[Neurons] 2011 Meta Reflections #23

[L. Michael Hall]

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Meta Reflections 2011 - #23

May 16, 2011

 

CONTEXT IS NOT CAUSE

 

 

Most people confuse context with cause.  They confuse the context of events
and experiences with cause.  They think that when and where something begins
is the cause.  And while all of these factors are indeed variables within a
system, they are not cause.  They are simply some of the complicating or
even contributing factors to a cause.  It is because of that we all have a
tendency to look at origins for the events, experiences, and contexts that
"caused" ourselves or someone else to now have a certain experience.

 

But context is not cause.  It is just context.  Nor is an event the cause of
a person's psychological state and experience-meaning is.  Ah, yes, meaning.
And that's because you and I are meaning-makers.  We are the ones who create
the meanings about what an event or experience means.  And as we do, we
typically use context or origin as our "explanation" as to "why" we think or
feel or respond to something as we do.

 

To have clarity about problem and solution, we need to sort out these
things.  We need to clearly sort out a true cause from the variables that
play a role in the creation of something.  Confusion begins by how we
language things, especially when we attribute cause to events, history,
origins, etc.

"My childhood is what makes me the way I am today."

"Going through a divorce is what causes me to be afraid of commitment now."

"Losing that ideal job through the redundancy program at work prevents me
from ever hoping to have the career I always dreamed of."

"I'm afraid of snakes because of what my brother did to me when we were
kids."

"I will never get over the tragedy and loss that happened during the
earthquake, it caused me to lose my faith in God and goodness."

"I could never take the risks you take in real estate, I'm just not a risk
taker; it's not in my genes."

 

In these and a thousand other similar statements, people attribute the cause
of their current fears, regrets, limitations, and ineffectiveness to events
and sources outside of their control and response.  They explain their
unresourceful states and inabilities as caused by some past event, some
unchangeable factor, or some experience that they have been through.  They
look at the contexts and events that they have experienced and attribute
control to them.  It is in this way that they make themselves victims and
leash themselves into a matrix of frames that prevents them from getting
over the experience.

 

Yet in spite of all of that, there is hope.  After all, if we can leash
ourselves to events, experiences, concepts, and give away our power by our
explanatory style and meaning-making, we can reclaim our power and unleash
ourselves with a new attribution of meaning.  Our neuro-semantic state
continues to be a function of the meanings that we make.  And so we can
change the languaging of causation and thereby create a meaning-making that
unleashes new potentials and powers.

 

The truth about causation is that you are the cause of your experience of
reality.  Reality is what it is, and your experience of it results from how
you represent it, how you code it, how you frame it, the meanings you give
to it, the beliefs that you develop about it, the conclusions you draw and
use about it, the interpretations that you use to explain it to yourself and
others.  We do not deal with reality as it is, in the raw, but as filtered
through our model of the world.  We call that model of the world our Matrix
- our matrix of frames of meanings.

 

What causes you to feel depressed about some childhood event, to fear
criticism, to give up and act like a victim, to feel out-of-control and
needing to over-manage things?  Your meanings!  And as I like to say in
explaining Self-Actualization Psychology: "The meanings you give is the
instinct you live."  The meanings you create about anything and everything
generates the Matrix you live in and from which you generate your
explanations and computations.

 

That's why we say in Neuro-Semantics, The person is never the problem; the
frame is the problem.  "Problems" (a linguistic nominalization created by a
meaning that you give to something) only exists in a human mind.  It exists
because you and I have goals that differ from our present state.  So the
problem is created by your definition and exists first and foremost as a
frame.  Problems are caused by the meanings (frames) that you use to
classify some action, event, experience, etc.

 

In NLP we have a basic Model, the SCORE Model.  In present state there are
the symptoms (S) and the cause (C) then there is the desired state as
indicated by the outcome (O) and effects (E) that results, and of course the
resources (R) that enables us to create the solution pathway in which we
move to the desired outcome.  Cause here is not history, not origin, not an
external event, it is the meanings that create the state and its symptoms.

 

Causation, as an experience, does exist.  We do indeed cause things to
happen.  We do so by believing, meaning-making, intending, understanding,
etc.  The frames of meanings that we create cause our experience of reality.
So to change our experience of reality- you only need to create better maps.
It is that simple, it is that profound.  This is the heart of
Neuro-Semantics, it is the heart of what Neuro-Semanticists do -whether they
are trainers, consultants, Meta-Coaches, parents, etc.

 

 

 

 

Less than 6 weeks to the First International Neuro-Semantic Conference!

            See details of all of the speakers and workshops at
www.neurosemantics.com 

            And the Registration form

 

 

 

 

 

 

L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Neuro-Semantics Executive Director  ----   <http://www.neurosemantics.com/>
www.neurosemantics.com

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA                             ----
<http://www.self-actualizing.org/> www.self-actualizing.org

1 970-523-7877                                               ----
<http://www.meta-coaching.org/> www.meta-coaching.org

 

     

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