THE META-SECRET The Secret of the Secret

There are secrets, and there is the Secret (as the Movie and the book), and then there is the Meta- Secret. In several of the recent Meta-Reflections I’ve written about The Secret under the themes of attraction and responsibility. Now it’s time to move to the secret of life, well, the secrets of life Neuro-Semantically.

Do you know the secret of life? Do you know the secrets of living life fully and humanly?

Similarly I also wrote an article for Actualise this month about this same subject (which you can obtain by signing up for Actualise on the Neuro-Semantic website, the article is in the second edition of Actualise June). I will not be repeating that here. Instead I’ll talk about one secret, the highest secret of all, the Meta-Secret.

In the movie The Secret, the idea that we can and do attract things into our lives (which is reasonable) was elevated to an absolute degree. It was pushed to an extreme and turned into an inevitable, immutable, everlasting, absolute, without exception, “law” of the universe. Yet if that was the case, we would be living in a nightmare universe. Anyone and everyone who “thought” anything so it would dominate his or her mind would bring that into existence. And that would last until someone else “thought” and “attracted” it into their lives; or someone thought-attracted the opposite, etc.

It would be the kind of nightmare world Alice experienced in Wonderland where nothing seemed to operate by the regular laws that we know and can count on. People and things and animals grew and shrink and reality kept shifting and changing by mere thought. In that world Alice couldn’t depend on things. Nothing was predictable, regular, systematic.

In the movie, The Secret, over-simplistic ideas combine with the simplistic thinking patterns characteristic of children —either/or, black-and-white, single cause attributions, magical thinking, ego-central perspective, over-optimistic thinking— to create a world of simple answers. What happens in your life is totally and solely your responsibility. You attracted it. You thought it. You believed it.

Ah, that things were so simple. But thankfully, they are not. Thankfully we live in a more complex world that calls for adult thinking. And this gives hint to the Meta-Secret. So what is the meta-secret? It is that to live and thrive and succeed in the real world (rather than the fantasy world of childish fantasy where we can attract anything into our lives and in fact attract everything) we have to develop sufficient ego-strength to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Disappointed? Don’t be. Developing ego-strength is a tremendously exciting thing. It lies at the very heart of being human, of growing, of actualizing potentials, of developing resources, of modeling the excellence of those who are the best specimens of human kind. After all, ego- strength speaks about a very special kind of consciousness, a consciousness that can look at reality, stare at it directly, without falling apart, without caving in, and without the need for defense mechanisms, or escaping to fantasy. Ego-strength speaks of a strong sense of awareness that simply acknowledges what is so that it can then begin inventing processes and skills for coping effectively.

Ego-strength is also developed. No one is born with it. For that matter, no one is born with an ego, a sense of self, that also is developed. In fact, all of life is about developing the construct called self so that we become what we are in our deepest self in possibility. Developmentally, this is the heart of growth and development, we grow up to become the best version of ourselves, of unfolding the potentialities within, and of developing the maturity.

For the growth of ego-strength, we have to develop more and more of an awareness of ourselves, others, and our world. It is also required that we develop our coping and mastery skills so that when things happen, we have a way to figure things out, rigorously define and understand problems and invent solutions. Ego-strength is the first step in being able to be fit for life as it is, for figuring out the life you live and for shaping it so that you fulfill your highest potentials.

This is the secret of creating a life well-lived. Instead of operating with the magical-thinking and wishing of a child, we create a life well-lived by developing our inner strength and resilience. We mature our skills and competencies and we develop the ability to perceive reality as it is so that we can then take effective action.

After there is thought, meta-states that operate as attractor frames, high level intentions, then there is ego-strength. Without ego-strength we don’t face reality as it is and begin working to transform it so that we attract to us the values, visions, and dreams that we have within our minds. To think that mere thought, mere desire, mere wishing is all that’s required is to live in a fantasy world that will lead to disappointment and dis-illusionment. Mere thought is not sufficient. That’s just mind. We need the full mind-body system. We need the active ability to do something about our dreams and visions and values. Sure we need semantics —rich and exciting meanings, but we also need neurology as well. We need the full neuro-semantic system. This is where the self-actualization quadrants comes in, the meaning-performance axes.