META-EXPERIENCES IN THE META PLACE

Above and beyond your everyday experiences are meta-experiences. These are the experiences of your mind. And when I say “mind,” I mean all of the known and unknown aspects of consciousness itself. Here are just some of the higher or meta-experiences in your mind: Your memories. What you “hold in mind” and take with you and use as your internal reference system—your library of what you’ve learned about what things mean, what things there are, what to focus on. Your knowledge. What you “know” or think you know. The ideas that you have become aware of in your home, culture, school, life experiences. As one aspect of a meta- experience, your knowledge informs you about lots of things. Your beliefs. All of the things that you “hold real and true.” They may not be real or true, but you believe them anyway and have all sorts of experiences both in your mind and in your outside life because of them. Why? Because every belief sets up a self-organizing and self-fulfilling process. Your imaginations. Your powers of imagining, fantasizing, pretending, thinking of possibilities, playing around with “what if...?” is your ability to create all sorts of internal meta-experiences—some very creative and productive, some that create pathology. Your decisions. You make choices, everyday you make lots of choices, little ones and big ones and cumulatively, your choices generate the over-all meta-experience of your life orientation—the direction of your life. In your decisions, you forecast how to live, where to go, and a thousand other inner experiences. Your intentions. Within intentionality are your choices, your decisions, and also your values—what you care about, what’s important to you. And this is the source of inside–out motivation, the energy and vitality to live with vigor and passion—more really important meta-experiences.

Well, you get the idea, do you not? Inside your mind—your wonderful consciousness by which your self-reflexivity operates—there are a hundred or a thousand meta-experiences. And they are all at your command when you learn how to use the meta-functions. In Neuro-Semantics we have been using the old NLP idea of “going meta” for two and half decades and since 2002 we have used The Matrix Model to sort out the human system. And it has worked pretty well. We modeled numerous experiences using the Matrix Model including stuttering. But now we have something even better. Something that takes the Matrix Model further, deeper, and higher— The Meta Place.

While the Matrix Model gave us three key dimensions of the Meta Place, that is just the beginning. It gave us meaning, intention, and self (identity in five aspects). But there is so much

more. And what it provides is a dynamic structuring of consciousness so that you can follow consciousness in a conversation and thereby come to understand another person at a much, much deeper level. What is meta to our everyday experiences at the primary level? If at the primary level of experience we have immediate thoughts and feelings (a state) as we respond (or react) to some trigger in the outside world—what is higher than that? What meta-experience do you first have and then have, etc.?

You first represent the outside experience. You create, as it were, a movie in your mind and use the representational systems—visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. You then edit your inner cinema. With all of the cinematic features that are available to you, you customize your movie sometimes making it wonderful, sometimes horrible. You then draw conclusions. You never just represent—you construct beliefs about things and once you do that, every higher meta-level is some form or aspect of a belief. You believe something is important—a value. You believe you should do something—a decision. You construct your identity. You invent a self-image that includes your worth, your skills, your social self, your temporal self, your roles, etc. You learn and remember. You encode and store learnings into your memory banks which become your Background Knowledge, which when fully habituated become your automatic programs. You anticipate and predict. Your mind as a prediction machine is always trying to figure out “what’s next?” “what’s coming?” It’s a survival mechanism. This is the foundation for thinking strategically, thinking consequently, and for hoping. You meta-state or set frames all the way up. By this self-reflexive function you then layer thoughts upon thoughts to create complex understanding and belief systems. You create value hierarchies, belief hierarchies, decision hierarchies, etc. You set multiple intentions. Now you are creating your life orientation, your future direction, and the management of your attentions.

Your meta-mind is rich! It is also chaotic and for most people unstructured. And because people do not have a sense of structure of their mind, they don’t know how to use it effectively. To do that, they need to develop an ability to use the meta-functions.

Want more? Check out Meta-Therapy and look for the newest book, The Meta Place.