MAY ALL YOUR META-STATES COALESCE

At a certain level, meta and meta-states is all about coalescing.

“Did you say coalescing? What in the world is coalescing? What does it have to do with the word meta and what does it have to do with the Meta-States Model?”

As a bit of a review, I ended the last reflection describing the systems loops in the Meta-States model. This is critical for anyone who wants to learn how to “follow the energy” through a human system. This is something that we teach in Meta-Coaching and in Matrix Games. And this involves a different kind of thinking than strict linear thinking, it is systems thinking.

Feed back — information that we get back from the world and others “out there” beyond our nervous systems that we bring into ourselves. We feed it back to our mental representational movie. Then we feed back to ourselves our thinking about it as we reflexively think and feel all the way up the levels.

Feed forward — the transformation of the information into energy that we experience as we metabolize our thoughts, ideas, and meanings. We feed this energy forward level by level as emotions and then feelings which then activates the motor cortex to translate into speech, behaviors, skills, and all of our responses back to the world outside of ourselves.

Feedback is the information we bring in and that we create as we draw conclusions up the levels. Feed forward is the experience we have of that feedback as it becomes energy within our mind- body system. Every time you draw a conclusion and feed that conclusion back to yourself at the next higher level, you create more meaning for yourself. You thereby set a yet higher frame of meanings. In doing so, you extend and expand your meta-mind about the subject. Feedback takes you up the levels of beliefs and abstractions.

Feed forward is bringing the higher level thoughts, beliefs, and meanings back down. The best example of it in Neuro-Semantics is the Mind-to-Muscle pattern. Here we start with a high level concept or principle that we “intellectually” know is true, valid, and useful, something that if we could just get ourselves to do would make a positive difference in our lives. But we don’t. We know but don’t do. To therefore close that knowing-doing gap, we linguistically drive the principle down the system and layers of meta-levels so that we code it as a belief. Then we drive it down to become a decision, then a feeling state, then an action that engages the real world out there.

In the Mind-to-Muscle process, we are feed forwarding into our mind-body system information that we know at higher levels. Now it’s time to feel it. That’s why in the process of bringing that knowledge down, we coach the body to feel it. That’s why we have a specific process for engaging more and more neurological activity and processes, why we encourage exaggerating and gesturing. We are seeking to feed the information forward and in doing so let it transform into energy— physical energy in our bodies.

I like to describe this as how we metabolize our ideas. We do metabolize ideas, you know. Yes, we also metabolize food and transform what we call food into fuel. We 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 Michael, or you. It becomes part of our skin, eyes, fingernails, internal organs. We 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 our biology.

There is also another kind of metabolism, a metabolism of ideas, thoughts, beliefs, understandings, experiences, and so on. We also bring in “mental” stuff out there in the world from the conversations we have with others, from the books we read, from the symbols we receive from our various cultures and we similarly masticate them as we think and reflect, as we tear the ideas apart and as we digest them and assimilate them into ourselves. For a century Gestalt psychology has been using this metaphor.

To take the metaphor to the next level, I’ve used it more explicitly to describe how we integrate ideas and make them ourselves. And this is where coalescing comes in. When we 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 eventually coalesce. They eventually “unite or come together in one body or mass” so that the two become one. They two now operate as one.

That’s why a coalesced meta-state feels like a primary state. From the inside, we experience it as if it were one thing. This is what we mean by the word gestalt in Neuro-Semantics, the two have become a whole. And that whole emerges in the mind-body system as something more than the sum of its parts.

Coalescing is like the percolating of coffee. You take two separate things, coffee beans and water, heat the water and pass the water through the crushed beans and, presto!, Coffee. The coffee we then drink is something other than, more than the sum of these parts.

When we meta-state another thought or feeling to our current experience, what is high or meta to us doesn’t always stay as something separate and distinct. It often coalesces into the lower. From this emergence something new that’s a whole, a gestalt. The emergence of this gestalt creates a new kind of state, a gestalt state.

So when we feed our states, ideas, meanings, beliefs, etc. forward and texture or percolate our previous thoughts and feelings with it, we metabolize our meanings in such a way that we commission our body to feel them. We commission our neurology to experience them. We close the knowing-doing gap and incorporate (put into the body, corpus) or embody what we know in our mind. This creates the personal power of congruence. It enables us to get ourselves to actually do and perform what know and believe in our mind. This unites meaning-and- performance, neurology and semantics, and knowing-and-doing. It gives us the synergy of the whole. And this is what lies at the heart of self-actualizing our potentials. Are you ready to coalesce? Great, then here’s to your positive coalescing in 2007!