HOW HIGH CAN YOU GO? CAN YOU GO DEEPLY HIGH?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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