[Neurons] 2025 Neurons #21 DON'T CONFUSE 'STACKING OF STATES' WITH META-STATING

Sun May 25 12:05:45 EDT 2025

From: L. Michael Hall

2025 Neurons #21

May 26, 2025

DON'T CONFUSE STACKING OF STATES

       WITH META-STATING

When you first learn NLP, you learn to "stack states."  This is most obvious
in the Circle of Excellence pattern.  You identify a positive and
resourceful state such as learning, joy, love, calmness, optimism, etc.
Next you "stack" other positive states on top of your first state.  It's
like wildly throwing any positive state that comes to your mind so that you
start stacking state upon state.  Sounds simple, obvious, and harmless.
Right?

That's what I thought.  I thought that for years after I learned that and
for many years, I never questioned it.  I did not even question it in the
process of discovering meta-states or in formalizing the Meta-States Model.
Why?  I don't know.  I just did not.  Then recently as I have been pouring
over many, many NLP books and manuals, I encountered this "stacking" process
again.  In one book, the author treated this as mana from heaven.  It was
his baby, his greatest diamond, and he talked about it as "a super Circle of
Excellence state."

In one example he took a person formally hooked on drugs, who had gotten
clean and he asked him what state would he like to make his circle of
excellence.  The man choose calmness.  After he accessed a calm state of
mind and emotion, the trainer asked him to stack onto that state another
one, he chose focus.  Then add another, he choose decision, then competence,
then fun, then confidence, and so it went.  As he stacked each state, he was
asked to experience it.  So in the end, he had an incredibly large amounts
of states, one upon the other, that he was experiencing.

So what is the problem?  Several things.  If you had experienced the
Meta-States Training called APG (Accessing Personal Genius), then you have
seen the list of 16 interfaces in the back of the manual.  These are also in
the book Meta-State as well as several books.  Now 16 different interfaces
means that when you bring one state and apply it to another, there are 16
different kinds of interactions that could occur.

           Apply passion to love, joy to learning, or curiosity to learn
and you increase the intensity of the first state.  So also with fear to
fear, anger to fear, fear to anger.

           Apply calmness to anger, mindfulness to fear, play to
seriousness and you reduce the original state's intensity.

           Apply anger to anger, fear to fear, love to love and you can
distort the original state. 

           Apply doubt to doubt or flexibility to compulsiveness and you
can negate or neutralize a state.

           Apply anxiety to calmness or humor to seriousness and you can
interrupt a state.

           Apply silliness to formality to create confusion.

           Apply a command ('be X') to something that's spontaneous ('on
the spur of the moment, do X) and create paradox; namely the 'be
spontaneous' paradox.

           Apply observing to anxiety, or distance to a pain and create
dissociation. 

           Apply courage to have courage, willingness to being willing and
create a response potential. 

           Apply calm to anger or appreciation to shame and radically shift
attention.

           Apply nominalizations and non-referring nouns and create a state
of trance.

           Apply three or more states and create gestalt state such as
'seeing opportunities.' 

           Apply any state that radically and incongruously jars with a
first state that is not threatening, and create humor. 

           Apply joy to learning, charming to lying, ruthless to compassion
and texture the original state.

           Apply belief to a thought, identity to an idea and solidify or
strengthen a state.

           Apply doubt to a belief, humor to a commitment and loosen a
state.

The problem with stacking states is the problem of relationship.  A state
(which is comprised of thinking, feeling, kinesthetic registering)
inevitably sets up a relationship with another state.  If you are feeling
anger (there are also thoughts and kinesthetic sensations abreast) so when
you apply respect (which has its own set of thoughts and kinesthetics) -the
interface of respect with anger will create a texturing of the original
anger state.  That builds up a new potential.  But if you then apply doubt
and questioning to the respectful anger, you then reverse things.  You tear
down or loosen when you just created.

So the idea of "stacking" states can do a lot of damage if you are not
careful.   It is actually reckless to just throw a bunch of positive states
in a circle of excellence.  In the end, you may not have excellence at all. 

Can a positive state negate or distort a positive state?  Certainly!  Apply
love to power and depending on the internal thoughts and kinesthetics of
these states, you may create a dictator.  Apply pride to confidence and you
may get a know-it-all who can't learn from others. 

While applying one state to another state sounds simple, and something
anyone can do- to do this meta-stating properly and ecologically, you need
to think   in terms of the interfaces between the states.

Neuro-Semantics News

·       Egypt --- Sharm El Sheikhk :. 2025 NSTT is now past the half-way
mark.

·       We have 46 participants from many countries and 14 on the Assist
Team.

·       We have completed the evening presentations and the participants are
getting ready for their final presentations.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

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