[Neurons] 2022 Neurons #51 THE MAGIC WORD "META"

Sun Dec 11 16:46:11 EST 2022

From: L. Michael Hall

2022 Neurons #51

December 12, 2022

THE MAGIC WORD "META"

If you know NLP, then you have heard about George Miller's famous paper.  It
was published in 1956 and, in part, launched the Cognitive Psychology
Movement.  Now that's a really influential paper!  "The Magic Number 7+/- 2"
also played a big role in the formative ideas of NLP as it identified how
many 'things' we can hold in consciousness at a time.  Even today 7+/-2
still maintains a near magical role in psychology.

If that's a magic number, what I want to zoom-in on here, and highlight, is
a magic word, the magical word of-meta.  And no, not Facebook's new name!
In NLP the word meta goes back way, way before that!  I'm rather referring
to the word which Bateson introduced as a way to model and understand
cultures, schizophrenia, learning, and much more.  And because Bateson
introduced the word and used it so prolifically, the early NLP community did
so also.

Now unknown to most NLP people, before they invented the name "NLP" in 1976,
in the years from 1972 to 1976, the pre-NLP people were called "the Meta
People."  Frank Pucelik then established "The Meta Institute" in 1978 in San
Diego and later in Oklahoma.  Even today, Frank has "Meta International" as
a NLP Association in Ukraine, Russia, and other former Soviet countries.
But while they claimed the name, the early NLP people didn't give much
attention to meta as a concept.  While they used the name to name lots of
things- meta-position, meta-level, meta-tactics, meta-representational
system (language), etc., for the most part they looked down on meta.

How can I say that?  Because in the 1980 book, Neuro-Linguistic Programming,
meta was pretty much reduced to a tiny little place in the Strategy Model,
the little "m" after a representational step-a tiny superscript.  This
little meta didn't seem to get any respect!  In reading a strategy, it reads
like an after-thought, and that's all.

But little meta was given a great big boost when I discovered a whole new
domain of meta.  The discovery of the Meta-States Model in 1994, meta was
finally treated to the respect it deserved.  It was then noted that big meta
provided the doorway to Logical Levels, to one's "Model of the World," to
the hidden and unconscious structures that govern all human "programming,"
and much more.  The big meta within Meta-States led to the re-modeling of
all of the major models in NLP.

That's what Bob Bodenhamer and I did in the late 1990s as we used big meta
to take a fresh look at the Meta-Model, Sub-Modalities, Meta-Programs,
Time-Lines, etc.  Over those years, I kept attempting to map out the
territory of meta.  About 1998 I did that, along with Bob, and we came up
with the four Meta-Domains of NLP.   After that, in 2002 I constructed the
Matrix Model with seven meta-dimensions.

At that same time, in Neuro-Semantics, we took big meta and designed the
entire Meta-Coaching System from it.  More recently (2022) I decided to
return to the field of psychotherapy and again, using big meta, designed
Meta-Therapy.  Now in writing that book as well as the previous book,
Thinking as a Modeler (2019), I found myself talking about the meta place.
This came out of researching being, and Maslow's B-values, in the
Self-Actualization books.  Then as I wrote, Inside-Out and Inspiring the
Heart (2022), and mentioning the meta place again and again, I got
wondering:

           What is this meta place, really?

           What is in the meta place?

           Is it possible to describe the landscape of the meta place?

Meta is magical because it lies at the heart of being human.  It is the
source of creativity and the place where all of your potentials emerge.  It
is the place where we do coaching and where we do therapy.  And because of
that, that's where coaches and therapists take their clients-if they are
skilled.  Actually, everything really important to we humans occurs in the
meta place.  It is in the meta place that you will find the inner game and
your "model of the world."

I wrote an introductory chapter about the meta place in the new book,
Meta-Therapy.  Upon finishing that book, I kept thinking about the meta
place and the more I thought, the more facets of meta opened up.  "I could
write a whole book on meta" I said to my wife, Geraldine.  She looked at me
in a way that said, "Do it!"  So that's what I'm now doing.  On a recent day
at the coffee shop, I shared a diagram of the meta place with her, and she
got more excited about it than I did.  "This puts everything in NLP and
Neuro-Semantics in place and makes it make more sense."  And, hoping that
others will have that same response, I'm still in pursuit of the meta place
and describing its landscape.  And why?  Because meta is such a magic idea.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall at acsol.net  

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