I’M NOT YOUR GURU,
I JUST BEHAVE AS IF I AM

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
January 2017

I have a bias as I begin this review of the movie and I want to make it explicit as I begin.
Namely, I like Anthony Robbins. I always have. From the first time I read Unlimited Power, I
knew that he had a real gift of explaining difficult things. Then over the years, it became evident
that he was a genius in marketing, branding, and entertaining. Even to this day, I would guess
that Tony brings more people into the field of NLP than all of the rest of us combined. Years ago
I had a front row seat as I saw how Richard Bandler treated Tony that caused Tony to stop saying
the three letters, “NLP” in public. That’s should not have happened; Richard should have put an
mantle of honor on Tony.

So what follows here is not a criticism of Tony personally. Instead it is a critique of his new
movie and its unfortunate message. The title of the movie is, I’m Not Your Guru, and it is about
Robbins and his work, especially the “Date with Destiny” program. Now to his credit, Tony
begins the movie by saying that he is not a guru and doesn’t want to be. He also explains to the
unknown interviewer that he does not have “the answer” to people’s dilemmas and that there are
many paths. All of that is good and I congratulate him on saying:
“Who am I? I’m not your guru. Not here to fix you. You are not broken.”

But … and this is a big but, in spite of those disclaimers, there are many things in the movie that
say otherwise.1

In fact, there are several things that Robbins does that will, in effect, actually
encourage people to think of him as a guru. That’s unfortunate. So unless Tony changes these
things, people will continue thinking of him as a guru and he will have to continue dis-avowing
that he is not a guru. To behave in these aspects —aspects that a guru would act— actually
argues against all of one’s disclaimers to the contrary. In writing the following critical review of
the movie, my objective is to use some critical thinking to offer some balance to Tony.

Now the movie is very well edited and produced. It is engaging and it is emotional. The voice
over sections powerfully tie together some of the interview questions while showing Tony back
stage or the thousands of people in the audience or the beautiful scenes in Florida. Overall, it is
very well done. And much that Tony presents is excellent. But in terms of the title about not
being a guru, the movie does not demonstrate that at all. In fact, I think the movie actually
encourages people to think of him as a guru. I’m here using “guru” not in the Eastern sense of
“teacher” or “master,” but in the sense of being a cult leader, someone so superior that people
treat him as an enlightened being.

If you want to be a Guru —
If you want to be a guru, there are certain things that you would do that would elevate you in
people’s thinking. Here are some of them:

1) Give No Credit to others.
If you want to be a guru and give people the impression that you are the source of all of your
wisdom, insights, and “magic.” Then give no one an credit to anyone for your message. Quote
no one. Mention none of your studies or where you got your material. And this is exactly what
Anthony Robbins does in the movie for nearly two full hours. In fact, when he encourage people
to go out and “teach one,” he refers to his tools and the tools that he has given them.

From the movie, no observer would have any idea that Tony learned what he learned from
Richard Bandler, John Grinder, and Wyatt Woodsmall. No would know that his first book,
Unlimited Power (1985) is essentially the NLP Practitioner course. For two hours, there is in
fact not a single reference to NLP. It is as if he invented every process that he has learned and he
is the source of all of that wisdom. But that is not so! Doing that is not the way to demonstrate
that, “I am not your guru.” It is the opposite. Do that and people will quote you and you only.
What else are they to think?

Yet within the movie itself are many things that come from NLP. In the opening scene, for
example, Tony does a pattern interrupt when he interrupts a young man’s pattern of hating
himself and wanting to hit himself. Tony asked, “Why you hate yourself so much?” There’s a
moment of hesitation, then he does a humor interrupt, “Is it because of the red shoes?” He looks
down at his shoes. “Those are fucking red shoes.” The young man smiles. Tony warns, “Now
be careful, you’ll start to enjoy yourself.” Other patterns within the movie that come from NLP
are Change Personal History and Collapsing of Anchors. But in all of that, not a single word is
uttered to give credit to NLP as the source.

2) Speak in Absolute and Global Terms.
As a great entertainer with tremendous showmanship, Tony is bigger than life, his “show” is
bigger than life, and he speaks about things in that kind of grandiose way. This both makes him
effective and equally makes him ineffective. He speaks using extreme language
statements. Who else would title a book, Unlimited Power? But power is limited. And no one
but God has unlimited power! He calls upon people to be is totally passionate. He speaks about
his program, “The Ultimate Business Mastery” about adding massive pleasure, adding massive
pain, engaging in massive action plan.

All this encourages people to think about him as bigger than life and about being cut from a
different clothe than the rest of us. If you don’t want to be viewed as a guru, sprinkle in some
down-to-earth language. Quote your sources, temper your speech with tentative words, avoid
absolute terms that polarize life into two categories.

By speaking in these over-simplistic ways, using over-exaggerated terms, and failing to speak
with precision— he leaves the impression that he has absolute truth. On day five from the stage
he poses the question, “Who has not had a breakthrough at this point?” Then he asks a rhetoricalquestion, “How could you not have a breakthrough?” After letting the question sit in the air for a
moment, he gives the answer. It was the theme of the day, “If you’re in your head, your dead.”
So he announced, “You are in your head.” Apparently there’s no other possibility or alternative
answer. Things are black or white; either or. There’s no middle.

Speaking about the lack of precision, he also uses the F-word frequently and commented later
that it is his way of breaking patterns and shaking people up by using outrageous words. He
shouts from the stage, “I’m fucking unstoppable.”

The advice he gives sounds right, but the problem is that it is so general that it doesn’t take any
context or constraints into account. When Sienna, a 19-year old girl, stands and says she has a
problem with her diet, he asks a series of questions and eventually she says that she’s looking for
love. Tony asks whether it was dad or mom that she didn’t get the love that she wanted— a
presupposition that he does not own as his, but presents as “the truth.” It was dad. He
announces, “She loves him, she just hates it that she loves him so much.” A little later he
announces, “As much as you hate what he does, he hates himself more.” Is he psychic? She
nods, so he must be psychic! Or maybe it is just over-generalized statements that could be true
of anyone, of everyone. “What if you called him and blame him for all these things. … You also
need to blame him for all the good too. Give credit for what’s great about you.”

From the stage he talks about problems and announces, “Your biggest problem is that you think
you shouldn’t have them!” He talks about the problems he had with his mother and that it made
him “the man that I am proud to be today.” So that seals the deal: problems are good. Of course,
what’s lacking is any precision about what kind of problems are we talking about.

3) Be a Fantastic Faith Healer.
Watching this movie reminded me of many of the old televangelists of the 1970s and 1980s, Oral
Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, and others. Crowds in the thousands, loud gospel music, charismatic
faith leader encountering a person who suffers desperately, commanding devils to flee, the person
falling back, swooning, God be praised! Even the music in the movie reminded me of the music
in those big events. And the movie ends with dimmed lights and Tony doing a hypnotic
induction to the music of Amazing Grace. Is this “The Church of Tony?”

Tony did that at the beginning with Matyas, a suicidal young man from Berlin, and then later
with Dawn, a young woman from Brazil who sold all of her furniture to come to the training as
her last hope. On Day three he said, “Raise your hand if you’re really fucked up! Someone who
is suicidal.” It was Dawn, the young 26-year old woman, who was still suffering from sexual
traumas from having grown up in the Children of God cult.

But the problem with the movie is that the suicide issue is treated as if it is solved once and for
all by an experience with Tony, and that’s it. Actually, I was surprised at these parts of the movie
because for years problems with suicides have plagued Tony. Once in Germany three people
who had attended his program committed suicide afterwards, it also happened in Australia and
other places. The over-emotional and over-intense program (which used to go to two and threein the morning) put a real strain on people already wounded by life and frail in terms of their ego-strength.

Like faith healers, the movie presents dramatic and intense “confrontations” that Tony has with
the people in the audience. He calls his “interventions” or “demonstrations.” He style is to go
out and find someone in the audience and interact with them in a way that seems incredibly
“personal,” and yet it is only superficially so. No one could “coach” or do a therapy intervention
in the way he talks and interacts with people. Well, unless you have 2,,500 people watching
you! Yet people respond quickly and dramatically! Why? Probably because they are on stage
with three thousand people watching! No wonder they are so responsive.

When he dealt with Dawn who raised her hand about thinking about suicide, afterwards he
explained that the solution “just came through me.” He explained that his own difficult
childhood set him up so his mission now is to save others from a horrible childhood.

4) Set Up Subtle Audience Response Rituals.
To “work the crowd” Tony has several processes that are both exciting and at the same time
subtly persuasive and maybe even manipulative. He repeatedly presents something and then
asks, “Who agrees with me? … Say Yes!” And with that comes a chorus of yeses. It sounds
obvious and innocent. Yet it actually taps into some of the power of group dynamics. Just
imagine hearing three-thousand people shouting “Yes!” Even if you didn’t say yes, you just
heard a whole auditorium exploding with “Yes!” repeatedly, that ritual will put you into a yesset. And the yes-set creates a subtle influence that predisposes a person to agree and value and to
avoid thinking it through.

Similarly when he gets people saying “I.” “How many are for that? Say ‘I’!” “Who gets
that? Say ‘I!’” “Who knows what I’m talking about? Say ‘I!’” The sound of “I” as a chorus in
an auditorium echoing around encourages people to take ownership of it and personalize
whatever was said or presented. Effective? Yes. Manipulative? I think we have to say yes to
that as well.

5) Always Make Everything Positive and Upbeat.
The entire “I’m not your Guru” movie is not a documentary although from the beginning of the
film it seems to suggest that. “This is the first time Robbins has allowed outside cameras to fully
document the six-day event.” Yet the film asks no hard questions, and it doesn’t present any
skepticism about anything. While there’s no indication what the Joe Berlinger Film is, it strikes
me as a video production company that Tony hired to create the “Date with Destiny” Video to
sell the program. In the end, everything is positive and upbeat. There’s no failures, no
downside, no “let the buyer beware.” There are no constraints or concerns presented. This is
good if you want to be a guru. It is counter-productive if you do not want to be a guru.

After challenging one young woman about whether she is getting what she wants from the
relationship. She shook her head no. He then ask her in front of the thousands to get her
boyfriend on the phone. When she let him know her dissatisfaction; the call did not end well.
He hung up on her. In a voice-over, the interviewer asked Tony, “Are you ever concerned about
giving the wrong piece of advice?” He says that he watches their body and what their body “tellshim is right.” “It’s true because her whole nervous system responds.” “I’m looking for what’s
real.” In this, he answers the question, not directly but indirectly: “I never give wrong advice.”!
At the end of the film in the credits, however, we learn Hali and her boyfriend have decided to
stay together. So, he was wrong. Hmmmm.

Conclusion and recommendations
The movie I Am Not Your Guru is a very entertaining film, well-crafted, and highlights the “Date
with Destiny” seminar. It will probably be great as a promotion for selling that seminar. It is
also a self-promotional marketing film and not a documentary movie and not from an objective
third-party perspective.

Most importantly, in terms of the title, it does not demonstrate that Tony Robbins does not want
to be your guru. In fact, due to the things mentioned, what it shows is precisely what would be
recommended to a person who wants to be seen as a guru. Now if Tony Robbins is serious
about not being seen as a guru, here’s what I recommend that he do.

-Quote sources, give credit to NLP for the original source of his skills. Invite people to
read or consult sources outside of himself.
-Temper the language patterns by using more precise language and less hypnotic language
patterns.
-Present cautions to the audience and to the people he works with letting them know that
he is not a psychologist, does not have therapeutic training, and that if they are suicidal
they should seek professional assistance.
-Temper the anchors, temper the use of the reverberating “Yeses!” and “Say ‘I’.”
-Present some non-dramatic conversations and/or interventions so to convey the idea that
change doesn’t require big dramatic instantaneous transformations.
-Co-train with other people on his staff so that it is not all about him.
-Mention the trainers that he has in the room with him and the “staff” so that everything is
not about him.

References:
1. In NLP the “command negation” paradoxically encourages the very thing that one is attempting to
negate. “Don’t think of blue.” So with “I am not your guru” it operates as a command negation, putting
into one’s mind “I am your guru.”

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

In his two books on Six Blind Elephants, Steve Andreas announces that it is 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. So far, so good, but then he uses these distinctions to mostly rephrase NLP. What we call sensory awareness of the VAK, he calls “scope.” Then for the higher level frames, the logical levels, and the meta-states, he calls them “category.”

What does that mean? It means that when you read Six Blind Elephants, you are reading about logical levels or meta-states and the meta-stating process. Yet the author does not acknowledge this nor does he seem to be even very much aware of it. Yet it is the meta-stating process that is presented over and over in the books.

Now a meta-state 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 (scope) 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 that I do when I speak about meta-states even if he has yet to acknowledge such. While this is obvious over and over in the book, you would never know it from reading these books.

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 [e.g., 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,” puts the primary state of “solving a problem” into one of these four categories. 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 has been a part of the NLP Meta-States Model since 1994 when it was recognized by the International Association of NLP Trainers. What Andreas seems to not know is that when you meta-state, you set up a new category.

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, italics added)

Did Andreas just say that a cognitive qualifier “refers to an emotional … state?” That’s amazing! Yet that is as close as he will admit that categorizing is the same as meta-stating. The cognitive qualifiers are at a higher level and “refer to an emotional state.” And that is how I have defined a meta-state. Though Andreas has sadly not noticed it before (years and years of Anchor Point and NLP World articles about Meta-States) this is precisely part of the description of a meta-state—a higher state about a lower state.

“Cognitive qualifiers direct your mind to think of an experience in a way that is specified by the kind of qualifier used.” (II, p. 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 also 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. (II, p. 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 and redirects our focus. Content wise, I think we are saying the same thing although we are using different words and drawing different conclusions.

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. I began doing that in 1996.

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!” (II, p. 108)

His fifth chapter, Self-Reference deals with Circularity.

“Self-reference inevitably occurs whenever we think about ourselves and how our minds work.” (II, p. 111)

Ah, here we again have a meta-state. 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.” (II, p. 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?’” (II, p. 116)

Now Andreas writes as if this is a brand new discovery. Actually, it was— back in 1994—12 years earlier! In fact, in 1995 I put together a book on negative meta-states (“dragons”) like worrying about worrying (anxiety) and I described the looping and downward spiraling when one brings a negative state against oneself.

“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.” (II, p. 125)

From the first edition of Meta-States (1995), I described paradoxes as a result of meta-stating. When you deliberately do what you typically experience as a spontaneous symptom you have a counter-intuitive way to interrupt the escalating loop which usually results in reducing the symptoms. Why is this? Because, as Andreas notes, it reverses the direction of the escalating loop (II, p. 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.” (II, p. 128)

In Meta-States, I also noted the meta-state structure in Virginia Satir’s question, “How do you feel about feeling depressed?” I quoted this in the book, showed how that this is a meta-stating process which Richard Bandler and John Grinder missed. Now 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. … 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.” . . . 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?” (II, p. 130)

Interesting enough, that is exactly what we have been doing in Meta-States for more than a decade. It offers an excellent way to gain control over a negative spiraling state. When we use this process in Meta-States, we acknowledge that it is the dynamic of multi-ordinality that Alfred Korzybski identified and described (Science and Sanity, 1933, pp. 440-1).

“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.” (II, p. 131)

“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.” (II, p. 150)

(“‘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.” (II, p. 157)

When George Bernard Shaw wrote, “I’m an atheist, and I thank God for it.” he put his identity (being an “atheist”) within the frame of “things to thank-God for.”

Andreas’ Basic Mistake
About self-reference Steve Andreas goes wrong from the beginning when he attempts to define self-reference. What he presents is not only simply wrong, but he forgets a back NLP principle and Meta-Model distinction, namely, The Lost Performative. His fallacious definition is this: “A category can be shown to include itself as a member.”

Now Andreas does admit that this goes against such intellectual giants as Bertrand Russell and Gregory Bateson. “I realize that this violates Bertrand Russell’s famous ‘Theory of Types.’” (II, p. 113). Yet even that doesn’t stop him. He wants to define self-reference as always involving a word or idea that “is both the categorizer and an example of the category” (II, p. 111).

“‘I respect you,’ is both a categorization of the relationship as respectful, and also an example of one of the behaviors described by the word ‘respect.’” (II, p. 111)

It is here that Andreas violated the Meta-Model distinction of Lost Performative. After all, who is doing the categorizing here? He says this “is both a categorization and … an example”—in other words, an identification. He writes as if it “is” that way and no human being is involved in making it so, which of course, is non-sense. He says “the sentence refers to itself.” Well, I’m sorry Steve, but sentences don’t do anything, a person uses a sentence to refer to things.

“When a statement refers to itself by including itself in a more general category of events, the statement must also be an absolute statement…” (II, pp. 114-115)

This is called the Lost Performative because someone is mapping out an understanding and the speaker has left out the performer of the map. Later he regains his sanity when he tells a story of a young woman and her mother. As he speaks about “how she categorizes,” he comments, “Her statement could have been a description that in her mind did not include itself.” (II, p. 171). Yes, of course! It is always a person who does the categorizing, the “sentence” is not the cause or source —the person is. Later Andreas writes something that he should equally apply to self-reference. If he had, he would not have made his error:

“Negation is either at a lower or higher logical level than existence, depending on how we think about it.” (II, p. 173, italics added)

To support this he declares that Bateson is also wrong (II, pp. 164,165). And once again he declares that “the statement categorizes.” “‘I love you’ categorizes the relationship at the same time that it is an example of the category of behaviors called ‘love.’” But that is not true. The truth is that it all depends on how we think about something. Do we include a category within the category? Or do we keep them separate? Here he creates confusion by making both category and member the same. The category of cats is not a cat, it is a category— a conceptual framework for talking about cats. And Steve knows this.

“… the name of the category is different from the group of experiences named…” (II, p. 113)

The problem is his invention of “heritability” which is the non-sense that he perpetuates.

“Whenever a category can be shown to include itself as a member, the criteria for the category apply not only to the members of the category, but also to the category itself, by the property of heritability. I realize this violates Bertrand Russell’s famous ‘Theory of Types.’” (II, p.113)

We see his lack of critical thinking when he thereafter declares this:

“If I say,’Ideas are insubstantial,’ that statement is also an idea, so it applies to itself, and is therefore insubstantial.”

But “that statement is an idea, so it applies to itself…” is his categorizing it as such. It does not have to be so categorize. I can treat the category, “Insubstantial ideas” as different from the ideas that I put into that category. “Insubstantial ideas” is a name. This is where Andreas goes wrong. Human beings are the persons who are doing the referring and categorizing. We can’t blame the sentences! That’s why we have to ask the person, “Are you making a distinction between class and member of the class? Are you applying the classification as a member of itself?”

If a person is doing that, then that statement from that person is self-referential and then many of the things Andreas writes about applies. But it is not the case that it always is that way. “I always say stupid things.” Ask, is that a stupid thing that you have said? “I never learn anything!” How did you learn that? Yes, self-reference statements do create paradox and when they do, two logical levels are confused: class and member of class. That’s the whole point from Russell and Bateson.

Conclusion
In the books Blind Elephants, Steve Andreas has renamed basic NLP realities using “scope” and “category.” From there he has offered new insights on various subjective experiences— much of it highly valuable and practical. For that I acknowledge Steve and his many contributions. Yet because Andreas has apparently not read extensively in the field of NLP, and doesn’t seem willing to know study the models I’ve introduced, specifically the Meta-States Model, he does not seem to know that his term and use of “category” corresponds with a meta-state, that is, a meta-level experience. In criticizing Robert Dilts and myself about logical levels, and mis-representing what both of us have said and written, he fights a Straw Man, does a wonderful job of devastating the Straw Man, but of course, doesn’t even address the real issue.

In Blind Elephants there are meta-states and meta-stating processes everywhere. But don’t ask Steve Andreas about that, he seems oblivious to that fact. I have attempted to point that out in these two articles. My wish and hope is that Steve will re-consider his position, read with an open mind, and not read to confirm his current beliefs.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., psychologist, author, and modeler with over 25 modeling projects, founder of Neuro-Semantics, developer of the Meta-States Model, and other models and patterns in NLP.

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.

During the past year I engaged in an extended discussion with Steve Andreas about the term meta. You can read that discussion on either the Neuro-Semantic website or Andreas’ website. It’s all there for your pursual. You will probably noticed that in the discussion, we both seemed to talk past each other and as a result we did not come to a meeting of minds. And while I pretty much anticipated that, I really do not understand why we could not get on the same page. Steve claims that I did not answer his questions. In my view, I fully answered his questions. I feel that he did not really seek to understand the multiple meanings that are entailed in the term meta.

In reflecting on this, I suspect that a possible reason is that some people simply do not see the wonder and the “magic” of meta is that they do not recognize that the term meta is both a multi-ordinal term and a systems term that requires the acceptance of numerous system principles.

To explain this, I will first describe multi-ordinality and then the “magic” of meta within a system and as a systems dynamic. That will then allow me to specify how linearly thinking is the problem in preventing a person from seeing the richness of the term meta.

Multi-Ordinality
Alfred Korzybski describe terms that have an overgeneralized meaning and whose meaning changes according to its level. He termed these infinite-valued terms multi-ordinal. This means that at all of its levels (“multi-”) the term is reflexive—it can be used on itself. You can fear fear. You can love love. Linguists say that such terms are polysemous, that is, “marked by multiplicity of meanings.” Korzybski writes (Science and Sanity, 1933/ 1994):

“‘Mankind, science, mathematics, man, education, ethics, politics, religion, sanity, insanity, iron, wood, apple, object, etc.’ We use them not as one-valued terms for constants of some sort, but as terms with inherently infinite-valued or variable referents.” (pp. 138–9, 433)

Korzybski argued that his Theory of Multi-Ordinality and Reflexivity solved the problems created when we confuse map and territory. They fail to distinguish the levels of abstraction (logical levels). For this reason I added multi-ordinality to the extended Meta- Model (Communication Magic, 2001).

“A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. … If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must be considered only as maps. A word is not the object it represents; and languages exhibit also this peculiar self-reflexiveness, that we can analyse languages by linguistic means. This self-reflexiveness of languages introduces serious complexities, which can only be solved by the theory of multi-ordinality. The disregard of these complexities is tragically disastrous in daily life and science.” (p. 58, italics added)

The term meta has multiple meanings precisely because it is a multi-ordinal term. Can you go meta (step back to a higher perspective) to the process of meta (stepping back)? Yes, of course and you can do that level upon level. Yet if you are using linear thinking to understand this, you will not and cannot understand this. Korzybski stated that the “Theory of Multi-Ordinality” (i.e., General Semantics) addresses map/territory confusion. The linguistic distinction of multi-ordinality explains why any word used multi-ordinally means something different at every level. And that’s why we have to ask, “At what level are you using that term?”

Multi-ordinality means that the term takes on a different meaning at each ordinal level (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.). That’s why we have to ask, “At what level are you using the term?” So fear at the first level refers to something “out there” in the territory that is dangerous. But can you fear your state of fear? What is fear2 of fear1? We could say that the second-level of fear (fear2) is paranoia. Could you fear3 your fear-of-fear?1

The term meta at the first level simply means “above, beyond, or about.” Context then determines what is put at a higher level to the first level. You can have an emotion about an emotion; a thought about a thought. When you talk about the way you talk, your language is meta-language. When you use a metaphor to make a comparison, you are meta-stating with that metaphor. A metaphor is literally meta and phorein (to bring, to carry over). As you create a metaphor, you bring one image, thought, idea, reference, etc. to another so that it becomes the frame which formats a structure for the first. When you do this, you think about one thing in terms of another. Andreas uses the word “scope” for the primary level and “category” for the meta-level (Six Blind Elephants, I, p. 26)

The Strangeness of Systems “Magic”
When you put one state in a meta-relationship to another, you are likely to create which seems like magic. This “magic” is not literal, it rather describes an effect— how meta-relationship can strike us as magical because the result is often surprising, unexpected, and amazing. Here is the meta-stating process whereby one element interacts with another element and out of the mixture, something new and different and unexpected arises. Since a gestalt refers to something that is more than and different from the sum of the parts, multiple meta-stating gives rise to gestalt states.

What this means is that if you add up all of the parts, elements, or components together, you cannot explain the resulting experience. What we call “learning” becomes a very different experience when you bring joy to learning. “Joyful learning”— here the quality of the learning changed, but the experience itself hardly seems like learning at all. It seems like fun. People in the meta-state of joyful learning seem to be very happy and passionate. Looking at them and evaluating what they are experiencing, you could say all sort sof things such as—they are “in the zone,” they are in a state of pleasure, they are just enjoying themselves, etc. Yes, you could also put “joyful learning” as one member of the class of “learning” as Steve does. Yet that does not deny or prevent “learning” within the category of “joy.”

This is the way it is with systems. In systems, when various components interact with other components, new emergent properties arise that cannot be explained by adding the elements together. A new quality arises. Bring respect, calmness, and kindness to your primary state of anger— “I’m angry because you snub me and didn’t give me a referral” and you have a very different experience. Calm respectfully kind anger is hardly felt or experienced as “anger” at all by the one receiving it. The person giving it is firm but the calmness and kindness gives it an unique quality as the respect tempers the person’s words and confrontation so that it is quite acceptable. It doesn’t seem like anger, it seems that the person is simply being direct and open. Andreas’ mindset seems to make the “anger” category his primary referent than “going meta” to that category.

Consider the person who has forbidden himself from feeling anger because he considers that it means being “out-of-control.” Here we have multiple levels. (Believing anger means out-of-control) (I forbid myself) from (experiencing anger). So when anger is experienced, because it is forbidden, that taboo could create one of several different gestalts— inability to recognize anger, blindness to one’s anger, anger transmuting into stress (or frustration or fear or some other emotion). If you calibrate to that person’s state, would you even recognize that he is angry? Maybe not.

Consider the person who hates selling because to him it means “taking advantage of people for monetary gain.” What is the primary state? Presenting a product. Suppose it is the state of wanting to present or offer a product, a product he believes “is good value for money,” and “useful.” But the belief frame “selling takes advantage of people,” which the person hates, now holds him back. What is the feeling? The person feels stuck. The person feels conflicted inside. “I know it is a good product, but I don’t want to be aggressive or controlling.” The gestalt state here is being stuck. This emerges from the inter-relationship between the thinking-feeling components in the person’s mind. Yes, “hating selling” can be treated as a member of the class of anger (Andreas’ position). We can also see “selling” in the higher category of “hate” (my position). It is not an either/or choice. Both are legitimate.

In Neuro-Semantics, we talk about this layering of multiple elements (the meta-stating process) as texturing the state’s quality. How do you want your learning state textured? How do you want your loving state textured? If the quality of your life depends on the quality of your state, then the quality of your state depends on the quality of your meta-state. The state that you put at a meta level to your first state — qualifies it, textures it, and sets up the “magic” of the emergence of new properties. This is the point that Andreas has not (or will not) concede.

Consider the primary state of acting sequentially in a step-by-step way (the procedure meta-program). Let’s call that—being “disciplined” because the person is following a procedure. Now ask, “What do you think and/or feel about being disciplined?” (i.e., acting sequentially). Imagine that a person says, “I think that I’m losing my spontaneity and that I have no freedom.” That now becomes the higher category. What will be the effect of that belief (a category and meta level state) about the primary state? Probably stuck and unable to act. “I can’t do that.” If we again ask for an explanation, she might say, “without freedom I have less opportunities and won’t grow, I’ll be dying inside.”

This is another example of tabooing a primary state. The person stops herself from “acting sequentially, one step after another” because at the meta level category she attributes the meaning of having no spontaneity, choice, freedom, growth, etc. The meaning at these meta-levels over-loads the primary state (the scope) and shuts the person down.

“Magic,” in the sense of something being surprising, unexpected, and amazing, arises from the emergent properties (qualities) when we bring one or more thoughts or feelings to another. It is the interplay of these elements that systemically give rise to experiences that can’t be explain by mere addition.

When a gestalt occurs from combining multiple elements what happens is that we cannot anticipate the results. Add commitment to a goal, responsibility and passion to the primary state of fear and out of the mixture will sometimes come “courage.” Courage, as the gestalt of those components, is something “more than” and “different from” adding those elements together. A reductionistic analysis of “courage” will not find those pieces or how they intermingle. This is the “magic” (the wonder and surprise) of creating a gestalt of multiple meta-level components.

Consider making a mistake. At the primary level, this is something we all do on a daily basis. But “making a mistake” does not stand alone. You think and feel something about it. But what? What category do you put it in? Do you (fear) (making a mistake)? Do you (judge yourself as a person) for (making a mistake)? Those are different states/ categories. And they are radically from (learning) from (making a mistake). What if you bring (appreciation) (learning) (wondrous curiosity) and (playfulness) to (making a mistake)? What gestalt experience would that generate?

Part of the “magic” of meta-stating various resourceful elements to a primary state consists of the surprise and wonder of the emergent properties and their qualities. What if you were (fascinated) and (joyful) about (embarrassment)? You might experience something like the outrageous physical humor that Jim Carey is known for. What if you had (gracious) and (playful) (persistence)?

All of this suggests a process that we use with the Meta-States Model. We write various “states” on pieces of paper and then pick up 4 or 5 of them and try them on in our imagination. What would (outrageous) (optimism) and (passion) along with (joyful exaggeration) do for a trainer? Could that turn out a Anthony Robbins?

Take any primary state experience — whether you focus on behavior, emotion, or thought— and then playfully layer on top of it various resourceful states and consider what could arise as an emergent property.

• (Accepting) (loving) (gentle) compassion.
• (Relaxed) (dedicated) (persistent) engagement.
• (Thoughtful) (calmness) (proactive) decision-making.

When you “go meta” to the next higher level and layer on yet another state of thinking-feeling, you then put a twist on the primary experience because you are putting it into a higher category. It textures that experience. It adds another quality to it. The mixture of multiple resources sets up a systemic complexity that operates as a catalyst for a new and unpredictable emergent property.

When you “go meta” you are doing what Ken Wilbur described as “transcending and including.” It is not either you are transcending or you are including, you are doing both simultaneously. Yes you transcend from the primary level to a meta-level and you are including that primary experience inside of a new meta-level that becomes its frame. This generates all sorts of new possibilities.

The Problem is Linear Thinking
If meta is a multi-ordinal and systems term, then what stops full appreciation of it is linear thinking. And surprisingly this is a very common problem for many in the field of NLP. This, in spite of the fact that there were many system influences in the founding of NLP (Satir Family Systems, Perls Gestalt, Korzybski’s General Semantics as a non-Aristotelian system, Bateson’s cybernetic systems, etc.).

When you have have a complex adaptive system that involves large number of parts (elements, components) and which interact with each other, then you have a kaleidoscopic array of simultaneous non-linear interactions. Given this, the sum is not a simple sum of the behavior of the parts. And why? Because as the elements interact and as the aggregate behavior of the whole occurs, all of these are fed back to the individual components. What in linear thinking is viewed as the effect then becomes the next level cause. And around and around it goes.

The key then lies in the interfaces that occur when one meta-level or phenomenon interacts with another. The following comes from Meta-States (2012) and is included in the training manual.

1) Reduce painful primary states: Calm about anger.
2) Intensify or magnify primary states: Worry about worry, anxious about anxiety.
3) Exaggerate and distort states: turn psychological energies against oneself: fear of anger: anger at one’s fear.
4) Negate or neutralize a state: In doubt about doubt, I feel more sure.
5) Interrupt states: Humorous about serious, intentionally panicking.
6) Confuse States: Ridiculous about serious.
7) Contradict levels to create paradox: hence “paradoxical intention,” the “be spontaneous now” paradox. Try really hard to relax, “never say never”
8) Dissociate from strong feelings: observing a remembered trauma.
9) Seed a new process to create response potential: courage to have courage, playful uncertainty.
10) Grab Attention: appreciative about anger, lovingly gentle about anger.
11) Entrance or hypnotize: Rebel against thinking about just how comfortable you can feel if you don’t close your eyes before you’re ready to relax deeper than you ever have before, now. I wonder if you’re going to fail to succeed at not going into trance at exactly your own speed or whether you won’t.
12) Generate gestalt states: Suppress excitement—>anxiety.
13) Jar consciousness for humor: An accomplished liar, flexible compulsiveness.
14) Qualify, temper, texture an experiences: Joyful learning, ruthless compassion.
15) Solidify a atate: Believe or value in X, take pride in X.
16) Loosen states: Doubt X, question X, be playful about X.

Summary
The meta process is a very dynamic one. Further, if used in an open system, then it never reaches an end-point, it never achieves its goals and “arrives,” it keep evolving, growing, and developing— becomes increasingly complex. This is why many do not see the dynamic nature of meta and why it takes on new properties and meanings at different levels.

• At the primary level, meta just means “above, beyond, or about.”
• Meta then establishes a relationships that is hierarchical as it establishes levels.
• As meta is used in relationship to something else, it takes on the meaning of “including and transcending
• ” which speaks of a system of inter-related components.
• As a system and systemic in nature, meta enables various emergent properties to emerge that cannot be explained by adding them together. It is non-linear, non-additive.

Do I use the term meta in several different ways as Steve Andreas suggests? Yes I do! That’s because the term is multi-ordinal and systemic. That’s also why and how the Meta-States Model can help us model complex, long-term system experiences.

Post Script
Interesting enough, Steve Andreas, quoting his wife Connirae’s work in Core Transformation, actually describes how the meta-stating process works. He uses the word “category” where I use “meta-state.” After starting with a primary level limitation, you ask—

“‘Having this outcome (X), what do you want, through having X, that’s even more important?’ This question is asked repeatedly, each time substituting the previous outcome, creating a series of outcomes in a hierarchy of importance. Each successive outcome is a more general category of experience, with increasingly larger scope and importance.” (2006, Vol. I, p. 89)

Then he says, “the description usually falls into one of several categories: ‘being,’ ‘inner peace,’ ‘love,’ ‘Okness,’ or ‘oneness.’” These vague terms are meta-states and/or meta-level understandings or beliefs.

References:
Polysemy refers to a word which has many different meanings. Mentioned in Six Blind Elephants, I, p. 59.

Review of Steve Andreas’s
Ongoing Misunderstandings of Meta-States

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Written 2006, updated 2018

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 criticizing and arguing against it!

“I admit to being dizzy and confused. What on earth could it mean…?” Steve Andreas (Six Blind Elephants, 2006, p. 116)

His Straw Man Fallacy Argument
At first, I hoped he would provide a solid critique wherein he might point out some weakness or some area that needs more refinement. But no. What he argued against, and critiqued, was only a “straw man” presentation of the Meta-States Model. So I felt disappointed in his criticism. It reads more like Don Juan fighting vigorously against the windmills because he imagined that they were knights. Against the straw man that he created I could have given him even more arguments. I would have equally disputed what he argued against 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 could find that on the Neuro-Semantic website if he so chose. There’s plenty of articles there, free articles, 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 wrote his review before he did his research? Not exactly professional.

In his book he quotes me, “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. It makes for an interesting, yet very inadequate critique. 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. Andreas did not do this.

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, but psycho-logical beings. When it comes to the way we categorize things (since Andreas’ book is about categories and categorization (most of which is a pretty good description of how meta-states work), in human experiencing and meaning-making through thinking-and-feeling, we can categorize just about anything as a member of any category.

Playfully Serious
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). Really!

Yet is it that? That’s the question. What if we thought about the state and quality of being serious (which Steve seems to be well practiced in) 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 (or meta-state) seriousness. I know it’s not logical, but what if we did it anyway? What if we did that just for the fun of it?

Steve does not even consider this possibility. He seems to only have one direction for sending his brain and that is in the direction of smaller and smaller categories. So for him, “playful” is a sub-category. And yes a person can perceive it that way. Yet there are other ways to perceive it. That is not the only choice for how to perceive it or frame 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. Doing this would reduce the scope (extent) of seriousness making it a smaller thing to playfulness (which would be the larger category). Simultaneously it would extend the scope of playfulness, making playful the bigger thing.

Blinded by the Flawed Sub-Modality Model
Reading Blind Elephants makes me think that Steve has been completely blinded by the old sub-modality model. (Actually there’s a number of NLP people blinded by it.) The old so-called “sub-modality” model thought that because sub is in the title of sub-modalities that the features and variables that are called “sub” are “smaller”and “finer” distinctions. Description has been treated as territory. If we use that name, 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! This could be his chemistry background getting in his way. Steve Andreas has “atoms” and “molecules” on his mind and so sees things via the chemistry model. [“If we think of a scope as an ‘atom’ of meaning, a category is a simple ‘molecule’ composed of a group of scopes.” I, p. 237.]

On the Disliking of Words
Andreas also does not like lots of words. He states that “state” is “an ambiguous term” (I, p. 203). He does not like “reframing” and he seems to especially not like “meta” (and meta-position) because he thinks it is too vague. His solution? Get rid of these words!

“The easiest solution is to simply not use these terms at all.” (I, p. 154)

That’s right. If you don’t understand something, if you don’t like the way someone else is using a term, kill it! Murder it in its sleep! 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 about it is pure fiction. It is certainly not what I have written about a meta-states, 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.” (I, p. 188)

Hmmmm. 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 the book (I, p. 189), he writes, “What is important is the quality or appropriateness of the resource state to the problem” Hmmm. If he had read what I wrote, he would have recognized that as the process of meta-stating. Bringing a vague and general “resource state” of quality or appropriateness to the problem state? That is precisely what we do in Meta-States.

This is the elephant’s blindness (Steve’s), he is meta-stating and does not even know it!
“‘Meta-stating’ applies one poorly defined state to another, compounding the ambiguity and confusion in the term ‘state.’” (I, 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 (Accessing Personal Genius, APG) 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.

Categorizing — also Known as Meta-Stating
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 definitions of category and scope, and involves our psycho-logics which given what he wrote, he does 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.

[By the way, I still have a standing invitation also to 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.” (I, p. x)

Actually, meta-stating involves setting a context about some other experience. You can meta-state a statement as meaning either criticism or compliment. You can bring the state of criticism or compliment to your first state of receiving those words. In doing so, you 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 critical thinking, we call that the Straw Man Fallacy.

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. Steve writes this:

“Soon after learning about cognitive qualifiers, I had a depressed client who began almost every sentence with ‘sadly,’ or ‘regrettably.’ [Say Steve, 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.” (I, p. 271)

To explain how the higher frame governs the lower, Andreas invents a word, “inheritability” (I, p. 267). Well, of course. You meta-stated him with new modifying states —happiness and fortune. This means that 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, a category, and it thereby 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 fully entailed in the Meta-States Model.

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, 1997/2005). 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 convoluted reasoning. After all, who has ever said that the meta-program of preferences is a control hierarchy so that those items that are most important govern those that are less? I have not (e.g., Figuring Out People, 1997/2007), and I don’t know anyone who has. This seems to be another straw man argument that Andreas then effectively demolishes. He did a good job except that he wasted his time on something that I also don’t agree with!

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, he 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 applies to me, it surely applies to him as well. 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?

Summary
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 to accurately describe it. He does not. Actually, he doesn’t have a clue about what it is or how it works. Yet on the other hand, he actually describes the meta-stating process when he talks about establishing a new and higher category.”

Response to Michael Hall, THE FIRST NEURO-LOGICAL LEVELS, Meta Reflections 2011 – #25, July 4, 2011

This is a response to Michael Hall’s Meta Reflection 2011 #25, The First Neuro-Logical Levels sent out on the Neurons egroup of Neuro-Semantics.  In this response, I will use Wilber’s Four Quadrants Model to understand the relationship between Dilts’Neuro-Logical Levels Model, Bateson’s Levels of Learning, and Michael Hall’s Matix Model.

The Four Quadrants model of Ken Wilber is the ultimate meta view of reality.   It is a major part of Ken Wilber’s system of integral theory and it is a useful tool for directing nuances in developing sound epistemology. In that the Four Quadrants distinguish four mutually exclusive perspectives it sheds light on four systems of knowing. This paper investigates the Neuro-Logical Levels model of Robert Dilts by seeing the model through the spectrum of the Four Quadrants. This analysis will provide an understanding of how patterns that utilize Neuro-Logical Levels can add value to the coaching process.

In the mid 80’s I was introduced to what was at that time called “The Logical Levels.  After very little of my own research I pointed out to Tad James that “The Logical Levels” he attributed to Gregory Bateson was not the same as the model presented in my NLP training.  He responded that the model presented was an adaptation of Bateson’s model by Robert Dilts.  I accepted that explanation with reservations at the time.  I did like the model and used it to understand different levels of my experience.  It was an intuitively rewarding experience.

Many years later I had a chance to talk to Robert Dilts about the Neuro-Logical Levels.   He acknowledged the difficulties that I pointed out in the model and directed me topage 315 of From Coach to Awakener.  On this page in the appendix Dilts points out the relationship of Bateson’s learning levels to the Neuro-Logical Levels.  He basically sees the learning levels as a kind of intermediary between the Neuro-Logical Levels.  Hence environment to behaviour is mediated with learning 0 or associative learning.  Behaviour to competency is mediated by learning I or operant learning.  As a rat runs a maze he becomes competent at that maze.  Strategic learning/level II mediates competencies to values. Level III learning is revolutionary change that makes changes to the system and mediates between values and identity in Dilts’ model.  Finally mediating between identity and spirituality is learning IV which has to do with systems of systems.  All this seems very arguable to me.

My biggest reservation to the Neuro-Logical Levels was its association with Bertrand Russel’s logical type theory.  It seemed to me that Bateson’s model had a structure of a hierarchy of logical types butNeuro-Logical Levels did not meet the necessary criteria. For example just as individual cells are at a different logical level than tissue Bateson delineates operant learning at a different level than associative learning. On the other hand we have the Neuro-Logical Level of identity which Michael Hall suggests is made up of beliefs and values about our self. When we change our identity we change our beliefs and values about self.  If we looked at identity strictly from this perspective it would follow that identity then is not a logical level.  Identity is only a set of beliefs and values. However as Dilts is associating identity to learning III and Learning IV he is making a distinction of identity in terms of the total system of self.  Hence with that distinction in mind he is able to make the logical level claim in the strict sense that Bateson used it.  The total self system is higher order and inclusive of the value and belief system parts.

The Neuro-Logical Levels model is a very popular model used in all kinds of cultural and personal intervention strategies.  One of the reasons for its popularity is that it fits an intuitive need for breaking down the complexity of the changes we can make in our personal and cultural constructed realities.   It also corresponds to the English lexicon as used to describe large C coaching activities.  This correspondence is precisely the content of Dilts’ book From Coach to Awakener.  According to the book someone who works strictly at the environment level we consider to be a guide, a custodian or a care giver.  The individual who is concerned primarily with behaviour we refer to in English as a small c coach.  Someone whose concern is the replication of competencies we call a teacher or trainer.  When we are involved in an individual’s value orientation we might be considered to be their mentor.  When we are concerned with the individual as a whole we could be considered their sponsor.  The word spouse comes from the same Latin root as sponsor. Finally Dilts designates the role of Awakener for the individual responsible for spiritual transformation.  Many successful transformation exercises have been constructed with this model. Although as Michael Hall points out there is no precise thematic theme that links the levels together.  There is a general order of change understanding that is very intuitively attractive.

When I was first introduced the Matrix model at an CANLP conference in Toronto  I was challenged to accept the matrix model over the Neuro-Logical Levels model.  I recognized that the Matrix model did have a thematic consistency lacking in Dilts.  I had to subdue my angst because I was doing a workshop on integrating Ken Wilber’s Quadrants with the Neuro-Logical Levels model.   While I could see the attractiveness of Michael’s Matrix Model I was not willing to abandon the Neuro-Logical Levels model right away.  Both models seemed to offer value in different contexts.  The key for me to understanding the value of both models was to understand the models in terms of Ken Wilber’s Quadrants.

Wyatt Woodsmall describes Wilber’s Four Quadrants as four distinct realities that make up the cosmos.  They are also described as perspectives on reality.  In the 20th century there was a good deal of scholarly discussion stressing the importance of our subjective experience over the grandiose importance placed on objective reality by positivistic science.  Our personal subjective experience is true and real in a way that cannot be explained or understood by objective science.  In like manner there is a trueness of our external reality that cannot be reduced to our subjective experience.  Wilber extends this dichotomy to four ways of realness.  He further posits  an inter-subjective or cultural reality and a systemic reality neither of which can be reduced to any of the other three realities.   I am including a small diagram that applies the quadrants to the NLP TEA model..

The workshop I presented at the CANLP conference used The TEA(Thinking, Emotion, Action)   Model above as a basis to understanding the relationship of Neuro-Logical Levels to the Four Quadrants.   The Matrix Model (Hall, 2002) proposes a model that clearly fits into the upper left subjective quadrant.  This is why it is so thematically consistent.  As Children we develop our matrix of the self, first.  It is entirely in the subjective quadrant.  Following this we develop the realm of doing and the realm of doing is in its entirety the subjective meaning about doing (power) as an individual.   In fact everything about all the other content matrixes:  time, other and the world and the process matrix meaning and intention exist in the realm of subjective experience. Although these matrices can be distinguished as developmental categories it is not clear to me that they are logical types in the sense proposed by Bertrand Russel and Gregory Bateson.   The content matrices are all composed of the same stuff and do not represent different levels of abstraction. Maybe there is an exclusive relationship between thematic consistency and logical levels.

The Neuro-Logical Levels model is better compared to the TEA model than the matrix model.  The Neuro-Logical Levels and the TEA model as models span the internal external divide of the Four Quadrants.   The TEA model is useful first because it makes distinctions between internal and external behaviour.  The further breakdown of the internal quadrants into thinking and emotional is generally an acceptable approach to understanding the contents of mind because most people make general distinctions between thinking and emotions.  However in cognitive linguistics there is a general recognition that you can not separate thought from emotion as they are kind of bundled together.  Meta-states reflect this growing understanding that states include both cognition and emotion.  Meaning has a feeling attached to it and becomes embodied in emotion as it moves from known to belief to a decision.   The TEA model makes  a clear distinction between  internal and external quadrants but the internal distinctions it makes between thought and emotion is a bit fuzzy. Though and emotion are logical types.  Noteworthy is that Michael Hall refers to emotions and thoughts as our internal powers and suggest external powers of speech and action that correspond to action in the TEA model. Overall the model is useful in that it relates internal process to external processes.  It makes apparent that changing internal processes will create different action.

The Neuro-Logical Levels in contrast do not fit neatly in any specific quadrant.  Even some of the levels do not relate to a specific quadrant but span them.   Only the environment/context level   is entirely observable and a product of the exterior quadrants.   The behaviour and competency levels in addition to having aspects that are observable and thus external also have an internal aspect that is experienced subjectively and cannot be observed by others. They are different from “action” in the TEA model because they include the internal aspect of the behaviour in addition to what is observable.   Behaviour and competency consist of factors that can be observed and tested but also factors that are internal and not easily and accurately measured. The remaining levels are not observable and exist entirely in the internal quadrants.   The values and beliefs level together with the identity level are entirely the product of our interiority.  They cannot be measured and quantified to a universal standard. Below is the diagram I created to relate the Neuro-Logical Levels to the Four Quadrants.

Contrary to the TEA model Neuro-Logical Levels imply a natural hierarchy; moving from the context/environment which is most observable to the deep internal identity which is least accessible to observation.   When Dilts compares the Neuro-Logical Levels to Bateson’s logical levels of learning he is assuming the natural hierarchy intrinsic in Bateson’s leaning levels.  The adage sometimes attributed to Einstein that you cannot solve a problem at the same level that it was created is adopted by this model to provide a diagnosis of the neurological level that change has to take place to resolve a problem.  Once the problem is identified as occurring at one level the problem is resolved by working to bring about change in the neurological level of next order of complexity.  Dilts offers a convincing hierarchy of levels of coaching that correspond to the Neuro-Logical Levels:  Guide corresponds to environment i.e. finding a location.  A behavioural problem needs Coach to develop a competency.  Competency problems need a teacher to teach the values to work at the competency.  A problem concerning ones values and beliefs requires a mentor to develop ones identity.  Identity problems associated with addiction require a sponsor to give you the security to get beyond the self, to the trans-personal.  This consistency of  Neuro-Logical Levels with corresponding  labels for coaching relationships that reflect a hierarchy of change complexity validates the usefulness of this schema as it is a linguistic artefact at least in English culture.

Michael Hall points out that the Neuro-Logical Levels which I have indicated are situated in the external quadrants are not logical levels of experience.  In the Matrix Model “Behaviour, capability, and environment are all facets of a primary state.” Likewise the Neuro-Logical Levels of identity and values and beliefs are among 100 logical levels of experience.  He also points out that one can have beliefs about identity, indicating that these levels are fluid and not hierarchical.   This is very true when looking at these phenomena from a specific perspective in theNeuro-Logical Levels upper left subjective quadrant.

Ken Wilber makes an additional distinction of perspectives when talking about the Four Quadrants.   According to Wilber you can view each quadrant of experience from the outside-in or the inside-out.  Each of these perspectives will result in different observations of stages, thematically consistent levels or holons. (Integral Spirituality, p.36)  The Matrix model describes subjective experience from the inside-out.  From this perspective you notice the different levels and intensities of levels of subjective experience. Think of a concept like smoking is unhealthy and notice how the quality of that concept changes when you know that smoking is unhealthy. Then notice how it changes when you believe that smoking is unhealthy and finally notice what happens when you decide that smoking is unhealthy.  When viewing from the inside-out one is observing one’s own experience and drawing conclusions based on that subjective experience.  This has been termed a phenomenological approach.

On the other hand subjective experience can be viewed from the outside-in.  This is more of a scientific approach where experience is seen objectively from the outside.  We start with general experiences and move to the particular. Hence I can observe that my subjective experience is composed of beliefs and values and at a deeper level there is my identity.  I can see from this perspective that changing my identity is more profound than changing my beliefs and values.  This perspective of our subjective experience has been termed structuralism.    This outside-in approach can be used to span the objective with the subjective quadrants as is done with the Neuro-Logical Levels to create a structural hierarchy of increasingly complex change moving from observable manipulations of the environment to the subjective depth of changing identity.

Michael Hall when speaking about collaboration in the new Human Potential Movement proposed that when speaking about different viewpoints it is often better to use the contraction “and” than “but” to describe reality.  In most cases including and integrating different perspectives in a more comprehensive map of reality provides a more robust understanding than pitting one perspective against another.  The Matrix Model and the Neuro-logical levels model are different perspectives of the same reality.  Both models have generated an alignment pattern that is used to integrate the contents of the mind to create more effective change in the individual.  A person is not very effective if different levels of his being are fighting against each other. The Neuro-Logical level alignment pattern from Robert Dilts and the meta alignment pattern from Michael Hall are both useful patterns coming at the same reality from two different perspectives.  In practice they are both effective and more relevant than the other depending on the context.  They are two tools in the tool chest of the NLP practitioner.

Michael Hall says in a recent reflectionin  Neurons“we have a complete system in Neuro-Semantic NLP, we don’t need to be eclectic.”  Application of Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrant model to understanding NLP is not a case of being eclectic in the same way that using the Enneagram in conjunction with NLP is eclectic.  In A Sourcebook of MagicHalladmits that the Domain of NLP is Subjective experience.The Eneagram also works on subjective experience hence they are two approaches to the same domain.  On the other hand the Four Quadrants model out frames the systematic treatment of subjective experienceby Neuro-Semantic NLP. The subjective domain that is explained by NLP comprises only one of Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrants.  The Four Quadrants are useful in understanding how NLP relates to a larger body of technical and philosophical understanding that is contained three other quadrants.  I have shown how out framing NLP in this fashion can lead to understanding that transcends apparent contradictions between Michael Hall and Robert Dilts and their discussion of logical levels. Seeing NLP through the lens of the Four Quadrants provides us with a greater facility to use the “and” conjunction to consistently incorporate other perspectives into a body of practices from which we can select the best tool for a given context.
Art Blomme is a social entrepreneur, an Integral theorist/practitioner and a Neuro-Semantic NLP and trainer.  He is engaged in introducing integral and NLP tools to empower grassroots social and political movements to create a sustainable alternative. http://integralshift.ca

NLP is a code—it is a code about human subjectivity. It is a code about how our mind-and-body system structures our experiences, emotions, and skills. As a code, it enables us to understand and work with the dynamic structure of experience. Over the years there has been the classical of NLP and then the New Code of NLP. And now there is the Newest Code. This is a description of that Newest Code which offers new distinctions to enrich and enhance NLP and to take it to new levels of effectiveness as a meta-discipline that models the structure of human experience.

The First Code of NLP, according to Judith DeLozier, was the original coding that Richard Bandler and John Grinder created along with their original practice group of associates in Santa Cruz (Dilts, DeLozier, Cameron-Bandler, Gordon, Pucelic, Lewis, McClendon, Gilligan, etc.). What was that First Code? It was the basic NLP model that arose from modeling the communication expertise of Perls, Satir, and Erickson and so it centrally is the Meta-Model, the Representation systems, sub-modalities, strategies, the separation of intentions and behaviors, and the techniques that followed (six-step reframing, change personal history, anchoring, phobia cure, etc.)^.1

If you have seen the movie of The Secret or read the book by the same title, then you have heard about the so-called “law of attraction,” the power of thoughts being magnetic, goals being magical, and life destiny being totally within your control. All sounds pretty promising, eh? Yet how accurate and how realistic are these things? What do you think? Is there any over-selling here? Any over-promising that life will under-deliver on later? If you have an open mind and are willing to explore things, then come with us.

Strengths of The Secret

To begin, we want to mention the obvious strengths of the movie itself. In terms of production and quality, The Secret is a very well done film especially for developing a conceptual idea. It is engaging, moving, fascinating, and emotional. It is not a lecture, but a dramatic presentation with images that jump and move and dance and keep you looking and listening. So from the standpoint of an engaging piece of celluloid, it is very well done.

And from the point of view of content, there are lots of good points in the movie. What we appreciate most is the inspiration for taking charge of one’s life, giving up the idea of being a victim and using your response-powers to become increasingly responsible. There’s a strong emphasis also on abundance — that there are resources and assets and that we need to develop the ability to recognize them and activate them. The world is not a place of scarcity and lack, but truly one of abundance.

There’s a good emphasis also on taking a positive attitude to things — thinking positively, believing in the best, appreciating and honoring what’s good and positive. And there are a few steps at various places in the movie about what to do to get involved and take some actions in life. Several of the speakers acknowledge the importance of starting somewhere, doing something, and letting every little step count.

Weaknesses of The Secret

In spite of these strengths, there are numerous things that counter-balance them that are weaknesses to the film. So while the movie makes some valuable contributions, there are some parts of The Secret that are really weak and that need some bolstering up in order to make it respectable and intelligible. The two weakest facets is how the author and the screenplay writer over-simplified things often to the point of ridiculousness. And they did it by using frames of universality and either-or thinking. And the problem with this is that these are the language patterns of small children, not adults.

The Secret’s Over-Simplistic Approach

In terms of universality, the movie is rife with statements that …

• “. . . everything you experience in your life, you attracted into your life by your thoughts.”
• “It always works, every time, with every person.”
• “Whatever you focus on is what you are creating, you are bringing it into your life. No exceptions.”

Ah yes, if life were so simple! If one simple statement could adequately summarize and explain reality. But alas, it is not so simple. There are many other factors, variables, and conditions that also need to be considered. If everything in your life, you attracted— then there can be no influence from others, from society, from nature, from political reality, from economic reality, etc. In fact, if everything is there solely because you thought it, then we have just discovered God; you are God. But, of course, the truth is that you are not that important or powerful. You are a fallible human being, not God.

The other childhood thinking pattern is the either-or pattern. And again, the movie is rife with them. It is shockingly used to think about emotions — there are “good” emotions and there are “bad” emotions and what the “bad” emotions mean is one thing, and only one thing, namely, you are out of alignment with your self. “The better you feel, the more aligned you will be.” It’s that simple. So the goal then becomes to not experience negative emotions. Either you are aligned with yourself and have good feelings or you are out-of-alignment with self and have negative feelings.

This goes against all that we have been learning for years in the Emotional Intelligence research and how emotions, both the negative and the positive, work effectively and productively within us. Just because an emotion is unpleasant or “negative” does not make it bad. These provide important and significant information regarding the relationship between what we have mapped out in our minds about life and what we actually experience in the territory. But The Secret would have you believe that the negative emotions should be avoided and ignored. In psychology such denial, repression, etc. are defense mechanisms of a weak and fragile sense of self, and not a healthy expression of full humanness.

“The way you feel is everything” The Secret asserts. So only the “good” emotions count, somehow the bad emotions, like the brakes in your car, are evil and must be ignored and avoided. If you focus on them, you make them grow, and that’s bad.

The Secrets Missing in The Secret

So though there are some good things in this movie, The Secret misses and leaves out many facets of the true secret of life. What secrets are missing in The Secret?

1) The Secret that Life is full of Systems.

Life is complex because it involves systems and systems-within-systems. In a child’s world, there are mostly simple choices between two things, either this or that. There’s no complexity. And there’s no systems. Yet it is systems like the mind-body-emotion system that creates complexity so that we have to think of multiple variables and those multiple variables operating at the same time and so influencing each other in multiple ways.

To think more systemically, we have to hold many variables in mind at the same time. And we have to transcend either-or thinking and grow up into both-and thinking. This means being able to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty so that we are not driven to over-simplistic answers. For adults in the real world, there are very few things that “always” work in a specific way. There are almost always exceptions. There are always other influencing factors, contributing causes, and differentiating contexts.

Yes we may attract things into our lives by our thoughts, emotions, behaviors, etc. But so do other people. All of our early life from birth to twelve or so is mostly created not by our thoughts and intentions, but our parents, caregivers, ancestors, culture, geography, and so on. A child born with cancer in its body did not attract that into its life! And what about the six million people slaughtered under Hitler; did they attract that into their lives? Is that what empowered Hitler to talk over a government and country? Don’t believe it for a moment.
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 these territories so we can understand what we have to deal with and then we have to develop sufficient knowledge and skills to cope with such.

2) The Secret of Levels of Awareness.

It would be such a wonderfully simple world if we only had one level of thought so that we could think one thing at a time. But that’s just not the kind of brain we have. We have self-reflexive consciousness which enables us to think about our thinking. We can have feelings about our feelings. And after our second thought or feeling about the first, we can have a third, and a fourth. This never-ending process is what we explore in Meta-States.
Self-reflexive consciousness means that we have layers upon layers of thoughts, feelings, awarenesses, beliefs, decisions, understandings, and so on. And again, this makes for complexity in the mind-body system. And because the higher levels govern and modulate the lower levels, this explains why the personal power of congruency and integrity also requires an alignment of the levels.

This means we can feel different emotions, good ones and bad ones at different levels. That’s why it is possible for someone to feel “good” about being depressed if one gets attention and sympathy. Or why one could feel “bad” about being ‘arrogant” and “selfish” and that would be a good thing. One can feel “good” about feeling superior and putting someone down and yet that would be a bad thing for personality and relationships. The either-or category of good and bad emotions is far, far too simplistic for adult life in the real world.

3) The Secret of Thinking and Reasoning at Different Levels.

Here’s another secret of human life — we think and reason and come to understand and map things at different levels. At one level we use classical science to figure things out, figure out Newtonian physics or Quantum physics, that’s what Einstein did. But even Einstein had to take his car to someone who knew Newtonian physics about mass, volume, and speed of a macro-machine like a car. A quantum physicist could not help him, or you, with a car. His thinking and understanding does not apply to that dimension.

Description and metaphor are two very different levels of reality. So the metaphor in the movie and book is that of magnetic attraction. In The Secret, they say, “Thoughts are magnetic.” Well, 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 (this quotation comes from the book):

• “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)

These over-simplistic explanations create actually 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 all of 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 beings, 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 asserting that thought alone absolutely creates 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 living such sad and pathetic lives.

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 about this area acknowledges such.

4) The Secret of the Distinction between Map and Territory.

The term “reality” is not a monolithic term referring to a singular thing. What is real depends on the dimension in which we 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 does so by assuming that whatever they map is real or is going to be real. This is a delusion. 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.

I’ll let you in on a significant secret of success: 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.

5) The Secret of Distinguishing Levels

In the book, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (2006) she quotes John Assaraf who says, “A thought has a frequency, we can measure a thought.” (p. 9). This same non-sense is also in the movie. Well, that’s probably a sexy thing to say, 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. “Thought” itself has no frequency. The overall functioning of the brain has frequencies, that’s a brain function. Within those operations of the brain, we experience what we call “thoughts.” Apparently, the author Assaraf has also forgotten that the idea of “frequency” applied to thought is a metaphor — a metaphor!

— not an empirical description.

6) The Secret of How to Effectively Negate.

Part of the over-simplistic and either-or thinking presented in the movie suggested that there is no way to actually negate a thought, memory, emotion, etc. The simplistic idea was to give no thought or energy to what you don’t want, only to what you do want. Yet human consciousness is designed so that we can think of what we don’t want, don’t believe, and don’t value. Are we therefore to pretend that this is not part of our kind of consciousness? Are we to ignore, or worse, or we to frame this facet of human awareness (negation) as “bad?”
Those in The Secret say, “You can’t say no and make it go away.” You can’t be anti-drugs, antiwar, anti-terrorism. “Always be pro things, never against.”

Ah, if only life was that simple and simplistic! Now it is true that regarding “command negation,” if you command it, we have to first represent it in order to then negate it. That’s why at the simplest levels, “Don’t think of blue,” “Don’t imagine a monkey on my shoulder,” invites us to create images of the very thing we want to avoid!

But that’s just one kind of negation. In Sub-Modalities Going Meta (1999/ 2006) I wrote an entire chapter on 8 kinds of negations and presented the many kinds of negation which enable us to effectively negate things from our lives and minds. After all, is there anything that just won’t “process” or “let in” to your consciousness for you to consider? I bet there are. If someone said, “You are a Martian and have red skin,” would you give that any entrance, any consideration, any energy? I wouldn’t. It just doesn’t process. I negate it and walk away from it by framing it as irrelevant and non-sense. That makes it go away.

Or what about your ability to so much “make up your mind” that you can stubbornly refuse to accept something? Do you have that ability? Can you be stubborn? Can you be obstinately stubborn? Think about something that you stubbornly refuse. That’s a pretty strong and empowered state isn’t it? You can now use that to refuse, to negate something. “Child sacrifice as a burnt offering.” When I think about it, my mental and emotional boundaries come up so that I would not consider child sacrifice for a second. My values are strong enough about the preciousness of life that they immediately negate that idea. In fact, the more I think about it, the more my values, understandings, and beliefs grow to negate it.

Summary

We’re delighted that The Secret has started a thousand or ten-thousand new conversations around the world about the untapped powers of human beings. That’s good. But The Secret is not the secret. It is just the beginning of understanding human nature and psychology and there are many, many secrets not revealed or exposed in The Secret. In this the film over-sells itself and over-promises and dangerously raises expectations which life events can then crush leaving the person burnt and immunized against true self-actualization and personal empowerment. That’s the danger of over-simplification.

We have written The Missing Secrets in the Secret so that the conversations people have can be more reality-oriented, more healthy and balanced, and may invite people to use the innate powers for unleashing more and more of their potentials and actualizing their dreams.

Authors

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is a cognitive psychologist who has spent the last 13 years engaged in various modeling projects, from wealth creation, to leadership, coaching, and now self-actualization. Michael is a best selling author in the field of NLP and the founder of Neuro-Semantics.

References

1. In the Movie The Secret the key presenters are Bob Proctor, Bob Doyle, Joe Vitale, Michael Beckwith, Jack Canfield, David Schirmer, John Assaraf, James Arthur Ray, Esther Hicks, John Gray, John DeMartini, Lee Brower, Dennis Watley, Mike Dooley, Marci Shimoff Mira, Marie Diamond, Lisa Nichols, and some others.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Written Feb.2000, Updated 2004

Abstract:

Using the linguistic tools of NLP’s Meta-Model, I have explored the nature, claims, structure, and processes involved in the training and model called Design Human Engineering or DHE.  The conclusion I have come to is that DHE is simply an exciting, provocative, and creative application of basic NLP, it is also over-sold, dehumanizing, and machine-heavy.  It is not “the next step,” nor is it anything more or different from NLP—in spite of the claims made for it.

That DHE extends the use and application of NLP in terms of visualizations, music, “sub-modalities,” and trance work, there is not under question.  But that DHE has produce anything new and/or different from NLP in the past ten years, that is the issue.

In this review I have repeatedly asked, “If DHE has created anything new, then what is it?”  Every aspect and facet of DHE that we know about can be located in the NLP model that existed at the time of its creation(1975-1990).  That DHE has produced no specific patterns for achieving new outcomes or creating new directions for people—and that nobody is presenting anything that has arisen from the DHE model arises concern whether its theoretical foundations are sound.  The Ten Years of DHE (1990-2000) have not only produced nothing of value, but has depersonalized lots of people with the machine-heavy metaphors in the training.

Whether you agree or disagree with the following analysis and conclusions, I only ask that you read with an open mind.  If you can answer any of the tough questions raised here—I would be delighted to receive your data, documentation, and response.  This paper was originally three articles.

Part I:  In The Beginning, there was NLP

In the early 1990s, NLP co-founder, Richard Bandler, set out to initiate a new and advanced form of NLP that he called Design Human Engineering or DHE.  Having become fascinated by “sub-modalities” and also assuming that within this so-called “sub-strata” of distinctions he would discover “the difference that made a difference,” Bandler and associates moved from modeling to design engineering.   Richard explains  it using the metaphor of cyborg (as in the second film of the Terminator Movie series).

“Suppose,” he says, “you could design and put into your head any preferred program that you can imagine.  What are the possibilities?”

And that became the driving idea in DHE.  Yet, after ten years of conducting DHE workshops and experimenting with hallucinating control grids, globes, binoculars, x-ray glasses, lightning bolts, etc., and claiming super-human intelligence and feats (telepathy, remote viewing), and seeing no concrete demonstrations from the model, I think it now time to begin to ask some tough questions about DHE.  I now think it is time to explore the validity and legitimacy of this model.  I offer these as an NLP trainer and as someone who cares about the credibility of this field.

• Where are the new patterns that DHE has developed?
• Where is the book that presents the complete model with grounding in the sciences?
• How does DHE differ from what we already have in NLP?
• What are the elements and variables of the model that go beyond NLP?
• Where is any evidence or demonstration of validity of the model?
• If it’s as powerful, magical, wonderful as the advertising asserts, what about the “problems” of the practitioners?
• The Process of Demonstrating the Validity of a Model

In reviewing DHE, I well know all about the challenge of demonstrating the validity of a model.   I say that having personally been involved in the development of the model, Meta-States, the Matrix model, and the Axes of Change model.   Over the years, I have had to answer these kinds of questions about what I have been doing, how Meta-States function as a model properly, the basis of its validity, its grounding in the cognitive-behavioral sciences, and the patterns that have uniquely arisen from it.  Actually, answering these kind of tough questions has enabled me to continue to refine the model so that the products and processes that it has generated become even more useful and practical.

Accordingly, I think it appropriate now to ask the same of DHE.  After all, lots of people are asking these questions anyway.   My knowledge of DHE began with my trainings with Richard Bandler who was beginning to come up with the idea in the early 1990s.  He introduced the hallucinating of grids in my Trainers Training, as well in some of the materials that I worked with to create some books for Richard.  Since that time I worked through the exercises of DHE from the recordings of DHE programs in 1993, 1995, and 1997.  I also conferred with several Neuro-Semantic trainers who had been through the actual trainings multiple times.

In thinking about the process of exploring the validity of any model, I will first clarify what I mean by a model and the necessary factors that make up an operational model that a person can use to accomplish something.  This is important because if we claim that a set of ideas and patterns make up a “model,” this means that it provides us the structure whereby we can actually do things in the real world.

• What does it take to have a workable model?
• How does NLP work as a system?
• How does the Meta-States model work as a model and system?

Minimally every model involves four features:

1) Theory

2) elements

3) guidelines

4) patterns.

NLP has all of these features and in the following chart, you can see that we can describe Meta-States using these terms as well.  The following page comes from some of the Training Manuals that we use in Neuro-Semantics in presenting Meta-States (Accessing Personal Genius), modeling, etc

THE NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT FACTORS

COMPRISING A MODEL

The Exploration

Is DHE a full fledge Model?

With this brief overview of NLP and Meta-States as full-fledge models, let’s now apply the same to DHE.

1) Theory:

What ideas or hypothesis drives DHE?  Primarily just one as far as we can tell, namely,

“Forget modeling experts, let’s imagine the possibilities of human experience by starting from the assumption that we can invent programs like we would with a cyborg and simply install brand new possibilities and skills from scratch.”

One DHE fan said that NLP is based upon observations while DHE is based on calculations.  One observes experts in order to then models their skills, states, and strategies.  The other starts from scratch, hallucinates preferred experiences and skills and then calculates what that will be like.  From that grand idea (which I must admit, is a fascinating idea), Bandler and associates have been playfully exploring the possibilities.  This describes one of the strengths of DHE.  It encourages thinking that’s beyond the box.  It encourages new and expansive flexibility of the mind.  It fosters creativity.  It opens up new vistas for dreaming and imagining.

The strength of DHE is that it provides more playfulness and use of NLP techniques, patterns, and processes.  It takes the idea of “running your own brain” and creates contexts for doing more of that.  It reinforces the idea that “the map is not the territory,” and that inventiveness and innovation begins when we give place to our creative fantasies and passions.  This is good.   I know various people who have used these exercises and trainings to build a place in their head for “Life Designing.”  This enables them to use this to reinforce the sense that they are the Designer and that they can utilize all kinds of resources.

Are there any other ideas of hypotheses driving DHE?  You may find this amazing, but there are no other thematic ideas or premises that I know about.  Postulating inventing programs from scratch is the only governing idea in DHE.

Advertisements for DHE says that NLP focuses on outcomes, whereas DHE focuses on directions. Yet this dichotomy falsely assumes that there is nothing in NLP regarding the directionalizing of the brain, or the creation of a sense of direction.  But is that really true?  No.   That contradicts how Bandler himself described the Swish pattern in the book Using Your Brain for a Change.

In a recent website chat about DHE, one participant asked, “What’s the nature of DHE?”  A legitimate question.  Yet in response, the fan said, “DHE has no nature unto itself; it’s just another nominalization for building new things.”   So it’s a process for building new things?  What new things?  What has it built?  What can you do with DHE that we cannot do with NLP?

The fan went on to quote from Bandler, who is supposedly said “The territory is the map.”  Oh really?  Now that would be something.  Korzybski would call that the unsanity of using your nervous system as an animal uses his—confusing levels, confusing map and territory.  This would not be a good thing.

That we create things by using our ideas, thoughts, representations, creativity and then manifest our ideas into the world does not mean or equate that our mental “map” is the territory.  Truly, we can create maps that allow us to invent new things, do new things, but still what we do inside our heads differ from what we end up creating on the outside.

2) Elements and components

What is there in DHE that we don’t have in NLP?  Here we come upon a blank wall.  NLP already has “sub-modalities,” trance, positive hallucinations, using embedded commands, chunking up, etc. So what’s new?  What has been added?

Is “Paradoxical Cushioning” new?  What does that mean?  One fan described it by saying the following:

“Paradoxical cushioning is about where the strongest point is with the least resistance.  It’s where things intersect and are bound in the strongest way possible.  It’s just a concept that we use to discover the easiest way to lock things in neurologically…”

Now I would not give that speaker above a high grade for specificity or clarity of expression.  That is one of the most convoluted and vague statements I’ve read in a long time!   “The strongest point” of what?  “With the least resistance” to what?  What things “intersect?”  How “bound in the strongest way possible?”  That writer ought to restudy the Meta-Model to learn to write with some precision or get to our Prolific Writing Workshop!

I assume this refers to the process of taking an idea, feeling, state, or belief and installing it into a person’s way of thinking and feeling.  So “the strongest point” must refer to how to get the best leverage on the new idea or feeling that the rest of the person’s beliefs, values, and neuro-linguistic meta-frames do not reject or resist.  That sounds like the processes of alignment, checking objections, fitting into a hierarchy of values, etc.  Giving it a new name, even one that has to win a prize for sounding “rad” (Paradoxical Cushioning) doesn’t make its referent new.   We engage in this process in Meta-States by exploring 16 possible state-upon-state structures involving how mental frames interface with one another.  I think that perhaps we ought to do the same in Meta-States, invent new sensationally robust terms.

3) Guidelines and Principles

What guidelines direct and govern the use of the patterns in DHE that we don’t already have in NLP?  None that I can tell.  Just more of the same with a focus on hallucinating things in trance.  And it is this lack of specificity, lack of offering descriptions for how to use the so-called model that questions the very foundations of DHE.  After all, if a designer cannot offer specific ways to use a model, what are the followers to do?  How can they know or discern the legitimate versus illegitimate uses of the model?

4) Patterns or Human Technologies

What patterns for new skills and experiences has DHE invented that don’t already exist in NLP?  Where is the binocular pattern for improving eyesight to such an incredible degree that humans can see details a mile or two down the road that could only otherwise be achieved by a pair of binoculars?  Bandler has often claimed to be able to do that.  But where is the pattern?  Where is the evidence that he can do that or anyone else can do that?  Since the first review, Bandler himself became diabetic.  Where is the Diabetic Cure pattern?

“Control panels”—perhaps this offers something new and different to NLP.   But no, sorry; it does not.  That’s been around for a long time too.  Where?  In the process of introducing “sub-modalities” (Using Your Brain—for a Change, 1985), Bandler or Andreas put a picture of a guy with head-phones running a control panel to adjust his subjective experience (Chapter 2, page 25).  And that’s what I was doing in Trainers Training just prior to the invention of DHE.

Exploring the Claims of DHE

What do we actually have in the DHE exercises?  When we examine the exercises, we discover that we simply have NLP patterns that primarily engage in “sub-modality” play embedded in trance work.  Most of the exercises that we have seen, heard about, and experienced are very similar to those that Master Practitioners and Trainers experienced with Richard Bandler in the late 1980s.

• There’s lots of play with visual hallucinations (cross hairs, grids, globes, and the like).
• There’s lots of fun play with sounds, noises, music.
• There’s lots of kinesthetic fun: sliding anchors, flirting, intense tingling,
• And there’s lots of hypnosis.

In fact, most of DHE is just that—hypnotic inductions to try on and experiment with altered realities.  And without doubt, given Bandler’s style, that can be, and often is, a lot of fun.  I would consider that one of the strengths of DHE, and even recommend it for that.  It does enable participants to become more playful, to explore more, and to push away self-imposed limitations.  Using DHE people can create visual hallucinations, many pleasureful states, a sweet hypnotic voice, and much more.  Yet there are also lots of unfounded assumptions and unsubstantiated claims.

Unfounded Assumptions of DHE

There are numerous assumptions of DHE that are just simply unfounded.   Let me start with the one that I have done the most study on.  Namely, the assumption that the NLP and structure of experience story ends with “sub-modalities.”  In DHE, Richard Bandler has posited that everything occurs at the “sub-modality” level.  This fit the NLP mythology at the time about “sub-modalities.”  Then it was thought that as a “sub”-class of distinctions, “sub-modalities” operate on the VAK modalities (the Movies in our mind) like atoms and sub-molecular particles work on molecules.  At the time I bought the idea as well.

Since then many NLP trainers have called the “sub-modality” model into question.  In 1999, Dr. Bodenhamer and I published The Structure of Excellence: Exposing the Meta-Levels of “Sub-modalities” to put an end to the old mythology about “sub-modalities.” [This was revised and published as, “Sub-Modalities” Going Meta, 2004.]  Today I’m of the opinion that mis-direction in the search for the structure of subjective experience (the passion of NLP from the beginning) has been responsible for why so little has been developed in NLP since the late 1980s.

Why?   Because the mythology and over-emphasis on “sub-modalities” simply took us in the wrong direction.  Yet this continues to be the story and main focus in DHE.  The exercises and focus there gives up the modeling idea, and, running with the “sub”-molecular idea, seeks to design new states, experiences, and structures from scratch.  The DHE argument says, “Why model world-class experts when you can create your own cyborg and install new possibilities from the start?”

Yet the challenge I have put to the DHE trainers is this.  Name one structure that has been so designed, marketed, and is now available for replication in human minds?  There is none.  And that there are none shows the emptiness of the approach.  It just does not work.  Yet worse, it goes in the wrong direction.  It goes down, instead of up.  And it’s UP where you’ll find the magic of NLP and Meta-States and all of the models and patterns that have arisen from Meta-States.

The Truth about “Sub-modalities”

With The Structure of Excellence, we have demonstrated in many ways that there is no “sub” level.  What is there?  There are features, distinctions, and qualities that we call “sub-modalities” which are actually “meta” modalities.  The Meta-Modalities of your internal movie which are full of pictures, sounds, sensations, smells, and tastes are the Cinematic Features of the Movies which we can step back from and edit in as an editor of our movies.  See the book, MovieMind (2003) for a full description of this meta approach to these cinematic features or “sub-modalities.”

This explains how and why some “sub-modalities” have, from the beginning of NLP, also been classified as Meta-Programs.  How could they be both?

C   How could Associated/ Dissociated be a “sub-modality” in every representation system and a meta-program?

C   How could Global /Specific be both a Meta-Program and also the “sub-modality” of “Zoom in/ Zoom out?”

This does not make the qualities, properties, features, and distinctions that we call “sub-modalities” go away.  Not at all.  It rather enables us to appreciate them for what they are—meta-level structures (meta-modalities or cinematic features) that enable us to set frames using such “mental” and “cognitive” distinctions.  After all, every “sub-modality” classification is just that—a classification, and as such, not a thing or noun.  So it fails “the nominalization wheelbarrow test.”  “You can’t put location, intensity, distance, etc. in a wheelbarrow.”  These are concepts, hence, meta-level structures. [I could write a lot more about this, but have already in Sub-Modalities Going Meta and MovieMind.]

Unconscious Installation

Another troubling assumption in DHE is that via hypnotic trances, the DHE trainer can totally bypass your conscious mind and do straight-on installation at the unconscious level.  Actually, this is an old saw for Bandler.  From the beginning of NLP, he downplayed the conscious mind.  After all, it can only process seven plus or minus two chunks of information at a time (Miller, 1956).  So why bother with it?

Yet when it comes to the installation of high level concepts and principles into muscle, every expert in every field has to go through the learning process of apprenticing him or herself to the discipline and use the neurological mechanisms of repetition, rehearsal, and patterning of the muscles.  We do that with typing, skating, riding a bicycle, playing basketball or tennis, driving a car, piloting a plane.   The muscle memory that later results then has well trained intuitions.  We then attain the level of unconscious competence.

Where is the DHE pattern for totally bypassing this apprenticeship/ mastery process?

What principle or understanding from the neuro-sciences would explain this?

What pattern can teach a person typing without actual practice?

The DHE disrespect for the conscious mind shows up in the older Bandler Videos (NLP Comprehensive, 1987) when he describes the conscious mind as “a dickhead,” and in some current advertisement in the UK using that same terminology.  In so dis-respecting the conscious mind, and wanting to engage in the questionable process of “unconscious installation,” DHE has missed out on the entire domain of background knowledge.  But rejecting “theory,” “conscious understanding,” and working with the higher structures of mind, prevents one from truly identifying and installing the higher frames, the place where  “the difference that makes a difference” occurs.

You wouldn’t want to model a pilot only using NLP and DHE and then take over the controls.  Indeed, you may find all of the strategies for how to sit in the cockpit, look at the gauges, and move the steering mechanisms.  You may even elicit the pilot’s supporting beliefs and values.  But I’d recommend you ask about some of the pilot’s background knowledge. This is a meta-level or “logical level” that we create through the meta-stating process.  So in modeling we ask the pilot,

“What do you know about aerodynamics and the principles of piloting that are absolutely essential to flying?”

In addition, there are all kinds wild and totally unsubstantiated claims, from growing limbs, hallucinating binoculars and microscopes and being able to see a mile away or at the microscopic level, increasing IQ from 120 to 183, etc.

Some of these claims need no comment.  What do the IQ numbers for an adult mean anyway?  What does it mean when you know that the IQ number is derived by dividing one’s age and what one “should know” in a given school grade?  A 100 IQ means that what a person “should know” at age 10 or 18 corresponds to what “the average” person of that age “should know.”

So what does that mean for someone 40 or 55?   How would we calculate the IQ number for 63?  And we have not even brought up any of the raging controversy in the field where researchers and designers conceptualize and test for IQ, and the problems this “concept” of an “Intelligent Quotent” provides.  I would have thought that the NLP Trainer on the East Coast who put that one out would have known better.  Apparently not.  As for growing back limbs, I think we need to have the hospital and doctor who did the original amputation provide some documentation on that one.  As for the other claims—

NLP Trainer, Leo Angart, of NLP Asia Limited has been working for years on Restoring Natural Vision and has provided documentation and demonstration of his processes repeatedly, along with extensive research and writings.  But seeing a mile away would be spectacular and super-human and would make all of the TV magazines.  Who will step up and let 20/20 or Primetime interview them on that skill?

Challenging Questions for DHE

If DHE truly operates as a workable “model,” then as a model, it minimally needs to have four features:

1) A basic theory about human nature and how it works

2) A set of elements and variables,

3) Operational guidelines for how to use the theory, and

4) A set of patterns or technology.

Yet it seems that DHE does not have any of these things.  Or, if it does, neither Bandler nor anyone else will reveal them.   This enables us to ask the following searching questions:

• Where are the actual patterns or technology that has arisen from the model?
• What is the theory that governs the model and how does it different from NLP?
• What additional elements, components, factors, etc. does DHE have beyond NLP?
• In terms of use and applicability, if DHE is so powerful, what does it offer that extends and expands the basic human experience that is not addressed in NLP?

DHE Really Needs the Meta-Levels of Meta-States

One associate who attended many DHE trainings said the he used it to develop a set of hallucinated and imagined structures for sorting out various structures.  He created what he called a “mind zone.”  Why?  To set various controls whereby he could more readily get to his motivation, understandings, and skills.  But then, “Having learned Meta-States, I now realize that I’ve actually been meta-stating myself with these concepts and using various symbols, icons, and visualized structures to encode the meta-levels.”

Since we all think by referencing, and then represent our reference (the Movie that we play on the theater of our mind), we then use our representation as a frame of reference.  Eventually this habituates to become a frame of mind—mind operates at multiple levels of awareness.  Meta-States tracks and operationalizes how this works and provides lots of practical applications from the specific strategies for engineering higher levels of states of consciousness (resilience, proactivity, un-insultability, etc.) to the strategies for specific domains (wealth building, selling excellence, fitness, accelerated learning, etc.).  This describes the structure of our frames embedded within frames that make up our Matrix (see Frame Games, 2000 and The Matrix Model, 2003).

Meta-States explains how we actually use “sub-modalities” semantically and symbolically.  After all, you have to go meta to even detect “sub-modalities,” let alone play, shift, and alter them.  And yet, when you do, you can then use various sights, sounds, and sensations to stand for and do service for new expressions of consciousness.  This gives us insight into which “sub-modality” to use with whom (see The Structure of Excellence).

Meta-States chunks up as no other model does and articulates the mechanisms and processes by which we create the meta-representation of language and the Meta-Model, how we give birth to our Meta-Programs, and how all of the meta-phenomena (beliefs, values, understandings, decisions, identifications, etc.) are generated in the first place.

What DHE truly needs is to integrate the intensionalizing and extensionalizing processes in Meta-States so that it can reality test the things it seeks to invent and make them available in the see-hear-feel world.  DHE does great at intensionalizing—moving up into hallucinated visualizations. It seems to be lacking in extensionalizing.   Korzybski introduced these terms and invented numerous extensionalizing devices for bring the “ideas” in one’s head down into practical everyday world.  We do this with the Mind-to-Muscle pattern among other processes.

In this, the process of creating control panels and stationary storage devices are too static and unwieldy.  While I built some of these during my Trainers Training, they lasted for about one day after the training and they play no role in any presentation I have ever made.  I have repeated asked people trained in DHE to hallucinate a globe and impose it on me and name off my meta-programs.  They cannot.  It does not work.

Conclusion:  What Will Richard Say?

What will Richard Bandler say about this review.   When I first wrote it, I said, “That’s hard to say.  You’ll just have to ask him!  In fact, please do.”  Since then I discovered that he only got angry and cursed my name.  That sounds like a helpful response, one open to feedback, one ready to have his theories and processes tested!

Should you go to DHE?   Well, yes if you can find the trainings any longer.  I understand that Richard doesn’t do them any longer.  And if you do, go to enjoy the process and then afterwards review it to quality control it and to critically evaluate it.   That’s what I recommend for any training, including my own.   As you go, access your ferocious Puma state, feel compelled to get everything you can from the training, asking the trainers the tough questions we’ve raised here, and demand excellence.  Don’t settle for anything less.   Isn’t that the spirit NLP?  Isn’t that the passion that Richard and John initiated this field with?  Then go.  Ask.

But don’t be surprised or disappointed if you don’t receive the answers that you’d prefer.

If you want to really know how Meta-States can enrich, enhance, and empower your use of DHE, then come share the adventure of the next step in NLP, the Meta-States of Neuro-Semantics.   Discover the meta-level principles and mechanisms that actually govern submodalities and other hallucinated concepts.  We’ll look for you at one of our trainings.

Part II:   DHE Critique Follow-Up

EVALUATING THE EVALUATIONS OF THE EVALUATIONS

No evaluation is perfect.  And certainly my original analysis and critique of DHE was not.  I considered it only a beginning of a dialogue.  In the first week of presenting it, I received a great many responses and so thought I would use this format to respond to various statements and questions.  There were many questions asked and so I have taken this format for addressing those.  There were also some personal accusations and insults, to those I will not respond and hope that in doing so, I will raise the level of the discussion.  It’s not about any person, it’s about ideas and processes.

What is DHE, really?

One of the most surprising things that we found was that almost nobody even attempted to defend DHE as a model.  The majority of respondents forthrightly acknowledged that it is not, not in the scientific sense, and that it is more of “an experiment,” a “marketing tool,” an “exploration of the limits of NLP,” an “amplification tool of NLP.”

A few individuals questioned my definition of a model.  True enough, the simplest definition of a model is that it provides a pattern for how to do something.  In that sense, we could hear someone speak in a warm and seductive way and use that as “a model” for how to replicate that.  Yet that does not address the larger issue of a field or domain of knowledge like NLP, and it was in that sense that we used the term.

Several people fell back to the original Bandler and Grinder myth that “NLP is not a theory but a model.”  I have written some articles on modeling in Rapport (the ANLP magazine, London, England) about this myth and how that the epistemology and theoretical work of NLP was snuck into the model by using the NLP presuppositions.

How is that a “myth?”  It’s a myth because there are always presuppositions to everything.  Korzybski described them as “unspoken assumptions.”  Bandler and Grinder initiated NLP by downplaying the importance of theory and that served NLP very well in the beginning.  It enabled them to focus on “what works.”  But they had theories.  John brought the theories about language functioning and acquisition into NLP—the cognitive development of Chomsky in Transformational Grammar, the cognitive psychology of Miller, Galanter, and Pribram about the TOTE, the General Semantics of Korzybski, the gestalt of Perls, the systems of Satir and Bateson, etc.

The same respondent also questioned whether NLP falls into the cognitive science model and wondered about “constructionism.”  That NLP used Transformational Grammar, “the map is not the territory” (Korzybski), the research from the Bateson group, the ideas from Miller, et al. (who initiated the Cognitive Movement, 1956) all highlight the cognitive nature of NLP.  Psychology textbooks (as I noted in The Spirit of NLP, 1996) have been locating NLP there for a long time.  Richard Bolstad and others have documented this extensively in their research as well.

DHE “Bashing?”

Several respondents said that all I was doing  in the article was bashing DHE.  Yet the great majority didn’t think so.  Several key players in DHE, who asked us to keep their names and words confidential, said that they agreed with the focus and emphasis of the review and one said that we had not even “expressed the half of it.”  Many participants in DHE wrote and offered many other complaints about DHE.

• The whole notion of basing skill generation on hallucinations only encourages delusional behavior.
• It’s full of black magic
• The machine model is a “parts” model without an ecology check.

Questions

What does “extensionalizing” mean?

Bandler and Grinder referred to it briefly in The Structure of Magic.  It comes from Korzybski—his way of talking about meta-modeling.  It is richer than that though.  He means extending from mind (thought, concept, hallucination) down to the ground… to sensory based expressions.  When we said that DHE lacks extensionalizing into the everyday world, we referred to how it builds hallucinations of globes and girds and things, but is very weak on testing out the hallucinations in the real world.  Many DHE participants said the same thing.

Where did Dr. Hall get his sources, do his modeling, etc.?

Several wanted to know about the sources in my modeling projects.  I have made this common knowledge by documenting all for the sources for the selling excellence, wealth building, women in leadership, accelerated learning, defusing hotheads, business experts, entrepreneurs, coaching, etc. by providing extensive documentation in the training manuals for each of those areas.  For anyone interested, the training manuals provides all of that.

Who did Dr. Hall interview about DHE?

Over the past three years, I have asked not only DHE participants, but key trainers.  Most of the people did not want their names publicized and so we have respected those wishes.

Are you not just stealing from other people?

Of course.  Just as Richard and John “stole” from Virginia, Fritz, and Milton and created NLP, as the modeled the “three therapeutic wizards” and presented a model of how they did their word magic (The Structure of Magic, 1975), so I have modeled Korzybski, Bateson, and many others.  I also have published the sources to these things in many books and articles.  In the early 1990s I published a series of articles on the “Almost Inventors of NLP” —exploring how William James, Wundt, Adler, and many others presented so many facets of what we now call NLP.

One of the key researchers in the field of wealth building is Dr. Scrully Blotnick.  When I found his longitudinal studies on 1500 people, and his research of interviews in focus interviews with multi-millionaires, he set forth extensive data that was just waiting for someone to format using NLP structures of Meta-Programs, States, Meta-States, beliefs, strategies, etc.  Later, when I interviewed a couple multi-millionaires myself, I found that what Blotnick had created was far richer than I could re-produce if I interviewed 100 more individuals.  He and his team had the data, they just didn’t have it in the NLP formats that made it readily available for replication.

Why didn’t you name the DHE trainers or people that you referred to?

I chose to not do that because I have no intention to embarrass anyone or to fall into the trap of describing something in a personal way that someone could take it as a personal attack.  I was tempted to name the trainer who claimed to raise his IQ 50 points since he used that in his P.R. pieces, but thought better of it afterwards.

I did have one respondent get really nasty and obnoxious.   He personally attacked my character, and even my right to review DHE as a model.  About that kind of thing, I don’t think there’s any need to comment.  The article speaks for itself as does openness of critique for any model.  When I asked him if he even read the article, he said no.  He actually said he would not.  He claimed that the title of the article had offended him too much.  To that I responded, “Is this the kind of closed-minded, narrow, bigoted, fundamentalist, spirit of total curiosity and playfulness that DHE has installed in you?”  Touché!

Aren’t you just promoting your own model of Meta-States?

Well, yes.   Of course I think that the “logical levels” of thought and mind as articulated in the Meta-States model could and does provide balance and enrichment for DHE as it does for NLP.   I’ll detail that more in the next section.  Does this bias me in such a way that I can’t see the true value of DHE?  Well, that is certainly possible.  Yet does that make me so totally subjective that I can’t put aside my own preferences and look at something with some objectivity?   Not at all.  In NLP we start from the premise that it’s all subjective anyway, and that objectivity is always relative.

Having seen and experienced much value and benefit from NLP and the DHE version using trance and “sub-modalities,” I have no desire to “bash” it.  The same thing can be said for the series of articles that I published three years ago (1998) about “the downside of NLP” (NLP World, Anchor Point).  There I sought to ask tough questions and encourage a more professional use of our technology.

Isn’t there a difference between a model and a theory?

Yes, it’s the difference between someone following/ using a model and someone modeling.   John and Richard gave NLP a nice mind-line when they first said that, yet in reality, that’s all it was.  They also had a purpose for saying that “NLP is not a theory, but a model.”  They wanted to get away from the theorizing and focus on description.  That served them well.  It served NLP well … at that time.  Then some people focus the frame and thought that their statement was “real.”  From there it was a short step to the delusion that NLP has no theory.

Actually Bandler and Grinder snuck their theories into NLP but they did so under the guise of “NLP Presuppositions.”  It was there that they hide their own biases, understandings, epistemology, etc.  There they stuck the disciplines of Transformational Grammar, General Semantics, Cybernetics, Systems thinking, cognitive psychology, constructionism, etc.

Actually, every model has a theory.   Well, any model that’s more than just an example.  Extensive models that provide descriptions for how something works also covertly contains assumptions about what something is, how it works, why it works, what mechanisms make it work, and the guidelines for using it.  In fact, while a person can just follow the model and not have a clue as to why it works, for someone to extend the model and invent new uses, applications, and refinements—he or she has to understand the mechanisms, governing ideas (theories, hypothesis, etc.).  That’s what a modeler does.  A clinical just uses a model.

Where are you documentation for your modeling projects?

We have written about it in our descriptions of our specific modeling projections.  If you want to know who we modeled, how we used the modeling efforts and data of others, etc. about wealth building, the best documentation for that is in the Wealth Building Training Manual.  One of the things we have become known for is our full documentation and that in our books we constantly and always give full credit to our sources.

Isn’t is good enough to just do “what works?”  Why worry about theory?

True enough, for the practitioner, just doing what works is good enough.  Not so for the modeler.  A modeler needs to understand.  We have written about this extensively in NLP: Going Meta— Advanced Modeling Using Meta-Levels.  We have a series of articles on modeling now [2000] being published in Rapport (London).  We also present training in modeling using Meta-States (Advanced Neuro-Semantic modeling, Matrix modeling, and Cultural Modeling).

“Good enough” also has a built in limitation.  After all, things change.  People, events, circumstances, cultures, etc.  So what is “good enough” at one time, in one location, for one context, may become not good enough in other contexts.  What determines the difference?

NLP has not been very explicit about what to do when.  That’s why I put a chapter in The Source Book of Magic, Volume I on the very question of how does a person figure out what to do when.  Understanding the theoretical foundations, guidelines, principles, and governing mechanisms of a model provide these answers.  Without such theoretical understanding, a person just shoots in the dark.   So its a question of use.  Do you want to understand the mechanisms that make something work so that you can extend and refine the model?  Or do you just need to buy the end products of the modeling?

What have other DHE trainers said?

Interesting enough, some of the once most well-known DHE trainers actually agree with the critique and say that I didn’t go far enough.  Rex Sikes, who I met in both my original master Practitioner and Trainer courses and the first DHE Trainer in the USA said that it is based on too many mechanical metaphors and that from such it had a dehumanizing effect on him.

PART III:

DYNAMIC FACETS OF DHE

EMPOWERED & ENGULFED BY META-STATES

At the beginning of this paper on DHE, I set forth the results of examining DHE as a “model,” and found it wanting.  That led me to then set forth the following propositions:

• DHE is great stuff, exciting, and trance-laden, but ultimately is just more NLP.
• DHE does not really extend the NLP model because it adds nothing to the model.
• DHE does not even qualify as a full fledge model apart from NLP, having no additional elements or components, guidelines or processes, and no additional patterns.
• DHE needs the richness and power of the Meta-States of Neuro-Semantics to truly make it full and complete.

In this section I want to follow up on those propositions and to extend our comparative analysis between DHE and Meta-States.  The questions that we will be addressing here are as follows:

• Is there a relationship between DHE and Meta-States?
• How do the processes, mechanisms, and outcomes relate to each other?
• How can Meta-States enrich, empower, and engulf DHE?

A Brief Description of Meta-States

Without reproducing the half dozen books on Meta-States and the scores upon scores of articles, I will first briefly summarize Meta-States as a model and how it drives the field of Neuro-Semantics.  The new reader to his field can find introductions, extensive descriptions, scores of free techniques, and patterns on the website.

To understand Meta-States you have to recognize and understand the levels of mind.  I took this originally from Korzybski’s “levels of abstraction” which Bandler and Grinder used for the first levels.  What they missed from Korzybski was that the “infinite regress” (or progress) continues up the levels without end.  This means that we build up “thought” into a “logical level” or psycho-logical system as we frame thought upon thought.  Each level arises from the previous level.  Each higher level is about and above the previous level.  As Bateson built his levels of learning using the thread of “learning,” and Dilts built the levels of outcomes from “outcomes,” so this is built upon “thought.”

1) Thinking begins as mind  references some experience or event in the world, say being yelled at or complemented by a teacher.  This occurs outside of us and we refer to it via consciousness.  We notice.  We hear, we see, we feel, etc.

2) Next, we record our recordings.  We represent our reference.  We make an internal movie of it on the theater of our mind.  We create our internal thoughts by using our senses and so inside have a “sense” of the sights (pictures), sounds, sensations, smells, etc. of the experience.  In NLP we call this the VAK of our sensory systems or modalities.  We make an internal movie of the teacher saying words and gesturing.

3) Then we create linguistic symbols of our first level representations.  We use the meta-representational system of words, language, and higher level symbols.  We say words about our internal movie.  “The teacher raised her voice at me.”  “The teacher smiled and said I did a great job.”

4) Then we use more abstract words to label, classify and categorize our conceptual understanding of the experience.  “The teacher was mean to me.”  “The teacher make me feel like a million bucks.”

5) Then we bring even more abstract words to classify our classifications, and so we fill up our “mind” with additional concepts.  “I’m inadequate and will never amount to anything in school.”  “I’m love learning and know that I can succeed at whatever I do.”

6) And so on and on it goes, abstracting up the levels. “Thought” become more conceptual and layered with more and more “ideas,” “principles,” “beliefs,” “values,” “understandings,” etc.

A “thought” does not occur apart from “body” and “emotion.”  These three terms all refer to the same holistic dynamic, the brain-nervous system processing information.  As the brain processes information, it activates neuro-pathways, neuro-transmitters, messenger chemicals, etc. and so activates “the body.”   “Emotions” refer to the evaluative judgment made in the brain and the higher cortex areas about neurological processes, feelings, sensations, etc.  Together we have the mind-body-emotion system.

The holistic result is a state—a neuro-linguistic state of awareness.  When we experience one state in relationship to another state, we have a meta-state.  We fear our anger, we rejoice in our learning, we feel confident about our decision, etc.  State-upon-state structure utilizes the levels of thought and speak about how layer upon layer of thought, emotion, physiology textures or laminates our states of mind.  Each higher layer sets a higher frame of reference.  Each higher layer brings reflexive consciousness back onto itself.  This gives us the structure of all of the meta-level phenomena that we call by various terms: beliefs, values, understandings, expectations, intentions, decisions, memories, imaginations, etc.

We go up a level by asking meta-questions:

And what do you think or feel about that?

What does that mean to you?

Or we can flush out the higher level frames by asking,

What’s the quality of your state (i.e. confidence, anger, fear, joy, etc.)?

We can then set new levels by inviting a person to experience a state-upon-state structure.

And with that in mind, what do you think about X?

When you feel X (confidence) fully and complete about your ability to handle your anger, what do you experience?

How Meta-States Enriches DHE

Given the predominant role that the mechanism of reflexivity plays in human states of consciousness and in language itself, we take both NLP and DHE to the next level (conceptually and literally) when we use the levels of thought or mind model of Meta-States.  This describes how Meta-States has been revitalizing and “eating” up NLP in the past six years.  Instead of each of the so-called “logical levels” operating as separate and disconnected domains of NLP, we now have a meta-domain (Meta-States) that ties it all together and provides a unifying theory and process for the entire field.  (I have detailed this more fully in The Matrix Model, 2003).

Meta-States flushes out:

The nature of “beliefs” as “confirmed thoughts” about other thoughts

The nature of “values” as “thoughts of importance” about other thoughts

“Decisions” as “chosen thoughts”

“Understandings” as a domain of “knowledge thoughts” about an area of study: aero-dynamics, chemistry, physics, gestalt psychology, mathematics, etc.

“Belief systems” as “confirmed thoughts” about other “confirmed thoughts”

“Expectations” as “anticipated thoughts” about our thoughts of the future

And so on.  In Meta-States, Meta-Coaching and Matrix trainings, we now have a list of 26 sets of meta-questions that utilize these “logical level” terms.

Meta-State Insight about “Sub-modalities”

As already noted, applying this to the mis-named domain of “sub-modalities” we discover that there is no actual “sub” level.  What we call “sub-modalities” are actually meta-level distinctions of the properties and qualities of our movies—the cinematic features that we can edit in or out.  That’s why some “sub-modalities” are also “meta-programs.”

To even detect “sub-modalities,” you have to go meta.   You have to step back and notice (with a meta-awareness) about your coding.  This occurs at a meta-level.  The same applies to changing and playing with these cinematic features.  The “sub-modalities” of distance, intensity, location, etc. are not things you can put in a wheelbarrow.  So, failing the nominalization test, they are not true nouns.  They refer to processes (verbs) and to mental conceptualizing, hence to concepts.

This totally revitalizes and streamlines how to work with ‘sub-modalities.”  They actually involve “concepts”—a level that NLP does not handle very well.  IT has take the Meta-States model to describe how “sub-modalities” work symbolically and semantically.

What does that mean?  It means that you never know what any particular “sub-modality” stands for and symbolizes until you talk to a particular person.   Does the “distance” of a picture mean (semantically) “more motivating,” “more compelling,” “more real,” all of those, none of those?   Does “brighter” mean more clear and compelling?   It does for most people regarding most things.  But “brighten” up a picture of a “romantic dinner” and it reduces the sense of “romance.”

And precisely because neither NLP nor DHE takes the symbolic and semantic nature of “sub-modalities” into account, this has caused all kinds of “failures” with NLP patterns, from turning “confusion” into “understanding,” running the first NLP “belief change pattern,” and many other things.  Meta-States sorts these things out and enables a person to know how to efficiently work with “sub-modalities.”  See The Structure of Excellence (1999) for a full presentation of this and six new sub-models for handling various meta-level phenomena.

Slam, Bam, Thank You Ma’m

DHE specializes in hallucinating globes, grids, cross-hairs, control panels, etc.  It specializes in filling the mind with these concrete objects from the outside world under the assumption that by doing so, one can take more “control” over the mind.

Yet, like “sub-modalities,” what do these objects stand for semantically?

Do the objects carry the semantic meanings up the levels of mind?

Does it install it at the appropriate level? How does one test?

What guiding principle governs such?

DHE never says.   Operating from some of the errors in the NLP old “sub-modality” model, DHE blindly gropes in the dark with regard to the theoretical foundation, guidelines, principles, and processes.  Hallucinating such objects and installing them via trance fails to take into account the structure of the levels of thought and how those levels actually operate.  Sure it’s playful and fun, but if you want a model that works, that can install practical strategies for “doing things,” don’t count out conscious understanding.  Don’t you want to “run your own brain?”

Trying to slam in concrete hallucinated holographic objects assumes too much and ignore too many of the higher principles.

Going Higher to the Boss

The most pervasive and generative processes in the “structure of subjective states of consciousness” occur at the higher levels, not imaginary “lower” or “sub” levels.  That’s why the most powerful patterns in NLP have always been patterns that govern meta-phenomena:

Time-Lines: the meta-domain of the concept of “time” (see Time-Lining, 1997)

Meta-Programs: meta-states repeated and habituated become Meta-Programs offer time (see Figuring Out People: Design Engineering Using Meta-Programs, 1998)

The Phobia Cure

Trance: moving up levels of thought and abstraction, into more “trancy” language, nominalizations, Milton Model patterns, etc.

Ecology Checking: moving up to an evaluation of our evaluations.

Change History Pattern: a “time” pattern

Decision Destroyer: Another “time” pattern

Re-imprinting: another “time” pattern

It lies in moving up the levels of mind and accessing higher meta-states that we find the most  powerful NLP patterns.  Meta-States as a model explicates this and extends it.  In Meta-States we have identified over a dozen specific “principles” or premises about meta-level mechanisms and processes.  These govern the use of this domain.  Once a person understands the structure of an experience, then he or she can perform what otherwise seems to the uninitiated as “magic.”

Meta-States speaks about accessing executive states of mind in order to more effectively manage the meta-levels of mind.  This enables us to quickly and powerfully eliminate frames and meta-states that might sabotage our success (what we call “Dragon States”).  It also empowers us to perform magic at meta-levels.  Here we can set an “attractor” frame (a meta-state) and let it self-organize the entire neuro-semantics states.  Here we can use feed-back and feed forward processes in a mindful and conscious way.

DHE longs for that kind of “control” over conscious and unconscious processes.  Yet until DHE gets over its current diatribes against the “dickhead” of the conscious mind, it will not be able to operate with a mindful and consciousness of the meta-level principles.  Assuming that everything can go “straight in” via trance misunderstands the power and processes of the higher mind— the way the higher frames work.

Hypnosis is powerful.  We know that.  We also know that it is no panacea.  Nor can you hypnotize someone and make them act against their higher frames of mind in terms of values and ethics.  This applies to the higher frames of beliefs, understandings, paradigms, etc.  Assuming that the DHE trainer will just “install” it and even though we don’t know that we know—the skill will just pop out in the appropriate situation presupposes that all of the higher frames are already aligned and congruent with the hypnosis.  So what’s the hypnosis for?  Reinforcement.  Sure.  But not installation.

If there are higher levels of mind (frame), the executive levels will not allow the installation.  Herein DHE lacks the sophistication to know how to install.  Not knowing the principles of the meta-levels, it also provides no guidance at all about how to truly “design” the higher states of consciousness.  That’s why DHE provides no new patterns, no new technologies, and why there is no body out there teaching new strategies for new human behaviors and skills.  That’s also why with Meta-States, we are.  We are teaching training workshops in a great range of applications—

• Selling and persuasion
• Wealth building
• Business excellence
• Health and Fitness
• Leadership
• Management
• Coaching
• Training
• Mastering Fear
• Mastering Stuttering
• Relationships

And we are coaching people through design and installation processes using new techniques and patterns:

• Mind-to-Muscle Patterning
• Meta-States Alignment
• Modeling using meta-levels
• Design and installation of higher states: resilience, un-insultability
• Design and installation of gestalt states: seeing opportunities, courage.

Summary

How Does Meta-States Enrich, Extend, and Engulf NLP and DHE?

In a great many ways.  For example—

1) It provides a rigorous model about the levels of mind.

2) It explains how “sub-modalities” work semantically and symbolically.

3) It presents guidelines and principles about the mechanisms and processes at work at the meta-levels.

4) It specifies the design and installation processes.

5) As a meta-domain, meta even to the Meta-Model and Meta-Programs, it explains the origin and structure of these two meta-domains.  This gives NLP (and DHE) a unified field theory—which we have now described in The Matrix Model.

6) It brings mindfulness and consciousness back into the picture so that people can take charge of the processes and use them to extend the model even further.

7) It articulates the governing theory that allows it to become testable and therefore tested for validity.

Summary

About 90% of the responses that we have received and heard on the chat group responses pretty much agreed with the main thrust of the Analysis and Critique of DHE.  As “more of NLP,” DHE has a lot to offer.  Its strength lies in its playfulness, its wild and wonderful exploration of the limits of human capacities and its actual practice of the NLP model.  Yet the advertising and marketing claims about it has probably not served it well or NLP well for that matter.   If in this I have started a self-examining process so that the NLP and DHE community learns how to “police” its own self, then I am most pleased.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., psychologist and entrepreneur living in the Rocky Mountains, author, developer of the Meta-States Model, and international Trainer.  He developed the Meta-States model, co-founded Neuro-Semantics with Dr. Bodenhamer, and more recently has co-created the Meta-Coaching Foundation and trainings with Michelle Duval.  He is the author of over 30 books, many best sellers in the field of NLP.

References by L. Michael Hall

Accessing Personal Genius, the Meta-States Training Manual (2004).

The Structure of Excellence (1999) Hall and Bodenhamer.  Now renamed, Sub-Modalities: Going Meta (2004).

Mind-Lines: Lines that Change Minds (2002) Hall and Bodenhamer.

Persuasion Engineering Simplified (2000).

Meta-States: Managing the Meta-Levels of your Mind (2000).

The Matrix Model (2003).

Meta-States in NLP Patterns Series
What carries the Most Impact in Communication?
Verbal or Non-Verbal Channels?

I first read the following article by “Buzz” Johnson in 1994 when it was published in Anchor Point. Having worked in communications as a trainer and therapist I knew that the old statement that 93% of communication is non-verbal was wrong. I would have known that from having tried to watch and understand movies on planes when I didn’t buy the headphones. Watching their faces wasn’t enough. When the movie was in a foreign language, I’d get more of a sense of when the actors were angry, upset, in love, etc. But that was about it.

This article confirms the fact that most information which we receive from each other in our communications is not non-verbal information and not conveyed by the non-verbal channels of tone, facial expressions, or body “language.” No. It is rather our meta-representational system of language that allows us to convey most of the information in our lives. Try to “say” (send the informational content) that “Supper will be ready at 5:45 p.m.” with just some tones and facial expressions! This highlights the crucial role that the higher linguistic systems play in our lives. We need words to convey higher level as beliefs, concepts, understandings, ideas, plans, meanings, etc. So while primary states are valuable and important, meta-states are much more so. They truly govern our experiences inasmuch as they set the conceptual and semantic frames that we live in. Enjoy.

L. Michael Hall

THE 7%, 38%, 55% MYTH

Dr. C. E. “Buzz” Johnson

In the remote sense that anyone in the NLP field needs their memories refreshed concerning the numbers in the above title, let me briefly give my recollection from numerous sessions. The total message one receives in any face to face communication is divided into three components. The words themselves, the tonality used in delivering those words, and the body language accompanying the other two.

The numbers indicate the relative weight or importance assigned to each of these three areas with body language receiving the 55% figure, tonality the 38%, and the actual words themselves being tagged with a paltry 7%. This strangely skewed distribution has bothered me ever since my introduction into this marvelous arena called NLP.

Out of the Mist

The first reason for my puzzlement was that none of my NLP instructors could tell me where those figures came from. Please do not interpret this to mean that I had been cursed with unknown and unknowing fly-by-night mentors. They are all very well known and active in the NLP community. They are also, in my opinion, excellent teachers. However, when asked where I might find further information about the research that produced those numbers, I was vaguely referred to a variety of well known universities. I later drew a blank at each of these institutions.

Secondly, if these percentages are really valid it would mean that the learning of foreign languages could be greatly abbreviated. After all, if the words only account for 7% of the meaning of communication, we should all be able to go to any country in the world, and simply by listening to the tone and carefully observing the body language, be able to accurately interpret 93% of their communications! And I’ll bet you always thought that learning Chinese or Russian would be a real stretch. In fact, from these percentages, it appears that you needn’t even bother. You may be better off without being encumbered by all the intricacies of any language. People like Leo Buscaglia are looking forward to the time when words will no longer be necessary as he states in his book Living, Loving & Learning. Since a word such as “love” has as many definitions as it has definers, he feels it will be a happy day when the world of word hang-ups is replaced by “vibrations.”

Counting on What?

I wonder how many of you have a 93% rate of accuracy when it comes to interpreting and understanding even your most intimate friends and family members? And that’s with people speaking the same official language with its 7% impact!

It is not only the NLP community that is espousing and apparently believing the 7_38_55 myth. I’ve heard therapists and counselors who were unfamiliar with NLP allude to those same numbers. There also seems to be a widespread believe among the general population that words are relatively unimportant. I’m sure most of us have heard people mid-read with statements such as, “She didn’t really mean what she said, she probably meant XXX instead.” Or, “He may have said that but he didn’t really mean it.” Or, “It’s not what you say, but how you say it.”

In NLP change work, note how carefully we re-word statements in order to reframe a client’s personal perceptions. And by very skillfully using just the right hypnotic language patterns, we are able to rapidly enhance desired shifts in our clients’ understandings and attitudes and beliefs. Would we need to be this meticulous and conscientious if we were really dealing with only 7% of a person’s awareness and comprehension?

I was finally able to track down the source of this myth thanks to a professional speaker who makes his living giving sales seminars and workshops. And yes, the 7-38-55 was an important part of his presentations. He didn’t know how to spell the name of the individual responsible for the research that originated those numbers or which university was involved, but he gave me a valuable starting point by offering me a couple of different possible pronunciations. I think you’ll be interested in what I found.

The Study

Albert Mehrabrian, Ph.. Of UCLA was the originator of the 7-38-55 theory. He speaks of it in two books, Silent Messages published in 1971, and Nonverbal Communications published in 1972. In these two books, he refers to research projects which were published in various professional journals. I will get to the journals in more detail later, but first let’s look at some of his statements from one of the books.

From Chapter 3 of Silent Messages we find that the numbers 7-38-55 expressed as percentages have to do only with what he calls the resolution of inconsistent messages, or to put it in NLP terms, incongruencies. He also states that there are very few things that can be communicated non-verbally. He initially was investigating liking/ disliking which he later generalized into feelings. In speaking with him by phone in March, 1994, he stated that his findings and inferences were not meant to be applied to normal communications. They were of very limited application.

Let me paraphrase some of his thoughts from page 134 toward the end of that book. Clearly, it is not always possible to substitute actions for words and therefore, what are the limitations of actions as instruments of communication? If you’ve ever played charades, you know that words and language are by far the most effective way of expressing complex and abstract ideas. The ideas contained in Silent Messages, and most other books for that matter, couldn’t be done with actions. A very important thing to remember about the differences between words and actions is that actions only permit the expression of a limited set of things; namely, primary feelings and attitudes.

The Details

Now let’s examine in more detail the specifics of a couple of his experiments from which some people have made some rather sweeping and inaccurate generalizations. From the Journal of Consulting Psychology, 1967, Vol. 31. No. 3, pg. 248-252 is a report entitled Inference Of Attitudes From Nonverbal Communication In Two Channels. This study was designed to investigate the decoding of inconsistent and consistent communications of attitude in facial and vocal channels. The experimental team found that the facial component received approximately 3/2 the weight received by the vocal component. You can readily see that this roughly corresponds to the 38% and 55% figures mentioned earlier.

You may be wondering how this study was conducted. There was only one word used. That word was “maybe,” selected for it’s apparent neutrality. Three female speakers were tape recorded saying that word wile varying their tone of voice so as to communicate three different attitudes (i.e., like, neutral, and dislike) towards an imagined addressee. Then the tapes were listened to by 17 female subjects with instructions to imagine that the speaker is saying this word to another person and judged by the tones what the speaker’s attitude is towards that imaginary addressee. So there was no direct feedback by anyone who was being addressed. It was a number of third-party listeners who were asked to mind-read, guess, interpret, imagine, etc., how the speaker felt towards someone who wasn’t even there and, in fact, didn’t even exist. There was no way to see or hear the reactions of this phantom individual, about whom someone was going to make several long-lasting and powerful speculations.

Next, black and white photographs were taken of three female models as they attempted to use facial expressions to communicate like, neutrality, and dislike towards another person. Then photos were shown to the same 17 subjects with the instructions that they would be shown the pictures and at the same time hear a recording of the word “maybe” spoken in different tones of voice. “You are to imagine that the person you see and hear (A) is looking at and talking to another person (B).” For each presentation they were to indicate on a rating scale what they thought A’s attitude was toward B. Again, third-party mind-reading with no direct contact with the person addressed, B, because that person was non-existent. The conclusions from this experiment were that the facial components were stronger than the vocal by the ratio of 3/2 as referred to earlier.

An interesting comment that came out of the discussion section indicated that the effect of redundancy (i.e., consistent attitude communication in two or more channels) is to intensify the attitude communicated in any one of the component channels. Perhaps this is something that could be more profitably pursued instead of the denigration of words. Or as you can see from this particular study, word, not words. And that word was “maybe.” It seems to play words under quite a handicap not much different from playing charades.

Two Studied Combined

They integrated this study with another one to come up with the .07, .38, and .55 coefficients. This second study was reported in the Journal of personality and Social Psychology, 1967, Vol. 6, No. 1, pg. 109-114 entitled, Decoding Of Inconsistent Communications. Here they dealt with inconsistent communication of attitude in two components; tone of voice and nine different words. Three words were selected that seemed to indicate a positive attitude, “honey,” “thanks,” and “dear.” Three were neutral, “maybe,” “really,” and “oh,” and three were negative, “don’t,” “brute,” and “terrible.”

Two female speakers were employed to read each of the nine words with each of the three tones, positive, neutral, or disliking of an imaginary addressee. These were recorded on tape which was then listened to by 30 University of California undergraduates.

They were instructed to imagine that each word was being said by one person to another and to judge what the speaker’s attitude was towards the imaginary recipient. One-third were told to ignore the information conveyed by the meaning of the words and to pay attention only to the tone. Another third were told to ignore the tone and pay attitude only to the meaning of the words. The last third were told to utilize both the tone and the content.

The findings were that the independent effects of tone, overall, were stronger than the independent effects of content. I should think so! After all, the words allowed were very limited while the tones allowed were unlimited as long as certain feelings were being demonstrated. But, after all, Mehrabian’s main interest is in non-verbal types of communication. However, in fairness, it was mentioned in the discussion that the methodology used failed to solve the problem for which it was intended. An alternative methodology could have employed written communication for assessing the independent effects of content and electronically filtered speech (with the content rendered incomprehensible) for assessing the independent effects of tone. I don’t know if an alternative experiment like that was ever carried out.

After commenting on some of the methodological problems, they do go on to say that the results indicate that judgments of attitude from inconsistent messages involving single words spoken with intonation are primarily based on the attitude carried in the tonal component. The use of single words is a long way away from normal communications, don’t you think? In fact, they admit that their findings can only be safely extended to situations in which no additional information about the communicator-addressee relationship is available. This seems to relegate it to the realm of tightly controlled laboratory-pure experimentation only.

I would invite all of you readers to examine not only Mehrabian’s books, but also his articles in the professional journals which go into more detail concerning his experiments. If enough of us carefully analyze the available data, perhaps we can reinterpret the results in a more useful, meaningful, and workable way than we have in the past.

Time For Accuracy

If we continue to disseminate erroneous information such as the 7-38-55 myth, I feel we are doing a grave disservice not only to the NLP community, but to the public in general. We could do a great service by helping the public realize that the words they use on themselves as well a on others are extremely important in determining the effectiveness and longevity of relationships, the strength of personal self-esteem, and a whole host of other psychological physiological phenomena.

Words and language are probably the primary motivation factors for human beings and they can be enhanced by proper congruent tonality and body language. They can also be somewhat diminished by incongruencies which then often show up as confusion and bewilderment in relationship situations. For example, think how often some battered women have desperately believed the words of their batterers despite overwhelming incongruent behavior. “He said he was really going to change this time.”

Think of your own personal experiences in close relationships that have gone sour. Haven’t you also hoped and waited for change that would transform incongruent communication signals into congruent ones? Especially before NLP training? Haven’t most of us, at some time, hopelessly clung to our own inaccurate interpretation of another’s actions hoping for a miracle that would once again make everything whole and comfortable just like we thought it used to be? And what was the total affect of the spoken word at those times? Did the words really have only a 7% influence on our hopes and desires? Not likely. Given the emotional impact of prior experience and beliefs, our memories are not about to logically reduce the words of a loved one, or former loved one, to such an insignificant role instantaneously.

Such impersonal and coldly analytical reactions are probably destined to remain in the safety aloof confines of the experimental laboratory with its pretend situations and imaginary interactions. Perhaps we could benefit from a re-assessment of old acquired beliefs in the glaring light of real life relationship reactions and perceptions.

References

Buscaqlia, Leo. (1982). Living, loving, & learning. Charles B. Slack, Inc.

Mehrabian, Albert. (1972). Nonverbal communication. Aldime Atherton, Inc.

Mehrabian, Albert. (1971). Silent Messages. Wadsworth Publishing Co.

Mehrabian, Albert; Ferris, Susan. (1967). Journal of Consulting Psychology, Vol. 31. No. 3. Pg. 248_252.

Mehrabian, Albert; Wiener, Morton. (1967). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 6, No. 1. Pg. 109_114.

Author

Dr. C. E. “Buzz” Johnson, retired Optometrist, has been through Master Practitioner and Trainer’s Training. He has been researching the power of words in a variety of different disciplines, medicine, education, addictions, relationships, psycho-neuro-immunology, hypnosis, psychotherapy, etc.

Quoted by Permission from Dr. Johnson, Published originally in Anchor Point, July 1994.

Meta-States in NLP Patterns Series

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Ecology, the search to make sure that a process, intervention, way of thinking or feeling, or an action or response truly fits into the full context of a person’s way of life, values, history, relationships, health, etc., represents a central focus in NLP. And so it should. As a systemic evaluation, it enables us to step back and think about all of the embedded systems that we live in. It also teaches us a new orientation, one of looking for goodness of fit.

Typically we “run an ecology check” in our patterns, processes, interventions, and methodology by asking “the ecology question.” This boils down to a very simple question that can be asked in a variety of ways.

• Does this serve you well?
• Does this way of thinking, feeling, responding, etc. enhance your life?
• Does it empower you or make you feel dis-empowered?
• Are there any parts or facets within you that would object to this?
• How would this fit into your life at work, at home, with your career goals, with your gifts and talents, etc.?
• As you think about taking this resource with you tomorrow, how does that feel?

Such questions, obviously, evoke a larger sense regarding a specific process. It enables us to think about other factors, influences, and dynamics that we may need to consider to make a new resourceful pattern last. Frequently, “checking for ecology” flushes out hidden factors and agendas that would otherwise sabotage the success and effectiveness of an intervention.

Accordingly, we could even assert that a good part of the very spirit of NLP comprises this question and orientation. So we ask about new patterns and processes:

• Is it ecological?
• What about ecological concerns?
• Is the ecology built into this pattern?

From here, we take the next step by using the ecological question as our criteria, value, or highest frame and we do so in order to quality check the pattern. This has led to one of the worst indictments that we can bring against a new process. “It’s not ecological.” In fact, this can become the NLP curse to defeat any process that we don’t like!

How Ecological is the “Ecology Question?”

Now it would seem that anything that addresses and looks at “the inter-relationships of organisms in the environment, or the totality or patterns of relations” would, by definition, always be ecological.

But what if the set of inter-relationships themselves sicken and make things toxic? What if the organism has a toxic relationship to its environment? What if the system under consideration itself is dysfunctional, hurtful, destructive, and unsane1? What then?

The founders of NLP, taking much of their original modeling from Virginia Satir and Family Systems, recognized that systems themselves can become quite destructive and sick. Frequently, the “problems” we experience arise due to some unsanity that’s incorporated within the system itself. Many of the stories that Virginia told about the families she worked with involved people who wanted her to help them become better adjusted to a sick system. They wanted the rebel or the scapegoat to just roll over and accept their labels so that they system could get back to an equilibrium. The abusive person just wanted his or her victim to get back to their normal non-assertiveness. That’s all. In such contexts, Virginia seemed always to take a hands on and un-ecological approach as she did things that (at first) made the symptoms worse and the system even more unbalanced. She first sought to deframe the system. This, of course, led to confusion, disorientation, and reactivity. The death throes of a system!

In systems theory and thinking, a vicious cycle or loop describes a system caught up in a closed-loop where its way of responding makes things worse, which then evokes more responsiveness from the system making it even worse, etc. Brief Psychotherapy describes this as “the attempted Solution is the problem.” Their prescription? Do anything that’s different!

In one family, her nagging evokes his silence and withdrawal. So she nags at him louder and longer. So he withdraws even further, getting angry and frustrated as he does. This pushes her buttons of feeling unloved and discounted, so she pursues him with even more words. This invalidates and insults him, so he gets even more angry as he pushes harder to get away.

Now imagine “checking the ecology” with this gal.

“You know, nagging doesn’t work, so imagine stepping into the resource states of being ‘loving,’ and ‘soft’ and gentle and just asking for what you want from your husband. Good. Now wouldn’t that enhance your life? Wouldn’t that be more ecological?”

“No! Not at all. He would then not listen to me at all and take advantage of being soft and kind. No way. I’m not going to do that! Are you crazy?”

Systemic processes, like a reinforcing cycle just described, leads us to experience the system as if it “has a mind and life of its own.” Here linear thinking about cause-and-effect only leads to more problematic influence on the problem as the individuals become more blaming, accusatory, finger-pointing, etc. Yet it also lies within the nature of systems to seek a homoeostatic balance. This balancing dynamic gives the system its energy to seek to return to its “norm”– even if that norm may work destructively in the lives of some of its members.

Here the problem lies in the system itself. The set of inter-relationships (ways of relating, beliefs, rules, values, understandings, etc.) has formatted and programmed the people to so respond. Seeking an “ecological” pattern or technique from within the system to “help” that system would only mean supporting and validating the status quo. In this case, checking for ecology makes things worse. Ecology within an unsane system perpetuates the unsanity.

Here also we now need to distinguish not only ecology asked from within or outside of a system, but also short-term ecology and long-term ecology.

A Good Word for Un-Ecological Responses

Sometimes the most ecological response (in the long run) is an un-ecological one (In the short term). Thinking systemically about systems in this way reminds us that the way we talk about something is just a way of talking. It is a map, not the territory. Our words and language patterns only attempt to map out the reality and is not the reality. So when we come to the limits of our language, we often have to check out our language itself if we want to speak with precision. Sometimes we even have to create a new language to map out a new and more sane approach to something. This is especially true when we want to map out systemic processes (the very heart of Korzybski’s approach). And sure, enough, when we think about the term “ecology,” we have a nominalization, a thing-ified verb. So what is the hidden verb lurking underneath the nominalized action?

“Studying (ology) the whole habitat or environment (Greek, oikos, house).”

To scientifically study and understand a whole environment, we often have to step back and go meta so that we can see system (i.e. family) as it is embedded in the next larger system, system (i.e. subculture of extended family), as it is embedded in the next larger system, system (i.e. a given culture), etc.

We do this very thing when we ask the ecology question repeatedly of ever larger meta-frames and the meta-phenomena that comprise them:

• How does this new way of responding to your boss fit it with your job description and role at work? Do you find it enhancing your career goals and objectives? Does it make you a more valued employee?
• How does this new response pattern fit in with your beliefs about your skills and abilities? Does it empower you in becoming more effective?
• How does this behavior fit in with your sense of who you are? Does it enhance your personal identity?
• How does this assertive communicating fit with your values? Does it enrich and fulfill your beliefs about what’s important?
• How does this new resource fit into the entire work and corporate culture? Does it enhance things?
• Etc.

This means that merely asking the ecology question is not enough. We have to ask it repeatedly and reflexively so that we ask it of as many of the relevant higher systems that it could be embedded within. Every level and meta-state structure needs to be checked. And we have to be careful not to ask it in a final way when inside of a sick or limited system.

When Does the Ecology Question Not Count?

It does not count when we only ask it within a system without stepping back to obtain a larger, system-wide perspective. To do that may only reinforce a dysfunctional system and make things a lot worse.

Ecology in that context does not count when we need to use such processes as Provocative Therapy. It does not count when you need to use a Pattern Interrupt, merciless tease a person out of incorporated non-sense, or when we need to exaggerate the thinking that created the problem so that it blows out, as in the Threshold Pattern.

It does not count when we have a sick and toxic limiting belief system. Ask a fear-ridden agoraphobic if an intervention of “going for it” ferociously is “ecological” for him or her! “Of course, it is not!” they will tell you. And inside their system of thinking-feeling, inside their neuro-linguistic, it is not ecological. Not at all. And yet, jarring them out of that self-reinforcing self-organizing system may be the most ecological thing– in the long run– that we can do.

When you do a belief change pattern– you do the ecology up front. You ask, “What do you believe that you wish you did not believe? What ideas, thoughts, or understandings have somehow been confirmed and validated so that, at some level, you’ve turned them into beliefs, but you know they limit you, sabotage you, and make life harder, meaner, and smaller? What would you rather believe?”

Such ecology questions set the initial frame for the belief change– from a limiting and dis-empowering belief to an empowering belief. Later, when you “run the pattern” and walk the old belief into “the museum of old beliefs” (the Dilts’ model), or jam the old limiting belief into “the submodalities of doubt” (the Bandler model), or disconfirm it with a strong and mighty Meta-No until it deframes (the Hall/ Bodenhamer model of Meta-Yes-ing)– the ecology inside the system does not count. At that point in the process, you don’t worry about objecting parts. Why? Because the old parts will, of course, object!

After all, you know the parts and relationships and comfort of the old limiting belief system will fight like hell against the new beliefs. Those old programs (in the form of the thoughts-and-beliefs of the old paradigm and all the experiences that the person has used and created to reinforce it) will not want to be de-commissioned. These parts will furiously object! Ah, the death throw screams again!

Typically, most of us cannot be “reasoned” into a new emotional belief. “Logic” has a hard time winning the day as the only tool to bring to bear on an old “illogical” belief. The old belief works like an attractor in a self-organizing system. It finds lots of “reasons” and “explanations” and “historical precedents” that “proves” itself validate. What else would you expect.

Now we can deframe. By using the questions of the Meta-Model, we can de-construct the old ideas. We can use outframing maneuvers like bringing the person’s awareness to the fact that the beliefs are not real, but only mental maps (the “Model of the World” Mind-Line). Or, in a much kinder/gentler way we can use a form of analogous reframing and laterally shift to another subject, and speak to the old beliefs in terms of some isomorphic metaphor.

There’s lots of things we can do to change beliefs more gracefully, gently, and elegantly. But when we use a direct, heads-on Belief Change Pattern, we typically enter the Lions Den and can expect a lot of agonizing roaring in the background– the death blows to an old system.

At that point, let the old parts rant and rave. Let them rage … in vain. The system was sick and toxic– you know what you want to believe. You know what would serve you much better. You see it modeled in others. So go ahead, click the mouse to Uninstall the old program. That will clear up space so that you can Install the new belief. You’ve already done the ecology work. In belief change work, you do that first, not in the midst of the belief change.

“But this is just ramming something down someone’s throat!”
“Perhaps.”
“But that violates ecology!”
“You mean that you are experiencing some discomfort as an old system of ineffective responses is being shakened to its core?”
“Yeah!”
“That sounds ecological– in the long run.”

This, of course, does not prevent you from taking the time and trouble to obtain the positive intent behind every part of the old belief system and building it into the new. Sure you can do it that way. It makes it harder, less elegant. But it is a choice. Yet if you have co-created with the person a well-formed new empowering belief which the person finds compelling, you will have already done this.

Ecology and Excuses

All of this also applies when we deal with excuses. While many “reasons,” “understandings,” and “explanations” are legitimate or at least have some legitimate facets, we all know that there are also such critters as just plain stupid and idiotic excuses that are totally useless. As we have been using the Excuse Blow-Out Pattern developed in Neuro-Semantics, we have found that what stops a lot of people from just getting out thee and doing marvelous and magical things are a lot of stupid excuses.

“Well, I don’t feel like doing it right now.”
“But what if I make a mistake.”
“But I don’t know enough yet.”

Now often times, if you ask about the ecology within the system of thinking and feeling that created the ridiculous excuse– there will be all kinds of parts warning you against “just doing it.”

Likewise as we have been using the Mind-to-Muscle Pattern for installing great ideas and concepts, principles from experts in a given field– principles that have already been proven very ecological over the long-term, some people have been afraid of installing the principles for fear of “violating ecology.” I always suggest that we run the pattern sandwiched between two ecology checks: first we pick great principles that have been tested and that we will again check the ecology afterwards.

“You mean we’re not allowed to check the ecology during any of the steps?”
“I would recommend that you do not.”
“You mean we can’t?”
“Of course, you can. That’s not the point.”
“Well, isn’t it always right and good to check the ecology?”
“No, it isn’t.”

And that’s the point.

Summary

Ultimately we do need to remember that ecology is not a “thing” at all, but a process. It involves studying, exploring, and examining not only an immediate symptom and the immediate system, but also all of the other relevant systems that it’s embedded within. Sometimes we do that at the end of a process; sometimes at the beginning. When we do it at the beginning– and have clearly defined a desired outcome that a person has checked out as a bright and compelling goal, then “ecology” may not make any different when you use some techniques.

End Note

1 “Unsane” is the term that Korzybski used to describe a poor orientation to the world, a map that may not have broken with reality entirely (insane), but a limited and unresourceful map that leads to a poor adjustment and ineffectiveness. Korzybski took this term from psychiatrist P.S. Graven.

References

Bandler, Richard and Grinder, John. (1975). The structure of magic, Volume I: A book about language and therapy. Palo Alto CA: Science & Behavior Books.

Bateson, Gregory. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Ballatine.

Korzybski, Alfred. (1933/ 1994). Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics, (5th. ed.). Concord, CA: International Society For General Semantics.

Hall, L. Michael; Bodenhamer, Bobby G. (1997). Mind-lines: Lines for changing minds. Grand Jct. CO: E.T. Publications.

Hall, L. Michael. (1998). Secrets of magic: Communicational excellence for the 21st. Century. Wales, United Kingdom: Anglo-American Books.