HOW META-STATES BEGAN





It all began with an Aha! experience in 1994.  It was that aha! experience
in the middle of a workshop at a NLP Conference which led to the discovery
of Meta-States.  Most of you know the story, but for those who don?t, here
it is again.



I was involved in my very first modeling project on resilience.  I had
decided to study how people develop the quality of ?bounce? in their
thinking-and-feeling so that when they get knocked down, they don?t stay
down.  In the process I took to interviewing numerous people who had
suffered set-backs, who had been through a living hell of one sort or
another, and who had recovered their passions about living and were back in
the game of life.  In the process I had been sketching a basic working
schema for the stages of recovery from set back to being back in the game of
life.  Using the schema of the NLP Strategy Model, I prepared a 3-hour
workshop for the Denver NLP Convention when ?the call for papers? went out.
After applying for the previous three years, Steve Andreas finally accepted
this one.  So I went and presented to some 50 or 60 people.



After presenting the stages in the process of ?Going for It ? Again,? I
invited someone to come forward ?who had been through hell and had
returned.?  When several raised their hands and briefly described the
traumatic events that they had been through and the degree to which they
were back.  I selected one gentleman and began inquiring about his strategy.
I wanted to use the interview questions to model out how he did it.  At one
point, he mentioned that he moved from one stage to another.  So I asked,
?What was on your mind as you did that?  What did you think or feel??  He
said something about knowing that it would all work out.  ?I know that
eventually I will come out of this stage.?  ?How did you know that??  Then
either he said ?I have a state about my state, a meta-state,? or I said, ?So
it is a state about the first state, a meta-state.?  I no longer remember
who said it.  And there?s a reason for that.



Suddenly the lights and bells went off inside my head!  Suddenly the phrase
?meta-state? brought together all of the studies in Korzybski and Bateson
that I had been studying for years.  Suddenly it all made sense.  And with
that, the Meta-States Model was given birth.  The Conference ended a few
hours later, and that evening I drove with three friends over the entire
Rocky Mountain range (250 miles) from Denver to Grand Junction and I
couldn?t stop talking about it.  That week, I sat down and wrote out the
model in a 40 page document.  And because the NLP Trainers Association was
running a contest for innovations in NLP, I sent my document to Wyatt
Woodsmall.  Two months later he called and said it would be given the award
for ?the most significant contribution to the field of NLP in 1995.?

Now the Aha! facet of this experience was that the term meta-state brought
together things that had been percolating in the back of my mind for several
years.  Suddenly, lots and lots of things became clear.  First and foremost
was the structure of complex states.  While it was easy to identify the
structure of the basic states, not so with the complex ones.  NLP gave me a
way to think about the primary states of fear and anger, stress and
relaxation, aversion and attraction, love and hate (or apathy), joy and
sadness, etc.  I described them by saying that there are ?two royal roads?
for accessing these states?first, mind (thinking, imagining, talking,
hearing) and second, body (physiology, acting, gestures, breathing, etc.).



But what about more complex states?  What about self-esteem, proactivity,
forgiveness, understanding, responsibility, etc.?  I knew that to model the
structure of these states there was something more, something missing.  Mere
representational images and sounds on the movie of the mind is not
sufficient for most of the people I was seeing as clients.  After all, how
do you represent ?self-esteem??  What picture induces ?proactivity??  What
sound track fully elicits ?forgiveness? or ?responsibility??  Where do you
kinesthetically sense ?self-esteem??  The primary representational data of
sights, sounds and sensations cannot fully describe these complex state.



So, what?s missing?  Within complex states, there was also typically a much
less direct and different kind of kinesthetic.  So when the gentleman that I
was interviewing started to describe a higher state, a state about the other
states in coming back from a set-back, he said it was a ?state of knowing
that he would eventually get through it all.?  I echoed back his words.

?So it?s a state of knowing that he would eventually get through it all.
Ahhhh.  So what do you call this state??  He didn?t know.  ?I?m not sure,
it?s a big picture state, like I?m above it all and know that I?ll get
through it all.?



?How do you know that you?re in this big picture state of knowing that?? I
asked again, trying to understand what he was doing in his mind, how he
represented it, and how I could replicate what he was doing.

?Well, it?s like this state is about that other state of feeling the
emotional ups-and-downs of the setback, but I?m not too concerned about my
roller-coaster emotions because I know I will get through.  It?s like a
state meta to the other.?



?You mean it is a meta-state about the first state?? I reflected back.
?Yes, a meta-state.?  My friends tell me that I finished the workshop that
day.  But I don?t remember it.  Inside my head was a whirlwind of ideas
spinning around.  I was picturing a circle of a mind-body energy state meta
to a first one and governing it and framing it as its internal reference
structure.  This dynamic picture provided a new understanding of the
meta-levels of learning in Bateson?s ?levels of learning.?  I was also
seeing Korzybski?s layers of referent experiences in action, now his
?Structural Differential? (which was his way of solving the self-reflexivity
of the human mind) was alive and dynamic.  This initiated a new search and
began my second modeling project, the structure of self-reflexive
consciousness.



Six months later I had written the first book, Meta-States (1995), and
immediately began running it as a new training which I called ?Dragon
Slaying.?  My initial focus with Meta-States was to analyze the problematic
states that arise when a person brings a negative state of
thought-and-feeling against oneself.  What I discovered is that this usually
created meta-muddles of self-conflict and self-antagonism.  It creates the
disordering of personality, self-sabotages, and wastes incredible mental,
emotional, and personal energy.  Dragon Slaying (1996) was then transcribed
and written from that training.



What are meta-states?  A meta-state is the structure of
thoughts-and-emotions about the first level thoughts-and-emotions which you
have about an experience.  If your first thoughts-and-emotions are reactions
and responses to the world, meta-states are your reactions and responses to
yourself.  This includes reactions to your thoughts, to your emotions, to
your experiences, to your concepts, to your abstractions, to all of your
meanings.



My meta-states and your meta-states are our reactions to ourselves.  So, how
do you react to yourself?  To you react to your thinking-emoting states with
kindness and grace or harshness and judgment?  Whatever you do, that sets
the frame or meta-state for the first state.  In this a meta-state is a
?logical level? jump.  We step back from ourselves as it were to then
think-and-feel a second time, then a third time, a fourth, and so on.



In fact, the process is never-ending.  Korzybski noted that it is ?an
infinite process.?  This is ?the infinite regress? which philosophers have
long noted.  In Neuro-Semantics I began calling it ?the infinite progress.?
Why?  Here the good news.  Whatever frames you have set and whatever
meta-muddles you have created with limiting beliefs and self-sabotaging
understandings and decisions, you can always make one more step forward and
set a whole new empowering frame.  Talk about opening up things so that you
are only as stuck as your frames.  This is it!



Why meta-states?  That will be the subject for the next Reflections.  There
you will discover the power, extensiveness, and nature of meta-states and
how to use them for fun and profit.




L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director

               Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                            

               1 970-523-7877

                    Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta@acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta@acsol.net