THE META-PERSPECTIVE

If you want to really see the power of a meta-move, consider the ability to step back from yourself. Step back from your thoughts, your emotions, your beliefs, your ego, your ego- investments, your history, your future, from all of your internal movies, fears, hopes, and dreams. When you do this, you are using and experiencing your own reflexivity. And while we may not understand all of the mechanisms involved in this, there is something amazing. Just asking you to do it facilitates it and suddenly, magically, wonderfully, you step back and begin thinking- feeling-experiencing-believing, etc. about it.

Stepping back from ourselves is reflexivity at work. And it is the very quality within our unique human kind of consciousness that reveals such a wonder within us. We can respond to our own responses! We can, as it were, step back from ourselves, or rise above what we have just created and think-and-feel about that. Philosophers have called this the infinite regress. No matter how far back you step, you can always step back yet another time. And then another. There’s no end to it. Noting this in Science and Sanity, Korzybski described it as part of the structure of multi- ordinality. And in Neuro-Semantics I have been describing this infinite regress as the infinite progress.

Infinite progress means that no matter what meta-muddles you or another create, you are never more stuck than your framing. It means that there is always yet another step you can make out of the muddle! Mark that down. No matter how deep your meta-muddles, there’s always the next step. You can always step up and gain a broader and more expansive perspective. And when you know that, when that is in your muscles as the knowing of muscle memory, then you will lose all fear of yourself and your insides. You will launch a whole new style of self-awareness and self-discovery so it becomes a truly exciting adventure.

Over the years, I’ve tracked with a person ten jumps, fifteen, even twenty as I explored with someone their “dragons,” their layers and layers of unresourceful states. I do that first to track, to understand the meta-muddles. And yet, no matter how dysfunctional, how toxic, how morbid, a simple meta-question or two and they can step out of the whole mess.

“So do you like all of that? Is that the way you want to live your life?” “How empowering is all of that? Would you like to continue living that way for another five years?”

Simple questions, yet suddenly, they step back from it all, take a good look at it, view it through the lens of ecology, the frames of empowerment, the belief about life’s purpose, etc. and suddenly the pull of the meta-muddle loses all of its attraction. Suddenly the person is out in the clear with a larger meta-perspective.

The important thing about going meta to yourself and your experience is that you make that meta-move with acceptance and appreciation. It must be done without judgement. If you do it with judgment, then you bring threat and danger inside and that will result in self-abuse. Then, your “conscious mind” will not serve you well. Then, you might even make the unfortunate mistake of concluding that the problem is your “conscious mind.” Many in NLP have made that mistake, including the two co-developers.

Yet the conscious mind is not the problem. The problem is only that you have that misused your reflexivity, your infinite progress, and your power to meta-state. You have thereby made your conscious mind a problem. But you don’t have to. To avoid that and to fully access the power of your conscious mind, all you have to do is bring love, compassion, wonder, curiosity, appreciation, and such like to the products of your thinking-and-feeling. Then making the meta- move takes you to a whole new level of consciousness. Do that and you will begin to understand and feel how transcendence is built into us.

And we all feel it. People of all cultures, times, and places have known and experienced it and have tried to come up with an explanation for it —from magic, to religion, to aliens, past lives, parallel universes, etc. For me, I prefer to think about it more simply, as simply a psychological mechanism within our multi-layered brain. When Ken Wilbur found it, he recognized it as the holon structure that reflects our holographic brain (Karl Pribram) and so popularized the language of “transcending and including.” That is, when we meta-state ourselves with love, appreciation, wonder, etc., we transcend whatever state we’re in and move to a higher state, a state about the first one which now becomes our basic state. As we do that, we also simultaneously include the base state inside of the higher state.

Transcend and include. In transcending we rise up, access new resources of thought and emotion, and set those as our frame about the lower. In including we embed what was a problem inside of a solution. And because with each move, with each level of meta-stating, we keep transcending and including, this gives us the feel of something higher, something more, something yet to reach for, and because it is infinite – unending, the sense of transcendence inside of us feels like something divine, something spiritual. No wonder we all have a touch of the divine, of the sacred, of a higher intelligence.

And no wonder the meta-skill itself is such an incredible skill and experience. And when you develop it so that it is within your control, your meta-skills will powerfully enable you to unleash your potentials. The meta-perspective that evolves from this will enable you to keep growing long, long after childhood. So while every animal grows during childhood, we humans have the ability to keep growing in our mind, our emotions, our relationships, our hopes, our creativity, our learning — throughout all of our life.

Our meta-perspective enables us to see the larger picture of things literally, symbolically, with regard to time, with regard to consequences, with regard to morals, etc. The meta-perspective also empowers us to stay calm and cool under pressure. It enables us to keep our head when circumstances, events, environments, immediate stimulate would distract us or hook us.

The meta-perspective also puts you at Choice Point, the point were you can truly choose the direction and quality of your life. Have you been there? Have you stepped up to that place? This is the place where you become self-directed and the director of your experience. Here you bring in the authority from outside so that you can author the script that you’ll play your life by. So did you know that there are so many benefits in accessing a meta-perspective? Well, now that you do, may you transcend and include your states with the very highest and best resources in your own adventure of self-discovery!