Response to Michael Hall, THE FIRST NEURO-LOGICAL LEVELS, Meta Reflections 2011 – #25, July 4, 2011

This is a response to Michael Hall’s Meta Reflection 2011 #25, The First Neuro-Logical Levels sent out on the Neurons egroup of Neuro-Semantics.  In this response, I will use Wilber’s Four Quadrants Model to understand the relationship between Dilts’Neuro-Logical Levels Model, Bateson’s Levels of Learning, and Michael Hall’s Matix Model.

The Four Quadrants model of Ken Wilber is the ultimate meta view of reality.   It is a major part of Ken Wilber’s system of integral theory and it is a useful tool for directing nuances in developing sound epistemology. In that the Four Quadrants distinguish four mutually exclusive perspectives it sheds light on four systems of knowing. This paper investigates the Neuro-Logical Levels model of Robert Dilts by seeing the model through the spectrum of the Four Quadrants. This analysis will provide an understanding of how patterns that utilize Neuro-Logical Levels can add value to the coaching process.

In the mid 80’s I was introduced to what was at that time called “The Logical Levels.  After very little of my own research I pointed out to Tad James that “The Logical Levels” he attributed to Gregory Bateson was not the same as the model presented in my NLP training.  He responded that the model presented was an adaptation of Bateson’s model by Robert Dilts.  I accepted that explanation with reservations at the time.  I did like the model and used it to understand different levels of my experience.  It was an intuitively rewarding experience.

Many years later I had a chance to talk to Robert Dilts about the Neuro-Logical Levels.   He acknowledged the difficulties that I pointed out in the model and directed me topage 315 of From Coach to Awakener.  On this page in the appendix Dilts points out the relationship of Bateson’s learning levels to the Neuro-Logical Levels.  He basically sees the learning levels as a kind of intermediary between the Neuro-Logical Levels.  Hence environment to behaviour is mediated with learning 0 or associative learning.  Behaviour to competency is mediated by learning I or operant learning.  As a rat runs a maze he becomes competent at that maze.  Strategic learning/level II mediates competencies to values. Level III learning is revolutionary change that makes changes to the system and mediates between values and identity in Dilts’ model.  Finally mediating between identity and spirituality is learning IV which has to do with systems of systems.  All this seems very arguable to me.

My biggest reservation to the Neuro-Logical Levels was its association with Bertrand Russel’s logical type theory.  It seemed to me that Bateson’s model had a structure of a hierarchy of logical types butNeuro-Logical Levels did not meet the necessary criteria. For example just as individual cells are at a different logical level than tissue Bateson delineates operant learning at a different level than associative learning. On the other hand we have the Neuro-Logical Level of identity which Michael Hall suggests is made up of beliefs and values about our self. When we change our identity we change our beliefs and values about self.  If we looked at identity strictly from this perspective it would follow that identity then is not a logical level.  Identity is only a set of beliefs and values. However as Dilts is associating identity to learning III and Learning IV he is making a distinction of identity in terms of the total system of self.  Hence with that distinction in mind he is able to make the logical level claim in the strict sense that Bateson used it.  The total self system is higher order and inclusive of the value and belief system parts.

The Neuro-Logical Levels model is a very popular model used in all kinds of cultural and personal intervention strategies.  One of the reasons for its popularity is that it fits an intuitive need for breaking down the complexity of the changes we can make in our personal and cultural constructed realities.   It also corresponds to the English lexicon as used to describe large C coaching activities.  This correspondence is precisely the content of Dilts’ book From Coach to Awakener.  According to the book someone who works strictly at the environment level we consider to be a guide, a custodian or a care giver.  The individual who is concerned primarily with behaviour we refer to in English as a small c coach.  Someone whose concern is the replication of competencies we call a teacher or trainer.  When we are involved in an individual’s value orientation we might be considered to be their mentor.  When we are concerned with the individual as a whole we could be considered their sponsor.  The word spouse comes from the same Latin root as sponsor. Finally Dilts designates the role of Awakener for the individual responsible for spiritual transformation.  Many successful transformation exercises have been constructed with this model. Although as Michael Hall points out there is no precise thematic theme that links the levels together.  There is a general order of change understanding that is very intuitively attractive.

When I was first introduced the Matrix model at an CANLP conference in Toronto  I was challenged to accept the matrix model over the Neuro-Logical Levels model.  I recognized that the Matrix model did have a thematic consistency lacking in Dilts.  I had to subdue my angst because I was doing a workshop on integrating Ken Wilber’s Quadrants with the Neuro-Logical Levels model.   While I could see the attractiveness of Michael’s Matrix Model I was not willing to abandon the Neuro-Logical Levels model right away.  Both models seemed to offer value in different contexts.  The key for me to understanding the value of both models was to understand the models in terms of Ken Wilber’s Quadrants.

Wyatt Woodsmall describes Wilber’s Four Quadrants as four distinct realities that make up the cosmos.  They are also described as perspectives on reality.  In the 20th century there was a good deal of scholarly discussion stressing the importance of our subjective experience over the grandiose importance placed on objective reality by positivistic science.  Our personal subjective experience is true and real in a way that cannot be explained or understood by objective science.  In like manner there is a trueness of our external reality that cannot be reduced to our subjective experience.  Wilber extends this dichotomy to four ways of realness.  He further posits  an inter-subjective or cultural reality and a systemic reality neither of which can be reduced to any of the other three realities.   I am including a small diagram that applies the quadrants to the NLP TEA model..

The workshop I presented at the CANLP conference used The TEA(Thinking, Emotion, Action)   Model above as a basis to understanding the relationship of Neuro-Logical Levels to the Four Quadrants.   The Matrix Model (Hall, 2002) proposes a model that clearly fits into the upper left subjective quadrant.  This is why it is so thematically consistent.  As Children we develop our matrix of the self, first.  It is entirely in the subjective quadrant.  Following this we develop the realm of doing and the realm of doing is in its entirety the subjective meaning about doing (power) as an individual.   In fact everything about all the other content matrixes:  time, other and the world and the process matrix meaning and intention exist in the realm of subjective experience. Although these matrices can be distinguished as developmental categories it is not clear to me that they are logical types in the sense proposed by Bertrand Russel and Gregory Bateson.   The content matrices are all composed of the same stuff and do not represent different levels of abstraction. Maybe there is an exclusive relationship between thematic consistency and logical levels.

Though Emotions Actions Diagram

The Neuro-Logical Levels model is better compared to the TEA model than the matrix model.  The Neuro-Logical Levels and the TEA model as models span the internal external divide of the Four Quadrants.   The TEA model is useful first because it makes distinctions between internal and external behaviour.  The further breakdown of the internal quadrants into thinking and emotional is generally an acceptable approach to understanding the contents of mind because most people make general distinctions between thinking and emotions.  However in cognitive linguistics there is a general recognition that you can not separate thought from emotion as they are kind of bundled together.  Meta-states reflect this growing understanding that states include both cognition and emotion.  Meaning has a feeling attached to it and becomes embodied in emotion as it moves from known to belief to a decision.   The TEA model makes  a clear distinction between  internal and external quadrants but the internal distinctions it makes between thought and emotion is a bit fuzzy. Though and emotion are logical types.  Noteworthy is that Michael Hall refers to emotions and thoughts as our internal powers and suggest external powers of speech and action that correspond to action in the TEA model. Overall the model is useful in that it relates internal process to external processes.  It makes apparent that changing internal processes will create different action.

The Neuro-Logical Levels in contrast do not fit neatly in any specific quadrant.  Even some of the levels do not relate to a specific quadrant but span them.   Only the environment/context level   is entirely observable and a product of the exterior quadrants.   The behaviour and competency levels in addition to having aspects that are observable and thus external also have an internal aspect that is experienced subjectively and cannot be observed by others. They are different from “action” in the TEA model because they include the internal aspect of the behaviour in addition to what is observable.   Behaviour and competency consist of factors that can be observed and tested but also factors that are internal and not easily and accurately measured. The remaining levels are not observable and exist entirely in the internal quadrants.   The values and beliefs level together with the identity level are entirely the product of our interiority.  They cannot be measured and quantified to a universal standard. Below is the diagram I created to relate the Neuro-Logical Levels to the Four Quadrants.

Individual External Collective Internal Diagram

Contrary to the TEA model Neuro-Logical Levels imply a natural hierarchy; moving from the context/environment which is most observable to the deep internal identity which is least accessible to observation.   When Dilts compares the Neuro-Logical Levels to Bateson’s logical levels of learning he is assuming the natural hierarchy intrinsic in Bateson’s leaning levels.  The adage sometimes attributed to Einstein that you cannot solve a problem at the same level that it was created is adopted by this model to provide a diagnosis of the neurological level that change has to take place to resolve a problem.  Once the problem is identified as occurring at one level the problem is resolved by working to bring about change in the neurological level of next order of complexity.  Dilts offers a convincing hierarchy of levels of coaching that correspond to the Neuro-Logical Levels:  Guide corresponds to environment i.e. finding a location.  A behavioural problem needs Coach to develop a competency.  Competency problems need a teacher to teach the values to work at the competency.  A problem concerning ones values and beliefs requires a mentor to develop ones identity.  Identity problems associated with addiction require a sponsor to give you the security to get beyond the self, to the trans-personal.  This consistency of  Neuro-Logical Levels with corresponding  labels for coaching relationships that reflect a hierarchy of change complexity validates the usefulness of this schema as it is a linguistic artefact at least in English culture.

Michael Hall points out that the Neuro-Logical Levels which I have indicated are situated in the external quadrants are not logical levels of experience.  In the Matrix Model “Behaviour, capability, and environment are all facets of a primary state.” Likewise the Neuro-Logical Levels of identity and values and beliefs are among 100 logical levels of experience.  He also points out that one can have beliefs about identity, indicating that these levels are fluid and not hierarchical.   This is very true when looking at these phenomena from a specific perspective in theNeuro-Logical Levels upper left subjective quadrant.

Ken Wilber makes an additional distinction of perspectives when talking about the Four Quadrants.   According to Wilber you can view each quadrant of experience from the outside-in or the inside-out.  Each of these perspectives will result in different observations of stages, thematically consistent levels or holons. (Integral Spirituality, p.36)  The Matrix model describes subjective experience from the inside-out.  From this perspective you notice the different levels and intensities of levels of subjective experience. Think of a concept like smoking is unhealthy and notice how the quality of that concept changes when you know that smoking is unhealthy. Then notice how it changes when you believe that smoking is unhealthy and finally notice what happens when you decide that smoking is unhealthy.  When viewing from the inside-out one is observing one’s own experience and drawing conclusions based on that subjective experience.  This has been termed a phenomenological approach.

On the other hand subjective experience can be viewed from the outside-in.  This is more of a scientific approach where experience is seen objectively from the outside.  We start with general experiences and move to the particular. Hence I can observe that my subjective experience is composed of beliefs and values and at a deeper level there is my identity.  I can see from this perspective that changing my identity is more profound than changing my beliefs and values.  This perspective of our subjective experience has been termed structuralism.    This outside-in approach can be used to span the objective with the subjective quadrants as is done with the Neuro-Logical Levels to create a structural hierarchy of increasingly complex change moving from observable manipulations of the environment to the subjective depth of changing identity.

Michael Hall when speaking about collaboration in the new Human Potential Movement proposed that when speaking about different viewpoints it is often better to use the contraction “and” than “but” to describe reality.  In most cases including and integrating different perspectives in a more comprehensive map of reality provides a more robust understanding than pitting one perspective against another.  The Matrix Model and the Neuro-logical levels model are different perspectives of the same reality.  Both models have generated an alignment pattern that is used to integrate the contents of the mind to create more effective change in the individual.  A person is not very effective if different levels of his being are fighting against each other. The Neuro-Logical level alignment pattern from Robert Dilts and the meta alignment pattern from Michael Hall are both useful patterns coming at the same reality from two different perspectives.  In practice they are both effective and more relevant than the other depending on the context.  They are two tools in the tool chest of the NLP practitioner.

Michael Hall says in a recent reflectionin  Neurons“we have a complete system in Neuro-Semantic NLP, we don’t need to be eclectic.”  Application of Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrant model to understanding NLP is not a case of being eclectic in the same way that using the Enneagram in conjunction with NLP is eclectic.  In A Sourcebook of MagicHalladmits that the Domain of NLP is Subjective experience.The Eneagram also works on subjective experience hence they are two approaches to the same domain.  On the other hand the Four Quadrants model out frames the systematic treatment of subjective experienceby Neuro-Semantic NLP. The subjective domain that is explained by NLP comprises only one of Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrants.  The Four Quadrants are useful in understanding how NLP relates to a larger body of technical and philosophical understanding that is contained three other quadrants.  I have shown how out framing NLP in this fashion can lead to understanding that transcends apparent contradictions between Michael Hall and Robert Dilts and their discussion of logical levels. Seeing NLP through the lens of the Four Quadrants provides us with a greater facility to use the “and” conjunction to consistently incorporate other perspectives into a body of practices from which we can select the best tool for a given context.
Art Blomme is a social entrepreneur, an Integral theorist/practitioner and a Neuro-Semantic NLP and trainer.  He is engaged in introducing integral and NLP tools to empower grassroots social and political movements to create a sustainable alternative. http://integralshift.ca

Art Blomme About Excerpt

Before we began I watched him do his magic with the microphone in a small room full of electronic equipment. Heseemed almost to have a relationship with the microphone.

Kevin also knew how to ask great questions and get to the heart of things very quickly. I don’t know if this was a natural gift or if he had developed it as a style. Wherever it came from, it was certainly one of his strengths as an interviewer.

All too often I’ve been interviewed by people who didn’t seem to know what they were doing or what an interview was for. Consequently, they would ask either placid questions which had no energy which weren’t worth answering or such conventional questions that would only bore people to sleep.

But not Kevin. Kevin intuitively went for the passionate center of things to see if there was any core. He also knew that to ask such fierce questions, he had to do his homework. So before showing up at the radio studio, we had sent him some of the promo material on Accessing Personal Genius and Neuro-Semantic. On the day that I met Kevin I noticed that he had marked up the written materials, had circled words and statements, had written large question marks on some, and that he had even been to the website and had downloaded some materials.

Seeing that, I felt excited knowing that this would not be a humdrum interview. I then discovered that Kevin knew about framing. He didn’t call it that, but that’s what he did as he introduced me, mentioned the trainings, and then set the structure of the interview. He would ask questions for the first half and then give the audience a chance to ask questions. With that, he delved right in to it.

“The first thing I think when I hear ‘Accessing Personal Genius’ is over-sell, that you are over- selling and over-promising. Surely you don’t mean that you can create geniuses or that everybody can become a ‘genius,’ do you?”

“That’s a great question! It’s great because what we call ‘genius’ is not something that’s created, it is something that is accessed and released and that’s because ‘genius’ is not so much about I.Q. intelligence as it is about being fully present.”

“You mean we are already geniuses? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes and no. No if the word ‘genius’ means high I.Q., but yes if you mean being at your best, being fully engaged in whatever you’re doing so that you are ‘in the zone,’ and fully ‘on.’ We call the genius state a state of flow because when we are in it, things just flow. It’s as if all of our mental, emotional, and personal resources are fully available.”

“That’s a different way of looking at ‘genius.’ So genius is more of an experience than a status. That must be why there’s no Universities that give degrees in ‘genius.’ So if it is an experience, then how do we experience it or as you say, ‘access’ it?”

“Suppose I told you that you were born for genius, that everyone listening to us right now was born for genius? Have you ever noticed how little children can get so lost in a toy or game as they play and become
so engaged in that activity that you have to almost shout or tap them on the shoulder to get their attention? If genius is being all there, then that child is in a genius state of full engagement, of one mind —single minded about that activity.”

“So genius is about focus and concentration? So it is the opposite of multi-tracking? Is that why we think of some geniuses as absent-minded and lost in their thoughts?”

“Yes,exactly. They are of one mind about something and because they are not splitting their awareness, but focusing it, they have a laser-beam focus and that’s what makes them so present, so engaged, so much in the zone.”

“That’s the best golfers do. They get in the zone and are able to stop all the mind-chatter so they aren’t disturbed by the things going on around them.”

“You’ve got it. Genius is a natural state of mind, we were born for it. The challenge we have is not in creating it, but in getting back to it. Our problem as adults is that we have too many things on our mind, we have too many things going on in the back of our mind. We need to ‘Lose our mind and come back to our senses’ so that we can be present and enter that zone of focus and flow.”

[Laughing] “That’s good. When I’m working at my home office on some of my projects, my wife is always telling me that I’ve lost my mind because she can call me for supper over and over and I never hear her. Now I’ve got the best excuse ever— I’m in my genius state!”

“When you’re in that state, what enables you to be so lost in your thoughts? How do you get so involved that you don’t hear the call for supper?”

“Well, I’m just doing what I love, usually searching for songs and clips that I can use on the radio. . . . And then it’s like I’m lost in my own world.”

“And when that happens, what happens to time, to your sense of time?”

“I don’t know, it’s gone.”

“And what happens to your environment?”

“Gone.”

“And to other people?”

“Gone.”

“Well, Kevin, sounds like in that context you already have accessed your personal genius state!”

“That’s great. Of course, the problem is that I can get lost in that state for hours and hours and then miss appointments, or not get sufficient sleep.”

“So how would you like to be able to switch that genius state of flow on and off at will? How would you like to be able to step into it and step out of it and to do so whenever you want to?”

“That would be great. I’d like that.”

“Well, that’s what our training and books about Accessing Personal Genius is all about. When we can do that, we have the state instead of it have us. That’s what I did with the states of both researching and writing. Prior to doing that, I suffered from writer’s block, but now that I can simply step into my writing genius state, I have not suffered from writer’s block since. Now, I can turn that state on for an hour or five minutes or however long I want it.”

“Now that would be different. Sometimes when I get into flow, I fear that if I stepped out of it, I couldn’t get it back.”

“Yes, that’s very typical. Because it’s such a joyous and powerful experience, when we are there we don’t step out and when we are not in it, we feel that we have to wait until it happens again. But once you recognize how you do it, then you won’t have to wait around for the genius state to occur. Because it is your state,you created it. And if you create it, then you can learn to turn it on and off at your choice.”

“So this is not more over-selling, is it? Just how can we just turn it on and off? How does that work?”

“Have you ever watched the Olympic athlete turn it on and off? Have you ever seen a gymnast, a diver, or a sprinter just step up to the time of their performance and just turn it on. When we watch them, we see them take their stand, access the state, and then explode into the activity.”

“Yes, that’s fantastic, but are you now saying we all can be Olympic athletes? That we can be or do anything we want to be or do? Does it go that far?”

“Perhaps. But who really knows? What I’m really saying is that we can take charge of the focus state itself—that we can learn to run our own brains so that we can get the best attitude, mood, and performance out of ourselves.
Wouldn’t that in itself be enough to make your day? What if you could simply step into a highly focused state when you are here in the studio or when you are creating a new show or when you are with a loved one . . . wouldn’t that make your life a little bit more wonderful?”

“Yes it would. That really would. . . . And you will teach how to do this in the training?”

“Definitively.”

“And what about you? Are you able to step into . . . what did you just call it, ‘the genius writing state?’”

“Yes, people often ask how I can write so much or how I come up with so many new models . . . and I can only say that since experiencing the genius pattern which I ran with myself in 1996, I have not had writers block.”

He was passionate enough about it that he was one of the people who traveled to Denver for the 1994 NLP Conference where I spoke on my modeling project on Resilience. He flew in from Washington DC and attended the presentation when I first discovered the Meta-States model and he was one of the three people there that I immediately began talking to after that presentation about Meta-States. Then, throughout 1994 and 1995, Doug was one of the colleagues who brainstormed with me about many of the factors and features that I incorporated into the first model of Meta-States.

Yet what I remember Doug Adams mostly for is that he was the person who invented the verb “meta-stating.” After reading my initial paper on Meta-States and contemplating it for a couple of weeks, we have a long conversation on the phone in December of 1994. That’s when Doug asked me about “the steps of meta-stating.” “The steps of what?” I inquired. “Meta-stating? I’ve never thought of it like that. What are you thinking Doug?”
“Well, if you’re not going to turn Meta-States into another nominalization so that people think that it is a thing rather than focus on the process and the mechanisms of reflexivity, then don’t you need a verb form of the term Meta-States?”

During that dialogue, Doug challenged me to come up with a meta-state process. When I later came up with the original meta-stating process. I think it had 11 steps! Talk about exhaustive, it said everything I knew and could think about reflexivity! Later as I began traveling and presenting Meta-States to various NLP Centers in the USA, I discovered one of the real benefits of presentation—feedback. People found 11 steps too much. So I began to simplify the process and to put it in a more memorable form. The result? The Five A’s of meta-stating:

1) Access a resourceful state that you want to set as your frame or meta-state.
2) Amplify it so that it is strong and robust enough to be felt.
3) Apply that state to a primary state or situation.
4) Appropriate it into the life context, environment, or relationship where you want it.
5) Analyze the result to make sure it is ecological, congruent, and empowering.

After coming up with the Five A’s, Denis Bridoux in England translated it into French using 5 A’s; others found 5 A’s in Spanish. When Colin Cox in New Zealand learned the 5 A’s, he applied his creative genius to them by turning them into gestures so that people could mime them for easy learning. He also added 2 more A’s– “awareness” and “accelerate.” He added

Awareness as the very first step and Accelerate as the last. 1) Awareness of the present and primary state that needs to be outframed, textured, or meta-stated with some higher resource. 7) Accelerate your actions and behaviors to make this new experience real and practical in your everyday life.

This gives us the current 7 A’s of the meta-stating process. Do you know those?

1) Awareness
2) Access
3) Amplify
4) Apply
5) Appropriate
6) Analyze
7) Accelerate

If you read the Meta-State Journal (1997 and 1998) you would have seen Doug Adams name in those monthly journals (which are now incorporated in the spiral book, Meta-State Magic). Before his untimely death at 38 years old, Doug was a beloved colleague as he contributed his insights and feedback for what has become the Meta-States model.

Now you know who first came up with the phrase, meta-stating. Of course, if you don’t know what a meta-state is you wouldn’t know what “meta-stating” means. That’s why from the beginning we came up with other phrases. The one that I used predominately for the first five years was “bring to bear” as in “bring this resourceful state of X to bear upon this primary state of Y.” Bob Bodenhamer still uses that phrase predominately.

One day in 1997 or 1998 I was in Austin Texas presenting Meta-States for business (“Genius at Work”) and a lady walked into the training on the second day with two teddy bears dangling on each side of her. She had tied them together with a string. It’s not everyday you see a woman walking round with two teddy bears strung around her neck and dangling on each side, so everybody was asking, “What’s with the bears?”

When I asked, she said, “You of all people should know! You talked about two bears all day yesterday.” “I did?” “Yes, you said ‘bring joy to bear on your learning,’ ‘bring ownership to bear on your awareness of your personal powers,’ ‘bring pleasure to bear on that pleasure.’ So that’s why I brought my two bears with me today.”

And that, of course, has become something many others have done. Just last year in Johannesburg South Africa, I walked into a training room sponsored by Anne Renew and Cheryl Lucas and there was Anne’s two bears in the front of the room!

We meta-state by bringing one state (thought, emotion, physiology) to bear upon another, by applying one to another, by embedding one inside of another (like Russian and Chinese dolls), by transcending and including (Ken Wilbur) to create new categories or logical levels, by finding out
“waz up about waz up” (how Mike Davis and Sterling Harris) defined it in songs that the Meta- Players created.

In this and other ways we speak about meta-stating ourselves and others with resources that make a transformative difference and that create new empowering frames of mind. As you can see, the introduction training to the domain of Meta-States (APG) did not arise full grown but has been developing and evolving and today has the richness that it does due to the creative contributionofmanypeople. And I’m convinced it will continue in this new year and in the years to come.

I still remember the shock that I felt when I first read that statement in the book review. Actually I was utterly shocked by the statement. That was a statement that I had never even entertained, I had not thought of Meta-States in that way. And given that it was presented so bluntly, I felt confused at first. Having not been my radar, I didn’t know how the Meta-States model could have consumed NLP.

That was 1996 and here it is a decade later, and I have to admit that Graham was more right than I ever suspected. Since his 1996 review of Meta-States, the Meta-States model has indeed almost eat up and consumed the NLP model in numerous ways. During the years in which this took place, I was mostly unconscious of it. Yet in review, I am able to take a broader perspective and to see the revolutionary effect of Meta-States on the original NLP model and domains.

None of these books or training manuals were set out in some futuristic Mission Statement as to what we would do in Neuro-Semantics to “eat up the NLP model.” And yet that is what essentially happened over the years. I did not know it at the time, it is only in looking back does that become evident.

At the same time, I was writing a series of articles as critiques of NLP. Some of the articles I wrote by myself and some of them I wrote with others. One of the first was “The Downside of NLP,” later I wrote an especially biting critique of DHE, “Ten Years and Still No Beef.” In all of them I attempted to address various problems in the NLP model as it had evolved over the years and to take NLP to a new level.

Yet through it all we discovered many things and began to distinguish what we were doing from NLP. What we have discovered? One of the things that we mainly discovered is that a large portion of the magic of NLP occurs above the representational level. Now, the representational level is indeed the genius of NLP. It is a genius and contribution that we readily recognize as the unique creation of John Grinder and Richard Bandler. What NLP does best and what NLP is mostly about is representation. That is, it is about what and how we represent information on the theater of our minds and how that some simple shifts can generate very powerful results.

In this, NLP is truly magical. As a cognitive psychologist, when I found NLP I immediately knew that it filled in the gaps of Cognitive Psychology, Rational-Emotive Therapy, and of Reality Therapy. That’s why I found it so compelling.

Yet while NLP is all about representation, we learned something unbeknowest to Bandler and Grinder. We learned that there was another part of NLP that created magic that actually operated at meta-levels, at meta-state levels, and that the founders and developers somehow never truly realized this. We learned that what we had found in the Meta-States model actually explained most of the so-called magic.

This is nowhere better illustrated than the whole mis-adventure into the so-called “sub- modalities.” NLP decided that the finer features of the various sensory representational systems were “sub” to the modalities and so thought and used metaphors about “going down” and probing to a sub-level to find the elemental particles of experience.

Yet these cinematic features of our mental movies, the qualities of our visual, auditory, and kinesthetic systems are not “sub” at all. As the features by which we edit our movies, they occur at a meta-level as one of our frames. Somehow the entire process of even detecting these features is discovered by stepping back and going meta. And when we discover them, we discover meta- programsandmeta-modeldistinctions. All these are strong indicators that the term “sub- modalities” was the problem and had mis-led us.

In all of this, the reductionistic approach of Bandler and Grinder that created NLP in the first place by identifying the “languages of the mind” in terms of the sensory and meta representational systems ultimately proved to be its own confusion. The result? There has been essentially nothing new produced within the basic NLP model in the past 20 years.

By way of contrast, Meta-States that originated as a NLP model and so recognized by the International Association of NLP Trainers has continued, year after year, to generate new models, hundreds of new patterns, new modeling of experts to create new training modules and programs, etc.

The reason for this? Meta-States is all about referencing rather than representation. Mere representation is a first level mapping whereas the frames that we set about a representation is much more governing. So the direction for finding more of the “magic” of NLP was not down but up. And that’s the direction that Meta-States took us. That’s why the idea of Meta-States becoming a model that “eats up NLP” was obvious to several people before it dawn on me.

The meta-level states and frames of Meta-States explains why and how the mind-body-emotion system operates as it does and brought forth a whole series of new presuppositions for the field of NLP and which later established the presuppositions of Neuro-Semantics. “The person who sets the frame governs the game.” “Someone always sets the frame.” “Where there’s a game, there’s a frame.” And that will be the subject of our next Reflection.

Reflexivity is a function of reflecting back on ourselves. As we reflect back on to ourselves, our experience, our thoughts, our emotions, even our physiology (the component elements of a mind- body state), we then entertain other thoughts-and-emotions about our first experience. On the surface, this sounds simple. It is not. As a system of interactive parts, when we step back and reflect on ourselves, we move to a higher or meta level and we set the second thoughts-emotions as the classification or category for the first. Now we have some system complexity at work.

Stepping back to reflect on ourselves is known in NLP as “going meta.” From Integral Psychology it is known as “transcending and including.” From logical levels, it is known as classifying and categorizing. From Korzybski’s General Semantics it is not as “abstracting at a higher level” and creating our human “psycho-logics.”

Wow, it means all of that! Yes, and even more but that’s enough to bite off for this Reflection on Meta-States. When we meta-state by going meta, we transcend the state of mind and body that we’re in and move to a level higher from which we then include the first state inside of it. In this we are embedding our states inside of higher frames.

As we transcend our first state and include it inside of a higher thought or emotion, that higher or meta-thought and feeling becomes the governing frame. It is in this way that we create layers upon layers of meaning. Let me give an example.

Start with the primary mind-body state of learning. Now step back to entertain some thoughts- and-emotions of delight, pleasure, even fun and joy about the learning. Do so by thinking about what the learning will do for you. Do so by considering what the learning will open up for you, what it will unleash inside you. As you now transcend your learning experience and step up into the delight and pleasure feelings about it, notice how you include your learning experience within the frame and category of joy.

Ahhh! Now you have the meta-state of joyful learning. Ready for another step back? Then go meta now to passion about your joyful learning. Transcend joyful learning to the state of passion, excitement, and love for so that joyful learning becomes embedded inside of that passion. Now you have passionate joyful learning. What class is learning a member of for you? Fun things. And what class if joyful learning a member of? Passion. Is this logical? Probably not. But is it psycho-logical? You bet it is.

The process of meta-stating is the process of transcending and including, going meta, setting higher frames, abstracting to create beliefs and belief systems, and abstracting to set up psycho- logical structures. Pretty profound, wouldn’t you say?

All of this is also a higher and different facet of “running your own brain.” In NLP, running your own brain mostly means managing the representations on the screen of your mind. This is the genius of NLP. NLP focuses mostly on representation. By zooming in to the movie theater of our mind, NLP looks at the sensory representation systems (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.) and the meta-representation of language, mathematics, etc.

NLP also discovered that there are even finer cinematic features within each of these systems and so developed the domain of sub-modalities. Yet the cinematic features like an image being close or far, clear or fuzzy, big or small, two-dimensional or three-dimensional, etc. are actually how we edit our movies and so operate as higher frames to our movies.
How the Meta-States Model of Neuro-Semantics takes this further to expand and enrich it is to recognize the meta-levels of our mind— the multi-dimensional nature of our thinking-and-feeling matrix.

Consider “sub-modalities,” as an example. Prior to the Meta-States model, all of us in NLP thought that the cinematic features of our movies were somehow at a “lower” level, a “sub” level. Then one day we began to realize that to make our pictures closer or further away, we have to step back, notice this feature of our representation, and then edit it in a new and different way. In other words, we had to go meta to detect and alter the close-far “sub-modality. This led to the Aha! Discovery that “sub-modalities” are meta-frames, that is, meta-states.

And it doesn’t stop there. Because of the infinite regress dynamic (the infinite progress dynamic) we can always step back, transcend and include, go meta, and meta-state yet one more level up. And it is this unending process that allows us to always outframe to get leverage on managing the meta-levels of our mind.

The art of learning Meta-States is that of learning to handle and manage the meta-levels that we dynamically create through the going meta process. And when you know this and become skilled in this process, you’ll understand that nearly all of the “magic” of NLP occurs at meta-levels.

For Training in Meta-States, check out the APG (Accessing Personal Genius) trainings. I will be in Portland OR. With Rich Aanrich and Cat Wilson in March Then will do APG in my home town of Grand Junction CO. in July

Other Neuro-Semantic Trainers present APG trainings in the USA and around the world. See www.neurosemantics.com schedule for such trainings.

I was involved in a modeling project on resilience as I was studying how people develop the quality of “bounce” in their thinking-and-feeling so that when they get knocked down they don’t stay down. In the process I took to interviewing numerous people who had suffered set-backs, who had been through a living hell of one sort or another, and who had recovered their passions about living and were back in the game of life. In the process I had been sketching a basic working schema for the stages of recovery from set back to being back in the game of life. So I prepared a 3-hour workshop at the Denver NLP Convention, it was accepted, and so I went and presented it there some 50 to 60 people.

After presenting the stages in the process of “Going for It – Again,” I invited someone to come forward “who had been through hell and had returned.” When several raised their hands and briefly described the traumatic events that they had been through and the degree to which they were back, I selected one gentleman and began inquiring about his strategy. I wanted to model out how he did it. At one point, he mentioned that he moved from one stage to another and I asked, “What was on your mind as you did that? What did you think or feel?” He said something about knowing that it would all work out. “How did you know that?” He commented that it was like a state about the first state, a meta-state.

That’s when the lights and bells went off. That’s when all of the studies in Korzybski and Bateson suddenly came together and made sense. That’s when the Meta-States model was birthed. Within a week I had the model detailed in a 40 page document and within two months Wyatt Woodsmall called and said it would be given the award for the most significant contribution to the field of NLP in 1995.

The aha! facet of this experience was that the term meta-state brought together things that had been percolating in the back of my mind for several years. Suddenly, lots and lots of things became clear. First and foremost was being able to understand complex states. Having learned about mind-body states in NLP, I described them by saying that we have “two royal roads” whereby we can access a state— mind (thinking, imagining, talking, hearing) and body (physiology, acting, gestures, breathing, etc.).

Yet having worked with more complex states like self-esteem, proactivity, forgiveness, and responsibility, I knew that there was something more, something missing. Mere representational images and sounds on the movie of the mind did not seem sufficient for most of the people I was seeing as clients for inducing and maintaining these states. How do you represent “self-esteem?” What picture induces “proactivity?” What sound track fully elicits “forgiveness” or “responsibility?”

But what was missing? Within such complex states, there was also typically a less direct and different kind of kinesthetic involved. So when the gentleman that I was interviewing started to describe a higher state, a state about the other states in coming back from a set-back, he said it was a “state of knowing that he would eventually get through it all.”
I echoed back his words. “So it’s a state of knowing that he would eventually get through it all. Ahhh. So what do you call this state?” He didn’t know. “I’m not sure, it’s a big picture state, like I’m above it all and know that I’ll get through it all.”

“How do you know that you’re in this big picture state of knowing that?” I asked again, trying to understand what he was doing in his mind, how he represented it and how I could replicate what he was doing. “Well, it’s like this state is about that other state of feeling the emotional ups-and- downs of the setback, but I’m not too concerned about my roller-coaster emotions because I know I will get through. It’s like a state meta to the other.”

“You mean it is a meta-state about the first state?” I reflected back. “Yes, a meta-state.”

Well, I’m sure I got through the workshop that day, but inside my head other things were going on. I was picture a circle of a mind-body energy state meta to a first one and governing it and framing it as its internal reference structure. Suddenly, I began to understand the meta-levels of learning in Bateson’s “levels of learning” in a new and more dynamic fashion. Suddenly the “structuraldifferential” of Korzybski also took on new significance. And so with that the search began in earnest.

Within six months I wrote the first book, Meta-States (1995), and immediate ran a new training here in Colorado that I called “Dragon Slaying” as I began specifying how bringing a negative state of thought-and-feeling against ourselves usually created meta-muddles of self-conflict and self-antagonism that creates the disordering of personality, self-sabotages, and wastes incredible mental, emotional, and personal energy. Dragon Slaying (1996) was then transcribed and written from that training.

So what are meta-states? Our meta-states are the thoughts-and-emotions we have within ourselves about our experiences. If our first thoughts-and-emotions are reactions and responses to the world, meta-states are our reactions and responses to ourselves. This includes reactions to our thoughts, to our emotions, to our experiences, to our concepts, to our abstractions, to all of our meanings.

My meta-states and your meta-states are our reactions to ourselves. So, how do you react to yourself? To you react to your thinking-emoting states with kindness and grace or harshness and judgment? Whatever you do, that sets the frame or meta-state for the first state. In this a meta- state is a “logical level” jump. We step back from ourselves as it were to then think-and-feel a second time, then a third time, a fourth, and so on.

In fact, the process is never-ending. It is an infinite process as Korzybski noted. Philosophers had noted this for centuries and called it “the infinite regress.” In Neuro-Semantics I began calling it “the infinite progress.” Why? Here the good news. Whatever frames we have set and whatever meta-muddles we have created with limiting beliefs and self-sabotaging understandings and decisions, we can always make one more step forward and set a whole new empowering frame. Talk about opening up things so that we are only as stuck as our frames! This is it.

Why meta-states? Stay tune for additional Meta-State Reflections and you’ll discover the power, extensiveness, and nature of meta-states and how to use them for fun and profit.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Just how close did William James come to inventing NLP?  When you read his classic work (1892/1961), Psychology: The Briefer Course, he seemed to come very close to many of the formulations that we now recognize as part of the NLP model of human functioning and consciousness.

After all, he described the sensory systems in great detail, de-nominalized vague terms in order to make them more precise and operational, offered narrative descriptions about “states of consiousness,” explored the subjective structure of various experiences, recognized submodalities, played around with reflexivity, made distinctions in the identity realm between “I” and “me,” wrote about memory, language, “programs” (habits), anchoring, “time,” etc.

Actually, James’s The Briefer Course condensed his original two volumes.  In it he emphasized the human senses and the representational systems as the essence of consciousness.  Upon identifying several nominalizations (including the word “emotions” as well as several specific emotions), James de-nominalize them to bring more clarity of thinking into the process.  He provided interesting refinements about the kind of learners–visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. that I think you will find most fascinating.  James further modelled a most engaging writing style in his presentations.

Neuro-linguistic “Habits” (NLH?)

You don’t have to read into James far to realize that he wrote a lot about “habits”– his term for the neuro-linguistic “programs.” A statement frequently quoted from him goes, “Habits are not merely second nature; they are ‘ten times nature.’” (p.9).  And as such, they therefore comprise the structural unit of mental life.  Here he speaks of the interface of habits and neurology.

“Habits are due to pathways through the nerve-centres.  Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.  If practice did not make perfect, nor habit economize the expense of nervous and muscular energy, he would be in a sorry plight.”

“Without habit a man might be occupied all day in dressing and undressing himself; the attitude of his body would absorb all his attention and energy; the washing of his hands or the fastening of a button would be as difficult to him on each occasion as to the child on its first trial; and he would furthermore, be completely exhausted by his exertions.  Think of the pains necessary to teach a child to stand.” (p. 5)

“Habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed.  We all have routine manner of performing daily offices… our higher thought centres know hardly anything about these matters!” (p. 7)

James proposed that the great thing in all education involves making our nervous system our ally rather than our enemy.  To capitalize on the acquisitions of skills, we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, and regarding as many useful actions as we can.  James recommended that we also “guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us” (11).  Sounds like the “Ecology Question and Check” that we use in NLP!

As we work to acquire new habits we should “launch ourselves assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way and make engagements incompatible with the old.”  Doing this gives new beginnings the kind of momentum so that we won’t feel tempted to break down so soon as we otherwise might.  Reading that reminds me of the emphasis Robbins (1991) puts on attaching “massive pain” or “massive pleasure” to the beginning of a new program.  In setting such anchors or programs, James wrote:

“Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.  Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. (p. 12)

“Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspiration communicate the new ’set’ to the brain. (p. 14)

James warned that without programming ourselves for effectiveness, we might end up as “the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.” (p. 15). To remedy that–we should never suffer ourselves to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in some active way.              “Let the expression be the least thing in the world–speaking genially to one’s grandmother, or giving up one’s seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic offers–but let it not fail to take place.” (p. 15)

Why?  Because if we let our emotions evaporate, then they will get into the habit of evaporating.  Then, that becomes our “program.”  Conversely, we should keep the faculty of effort alive in us by a little gratuitous exercise every day.

“Be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.” (p. 16)

States of Consciousness

James invented, or at least introduced and popularized, the term “the stream of consciousness.” Within each personal consciousness, we experience thinking as “sensibly continuous.”  Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bits.  It flows.  So we use the metaphors of it flowing like a river or a stream (p. 26).  He noted (1892) that states of mind succeed each other and that every state operates as part of a personal consciousness.  (As an aside, most writers and thinkers in NLP generally utilize this definition of a state of consciousness, not as a static and non-moving “thing,” but as a ongoing flow of consciousness.)

“Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself.  There is no giving or bartering between them.  No thought ever comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own.  Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law.  It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned.” (p. 20)

In his de-nominalizing of “thoughts” and feelings, James both put the pseudo-noun (“emotions” and “thoughts”) back in verb form (thinking, feeling) and added the Lost Performative (the person thinking-emoting) when he highlighted the fact that feelings and thoughts do not exist… they do not exist apart from a person.  He noted that each person exists as a thinker-feeler.  Hence, “‘I think’ and ‘I feel’” exists, but not detached “thoughts” and “feelings.”  And true to Korzybski’s basic tenet of non-identity, James noted the constant change of consciousness and that “No state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before.” (p. 21).

“Our state of mind is never precisely the same.  Every thought we have of a given fact, is strictly speaking, unique and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact.  When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner.  Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our successive views of the same thing.” (p. 23)

“It is logically impossible that the same thing should be known as the same by two successive copies of the same thought.  The thoughts by which we know what we mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed from each other. We think the thought now substantively, now transitively; now in a direct image, now in one symbol, now in another symbol.” (p. 110)

James also noted the speed of consciousness as Bandler and Grinder did when they created several of the initial NLP patterns that depended upon doing a piece quickly.

“When we take a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is the different pace of its parts.  Let us call the resting-places the ’substantive parts,’ and the places of flight the ‘transitive parts,’ of the stream of thought.  It then appears that our thinking tends at all times toward some other substantive part than the one from which it has just been dislodged.  The rush of the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before we can rest it.” (p. 27, emphasis added)

Today in NLP we recognize “the different pace” of parts of our pictures and sounds when we do contrastive analysis between “fast time” and “slow time.”  Different parts of our represnetations will move at different speeds.  You can detect this by thinking about some time when you zoomed along an interstate and then came off on an off-ramp and creeped along.  The distortion of your sense of “time” almost inevitably involves some facets of your visual representations moving at a different pace than other parts.

James intuitively recognized these things— although he didn’t know what to do about them or how to use them.  As with the “rush of thought” as representations swish off to other places— he didn’t know how to use that very mechanism to continue the swishing!

In his writing James frequently commented on one state namely, the one he designated as the tip-of-the-tongue state.  This state arises when you see someone you know but can’t recall his or her name, or when you have a word on the tip of your tongue, but can’t quite get to it.  At such times, we experience “a gap” in our mind,

“…but no mere gap.  It is a gap that is intensely active.  A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term.” (p. 30)

How close to Bandler’s comment that “the tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon involves a kinesthetic feel! As James explored the phenomenology of this experience, he noted that it involves the intention of saying a thing before saying it.  We have an entirely definite intention that comes to our mind, we feel an anticipatory intention, but then can’t quite access it.

“Try to symbolize what goes on in a man who is racking his brains to remember a thought which occurred to him last week.  The associates of the thought are there, many of them at least, but they refuse to awaken the thought itself.  We cannot suppose that they do not irradiate at all into its brain-tract, because his mind quivers on the very edge of its recovery.  Its actual rhythm sounds in his ears; the words seem on the imminent point of following, but fail.  Now the only difference between the effort to recall things forgotten and the search after the means to a given end is that the latter have not, whilst the former have, already formed a part of our experience.” (p. 138)

At a meta-level, he noted that knowledge about a thing involves knowledge of its relations.  Because mind naturally wonders, it bounces about between referents— it goes places.

“The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things [it swishes to new referents!]; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else.  If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.” (p. 94, emphasis added)

“The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration follow each other through our thinking the restless flight of one idea before the next, the transitions our minds make between things wide as the poles asunder, transitions which at first startle us by their abruptness, but which, when scrutinized closely, often reveal intermediating links of perfect naturalness and propriety— all this magical, imponderable streaming has from time immemorial excited the admiration of all whose attention happened to be caught by its omnipresent mystery.” (p. 120)

“The train of imagery wanders at its own sweet will, now trudging in sober grooves of habit, now with a hop, skip, and jump, darting across the whole field of time and space.  This is revery, or musing; but great segments of the flux of our ideas consist of something very different from this.  They are guided by a distinct purpose or conscious interest; and the course of our ideas is then called voluntary.” (p. 138)

I like to think of these “hops, skips, and jumps” of consciousness as thought-balls that bounce around in consciousness.  Regarding states of consciousness, James also noted the effect that a state can have upon a person’s thinking, emoting, behaving.  He noted what we today call “state dependency.”

“The difficulty is mental; it is that of getting the idea of the wise action to stay before our mind at all.  When any strong emotional state whatever is upon us, the tendency is for no images but such as are congruous with it to come up.” (p. 318)

Conclusion

Yes, he almost stumbled onto the model of neuro-linguistic habits— but not quite.  In the next parts, I’ll reference facets in James’ writings where he spoke about the sensory representational systems, submodalities, meta-programs, “time,” and much more.

Part II
WILLIAM JAMES
Almost NLP Inventor (Part II)

In the first article on William James as an almost inventor of NLP, I highlighted his descriptions of human “programs”— which he called habits and his description of states of consciousness— and how “mind” flows as a stream, every jumping, hopping, and skipping about between referents. He knew that the brain goes places, and noted many of the places that brains typically go— he just didn’t know how to tap into these mental-emotional mechanisms as NLP has taught us.  Now look at his almost discovery of sensory systems, submodalities, self-reflexivity, and identity.

The Sensory Representational Systems

James described the senses as organs of selection and noted that each sense-organ picks out those which fall within certain limits of velocity, and ignores the rest. He noted that each of our senses generalizes, deletes, and distorts to create its representations.

“We do far more than emphasize things [distortion], and unite some [generalization], and keep others apart.  We actually ignore [deletion] most of the things before us.” (p. 37)

“Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis [the Territory], our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and shade. It chooses certain of the sensations to represent the thing most truly.” (p. 38)

So via our senses, we create our represented map of the territory!  Then, as we continue to create our internal representation or “experience,” we do so using our “habits of attention” or what in NLP we call Meta-Programs.

“In a world of objects thus individualized by our mind’s selective industry, what is called our ‘experience,’ is almost entirely determined by our habits of attention.” (p 39)

In the area of memory, James noted that all improvement of memory consists in the improvement of one’s habitual methods of recording facts (p. 165).  He became highly impressed by the fourfold channel of eye, ear, voice, and hand (VAA_tK) as an improved method of memorizing!  Notice just how close he came here to the NLP sense modalities!  He also noted the effect of the sense modalities on the nervous system.

“Sensations, once experienced, modify the nervous organisms, so that copies of them arise again in the mind after the original outward stimulus is gone.”

Noting how people differed in visual imagination, he quoted the statistical inquiry that Mr. Galton (1880) collected from one of the first recorded psychological experiments.

“He addressed a circular to large numbers of persons asking them to describe the image in their mind’s eye of their breakfast-table on a given morning. The variations were found to be enormous; and, strange to say, it appeared that eminent scientific men on the average had less visualizing power than younger and more insignificant persons.” (p. 170, from “Inquiries into Human Faculty, by Galton, p. 83-114)

James noted some differences between good and poor visualizer. He said that

“…some people undoubtedly have no visual images at all worthy of the name, and instead of seeing their breakfast-table, they tell you that they remember it or know what was on it. The ‘mind-stuff’ of which this ‘knowing’ is made seems to be verbal images exclusively.” (p. 172)

Regarding the modality of words and language, James noted that “The scheme of relationship and the conclusion” function as the essential things in that kind of thinking.

“Now words, uttered or unexpressed, are the handiest mental elements we have.”

They provide us a rapidly revivable anchor to the referents, “coffee,” “bacon,” “muffins,” “eggs,” etc.  But both James and Galton drew (what to us in NLP seems like) a very strange conclusion.  They believed that —

“The older men are and the more effective as thinkers [use language], the more, as a rule, they have lost their visualizing power.” (p. 173)

Regarding those who favor the modality of auditory-tonal (A_t), James described those who think by preference in auditory images as audiles (after Galton).  This type “appears to be rarer than the visual.”

“Persons of this type imagine what they think of in the language of sound.” (p. 173)

“It is clear that the pure audile, seeking to develop only a single one of his faculties, may, like the pure visualizer, perform astounding feats of memory— Mozart, for example, noting from memory the Miserere of the Sistine Chapel after two hearings; the deaf Beethoven, composing and inwardly repeating his enormous symphonies.”

For kinesthetic, James talked about people using “images of muscular sensations, a ‘motile’ form of imagination.”

“The movements of articulate speech play a predominant pat of his mental life.  Most peoples on being asked in what sort of terms they imagine words, will say, ‘In terms of hearing.’  It is not until their attention is expressly drawn to the point that they find it difficult to say whether auditory images or motor images connected with the organs of articulation predominate.” (174)

Sub-Modalities

James even anticipated sub-modalities as he talked about the distinguishing differences between things.  In describing the conditions which favor discrimination, he treated several different kinds.

“First… the things to be discriminated must be different either in time, place, or quality.  In other words, and physiologically speaking, they must awaken neural processes which are distinct.  The sensations excited by the differing objects must not fall simultaneously but must fall in immediate succession upon the same organ.

It is one of those transitive feelings or feelings of relation.  When once arouses, its object lingers in the memory along with the substantive terms which precede and follow, and enables our judgments of comparison to be made.” (pp. 112-113)

He also noted that the longer the interval of time between the sensations, the more uncertain would become our discrimination of them.  Regarding differences inferred he said that we must not confound those entirely unlike cases [from direct perceptions of differences] in which we infer that two things must differ because we know enough about each to warrant our classing them under distinct heads.  We constantly compare feelings with those qualities our imagination has no sort of acquaintance at the time–pleasures/ pains for example.

Self-Reflexive Consciousness

With Bateson’s bequeathal of “going meta” and Korzybski’s distinction about abstracting to second and third, etc. levels, we have in NLP the concept of self-reflexive consciousness (Hall, 1995, 1996). James spoke about such in the following words.

“Whatever I may be thinking of, I am always the same time more or less aware of myself, of my personal existence. At the same time it is I who am aware; so that the total self of me, being as it were duplex, partly known and partly knower, partly object and partly subject, must have two aspects discriminated in it … Me and… I. … The self as known, or the me, the empirical ego… [a primary state], and the self as knower or I, the pure ego [a meta-level state of consciousness].” (p. 43)

With his separating these levels into a “Me” and “I,” James specified that “a man’s Me is the sum total of all that he can call his” –body, psychic powers, clothes, house, wife, children, ancestors, friends, reputation, work, lands, horses, yacht, and bank-account.  He divided the constituents of “the Me” into the material me, the social me, and the spiritual me (p. 44).  He spoke of our social me as arising from the recognition that we get from our mates and that we have as many social selves as we have individuals who recognize us. The spiritual me arises when we think of ourselves as thinkers.  For James, self as knower (a meta-state) raises many ontological questions.

“The pure ego is a very much more difficult subject of inquiry than the Me. (62).   What is the thinker?  Is it the passing state of consciousness itself or something deeper and less mutable?  The passing state is the very embodiment of change.  Yet each of us spontaneously considers that by “I,” he means something always the same.  This has led most philosophers to postulate behind the passing state of consciousness a permanent Substance or Agent whose modification or act it is.” (pp. 62-63)

In speaking about states of consciousness, James talked about the process of ’singling out’ the elements in a compound much the way we pull apart a strategy and identify its component parts in terms of representational systems.

“It is safe to lay it down as a fundamental principle that any total impression made on the mind must be unanalyzable so long as its elements have never been experienced apart or in other combinations elsewhere.” (p. 115)

“Analysis of a thing means separate attention to each of its parts.” (117)

James recognized that we use consciousness to both discriminate between things in order to pull associations apart (find and specifying the strategies of experiences) and then we associate things to create new constructions (inductively move up the scale of abstraction to generalize new constructions).  Thus he speaks about deductive and inductive thinking to deal with large chunks and small chunks.

“All advance in knowledge must consist of both operations; objects at first appearing as wholes are analyzed into parts, and objects appearing separately are brought together and appear as new compound wholes to the mind.” (p. 120)

James also distinguished between levels of thought.  At the primary level of thinking about something beyond the nervous system, he noted that such a thought may induce various thoughts, but then when we later think about that thought (a thought-about a thought, a feeling about a feeling) we may experience even more of a state.

“One may even get angrier in thinking over one’s insult than one was in receiving it; and melt more over a mother who is dead than one ever did when she was living.” (p. 240)

Ah, re-induction of a state— and then an amplification of the state recalled!  James noted the innumerable varieties of emotion at various levels.  He designated the primary level as where we experience “the coarser emotions,” in distinction from meta-levels where we experience “the subtler emotions.”

“Anger, fear, love, hate, joy, grief, shame, pride, and their varieties, may be called the coarser emotions, being coupled as they are with relatively strong bodily reverberations.  The subtler emotions are the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic feelings, mere description of the objects, circumstances, and varieties of the different species of emotion may go to any length.  Their internal shadings merge endless into each  other, and have been partly commemorated in language, as, for example, by such synonyms as hatred, antipathy, animosity, resentment, dislike, aversion, malice, spite, revenge, abhorrence, etc.” (p. 241)

The Identity Level

James wrote that the problem with a man “… is less what act he shall now resolve to do than what being he shall now become.”  As he made this distinction in logical levels (Dilt’s Identity over Behavior), he suggested that we keep a selected ideal uppermost in mind and that to do so operates as a “greater importance than the performance of a specific act.” (p. xv).

From his construct of “Me” and “I” James suggested that as we seek out our truest, strongest, deepest self we review our list of traits and values and pick out the one/s on which we “stake our salvation.”  “All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real.” (p. 53).  From this he developed his strategy for “self-esteem.”

Figure 1

“Everything added to the Self is a burden as well as a pride.  Neither threats nor pleading can move a man unless they touch some one of his potential or actual selves. Find out a person’s strong principle of self-regard.  If a man has given up those things which are subject to foreign fate, and ceased to regard them as parts of himself at all, we are well-nigh powerless over him.  The Stoic receipt for contentment was to dispossess yourself in advance of all that was out of your own power —then fortune’s shocks might rain down unfelt.”

Epictetus exhorts us, by thus narrowing and at the same time solidifying our Self to make it invulnerable: ‘I must die; well, but must I die groaning too?  I will speak what appears to be right, and if the despot says, ‘Then I will put you to death,’ I will reply, ‘When did I ever tell you that I was immortal?  You will do your part, and I mine; it is yours to kill, and mine to die intrepid; yours to banish, mine to depart untroubled.’

How do we act in a voyage?  We choose the pilot, the sailors, the hour.  Afterwards comes a storm.  What have I to care for?  My part is performed.  This matter belongs to the pilot.  But the ship is sinking; what then have it to do?  That which alone I can do–submit to being drowned without fear, without clamor or accusing of God, but as one who knows that what is born must likewise die.” (p. 55)

In this presentation on James, let me end with what I find a humorous note.  James spoke about the marvel of how we always wake up in our own body with our thoughts intact!

“The I appropriates the Me.  Just such objects are the past experiences which I now call mine.  Other men’s experiences never bear this vivid, this peculiar brand. This is why Peter, awakening in the same bed with Paul, and recalling what both had in mind before they went to sleep, reidentifies and appropriates the ‘warm’ ideas as his, and is never tempted to confuse them with those cold and pale-appearing ones which he ascribes to Paul.  Each of us when he awakens says, Here’s the same old Me again, just as he says, Here’s the same old bed, the same old room, the same old world. (71)

So thank God that when you woke up this morning, you easily found your own warm thoughts— those that belong to you, to your consciousness!  Imagine the confusion, strangeness, and difficulties that would arise if the thoughts that you found rushing into your mind when you “come to consciousness” as you awaken depended on the proximity of someone who slept close by!

Part III
WILLIAM JAMES
Almost Inventor of NLP — Part III

He almost did it— William James almost formulated many of the distinctions that we today find in NLP: sensory-based representational systems, submodalities, meta-programs, states of consciousness, levels (primary and meta) of consciousness, etc.  In this article, I want to continue this exploration of James’ formulations and relate them to NLP today.  Here we will look at his emphasis on will or choice, the plasticity of memory and representation, language, anchoring, “time” and time-lines, learning, and the physiology of thought.

An Empowering Decision

If you read the story of William James and the struggle that he had early in life with depression, then you will remember that classic Jamesian empowerment decision.  This goes back to the moment that he decided to subscribe to the doctrine of freedom.  To that decision, he dated his recover from a depression with which he had struggled.  In other words, he swished himself from a limiting belief to an empowering one.  In this case, he decided to run his own brain!

“I think yesterday was a crisis in my life.  I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will–”the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts” –need be the definition of an illusion.  At any rate, I will assume… that it is no illusion.  My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” (p. xix).  From, The thought and Character of William James, Ralph Barton Perry, diary, April, 1870.

Yet because James put so much emphasis upon will, choice, decision, etc., he failed to recognize the technology that we have today in NLP, like swishing consciousness to referents so that we don’t have to constantly use “will” power in keeping ourselves oriented according to our values and desired outcomes.

“Volitional effort is effort of attention.  We thus find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask by what process it is that the thought of any given actions comes to prevail stably in the mind. We see that attention with effort is all that any case of volition implies. The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind. Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will.” (p. 317)

“To sum it all up in a word, the terminus of the psychological process in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied, is always an idea. (p. 322)

The question of fact in the free-will controversy is thus extremely simple.  It relates solely to the amount of effort of attention which we can at any time put forth.

The heroic mind does differently.  To it, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things.  But it can face them if necessary, without for that losing its hold upon the rest of life.  The world thus find sin the heroic man its worthy match and mate.” (p. 326)

“‘Will you or won’t you have it so?‘ is the most probing question we are every asked; we are asked it every hour of the day and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things.”  (p. 327)

This comprised, for James, his decision destroyer process.  He simply ran the meta-level question about his decisions, beliefs, thoughts— “Will you or won’t you have it so?”

Memory as Constructs that Inevitably Change and Grow

James frequently spoke about the very nature of memories and, in fact, made his exploration into memory one of his central themes in his search for understanding consciousness.  In the following quotation, James speaks about the plasticity of memory, of the inherent constructive nature of our representations.  Before Constructivism as a psychological paradigm became known, James assumed it.

“False memories are by no means rare occurrences, and whenever they occur they distort our consciousness of our Me.  The most frequent source of a false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experiences.  We quote what we should have said or done… and in the first telling we may be fully aware of the distinction.  But ere long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns in its stead alone.  This is one great source of the fallibility of testimony mean to be quite honest.” (p. 73)

Language

James viewed language as part of our conceptual system.  He noted that the letters of words do not typically enter our consciousness separately, as they do when we apprehended them alone.  But rather a sentence flashed at once upon the eye functions as a system relative to its words.  A conceptual system works to elicit in us sensible objects.  In other words, a gestalt arises via words and language system so that while it begins by anchoring sensory-based representations, we then generate higher level concepts about such, and then higher concepts about that, etc.

Thus we bring conceptual understandings to lower level information and when we have disconnected data “with no conception which embraces them together, it is much harder to apprehend several of them at once, and the mind tends to let go of one whilst it attends to another.” (p. 86).  In other words, “mind” naturally operates and seeks to operate a meta-mind levels.

Anchoring

Noting the patterns that “mind” takes in its “movements,” James talked about the principles of connection (or association), namely, coexistence, suggestion, resemblance, contrast, contradiction, cause-and-effect, means and end, genus and species, part and whole, substance and property, early and late, large and small, landlord and tenant, master and servant, etc. (p. 121).

“When two elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on re-occurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other.” (p. 123, emphasis added)

He also recognized the importance of vividness in an original experience in terms of re-anchoring it later, although James talked in terms of “tracing the course of reproduction between an idea and our mood.”  Here he speaks about one-time learnings that get strongly anchored.

“If we have once witnessed an execution, any subsequent conversation or reading about capital punishment will almost certainly suggest images of that particular scene. Thus it is that events lived through only once, and in youth, may come in after-years, by reason of their exciting quality or emotional intensity, to serve as types or instances used by our mind to illustrate any and every occurring topic whose interest is most remotely pertinent to theirs.” (p. 133)

James knew that our anchored referents not only create the categories for our thinking, he knew that they also control our states.  Today in NLP we recognize that importance of “state” and state dependent learning, memory, communication, perception and behavior.  In the following, we see James noting such, using the old term “temperament” for state.

“The same objects do not recall the same associates when we are cheerful as when we are melancholy.  Nothing is more striking than our ability to keep up trains of joyous imagery when we are depressed in spirits.  Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty, perishing, and dread afflict unremittingly the imaginations of melancholiacs.  And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are high, find it impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts.  In an instant the train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine and images of spring and hope.” (p. 133)

“Time” and Time-Lines

As James explored “time” he noted that it did not exist as an external referent, but an internal one–as a concept.  In the following quotations, he labors to identify the submodality qualify of duration in “time.”

“The sensible present has duration.  Notice, attend to, the present moment of time. Where is it, this present?  It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.  An ideal abstraction, not only never realized in sense.   The only fact of our immediate experience is what has been called ‘the specious’ present, a sort of saddle-back of time with a certain length of its own, on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.” (p. 147)

“The moment we pass beyond a very few seconds our consciousness of duration ceases to be an immediate perception and becomes a construction more or less symbolic.  To realize even an hour, we must count ‘now! now! now! now!’ indefinitely.  Each ‘now’ is the feeling of a separate  bit of time, and the exact sum of the bits never makes a clear impression on our mind. The longest bit of duration which we can apprehend at once so as to discriminate it from longer or shorter bits of time would seem to be about 12 seconds.” (p. 148)

“Thus we can no more actually perceive a duration than we can perceive an extension, devoid of all sensible content.  We are inwardly immersed in what Wundt has somewhere called the twilight of our general consciousness.  Our heart-beats, our breathing, the pulses of our attention, fragments of words, or sentences that pass through our imagination, are what people this dim habitat.” (p. 149)

James, in this next quote, writes about the kinesthetic aspect of our “time” representation.

“Empty our minds as we may, some form of changing process remains for us to feel, and cannot be expelled.  Awareness of change is thus the condition on which our perception of time’s flow depends; but there exists no reason to suppose that empty time’s own changes are sufficient for the awareness of change to be aroused.”

Next, James reflects on the kinesthetic “feel” of time and relates it to our “time” constructs of past, present, and future.  From this he even talks about a time-line–”a horizontal line” to represent the “time” concept.

“The feeling of past time is a present feeling.  In reflecting on the modus operandi of our consciousness of time, we are at first tempted to suppose it the easiest thing in the world to understand.  Our inner states succeed each other.  They know themselves as they are.  But this philosophy is too crude, for between the minds’ own changes being successive, and knowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as between the object and subject of any case of cognition in the world.”

“A succession of feelings, in and of itself, it not a feeling of succession.  And since, to our successive feelings, a feeling of time succession is added, this must be treated as an additional fact requiring its own special elucidation.  If we represent the actual time-stream or of any segment of its length by a horizontal line, the thought of the stream or of any segment of its length, past, present, or to come, might be figured in a perpendicular raised upon the horizontal at a certain point.” (p. 152)

“Our intuition or immediate consciousness of pastness hardly carries us more than a few second backward of the present instant of time.  Remoter dates are conceived, not perceived; known symbolically by names, such as ‘last week,’ 1850, or thought of by events when happened in them.”

James recognized and wrote about the hypnotic phenomenon that in NLP we describe as “fast” and “slow” time.

“A time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back.  On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.” (p. 150)

“The length in retrospect depends obviously on the multitudinousness of the memories which the time affords.  Many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immediately widen the view as we look back.  Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel up.” (p. 151)

“The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older.  The earlier events get forgotten, the result being that no greater multitude of distinct objects remains in the memory.  A day full of excitement, with no pause, is said to pass ‘ere we know it.’  A day full of waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a small eternity [the structure of boredom].  It comes about whenever, from the relative emptiness of content of a tract of time, we grow attentive to the passage of the time itself.  Close your eyes and simply wait to hear someone tell you that a minute has elapsed, and the full length of your leisure with it seems incredible.” (p. 151)

Learning and Memory

For James, a good learning strategy involved utilizing all of the resources from all of the sense modalities, as well as setting up associations for linking things together.

“The ’secret of a good memory’ is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain. …The one who thinks over his experiences most, or weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.” (p. 161).

Why? Because he constantly goes over those items in his mind, compares them, and make a series of them.  They will form for him, not so many odd facts, but a concept-system.  This explains why the memory items “stick.”  James then applied this to effective studying versus “cramming.”

“Let a man early in life set himself the ask of verifying such a theory… and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes on their stem.  In a system, every fact is connected with every other by some thought-relation.  The reason why cramming is such a bad mode of study is now made clear.  Things learned in a few hours, on one occasion, for one purpose, cannot possibly have formed many associations with other things in the mind.  Speedy oblivion is the most inevitable fate of all that’s committed to memory in this way.”

“Whereas the same materials taken in gradually, day after day, recurring in different contexts, considered in various relations, associated with other external incidents, and repeatedly reflected on, grow into such a system, form such connections with the rest of the mind’s fabric, lie open to many pathways of approach, that they remain permanent possessions.  This is the intellectual reason why habits of continuous application should be enforced in educational establishments.” (p. 163)

The Physiology of “Thought”

Among one of those who first recognized the role of physiology and neurology in “thought,” James posited that all consciousness involves motor factors.

“The whole neural organism, it will be remembered, is, physiologically considered, but a machine for converting stimuli in reactions; and the intellectual part of our life is knit up with but the middle or ‘central’ part of the machine’s operations.  Every impression which impinges on the incoming nerves produces some discharge down the outgoing ones, whether we be aware of it or not.” (p. 237)

“We may then lay it down for certain that every representation of a movement awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its object; and awakens it in a maximum degree whenever it is not kept from so doing by an antagonistic representation present simultaneously to the mind. … We do not first have a sensation or thought, and then have to add something dynamic to it to get a movement.  Every pulse of feeling which we have is the correlate of some neural activity that is already on its way to instigate a moment.” (p. 293)

Conclusion

As the “father of American Psychology,” William James tremendously impacted the study of psychology.  Into psychology he brought both pragmatism and phenomenology.  His own pragmatic spirit caused him to ask questions of relevance and usefulness (ecology); his phenomenology of subjective experience enabled him to write in a most engaging narrative style.  And, as evident in his writings, he came very close—  amazingly close— to creating many of the distinctions and facets of the NLP model.

Bibliography

James, William (1892/ 1961). Psychology: The briefer Course. (Ed. by Gordon Allport). NY: Harper & Row.

Robbins, Anthony (1991).  Awaken the Giant Within. NY: A Fireside Book, Simon & Schuster.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Suppose we made a correlation between Adlerian Psychology (theory and methods) with the model and technology of NLP.  Suppose further that we explore the psychological jargon of “Individual Psychology” of the 1920s and translate it into the NLP jargon of the 1990s.  Would we find few or many correlations?  Would we find the systems compatible or conflictual?  Would Alfred Adler have liked NLP?  Would he have become a practitioner?  After you think about the following correlations, see what you think.

Though packaged in different language, Adlerian psychology and the Neuro-Linguistic Programming model consist of an impressive number of similarities.  Many of the factors, presuppositions, and orientations within each system highly correlate.  Obviously, the Adlerian model represents a much older theory of personality (1920) and traces its roots to Freudian psychoanalysis.  NLP (1975) traces its immediate roots to Gestalt psychology, Information Processing theories, and Family Systems.  It expresses an outgrowth of Phenomenology, Constructivism, and Humanistic Psychology.

ADLERIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Gilliland, James and Bowman (1989) present the following overview of the general personality theory to whicih Adlerian psychology gave birth.  The following features and characteristics provide some broad strokes about this theory.

• Humanistic —it values the well-being of individual and society over that of organizations.
• Holistic—it views the person as an indivisible entity.
• Phenomenological—it sees each person’s world from his or her viewpoint.
• Teleological—it views the person as pulled by the subjective future rather than pushed by the objective past, as creatively striving for goal attainment rather than reacting automatically to external events.
• Field-theoretical—it considers the individual’s feelings, thoughts, and actions as transactions with the social and physical environment.
• Socially oriented— it views the person as actively responding to and contributing to society.
• Operational— in its methodology (p. 40).

Adlerian psychology became a major “school” of psychology during the 1920s after Alfred Alder left Sigmund Freud.  Adlerian psychology, in fact, represented a major shift from psychoanalysis. Over the years it has continued to manifest a flexible adaptability which has allowed it to become quite eclectic.

Adlerian psychology has also directly and indirectly influenced other “schools” of psychological thought.  It has informed the Existential approach, the person-centered approach, Gestalt, Transactional analysis, Behaviorist, Reality theory, and Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) (Corey, 1991) as well as the whole field of Cognitive Psychology.  Albert Ellis specifically detailed the relationship between Adler and RET (Ellis, 1971).

NLP TRANSLATIONS OF ADLERIAN PSYCHOLOGY

The Adlerian views personhood, as does NLP, from the phenomenological perspective. Both begin with an understanding of the importance of a person’s unique perspective.  In this sense, both systems accept the philosophical point-of-view of constructionism— the people construct their own private version of reality for their own weal or woe.

Consequently, this leads practitioners in both fields to recognize and deal with each person by respecting their unique perceptions.  Adlerians call this, the person’s “private logic,” NLP practitioners describe it as that person’s unique “model of the world.”

For Adlerians, clients develop their own “style of life,” with both fictional and realistic goals.  NLP says that people have their unique strategies and programs for functioning.  Adlerians focus on people “striving for superiority” as they fulfill their “social interest.”  NLP takes a broader perspective, believing that any given person’s drives and values depends on the maps they have constructed about what matters most.

Style of Life

Adler concluded that the most central formative factors to understand in someone concerned their individual “style of life.” In fact, Adler invented the now-commonplace term “lifestyle.”  This facet of lifestyle consisted of two sub-pieces, each that dealt with the person’s early history.  First, their place in the family constellation and second, the nature and quality of the family atmosphere (rejecting, suppressing, over-protecting, disparaging, affirming, etc.).

NLP practitioners talk about “lifestyle” in terms of those component pieces that make up one’s style of life, namely, his or her strategies, states, orientations, beliefs, etc.  Adler’s identification of the contexts out of which a person develops and learns his or her lifestyle describes a facet that NLP has played down and gives less attention.  NLP does not deny that family constellation place and nature/quality of family context plays a crucial role in the formation of personality.  NLP simply focuses on what mental maps a person draws about such.

Adlerians understand the importance of the family constellation and early recollections and so use these system-oriented factors in understanding early decisions, goals, understandings, and life-style.  NLP puts even less stress on the facts of early childhood and more on the client’s decisions and beliefs about those facts.  Using Time-Line therapy, a hypnotic process for age-regression, NLP provides techniques for re-processing those facts and creating more useful “models of the world.”

Private Logic

Adler invented a special phrase for the way children and adults think.  He called it the person’s “private logic.” By “private logic” he meant the individual’s hidden reasons (agendas) in life (their fictional goals), their fictional conceptualizations about how to reach those goals (their life-style), and their understandings about their own identity, and the identity of the world.  In speaking about “private logic” Adler spoke about the irrational ideas, beliefs, goals, life-styles, etc. that arise from it and which cause maladjustment.

Such finds correspondence in NLP as the person’s unique “model of the world.” This contains limiting and enhancing beliefs, strategies, states, resources, etc.  This refers to a person’s individual “model or map of the world” which then creates his or her “frame” (as in, frame-of-reference).

Major Life Tasks

It might surprise some to know that “Individual Psychotherapy” (Adlerian) put a significant emphasis on the social role.  Yet beyond the irony of the name “Individual Psychotherapy,” Alder believed that the goals of belonging, connecting, relating, etc. played centrally to the formation and expression of personality.  Accordingly, he spoke about the importance of the major life tasks of friendship, occupation, loving relations with family, sex and intimacy, self-acceptance, and making a contribution.  How one does in these areas of competence determines one’s adjustment or maladjustment to life.

Adler spoke about the life tasks of work, vocation, friends, family, self, and love.  In NLP we speak about how each person generates a mental map that resourcefully fits one’s station in life in order to function productively.  NLP speaks about modeling excellence in those who already can accomplish behaviors and can generate experiences worth repeating.

Similarly, NLP assumes that we learn our models of the world from our social contexts.  As a communication model, in fact, NLP recognizes that meaning itself critically depends on context.  Accordingly, the first applications that people sought for NLP concerned relationships, communications, business relations, therapy, etc.

Adler considered the life task of friendship as probably the best indicator of a person’s “social interest.” Relationships with significant friends expresses one’s general attitude toward society.  Because people can freely enter into friendships, how they enter, to what extent they take that risk, how they adapt themselves to others and create cooperative relationships, whether they put more value on solitude and detachment or alliances and connection–all of these factors provide psychological insight about the person’s “style of life.”

Work provides another important road of insight.  This makes sense when you consider that work consumes the greatest portion of our waking hours.  In like manner, our attitude toward work, how we work, the way we adapt to the work environment and to people in the work environment, etc. again underscores our style of life, level of happiness and adjustment.  NLP speaks to these concerns not by making similar statements, but by addressing specific strategies, states, and resources for more effectively achieving, producing, becoming creative, etc.

Adler defined the life task of loving relationships as concerning family relations and opposite sex relations.  The ability to enter and maintain significant connection powerfully impacts our capacity for intimacy and happiness.

Adler looked upon these life tasks as a meta-communication about a person.  He viewed them as describing the person’s basic adaptation to “reality.”  For him, successful adaptation depends upon striving toward appropriate goals with others, with cooperating, adapting, etc. rather than inappropriate goals, conquering, win over, defeating, being superior, etc.  NLP talks about such things in terms of “the ecology check/question” about whether any particular set of behaviors work and enhance life or not.  Our adaptation to life depends upon the accuracy and usefulness of the maps that we bring to life.

Fictional Goals

Adlerian psychology talks a lot about “fictional goals.” For him this referred to those fictional ideas, beliefs, and understandings that people inappropriately adopt as children and which have no reference in the objective world.  In NLP, we speak about the same as limiting and unproductive maps/models.   Dinkmeyer, Dinkmeyer, and Speery (1987) write,

“Fictions start early in life.  A newborn child enters an environment that is by no means neutral.  That environment is represented by the family constellation.  Through observation, exploration, trial and error, and feedback from this primary environment, the child quickly learns what will and will not work.” (p. 34)

This shows the cognitive nature of both Adlerian psychology and NLP.  Because children strive to “make sense” of their world, they operate in their early home environment as active and passionate “learners.”  They do so by creating mental understandings and perspectives in order to navigate through life.  Yet because their rational skills do not express the best logic or reasoning skills and because their ego-strength has not become well developed, they make many illogical and sometimes stupid judgments about themselves, the world, how to cope, etc. This leads to illogical thinking and erroneous judgments–ill-formed belief statements (NLP).

Both systems see change, transformation, healing in terms of a psycho-educational model.  Both reject the notion that people exist as broken or sick in nature.  Both assume people have become mis-in-formed (how inwardly “formed” by information based on error and mistakes in logic.  Both primarily focus on providing individuals with more accurate or useful information for adjusting themselves to the realities outside their skins.  Adlerians ferret out mistaken goals, fictional objectives, erroneous ideas; NLP meta-models linguistic statements that we evaluate as structurally and semantically ill-formed.

Teleological Orientation

Adlerians speaks about behavior as purposeful and goal oriented.  One’s teleological orientation arises from the existential concerns of “where are we going?” and “what are we striving for?”  Adler called the imagined central goal that guides a person’s behavior “fictional finalism.”  The philosopher Hans Veihinger influenced Adler that people live by fictions (views of how the world should function).  “Only when I am perfect can I be secure.”  “Only when I am important can I be accepted.”

NLP speaks about desired outcomes and have developed a criteria for well-formedness in desired outcomes that enable a person to generate realistic, achievable, measurable, and empowering outcomes.  The well-formedness criteria enable one to update ill-formed and maladaptive goals.

Striving for Significance

Adler further said that the central fictional goal for people involved becoming a “somebody” by striving for significance in the eyes of others.  Ironically, such striving for significance and superiority first arises from a realistic recognition in the child–his or her inferiority as a child.  Adler used the term “superiority” not to mean being superior to others, but rather attaining a greater degree of one’s own potential.  For him, striving for superiority involved a striving from a lower to a higher state.

For moving from some unresourceful present state to some more empowering state (NLP).  Human beings cope with feelings of helplessness by striving for competence and mastery according to Adler.

If striving for superiority, in the sense of attaining a greater degree of one’s own potential and overcoming feelings of inferiority and helplessness, summarizes the Adlerian approach, then NLP speaks about moving from unresourceful present states to more enhancing resourceful and empowering states.

Adlerians address a client’s assets and strengths to encourage them to take risks and develop social interest.  NLPers speak about accessing one’s resources to find the internal empowerment that allows them to experience more excellence in life.  Modeling provides a great source of encouragement in NLP inasmuch as the key to human subjectivity involves the strategy that a person has for achieving various experiences and responses.

Only when a person seeks to become a somebody exclusively “in the eyes of others” does this become the heart of maladjustment.  Dinkmeyer (1987):

“Neurotics vacillate between inferiority and superiority.  They are highly ambitious but lack courage.  Avoidance, displacement, projection, retreat, helplessness, and detouring all describe how they save face when confronted with the ultimate threat— being seen as a failure.” (Ibid. 41)

Here the “other-referent” meta-program of NLP describes someone over-doing a resource.

The Therapeutic Relationship

Adlerians consider a good client/therapist relationship as one between equals based upon cooperation, mutual trust, respect, confidence, and alignment of goals.  NLP speaks about the same in terms of pacing or matching the client’s model of the world.  NLP teaches pacing as a hypnotic process on both the verbal (linguistic) and non-verbal (neurological) levels.  This enables them to “enter into the client’s world.”

Adlerians “explore the individual’s dynamics by seeking to understand their lifestyle, see how it affects their current functioning in all the tasks of life.”

“They operate on the assumption that it is the interpretation that people develop about themselves, others, the world, and life that governs what they do.  Lifestyle assessment aims at uncovering the private interpretations and private logical of the individual.” (Corey, p.148)

NLP practitioners meta-model and pace clients in order to understand their particular model of the world.  By listening for their language patterns, watching eye-accessing cues, noticing non-verbal analogue responses, etc. they identify the client’s strategies for generating whatever experiences and behaviors that they do.  This then enables them to specify what and how the person can make changes to enrich their lives.

Adler said that to engage in therapeutic interventions, the therapist must first make the client feel comfortable (pace their reality, NLP) since they will undoubtedly use their current inferiority/superiority perceptions to interpret the counseling process itself.  Here Adlerians talk most about “encouragement” as a therapeutic technique to enable the client to face themselves, their goals, their life-style, etc.  NLP speaks about facilitating the client’s resourcefulness.

Because Adler saw discouragement as the basic condition that prevents people from functioning at their best, he recommended the antidote of encouragement.  To “induce a state of encouragement” (NLP) can take many forms: highlighting the client’s strengths and assets, providing more appropriate and useful goals, taking courage to act on one’s dreams, etc.  Again, the process of facilitating resourcefulness!

Coming to understand and identify the client’s beliefs, perceptions, and feelings and the movement and pattern of his/her life then describes task one of therapy.  The counselor “reads” the client by noticing and observing every expression, word, thought, feeling, verbal and non-verbal presented.  (Sounds like noticing various Meta-Programs, NLP).  The counselor uses early memories, birth order, family constellation, family atmosphere, dreams, current life-tasks, priorities, behaviors, style of approach/avoidance, etc. to determine the client’s overall life-pattern.

At the point of therapeutic communication, the Adlerian begins with basic listening and supportive skills (pacing), then moves on to restatements, empathetic listening, reflections, and interpretations.  From there the Adlerian will make meta-comments on non-verbal behaviors, here-and-now experiences, discrepancies between what the clients says and does, confrontation of mistaken beliefs, perspectives, private logic, and destructive behavior.  In their repertoire also reside paradoxical recommendations (prescribing the symptom, NLP), creating images to assist clients in seeing the absurdity their goals or styles (submodality exaggerations! NLP).

Psychopathology

Adler identified several factors that contributed to maladjustment.  He specified the “parenting errors” like abuse and spoiling, mistaken opinions about oneself and the world, over-coping with distorted response styles, etc.  For Adler, the obsessive-compulsive person stands as the prototype of all neurosis.  The obsessive-compulsive person’s indecisiveness and doubt, deprecation of others, godlike strivings, and focus on minutiae represent routine safeguards that exclude him or her from the social mainstream.

Adlerian psychology has little use of personality, aptitude, achievement, interest, or intelligence tests per se.  The most important diagnostic issue involves the client’s life-style (one’s overall pattern that influences and controls thinking, feeling, and behaving).  This lifestyle arises from the person’s private logic and expresses their life-plan of realistic and fictional goals.

Cognitive

Adler (1956) fully accepted what has become the basic tenet of the cognitive psychologies, namely, “Behavior is clearly a function of perception.  We tend to behave according to how things appear to us, and when our perception changes, our behavior changes accordingly.  Thus, perception (“frame” or “map” NLP) of the situation often determines behavior and belief more than the reality of the situation.

“Individual psychology, then, draws its conclusions not from a person’s possessions but from his or her use of those possessions.  These applications and, more important, the manner in which the individual ‘experiences’ them are the bricks and mortar with which an attitude toward life is builtl.” (pp. 250-256)

In writing that, one expects Adler to quote Korzybski’s “map/territory” distinction at any minute and then to suggest the reframing principle that when one changes the frame-of-reference within which an idea, thought, or belief lies, one changes its meanings which then leads to a transformation in our thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Therapy and therapeutic inventions, for Adlerians, focus on ferreting out the client’s goals and fault beliefs about life tasks and providing re-education about the reality of social life, self-concept and definition, life-style goals and methods, etc.  Sounds like NLP, does it not?  First the information gathering about the person’s psychological world, some map-adjustment information, and some shifting of maps to those that allow one to reach their desired outcomes.

Therapeutic Interventions

The therapeutic interventions which seem fairly unique to Adlerian psychology include the following.

1) Asking “The Question,” i.e. “If I can a pill that would make this symptom go away, how would things be different in your life?”  The “as if” frame in NLP.

2) Catching oneself. This involves catching oneself in some irrational behavior and designating it a “mental stop sign” that thereafter will signal the person to “Stop!”  Ah, a Pattern Interrupt!

3) Acting “as if.” The therapist provides instructions for a client to act out the role that they want to learn.  By trying out the role they discover new things and become a different person in the process.

4) Spitting in the Soup. This involves identifying a self-defeating behavior and then spoiling it by making it extremely unpalatable (“spitting in the soup”).  This changes the behavior so that it takes the relish out of it.  Another Pattern Interrupt.

5) Pushing the Button. This involves “having the client alternatively picture pleasant and unpleasant experiences and noting the feelings that accompany the experiences.  By alternating experiences and feelings the clients become aware that they control their emotions, and not vice-versa” (Ibid. p. 53).

6) Encouragement. The primary technique based upon the assumption that clients do not exist as sick individuals, but suffer from feeling discouragement.

7) Midas Technique. This involves exaggerating a client’s neurotic demands based on the King Midas story of giving someone precisely what they wanted and helping them see how it can become a curse!

Pleasing Someone. Getting a client to re-enter the social environment by going out and doing something nice for someone.

9) Avoiding the Tar Baby.  The “Tar Baby” refers to the perceptions on life which the client carries into counseling and attempts to fit onto the counselor.  By responding in ways contrary to the expectations, it upsets the system.

10) Early Recollections.  Adler used this as a means for assessing the person’s life-style.

Overall, Adlerian psychology focuses on educating clients about themselves, their style of life, their fictional goals versus their realistic ones, social interest, perceptions, etc.  It operates from the underlying belief is that people can learn better and adopt more healthy and appropriate coping styles.  It does not see people as sick, as victims, or as fated for dysfunction.

Summary

What do you think?  Alfred Adler— a NLPer?  Would he have appreciated the NLP model?  I think so.  My own studies in Adlerian psychology certainly prepared me for, and made me received to, the NLP model.

References:

Adler, Alfred. (1927/ 1954).  Understanding human nature. (Trans. by W. Beran Wolfe).  NY: Fawcett.

Adler, Aflred. (1931/ 1958).  What life should mean to you. NY: Capricorn Books.  Ed. by Alan Porter.

Dinkmeyer, D.D., Dinkmeyer D.C. Jr., & Speery, L. (1987).  Adlerian counseling and psychotherapy (2nd ed.). Columbus, OH: Chas. E. Merrill.

Dreikurs, Rudolf, R. (1953).  Fundamentals of Adlerian psychology. Chicago: Alfred Adler Institute.

Ellis, Albert. (1971).  The Journal of Individual Psychology.   (May, 1971).

Gilliland, Burl E., James, Richard K., and Bowman, James T. (1998).  Theories and strategies in counseling and psychotherapy. (second ed.).  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Orgler, Hertha (1963).  Alfred Adler: The man and his work. New York: New American Library.

Porter, Alan (1958) (Ed.).  Alfred Adler: What life should mean to you.  New York: Capricorn.

Veihinger, Hans. (1924).  The philosophy of ‘as if.’ London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul. Ltd.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.  Psychologist, researcher, modeler, prolific author.

INTRODUCING NEURO-SEMANTICS^®

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

We first introduced the new cutting-edge field of Neuro-Semantics in our book Mind-Lines: Lines that Change Minds (1997).  Since then we have also published other works in this field of Neuro-Semantics.  These include Figuring Out People: Design Engineering Using Meta-Programs (1998), Time-Lining: Patterns for Adventuring in Time (1998), and The Secrets of Magic (1998).

In this calendar year (1999), we plan to bring out more pieces to highlight and distinguish Neuro-Semantics from NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and GS (General Semantics).  The most radical and revolutionary of these will be the work regarding the so-called “submodality” model.  We’ve entitled it, Meta-Stating Genius: Distinctions of Excellence.  It is scheduled for publication in August, 1999.

Since we have had many questions about this new field, this paper will utilize the following questions that we most frequently hear people ask to navigate our way through the process of setting off the distinctive features of Neuro-Semantics.

∙    What is Neuro-Semantics and where did it come from?

∙    How does Neuro-Semantics differ from Neuro-Linguistic Programming?

∙    How does Neuro-Semantics differ from General Semantics?

∙    What uniquely distinguishes this new field?

∙    What central principles govern this domain?

∙    What is The Institute of Neuro-Semantics^®?

∙ Who are the principal players in the Institutes of Neuro-Semantics?

∙    What is their agenda, motivation, and intentions?

What is Neuro-Semantics and Where did it Come From?

Neuro-Semantics began in 1996 as the brain-child of Michael Hall and Bobby Bodenhamer as we engaged in various conversations about Meta-States, NLP, and General Semantics.  Out of those conversations we wrote several articles regarding the current state of affairs in NLP.  The first one we entitled, “The Downside of NLP.” This article, as well as some follow up articles about the state of disarray, bad P.R., the Bandler lawsuit, the over-emphasis and vague emphasis on “installing learnings unconsciously,” etc. were published in Anchor Point.  Nelson Penaylillo (NLP Trainer in Australia), Peter Kean (NLP Trainer, Washington DC), and Robert Olic (NLP Trainer, Philadelphia, PA) were the first to thereafter joined in the conversation.

In extending, expanding, and enriching both NLP and GS, we (Hall and Bodenhamer) first sought simply to unite and synthesize the best pieces from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and General Semantics.   Our passion was to get more credibility and validity for the field that seemed so disorganized and torn by competition in the USA.   Simultaneously, we were developing numerous new patterns using the Meta-States Model.   This was beginning to revolutionize things and it was Dr. Bodenhamer who first saw this vision in the Meta-States model.  Consequently we choose the term Neuro-Semantics to designate the new enriched field.

Now the term Neuro-Semantics goes back to Alfred Korzybski.  The father of General Semantics introduced both phrases, “neuro-linguistic” and “neuro-semantic,” in 1936 in some of his papers.  Later, they showed up in his 1941 Preface to his classic work, Science and Sanity. In Korzybski’s writings, you will find both terms used pretty much synonymously.  Here, however, following the Meta-States Model^®, we have arbitrary chosen to use Neuro-Linguistics to refer to the Modeling, Methodology, and Technology that has grown out of the field of NLP and Neuro-Semantics to refer to the newer and more extensive Modeling, Patterning, Methodology, and Technology that has resulted from the Meta-States Model.  In the next section you will find a fuller discrimination between NLP and Neuro-Semantics.

How does Neuro-Semantics differ from Neuro-Linguistic Programming?

NLP emerged as a happen-chance from a modeling project of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir.  This happened as the young college student, Richard Bandler, discovered his genius of imitation of their language patterns.   Linguistics Professor, John Grinder, began working with Richard to model the structure of the therapeutic wizards.  This brought them into relationship with Dr. Robert Spitzer, who became their first publisher (Science and Behavior Books).  And that, in turn, led to their association with the genius of Gregory Bateson (anthropologist, linguist, cybernetician) when Spitzer moved them onto his property.  They became neighbors of Bateson.  And that connection, in turn, then led them to Milton Erickson and hypnosis.

Using the new formulations of the then-emerging Cognitive Psychology Models, Bandler and Grinder tapped into the elegance of the TOTE Model of Miller, Galanter, and Pribram.  This gave them a linear way to track the processes within “the black box” that Behaviorism had always avoided.  Out of this came the NLP Strategy Model— a Model for Modeling Excellence.  This model primarily operates like a flow chart of consciousness, tracking “mind” linearly.  In Neuro-Semantics, we add the vertical dimension and so tease out the hidden meta-levels within the structure of subjectivity.

In the beginning, NLP sought to avoid all theory, explanatory models, and “the why” question by presenting itself as strictly focused on how do you do that? Accordingly, NLP arose first and foremost as a Communication Model.  It explored how the body (Neuro, e.g. the nervous system, physiology, neurology, etc.) gets Programmed by the use of various Languages (linguistics).

By way of contrast, Neuro-Semantics goes beyond the linear “flow chart” analysis of the Structure of Subjective Experience by focusing more fully on the Meta-Levels that support and drive the movement of consciousness along its TOTEs.  By tracking the vertical dimensions of human processing, it moves into higher level Meanings much more fully.  Accordingly, it tracks and models the neuro-semantic structures of meanings at higher (and typically, unconscious) levels.

Both Neuro-Semantics and NLP operate as interdisciplinary approaches, utilizing models from many psychologies.  This includes cybernetics, computer science, neuro-biology, family systems, anthropology, etc.

Neuro-Semantics highlights much more fully and extensively the existence of multiple meta-levels and logical levels than does NLP.   Korzybski (1933/1994) labeled the higher level abstractions as “second order” and “third order” abstractions.  He suggested that much study and exploration needs to be done in this area of reflexivity about how we evaluate and then evaluate our evaluations and by that create higher levels of “mind.”

Bateson (1972) picked up on this in how he used meta-levels and logical types in his theories of schizophrenia, play, humor, aesthetics, etc.   He and the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto laid so much of the foundation for NLP (especially in the 1974 book, Change by Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch).

NLP, as a meta-discipline itself, certainly has meta-levels (the Meta-Model, Meta-Programs).  And co-developer, Robert Dilts has contributed numerous meta-level models.   But nowhere in NLP had a fully descriptive and comprehensive model about Meta-Levels emerged until the development of the Meta-States^® Model (Hall 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998).  This was recognized by the International NLP Trainer’s Association in 1995 in their award for Meta-States as “the most significant contribution to NLP in 1994—1995.”

In many ways, the Meta-States Model has turned NLP upside down.  And it has done so in such a simple way.  By merely changing the operational metaphor of “depth” inherited from Transformational Grammar, and adopting the “height” metaphor, Meta-States reformulated NLP.  Dr. Graham Dawes noted this in his early reviews of Meta-States and Dragon Slaying commenting that Meta-States will be the model that “ate NLP.”  Others have commented that Meta-States outframes NLP as it sets up higher frames for the processes of NLP.  If this sounds like we think Neuro-Semantics will replace NLP, we would like to add that we see it in a different function, namely, as extending, continuing, and evolving the development that began with Korzybski, Bateson, Bandler, Grinder, Dilts, etc.

In the Meta-States Model, the nature of self-reflexivity has finally been given its full due.  In this way, the model provides a way to track thoughts-about-thoughts, feelings-about-feelings, as our inevitable and inescapable meta-thinking, meta-feeling, and meta-responding generates layers upon layers of cognition.  This flexible model provides a way to identify the ever-changing hierarchy of human consciousness, without becoming a rigid way.  The levels themselves shift and change.  And true enough, while this makes for seeming complexity in human “mind” and experience, the ordering of the Meta-Level Principles formats and structures that complexity.  This means that the plastic and flexible nature of meta-levels whereby any thought can reflect back onto itself or onto another thought at any level does not have to create confusion or chaos.  We can track it.  We can model it as a system.

While the recursive nature of thought-feeling does create complexity, it does not create chaos.  Systemic complexity contains structure.  So even though it may at first appear as the complexity of chaos, with a meta-level model like Meta-States we can easily discover an ordering at a higher level.  And as this distinguishes different levels of “thought”— this provides a new and profound understanding in NLP.  We have designated this as the beginning of Neuro-Semantics. This Meta-Level Model thus provides a way of distinguishing such mental phenomena as:

∙     Beliefs — Validated Thoughts-about-Thoughts

∙     Values — Valued Thoughts-about-Thoughts

∙    Understandings— Extensive systems of Thoughts-about-Thoughts

∙     Decisions — Choiced Thoughts-about-Thoughts

∙     Identity — Beliefs about Thoughts-about-”Self” Concepts

∙    Concepts — Extensive (simple or complex) Understandings about Domains of Understandings

∙     Categories — conceptual sorting of Concepts

∙    Reasons —higher level structures used as explanatory constructs

∙     Etc.

As an aside, I should here mention the extreme limitation of the term “thought.”  By itself, the term reflects a very limited, Aristotelian, and primitive term—an Elementalism.  Using the principles of General Semantics, we know that “thought” includes “emotion,” hence the awkward yet more sane mapping of “thought-feeling.” So to use “thought” sanely we have to do so from a non-elementalistic perspective.  For people in NLP, this provides a new piece straight from GS that was not in the original Meta-Model.  You will find it in the expanded Meta-Model in The Secrets of Magic.

With the systemic nature of self-reflexive thought-feeling looping recursively back onto itself creating layers of consciousness and the higher level structures (the “mental” phenomena), we have states-about-states or Meta-States.  This sets up systemic processing.  It generates logical levels in our “thinking-emoting.”  It sets up attractors in a self-organizing system.  And these run by certain higher level principles— all articulated as the Meta-Stating Principles.

Now we can begin to sort out different kinds of meanings. We can sort out linkage “meaning,” previously known as Pavlovian conditioning or Associative Meanings. It goes further.  It introduces Contextual Meanings— the meanings that arise from higher mental contexts.  These higher level abstractions of “meanings” into which we categorize and attribute significance to things thereby generates our Semantic or Conceptual States. And with this, we introduce yet another new distinction in NLP.

I trust that by now you can recognize that in these ways, Neuro-Semantics incorporates higher level “meanings” into the structure of subjectivity.  Our “states” involve the primary level neuro-linguistic thoughts-and-feelings in response to something out there in the world.  That defines a Primary State.  A Meta-State involves more.  It involves our thoughts-feeling about our thoughts, emotions, states, memories, imaginations, concepts, etc.  It involves our meta-responses to previous responses.

There is a lot more to Neuro-Semantics than this (and more being developed every week), but this does begin to offer a set of distinctions.  In summary, notice the following chart.

How does Neuro-Semantics differ from General Semantics?

General Semantics began with Alfred Korzybski (1933) and continues today as a viable discipline and field in its own right.  As an engineer, Korzybski sought to redesign the old Aristotelian language as our primary way of mapping the territory.  He wanted to do this to increase our ability at effective adjustment to increase humanity’s sanity.  The old mapping involved several unsane factors: identification, elementalism, confusion of levels, etc.

NLP brought over many of the features of General Semantics into its Meta-Model of language.  More recently, we have identified many of the Korzybskian linguistic distinctions not brought over and have added them to the Meta-Model (Hall, Secrets of Magic, 1998).

Neuro-Semantics differs from General Semantics by its NLP emphasis on modeling excellence and designing patterns, technologies, and new methodologies for human design engineering (a phrase, by the way, originated by Korzybski, 1921).  In Neuro-Semantics we have begun to create a Merging of the Models (NLP and GS).  What we began in November 1998 in London as a three-day training program under the title, The Merging of the Models, will eventually result in a second modeling — or Engineering Training using other as-of-yet unmined treasures of Korzybski.

What Uniquely Distinguishes this new field?

Neuro-Semantics stands out as both “enriched” NLP and “enriched” General Semantics.  Returning to the sources of NLP, General Semantics, Bateson’s works in anthropology, schizophrenia, Levels of Learning, and cybernetics, MRI Institute, Cognitive Psychology (Miller, Galanter, Pribram), etc., we have sought to establish Neuro-Semantics on solid, scientific, and highly researched studies.

NLP, for a variety of reasons, has seemed to have received lots of negative and harmful Public Relations and General Semantics has seemed to locate itself in a small and isolated community.  For these (and other reasons), we have sought to step aside just enough from NLP and GS so that we can both continue the adventure of modeling and engineering human excellence but not tied down to the limitations of the two source disciplines.

I should mention here that we in the Institute of Neuro-Semantics are not the only ones who have been moving in this direction.  Canadian Dennis Chong, M.D. and Roye Fraser of Blue Dell Systems, both NLP trainers, have in recent years written about Neuro-Semantic Programming (NSP).  As noted on our web site (www.neurosemantics.com), Dr. Chong has written several books mentioned NSP, Don’t Ask Why, Language Elegance, and Knife Without Pain. While we have some differences with these gentlemen, the basic thrust and emphasis corresponds to an amazing degree.

Neuro-Semantics has also found new life and excitement in Chaos theory, Self-Organization Theory, the newer developments in Cognitive Psychology, Performance Coaching, Brief Psychotherapy, REBT, Glasser’s Reality Therapy/ Control Theory, and many other fields.

What Central Principles govern this domain?

First and foremost of the principles that govern Neuro-Semantics is the Bateson principle that “The higher levels govern (modulate, drive, organize) the lower levels.”   Meta-levels serve as the frame-of-reference for the activity (thinking, feeling, responding) that occurs at the levels lower to the frame.  The meta-level thus operates as an attractor in a self-organizing system.  From this we have identified numerous other principles.

Someone (or something) will always set the frame of reference. The question becomes, “Who set the frame?”  Count on your Meta-State becoming your unconscious frames— your “way of being in the world,” your attitude

Whoever sets the frame will govern the experience (run the game!). Since higher frames govern—and since somebody also sets it, the person who sets the frame thereby takes charge of the subsequent experiences.  The resulting thoughts, ideas, concepts, beliefs, emotions, behaviors, language, problems, solutions, and experiences derive their existence from the frame.  Frames govern.

The whole determines the parts and from the parts, the whole emerges. This speaks about the systemic nature of the mind-body system.  It speaks about the gestalt nature of our neuro-linguistics processes.  The system that emerges from the meta-levels that govern the lower levels brings about an overall gestalt (or configuration of interactive parts) which in turn, define the character of the whole.

In outframing, we set up a higher level frame-of-reference that will take over. The power to identify a frame enables us to step aside from a frame and to set a whole new frame.  Doing this transforms everything.  It performs meta-level “magic” in that it installs a new self-organizing attractor at the top of the semantic system.

What we call “experience” differs radically and significantly at each level. Korzbyski described these in his “levels of abstraction” model regarding how the nervous system abstracts at different levels.  We can use the same word/s at the different levels as multiordinal terms —terms that have no specific meaning until we specify at which level we refer.

Reflexivity endows consciousness with systemic processes and characteristics. Reflexivity describes the mechanism that drives these levels of abstraction and these meta-level experience.  This refers to the fact that our consciousness can reflect back onto itself or its products (thoughts, emotions, beliefs, values, decisions, specific concepts, etc.).  As it does, it sets up feed-back and feed-forward processes and thereby creates a circular system.

Meta-level disorientation and conflict can create living hells. Generally speaking (numerous exceptions do exist), whenever we bring negative thoughts-and-feelings (states) against ourselves or any facet of ourselves, we put ourselves at odds with ourselves.  And when our self-relationships (relation to ourselves) become disturbed, we begin to loop around in vicious downward self-reinforcing cycles.  And when self-disturbed (self-condemning, self-contempting, self-repressing, self-hating, etc.), this then creates a disturbance for all of our relationships with others.  This creates neurosis, psychosis, personality disorders, character disorders, etc.

Paradox frequently governs meta-level solutions for health, integration, balance, and empowerment. The only way to rid ourselves of unwanted thoughts, emotions, behaviors, habits, etc. involves, paradoxically, welcoming, accepting, appreciating, and celebrating that very thought, emotion, behavior, etc.  By welcoming it into consciousness we can take counsel of it, reality check it, learn from it, etc.  To not reckon with it leads to unuseful suppression, repression, self-rejection, etc.

Setting a frame necessitates neuro-linguistic energy & repetition. How do we actually set a frame or establish a meta-level State?  Merely “thinking” or even “feeling” will not do it.  We can think, know, feel, and have awarenesses that do not establish a higher level frame-of-reference.  Here we need to utilize the natural processes of how our brains operate—we need to use drama, energy, repetition, etc.

Altering higher level frames alters Identity and Destiny. You can’t change what you do (so that it lasts in a pervasive and generative way), without also changing who you are. Does your higher frame of self-definition support the change?  Your behavior is like a printout of your Operating Programs.

What are some of the New Techniques & Patterns that have already emerged from Neuro-Semantics?

At this point in time we have not made a full account of the scores of pattens and technologies that have arisen.  Every month in Meta-States Journal we have published at least one new or adapted pattern.  There you will find more than twenty fully described patterns.  (We also have most of those in outline form in Secrets of Meta-States, the Training Manual).  You can locate 16 new Time-Lining Patterns in the book by that title, and technologies in the remaking of Meta-Programs (Figuring Out People).

∙     Conceptual Positions (the Perceptual Positions reformatted as a Logical Level System and incorporating Semantics.

∙      Meta-Yesing: A Ten-Minute Belief Change Pattern.

∙      Inserting Resources Pattern

∙      Meta-Detailing: The heart of Genius (see Meta-Stating Genius)

∙     Modeling with Meta-Levels (see NLP: Going Meta)

What is The Institute of Neuro-Semantics^®?

Who are the Principal Players in the Institutes of Neuro-Semantics?

It began when Michael Hall and Bob Bodenhamer filled for trademarks for Neuro-Semantics and Meta-States in 1997.  The Registration of the Trademarks were finally obtained in 1998 (Registration numbers: 2,210,336 and 2,199,913).   During this time, Dr. Bodenhamer established The First Institute of Neuro-Semantics in Gastonia NC.  Later, Robert Olic (Olic Performance Seminars) began sponsoring Neuro-Semantic Trainings by Michael Hall on the east coast.

We established Meta-States Journal in 1997 as a monthly publication for Neuro-Semantics.  It promotes and markets much of the current research and discoveries, training schedules, responses from around the world, and much more.  We have also created a website at www.neurosemantics.com.

What is the Agenda, Motivation, and Intentions of those Associated with Neuro-Semantics?

The purpose (agenda and motivation) of The Institute of Neuro-Semantics is to continue the exciting research and modeling into the adventure of human design engineering using the tools of General Semantics, NLP, and Meta-States.

The design of this?  To engineer human excellence by modeling the best, by identifying the structure of Excellence, and by designing afresh new forms of human excellence in all fields.

And the meta-outcome of that?  To enable people to find, discover, and actualize their best — to consciously enter into more experiences of Flow (Czikszentmihalyi), Positive Addiction (Glasser), Genius (Bandler, Grinder, Dilts, etc.), to empower people to run their own brains and to manage their meta-minds, and to achieve high performance whether it be in career, relationships, personal development, spirituality, health, or whatever.

Historical Development of the Meta-States Model

(Compiled by Denis Bridoux, NLP Trainer with Post-Graduate Professional Education, Harragate, England)

1933: Alfred Korzybski coined the phrase neuro-linguistic training, postulated his theory of the levels of abstraction, constructed his theory of second-order abstractions, third-order, etc. in his classic word Science and Sanity.

1972: Gregory Bateson’s classic work Steps to an Ecology of Mind that brought together all his revolutionary studies on double-bind theory, applications of Logical Theory of Types, going meta to meta-levels, the levels of Learning Model, etc.

1975-1983: John Grinder & Richard Bandler utilizing the idea of going meta in their NLP model beginning with the Meta-model—an explicit model about how language and VAK representations work in human experience.  They distinguish sensory-based level from the evaluative level, the importance of meta-parts, and the strategy model for modeling “the structure of subjective experience.”

1994: Michael Hall specifies how meta-levels of mind-body neuro-linguistic states factor into the structure of subjective experience and bring over Korzybski and Bateson ideas into the strategy model.  This arose from modeling resilience and discovering that within it people have embedded numerous layers and levels of consciousness and states.  Awareness by the International Trainers Association of NLP (1995) for the most significant contribution to NLPduring 1994-1995.

ISNS The International Society of Neuro-Semantics

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

(970) 523-7877

NLP A Model of Communication that empowers people to run their own brains by using the “languages” of the mind, namely, the sensory representational systems — the Visual, Auditory, & Kinesthetics (body sensations).  We think in these see, hear, and feel dimensions or modes.  As we so represent things to ourselves on the inner screen of consciousness which we call “thinking,” so we signal our bodies.  This then puts us in state— that is, in a Mind-Body State of Consciousness.

Developed by two guys fascinated by human excellence.  NLP provides a model, insights, and specific step-by-step techniques for running your own brain, managing your own states, communicating more effectively and elegantly with yourself and others, and replicating human expertise in every field.

META-STATES®

A Model of Reflexive Consciousness that details precisely how we reflect back on our thoughts and feelings to create higher levels of thoughts-and-feelings.  In so using our thoughts-and-feelings thoughts-about-our-thoughts, feelings-about-feelings, we thereby create mind-body states-about-states or Meta-States.

This differs from a Primary State like fear, anger, joy, relaxed, tense, pleasure, pain, etc. in that a Meta-State has a layering of higher level concepts such as fear of my fear, anger at my fear, shame about being embarrassed, joy of learning, esteem of my self, etc.

NEURO-SEMANTICS®

A Model of Meaning or Evaluation that utilizes the Meta-States Model for articulating and working with higher levels of states and the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Model for detailing human processing and experiencing.  Neuro-Semantics presents a fuller and richer model that offers a way of thinking about and working with the way our nervous system (neurology) and mind (linguistics) create meaning, evaluate events and experiences, and assigns significances (semantics).

∙    Where does Neuro-Semantics come from?

∙    What are the theoretical foundations of Neuro-Semantics?

∙     What contributing forces influence the development of Neuro-Semantics as a model and field?

∙    How does Neuro-Semantics differ from NLP as a model?

∙    What is Neuro-Semantics not?

What is it?

Do you to know what it is?   Neuro-Semantics is a model that describes how we humans get meaning (semantics) so incorporated into our body (neurology) that we feel meanings and do so in terms of our emotions and states.  Neuro-Semantics is an inter-disciplinary field that explores the structure of meaning and how those meanings become embodied within us.  In Neuro-Semantics we approach the mind-body-emotion system in several ways.  From the mental dimension, we explore how language works inside of us, how we attribute meaning, create meaning by words, associations, framing, metaphors, etc.  From the neurological dimension, we explore how our body works with ideas to “realize” or “actualize” them and how what we do influences what we believe.

Neuro-Semantics, as a field of study and as a model, arises from many sources.  Much of it comes from psychology, linguistics, semantics, anthropology, systems, etc.  In this article, I will sketch out a brief history of the key sources that have come together to create the foundation of this inter-disciplinary study.

Why do this?  First I want to locate and position Neuro-Semantics as a field and to distinguish it from those disciplines that gave it birth.  And why is this important?  I want to do that to set the boundaries and parameters of the field.  As a new emergent field, this is important (especially here at the beginning) in order to make clear what Neuro-Semantics is and its focus of attention.  And why do that?  Mostly because there are many who are entering this field as trainers, coaches, and researches who keep asking me about this!   And so for those enter the field as well as those already in this field, and for those who are just now discovering this field and examining it to see if it fits with their interests, I want to provide a clear sense of what Neuro-Semantics is and what is not.

From General Semantics to NLP

To give credit where credit is due, it was an engineer, Alfred Korzybski, who first gave voice to the terminology of neuro-linguistics and neuro-semantics as he founded the field of General Semantics with his classic work, Science and Sanity (1933/ 1994).  By these terms he referred to the human mind-body system as a holistic system of many interactive parts.  It was his way of re-uniting the fragmented elements of “mind,” “body,” “emotion,” “beliefs,” etc.

In thinking structurally about a living human mind-body system in interaction with the world “out there” beyond the human nervous system, he looked at it in terms of information coming into the protoplasm of the human nervous system and how the nerve impulses from sense receptors to the internal processing structures of the brain and how we abstract from one level to another level to create our inner “sense” of the world.  We map the world into ourselves and we feel that map (or layers of mappings) as feelings, emotions, and intuitions.

To understand this dynamic communication process, Korzybski used a metaphor, that of mapping a territory. What we humans do in and with our neurons, nerves, nervous energy, and nervous systems is create a map, so to speak, about what we are encountering and interacting with.   Out there in the world there are energies —energies that we recognize as the electromagnetic spectrum.  We translate and interpret these energies as light, sound, sensation, smell, taste, and balance.  We do that by the protoplasm of our body which we experience as our sense receptors.  At the end of our nervous system we have eyes, ears, skin, olfactory and taste buds, and inner ear hairs and structures that enable us to “sense” the world.  We then use these senses (the sensory modalities) to “make sense” of the world.

Our first maps about what is “out there” are strictly neurological and occur a long time prior to awareness or consciousness.  The energy “out there” impacts and stimulates our sense receptors and we “sense” things in terms of the sense receptors.  We see objects, hear sounds, feel textures, pressures, moisture, temperature (sensations), we smell smells and taste tastes and have a sense of balance or dizziness.  These sensory systems interpret the energies in these terms.

But close your eyes and press on your eyelids and you will see colors and shapes.  Pressure on the end- receptors of eyes is translated and interpreted as light. Each end-receptor funnels, channels, and interprets “energy manifestations” out there according to what it is designed to pick up and interpret.  Each sense maps the world according to its own design.  Even at that level, it’s just a perception.

From this Richard Bandler and John Grinder created the components of NLP in the 1970s.  They specified the “languages” of thought in terms of the sensory systems— the Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, etc. systems.  We re-present to ourselves in our mind what we have seen, heard, and felt.  This gave rise to the VAK.  We think in terms of pictures, sounds, and sensations.  We make a movie in our mind.  We also say words about our movie, and so the meta-representation system is language.  This was the genius of NLP.

NLP began with the presupposition that Korzybski specified, “The map is not the territory.”  This means we do not deal with reality directly, but indirectly.  We deal with it through our maps.  If our world seems impoverished and we feel unresourceful, the problem lies in our maps.  Do we have a rich enough map to go places, do things, understand things, etc.?  If not, the problem isn’t ourselves or th world, it’s in enriching our map.  Successful and effective people have rich and empowering maps in their heads.

What does this mean?  It means that NLP is primarily a Communication Model. It’s a model about how we use the languages of the mind to construct our maps and how to enrich those maps.  It’s also about identify and modeling the maps of experts to streamline the learning process.  NLP modeled three world-class therapists from three different fields to create a model of how language works (the Meta-Model) and how to use language for more precision or for more artful mapping (the Milton Model).  From Family Systems they modeled Virginia Satir; from Gestalt Therapy they modeled Fritz Perls; and from Ericksonian Hypnosis they modeled Milton H. Erickson.

NLP provides powerful models and technology for “running one’s own brain” and thereby changing our states and experiences.  As a model, NLP is not about any particular field, but is a meta-discipline. It’s a model about the structure of experience and so has practical applications for business, negotiating, selling, parenting, therapy, education, training, influence, marketing, writing— in a word, for anything that involves communication, relationship, and people skills.  That some people have taken the model and misused it speaks about the power of this cutting-edge communication model.

Neuro-Semantics began here.  What NLP did not have was a model about self-reflexive consciousness and how to model, take into account, or use reflexivity in communication, relationship, or modeling.  With the Meta-States model I provided those structures and so created another meta-domain of NLP— Meta-States.

From “General” Semantics to “Neuro” Semantics

Where did Meta-States come from?  From two key sources—Korzybski and Gregory Bateson.  It was in Korzybski’s “levels of abstraction” (his Structural Differential) and his theory of multi-ordinality that I found much of the structure of Meta-States.  Having immersed myself in Korzybski’s work for many years, when I “stumbled” upon Meta-States while modeling the structure of resilience, I found myself referring mostly to many of the features in General Semantics.

So after I first introduced Meta-States in England under the sponsorship of Denis Bridoux and Dr. Philip Nolan (Post Graduate Professional Education), for three years we followed that up with a series of workshop on GS and NLP.  These trainings in England were first entitled “The Merging of the Models: General Semantics and NLP” and later Advanced Flexibility.  It was during that time that I was able to more fully develop and articulate the structures, processes, guidelines, and patterns in Neuro-Semantics.

We were able to translate abstract ideas and concepts in Science and Sanity that informed General Semantics into practical Neuro-Semantic tools—extending the Meta-Model, developing the first meta-level questions to deal with human psycho-logics (“logical levels”), use mathematics for modeling (finding variables in an experience and identifying those variables as functions of some multi-ordinal concept).  What has and remains abstract and obtuse in General Semantics became dynamic processes in Neuro-Semantics.

For more on this, see Chapter 8 in NLP: Going Meta: Advanced Modeling Using Meta-Levels (2001). It is entitled, “Levels of Abstraction: Alfred Korzybski’s Neurological Meta-Levels.”  Also, Communication Magic (2001).

From Bateson’s Frames and Meta-Function to Neuro-Semantics

Another crucial source in the Roots of Neuro-Semantics is anthropologist Gregory Bateson.  It was his fabulous work, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and his treatise Mind and Nature (1979) that completely captured my attention on several accounts.

First there was his use of the meta-function (his phrase) regarding the structure of complex experiences from schizophrenia to national personality traits (cultural phenomena), to wisdom, art, change, learning, and so on that enabled me to see the systemic nature of meta-states.  Once I had constructed the first tentative Meta-States model, I began testing it with numerous experiences that had layers of thoughts and feelings like proactivity, forgiveness, self-esteem, etc.  With each of these, I kept revisiting Bateson’s way of thinking to borrow more and more of his formulations about frames and making a move to a  meta-position.

In Neuro-Semantics Bateson led us to move beyond modeling the individual to working on cultural models, cultural modeling, anthropology, and cybernetics.  It was from Bateson that I build systems thinking and systems dynamics into the feedback and feed forward loops of the Matrix.

To see how much Bateson’s thinking, terminology, and conceptions inform Neuro-Semantics, see Chatper 7 in NLP: Going Meta: Advanced Modeling Using Meta-Levels (2001).  That chapter is entitled, “Bateson’s Logical Levels of Learning.”  Also, see The Bateson Report (2003) which contains more than a dozen articles on Bateson and our use of his work in Neuro-Semantics.  Also, the training manual, Cultural Modeling using Neuro-Semantics.

Cognitive Psychology’s Contribution to Neuro-Semantics

Even though neither Bandler nor Grinder were psychologists, psychotherapists, or had any extensive training in therapy, they model three therapies (i.e., Family Systems, Gestalt Therapy, and Ericksonian Hypnosis) and so constructed a model that is now recognized as a Cognitive-Behavioral model.  In psychology textbooks, NLP is classified in this way and has for more than 15 years.  Why is that?  How did that come about?

Possibly for two reasons.  First, Korzybski’s presupposition is that we operate by the mapping and maps we create in our heads about things—a cognitive premise.  Second, Noam Chomsky who created the Transformational Grammar model for linguistics, in which field John Grinder was an expert and contributor, was a key person in the founding of the Cognitive Movement.  In fact, it was he more than anyone else who single-handedly defeated Behaviorism in 1956 with his paradigm changing book, Aspects of Grammar. For more about this, see Howard Gardner’s book that documents the history of, The Cognitive Movement.

There’s a third reason, Bandler and Grinder also relied on and quoted George Miller for his classic 1956 paper “The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus Two” that launched the Cognitive movement as well as relied on him with Gallanter and Pribram for Plans for the Structure of Behavior (1960).  From this book came the T.O.T.E. model that NLP turned into the Strategy Model (see NLP: The Structure of Subjective Experience, Volume I, 1980, Dilts, et al.).

In addition to this, my training, first as a psychotherapist and then as a psychologist was in Cognitive Psychology, specifically in Albert Ellis’ RET (later REBT) model, Aaron Beck’s work, and William Glasser’s models of Reality Therapy and Control Theory. These and other cognitive models were the guiding models and principles that guided my thinking and so became intimately incorporated in Neuro-Semantics.

Minor contributions, still within this general area included the field of Meta-Cognition.  This field arose in 1977 and focuses mostly on the study of memory and meta-memory devices.  Key thinkers, theorists, and researchers in this area work on how feedback loops govern feedback loops at a higher or meta-level.  For more on this, see chapters in Meta-States Magic (2003).

Logotherapy, a cognitive psychology/philosophy, also contributed to the early development of Meta-States and hence to Neuro-Semantics.  Neuro-Semantics takes from Viktor Frankl’s work on the therapy of meaning (logo-therapy) a focus on meaning and meaningfulness in a philosophical sense.  It is, after all, the search for meaning and the use of our powers to create meaning that fill our neurology with the most intense and powerful emotions.

Cognitive Linguistics and Neuro-Semantics

While studying the linguistic distinctions that Korzybski highlighted in General Semantics, I continued reading in the field of linguistics.  I did that, in part, as one of my natural interests and, in part, as part of my degree in psycho-linguistics. What I found was fantastic—at least to me.  It seems that the linguistic foundations of NLP, Transformational Grammar, was rejected by its founder Noam Chomsky in 1976, one year after the appearance of The Structure of Magic by Bandler and Grinder.

What did this mean?  What was the significance of Chomsky throwing out Deep Structure (D-structure) and declaring that the Transformational Grammar approach was untenable and unworkable?  How did this relate to all of the information in NLP books about the Surface and Deep Structure?  As I began searching I found out that the field of Linguistic had shifted emphasis over the years and that by the 1990s Cognitive Linguistic has taken over.  Transformational rules had given way to thinking about grammar in terms of “space” (hence the book, Space Grammar) and the use of our “representational screen” to posit objects (nouns), trajectories of movements (verbs) to objects.  See Harris, The Linguistic Wars for more on this as well as works by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

Philosophy of Mind, Neurology, and Neuro-Semantics

There are many thinkers who write on what is called “philosophy of mind.”  These writers and theorists offer numerous conceptualizations for how to think about “mind.”  These frameworks provide the presuppositions that we begin with.  Among them, I continually return to Bateson (Mind and Nature) for insights.  Among others who I have found influence and whose influence on my thinking is incorporated in Neuro-Semantics are Daniel Dennett (Kinds of Minds, Consciousness Explained, Intentional Stance), Stephen Kosslyn and Olivier Koenig (Wet Mind), Julian Jaynes (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind), etc.

Neuro-Semantics is also based in Neurology, the levels of the brain-body structures that make up our neurological structures is detailed in Korzybski who also specified things about the representational systems that I’ve never seen reproduced in NLP.

It is to John Searle (The Construction of Social Reality) as well as other writers in anthropology, cultural studies, social psychology, etc. that Neuro-Semantics owes a debt.

What Neuro-Semantics is Not

With these fields and sources of Neuro-Semantics, I hope it is clear that Neuro-Semantics is a meta-discipline about the structure and form of things, not another psychology or philosophy.  Neuro-Semantics is the study of how we translate data into information and then into communication to create our inner worlds of reality, our inner Matrix of frames within frames within frames.

And as Neuro-Semantics is neither a psychology, nor is it a psychotherapy.  It is not primarily about the healing of human hurts, although it certainly has powerful applications to therapy.  Neuro-Semantics studies the structure of how people get hurt, find healing, and move on to actualize their greatest potentials.  In this Neuro-Semantics transcends any particular psychotherapy as it is looking for the structure that makes such therapies effective.  Nor is Neuro-Semantics a theology or religion.  Undoubtedly people will use Neuro-Semantics to model various spiritual experiences and perhaps to explore various theologies, but that is not what Neuro-Semantics is.  It is only an application.  Neuro-Semantics holds no allegiance with any particular religion whether Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Buddhist, etc.  It is not related to any New Age ideology or to any alternative healing modality.

From Practical Down-to-Earth Pragmatic Applications

Neuro-Semantics also arose from another source.   While the original model of Meta-States was the brain-child of L. Michael Hall, very early I looked to others to help me explore what we could use it for and where we could go with the model.  It was in this way that Dr. Bob Bodenhamer and I began having conversations.  At first we worked on some books together, but it soon became evident that Bob’s skills at the clinical level of working with clients would become a source of credibility for the new patterns and ideas.  So it was with Bob’s clients and students that we “tried out” and experimented with many of our new ideas and models.

This moved Neuro-Semantics from the conceptual level to the practical level of everyday life.  What we worked through conceptually on paper, we then had Bob put to the test in working with people who had come to him for assistance.  It was in this way that the Meta-Yes Belief Change pattern emerged as well as many others.  In the development of various patterns we would give it a go, adjust the steps of a pattern to create a more streamlined sequence, add or subtract steps, put in new preframes, etc.

We then began transferring the same to our trainings.  I came up with the Mind-to-Muscle pattern while doing a training in Wealth Building because I felt the need to transfer the great ideas that were already in the minds of participants (they knew good and well what to do), they just were not actually doing them.  This came about in a training when I just so happened to ask if anyone knew any principle about finances, financial intelligence, building wealth, etc.  Hands went up all over the place.  I inquired about what they knew.  After 30 minutes of that I had discovered something very important.  I did not need to share anything else about the content of building wealth.  Everybody already knew plenty.  If I were to keep adding other “great ideas” they would just be even more overwhelmed and have more to feel bad about since they were not doing the most simple of things like the principle “Spend less than you make.”

For me that was an “Ah ha!” moment.  The problem wasn’t knowing, it was doing.  The problem wasn’t lacking great concepts, wonderful principles, or inspiring ideas.  No.  They knew.  The gap was between knowing-and-doing, between the head and the legs.  It was at this point that I began asking myself many questions, questions that would stimulate the creation of a new pattern:

∙      How can we close this knowing-doing gap and get what they know in their heads into their muscles?

∙      Can ideas or concepts move from “the head” into “the body,” into muscle memory?

∙      What is muscle memory anyway?

∙      How do ideas get into muscle memory?  What are the mechanisms involved?

∙     How can we take ideas about wealth building and translate them so that people actually act on what they know and learn?

Everyday practical life and challenges—this is one of the ongoing sources of Neuro-Semantics.  Today we have lots of people doing this very thing.  That is they have eyes to look for gaps, for problems, for needs.  That’s why Neuro-Semantics has gone the way of creating dozens of Gateway Trainings and using the hard questions we find in those fields—the places where other fields and disciplines are stuck to stimulate creativity.  Bob Bodenhamer has done this with people who block and/or stutter.  I have done this with Defusing Hotheads and other Cranky and Stressed-out People.  We have people now doing this in criminal justice departments, with weight management, fitness, stress management, resilience for times of change, leadership, etc.  This also is the focus for the Neuro-Semantics Developers group that we are now developing.

Author: L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. was first a psychotherapist, then psychologist, then NLP Trainer, then discover of Meta-States, then co-founder of Neuro-Semantics, now an entrepreneur, prolific writer, researcher, modeler, and explorer of things of the mind-body-emotion system.