UP YOUR META

I’m not sure who first introduced the term meta into English as it is now used, but from my research I would guess that it was either Gregory Bateson or Abraham Maslow. They were certainly the two individuals who popularized the term in the fields of anthropology, psychology, and linguistics from which it was then adopted in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Brief Psychotherapy, Solution Focus Therapy, and Neuro-Semantics.

What does meta mean? Sometimes after a glass of wine I will playfully answer, “I don’t know, it’s over my head!” Or, “I don’t know, it’s above me!” Or, possibly, “I’m not sure that I’m up to defining it yet.”

But if you catch me during the day, I’ll say that the term from Greek and literally means “above, beyond, about, over.” When we put one experience at a meta-level to another and create a meta-relationship, the meta experience is above and beyond the referent experience: meta-communicating is communicating about our communications, meta-thinking is thinking about our thinking, meta-feeling is feeling about our feelings, a meta-analysis is an analysis regarding an analysis.

Because of this, we can use the term meta to refer to one thing at a higher level to another thing. Metaphysics refers to the physics that are beyond the field of physics. So a meta-state refers to a higher level state, a state that is above and beyond the first state.

Now in NLP, there is a point of confusion about this. I think Richard Bandler initiated it and that various people have picked it up. It is the erroneous idea that meta means to dissociation. Have you heard of that one? Of course, that’s pure non-sense. When you access fear about your fear, does that dissociate you from fear? Does that decrease your fear? Of course not! When you access an intense state of love of curiosity, does that reduce the curiosity or dissociate you? Of course not!

Yes we can access a state of “just observing” our love or fear or any other emotion, and then “just observe” that observing and access a gestalt experience of being less and less emotional and more and more objective. Yet even that is not “dissociation.” That term, in psychiatry refers to an unhealthy state trigger by trauma plus lack of ego-strength, and occurs as a defensive maneuver that we use to avoid representing and feeling ourselves fully in our bodies. That’s why I have argued for years that we ought to abandon the use of a psychiatric term (“dissociation”) for a resourceful state like witnessing or observing another state.

The bottom line is that meta does not refer to dissociation. And the process of stepping back from our immediate experience to rise up in our minds and our emotions to set a higher frame about it does not create dissociation. Moving to a meta-position is what Bateson called the meta-function and this refers to creating additional thoughts-and-feelings about previous thoughts-and-feelings whether those “thoughts-and-feelings” were beliefs, decisions, values, intentions, understandings, memories, imaginations, and so on. In the meta-function we layer, level upon level, additional thoughts-and-feelings about something.

Actually, there’s no way to not do that. That’s because it is simply the way our kind of human consciousness works. We call this special kind of awareness, self-reflexive consciousness which means that we have the ability to step back, in our mind, and notice and reflect on ourselves and on the products that we create as well as the processes that we use in such creations. Now some of the higher intelligent animals can do the same, at least a level or two. Yet that’s it. Bateson’s work with the dolphins indicated two or possibly three meta-levels.

Yet with us humans this stepping back to reflect upon ourselves, this “going meta” to the products and processes of our consciousness, this meta-stating of our experiences is an infinite process. It never ends. Whatever we think, whatever we feel, we can always step back to think about it, feel about it. Korzybski described this as “an infinite regress.” He took that from the philosophers who for centuries that recognized this quality about human consciousness. In Neuro-Semantics, however, we call this the infinite progress. Why? Because it is this meta-process that allows us to continually progress. Practically, this means that there is always another step; that we are never stuck!

So given that we are forever rising up in our minds to create thoughts and feelings about thoughts and feelings, what does this moving up the meta-levels do? It creates the layers of our thinking or our meta-thoughts. And meta-thoughts are more “solid” and stable than the flow of thoughts-and-feelings through our minds. They are the kind of thoughts that we “hold in mind” and carry with us as our basic frameworks of understanding. We call these meta-thoughts by various terms: beliefs, understandings, knowledge, intentions, memories, imaginations, decisions, etc. In Meta-States we now have over 70 of these levels and using these we have meta-questions and the Matrix of our frames.

Going meta we draw conclusions, create abstract ideas called concepts, principles, premises, etc. and these become the meanings that govern how we read and interpret things. It is in going meta and “holding in mind” our frames (belief frames, value frames, understanding frames, etc.) that we generate the meanings and meaningfulness of our lives. And as we repeat these, the repetition transforms them into our habitual ways of perceiving and experiencing the world. This activates the part of our brain that translates our meanings into our physiology and hence performances.

Given that we are born without “instincts” and have to make sense of the world through the use of our self-reflective mind, we are inevitably meaning-makers. And it is this that makes the meta-levels of beliefs, values, intentions, etc. so important. We inevitably live in and from the meta-levels of our mind. This explains why the quality of our lives directly reflects the quality of our beliefs, understandings, intentions, decisions, identity, etc. It explains why our “problems” are primarily problems with our frames and why the solution involves recognizing the constructs we’ve built and which are limiting, sabotaging, and sometimes even toxic.

So, how’s your meta-life? How competent are you in rising up to make a meta-move that can frame and reframe your inner game so that you can enhance your outer game? In a word, that’s what Neuro-Semantics is all about and why the term meta lies at the heart and soul of what we do. Ready to clear out meta-muddles and master your meta-powers? Then stay tuned for the series of Meta Reflections.