YOUR BELIEFS/ YOUR EPISTEMOLOGY

Here’s something new that I’ve learned recently from my studies in thinking. When you engage in representational thinking, and even when you engage in the next higher level of thinking, editorial thinking— your thinking is direct and immediate. You are in a primary state of thinking and perceiving. What you immediately perceive—you track to the movie you play in your mind. This thinking is straight-forward, natural, and simple. And you really cannot do any semantic damage to yourself with it.

What comes after that? Once you think and create a mental movie of what you have seen, heard, and felt—then you draw a conclusion. You like it or you don’t. You think it is good and valid or you think it is not-so-good, even bad, and want none of it. In other words, after your first-level thinking, you think-about-your-thinking. This is your self-reflexive consciousness at work. It is what uniquely makes you human. It is also your glory and your agony.

In this second thinking, as you draw a conclusion—whatever that conclusion is—is a belief. You believe something. And you create all sorts of beliefs—beliefs about what a thing is (identity), how it works (cause-effect), its significance in your life (value or disvalue), its source (history, development), what you should do (purpose, intention), etc. And here’s the thing—you cannot not believe. Whenever you think about your primary experience in the world—you have moved to a meta-level and you are beginning to create a whole inner world of beliefs, beliefs that define you and that determine the quality of your life.

Wow! No wonder beliefs are important! No wonder what you believe is one of the most, if not the most, important factors of your life. Take any particular item that you have to deal with in life— work, relationships, money, budgeting, time, scheduling, working for someone, taking orders, paying taxes, exercising, eating healthily, etc.—and you have all sorts of beliefs about these things. Some are empowering beliefs—they inspire you, they energize you, they make your life enjoyable. Some are limiting beliefs—they constrain you, they hold you back, they create inner conflict, they disempower you.

This means that everything in your mind beyond the movie is a belief. Everything in your Meta Place (values, memories, anticipations, imaginations, identity, metaphor, permissions, prohibitions, decisions, intentions, etc.)—is a belief of some sort. Each offers a different kind of belief.

Believing then is your way of thinking about your experiences. When you believe, you are moving beyond the sensory world, building your own personal “model of the world” as your map for finding your way around. And whatever you believe is your epistemology—your way of knowing and understanding what you know and understand. If you believe that people are essentially bad or evil—that’s your epistemology. If you believe you’ll never truly succeed—that is your epistemology. Your belief establishes how you know what you know. Your belief determines and governs your way of knowing things.

No wonder then that your beliefs operate as self-fulfilling prophecies. No wonder also that most people are stuck in their beliefs. While they need to step out of the kind of thinking that created their limitations and stuckness, when they attempt to do so, they use they same kind of thinking that created the limited belief. That puts them in a loop. They now go round and round, yet they are in a loop with no escape.

How then can they escape their own thinking? How can they gain freedom from their own limiting and negative beliefs? They need to think again. Only by re-thinking their original limiting belief, can they establish new empowering beliefs. And to do that, they have to claim, probably for the first time in their lives, their self-reflexive consciousness. This is their ability to engage in meta-thinking for only in that way can they take charge of their thinking.

Now thinking-about-your-thinking is the essence of meta-stating. Start with your movie. Intentionally “lose your meta-mind” about the movie so that you can start over, start afresh. Just observe the movie as a witness— see and see, hear and hear, feel and feel. Now bring a state of acceptance to it, curiosity, playfulness, learning, and optimism. Doing this meta-states your original thought (the movie) with one of these higher level frames. Now you can truly re-think. You can run an ecology check on your other thinking and begin to take control of your mind. And when you do— you know what Meta-States and Neuro-Semantics is all about.