[Neurons] 2009 Meta Reflection #8

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2009 Meta Reflections #8

February 23, 2009

 

META-GOALS

AND GETTING WHAT YOU REALLY NEED

 

 

After writing the last Meta Reflection I had several conversations that made
me realize that I have not yet distinguished goals and meta-goals as
sufficiently as I want to.  So I'll give it another go.  One reader asked
the following which helped me realize that a person could set a meta-goal
and then seek to fulfill it through a lower level need.

"Suppose I seek excellence and beauty through designer clothes?  Would that
be a meta-goal?  Suppose I set justice and perfection as a meta-goal and
seek it by becoming a dictator and impose my will on others?"

 

I'll answer by once again navigating the subject of our human needs, the
level of needs, the issue of satisfying the needs-adequately satisfying with
true satisfiers, the conditions of satisfaction, and the nature of the
being-values as meta-goals.  This will involve distinguishing goals and
meta-goals, basic needs and higher needs.  This also reveals one of the ways
that many people cut off their possibilities of self-actualizing: they
semantically load a lower-level goal mis-perceiving it as a meta-goal.

 

The powerful point of Maslow's Hierarchy of Prepotent Needs model is this:
Needs come in levels.  All needs are not the same; some are more fundamental
than others.  Others emerge over time as the foundation is developed and
this explains the relationship between needs and their satisfiers.

 

Needs and Satisfiers

While your "needs" drive you and create the biological impulses that you
feel within, they can be "satisfied" along a range of satisfiers.  "What
will satisfy your need?"  The answer to this is, Satisfiers occur along a
range.  You can adequately satisfy the needs and you can inadequately
satisfy it.  You can partially satisfy it and try in vain to satisfy them
with things that will provide no satisfaction.

 

Maslow noted that at the lowest level, the range of satisfiers is very small
and sometimes just the thing itself.  The need for oxygen can only be
satisfied by oxygen.  Our need for trace salts, vitamin B or E, etc. can
only be satisfied by one thing.  For the need for sleep-only sleep will
work.  Yet as you move up the levels, the range of things that can satisfy a
need increases.  To satisfy the thirst need, you can use water, orange
juice, coffee, Pepsi, etc.  Many things can operate as a true satisfier for
thirst.  But there are things that will not satisfy that need.  Trying to
satisying thirst with a jar of dry peanut butter will not work.  Nor will
dirt, sand, rocks, or plastic wrap used in packaging- such are not true
satisfiers of thirst.

 

Here we can be wrong-we can make a cognitive mistake and think something
will satisfy a need when it will not.  The false-satisfier may even create
harm, damage, death.  And as Maslow noted, at the higher levels, it creates
pathology- meta-pathologies.

 

At the survival needs level, there's a close relationship between need and
satisfier.  But just move up the next level and the needs become more and
more affected by meanings.  What will satisfy your need for safety and
security?  Having locks on your doors, being able to know what neighborhoods
to walk and which to stay clear of, having a gun hidden in your coat, having
three insurance policies, having a roller-dex of names of people you could
call in an emergency, knowing a marshal art?

 

What will satisfying your need for love and affection and all of your social
needs?  Being told that you're pretty, having a favorite bar you stop by
each evening, being in relationship, having your entry on facebook, knowing
how to manipulate others to like you, etc.?  What will satisfying your need
for self-value and self-esteem?  Driving an expensive car, having a
six-figure job, wearing the latest fashion, etc.?

 

As you can see, moving up the levels expands the degree to which the need is
semantically governed.  This explains why you can take almost any
commodity-almost any product or service and semantically-load it.  Beginning
with a need, you can now semantically load it with meta-goals to thoroughly
confuse yourself.  As you come to believe that clothes give you social
likeability, or raises your self-esteem, or makes you feel safe and
secure-you can load the latest fashion of clothes to these goals and then
"shop till you drop" trying to get more love and affection, sense of
security, and self-value.

 

Once you link the commodity to a goal, you could even link it to a
meta-goal, to one of the being-values.  You could link "wearing new
fashionable clothes" to completeness, beauty, justice, fairness,
contribution, and so on.  Doing that not only creates a thorough confusion,
it can even disorder personality.  As "fashion" now becomes "the meaning of
life."  Now you load designer clothes with so much semantic meaning that
when you lack such, you are devastated.

 

In the past few weeks, we have had several cases of suicides in the US from
the turndown of the Wall Street stock market.  Losing "money," and
"investments" were so semantically loaded that the loss meant "life is not
worth living."  It meant loss of status, loss of self-value, loss of hope,
loss of purpose.

 

In human life, our first needs are our "lower needs" which are based on our
biological needs as intelligent animals.  We share these needs with the
higher intelligent animals.  These are the needs to survive, to be safe, to
be social and have a social reality, and to be valued and have a place in
society.  Maslow put these needs into an hierarchical order and showed how
that each next level of need emerges in awareness as a need is satisfied. 

The higher needs are also biological (wired into our being) and emerge as
the lower needs are satisfied.  What makes this hierarchy a bit difficult to
comprehend is that every day we move up and down all of the levels.  At any
time, we can be sent all the way to the bottom with our need  for food,
water, air, etc.  As biological creatures, we will always need these.  And
every day we need them again.  Yet along with these needs we also experience
the higher needs -meaning, justice, understanding, beauty, order,
contribution, etc.

 

The higher needs takes you into the human dimensions of experience.  This
realm of meaning creates inspiration and value for you, a reason to live, a
why for doing what you do.  It is the realm of being-being who you are and
being rather than just doing.  This is the realm of the being-values.

 

So to confuse money or fashion or food or status or a house or an investment
with the being-realm confuses, disorients, disorders, and distorts human
personality.  So what are so many people trying to get with fashion, food,
cars, etc.?  A purpose for living.  The meaningfulness of life.  They are
trying, but they can't.

 

The point?  Self-actualization is not a commodity-you can't get it on the
blue-light special at K-Mart; nor can your stock broker get it for you on
the stock exchange.  Self-actualization is an inner experience of the
being-values that arise from meta-goals.  Ah yes, the meta-goals- the higher
goals that enable you to transcend yourself, your egos, your materialistic
needs -to expressing your unique contributions that add to the beauty,
justice, meaningfulness, richness of life for others.

 

So answering the question, your lower needs require the things that satisfy
them and can be used to fulfil the meta-goals.  Food is nourishment, clothes
are for covering and warmth, and to over-load them leads to psycho-eating,
psycho-spending and so on.  Then our attempt to use them actually mis-uses
them.

 

 

 

 

 

L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

International Society of Neuro-Semantics

Meta-Coach Training System

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA

1 970-523-7877

1 970-523-5790 fax

      <http://www.neurosemantics.com> www.neurosemantics.com 

       <http://www.neuro-semantics-trainings.com>
www.neuro-semantics-trainings.com 

       <http://www.self-actualizing.org> www.self-actualizing.org

       <http://www.meta-coaching.org> www.meta-coaching.org

       <http://www.ns-video.com> www.ns-video.com 

 

 

Trainers Training in 2009 --- July 22--- August 5/8  If interested, write
for information: meta at onlinecol.com 

Meta-Coaching Modules I-IV, Coloradao, June  write for brochures. 

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