WHEN META DIVES

The concept of “going meta,” and the self-reflexive process of actually moving to a higher cognitive awareness about your thinking and feeling, while it goes meta, goes upward, transcends, it doesn’t stay there. It dives. With your self-reflexive consciousness and your prefrontal cortex, you have the ability to think again and again about previous thoughts, ideas, beliefs, emotions, etc. Incredible things happen when you do. From all of these dynamic processes which occur are all the results of civilization, beginning with science.

The meta drive within us enable us to set goals, plan, monitor our progress, focus our attention, sustain that attention, make thoughtful decisions, etc. These are the executive functions of your higher cognitive processes. But they do not stay higher. They do not stay meta. What goes up must come down, and so it is in your neurology. As you think at the higher levels, so you thereby send messages and commands to the lower parts of your brain to thereby activate your motor programs.

Higher and lower brain anatomy and functions are all inter-connected. And they are interconnected in such a way as to set up multiple circular systems. In systems language, we input information, process that information, and then output it as energy— emotions, reflexes, behavioral responses, speech, actions, skills, etc.

So while at any time you may “go meta” to a thought or feeling or experience that you’ve had, going meta is not a static thing. It’s not that you climb up some inner mental stairs and now live there. It’s not like that! All of the brain anatomy and functions are operating at the same time. It is more the case, that one aspect of you has inputted and is processing some thoughts-and- emotions and while you are doing that, another aspect of you are stepping back to think about your first experience.

You learn a new concept, you discover a category, you detect a pattern— these are high level processes that transcend and go beyond mere representation. Yet once you have gone meta to create these, the information that you processed and created then takes a dive. It dives into your memory banks as your long-term memory. It dives into your cognitive unconscious as your perceptual filters— your thinking patterns. And that includes your meta-programs, your beliefs, your values, your biases, you cognitive distortions, etc.

When meta dives, you have “programs” for how to respond and how to function. You have your automatic procedural programs like typing, driving a car, and doing a hundred mindless things from dressing to fixing your eggs for breakfast, etc.— things that you don’t have to think about. You also have your unconscious and unthinking learning programs which support numerous biases — especially the Confirmation, Availability, and Status Quo biases.

The big myth to this day in NLP is the equation of “meta” with “dissociation,” auditory-digital, and mere intellectualization. Actually each misunderstanding shouts aloud that the person does not even know about self-reflexivity or has forgotten to take it into account. When I first discovered and presented the Meta-States Model, I included the fact that you can go meta with a kinesthetic representation. That led a dance therapist in Chicago to develop a meta-state dance as part of her dance therapy. And from that I developed several kinesthetic meta-state patterns. Why? What explains that? Namely one thing— meta dives. It dives into neurology so that it becomes a felt reality— something that you can then know in your body.

If you think about meta or “going meta” as a static thing, then you generate a picture of a static hierarchy or you use a metaphor like a ladder or a set of steps. But it is not like that. Not at all! It is dynamic. And as a dynamic process, moving to a meta-position about other internal experiences (thoughts, feelings, ideas, memories, decisions, imaginations, and on and on) then puts them into new categories and classes and creates an internal psychological-logic. That’s another aspect of “going meta.”