Re: Whispering Meta-States

As many of you know, in his latest book, John Grinder (along with Carmen Bostic St. Clair) have written a criticism of NLP and the inadequacies of the “classic code” of NLP in order to promote his “new code” (actually a misleading phrase since Perceptual Positions and Ecology, etc. was “new” back in 1985). The book presents NLP in some new language, they talk about “First Access” (FA) and then later accesses to “the world.” I found it interesting in some respects but adding nothing new to the field.

It was nice to see in “Whispering in the Wind” that John and Carmen recognize and acknowledge meta-states. He acknowledges, “One explicit use of a meta-state is third position as it occurs in triple description…” (288). Yet John also doesn’t understand the model. I don’t think he has read the book Meta-States at all even though I have sent him a complementary copy.

He especially complains about the wild “proliferation of meta-states” and inquired about how such meta-states would be valuable, and what a person could do with such. Nor does he understand what Robert Dilts and I have argued for over the years, that the higher levels of “logical levels” have a progressively more encompassing and impactful influence in a mind-body system.

So to those things and many others, I’ve responded to some of John’s challenges to explain meta-states, logical levels, and so on. Several have commented that the field of NLP needs this kind of open dialogue and so we have posted the first three on the web site at the following locations:

https://legacy.neurosemantics.com/Articles/Grinder_Reply_1.htm

https://legacy.neurosemantics.com/Articles/Grinder_Reply_2.htm

https://legacy.neurosemantics.com/Articles/Grinder_Reply_3.htm