MAY ALL YOUR META-STATES COALESCE

When you meta-state a resourceful thought, belief, state, emotion, or physiology, you bring that piece of experience to your current experience and apply it to the state of mind, emotion, or body that you are in. That’s what “meta-stating” means. You apply joy to learning and create joyful learning. You access and apply respect to anger to create respectful anger. In Neuro-Semantics, we talk about this as coalescing. The state you access and apply coalesces into the first state. Given that, you may have several questions.

“What exactly is this coalescing? How does this coalescing work? What’s going on when one state coalesces into another state? What are some examples of this coalescing?”

The idea of coalescing is that of two things that “grow together,” that “unite into a whole,” and that “fuse together.” Water and coffee beans do that. Put hot boiling water on the ground up coffee bean and presto! Coffee! Now when you hold a cup of Starbucks coffee in hand and look at the way that the water and the bean coalesce, think about how you would separate the two. “Impossible!” The water and the bean have so coalesced that they are one.

Coalescing your states upon states is similar to the percolating of coffee. As you take two separate things, coffee beans and water, so with taking two different states or aspects of states (thoughts, beliefs, emotions, sensations, physiology, breathing, posture, etc.) and let them inter-penetrate each other. In coffee, you heat the water and pass the boiling water through the crushed beans to get coffee. The end result is something more than water, more than coffee beans, it is something more than the sum of these parts.

Similar to when you meta-state. You take another thought or feeling to your current experience so that there’s a new alchemy. The second state starts off being higher or meta to your first state or experience. But it does not stay that way. It does not stay separate and distinct. It coalesces into the first. Then, from this emerges something new, something that represent a new whole or gestalt. The emergence of this gestalt creates a new kind of state that in Neuro-Semantics we call a gestalt state.

This is the feed-forward process that’s inherent in systems and systemic thinking. When you feed (or put) a new and more resourceful state, idea, meaning, belief, etc. forward into your current experience, you texture or percolate your previous thoughts and feelings with it. This also is an integral part of Meta-States because it is a systems model. When you make a meta-move to a higher level of awareness and bring it to your current experience, you are giving feedback to yourself of that higher awareness. Then when you apply it to yourself, you are feeding it forward. This is also part and parcel for how we

are then able to “follow the energy” of a client through his or her human system in coaching and training. Obviously, this different kind of thinking separates it from linear thinking. It is systems thinking.

Feed back is information that you get back from the world and from others “out there” beyond your nervous systems. It is information into you, into your system of thinking and feeling. You then feed it back another time as you put it forward into your mental representational movie. After that you can feed other thoughts back to yourself about your first thoughts. You are reflexively thinking and feeling.

Feed forward is how you transform that information into energy. You turn your thoughts into signals that the body transforms into feelings, urges, impulses, etc. As a metaphor, you metabolize your thoughts and meanings. As you feed this energy forward into your body, your neurology (brain, nervous systems, motor cortex, etc.) translate them into speech, behaviors, and all of your responses so they become your skills to the outside world.

All of this is involved in the coalescing process. You bring information inside and then you draw conclusions about it. Eventually you feed-forward information or emotion into your experience so that it becomes energy in your mind-body system. Every time you draw a conclusion and feed that conclusion back to yourself, you create more meaning, more significance. You thereby set a higher frame.

Feed forward describes how you take a higher level thought, belief, emotion, etc. and send it back down into your body and neurology. This is what happens in the Mind-to-Muscle pattern. Here you take a high level principle that you know “intellectually” is true and valid, something that you want to get yourself to do. If you did, that would make a positive difference in your life. But now you know and don’t do. To close that knowing-doing gap, this pattern enables you to linguistically drive the principle down into your system. You turn the principle into a belief, then into a decision, then into a feeling state, then an action to engage the external world. In the Mind-to-Muscle process, you feed forward a principle into your mind-body system so you feel the principle. You bring that knowledge down and coach your body to feel it.

As a metaphor, you are metabolizing your ideas. As you metabolize food and transform food into fuel, you do the same thing with ideas. You eat fish and chips, pizzas and tacos and somehow the fish in the river and the potatoes in the garden become part and parcel of you! It becomes part of your skin, eyes, fingernails, internal organs. You masticate the food, tear it apart, digest it, and then assimilate it so that what was other now becomes part of self. Metabolism describes a basic transformation process for how stuff “out there” comes in and becomes a living part of your biology.

Coalescing is a kind of metabolism. It is a metabolism of ideas and emotions as you access it and apply it to your experience. You bring mental stuff from conversations, books, symbols, etc. and masticate them as you think and reflect upon them. You tear the ideas apart, digest them and assimilate them into yourself. Similarly, you integrate beliefs and make them an integral part of yourself. This is coalescing. When you apply one state to another (joy to learning; calmness to fear, respect to anger, abundance to relating, etc.) and bring the two states together and allow them to become linked— they can coalesce. They “unite or come together in one body or mass” so that the two become one and

operate as one. This explains why a coalesced meta-state feels like a primary state. From the inside, you experience it as if it were one thing.

This is the process by which you are metabolizing your meanings so that you are commissioning your body to feel them. You are commissioning your neurology to experience this new gestalt. You are closing the knowing-doing gap and incorporating (put into your body or corpus) or embodying what you know in your mind. This creates the personal power of congruence. It enables you to get yourself to actually do and perform what know and believe in your mind. This unites meaning-and-performance, neurology and semantics, and knowing-and-doing. It gives you the synergy of the whole. This is what lies at the heart of self-actualizing your potentials. Are you ready to coalesce? Great! Here’s to your positive coalescing in 2016!