MODELING MEANING

I wrote about two facets of meaning in the Meta Reflection (#53). The first facet involves the meanings we create and attribute to things and the second, the sense of meaningfulness that we experience in life regarding things. Those are two meanings of “meaning,” and two distinctions, we can make about meaning. Yet there are a lot more. A lot more!

If you’ve been to Neuro-Semantic trainings, you already know this. It’s what we regularly present. We present it when we are working with NLP framing and reframing models, Meta- Coaching, or the meta-stating process in Meta-States. We do this by making some key distinctions regarding the meanings that we make. We do this to identify the kinds and dimensions of meaning. And in this, we usually identify about 10 kinds of meanings which gives us that many dimensions of meaning.

The other day I presented this and pointed out the box of 10 levels or kinds of meanings, and later during the break one of the participants asked, “Have you modeled meaning in Neuro- Semantics?” His question stopped me in my tracks. “Hmmmm, modeled meaning?” As I began wondering about that to myself, I realized that I had not. Not really. Not formally in any systematic way (well, not until now). Regarding the meaning-making process, we have several models in Neuro-Semantics:

1) First there is the Meta-States Model and the meaning-making process within it. Meta-States highlights that with every new mind-body state that we attach to a previous state also sets a new frame and embeds the old thoughts, ideas, feelings, understandings, etc. within the new and higher frame. It is precisely in this way that we create meaning. In this way we create layers upon layers of meanings and with every next higher level, the overall meaning of anything and everything shifts and changes.

It was from the Meta-States model that Neuro-Semantics has been able to identify ten kinds and dimensions of meanings which expands our choices. Knowing this enables you to ask meta- questions thereby expanding awareness, increasing mindfulness, and facilitating the emergence of new resources.

2) The Meta-States Model also informs the structure of the Mind-Lines Model. In Mind-Lines I came up with a new format for framing and reframing, a format about the experiential construction of meaning from some stimulus (“external behavior” EB) which leads to some state (“internal state” IS) or comes to equate to that internal state. In Mind-Lines I designated that equation as the “magic box” within which “meaning” arises. And, of course, that then led to the seven directions that we can frame and reframe the meaning of something.

That led Bob Bodenhamer and I to put together the book Mind-Lines: Lines for Changing Minds in which we put the linguistic communication and persuasion model of NLP. Originally it was called “the sleight of mouth” patterns, but we felt that metaphor carried too much of the assumption of manipulation so our new title put the emphasis simply on “lines” (sentences) that inform and influence the mind.

3) Another exploration of meaning in Neuro-Semantics is the feed-forward process in Meta- States. In the vertical aspect of the feedback communication loop we have the meta-stating layering of meanings. That’s how it all begins. We feedback to ourselves our next level thoughts as we make our interpretations and draw our conclusions. When we then stop, at whatever level we stop at to see what difference that will make, we begin feeding-forward the frame or meta-state. That’s the feed-forward loop of communication—first in our own self- communication. When we do this with something that we “intellectually know” but do not feel and do not act on, we are essentially engaged in the Mind-to-Muscle pattern.

The Mind-to-Muscle pattern in Neuro-Semantics works with the neurology of meaning, how conceptual meaning can become neurological meaning—a neural pattern in the body that gives you a “knowing” that is deeper than what you know in your mind.

Thinking about the pieces of meaning and meaning-making that we already have in Neuro- Semantics got me thinking about modeling meaning.

“What would be involved in modeling something like ‘meaning?’ What would be involved in modeling the human phenomena of constructing meaning (meaning-making as a process)? What do we already know about what ‘meaning’ is and how to define it, and what do we not know? What have we not defined operationally yet? And what framework would we need in order to be able to understand, speak about, and work with meaning in all of its dimensions? Obviously meaning lies at the heart of what we do in Neuro-Semantics, and yet what is meaning? What theory of meaning guides and governs what we do in Neuro-Semantics?”

So as I got thinking about all of this, I returned to Korzybski and his original work. Korzybski mapped out how we use our body-minds to “abstract” from the world and create our human maps. As such he created the neuro-linguistic or neuro-semantic approach which by these words that he choice to use was an embodied approach. That is, we create meaning from the body upward. Meaning is not just a thing of the mind; it is a production that begins with our neurology. We “know” things first in our body then we translate them to our mind so that we can make what we know explicit and conscious. We holistically create meaning via our entire mind- body-emotion system. We first use our neurology, then we use our linguistics to generate our semantics— our felt sense and our understanding sense of reality.

What does this mean? For one thing, it means that we make sense of things in life and in the world from the bottom up. It means that meaning is on a continuum. We create meaning that begins at an unconscious felt sense and experiential phenomena and then keep mining and refining that meaning until it becomes representational, linguistic, conscious, and conceptual. And if it is on a continuum, we can take a piece of ‘meaning’ and identify its form and structure at different levels. It means we can work with meaning at its multiple levels. It means we have a holistic framework for the construction of meaning, the quality of meaning, and the experience of meaning. And given that the quality of your life is the quality of your meanings, your ability (and mine) to construct robust and rich meaning determines the richness and robustness of life. Here’s to the richness and robustness of your meaning-making skills!