META-STATING META-MUDDLES

Last week someone asked me, “What is the heart-pulse of the Meta-States Model and why is that so important?” I liked that question because it made me stop to think about how to answer it.

If there’s a heart-pulse of the Meta-States Model, it concerns reflexivity. It concerns with how your self-reflexive consciousness works and how you can work it to your health and effectiveness. It is about how you constantly, inevitably, and forever reflect back onto yourself. It is about how you reflect back onto yourself with more thoughts, emotions, and physiology. It is about how you apply one state to another of your states. Yes, I know, stating it this way doesn’t sound very sexy. Stating it this way may even sound technical and boring. Yet actually it is magical.

Reflexivity is the most peculiar feature of human consciousness and it is the very essence of our consciousness that causes it to differ from that of every other creature on this planet. That’s because when you reflect back, you move to a position above what you just thought or felt and as such, this means you have just stepped up to a meta-position. You are no longer in reference to the world, you are in reference to your interact state. You are in reference to your thoughts, to your beliefs, to your understandings, to your memories, to your imaginations, and so on. You have turned inward. You are inside the Matrix. And because of this, whatever you think and feel at this higher or meta-level sets a frame about everything below it.

And with that, the magic begins. With that, you classify the lower. You catagorize the lower, you embed the previous thoughts and feelings inside of a higher frame that defines them, that positions them, that determines what you will feel about the previous thoughts and how you will respond. And with that you enter into the magical land of framing and reframing.

Here’s an example. Say you have an experience wherein you worry about someone or something. Do you know that one? Recall a time when you worked up a good case of worrying. Shouldn’t be too hard to do. Most of us are pretty skilled at worrying, especially about things that never happen.

Black Magic Now to create a meta-muddle out of worry—worry about your worrying! That’s right, worry that your worrying is irrational and that maybe you’re losing your mind or perspective, and that if this continues, you’ll create an ulcer. Now fear that this may happen. Now dread it. Now hate that this is happening to you. How’s that for a sick, morbid, and very, very un-useful meta-state which is actually meta- muddle!

So far you have categorized your worry in the class of Worry (Worrisome Things). Then you classified your worry-of-your-worry in the class of Dreadful Things. Then you put all of that inside of the frame of Things to Hate. Do that and you will create some black magic. You will create a complex meta-state that will undermine your health, peace of mind, and effectiveness. And with it you just might send enough messages to your nervous system to actually create an ulcer.

White Magic But what if you want to create some white magic? Okay, let’s start with worry again. Got it? Now step back and bring a state of Witnessing to the worry so that you categorize worry in the class of Things to Observe and Witness. How’s that? Now given that most worry is silly and un-useful and an unrealistic exaggeration, bring Exaggeration to the Witnessed-Worry. Exaggerate it to the most extreme situation that you can. Doing that you categorize witnessed-worry in the class of Humor. How’s that? This describes how frames work, how meta-stating works, how reflexivity works. And it is magical. Yet, you ask, How can I say that it is “magical?” What does that mean?

It is “magical” in the sense that you can put almost anything in any category that you want — no matter how unsane, insane, crazy, irrational, stupid, idiotic, etc. that it may be. Consider fanatics who take a fundamentalistic attitude to and believe in their belief. They are great examples of this. A fanatic fundamentalist is someone who forgets, or doesn’t know, that “the map is not the territory” and so a fundamentalist actually thinks that his or her belief is true. So above the meta-state of a belief (a validity thought about a first thought), they believe in their beliefs. They believe in the belief of their beliefs. All of this, of course, closes them off to new or different information. It doesn’t matter if the person is a Christian fundamentalist, a Muslim fundamentalist, a Science fundamentalist, etc. The structure is the same.

The problem is not that these people have beliefs. Believing is fine. We all believe. The problem is that they believe-in-their-beliefs which leads them to assume that they cannot be wrong, cannot be corrected, and so they are unable to have an open explorative conversation. In their meta-muddle, they cannot simply believe. Having over-loaded their beliefs with so much meaning and significance, even a question about their belief triggers them to feel attacked and so they get defensive about ideas in their heads or the heads of others.

The process of meta-stating involves bringing thoughts-and-feelings to an experience, to a state, and that creates categories of the mind —classifications, frames, contexts, meaning structures, etc. When you do this without awareness that you are not even dealing with the world, just your own levels of thinking-and-feeling —you confuse your internal mappings with the territory. You then think your conclusions are real. Getting to this point reveals a very deep meta-muddle.

What is the solution? First and foremost— become aware. What categories have you created as you have meta-stated some primary experience that has become semantically loaded and now creates limitations and problems for you? Second, dis-identify with the map, that is, your belief. You are more than what you believe. Your beliefs are just human maps trying to figure something out. The problem is never you as a person, the problem is always your frames. Stop identifying yourself with your frames and categories — dis-identify yourself and that will begin to give you some perspective.

Now most meta-muddles build up and get created lightning quick. Really. In a nano-second you jump logical levels and bring various thoughts-and-feelings to your experiences (to your primary states or to some level of a meta-state). Just as soon as you do, the next thought—there you go again. This is your reflexivity at work! Now if you can begin to just observe it, you will be able to catch the process without judging and evaluating. Doing that, you begin to develop an incredible skill that few humans have— the meta-skill that enables you to unleash potentials like no other skill.