[Neurons] 2025 Neurons #37 YOUIR BELIEFS/ YOUR EPISTEMOLOGY

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2025 Neurons #37

September 8, 2025

NLP as Epistemology #6

 

YOUR BELIEFS/

YOUR EPISTEMOLOGY

 

Here's something new that I've learned recently from my studies in thinking.
When you engage in representational thinking, and even when you engage in
the next higher level of thinking, editorial thinking- your thinking is
direct and immediate.  You are in a primary state of thinking and
perceiving.  What you immediately perceive-you track to the movie you play
in your mind.  This thinking is straight-forward, natural, and simple.  And
you really cannot do any semantic damage to yourself with it. 

 

What comes after that?  Once you think and create a mental movie of what you
have seen, heard, and felt-then you draw a conclusion.  You like it or you
don't.  You think it is good and valid or you think it is not-so-good, even
bad, and want none of it.  In other words, after your first-level thinking,
you think-about-your-thinking.  This is your self-reflexive consciousness at
work.  It is what uniquely makes you human.  It is also your glory and your
agony.

 

In this second thinking, as you draw a conclusion-whatever that conclusion
is-is a belief.  You believe something.  And you create all sorts of
beliefs-beliefs about what a thing is (identity), how it works
(cause-effect), its significance in your life (value or disvalue), its
source (history, development), what you should do (purpose, intention), etc.
And here's the thing-you cannot not believe.  Whenever you think about your
primary experience in the world-you have moved to a meta-level and you are
beginning to create a whole inner world of beliefs, beliefs that define you
and that determine the quality of your life.

 

Wow!  No wonder beliefs are important!  No wonder what you believe is one of
the most, if not the most, important factors of your life.  Take any
particular item that you have to deal with in life- work, relationships,
money, budgeting, time, scheduling, working for someone, taking orders,
paying taxes, exercising, eating healthily, etc.-and you have all sorts of
beliefs about these things.  Some are empowering beliefs-they inspire you,
they energize you, they make your life enjoyable.  Some are limiting
beliefs-they constrain you, they hold you back, they create inner conflict,
they disempower you.

 

This means that everything in your mind beyond the movie is a belief.
Everything in your Meta Place (values, memories, anticipations,
imaginations, identity, metaphor, permissions, prohibitions, decisions,
intentions, etc.)-is a belief of some sort.  Each offers a different kind of
belief. 

 

Believing then is your way of thinking about your experiences.  When you
believe, you are moving beyond the sensory world, building your own personal
"model of the world" as your map for finding your way around.  And whatever
you believe is your epistemology-your way of knowing and understanding what
you know and understand.  If you believe that people are essentially bad or
evil-that's your epistemology.  If you believe you'll never truly
succeed-that is your epistemology.  Your belief establishes how you know
what you know.  Your belief determines and governs your way of knowing
things.

 

No wonder then that your beliefs operate as self-fulfilling prophecies.  No
wonder also that most people are stuck in their beliefs.  While they need to
step out of the kind of thinking that created their limitations and
stuckness, when they attempt to do so, they use they same kind of thinking
that created the limited belief.  That puts them in a loop.  They now go
round and round, yet they are in a loop with no escape.

 

How then can they escape their own thinking?  How can they gain freedom from
their own limiting and negative beliefs?  They need to think again.  Only by
re-thinking their original limiting belief, can they establish new
empowering beliefs.  And to do that, they have to claim, probably for the
first time in their lives, their self-reflexive consciousness.  This is
their ability to engage in meta-thinking for only in that way can they take
charge of their thinking.

 

Now thinking-about-your-thinking is the essence of meta-stating.  Start with
your movie.  Intentionally "lose your meta-mind" about the movie so that you
can start over, start afresh.  Just observe the movie as a witness- see and
see, hear and hear, feel and feel.  Now bring a state of acceptance to it,
curiosity, playfulness, learning, and optimism.  Doing this meta-states your
original thought (the movie) with one of these higher level frames.  Now you
can truly re-think.  You can run an ecology check on your other thinking and
begin to take control of your mind.   And when you do- you know what
Meta-States and Neuro-Semantics is all about.

 

 

    






L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist8.pair.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20250908/306800f3/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 36723 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://pairlist8.pair.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20250908/306800f3/attachment-0001.jpg>