THE META-LANDSCAPE OF YOUR MIND Part IV

In the beginning of NLP, Richard Bandler used the following example of a belief as he proposed changing beliefs with sub-modalities: “Think of a strong belief like ‘I believe the sun will rise tomorrow.’”

But is that really a good example of a strong belief? I don’t think so. Are your beliefs like that one? Do your strong beliefs follow that format? Aren’t your strong beliefs more emotional and personal than that? Are they not more like the following: “I believe that people are human beings who should be treated with respect.” “I believe that continuous learning is a key to success.” “I believe that in loving my children and spending quality time with them.”

These are strong beliefs. Believing that the sun will rise tomorrow is not a strong belief. Come to think of it, it’s not even very much of a “belief” at all. It is more of an understanding. It is conceptual knowledge. The sun coming up tomorrow is something that we know, not that we believe. After all, what would be the opposite if you didn’t believe it? That the sun will not rise? Do you believe that? Does anyone? How much emotion goes into that? How personal is that?

The idea of the sun rising is a metaphor regarding how we experience the beginning of a new day. It actually does not rise. Since the earth circles the sun, the earth “rises.” But even if we take the phrase about the sun rising at face value, this is knowledge content about the everyday life on this planet. It is not a strong personal belief about what you can, or cannot, do. That’s why, as an understanding or fact of knowledge, “I believe the sun will rise tomorrow” is an inadequate comparison to a belief.

Bandler would then use that phrase to invite a person to notice how he or she represents the sun rising, notice all of the sub-modality features and then to use them to encode a belief that the person wants to strongly believe with the same cinematic features. But beliefs are not just representations vividly encoded with the qualities of reality. Today with all of “the movie magic” that’s available through computer generated images we can see and encode all kinds of things as real. Yet no matter how many times we repeat the “real” representation, that in itself, will not turn our representations into a belief.

To turn a representation into a belief we have to make a meta-move to a higher level and set a frame of confirmation about the representation. We have to confirm what we are representing as true, real, factual. We may even need to layer our evidences upon the representation so that we have proof that we have the right to confirm it as true.

All of this highlights the different dimensions of our mind. We begin with the representational level and then move up to the levels. The first level up is the meta-state level. At this level we bring various other thoughts-and-emotions to our first ones and this begins to layer our consciousness making it richer and more complex. With regard to beliefs, we bring confirmation thoughts-and-emotions to our representational thoughts-and-emotions.

It is at the meta-state level that we qualify and texture our states. The quality of our beliefs, the quality of any of our states, the quality even of the coding of our representations are all state- about-states or meta-states. This explains why the Meta-States Model is unique in being able to explain the structure of “magic” in NLP. All of the “magic” of NLP are meta-stating processes. Meta-Programs are coalesced meta-states. All of the Meta-Model distinctions about language and linguistics are meta-stating processes regarding the meta-representational system (language). All of the cinematic features that enable us to add finer distinctions and textures to the movies in our mind (sub-modalities) are meta-stating processes.

Above and beyond the meta-state level is the gestalt dimension. Something holistic occurs when we meta-state. As mentioned in Meta Reflection #8 (January 15), meta-states coalesce. They do not stay “meta” but as a systemic process facilitate the emergence of systemic processes —gestalts. Something “more than the sum of the parts” emerge, a whole, a larger phenomena that cannot be explained by adding all of the parts together.

At the gestalt level, we experience the layers of states and frames and all of the multiple meta- levels as one thing. As one state. As one experience. Courage, as a gestalt state, is experienced as a single focus and state and not in terms of all of the ingredients that go into it. So with self- esteem, proactivity, responsibility. These complex states are a holoarchy made up of multiple holons (wholes that are parts within larger wholes) yet which we experience as a single phenomenon.

There is, however, yet another dimension of the mind. As human beings, we can also create, process, and operate from concepts. At the highest level of the mind, we have conceptual models, paradigms of reality, intellectual and abstract understandings about things. These are often highly abstract conceptions— hypotheses, premises, presuppositions, computations, etc. They are things like “the sun will rise tomorrow.” “E = MC 2.” “Relationships depend on respect.” Intellectually we know, understand, accept, go with, and operate from these high level abstract principles. But emotionally these do not seem to have much if any somatic affect in our bodies.

So these are not beliefs so much as they are concepts and conceptual reality. They describe another dimension of mind. In the meta-landscape of your mind are these dimensions.