[Neurons] 2008 Meta Reflections #45

[Dr. Hall]

From:  L. Michael Hall

Oct. 5, 2008

Meta Reflection #45

                        

 

                                  I CAUGHT A THOUGHT

 

 

I remember when I first began teaching NLP (the practitioner and master
practitioner courses) I began meeting people who complained about not
visualizing.  They said that they didn't make pictures in their mind.  When
someone would say that, I would then repeat a little process that I learned
from Richard Bandler.  I'd ask for their billfold or purse and ask for a
picture of their loved one or children.  When they produced it I would point
to the people in the pictures and ask, "Who is this?"

 

When they would tell me, "It's my wife."  I'd ask, "How do you know?"  They
would say, "I just know?"  "Maybe that's not really your wife.  You don't
make pictures in your mind, you are just looking at a picture that you're
carrying, how do you know that it is her?  Maybe it's someone else's wife!
Maybe it's a mistress!  How would you know if it isn't?"

 

The design of that response was to provoke a person to catch their own
thoughts.  It was designed to set a question within a person regarding how
do you know and recognize your thoughts.  Of course, that's just one way to
evoke a person's recognition of their internal pictures.  There are many
others.  I learned to catch my auditory thoughts by "snapshoting" sounds.  I
would listen to something on TV or radio, then turn the source off and see
if I could re-present it to myself.  If not, I'd turn it on again and make
another "snapshot" of it -noticing its qualities, tones, volumes, etc.

 

This is the exercise I recommend to anyone wanting to learn to visualize or
to enhance the quality of their inner thoughts of images.  Look at
something, see it, really see it, now close your eyes and see it inside.
Re-present its colors, shapes, form, etc.  Now look at it again, really look
at it for all of its qualities.  Use your hand to feel it.  Now close your
eyes and feeling it-in your mind-see it.  Then using your hand, knock on it
and listen to those sounds.  Now with eyes closed, hear those sounds and let
the images emerge.

 

What's all this about?  It's about catching thoughts.  Most of the time we
think and don't even recognize our thoughts and especially don't recognize
the form or code of the thought.  Yet because we humans have a brain with a
visual cortex, an auditory cortex, a motor cortex, an associative cortex,
etc., we think using the sensory modalities.  This is the most fundamental
level of our thinking and the genius of NLP.  Others had discovered this
long before NLP, but Bandler and Grinder put this together into a format
that enable people to "run their own brains."

 

This explains why NLP can be used for developing emotional intelligence.
Given Daniel Goleman's list of the four facets of EQ: self-management,
social awareness, relationship management, self-awareness is first.  No
wonder Denis Bridoux and his associates wrote a basic NLP book (including
Meta-States) entitled, Seven Steps to Emotional Intelligence. 

 

Well, this week I caught a thought.  I was watching the political debate
between the vice president candidates and when it was announced that it was
at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri-all of a sudden pictures,
images, sounds, and even smells popped into my mind.  And because there were
so many of these sights and sounds, I became aware of them.  In fact, I
missed a bit of the beginning of the debate because of the intrusion of this
inner movie.

 

Now I'm pretty sure you didn't experience that.  "Pretty sure" because the
likelihood that you have not spent much time in the neighborhood of
Washington University in St. Louis, Forest park, and Skinker Blvd.  But I
did.  And as I caught the first thoughts of those sights and sounds, then
also I caught higher level thoughts-old thoughts from 25 years ago when I
lived in St. Louis.

 

When it comes to catching your thoughts, you can catch thoughts at many
different levels.  Here's one way that we frame the levels of thoughts in
Neuro-Semantics:

 

1) Awareness.  The first thinking is simply being aware, sentient, and
conscious.  The content of this consciousness is whatever you're aware of,
whatever gets your attention, whatever grabs it.  You are aware but not
aware of that awareness.  This is the mind of a small child or animal.  It
is only the beginning of consciousness.

 

2) Awareness of awareness:  Then you catch a thought.  You become aware of
your thought.  "I was just thinking about X."  "An image just popped in
mind."  Or someone interrupts your daydreaming asking you "Where were you
just now?  Where did you go?"  At this level you become aware of the two key
sensory representational systems: visual and auditory and the snapshot or
movie playing in your mind.  At this level you experience the first
meta-state.

 

3) Dimensions of thoughts: You can then identify the dimensions of your
thinking in terms of their qualities.  My images of St. Louis were of the
stone buildings and green trees around Washington University.  Some were
close, others were far away.  In this I was using the concept of distance as
well as the concept of color to create and re-present my thoughts.  At this
level you catch your meta-modalities of the cinematic features of your
movies ("sub-modalities" in NLP).

 

4) Narrative of the thoughts: Then there is our self-talk as we have a
running commentary in our mind about our thoughts.  We use this self-talk as
our story to describe and narrate their meanings.  At this level you catch
your words and the linguistic representational system (the
meta-representation system of NLP).

 

5) Experience of the thoughts: And if we use our sights and sounds in such a
way that we imagine ourselves inside things, then we use the concept of "as
if I am there again."  This re-creates the sense of the experience so that
the messages you send your body accesses your kinesthetic encoding and
activates your motor cortex.  At this level you catch your kinesthetic
sensory system so that you do not merely think the thought, but experience
it.

 

6) Evaluation of thoughts: From there you can, and do, make all kinds of
evaluations of your thoughts and thoughts-of-thoughts.  You create
metaphorical evaluations, intentional, meaning, etc. as we frame things with
higher levels of concepts and understandings.  At this level you enter into
all of the 100 meta-levels of the meta-state distinctions and can map out
the fuller Matrix in which you think.

 

Catching a thought- ah, that's what any good Meta-Coach with his or her salt
does!  We catch the thoughts that operate as our maps of reality, the maps
that either effectively enable us to get on in life or that trip us up.
Because we don't deal with "reality" directly, but through our maps,
catching a thought is the first step in reframing.  We catch a thought in
order to know what framing we're currently living in and what needs to be
reframed.

 

Here's to your successful thought-catching this week!

 

 

 

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L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

International Society of Neuro-Semantics

Meta-Coach Training System

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA

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