[Neurons] 2013 "Neurons" --- Meta Reflections #43

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall


Meta Reflections 2013  #43

Sept 30, 2013


 

 

 

"TRANSCENDENCE IS INCLUDED"

 

 

When it comes to human beings, transcendence is part of the package.  You
don't have to go to school to learn it.  You don't have to hire a coach or
consultant so that you can learn how to do it.  You don't need to apply for
a scholarship so that you can take off a few years and develop it as a
spiritual quality to add to all of your human qualities.  It's not like
that.  Not at all.

 

When it comes to the experience and capacity for transcendence, it is part
and parcel of being human.  This is so much true that you could not turn it
off even if you wanted to.  It is inevitable, inescapable, and innate.  Now
true enough, it is not there at birth, but it is there as a potential and
it doesn't take long and Pow! there it is. 

 

What am I talking about?  What is this transcendence?  Transcendence is the
mechanism of consciousness whereby you become aware of your awareness.  In
other words, it is the first meta-state which we all experience.  But again,
not at first.  At first, we are in the Garden of Bliss or to use the
biblical story, the Garden of Eden.  We are conscious- sentient- aware, but
we're not aware of our awareness.  We live in the World of Attentions.
Whatever catches our attention leads our thinking and emoting.  We're not
even aware of ourselves.

 

Then it happens.  Like the biblical story of the beginning, it is like
eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in that as we grow and
develop, as our mind develops, we become aware of "knowing" (knowledge) that
some things are good for us and some things are not.  And with this
awareness, we begin to become conscious of being conscious.  We become
self-conscious.  Suddenly we know that we're naked.  So while a four-year
old may joyfully jump out of the bathtub and run through the house and out
into the yard buck naked, at five or six years of age we have a more
developed consciousness.  We are self-conscious, conscious of being seen,
being exposed.  And so the age of shyness deepens. 

 

Now begins the age of self-consciousness and given that we live in a world
of giants who are so smart, so big, so strong, and so much in control, we
become aware that we are not.  We become aware that we lack the ability to
do so many things and so we feel the lack of self-confidence and the lack of
self-assurance.  This is transcendence.  It is as if we can stand aside from
ourselves and be aware of ourselves.  And as this power or capacity
develops, it is as if we can stand aside from our awareness of others and
become aware of what they are thinking of us.  Little children cannot do
this.  Cognitive development takes some time before this occurs.

 

Then again, with the maturing of the brain during adolescence when new
chemical are pouring into the brain and bringing it to higher levels of
formal logic, transcendence also develops and we are able to as it were step
aside from our mortality, temporality, fallibility, and dozens of other
concepts to become philosophical about these mysterious aspects of human
life.

 

How our brains create the sense of transcendence is a mystery; we simply do
not know.  We have guesses and we might assume that it might or could or
probably arises due to the complexity of the processing neural systems
within us, but in the end, all we have are guesses.  We certainly have not
been able to model it and replicate it in a computer.  Nor do other
biological creatures have this sense of transcendence as far as we can tell.


 

In his work with dolphins in Hawaii Bateon noted the ability to "jump at
least one logical level," that is, to move beyond a certainly classification
of information to the frame of that classification and to then create a
higher level understanding.  You can read about that in his classic, Toward
an Ecology of Mind (1972).  Yet jumping one logical level or even two,
that's all that the most intelligent animals can do.  Yet a child can jump
many and then into the teenage years, we humans have no limit to the number
of logical level jumps that we can make.  No limit!

 

The reflexivity of our minds seems to be the mechanism by which the sense of
transcendence arises.  And since the Meta-States Model is a model of
reflexive consciousness, transcendence is built into the core of the
Meta-States Model and hence the Neuro-Semantic approach to NLP.  Over the
years this has enabled us to model higher level and more complex states of
consciousness than what we could do with old classic NLP.  The Meta-States
Model emerged from my modeling project on resilience as told in the book,
Meta-States (2007).  But that was just the beginning.  Then we modeled out
the structure of the subjective experience of proactivity, responsibility,
self-esteem, magnanimity, forgiveness, seeing and seizing opportunities, and
a hundred others.

 

So far we have not been able to create any final definitions of the sense of
transcendence, we are still in our infancy in being able to model that.
Currently we are working on those rich complex states that entail and
encompass the sense of transcendence.  That is, in certain states almost
everybody has "a sense" of rising above oneself, stepping outside oneself,
taking a higher perceptual position than first or second position, even
beyond third and fourth and having a system perception of the whole.  We are
also modeling out more fully "the peak experience" of Abraham Maslow,
beginning where he ended in his incredibly insightful work about the
mystical "peak experiences."  He knew they were special, that there was
something "other-worldly" about them, but he could only map out with broad
strokes the mysterious realm that he had identified.

 

Transcendence- it is built into us, it comes with the package, it is innate
and inevitable.  And it is a mystery.  It seems to lie at the heart of what
it means to be human.  And the study of transcendence, going meta, and using
our self-reflexive consciousness lies at the heart of Neuro-Semantics.

 

 

 


 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

                Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

                Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

                1 970-523-7877 

                Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net


     

    

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