions (emotions, actions, reactions, behaviors, speech, etc.) there is meaning being performed.  And wherever there is meaning being created and computed in a human being’s head, there will eventually be the performance of it as a game.

We can provide analysis of such events at various levels.  We can stay at the primary level and simply look at what’s  This seems to be what most analysts do.  It’s easier, it’s more black-and-white.  Or we can move up a level and explore what’s the first level of meaning that’s occurring.  Or, we could move up several levels or many levels and seek to understand more fully the world of meaning that people are coming from.

What can Neuro-Semantics offer to this whole fiasco?  Several things.

First, we can highlight the difference between map and territory.  No matter what representation we create about someone else or something that another values, it is in the end a representation.  A cartoon isn’t real.  A representation, even a mis-representation is just someone’s opinion and no matter how much we dislike it, they have the right to think, feel, speak, and behave to express themselves.

Second, we can recognize the power of representations to convey meaning and be more respectful of other people’s understandings, beliefs, and values.  We don’t have to agree with another person in order to be respectful and considerate.  We can still value persons without needing to validate everything they think and believe.

Third, when we disagree and want to use humor, we can make sure the fun-making, jokes, and teasing is tasteful and appropriate rather than disrespectful and insulting.  There’s plenty of humor to be had that’s healthy and fun without being obnoxious and nasty.  And in fact, if we can inject some good playful humor perhaps we can all lighten up.  After all, as we say in Neuro-Semantics, when we get serious, we get stupid.

· Can “intelligence” be improved and enhanced or are we stuck with whatever we inherited?

· If we can expand and enrich our intelligence, then what does NLP and Neuro-Semantics offer for the acceleration of learning, states of excellence, and replicating the intelligence states of experts?

· When it comes to “running our own brain,” which is one of the key themes of NLP, does this assist in accelerating learning?

· When it comes to setting higher frames of meaning, which is one of the key themes of Neuro-Semantics, does this actually assist in enhancing a person’s level of intelligence?

It is no secret that teachers, educators, knowledge workers, and business experts who know that to keep up with the acceleration of change they have to create learning organizations and themselves stay on the cutting-edge of information have long been using both NLP and Neuro-Semantics.  In the field of NLP there are many, many books, articles, and trainings that apply the NLP model to learning.1

First and foremost, to discern the origin of any deficient in attention in learners or knowledge workers, we have to explore the person’s state, state management, focus, intentions, congruency, relationship to the subject, to the teacher or presenter, and many other emotional factors.   And in this, NLP provides plenty of answers.  There are patterns in this field for getting clear about out outcomes, for taking charge in running the movies we play on the screen of our mind, for rewinding those B-rated movies that keep us internally preoccupied, for destroying old limiting decisions, beliefs, and for finding and utilizing better learning strategies.

So what about the Enhancing of Intelligence?

In terms of the subject of intelligence, we now know that there is no one monolithic thing called intelligence, but that we have multiple intelligences.  Through the pioneering work of Howard Gardner in Frames of Mind and the Multiple Intelligences Model that he’s developed, we can identify eight kinds or dimensions of intelligence.  So in exploring any question about intelligence, we have to explore which kind.2

1) Linguistic Intelligence

The intelligence needed to read a book, write a paper, novel, or poem; and understand spoken words.

2) Logical-Mathematical Intelligence

The intelligence needed to solve mathematical problems, balance a checkbook, solve a mathematical proof, and engage in logical reasoning.

3) Spatial Intelligence

The intelligence needed to get from one place to another, to read a map, and to pack suitcases in the trunk (or boot) of a car.

4) Musical Intelligence

The intelligence needed to sing a song, compose a sonata, play a trumpet, or even appreciate the structural patterning in a piece of music.

5) Bodily Kinesthetic Intelligence

The intelligence needed to dance, play basketball, run a mile, or throw a javelin.

6) Inter-personal Intelligence

The intelligence needed to relate to other people, such as when we try to understand another person’s behavior, motives, or emotions.

7) Intra-personal Intelligence

The intelligence needed to understand ourselves—the basis for understanding who we are, what makes us tick, and how we can change ourselves, given the existing constraints on our abilities and interests.

In this NLP and Neuro-Semantics offers tremendous resources.  Not only did the founders of NLP create a stroke of genius of identifying the components of “thought” as the sensory representation systems —visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc., but they were able to identify that merely paying attention to these things develops greater intelligence.  As people begin to notice their pictures, they develop more management over what and how they represent.  As people begin to notice the sound tracks in their movies, they begin to manage the volume, tone, pitch, etc.  Awareness per se facilitates the increase of these kinds of intelligences.

That we make pictures in our mind and visualize is not news.  That we can became aware of our movies and that we can rise up in our mind and direct them, that is news.  These meta-states identify more complex and expansive states of consciousness.

Beyond this, NLP and Neuro-Semantics recognizes that our intelligence is not only a matter of innate capacities and potentialities, but is also a function of our beliefs in them.  If we hold limiting beliefs about our capacities to learn, to be intelligent, to solve problems, to fully use all of our potential, etc., those limiting beliefs will undermine our intelligence.  Conversely, setting empowering beliefs about our capacities for learning, beliefs about our identity as intelligent persons, beliefs about positive expectations of using our intelligence actually enable and enhance intelligence.

Detailing Intelligence

When it comes to “intelligence,” what are we talking about?  What are the components and variables in this subjective experience?  If we index the details of intelligence we come up with a list of such variables as the following:

·                    Representation of information visually, auditorically, kinesthetically, etc.

·                    Management of these representations

·                    Belief in developing these awarenesses

·                    Strong intention of working with our representations

·                    Focused attention that enables us to be fully present to our thoughts

·                    Congruency and integration so as to not be distracted by internal conflicts

·                    Clarification of values and why a learning is important

·                    Meaningfulness of the particular learning

·                    Openness to feedback and feed forward

While there are undoubtedly other variables, we can begin with these that obviously play a central role as success factors for enhancing our intelligence.  One of the first Meta-State patterns that I developed by re-modeling the original work of Grinder and DeLozier is that of the Accessing Personal Genius pattern.  This pattern takes the prerequisites of genius— clarity, focus, being one-minded, relaxed tension, enjoyment of experience, etc. and sets each of these as a frame of mind.3

The result is that this provides a way to step into being “in the zone” or in the flow state, where we optimize our skills and competencies with the challenges of a situation.  Most people still find the flow experience of being in the zone something that they experience from time to time, but cannot control.  Yet what if we could?  What if we could identify the structure, feeling, and elements of being in the zone for a given activity, and then practice stepping in and out of it, and anchoring it, so that we could turn it on at will?

That’s precisely what the “genius” pattern does.  By making negotiations with the executive level of our mind, the part that makes decisions, that “makes up” our mind, we set a frame of mind that then allows us to step into an experience, like learning, and stop double-tracking.  Multi-tracking is our problem.  We have five things on our mind, or 15 or 30.  No wonder we don’t use our minds effectively—we are not all there!

Here we have to set number frames by meta-stating our flow state.  As we bring each resourceful thought-and-feeling variable and apply it to our primary state, we set up a frame of mind or attractor.  Meta-stating is simply applying one state to another.  So in the genius state, we apply joy to our learning, we then apply this is really important to it, then letting everything else go to it, and so on.  In the end, the meta-stating process textures our engagement state so that we are all there!  And when we are all there, our best resources are more available.

I first ran the “genius” pattern on myself in 1995 with regard to reading and then to writing.  I wanted these two focused flow states so that when I’m engaged in the activity of reading or writing, I would be all there.  Prior to that, I would often find my eyes scanning the lines of a page and then realizing, “Nothing went in!”  I looked at the words, but my mind was somewhere else.  That hardly ever happens these days.

Prior to 1995, while I wrote articles for many NLP journals, each article would take two or three months and I would suffer many bouts of “writer’s block.”  Since then, I have not once suffered from writer’s block.  Prior to that, it took me eight year to write my first book; afterwards, I have been writing three to four books a year, 50 articles a year, and many other things.  The difference?  When I write, I’m all there!

Has my intelligence increased?  Well, if intelligence is measured by the ability to be more efficient and more productive, then yes.  If I.Q. intelligence is the ability to have more extensive how-to knowledge, then I “get” things quicker today and am more able to get to the heart of things with more efficiency.  I attribute that to the Meta-Model which is such a powerful and magical tool for thinking, for both critical thinking and creative thinking.  I also attribute that to the Meta-States model which enables me to think systemically about the mind-body-emotion system (or other systems) and to find the leverage point more quickly.

If we shift to E.Q. type of intelligence, then the ability to manage my states enables me to stop wasting energy on internal conflicts.4  I attribute this first to the NLP patterns for integration, ecology, and resolution of things of the past.  From the beginning of NLP, Richard Bandler has repeatedly said, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”   And the reason is that “the past” is not a thing.  It does not actually exist.  The only “past” we have are the movies that we play in our mind.  That’s why we can now use the Movie Rewind pattern to take the emotional charge out of any old traumas that still “hurt” us when we think about them.5

I also attribute that to the Meta-State pattern of Dragon Slaying and Taming.  If we turn our thoughts and feelings against ourselves by applying a negative state to another state, we only put ourselves at odds with ourselves.  If we fear our anger, or anger at our fear, or shameguilt ourselves for being afraid or tender—we put ourselves at odds with ourselves and create fire-breathing dragons inside our minds and bodies.  Yet we can turn all of that around in seconds.  We can accept our fear, appreciatewelcome our shame, embrace our sadness, be curious about our worry and anxiety, etc.  These meta-states enable us to accept our emotions as emotions without creating a big deal about them. ourselves for feeling vulnerable, or our anger,

In terms of S.Q. intelligence (spiritual quotient, inspiration), I use the meta-stating process of moving to my highest intentions and setting the highest reasons why something is important so that my intentions governs my attentions.  This is the Intentionality pattern which enables us to add rich meanings to every engagement.  There is also the meta-stating pattern of layering level upon level of robust meanings and beliefs and expectations to super-charge our attitude.  All of this facilitates to give us more spirit, make us inspirited rather than dis-spirited.

Summary

Time fails me to go into great detail about the many ways NLP and Neuro-Semantics enhance our learning and expands our sense of intelligence.  These are powerful models for actually enhancing intelligence as they enable us to run and manage our own brains much more efficiently.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is a cognitive psychology, NLP Trainer, author, entrepreneur, and developer of Meta-States, Frame Games, Matrix, Meta-Coaching, and Neuro-Semantics.  He lives in Colorado in the Rocky Mountains.

End Notes:

1.  My favorite works in NLP are those of Don Blackerby and Sid Jacobson.

Jacobson, Sid. (1983, 1986). Meta-cation: Prescriptions for some ailing educational processes. Volumes I, II, & III.  Cupertino, CA: Meta Publications.

Grinder, Michael. (1989).  Righting the educational conveyor belt.  Portland, OR: Metamorphous Press. Inc.

Lloyd, Linda.  (1990).  Classroom magic: Amazing technology for teachers and home schoolers.  Portland, OR: Metamorphous.

Nagel, C. Van; Reese, Maryann; Reese, Edward; Siudzinski, Robert. (1985).  Mega-teaching and learning.  Portland, OR: Metamorphous.

Blackerby, Don A. (1996). Rediscover the joy of learning.  Okla. City: Success Skills, Inc.

Dilts, Robert B. (1994). Strategies of Genius, Volumes I, Ii, and III.  Capitola, CA: Meta Publications.

2.  Howard Gardner pioneered the Multiple Intellience model.

Gardner, Howard. (1983).  Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences.  NY: BasicBooks.

Gardner, Howard. (1983).  Multiple intelligences: The theory in practice. NY: BasicBooks.

3.  In Turtles all the way Down, John and Judith began unpacking Bateson’s understandings of logical levels and types and using them to model the structure of the genius state.  After discovering the Meta-States model, I was able to re-model and extend their work.  See Secrets of Personal Mastery.

Grinder, John; and Judith DeLozier. (1987).  Turtles all the way down: Prerequisites to personal genius.   Scotts Valley, CA: Grinder & Associates.

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

4.  Daniel Goleman popularized the current developments of Emotional Intelligence.

Goleman, Daniel. (1995).  Emotional intelligence.  New York: Bantam Books.

5.  The Movie Rewind pattern is also called Phobic Cure or Visual-Kinesthetic dissociation.  You can find the pattern in MovieMind (2002).

Other References

Hall, L. Michael; Bodenhamer, Bob G. (1999). Sub-Modalities Going meta. Clifton, CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

Hall, L. Michael. (2001).  Communication Magic.  Wales, UK: Crown House Publications.

Sternberg, Robert J. (1996).  Successful intelligence: How practical and creative intelligence dtermine success in life.  NY: Simon & Schuster.