GRINDER’S OLD “NEW” CODE AND SELF-REFLEXIVITY

I have recently had several conversations with people from the Grinder Camp of NLP—the “new” code people. I usually begin by teasing them: “How many years does something have to be around before you stop calling it ‘new’ and recognize that it is now ‘old?’ If the ‘new code’ was new in 1985 and it is now 24 years later, isn’t it about time to recognize that it is an old code?”

They usually smile and say, “Yeah, yeah, I know.” But one guy was persistent. “It is ‘new’ to the ‘classic’ code.” So I said: “So the ‘classic’ code of 1975 was old by 1985 compared to the ‘new’ code of 1985? Ten years and it was considered ‘old.’ Hmmmm; interesting. So then ‘the newest code’ of Neuro-Semantics, 2008 now makes the ‘new’ code a former ‘classic’ code. Right?!”

He immediately entered into a deep trance and accessed his unconscious mind which, knowing everything, confirmed how right I was, so he did the alphabet game for the last time, and did an unconscious uptake on my meta-stating skills. And after that he felt compelled to go on a vision quest for identifying the highest meta-states of all...

Well, not really. But it would have been a nice ending. Actually I recently meet an intelligent and articulate NLP Trainer of the Grinder Camp in Toronto at the Conference and had a fierce conversation in which we both sought to get to the heart of things as quickly as we could. He said that Grinder’s point to me and Robert Dilts was singular: “While the ‘third perceptual position’ is a higher logical level and a meta-state, the form of meta-stating is simply stepping back and bringing some thoughts and feelings to the first access and every other meta-state is the same thing, the same form, so there’s no need for all of the meta-states that you present, it is one form; nothing more.”

I really appreciated that he shared that perspective. I appreciate it because while it is wrong, in that short exchange I was able to discover John Grinder’s mistake and the false conclusion that keeps him from recognizing the Meta-States Model. John sees a single form in meta-stating, namely, stepping back and applying a next level of thoughts-and-feelings to a previous state. And because that’s all he sees, that limits him to a linear kind of thinking: A —> B and the next level of meta-state, another A —> B and then another A —> B and so on. Just more and more linear thinking. And if that’s all that was involved in the Meta-States Model, he would be right.

But thank the angels of the higher levels, he is not. The Meta-States Model involved much

more—much, much more! Yes human self-reflexivity does involve A —> B, but after that it is not just more of the same, it then becomes more as it facilitates the emergence of other properties and mechanisms. As a person makes the first meta-jump to think B about A and then does that again, the next time B2 is reflecting on both B1 and A. With the next jump B3 is thinking and feeling about B2, B1, and A. And so it goes, and as it does simultanity enters the picture. When the next meta-jump occurs, all of the others are still occurring and being enriched and textured and in this complexity gestalt states emerge— states that are more than the sum of all of these factors.

This shifts the richness of your state from linear thinking to systems thinking and operating. The Meta-States Model is not just about one frame or another frame— it is about all of the frames that we meta-state and which make up the largest gestalt experience— the Matrix of all of our frames of meaning. And this is systemic in another dimension. While all of this is going on cognitively, it is also going on neurologically, somatically, emotionally, and conatively.

That is, we are not only engaged in the feedback to ourselves layer upon layer, we are simultaneously feeding-forward into the body “energy” for emotions and then speech and behavior as all of this creates our states. The input that we use for feedback at various levels then become through-put which goes through the mind-body-emotion system and then becomes feed- forward or out-put (to introduce a bit of systems language).

And there’s more. As all of this is happening, so is multi-ordinality. Korzybski introduced this term to describe that the meanings we create at each level of our meta-stating (or abstracting, his term). At least level the meanings are different— even if they are encoded in the same term. “Love” at the first level (attraction) differs from “love of love” (infatuation) at the second level and from “love of love of love” (romanticism) at the third level and so on. “Fear” at the first level (sense of danger of something external) differs from “fear of fear” (paranoia) at the second level and differs from “fear of fear of fear” (agoraphobia) at the third level.

Multi-ordinality shows that meta-stating at each level is not “the same form” repeated endless as the ‘new’ code people would suggest. That is thinking in a linear way about human consciousness. When we think systemically, we begin to realize that it is not an either/or proposition, but that the higher experiences are both/and experiences.

With the creation of layers of meta-states about various subjects we call into existence the creation of our frame unconscious. This refers to the Matrix of frames that we live in as our canopy of consciousness that is mostly outside-of-consciousness. These operate as our current meta-programs and our unconscious interpretative schema for giving meaning to things and responding automatically as we do to most things. And if these are ill-formed, then they operate as dragon states to us, turning our energies against ourselves. If they are well-formed, then they comprise the structures of expertise and excellence.

John asked in his book, “Why the proliferation of meta-states?” I didn’t fully understand how he could not understand that. But now I get it. If he is thinking linearly, A —> B, and he thinks

that it all that self-reflexivity is and fully explains how it works, then yes I can see how he mis- understands the dynamic and systemic nature of meta-states and the other mechanisms involved when a person transcends and includes a state and does so level after level.

No wonder that “New Code” does not and cannot understand and adequately model the special kind of consciousness we humans have—self-reflexivity. No wonder the unique nature of human consciousness, having a self-reflexive mind, was never included or modeled in the original “classic” code of NLP or in the “new code” in 1985. It was not until 1994 when I introduced the Meta-States Model that self-reflexivity was finally modeled for the NLP model —which Wyatt Woodsmall immediately recognized as did the International Association of NLP Trainers.

[For more about this, see the exchanges on www.neurosemantics.com between John Grinder and I that came from John’s questions and challenges about Meta-States in “Whispering in the Wind.” Also see the new article, “The Newest Code of NLP.”]