THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ROSETTA STONE OF META-STATES

In 1799 the Rosetta Stone was discovered by accident by Napoleon’s armies. And with the discovery of that stone, the mysteries of Egyptian hieroglyphics began to be unlocked. This was possible because the Rosetta Stone contained the same message in two languages and three alphabets, two of which scholars already understood. This immediately meant that the hidden code of hieroglyphics could be broken so that with the code the ancient world was opened to be explored in a new way.

The Meta-States Model operates in a similar way. The similarity is that the Meta-States Model today provides a new way to unlock the code of all of the meta-language that evolved over the centuries for our higher levels of awareness, for our meta-life. For millennia the human race has been trying to come up with the language for describing the meta-levels of the mind, for the “realities” that we live in and deal with, but which do not exist empirically. We live in this higher realm. We live in a realm that is an evaluative rather than descriptive realm. It is created by the human mind through the way we draw conclusions, abstract, and conceptualize. And it exists at that level, not at the primary level.

This means that whenever you talk about “beliefs,” “values,” “understandings,” “concepts,” “intentions,” “memories,” “imaginations,” “models,” “permissions,” “prohibitions,” and use a hundred other terms similar to these—you are talking about the higher levels of the mind. You are talking about the “logical levels” of your meta-life.

Yet the referents of these words are not real. They do not exist—well, at least they do not exist “out there” in the world. You can’t go to Wal-Mart and buy these things. You can’t ask the attendant, “Where do you keep new beliefs; mine are worn out.” “What aisle is ‘values’ on?” “I need a pound or two of some higher intentions.” You can’t put these meta-terms in a wheelbarrow—the NLP test for nominalizations. You can’t weigh them, measure them, take pictures of them—no empirical see-hear- feel test will be able to identify these things.

That’s not only because they are not things, they also do not exist at the primary dimension. Their referent exist in the meta-dimensions of your meta-life. Further, this is where all of us mostly live our lives—we live in meta-land. We live our lives seeing each other and the world and the things we do through the lens of our beliefs. We shop by making our choices through the lens of our values. We relate and get along with each other, or don’t, and have fights and arguments through the lens of understandings, memories, imaginations, and all of the other hundred meta-terms. In Neuro-Semantics, we refer to these meta-terms as the psycho-logical levels (following Alfred Korzybski) and use the four Meta-Dimensions model to detail out the numerous meta-questions that this model gives rise to.

As a psychological Rosetta Stone, the Meta-States Model explains how we create level-upon-level of layers of thoughts-and-emotions to create these psycho-logical levels. And Meta-States also shows how that each of these “layers” or “levels” of these processes are simultaneously “the same thing.” That is, they offer us multiple points of view of the same thing—the subjective experience. (This is the point of the Diamond of Consciousness diagram that we have in the APG manual.)

Consider the experience or meta-state of “joyful learning.” Is that a belief? Do you believe in joyfully learning? Is it a value? To you value joyfully learning? Is it a memory? An imagination? A concept? A decision? An identity? Are you a joyful learner? A permission? A plan? It is all of these and many, many other meta-levels and it is all of these at the same time from different perspectives.

What then is a “belief?” Using Meta-States, we define a belief as a confirmed thought. That takes it to a meta-level from the primary level. And as a meta-level generalization, it is also many other things—a value, an understanding, a concept, a permission, a thought, an emotion, a meaning, etc. The Meta-State Model as a Psychological Rosetta Stone now gives us an extended vocabulary and alphabet so that we can talk about and give expanded descriptions of the higher realms of the human mind and spirit. It gives us a redundancy about the layers of our meaning frames in our mind (our Matrix) so that we can open up a belief system and work with it using the language of permission, decision, value, identity, meaning, and so on.

A belief may be a belief about the importance of something (a value), a belief about the direction to take (a decision), a belief about one’s self-definition (an identity), a belief about the allowance or dis- allowance (permission or prohibition), and so on. In this, it is beliefs all the way up. Now you can discover that each of the words that have been considered different logical levels are just different languages for the same thing—a Rosetta Stone enabling us to translate one “logical level” in terms of another.

If you want to learn about this psychological Rosetta Stone do so via the Accessing Personal Genius (APG) training or in the NLP Master Practitioner delivered by Neuro-Semantic Trainers. Or you can read about it in the book Meta-States (2008). The good news is that when you do, you are learning to decoding the higher levels of your meta-life which gives you many more tools for self-management and self-leadership.