WHAT THE OLD NLP GUARD DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT META-STATING

If you’ve been following these Reflections on Meta here on Neurons, then you already know several things that “the old guard” of NLP (Richard Bandler, John Grinder, Steve Andreas, etc.) doesn’t. In writing this I don’t mean to pick on them, just to highlight where they are stuck and explain why they are now arguing for “pure NLP,” and discounting new developments and evolutions of the model. While I find that sad, I guess it is inevitable since it seems to happen with every organization and movement. I had assumed that perhaps it would be different in a field like NLP that’s supposed to recognize the difference between map and territory and that’s supposed to be a discipline of creativity.

Anyway, Steve, as John Grinder did before him, has now written a book in his attempt to discount, discredit, and explain away the “logical levels” within the Meta-States Model. Grinder did the same in his book on whispering in the wind (or was that whistling in the wind?) questioning “the proliferation of meta-states.” I’ve written several reviews about that which you can find on the Neuro-Semantics website. More recently Steve Andreas, less elegantly has done the same. And again, I have written two articles that you can find on the website. Andreas books are on “category and scope” which he doesn’t know involve the very processes within Meta- States (See “Blind Elephant’s Confusion #1 and #2).

Now, given that any and every meta response to yourself, to your thoughts, emotions, experiences, memories, imagination, and a hundred other things is a meta-state, and that if you don’t take charge of the process, you’ll create meta-muddles, I will here contrast Neuro-Semantic NLP from the old classic NLP of those individuals who haven’t come into the twenty-first century.

So what’s the difference? The difference lies in the confusion and non-sense of the idea of Sub- Modalities. Now if you are new to NLP, sub-modalities is the term used to describe the quality and the properties of our mental movies— the cinematic features that we use to code our movies. For example, in the visual system, we can edit our movies in a wide variety of ways: close or far, bright or dim, panoramic or narrow, snapshot or movie, are some of the sub-modalities. In the auditory or sound system, we can do the same: close or far, loud or quiet, coming from one side or the other or panoramic, etc.

These are the cinematic features of our representations. They are not sub to the visual or auditory modality. Want proof? Okay, good. Here we go. Think about your fifth or sixth grade when you were in elementary school. Go back there and imagine it again. Got it? Good. Now, is your picture of your childhood school days in color or in black-and-white? Is there any sound in that school? How big or small is your picture?

Do you not have to step back from the picture (yes, go meta) in order to answer these questions? Do you not have to move your head or body back so that you can get some perspective to notice the cinematic features? Ah, yes, you have to go meta to notice sub-modalities! Well, try this. Make the picture bigger (or smaller), make it brighter (or dimmer), put in some circus music in it, etc. Didn’t you also have to step back, and go meta, to shift or change the sub-modalities?

How large is your picture? What if you doubled it? What if you shrunk it to half-size? With each cinematic question, you are invited into a higher frame of mind about your representations. These questions invite you into the editorial level of your thinking and feeling so that you can then make changes to the cinematic features. It’s as if you are in the creation room of a movie editor and you have all the tools at your disposal to alter the film. You can delete all of the noise and irritating sounds. You can put into the movie the sound track of a great piece of music. You can put a sub-script on the movie to explain things.

At this editorial level to your movies, these cinematic features are not sub to the movie. They are the editorial features that you can alter and manipulate at will. From this higher position you can do all kinds of things to your pictures, sounds, and sensations. That’s why you can step back from any mental representation and alter it with a change of these qualities.

Also, what you are essentially doing when you do these cinematic alterations is meta-stating. Think about the cinematic distinction of making an image bigger or smaller. To make it bigger you are zooming in so that one facet of the picture totally fills the screen of your mind. Zoom in on the person’s face who is criticizing you. Zoom in further. Further! Zoom in until every tiny pore is the size of a baseball so the face looks poc-marked.

Dif you do that? If so, then you have just meta-stated a primary experience (an image of a face) with the conceptual idea (a meta-state) of “zooming in” so that it telescopes the skin of the face with “big, bigger, bigger yet.” You have brought the state, frame, category, and classification of “bigger” and applied it to a previous thought (image) of a face. Congratulations on some elegant meta-stating!

But don’t tell the old guard. Don’t tell Steve Andreas. Don’t let John Grinder know. You’ll just get shot down and insulted. Is it that they don’t know that every sub-modality shift is a meta- state process? Can they really not know that? Or is it that they don’t want to know that? Their linear reasoning goes like this, “A sub-modality is a ‘finer’ distinction in the rep. system, therefore if it is ‘finer’ it is smaller, and if it is smaller it is sub to the rep. system.”

While I don’t know the answer to that, I do know that Steve Andreas thinks that because bigger /smaller are members of the class of Visuals, they are “smaller” to the class and therefore a “scope.” To him, a scope is different from a category. And because of that, it has to be sub, hence sub-modality. He can’t even imagine meta-stating with something small or tiny and setting that as a new category as you just did.

“I did? When did I do such a thing?” Just a moment ago when I invited you to start with the representation of a face and to zoom in on the face until it fills the entire screen in your mind, then zoom in again until a one inch area fills the screen. Doing that is meta-stating the idea of “big” (make it bigger, and bigger yet). Okay, do the opposite, zoom out of the face and see the person’s entire body, zoom out to see the person in a house, in a city, in a country, zoom all the way out to see the planet the person is on, then the solar system. Good. You just brought “small” (make it smaller) and applied it to the base representation.

Now what Steve Andreas really doesn’t know or understand is that the size or scope of something does not absolutely, and for all time, lock it into that category. Bright is a small unit in the visual category and is on a continuum with Dim on the other side. Yet though “smaller” to visual, we can meta-state bright or dim and bring it to a visual representation so that the visual representation is now a member of the class of bright or dim.

“Impossible! Couldn’t happen!” One of the old guard says. Okay, then consider the optimist, the over-optimistic person who sees everything around him and into the future as bright. Hasn’t he put all visual representations into the category of bright? Consider the die-in-the-wool pessimist who knows that it is all futile, meaningless, that she is ineffective and helpless, and so has dimmed all pictures and representations of her world and her future. Hasn’t she put all visual representations into the category of dim even dark?

If you don’t know about meta-stating, about making the meta-move and that you can meta-state any piece of “thought” or “emotion” with any other, then you don’t know about our human psycho-logics and how we set frame upon frame of meta-levels to create our mental maps about reality. Sure it is not logical. And that’s the whole point. It is psycho-logical.