Questions and Answers

 

                                                                                                       L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

 

 

I first introduced the new cutting-edge field of Neuro-Semantics in the book Meta-States (1995). book   Since then I have published numerous other defining works that has describes and positioned the field of Neuro-Semantics.  I have often written these in collaboration with others, primarily with Bob Bodenhamer and Michelle Duval.  These include the following:

Dragon Slaying (1996 / 2000)

Mind-Lines (1997/ 2006). 

Figuring Out People (1998/ 2005)

Time-Lining (1998)

Communication Magic (1998/ 2001)

Secrets of Personal Mastery (1999)

Sub-Modalities Going Meta (1999/ 2005)

Frame Games (2000), new title Winning the Inner Game (2006)

NLP Going Meta (2001)

The Matrix Model (2002 / 2003)

MovieMind (2002)

User=s Manual of the Brain, Volumes I and II (1999 / 2002)

The Structure of Personality (2003)

Sourcebook of Magic, Volume II (2003)

Meta-State Magic (2003)

Coaching Change, Meta-Coaching Volume I (2004)

Coaching Conversations, Meta-Coaching Volume II (2005)

Unleashing Potentials (2007)

Achieving Peak Performance  (2007)

 

Over the years a great many questions have arisen about this new field of Neuro-Semantics.  I originally wrote this article in 1999 to answer some of the most frequently asked questions.

 

The term Neuro-Semantics goes back to Alfred Korzybski.  The father of General Semantics introduced both phrases, Aneuro-linguistic@ and Aneuro-semantic,@ in 1936 in some of his papers.  Later, they showed up in his 1941 Preface to his classic work, Science and Sanity.  In Korzybski=s writings, you will find both terms used pretty much synonymously.  Here, however, following the Meta-States Model, I arbitrarily chose to use Neuro-Linguistics to refer to the modeling, methodology, and technology of NLP and Neuro-Semantics to refer to the newer and more extensive modeling, patterning, methodology, and technology resulting from the Meta-States Model.

 

How does Neuro-Semantics differ from Neuro-Linguistic Programming?

NLP emerged as a happen-chance from a modeling project of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir.  This happened as the young college student, Richard Bandler, discovered his genius of imitating their language patterns.   Linguistics Professor, John Grinder, began working with Richard to model the structure of the therapeutic wizards.  This brought them into relationship with Dr. Robert Spitzer, their first publisher at Science and Behavior Books.  That, in turn, led to their association with the genius of Gregory Bateson (anthropologist, linguist, cybernetician) when Spitzer moved them onto his property.  They became neighbors of Bateson.  And that connection, in turn, Bateson pointed them to Milton Erickson and his genius in hypnotic language patterns.

 

Using the new formulations of the then-emerging Cognitive Psychology Models, Bandler and Grinder tapped into the elegance of the TOTE Model of Miller, Galanter, and Pribram.  This gave them a linear way to track the processes within Athe black box@ that Behaviorism had always avoided.  Out of this came the NLP Strategy ModelC a model for modeling excellence.  This model primarily operates like a flow chart of consciousness, tracking Amind@ linearly.  In Neuro-Semantics, I added the vertical dimension and so tease out the hidden meta-levels within the structure of subjectivity (NLP Going Meta).

 

In the beginning, NLP sought to avoid all theory, explanatory models, and Athe why@ question by presenting itself as strictly focused on how do you do that?   Accordingly, NLP arose first and foremost as a Communication model.  It explored how the body (Neuro, e.g. the nervous system, physiology, neurology, etc.) gets Programmed by the use of various Languages (linguistics).  

 

By way of contrast, Neuro-Semantics goes beyond the linear Aflow chart@ analysis of the structure of subjective experience by focusing more fully on the meta-levels that support and drive the movement of consciousness along its TOTEs.  By tracking the vertical dimensions of human processing, it moves into higher level meanings much more fully.  Accordingly, it tracks and models the neuro-semantic structures of meanings at higher (and typically, unconscious) levels.

 

Both Neuro-Semantics and NLP operate as interdisciplinary approaches, utilizing models from many psychologies.  This includes cybernetics, computer science, neuro-biology, family systems, anthropology, etc.

 

Neuro-Semantics highlights much more fully and extensively the existence of multiple meta-levels and logical levels than does NLP.   Korzybski (1933/1994) labeled the higher level abstractions as "second order" and "third order" abstractions.  He suggested that much study and exploration needs to be done in this area of reflexivity about how we evaluate and then evaluate our evaluations and by that create higher levels of Amind.@

 

Bateson (1972) picked up on this in how he used meta-levels and logical types in his theories of schizophrenia, play, humor, aesthetics, etc.   He and the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto laid so much of the foundation for NLP (especially in the 1974 book, Change by Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch).

 

NLP, as a meta-discipline itself, certainly has meta-levelsCprimarily two, the Meta-Model (language) and Meta-Programs (perceptual filters).  And co-developer, Robert Dilts has contributed numerous meta-level models.   But nowhere in NLP had a fully descriptive and comprehensive model about meta-levels emerged until the development of the Meta-States Model (Hall 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998).  This was recognized by the International NLP Trainer=s Association in 1995 in their award for Meta-States as Athe most significant contribution to NLP in 1994C1995.@

 

In many ways, the Meta-States Model has turned NLP upside down.  And it has done so in such a simple way.  By merely changing the operational metaphor of Adepth@ inherited from Transformational Grammar, and adopting the height metaphor, Meta-States reformulated NLP.  Dr. Graham Dawes noted this in his early reviews of Meta-States and Dragon Slaying (in Anchor Point and NLP World) commenting that Meta-States will be the model that Aate NLP.@  Others have commented that Meta-States outframes NLP as it sets up higher frames for the processes of NLP.  If this sounds like we think Neuro-Semantics will replace NLP, we would like to add that we see it in a different function, namely, as extending, continuing, and evolving the development that began with Korzybski, Bateson, Bandler, Grinder, Dilts, etc.

 

In the Meta-States Model, the nature of self-reflexivity has finally been given its full due.  In this way, the model provides a way to track thoughts-about-thoughts, feelings-about-feelings, as our inevitable and inescapable meta-thinking, meta-feeling, and meta-responding generates layers upon layers of cognition.  This flexible model provides a way to identify the ever-changing hierarchy of human consciousness, without becoming a rigid way.  The levels themselves shift and change.  And true enough, while this makes for seeming complexity in human Amind@ and experience, the ordering of the meta-level principles formats and structures that complexity.  This means that the plastic and flexible nature of meta-levels whereby any thought can reflect back onto itself or onto another thought at any level does not have to create confusion or chaos.  We can track it.  We can model it as a system.

 

While the recursive nature of thought-feeling does create complexity, it does not necessarily have to create chaos, although that=s how we generally experience it.  At first systemic complexity contains structure.  So even though it may at first appear as the complexity of chaos, with a meta-level model like Meta-States we can easily discover an ordering at a higher level.  And as this distinguishes different levels of Athought@C this provides a new and profound understanding in NLP.  This initiated Neuro-Semantics.  This meta-level model thus provides a way of distinguishing such mental phenomena as:

C           Beliefs C validated thoughts-about-thoughts

C           Values C valued thoughts-about-thoughts

C           UnderstandingsC extensive systems of thoughts-about-thoughts

C           Decisions C choiced thoughts-about-thoughts

C           Identity C beliefs about thoughts-about-self concepts

C           ConceptsC extensive (simple or complex) understandings about domains of understandings

C           Categories C conceptual sorting of concepts

C           Reasons Chigher level structures used as explanatory constructs

C           Etc.

           

As an aside, I should here mention the extreme limitation that the term Athought@ creates.  By itself, the term reflects a very limited, Aristotelian, and primitive termCan elementalism.  Using the principles of General Semantics, we know that Athought@ includes Aemotion,@ hence the awkward yet more sane mapping of Athought-feeling.@   So to use Athought@ sanely we have to do so from a non-elementalistic perspective.  For people in NLP, this provides a new piece straight from General Semantics that was not in the original Meta-Model.  You will find it in the expanded Meta-Model in Communication Magic (2001).

 

With the systemic nature of self-reflexive thought-feeling looping recursively back onto itself creating layers of consciousness and the higher level structures (the Amental@ phenomena), we have states-about-states or what I designated as meta-states.  This sets up systemic processing.  It generates logical levels in our Athinking-emoting.@  It sets up attractors in a self-organizing system.  And these run by certain higher level principlesC all articulated as the meta-stating principles.

 

Now we can begin to sort out different kinds of meanings.  We can sort out linkage Ameaning,@ previously known as Pavlovian conditioning or associative meanings.  It goes further.  It introduces contextual meaningsC the meanings that arise from higher mental contexts.  These higher level abstractions of "meanings" into which we categorize and attribute significance to things thereby generates our semantic or conceptual states.  And with this, we introduce yet another new distinction in NLP.

 

I trust that by now you can recognize that in these ways, Neuro-Semantics incorporates higher level "meanings" into the structure of subjectivity.  Our "states" involve the primary level neuro-linguistic thoughts-and-feelings in response to something out there in the world.  That defines a primary state.  A meta-state involves more.  It involves our thoughts-feeling about our thoughts, emotions, states, memories, imaginations, concepts, etc.  It involves our meta-responses to previous responses. 

 

While there is a lot more to Neuro-Semantics than this, this begins to offer a set of distinctions as I have summarized in the following chart:

---

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Neuro-Semantics

---

Linear processing of the structure of experience TOTE strategy analysis                                      Linear flow chart tracking consciousness          (i.e. values, beliefs, etc.)                                     Confusion of all Astates@ as the same                                 Lack of how Meta-Model and Meta-Programs                  relate and interface                                             ASleight of Mouth@ Patterns                                                   Confusion of orientation metaphorC up and   down: depth (core) and height                         ASub-modalities@ patterns, technologies, etc.

Meta-level processing Vertical Alogical levels@ analysis Recursiveness/ reflexivity   meta-phenomena Distinction between primary states, meta-states and gestalt states Clarification about the four meta-domains as interactive and redundant C the systemic model. which later became the Matrix Model. Mind-LinesC conversational reframing ordered in a logical level format that includes deframing, reframing, outframing, etc. Clarity about the orientational metaphorsC   Recognition that the cinematic features of our representational distinctions are at a higher level, so meta-modalities or the editorial framing of our inner movies. Introduction of meta-detailing as the heart of genius Meta-Programs seen as coalesced meta-states Canopies of Consciousness Attractors of self-organizing systems

  

How does Neuro-Semantics differ from General Semantics?

General Semantics began with Alfred Korzybski (1933) and continues today as a viable discipline and field in its own right.  As an engineer, Korzybski sought to redesign the old Aristotelian language as our primary way of mapping the territory.  He wanted to do this to increase our ability at effective adjustment to increase humanity=s sanity.  The old mapping involved several unsane factors: identification, elementalism, confusion of levels, etc.

 

NLP brought over many of the features of General Semantics into its Meta-Model of language.  More recently, I have identified many of the Korzybskian linguistic distinctions not brought over and have added them to the Meta-Model (Communication Magic, 1998/ 2001).

 

Neuro-Semantics differs from General Semantics to the extent that we keep the NLP emphasis on modeling excellence and designing patterns, technologies, and new methodologies for Ahuman design engineering@ (a phrase, by the way, originated by Korzybski, 1921, not Bandler).  In many ways a great deal of the content of Neuro-Semantics has come from General Semantics and from the trainings that I conducted in London under the title, The Merging of the Models.  In these workshop I, along with Denis Bridoux, were interested in and seeking how to synthesize the best of NLP and General Semantics, yet what actually fell out from those trainings in 1998 through 2000 was the fuller development of Neuro-Semantics.  Today the training and training manual of The Merging of the Models is called Advanced Flexibility.

   

What Uniquely Distinguishes Neuro-Semantics as a new field?

In a way, Neuro-Semantics began as either Enriched NLP and/or Enriched General Semantics.  It began through the process of returning to the sources of NLP, General Semantics, Bateson=s works in anthropology, schizophrenia, levels of learning, and cybernetics, MRI Institute, Cognitive Psychology (Miller, Galanter, Pribram), etc., we have sought to establish Neuro-Semantics on solid, scientific, and highly researched studies.

 

NLP, for a variety of reasons, has seemed to have received lots of negative and harmful public relations (PR) and General Semantics has seemed to locate itself in a small and isolated highly academic community.  For these (and other reasons), I have sought to step aside just enough from NLP and General Semantics in order to continue the adventure of modeling and engineering human excellence without being tied down to the limitations of these two source disciplines. 

 

I should mention that I have not been the only person moving in this direction.  Upon founding Neuro-Semantics, I met Dennis Chong, M.D. (Canada) and Roye Fraser (Blue Dell Systems, Florida) both NLP trainers who had created their version and who named their approach, Neuro-Semantic Programming (NSP).  Dr. Chong has also written several books that mention NSP, Don=t Ask Why, Language Elegance, and Knife Without Pain.  While Neuro-Semantics differs from what Dennis and Roye created, there are a lot of overlaps, although we have never worked together.

 

Where else did Neuro-Semantics come from?  I used numerous other models (and continue to do so) in order to integrate the best that directly applies to what we are doing in Neuro-Semantics.  This include Chaos theory, Self-Organization Theory, the newer developments in Cognitive Psychology, Performance Coaching, Brief Psychotherapy, REBT, Glasser=s Reality Therapy/ Control Theory, and many other fields.

 

What Central Principles govern this domain?

First and foremost of the principles that govern Neuro-Semantics is the Bateson principle:

AThe higher levels govern (modulate, drive, organize) the lower levels.@

 

Meta-levels serve as the frame-of-reference for the activity (thinking, feeling, responding) that occurs at the levels lower to the frame.  The meta-level thus operates as an attractor in a self-organizing system.  From this we have identified numerous other principles. 

 

Someone (or something) will always set the frame of reference. The question becomes, AWho set the frame?@  Count on your meta-state becoming your unconscious framesC your Away of being in the world,@ your attitude

 

Whoever sets the frame will govern the experience (run the game!).  Since higher frames governCand since somebody also sets it, the person who sets the frame thereby takes charge of the subsequent experiences.  The resulting thoughts, ideas, concepts, beliefs, emotions, behaviors, language, problems, solutions, and experiences derive their existence from the frame.  Frames govern. 

 

The whole determines the parts and from the parts, the whole emerges. This speaks about the systemic nature of the mind-body system.  It speaks about the gestalt nature of our neuro-linguistics processes.  The system that emerges from the meta-levels that govern the lower levels brings about an overall gestalt (or configuration of interactive parts) which in turn, define the character of the whole.

 

In outframing, we set up a higher level frame-of-reference that will take over.  The power to identify a frame enables us to step aside from a frame and to set a whole new frame.  Doing this transforms everything.  It performs meta-level Amagic@ in that it installs a new self-organizing attractor at the top of the semantic system.

 

What we call Aexperience@ differs radically and significantly at each level.  Korzbyski described these in his Alevels of abstraction@ model regarding how the nervous system abstracts at different levels.  We can use the same word/s at the different levels as multiordinal terms Cterms that have no specific meaning until we specify at which level we refer.

 

Reflexivity endows consciousness with systemic processes and characteristics.  Reflexivity describes the mechanism that drives these levels of abstraction and these meta-level experience.  This refers to the fact that our consciousness can reflect back onto itself or its products (thoughts, emotions, beliefs, values, decisions, specific concepts, etc.).  As it does, it sets up feed-back and feed-forward processes and thereby creates a circular system.

 

Meta-level disorientation and conflict can create living hells.  Generally speaking (numerous exceptions do exist), whenever we bring negative thoughts-and-feelings (states) against ourselves or any facet of ourselves, we put ourselves at odds with ourselves.  And when our self-relationships (relation to ourselves) become disturbed, we begin to loop around in vicious downward self-reinforcing cycles.  And when self-disturbed (self-condemning, self-contempting, self-repressing, self-hating, etc.), this then creates a disturbance for all of our relationships with others.  This creates neurosis, psychosis, personality disorders, character disorders, etc.

 

Paradox frequently governs meta-level solutions for health, integration, balance, and empowerment.   The only way to rid ourselves of unwanted thoughts, emotions, behaviors, habits, etc. involves, paradoxically, welcoming, accepting, appreciating, and celebrating that very thought, emotion, behavior, etc.  By welcoming it into consciousness we can take counsel of it, reality check it, learn from it, etc.  To not reckon with it leads to unuseful suppression, repression, self-rejection, etc.

 

Setting a frame necessitates neuro-linguistic energy & repetition.   How do we actually set a frame or establish a meta-level State?  Merely Athinking@ or even Afeeling@ will not do it.  We can think, know, feel, and have awarenesses that do not establish a higher level frame-of-reference.  Here we need to utilize the natural processes of how our brains operateCwe need to use drama, energy, repetition, etc.

 

Altering higher level frames alters Identity and Destiny.  You can=t change what you do (so that it lasts in a pervasive and generative way), without also changing who you are.  Does your higher frame of self-definition support the change?  Your behavior is like a printout of your Operating Programs.