MOVING UP FROM THE JUNGLE

I concluded the last Meta Reflection with a statement about our basic needs being legitimate needs—biological, essential to our physiological well-being, and the needs that we share with the higher intelligent animals. I also noted that at any moment, we can be sent back to these needs because these needs are always with us as they serve as the foundation for our life and vitality.

Yet here’s the rub. When we could satisfy them in an accurate and stable way, but do not, we then perpetuate our life at the level of the deficiency needs. And that perpetuates instrumentality thinking that leads us to view people and things as means-to-ends rather than being ends-in- themselves. This puts us back into life in the jungle.

Jungle life? Yes, life at the deficiency needs is life in the jungle. Maslow used this phrase when he began translating self-actualization and his new psychology to management, leadership, and business. Human beings who could and ought to be rising up to the human level of living —expressive, being, self-actualizing, living the being-values, enjoying being-love, being- cognition, peak experiences, and even peak performances —do not, then continue to live life at a much lower level, the level of competition, demandingness, competitiveness, deficiency, lack, reactiveness, and ego-centricity.

And what causes that? Each person’s unique and idiosyncratic psycho-logics. “Psycho-logics?” Yes. Now if you are new to Neuro-Semantics, this might be a new term and idea for you. So let me explain. Psycho-logics comes from Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics and his classic book, Science and Sanity (1933/ 1994). Korzybski derived the term by putting a hyphen inside of the term psychology. This created psycho-logy, psycho-logicians, and psycho-logics.

His point? That we are not logical beings, we are psycho-logical beings. Our “logics” depends not upon Aristotle or Plato or syllogisms or mathematics, but upon our personal psychology. Our way of thinking, reasoning, and making sense of the world —our psycho-logics— depends upon something very subjective, personal, and idiosyncratic. Namely, upon the connections, associations, and emotional experiences. It’s in this way that what something means to us depends upon our experiences and the conclusions that we have drawn from those experiences.

In NLP we say that it depends on the way we have mentally mapped something. And that depends upon the generalizations we have created (beliefs, decisions, understandings), the deletions we’ve made as we mapped things, and the distortions that we modeled. Your psycho- logics about what anything means to you depends upon how you have created meanings about it.

Now we can ask about any particular thing— food, wealth, money, exercise, work, budgeting, selling, negotiating, etc. —what does this mean to you? And whatever you say it means to you, whatever frame of reference you use — that creates your meanings, your psycho-logics.

It is in this way that you can take any of the basic human needs, the lower needs, and over-load it with so much meaning that you can condemn yourself to that level of living. With the meanings that you attribute to food, shelter, money, safety, friends, respect, etc., you can imprison yourself inside that need so that it becomes all-consuming. By semantically over-loading a basic need with existential meaning, it can become to you the very purpose of life. You can live to please people, get along peacefully with everyone, be in control of every social situation, accumulate millions (or billions), etc.

And it is precisely by semantically over-loading something, even a basic lower need, that you can doom yourself to life in the Jungle. How does that happen? It happens because by giving it so much meaning, any threat to it feels like a physical threat to you—like an existential threat. And because that locks you into life at the lower needs level, you are prevented from moving up to the highest human needs, the self-actualization needs.

What’s a human being to do? Ah, that’s the simple part. Well, simple if you know about your own psycho-logics and how to work with them neuro-semantically! The answer? Simply identify what and where you have semantically over-loaded something with too much meaning, step back to quality control your life with that meaning, then step up to release or suspend the over-load of meaning, and set a limit of meaning on it so that the lower need is just what it is without all of that extra meaning. Simple.

Well, on second thought, you might want to contact a Meta-Coach or a Neuro-Semanticist to help you with the res-structuring of your meanings so that you can move up out of Life in the Jungle to the highest of Human experience. Or get some training in the neuro-semantics of your psycho-logics and learn to run your brain at all of the higher levels of frames —the frames of meaning that create your inner reality. This also is theme of the book, Winning the Inner Game.

And because this is the determining factor of the very quality of your life — here’s to your highest and best of what’s human!