META-CONSCIOUSNESS

Several years ago I wrote an article that I titled, Which Unconscious Mind Do You Train? In it, I distinguished several references that we call by the same term, “the unconscious mind.”

1) Conscious dropped into unconscious awareness as our storehouse of knowledge

2) The autonomic nervous system

3) The sub-conscious mind processing information below the threshold of consciousness

4) The forgotten mind of stored memories

5) The repressed mind

6) The meta-consciousness of assumptive frames

The design of the article was to warn against a sloppy use of the vague phrase, “the unconscious mind” and to warn against positing the unconscious mind against the conscious as if it were god —always right, infallible, all knowing, etc. and the conscious mind was inferior. I argued that “the unconscious mind” should no more be implicitly trusted than the conscious mind. Every aspect of our holistic mind is human and therefore fallible.

Yet “mind” as reason, consciousness, and meaning-creation is our primary survival mechanism. And it is through developing a mindful awareness that we are able to monitor and regulate our consciousness and use it in thinking with clarity, precision, and understanding. And this is what makes us most fully alive/ fully human and so actualizing our best. And this applies to our whole mind in both conscious and unconscious forms.

This, in fact, was part and parcel of the original NLP vision about “running your own brain.”

It is mindful awareness that allows us to recognize the movies that we’re playing on the theater of our mind and begin to edit them in terms of their cinematic features.

It is mindful awareness that enables us to discover the perceptual filters (meta-programs) that govern what and how we sort for information as we move through the world and expand those perceptual filters so that we don’t create a self-impose blindness by over- relying on a particular meta-program.

It is mindful awareness that empowers us to recognize the states we apply to our states that create our higher and more complex meta-states by which we create our sense of personality and identity and the textured qualities of our states.

And what is mindful awareness but the ability to access and use our meta-consciousness? How well are you able to do that? Now to read some authors and some disciplines, you would think that consciousness is the central problem of human life. You would think that being mindful, having the power of reason, and being aware is the source of all evil. It is not.

True enough, there are forms of consciousness that are very problematic. If your consciousness is full of judgments, harshness, demandingness, rules, and punishment— well, you would experience that as a really big problem. You could hardly “think” or be aware without experiencing immense pain. A consciousness like that would make you your own worst enemy. A consciousness like that would be so hard on yourself. A consciousness like that would tempt you to try to avoid thinking and avoid awareness itself. And that, in turn, would undermine your cognitive efficacy.

Timothy Gallwey calls that kind of consciousness Self-1 and identifies it as the reason so many people sabotage themselves and prevent themselves from taking their performances to new levels of expertise (The Inner Game of Tennis). That’s why we use acceptance, appreciation, awe, love, support, empathy, etc. so often in Neuro-Semantics as resource states to meta-state ourselves and others with. Doing so changes consciousness. Doing so gives us a kinder/gentler meta-consciousness whereby we are able to live more graciously with ourselves and then, in turn, with others. For this reason also we use the “Releasing all Judgment” pattern in Neuro- Semantics to shift out of a critical demandingness state of mind to one of simple witnessing and noticing.

As one facet of our “unconscious mind” is our meta-consciousness which includes all of the assumptive frames that we have absorbed from the numerous cultures that we live in. These higher outside-of-consciousness frames make up the content of our overall “model of the world” that we live within as our mental-emotional atmosphere. And while we are unconscious of it, we can bring these frames into awareness so that we can quality control them and choose those that enhance our self-actualization.

To further develop a rich and robust meta-consciousness, we explore our matrix of frames. If we aren’t able to detect the assumptive frames that govern our everyday experience, then the matrix has us. To become a master of your own matrix and to be able to change it from within at will, we have to be able to detect and explore our highest presuppositional frames. That’s where the Matrix Model offers us a useful tool.

How open are you to your meta-consciousness? How skilled are you in exploring your assumptive frames? How often do you run a meta-cognitive analysis to quality control the self- organizing frames that structures your life? How able are you to create a new matrix of frames to tap into potentials yet to be released?

It is within our meta-consciousness that we can set “standing orders” as policies of our executive level of mind. Here we can establish self-organizing attractors at the higher levels and automatize a frame. And that will be the subject of the next Meta Reflection.