[Neurons] 2008 Meta Reflection #30

[meta]

From: L. Michael Hall

July 7, 2008

Meta Reflection #30





SELF-REFERENCE

IS THE NAME OF THE GAME



"Meta-States? What are meta-states? I never heard of that before."

That's what he said to me; not unsurprising and yet it was precisely what I wanted him to ask. I was sitting at Starbucks and while he had seen me there numerous times, today he started up a conversation. And so interrupting my reading and writing, I began with some small talk, then he asked me what I was working on, which happened to be the Psychology of Meta-States which I'll present at Trainer's Training this year in New Zealand. And that's when the question came.

"Meta-States? What are meta-states? I never heard of that before."

Now you have to know that I'm always looking for new ways to answer the question. Over the years I've answered it in many different ways: 

Meta-States- how you respond to your own responses.

Meta-States- how you go spiral round and round the thoughts and emotions you experience. 

Meta-States- I don't know, it's above me. It's over my head. That's too high of a question for me to answer. :)

Meta-States- how you layer level upon level of thoughts and emotions to create the Matrix of your mind.

Meta-States- how you create second thoughts to your first ones; third thoughts and feelings to your second ones, and so on.

But this time I tried something new.

"Meta-States- how you create and ride the self-referential loops of your mind."

"What?" he immediately said. "I don't understand what you're saying."

"Yes I know..." I said playfully, winking so that he would take it in as conversational play. "That's because self-reference itself is the name of the game."

"And what is self-reference?"

"It's how we refer to ourselves, and reference our thoughts and emotions and repeatedly spiral round and round our own experiences. It's how we create horrible downward spiraling of responses to our responses as we react to our reactions and how we create wonderfully inspiring and awe-stirring states as we spiral upward into those "Aha!" moments of inspiration. Does that make sense?"

"Well, I suppose. Yes, kind of. So, what are you doing with these Meta-States and this self-reference game?"

"I'm tracking them. I follow them. I mostly map out how we spiral round and round something to create moments of genius, experiences of self-actualization, and the most astonishing experiences of excellence that's possible for human beings. As a Bright-Side psychologist and modeler, I am doing this to make specific and explicit how we can model and replicate the very best experiences so that we can pass them around and raise the quality of life on this planet." 

I uttered the last words "raise the quality of life on this planet" slowly and with a tone of an old fashion radio broadcaster ... doing so playfully as part of our conversation. After that he asked if he could sit down for a minute, so he sat down and we had an engaging conversation for the next ten minutes. We talked about the self-referencing nature of language and of mind and Heidegger's famous quote, "Language is the house of being. Man dwells in this house."

When he asked about some of the trainings and materials we have in Neuro-Semantics, I talked to him about how we are the creators of meaning and that Meta-States models the layering of meanings to create a Matrix of frames of meaning. I was delighted that he was so interested and seemed to pick it up very quickly. And he said he would peak into the Meta-Coach training that would be in town in a week or two. 

Later I realized something as an "Aha!" awareness: Living life in a self-referential world is precisely what makes human life, emotion, personality, thinking, consciousness, problems, etc. so complex. When it comes to the self-referential, everything recursively feeds into everything else. Not infrequently I am absolutely amazed and even astonished when I listen to the conversations in the Meta-Coach trainings when one person relates things to something else. Usually I am not the coach, but the person benchmarking skills so I can't jump in and say, 

"Wait a minute, how is X related to Y? How did you come up with A connected to K?"

People in conversation with others and privately with themselves as they "think" use words, symbols, meanings, memories, imaginations, fears, hopes, worries, movies, lines from a teacher 30 years ago, quotes from a song, etc. and recursively feed all kinds of things back into other things. And in this way they create their meanings, their psychology, their psycho-logical state of mind-and-body. No wonder we are all so psycho-logical! No wonder that almost all of our problems are essentially and fundamentally problems of self-reference which creates the so-called "paradoxes" of life.

So, if self-reference is the name of the game, how are you at playing this game? Are you able to win at this game? Or it is this game itself that keeps defeating you as you keep spinning around things and getting lost? Are you willing to learn the art of riding the spirals of self-reflexivity? If so, welcome to the dimension of Meta-State Mastery!



L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Neuro-Semantics Ltd., Executive Director
ISNS - International Society of Neuro-Semantics
P.O. Box 8
Clifton, Colorado, 81520 USA
www.neurosemantics.com 
www.meta-coaching.org
www.self-actualizing.org 

Email: meta @onlinecol.com @acsol.net @mindfocus.co.za
(970) 523-7877
(970) 523-5790 FAX
(877) 686-2867 toll free in the USA only
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://eight.pairlist.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20080707/a582b6ba/attachment.html>