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.