IN THE LAND OF “META”

There’s a landscape within your mind. It is above and behind your everyday experiences, it is the meta place. And no, it is not a landscape of chaos, even though it may seem that way at times when you’re confused or anxious. You know about meta (Neurons #51), but do you know about the meta place? Do you know what’s there or how it is organized? Do you know how to enter into it and transform it at your will?

A little history. Freud pictured the landscape of consciousness as comprised of ego, id, and superego. These became the ego-states of Adult, Child and Parent in TA (Transactional Analysis). In that landscape were these three ego-states and the ego defenses. It was also a dark place of conflict and war with various instincts fighting each other (life instinct, death instinct, etc.).

Actually most psychologies and psychotherapies, however, did not offer any picture of the landscape of consciousness at all. Behaviorism said that mind, and everything inside the mind, was a black box which does not emit any light about what was inside. So Behaviorists didn’t even attempt to figure it out.

Korzybski pictured mind as a set of levels—“levels of abstraction” and created a diagram that he called “the Structural Differential.” But that, in itself, was probably enough to turn most people off (you can see it in Science and Sanity, 1941/1995). Maslow also thought in terms of levels. For him, it was levels of needs, the D-needs and the B-needs and he spoke about them in terms of being hierarchical. Then later, some of his students came up with the picture of the pyramid.

When Cognitive Psychology entered into the picture, George Miller and associates came up with a diagram picture, the TOTE model (test-operate-test-exit) in their book on The Structure of Behavior (1960). This diagram was mostly a linear decision-tree or strategy picture about setting an outcome and then testing it to see if it was “good to go” or not. If not, one was to operate on the outcome and test again and to do so until one was ready to exit the program.

NLP took over the TOTE diagram, added the sensory-representations to it and created the NLP Strategy Model, a linear decision tree diagram which details a person’s strategy for how to achieve an outcome or create an experience. They then added a temporal Now – Then pathway and came up with a model of the mind when the mind thinks about a goal, the SCORE model. This added symptoms emanating from Now and effects coming out of Then. Resources would then move a person from Now to Then.

So, how can we picture the inner world of consciousness or mind? For years I worked with the NLP idea that we have a cinema in the mind (representations) which we use as an inner map for the outer territory. Discovering Meta-States Model led to the realization that above the cinema

we can step back and edit our movies with the various cinematic features (“sub-modalities”). After that, I added additional layers or levels following Korzybski and Bateson, thereby creating the Frame Games picture of the mind (see Winning the Inner Game). Eventually that led to the Matrix Model of 8 dimensions: two about process, five about self, and all grounded in state (see The Matrix Model). As a systems model, Matrix allows you to “follow the energy of a person through his or her system.”

Catching up to the Future Now this picturing and diagramming of consciousness has been further extended and expanded yet again. And this time, resulting in being able to identify the landscape of consciousness. Viewing mind as the meta place, there is a landscape which you can detect with 10 key locations— locations that you can use to describe where you are in your mind and where you move to at any given moment.

This landscape enables you to identify the meta-level processes and what you are doing which thereby creates your experiences—your emotions, behaviors, and talk. It’s from the meta place that you create your sense of reality and create the quality of your performances and experiences. This is the cause of what you think, feel, speak, and do. And when you know the cause, that is, how you are creating your experiences, you have choice and the power of change.

What’s the benefit of this? Namely that by entering into, detecting, and developing your meta place, you can gain true control—self-control and self-determination. It enables you to stop any and all victimizing that you do to yourself. Now you can find and unleash the genius within. Now you can catch yourself as you think and as you construct the meanings that you then make actual in your behaviors. Now you can become your own best programmer. Now you can make sure that your meta place is well-designed and serves to bring out the best version of you.

Interested in more? The first chapter in Meta-Therapy provides an overview of the meta place. Then sometime in 2023 there will be a book The Meta Place.