ON BEING A META-CONNOISSEUR

If a connoisseur is someone who knows and understands the details, techniques, and principles of an art and has become competent to make critical distinctions about it, then it speaks about a high level of expertise. At the primary level a person could be a connoisseur of wines, flowers, literature, architecture, or ten-thousand other things.

But what is a connoisseur at the meta-levels? Could a person become a meta-connoisseur? If so, what would that be like? What would that be about?

I began thinking about this last week in a training and then afterwards at dinner when we were dealing with the multifaceted nature of mind and meaning within an experience. For several years now we have used the metaphor of a diamond to speak about “logical levels.” That’s because there are no “levels” in logical levels in the way steps up a pyramid are hierarchical levels. In the “world of communication” or “mind” (Bateson), things are just not like that. It just not that simple or that literal.

The metaphor of “levels” here (as a nominalization) refer to how we layer one thought or feeling upon another. And, of course, we do not literally do this. This is just a way of talking. Just the way we use language in an attempt to describe an experience to which we then use our self- reflexive consciousness to think about it and to layer level upon level other thoughts and feelings.

When we use the diamond metaphor, we can then step back and reflect upon the experience using a wide-range of meta-terms. And each one then gives us another discriminating look at this or that facet of the experience. It’s like turning the experience over and over in our mind and gazing at its different facets as a connoisseur contemplates a fine painting, seeing it now in terms of this organization and then in that.

That’s when it struck me! After you learn about the meta-levels and the meta-dimensions and begin to use the more than 80 meta-terms, you become more like a meta-connoisseur enjoying the multi-facetic nature of an experience, forever becoming more fascinated as you look at it from this and then that perspective, all the while being able to make new and finer distinctions about it.

If you consider what seems like such a simple state, the state of passionately joyful learning, what is this state in terms of “logical levels?” If you say, “Well, it’s a belief. You believe in passionately enjoying learning.” That’s one facet to that experience. But is it the only? Perhaps it is a value? Could you value learning in a passionate and joyful way? Yes, you could! But perhaps it is a decision. Could it be a decision? Again, yes, of course. What about an intention?

An anticipation? A memory? An identity? A permission? An awareness? A feeling? And on and on we go covering all 80 of the meta-terms.

Yes it is all of those things— and here’s the profundity of it all, it is all of those things at the same time. So instead of one step after another step up a hierarchy of levels, it is more of a holarchy, a hologram where the slightest sliver of the image can enable us to see the whole image.

But you have to become a meta-connoisseur to recognize that and to have the expertise to work with it effectively. And this, in a manner of speaking is what you can learn from Meta-States, Meta-Coaching, and Neuro-Semantics. You learn to take an experience and whether it creates a hell or a heaven on your insides, that experience has structure, has form, has a hundred distinctive facets and you can stand in awe of it, stand in fascination of it, and then, as you turn it this way and that, witnessing and observing and appreciating its structure— you can identify its distinctive qualities. And that’s when magic happens.

That’s when you yourself enter into the diamond and are able to identify the critical leverage points for change, transformation, or enhancement. Again, language fails to do us justice in describing this. So I have to shift metaphors again. Now as with a dynamic and interactive system as we turn the experience over and over in our minds, our turning itself influences the system, changes the system. After all, we are part of the experience. If it is our experience, then the facets are facets of our inner world and of the experience is that of another, then we have entered into its inter-personal dimension and so we influence and change it.

Ah, becoming an informed and wise meta-connoisseur! Perhaps we should market Meta-States that way. After all, it is about developing finer discriminations of taste — mental tastes.

“Fine minds developed from the richest ingredients, blended together to give you the quality of mental and emotional states that you deserve! For those with discriminating tastes for luxury —who have no tolerance for greasy fast food beliefs. If you want to live in the penthouse of life with an expansive views of beauty, then choose the higher states for the kind of interior decorating that makes your mind a place of beauty, tranquility, and wealth.”